Fort of HomePods
Marco:
So my day started out interesting.
Marco:
I got an email from my neighbor who was forwarding me the New York announcement that you can now get COVID vaccines age 50 and up.
Marco:
And he was like, I'm not sure if you make it, but here, this might be useful to you.
Oh, no.
Marco:
Ralph.
Marco:
Ralph.
Marco:
I am 38.
Casey:
Brutal.
Casey:
Well, let me really twist the knife because I'm that kind of jerk friend.
Casey:
So I had an occasion to be standing in line today for reasons we're not going to talk about.
Casey:
And somebody asked me, oh, are you from one of the local colleges?
Casey:
And I looked at that person and I was like, thank you.
Casey:
Thank you so much.
Casey:
And not even close.
Casey:
I turned 39 last week, but thank you.
Marco:
Well, did they think you were a student or a professor?
Marco:
No.
Casey:
Oh, you know, you've ruined it for me.
John:
Here's his.
John:
It's all about context, Marco.
John:
The the assumption of your neighbor that you would have to be approaching 50 to have a house on Fire Island is a safe bet.
John:
Demographically speaking.
John:
And if you're hanging around with a bunch of college students, someone who mistakes you for a college student, it's all about context, right?
Casey:
You know, that's the least exciting, interesting, and funny, but also probably most accurate explanation.
John:
And also the hair color.
Casey:
I'm getting a lot of salt in my pepper, if you know what I'm saying.
Casey:
So I shouldn't really be throwing stones on that issue.
Casey:
Marco, what would get you to actually leave your house, like in COVID notwithstanding, and go see a concert?
Casey:
Like we've established that you're not a fan of Phish concerts.
Casey:
Is there a concert or perhaps a musical or some other sort of theater-like thing that you would be willing to attend?
Casey:
Or are you, again, COVID notwithstanding, are you totally hands-off on anything that even vaguely smells like a concert?
Marco:
My thinking on that has kind of changed recently.
Casey:
Oh, tell me more.
Marco:
Obviously, as everyone knows, I'm a huge Phish fan.
Marco:
And Phish is very much a band about their live shows.
Marco:
That's very much, you know, the focus of the fandom.
Marco:
And most of the music that comes out of them is from live shows.
Marco:
Since COVID, there have been no live shows.
Marco:
And so I've been accustomed for the last...
Marco:
decade or so to getting like 15 new fish shows a year or whatever you know whatever the number is and i i buy them all through their website so i get all the downloads all legally and everything and it's like my favorite band produces basically 15 new albums a year in the form of these live shows
Casey:
As much as I love to give you crap about Phish, that is really incredible.
Casey:
And you can do similar things with a lot of other artists, including the Dave Matthews Band, but they are not soundboard recordings like you're getting.
Casey:
They're, you know, at this point, reasonably sophisticated, but nevertheless still audience recordings where somebody put two microphones on a stand and just recorded the loudspeakers, which is nowhere near the quality you're talking about.
Casey:
So how much, just ballpark, how much is it for like a year or season pass to whatever service it is that does this?
Yeah.
Marco:
It's from Live Fish.
Marco:
And I think they don't do like year passes.
Marco:
They do like tour passes.
Marco:
So if there's like a summer tour, it ends up being like 10 bucks a show, whatever that is.
Marco:
So a tour might be like 150 bucks or something, but it's not like a huge, massive thing considering it's so much music.
Marco:
And as you said, like, it's not it isn't just like a microphone in the audience.
Marco:
The Phish community has that as well.
Marco:
You can listen to the same show through like tapers versus the actual official releases.
Marco:
And it's I mean, it's no contest.
Marco:
It's the official releases are way better.
Marco:
And and so I'm accustomed to, you know, my favorite band releasing a pretty large amount of new music every year.
Marco:
And then to go from that to nothing.
Marco:
for you know probably a year and a half or you know whatever it will end up being once this all opens up again for concerts uh when the time comes when they start doing concerts again i've thought about going to like one of the first ones if i can i'm sure it's gonna be insane to try to get a ticket but i've thought about going to one of the early ones that i would be able to go to geographically because i can only imagine like the
Marco:
the jubilation that will be like the energy that would be in that crowd like coming out of this going into that i think would be really something to see i think that could be you know like like my my parents went to woodstock like the original one in 1969 no that yeah my mom was only like 19 but yeah it's like my parents went to woodstock that was like a you know generation defining thing and
Marco:
And I don't think a Phish concert in 2021 or 2022 is a generation-defining thing for most people, but I think the idea of having all this time off where we were forced not to have live music, once it opens up again, whenever that is...
Marco:
I think there's going to be just a massive celebration from people.
Marco:
I think it's going to feel incredible.
Marco:
And if I was ever tempted to go to another concert, that's the time to go, I think, to feel that.
Marco:
Even though when Phish hasn't played in concert for a while, they tend to be worse.
Marco:
They tend to kind of suck.
Marco:
They make more mistakes and it's not as tight and everything because they haven't had as much time to practice and everything.
Marco:
But I think this moment in live music is going to be really...
Marco:
felt by everybody i think it's going to be a really big deal and i can't think of a cooler way to celebrate like the world reopening again whenever that happens then going to a fish concert uh even though normally i'm as you mentioned at the beginning normally i'm not super into going to concerts i love listening to them but i'm not super into going to them um there are no other bands at this point that i would really consider going to see in concert just because
Marco:
Concerts, I find most of the time I find that my attention drifts and I get tired and I kind of just want to like leave after a while.
Marco:
They're not usually very appealing to me.
Marco:
But again, I think in this particular instance, whenever that event happens, I would be interested in going to that.
Casey:
I hear you.
Casey:
Now, I feel like your destiny, if all the stars align, is to go to one of the New Year's Eve shows.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
Madison Square Garden?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And be there for that, which I'm sure in so many ways would be a disaster, but a beautiful, beautiful disaster.
Casey:
And I think that would, especially if it happened in 2021, which I'm super skeptical, but just hypothetically, like, you know, Fish finally was able to do their New Year's Eve show again, and you were able to get to it.
Casey:
I think I could see you really enjoying that.
Casey:
And then saying, I'll never do that again.
Marco:
yeah i mean like well ideally i mean madison square garden i that that is actually the one place i saw fish um the one time i went uh was it wasn't a new year's eve show but it was at madison square garden um and you know it's fine but it's giant indoor arena like one thing i really don't like about concerts is all the cigarette smoke and that's better in recent years like since it's mostly illegal in most places now but like being at a concert where you're just constantly breathing in everyone's smoke really sucks and
Marco:
at fish the entirety madison square garden will be one big hot box exactly so ideally it would be an outdoor venue and what's really close to fire island jones beach uh yeah i've actually seen a concert there fish has played there um so that i think would be ideal like if they go there i'll pay whatever it takes to get that ticket everything's better at the beach
Casey:
Of course.
Casey:
Do you have any interest, Marco, in any other concert adjacent things like musicals or live theater or anything like that?
Casey:
If the original cast of Hamilton was back on Broadway for 10 nights and you scored a ticket, would that be interesting to you or is there nothing there for you?
Marco:
If I'm with other people who are into it, I'll go and I'll have a good time, but I'm never really like initiating that kind of thing.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And John, I know you do enjoy musical theater, but similar question, like, is there anything that would get you to go to, I don't know, a U2 concert or perhaps some other concert for someone that you're interested in?
John:
I don't think there's anything special about the end of COVID times.
John:
I'm always game to go to a concert.
John:
The last one I think I went to was Amy Mann when she came to Boston.
John:
I loved it.
John:
One of the best concerts I've ever been to.
John:
I'm not a big music concert goer and it would have to be a band that I really like.
John:
But if it is a band that I like and I don't have to travel that far, I go to it.
Casey:
Good deal.
Casey:
Was it Rectifs or was it Dubai Friday where Merlin was talking about what it's going to be like coming out at the end of times?
John:
Probably both.
John:
We definitely talked about it in Rectifs.
Casey:
That was a really, really good conversation and worth listening to.
Casey:
Both shows are excellent.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
In fact, it really makes me grumble how great both those shows are.
John:
All part of the MPU.
John:
Yeah.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right, we should probably start with some follow-up.
Casey:
And we have some reports from the field.
Casey:
Coming in live from the field, we have reports of the Wheel of Shame.
Marco:
I love that we could put out the request saying, hey, if any Tesla owners have gotten flat tires and have gotten service wheels, let us know how they were spray-painted.
Marco:
And we actually had listeners respond.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
It is ridiculous that this is my life, that I can talk about some stupid flat tire on some expensive car and have people from all over the world send me pictures of these things.
Casey:
But I love it, and I'm thankful for it.
Casey:
So we got several reports.
Casey:
Apparently in Hong Kong, the Wheel of Shame is a solid red, and we'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
Well, well, I wouldn't go that far.
John:
So this is this this is a silver outlet who wrote from Hong Kong and sent us a picture of a Tesla with a wheel of shame.
John:
And it is indeed spray painted red.
John:
And it's not like the ones that Marco has showed us where it's a silver wheel and just kind of haphazardly spray painted in a zigzag pattern red.
John:
but it is also not carefully sprayed entirely red.
John:
If you zoom in on the wheel, you will see that they're maintaining that this shouldn't look like a red wheel.
John:
It should look like a silver wheel that a small child's tried to spray paint red, but got bored and left before actually covering the entire wheel.
John:
So it is a slightly better paint job, but no one will mistake this for a red wheel.
John:
They'll say someone tried to spray paint their wheel really badly, but there's splotches of gray showing through.
John:
So this is Hong Kong.
John:
This is a worldwide phenomenon, not just the metro New York area, right?
John:
Worldwide, the memo went out to all Tesla dealerships, hey, take your wheels, get a can of spray paint from the hardware store, and go to town on them because we don't want people not bringing their car back to get the quote-unquote real wheel.
Marco:
it looks like the really big version of you know how when you're in school and you tried to color something with a sharpie you try to like you know change the color of like your shoe or something like it looks like that but just really big and you don't get good coverage and you kind of get tired out because you do one area and it gets darker red but then yeah the other areas you're just like ah forget it
John:
so true and then uh tg sid writes that apparently just a couple hours north of me in dc uh the red haphazard spray paint has not made it to the dc area down here it's blue now this blows my mind it's red in hong kong it's red in new york but in dc it's blue what's going on is there i mean is dc just uh you know a rebel a rogue they're just not they didn't follow the manual correctly they ran out of red spray paint
John:
Well, down there, red means something else politically.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, this is the world's dumbest corporate policy, and I can't wait until they change it.
Marco:
Are red wheels ruined now, too?
Casey:
Red, pretty much everything is ruined at this point.
Casey:
And then finally, Aaron Farnham writes that the Tesla spare wheel graffiti is different in Houston.
Casey:
My two experiences have resulted in a wheel with a Tesla logo neatly stenciled on the rim.
Casey:
Unfortunately, no pictures.
John:
Well, there you go.
John:
That's exactly what I was talking about.
John:
But neatly stenciled makes you think, do you mean someone held up a piece of cardboard with a Tesla logo cut out of it and then took that same can of spray paint and sprayed through it?
John:
Or do you mean actually neatly stenciled?
John:
Because there's like the drip mark coming down.
John:
Right.
John:
There's neatly stenciled and there's neatly stenciled.
John:
So I think we need more photos of this.
John:
But that is an interesting variation.
John:
Someone just couldn't bear.
John:
They probably got the instructions.
John:
Randomly spray paint it, please.
John:
And I said, I randomly spray paint.
John:
I'm at least going to take these scissors and some construction paper and cut out a stencil of a big T and then spray it on there.
Marco:
And do you think that would be less effective at making people return it?
Marco:
Because it might look intentional.
John:
Well, that's what I'm saying.
John:
I'm expecting it doesn't quite look as good as the phrase neatly stenciled.
John:
It's making it sound... Because it's not an even surface and it's not easy to do.
John:
And it's not like a pre-made factory decal that you apply.
John:
So someone had to do an arts and crafts project to make this.
Casey:
So here's the thing, Aaron Farnham, if you really want to be an excellent listener and an above and beyond feedbacker, I need you to pop one of your tires and get a spare wheel and then take a picture for us.
Marco:
Drive over a spike strip.
Marco:
Yes, please.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
John, do you want to tell us about App Store pricing policing, please?
John:
We talked about this a couple of shows ago, how Apple was telling certain people, essentially, your app is not worth the price you are charging for.
John:
It says us.
John:
So stop it.
John:
And this was in the context of scam apps, which are, you know, charging, you know, trying to get people to sign up for, you know, a five dollar a week fee for some app that does nothing or whatever.
John:
And Apple is trying to get them out of the store.
John:
And the way they do it is they send you an Instagram that says, no, you can't charge that much because your app is bad.
John:
um and i i we talked about in the context of getting scam apps off the store and i talked about in the context of apple having the ultimate control over pricing and now flexing that control and because app store policies even the ones we agree with are haphazardly applied uh you might think well i'm not a scammer so i have nothing to worry about
John:
But that's never a safe bet with the App Store.
John:
And so here's one story from Tim who says, one of my B2B app updates just got metadata rejected with, quote, specifically, can you confirm that X is the intended price of your in-app purchase product?
John:
Right?
John:
So he didn't give the price, but it's basically they asked him.
John:
Metadata rejected him and said...
John:
Did you mean to charge what you're charging?
John:
And he says, my plan hasn't changed price in years.
John:
And the price is $49 a month, which might sound like a lot, but its competitors are $50 to $150.
John:
These are not supposed to be consumer apps.
John:
I replied that the price is intentional and they approved the app hours later.
John:
It felt icky though.
John:
My app has been on the app store since 2015 and the price hasn't changed often.
John:
So this is kind of like he didn't get rejected.
John:
They didn't tell him his app wasn't worth that price, but they did say, are you sure you want to charge $50 a month?
John:
Kind of implying that seems like a lot for your cruddy app.
John:
And especially for an app that's been on the store for years and hasn't changed price a lot.
John:
that's i mean you know you count it as a win if it was only a one or two day delay but you start to get a little afraid that the next time you try to send a bug fit update they're going to be like yeah i'm sorry it just doesn't look like a 50 app to me i mean on the one side i'm glad that they're at least looking at this but it seems like they should be taking more than just a cursory look like look at the history of the app and look at what does the app do because it should in most cases if the price hasn't changed in years then come on
Casey:
Well, but I mean, even if it's a scam app that hasn't changed in years, it seems to me like in most, but not all cases, it should be pretty obvious what's a scam and what's not.
Casey:
Again, I mean, it's never 100%, but it strikes me as though this app smells very strongly of not scam.
Casey:
And most of the scam apps I've seen smell very strongly of scam.
Casey:
So a slightly more discerning eye would probably do some service here.
John:
There was a related story I didn't put in the notes, but just reminded me that some people were getting their apps rejected simply because they hadn't issued an update in a long time.
John:
One of them was like a sort of breakout style game that had been in the store for three years without an update.
John:
And Apple is just like, look, we're going to pull your app because it's obvious that you've abandoned it.
John:
And the developer was like, look, this app runs perfectly.
John:
It works on all the new iPhones and all the new shapes.
John:
You would have no idea that this app wasn't released yesterday.
John:
There's nothing broken about it.
John:
It's 64-bit.
John:
It scales to the iPhone X. It goes into the corners.
John:
It handles the notch.
John:
It does all the things.
John:
It's a perfectly fine game.
John:
And the reason it hasn't had an update in three years is, yes, because the developer is not working on it anymore, but also because it hasn't needed one.
John:
It's fine.
John:
It made me afraid that someday, am I going to get to the point with my apps where they...
John:
work and I don't have any features that I want to add and Apple's going to say I'm sorry we're pulling your apps from the store because you haven't updated them in a few years yeah that's you know if you're going to pull things off the store by all means pull abandoned apps that are crappy but apps that three years is not abandoned first of all and second of all if it's like a game and it works fine
John:
like just again inconsistent uh you know application of uh rules that make sense and you know if you heard them explains to you it's like oh yeah certainly we want don't want zombie games in the store but it's all about the execution and execution at the scale apple works it's impossible to have any execution that is so perfect that it does not produce stories like this
John:
And of course, all we talk about are the stories like this and not the 10,000 other actual scam games that were pulled.
John:
So that's just the nature of dealing with the app stories.
John:
You're going to hear about the stories that seem, quote unquote, unfair.
John:
And you won't hear about the thousands and thousands of ones that work correctly.
John:
But that is the challenge before Apple when running something like this.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Moving right along, Brett Johnson writes, I've seen a lot of game devs giving up on Mac ports over the last couple of years.
Casey:
Deprecating OpenGL is often an issue cited, along with Metal just being difficult, especially for those running custom or smaller game engines.
Casey:
The drop of 32-bit support was a huge hit to a lot of devs too.
Casey:
But I've also seen a lot that give up because the notarization process is unexpected and confusing.
Casey:
All these choices make sense for Apple, but they could be doing more to help devs over these hurdles.
Casey:
So can you tell me, John, in brief, what is app notification?
Casey:
I almost said app store notification.
Casey:
What is app notarization?
John:
So these complaints, OpenGL being dropped and 32-bit and Metal versus other APIs, right?
John:
And notarization are all kind of in the bucket of hurdles, hoops that you have to jump through if you want to have a game on an Apple platform.
John:
Notarization in particular is a thing where you send your app to Apple and they sign it for you.
John:
And then you can distribute your game outside the app store.
John:
So it's been signed by Apple, but it's not being distributed by Apple.
John:
But all those things are nothing compared to the hoops you have to jump through to ship a game on any game console.
John:
If you want to ship a game on a Nintendo game console, you will be begging for notarization.
John:
The things you have to do...
John:
The things that they care about in your app that you are forced to change and the things you have to support.
John:
It is so much harder to ship for any game console than for the Mac, right?
John:
So when I see things like this, all this is true.
John:
It does discourage Mac ports and people...
John:
decide not to port to mac because of these things but what it shows is how small of a hurdle it takes for people to bail on the mac when it comes to gaming because there's not much money to be made apple's not particularly friendly to it so all it takes is a little bit of inconvenience like say notarizing your app which is a thing that you know ios developers or mac developers are accustomed to and and more going through app review and everything but it's like uh now it's not worth it anymore
John:
Oh, I had a 32-bit game, and I don't feel like porting it.
John:
And because it's the Mac, it's not worth it anymore.
John:
Whereas when Sony comes out with a new game console, no matter how Byzantine it is, people say, oh, God, this is so terrible.
John:
But it's worth it.
John:
It's worth it because Sony wants my game on it, because Sony is courting me, because I know Sony's going to sell a lot of these consoles.
John:
And I know the people who buy them are the kind of people who want to play the kind of game I'm making.
John:
So, yes, we are going to jump through all the hoops to get our game on these game consoles.
John:
But we are not going to jump through the hoops to get the games on the Mac.
John:
So...
John:
situations like this are just more proof that the mac apple has not made the mac a platform that is attractive to game developers and that's apple's job to do um and most of the things they do either are neutral with respect to that goal or make it worse like uh adding a few more little requirements that game developers weren't used to um
John:
When Apple added app signing to the Mac App Store and app signing in iOS, all those things they did were also hurdles for people making applications for the iPhone and making applications for the Mac.
John:
But Mac developers and iOS developers may have grumbled, but they continue because they say, well, this is our business.
John:
If we're going to put apps on the phone, we've got to do what Apple says.
John:
And even the Mac App Store, many companies went through heroic efforts because they thought that the upside of being in the Mac App Store was worth...
John:
uh making the effort in some cases they've changed their mind into that sometimes they change their mind and then change their mind back but the point is those platforms the phone the ipad the mac are attractive enough for developers to be willing to deal with these hurdles and games on the on apple's platform are not
Marco:
Yeah, and I think a lot of this comes down to – I mean some of it is definitely Apple's attitude towards developers, which I think can mostly, most of the time be described as tense.
Marco:
Apple doesn't seem to have it in them or have any interest in attracting developers to their platforms.
Marco:
Apple seems to dictate certain things to developers.
Marco:
Certain things are nice.
Marco:
I love a lot of the APIs and everything.
Marco:
A lot of the tooling is pretty good.
Marco:
A lot of it's good, but for the most part, the overall attitude for Apple towards developers, Apple's sitting back waiting for people to come to them and putting up hurdles and saying, hey, here's a new hurdle.
Marco:
You have to deal with it, period.
Marco:
What are you going to do?
Marco:
When there is a large potential upside to a platform, we go through those hurdles.
Marco:
I'm willing to jump through all their stupid hoops and go through their stupid code signing that still is completely broken.
Marco:
If you use CarPlay, you have to do it all manually still.
Marco:
You go through all this stuff, the notarization.
Marco:
You go through all that stuff because I want to make a podcast app on the iPhone.
Marco:
I want to make it badly enough that...
Marco:
all those hassles and costs and the app store tax and app reviews bs all of that i'm willing to go through all that because there's a big market for making a podcast app on the iphone and also i use an iphone and i want to and i want to have my own podcast app and so therefore i'm motivated even myself let alone the business side
John:
And let me just pause you there.
John:
And that is a key point.
John:
Like Apple has Apple sells a ton of iPhones, right?
John:
Apple makes a platform that is attractive to you as a developer by selling tons of iPhones to people who have money and are willing to spend it on software.
John:
That's why it's not like, oh, I just like the iPhone.
John:
So I'm just going to make overcast for it.
John:
the overcast is where the customers you want are and apple really helped to make that happen it's not true of games apple sells a lot of devices but the people who buy them aren't waiting to sell to shell out 60 bucks for games people who buy game consoles are so it's like it's where the customers are and that is the job of the platform owner if they want games on their platform they need to sell enough devices to people who buy them and then want to play games to make it worthwhile for games developers
Marco:
right and that's where you know the the iphone is a pretty decent casual gaming device pretty good casual gaming device the ipad is also a pretty good casual gaming device the mac isn't for lots of reasons um but you know you think about like how many gamers buy macs you know it is to some degree a chicken or egg problem
Marco:
Not a lot of gamers buy Macs because in part, because there's not a lot of good games on Macs, but also because Apple's hardware choices in, especially things like GPU, GPU options, certainly the ability to make customizable towers at reasonable prices, like things that gamers are really into.
Marco:
Apple has just given the huge middle finger to so often in their hardware offerings and their pricing and things like that.
Marco:
And so,
Marco:
most gamers don't buy Macs.
Marco:
And therefore, there is not much reason for most game developers to go through Apple's hurdles and hassles to bring their games to the Mac.
Marco:
Now, I was hoping that the era of the Apple ARM Macs coming in and the availability of iOS apps on Macs, I was hoping that would improve things.
Marco:
So far, it seems like it hasn't.
Marco:
But it is still early days.
Marco:
We'll see what happens.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
Unfortunately, what I've seen mostly is, you know, Apple gave game developers or gave all developers the ability to opt out of their iOS apps being available on M1 Macs, and many large developers have taken that option.
Marco:
Many of them, for not particularly good reasons, just like, we don't want to go through the hassle of testing that, so we'll just disable it because who will care, right?
Marco:
So I feel like that's kind of a non-starter.
Marco:
Catalyst has been mostly a non-starter for most people.
Marco:
So the efforts to try to take that iOS effort that's being invested on the iOS side and bring it to the Mac without much effort on the developer side –
Marco:
mostly hasn't panned out or hasn't panned out the way that we expected or wanted.
Marco:
I think the only thing that might save this is if Apple's laptop hardware for a while ends up having really good GPUs.
Marco:
And we're seeing the beginnings of that.
Marco:
The M1 GPU is pretty good for an integrated GPU.
Marco:
It's very good for an integrated GPU.
Marco:
It's not very good for a gaming GPU.
Marco:
It's okay, but it could be a lot better, and maybe the higher-end ones will get better options there.
Marco:
We'll see what happens.
Marco:
But ultimately, until and unless a lot of gamers buy Macs,
Marco:
we're not going to see a lot of games being developed for the Mac.
Marco:
And I just don't see like what gamers want in hardware and in customizability and pricing and everything.
Marco:
I don't see Apple ever doing that.
John:
I think it's good to have a reminder.
John:
When we talk about this, I think most people are on the same page with us in terms of the context of the conversation, but the mobile gaming market is bigger than the non-mobile gaming market.
John:
Mobile gaming, of which Apple has a huge piece,
John:
is the bigger piece of the pie.
John:
There's more money flowing through mobile gaming than there is for quote-unquote real gaming, right?
John:
The AAA games or whatever.
John:
The reason we always talk about it in this context of like, well, why is Apple so bad at games?
John:
We're talking about the AAA games kind of for the same reason that we talk about blockbuster movies.
John:
I mean, it's a little bit different, but like...
John:
It's because the people who are the most into games like those big AAA games.
John:
It doesn't mean that's where all the money is.
John:
There's a lot of money in AAA games, but there's more money in quote unquote casual mobile games.
John:
So it's actually kind of hard to pitch Apple and say, oh, here's how you can get better at gaming.
John:
They'd be like, we're already making a ton of money because mobile gaming is the biggest kind of gaming and we may have a big chunk of that.
John:
Why would we go after this smaller piece of the pie that you tell us maybe we can get some piece of if we fight against Microsoft and Windows PCs and game consoles?
John:
That doesn't sound like a fun time to us.
John:
We'll just keep being dominant in mobile gaming because that's where the money is and that's where the future is.
John:
And everybody has a phone and everyone plays games on those things and only a few people have gaming PCs.
John:
But...
John:
It's still, you know, when they sell machines that are ostensibly capable of these type of games, it's got a keyboard, a mouse, a big screen, a fast GPU, a fast CPU.
John:
People buy them for, you know, a lot of money and say, it's a shame that I can't play these popular games on this because the hardware is capable.
John:
And that's where you get letters like this to say, oh, developers aren't doing Mac ports of these games, right?
John:
I mean, they're not doing Mac ports of mobile games either, but the mobile games are already on the iPhone, right?
John:
And to your point, Marco, those mobile games could be on the Mac if the developers... I think the reason developers bail is because if they're like, ah, if we ever decide to address the Mac, we'll sell them a separate SKU, right?
John:
We don't want to just let them have our existing game, and we don't want them to buy it and play it on the Mac.
John:
We'll have a Mac-specific game, but we're never going to do that because nobody games on the Mac anyway, so who cares, right?
John:
But...
John:
Like the mind, it's kind of like the alpha geeks when that are all our goal from back in the day, O'Reilly wrote about the alpha geeks moving to the Mac in like 2003 and four, right?
John:
When this subset, this smaller subset of the gaming population, the people who are super into games are willing to get play games for hundreds of hours that are very complicated and intricate and difficult and aren't quote unquote casual.
John:
that that minority of the gaming world has disproportionate influence because they are sort of on the bleeding edge of gaming technology on the bleeding edge of gaming complexity and of the advancement of the art form you know using the best technology available and that's why we always talk about in this context obviously that's my bias to those are the type of games i like and play but it is important to recognize that from apple's perspective there's nothing broken here mobile gaming is where it's at and apple is doing really well there
Casey:
Well, the good news is that Apple's documentation is so flawless that if you ever have anything you're confused about, you can look at their perfect documentation and find the answer every time.
John:
I don't think people are refusing to port games to the Mac because of bad documentation.
Casey:
You say that, but if notarization was easily explained, then perhaps that wouldn't be such a hurdle.
John:
I think there's people looking for any excuse to not do the port.
John:
Oh, and I got to notarize too?
John:
That's it.
John:
I'm not making a game.
John:
I'm just saying.
John:
I'm just going to throw that out there.
Casey:
Not that I ever burrow up my butt or anything.
Casey:
Anyway, Marco, tell me about what's going on with your HomePods.
Marco:
Yeah, so I wanted to just do a little bit of quick expansion on the HomePod discontinuation discussion from last week, because there were a couple things that I learned in the meantime or that I forgot about.
Marco:
So one of them, a bunch of people wrote in to point out that the Google Home Max was also apparently discontinued.
Marco:
This was basically like Google's $300 big smart speaker.
Marco:
It apparently was, again, $300, so similar price, you know, big speaker, but that also had a Home Assistant built in, and it also had an aux-in jack.
Marco:
Imagine that.
Marco:
Didn't Google also have a sphere that they canned before they even shipped it?
Marco:
They had that TV box that was like the Q something.
Marco:
What was that?
Marco:
That never shipped, I don't think.
John:
Yeah, there was some Google.
John:
I thought it was a smart speaker that was spherically shaped that got canned before.
Marco:
But anyway, continue.
Marco:
So a lot of people were saying like, okay, well look, the Google Home Max, which was similar marketing-wise, was also discontinued.
Marco:
So there must just not be a market for a premium smart speaker.
Marco:
And I don't think that follows.
Marco:
No, because Google cancels everything.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Google discontinues stuff all the time and they suck at hardware and they've discontinued lots of hardware of all sizes, big and small, different prices and everything.
Marco:
So yeah, I wouldn't necessarily say that says anything about it.
Marco:
There is an Echo Studio that is $200 and looks kind of like a knockoff HomePod.
Marco:
I've never seen one in person, but Amazon's been selling it for a while.
Marco:
So, you know, that product seems to be similar and exists there.
Marco:
and you look at the entire product line by sonos almost all of which costs significantly more than the home pod or at least in the ballpark of the home pod and they've been selling that stuff for years uh and they seem to not be out of business yet so clearly the market is there i mean look at like any of the speakers apple has sold in the apple stores in throughout throughout history you know not not just like the ipod hi-fi which we'll get to in a second but like
Marco:
You know, you look at like all of the, you know, Bose and B&W and B&O and all these things, like all these like big speakers and speaker docks and things like that over the years, and they're all like $300.
Marco:
So I don't think we can say there's no market for this.
Marco:
I think there's clearly a market for this if they're good and if they're compelling.
Marco:
And the HomePod was not good and compelling enough for its price.
Marco:
I think that's the real problem here.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
We also heard from a few people who pointed out something I should have thought of but didn't, that with both the iMac Pro being discontinued and the HomePod being discontinued, one factor that I don't think we mentioned or at least didn't mention a lot is possible component shortages due to COVID.
Marco:
there's apparently been a massive like chip and component shortage uh in the industry so it's possible that apple intended to have these things these products in the lineup for longer before like maybe until their replacements were ready but they had to start making tough decisions because of some kind of component shortages that they literally just can't get you know even if it isn't intel with the xeon maybe they literally can't get like
Marco:
the speaker rim holder or the Bluetooth chip or something anymore for the iMac or for the HomePod, it could have been anything.
Marco:
Because when you look at what goes into a full-size HomePod, and this is kind of where I wanted to go with this, you look at what goes into a full-size HomePod compared to the HomePod Mini, and you see very, very different engineering and cost priorities in these things.
Marco:
You look at the HomePod, the full-size one, and
Marco:
And one of the headlining features of it was this automatic sensing of the room where it would detect where the walls and stuff were and it would bounce the sound off the walls and reflect it all around the room to basically try to simulate it being more than just one speaker.
Marco:
To say like, oh, you can make great sound, room-filling sound with just one speaker.
Marco:
And you look at all the...
Marco:
product marketing like depictions of the home pod that apple had at that time and it was always like the home pod magically with no power cord sitting in the middle of a table in the middle of a room and you know somehow filling the whole room with sound and i think that's that's how they designed this you know and they they're like let's let's make the the maximum you know maximum engineered thing we can here
Marco:
And if you look at all the hardware, it's in the HomePod.
Marco:
It has, to quote their page, an array of seven horn loaded tweeters, each with its own custom amplifier.
Marco:
So there's seven amps.
Marco:
And that's just for the tweeters.
Marco:
I assume that the woofer has its own amp as well.
Marco:
It must.
Marco:
So, you know.
Marco:
eight amps inside a home pod seven tweeters um they have this internal low frequency calibration microphone for automatic bass correction direct and ambient audio beam forming all this all this like you know processing intensive stuff all the tweeters to be able to fire 360 degrees and all the directions and you know be able to sense the room and adjust things and everything meanwhile
Marco:
If you have one HomePod playing by itself without a second one paired to it, it sounds pretty good.
Marco:
But, you know, it sounds a hell of a lot better getting a second one and making an actual stereo pair that actually has physical space between the two speakers.
Marco:
And when you do that...
Marco:
Almost all of that custom processing is disabled.
Marco:
Oh my.
Marco:
And so the way that I've heard HomePods for most of the time that I've been using them, I'm almost always listening to a stereo pair.
Marco:
And the stereo pair really does sound way better than a single one.
Marco:
Way better.
Marco:
And it's not even then using all that stuff.
Marco:
Or it's using very little of it, at least.
Marco:
If you want room-filling sound, you can do it.
Marco:
You can try it with, like, one thing in one place that's doing all these tricks.
Marco:
You know, sound bars, which I hate as a category, often advertise similar kind of things.
Marco:
Oh, they bounce the sound off the walls.
Marco:
You don't need rear speakers.
Marco:
You don't need, like... And you know what?
Marco:
Doesn't really work that well.
Marco:
I've never been fooled by these things.
Marco:
I've never once thought, wow, it sounds like there's speakers actually on the left and right of me.
Marco:
Or it sounds like I actually have rear speakers from this soundbar.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
You know why?
Marco:
Because of physics.
Marco:
It's not that easy to bounce stuff off walls in ways you can actually tell with reasonable volumes that don't sound really overwhelmingly weird from certain angles.
Marco:
It's just physics.
Marco:
You need multiple points of sound to actually fill a room with sound that sounds good.
Marco:
The entire idea of cramming all this stuff into one speaker, I think was bad engineering and cost management.
Marco:
I don't think this product should ever have been released in the way it was.
Marco:
That added so much cost to it.
Marco:
Meanwhile, you look at the HomePod Mini, a device that was almost certainly prioritizing cost over almost all else.
Marco:
It's $100 compared to the $350 they were selling this thing for.
Marco:
The HomePod Mini is actually kind of expensive for what it is because it only has one driver.
Marco:
It doesn't even have a dedicated tweeter and woofer.
Marco:
It's one single speaker driver that does both jobs, which is one of the reasons it doesn't sound very good because that's fairly hard to make work physics-wise to make it sound good with just one thing doing everything.
Marco:
They really cut down so much.
Marco:
If you look at the teardowns on iFixit versus the HomePod full-size one, and you can see there's just...
Marco:
all this massive complexity and engineering and components in this thing.
Marco:
And then you look at a teardown of the HomePod Mini, and there's almost nothing in it, and it's significantly stripped down, way cheaper, way simpler.
Marco:
And it starts to seem obvious, like, the HomePod, the first HomePod, just, it seems like Apple totally ignored cost when designing it.
Marco:
Like, it seems like they totally over-engineered it, thinking that they could just kind of
Marco:
Walk into the market and just start taking money.
Marco:
And a lot of people have made the same – have made an analogy to the iPod Hi-Fi, the old speaker dock.
Marco:
It's actually a very good analogy because that was another area where Apple didn't have a passion for speaker docks.
Marco:
They were not the first ones to the speaker dock market.
Marco:
I think Steve Jobs was jealous of all the money that Bose was making selling $300 speaker docks for their iPods.
Marco:
And they were like, we can get that $300 ourself.
Marco:
And they made one that was a little bit more expensive and a little bit nicer in certain ways, not nicer in other ways.
Marco:
Sound familiar?
Marco:
And it flopped in the market because it turned out most people don't need one of those at all.
Marco:
And the ones that did want speaker docks would much rather buy one of the like $100 JBL ones that sound pretty decent than buy the like
Marco:
almost $400 you know Apple or Bose or whatever ones and I think the HomePod it was a similar flaw and a similar flop in that they just over engineered it so much in ways that they didn't need to like it it's not like they made it sound too good it doesn't sound that good when you only have one of them
Marco:
They just over-engineered it.
Marco:
And the HomePod Mini sounds significantly worse, not because it lacks seven tweeters and a special microphone to tune itself to the room.
Marco:
You know how you can tune your woofer to the room for automatic bass correction?
Marco:
Remove one word, automatic.
Marco:
And offer an EQ or at least a bass knob in the adjustment panel for the HomePod in software.
Marco:
Which, by the way, as a HomePod owner and as someone who has heard from a lot of other HomePod owners, we all want that.
Marco:
If there was adjustable bass on the HomePod, that would solve the vast majority of issues people have with its audio.
Marco:
It works pretty well for me, but yeah, there are times where I would want to adjust it.
Marco:
And I've heard from so many people who are like, I tried it, but it's too much bass.
Marco:
So many people would love a software adjustment of just a bass knob in the control panel in the software, and they can get rid of that microphone.
Marco:
And they can also, you know, design a product that's made to either be firing in one direction or paired with the second one and get rid of most of those seven tweeters and seven custom amplifiers that are on each one.
Marco:
They can get rid of the direct and ambient audio beam forming because again, like you're not trying, like if you don't try to fill a room with one single point and just say, all right, here's one point.
Marco:
It'll be inexpensive.
Marco:
If you want to fill a room, get two of them and pair them.
Marco:
That is such a different engineering goal and that makes for such a different product.
Marco:
And then you can make that product cheaper.
Marco:
And maybe you could make a really good sounding one for $200.
Marco:
And then a pair would be $400 instead of $700.
Marco:
And that's a really big difference.
Marco:
That alone, even ignoring the input issue and the Siri issues, that alone could have been a huge deal.
Marco:
And then finally, they put all this engineering and all this cost into the HomePod.
Marco:
And then the CPU they put into it was the A8 from the iPhone 6.
Marco:
And when you ask it a question of Siri, it's slow to respond.
Marco:
Now, this has been one of the only things that I miss about the Alexa ecosystem when I switched over to this.
Marco:
Alexa is faster.
Marco:
Faster to respond.
Marco:
Like, way faster.
Marco:
And always has been, even on their very first generation hardware.
Marco:
And I have to wonder – obviously most of that is probably the service side.
Marco:
But I have to wonder how much of that could Apple have solved with a higher-end or faster processor or some kind of different processor choice?
Marco:
Like they spent all this engineering and all this cost in all these fancy audio features that nobody was asking for for a goal that they couldn't actually achieve of filling a room with sound with one point.
Marco:
And yet, the actual main interaction method to this thing is slow.
Marco:
Now, the HomePod Mini moves from the A8 from the phone chip to the S5 CPU from the Apple Watch Series 5.
Marco:
So the HomePod Mini actually has an Apple Watch CPU in it.
Marco:
I couldn't find many good direct comparisons of how the performance between the A8 and S5 is.
Marco:
The one benchmark I found, which was not very reliable, suggested the S5 is way faster at certain things than the A8 was, so that the HomePod Mini should, in theory, be way faster than the original HomePod at certain things.
Marco:
I don't know if that actually plays out.
Marco:
Anecdotally, it does seem like the HomePod Mini responds faster based on my limited experience here, but it certainly does seem like
Marco:
They gave the original HomePod a way too slow processor and spent way too much money on all of the other stuff inside of it that mostly wasn't necessary or was over-engineered.
Marco:
And the HomePod mini was able to be so much cheaper because they designed it that way from the start.
Marco:
And so I think they're totally able to make a really good larger HomePod for $200 if they actually go and go into it with that goal in mind with some kind of degree of like humbleness.
Marco:
Like the first HomePod was like, we're going to walt into this market.
Marco:
We see what everyone else is charging.
Marco:
We're going to charge two and a half times or whatever it is.
Marco:
And people will buy it because it's good.
Marco:
And I think hopefully they can reenter this market when they're ready with a little bit more, you know, humbleness and reality check and engineer a higher end product that sounds way better than the HomePod mini, which, again, is not super difficult and can actually be sold at a compelling price of, I'd say, around 200 bucks.
Marco:
And I think that could be a really good product.
Marco:
People like me who want bigger sound can buy two of them significantly more affordably than when it was $350.
Marco:
And ideally integrate it better into the ecosystem and give it a little bit faster processor so we can respond faster.
Marco:
And that could be a really good product.
Marco:
So I'm looking forward to where this is going.
Marco:
Although at least I was until I saw the rumor from German this week about apparently they're working on future HomePods with screens.
John:
I think that's a good idea, because a lot of the possible utility, I mean, especially if they make it kind of a Home Hub thing, like, yes, using it as a speaker, as you described, they could definitely make that product.
John:
Fewer drivers, less smarts, lower price, and now you can get two of them more easily, and you're all set.
John:
But it's still just a speaker, and all the things that the HomePod can do, like all the questions you can ask Siri...
John:
you know a lot of them would benefit from having a screen show me the weather don't just tell me when I wake up in the morning have a little display ready for me have a rotating you know thing of pictures if I ask to see a picture of somebody put it on the screen for me if I'm looking at a recipe show me your recipe like there's
John:
The Amazon products and the Google products that have screens, I think, enjoy popularity because a screen is a really useful thing to have for a voice assistant in your house.
John:
If you stop thinking of it as a speaker, which is mostly what you were talking about, and start thinking of it as a voice assistant that happens to have a non-terrible speaker, a screen is very attractive and I think plays much more to Apple's strengths because...
John:
There are lots of things that I just described that are already possible on watches and phones and iPads.
John:
So Apple has already done some of the work for it.
John:
And if Apple half butts it, as Marco says, they could do a poor job of it.
John:
But you can imagine a really good implementation of, oh, I roll out of bed.
John:
And in the kitchen, there's my HomePod with a screen showing me today's schedule and a weather forecast.
John:
And I can ask it to do things and I can intercom to wake the kids up and like the ad rights itself.
John:
Like Apple, I think once Apple has a screen, they are more comfortable.
John:
Whatever that thing is on top of the HomePod is not a screen.
John:
And the product is lesser for it because without a screen, Apple doesn't know what to do.
John:
And then it has to lean entirely on its sluggish and not so smart voice assistant.
Marco:
Yeah, and by the way, thank you for hoofed in the chat for giving me the word that I was looking for with humbleness.
Marco:
Apparently there's already a word for that called humility.
Marco:
I couldn't get it.
Marco:
As I was saying, I'm like, I know there's a word for this.
Marco:
I can't think of what the word is.
Marco:
Humble-bility, they call it.
Marco:
That's it, yeah.
Marco:
Humble-osity.
John:
Oh, and one more thing on the chip shortage thing of like all the different, you know, the COVID has caused a shortage of parts or whatever, and that could explain why stuff's getting canceled early or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Some of this is just I don't know if this is a real thing, but I saw it three or four times on Twitter and on websites.
John:
So who knows?
John:
But it was people buying HomePods.
John:
Like I said, hey, get them while supplies last.
John:
So people are like, OK, well, fine, I guess I'll get one now.
John:
So they would order a HomePod to get one of the last ones.
John:
And, you know, before they're all out of stock.
John:
Right.
John:
And they would receive them.
John:
And reportedly, the manufactured date was the launch date of the HomePod.
John:
meaning they made they made a bunch of home pods in like 2017 or whenever it was and they never made any more and they just have been trying to sell those like like us with the atp pins which we made many years ago and we're still trying to sell them because apparently everybody who wants an atp pin has one right and we just have a you know a handful of the left but you know if you buy an atp pin today you're getting a pin that was made three years ago luckily there are no electronics in it and it's still supported by all our software but
John:
buy an atp pin um but yeah so shortages could have contributed to the early as we discussed the xeon being discontinued stuff the early demise of the iMac but it seems like from people buying them that home pods are not suffering from a lack of parts because apple isn't making home pods anymore
Casey:
yeah apple hasn't made home pods in years apparently right they're just they're just trying to sell through the warehouse filled with home pods someone's built like a fort out of home pods in the back room it's like that um remember that i don't remember what like magazine or company it was or whatever but that did the the wheel oh imac boxes you know what i'm talking about yeah uh same same basic idea
Marco:
yeah and and like i'm i'm kind of surprised like as of now we record they still aren't sold out i assumed that when they announced that they were discontinued that they would sell out within a day right and and the space gray ones did they sold out pretty quickly but the white ones which is actually my preferred color of them are still for sale now like two weeks later or whatever it's been did they did they introduce the space gray one later or was that at launch day it was always at the same time yeah i don't know maybe that was just the more popular color
John:
Or maybe they misguessed when they manufactured them all originally in whatever year it was.
Marco:
And I've been tempted to buy one now because I really do enjoy them.
Marco:
Because you have so many and they need friends.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
But I don't really have anywhere else I could put a full-size HomePod.
Marco:
You could make a fort.
Marco:
But if any of mine die and if they haven't released a new one by that point...
Marco:
I will actually really regret not having one.
Marco:
You need to have spare HomePods.
Casey:
This is how you end up with a closet full of cheese graters.
Casey:
Except for you, it'll be a closet full of HomePods.
John:
My thing that I'm collecting costs like $9 each, though.
John:
It's a little bit easier to get them.
Casey:
Well, it won't be too long until those are $9 each as well.
John:
Cheese graters only appreciate it in value.
John:
The price of Oxford cheese graters has never gone down, Casey.
Casey:
Sure.
Marco:
Honestly, ever since the HomePod's death was announced and as I've kind of waffled on getting any spares, I've started to realize I really like the way it works for the most part.
Marco:
First of all, if anyone out there does not yet have AirPlay 2 in your household, I would strongly recommend giving it a shot in some form, whether it's playing stuff to an Apple TV or to a HomePod Mini or a regular HomePod or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
or any of the other ecosystem stuff that supports it, like obviously all of Sonos' recent stuff supports it.
Marco:
A lot of other manufacturers are starting to add it as well.
Marco:
AirPlay 2 is awesome.
Marco:
It is by far my favorite household slash multi-room slash whatever audio management thing because, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, you can control it not only from the voice assistant that's built into the speaker, but you can also control it from your phone.
Marco:
And from your iPad.
Marco:
And everyone else can in the house, too.
Marco:
So if you have an Apple household where everyone has iPhones or iPads or whatever, everyone can control it.
Marco:
And it just shows up in Control Center.
Marco:
And you can hand off from your music app to it or from it to your music app.
Marco:
And it's really nice.
Marco:
It's a wonderful interaction method if you are in Apple's ecosystem and especially if you use Apple Music.
Marco:
Now, here's the thing.
Marco:
I understand that everyone who uses Spotify, everyone, 100% of you,
Marco:
Hi.
Marco:
Think that everyone uses Spotify.
Marco:
And that's not that far off.
Marco:
Spotify is very popular.
Marco:
But not everyone uses Spotify.
Marco:
And the Spotify people, look, many of you are my friends.
Marco:
Hi.
Marco:
spotify is not everyone it's not everything it's not all music it's not the way everyone wants to listen to music their app honestly is garbage apple music is also garbage in their apps but you know it's like there's a lot of problems spotify that i have but if you're not a spotify user there are dozens of us dozens the home pod is actually amazingly good because if you're on a spotify user you're probably either an apple music person or an
Marco:
If you are especially old, like my neighbor thinks I am, you might be an iTunes slash like music on the Mac person.
Marco:
And if you are still keeping a music library, again, Spotify people, you think, quote, nobody does that anymore.
Marco:
I assure you there are people out there who do it.
Marco:
I recognize it isn't the majority anymore, but we're out there.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Nothing integrates better with an iTunes music collection than a HomePod.
Marco:
None of the other speaker things come close.
Marco:
And so I have – between me and TIFF, we both use Apple Music.
Marco:
We both used iTunes before that.
Marco:
I have playlists in there.
Marco:
I have a music collection in there.
Marco:
I have all my Phish stuff that I've downloaded legally from their site, but then that's not listed in Spotify or in Apple Music's online directory, but I have my own collection merged in with that.
Marco:
Tiff has her own stuff.
Marco:
The HomePod recognizes each of us by voice, and if Tiff wants to play one of her playlists, she asks for it, and it just knows it's her and knows which collection it's in.
Marco:
If I ask for something, it knows it's me, and it plays stuff tailored to me based on my collection that I've built up over years, my ratings, my play frequency, and stuff like that, and it has all my Phish stuff.
Marco:
So if I want to say, hey, play my best official playlist that I maintain on my own devices and with my own collection, it has access to that and it can do it.
Marco:
That's one thing that whenever we had Alexa stuff in the house, it can't do that.
Marco:
It doesn't have access to it.
Marco:
And Amazon has ways to upload stuff to it.
Marco:
So does Spotify.
Marco:
They suck and they don't work.
Marco:
Believe me, I've tried them over the years.
Marco:
They don't work.
Marco:
And so the HomePod is...
Marco:
really good for this set of needs and if you don't care about audio quality or can't you know afford the really high price tags of some of this gear or if you are super into Spotify and you and all you listen to is stuff that's available on streaming
Marco:
Well, that's a pretty big percentage of the population.
Marco:
And for all of those people, this might not be the best choice or might not be a choice at all.
Marco:
But that's not everyone.
Marco:
And for those of us who still do things kind of the old way or more into the Apple Music ecosystem for various reasons, the HomePod is great.
Marco:
And the other solutions out there are not.
Marco:
And so I really, really hope that Apple is just, again, taking a step back to regroup and will come out with better offerings here as opposed to abandoning this market forever.
Casey:
It's funny.
Casey:
I am a devout Spotify person when it comes to music.
Casey:
Obviously, I have many problems with what they're doing in the podcast space.
Casey:
But I just, in the last 48 hours, paid for another year of iTunes Match because I still do use it from time to time.
Casey:
And there's still plenty of music that I have in my library that, with time, I listen to less and less often.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I...
Casey:
do you want it available?
Casey:
And I want it available without having to carry my entire library on my phone or my iPad or what have you.
Casey:
And just today when I was in the car for a few hours, I was listening to some of my library that was in iTunes Match.
Casey:
And so I think I have a foot in both of these worlds.
Casey:
I have never used a HomePod ever, ever, ever.
Casey:
I've never heard one playing to my recollection.
Casey:
I don't debate anything that you've said.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say you're wrong.
Casey:
I will say that my experience with the Echo and Spotify is actually pretty good.
Casey:
I'm not asking it to do a lot of the things that you're doing.
Casey:
I'm not a heavy playlist person.
Casey:
Our entire family just uses my Spotify account as the canonical Spotify account.
Casey:
It works pretty well for our needs, so it depends on what your needs are.
Casey:
I don't think it would work well for your needs, Marco, but it does work pretty well for our simplified needs.
Casey:
Ultimately, I agree with you that I think it would be too bad if Apple just pulled an airport extreme slash express or whatever and just walked away from this market.
Casey:
Because I think for a company that seems to claim to really care about music and once bought a company that was entirely around making speakers and particularly headphones for music.
Casey:
It seems like this is something Apple should do well, even if they haven't yet.
Casey:
And gosh knows, my AirPods are some of my favorite devices in the entire world.
Casey:
Those things are freaking magic.
Casey:
So I would hope that they take a second crack at this, or maybe a third crack.
Casey:
I don't really consider the HomePod Mini to be but a refinement of what they've already done, but a perhaps complete rethinking of what they've already done would be pretty good.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Squarespace.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And no matter what your skill level is, there is no coding required.
Marco:
Anybody can do this.
Marco:
And the resulting site that you make at Squarespace is going to look and work like a professional site.
Marco:
These are professionally designed templates that you're starting from.
Marco:
You can customize them as much as you want.
Marco:
And everything is intuitive and visual and live previewing and easy to use online.
Marco:
All of this is super great at Squarespace.
Marco:
I've personally built lots of websites there, both for myself and for other people.
Marco:
And it's really great, especially when you're handing it off to somebody else to maintain.
Marco:
You know that they're never going to have to worry about software updates or security patches.
Marco:
You aren't going to have to be involved once you hand it off.
Marco:
Squarespace has their own dedicated, amazing support team.
Marco:
So you can just make a website for somebody or direct them to Squarespace and say, hey, build it here.
Marco:
and then you're out of the picture as the nerd friend who recommended where they build a website.
Marco:
So it's just a wonderful place to make websites from anybody, again, novice to professional.
Marco:
It's just great building on Squarespace.
Marco:
You get tons of functionality built in, stuff that's honestly kind of hard to do yourself, and it's just super easy on Squarespace.
Marco:
See for yourself with a free trial with no credit card required at squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
When you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to head back there, squarespace.com slash ATP, and use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
That's squarespace.com slash ATP, offer code ATP for 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Make your next move with Squarespace.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
We have to do a little bit of housekeeping, but it's a happy kind of housekeeping.
Casey:
This is for ATP membership.
Casey:
Marco has been doing a lot of work, and I say that with not an ounce of sarcasm.
Casey:
Marco's been doing a lot of work to add a couple of options that... I've been doing work.
Casey:
Take credit.
Casey:
Take credit.
Casey:
Marco's been doing a lot of work.
Casey:
For me, it's a lot.
Casey:
People have been asking for a fair bit of time now, and we're approaching one year of ATP membership.
Casey:
We're getting there.
Casey:
And we wanted to try to add a few options for those of you, particularly those who are not American.
Casey:
So we have new options for annual billing, both in U.S.
Casey:
dollars, of course, but also in euros and in pounds.
Casey:
Marco, can you talk through kind of what the situation is there and perhaps how you would switch from monthly billing to annual billing?
Marco:
Sure, yeah.
Marco:
Although, first, a little bit of housekeeping.
Marco:
If you see a bunch of refunds on your bill this month...
Marco:
That is because we had a bug where under certain billing failure and renewal scenarios, it was possible to have two subscriptions active at once for the same member.
Marco:
I detected those.
Marco:
I ran a script to cancel all the duplicate subscriptions and issue back refunds for anybody who would have had four months of double payments or whatever.
Marco:
I'd go refund half of them.
Marco:
And so some people out there, I think there was like 40 of you totaled.
Marco:
Not a large number.
Marco:
Some number of people out there will have some refunds this month.
Marco:
So if you see that, that's why.
Marco:
And that should be not possible in the future.
Marco:
Yeah, so now, back to the good news.
Marco:
Yeah, so we now have euro and Great British pound options for currency.
Marco:
And we also have an annual billing option instead of monthly.
Marco:
That was another very hotly requested item because a lot of people, for whatever reason, either don't want...
Marco:
a certain number of small charges to happen every month as opposed to one big one every year or people who maybe it was easier to account for that or whatever else.
Marco:
So annual billing is now a thing as well as euro and pound support.
Marco:
We tried to make the prices pretty reasonable on those so that they all equate to about $8.
Marco:
So it's 7 euro or 6 pounds.
Marco:
The one thing that a lot of people have asked is...
Marco:
how to switch their existing account like people who are already in one of these countries uh to switch your account from u.s dollars where you already created it to euro or pound and there is a way to do it it kind of sucks and i'm sorry but there's reasons so
Marco:
We've always heard from people who tell us why it's so hard to move an Apple ID.
Marco:
If you move to a different country and you need to move your Apple ID, apparently you have to cancel all your subscriptions and wait for them to all lapse.
Marco:
So it might be like a year out, and then they can move your Apple ID or something like that.
Marco:
Well, that's kind of how this works too, probably for the same reasons.
Marco:
For various reasons dealing with how Stripe deals with customers and credits and refunds and currencies and international currencies, things like that.
Marco:
You can switch your account to a different currency, but you have to cancel the existing subscription, which doesn't actually cancel it instantly because people don't expect it to work that way.
Marco:
So I had to change that last summer.
Marco:
When you cancel your subscription, it just turns off auto-renewing, but you still get the rest of the month or whatever you paid for.
Marco:
So you have to wait for that month to be over, and then your membership will still exist, but it will go into the expired state, and it will tell you and say, hey, you should renew.
Marco:
At that point, then you can sign up with any currency you want to.
Marco:
So, yeah, short version is to switch currencies with an existing account, you have to cancel your existing membership, wait for that month to expire, and then re-enable it with the new currency.
Casey:
Additionally, coming soon, and we don't know exactly when, but coming soon, there will be WWDC merchandise coming up.
Casey:
We are...
Casey:
Definitely going to have an all-new shirt design.
Casey:
We are not going to talk about what it is.
Marco:
It's good.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it's going to be something pretty cool.
Casey:
And John has spent a lot of time working on this, basically on the slacker of the three of us this month.
Casey:
John has spent a lot of time working on this, and I'm really excited for it.
Casey:
Although I guess I'm not entirely slacking, I've also come up with an entire new product.
Casey:
Well, kind of.
Casey:
That's overselling it a bit.
Casey:
But nevertheless, here we are.
Casey:
I've come up with an entirely new product to the ATP world, which I'm very excited about.
Casey:
And the spiritual return of something from several years ago.
Casey:
So I'm really excited about that, too.
Casey:
And we don't have an exact date for this.
Casey:
But we bring this up in part to say...
Casey:
that members, ATP members, get 15% off on all ATP merchandise.
Casey:
So if you wanted a reason to join, but we're holding out for annual billing or we're holding out for billing in weight, I mean pounds, then now is the time and the merchandise is just the icing on the cake.
Casey:
So ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
John, today is a big day for you, and particularly you.
Casey:
Mac OS X 10.0 is 20 years old today.
Casey:
I was still a teenager 20 years ago today.
John:
Lots of people are tweeting about it and posting articles and stuff, and it's just a coincidence that today, literally the day that we're recording this, March 24th, is the exact day that is the 20th anniversary of the release of Mac OS X 10.0.
John:
um i didn't do anything for it sorry mac os 10 i didn't get you anything this year uh part of it is because uh you know i i wrote all those reviews of it way back when right and then i did a five-year retrospective when mac os 10 for five was five years old and then i did a 10-year retrospective when mac os 10 was 10 years old i just feel like not only am i done reviewing mac os 10 i'm also done writing retrospectives on it like
John:
It's like, well, you did a five-year and a 10-year.
John:
You've got to do a 20-year.
John:
Apparently, I don't.
John:
But it's worth marking the occasion.
John:
If you want to look back at some of my old reviews, we'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
I collected all the links on my website when I stopped writing them.
John:
So there's the reviews of the releases, 10.0, 10.1, so on and so forth, up to when I stopped.
John:
There's also links to all the pre-releases, so Developer Preview 3, Developer Preview 4, the public beta.
John:
And then there's the links to my retrospectives that I just talked about.
John:
I think the retrospectives maybe are the most interesting because like 20 year is it's a retrospective moment.
John:
Let's look back.
John:
And especially because what we're looking back on is Mac OS 10.
John:
I know it's not such a big deal that they change the name.
John:
They change it to OS 10 and then they change it to Mac OS.
John:
But I do feel like Mac OS 10 sort of ended.
John:
And now we're just in the age of like modern macOS because a lot of the defining characteristics of macOS 10 slowly faded.
John:
Not that I'm saying this is a new operating system.
John:
It's obviously macOS 10.
John:
It's the same thing that it always was.
John:
It's the next drive operating system.
John:
It's got a dock.
John:
It's got a menu bar.
John:
It's the same OS, right?
John:
But I do feel like there's sort of been a...
John:
a slow changeover in the os so i feel like the the era that we are celebrating 20 years ago today mac os 10 10.0 was released that era has a beginning middle and an end and now we're in this new era of sort of the modern mac maybe maybe this era will come to be defined as like the arm transition be the being the turning point or whatever but anyway it's always fun to look back on those things unfortunately some of my old reviews are slowly deteriorating through bit rot on the internet not literal bit rot but just like
John:
If you write something on the web and it stays there for 15 or 20 years and the site that it was written on has gone through like five different CMSs on the back end, things inevitably get a little bit creaky.
John:
I also always push the limits of the Ars Technica CMS by writing like custom HTML and JavaScript and doing my own thing all over the place.
John:
And that stuff has particularly rotted.
John:
Kind of like doing custom UI in like a Mac or iOS app.
John:
You come to regret it as the OSs keep changing and your custom stuff starts breaking.
John:
I did that with all my articles, right?
John:
Someday I will probably put up – because I used to have a quote-unquote blog over at Ars Technica called Fat Bits.
John:
And I have reproduced every single one of those Fat Bits posts with permission on my own personal website, hypercritical.co.
John:
But someday I will eventually ask ours and say, hey, it looks like my reviews are getting creaky.
John:
You probably don't get any traffic on them because they're super old.
John:
Can I just put up, you know, versions of them on my website where I'll make sure all the links work and all the screenshots are there and all that other stuff?
John:
Unfortunately, one of the big factors here, and I was going through this weekend, is that a lot of the, you know, the thing you can't avoid is actual link rot.
John:
As in, you know, if you've ever read any one of my Mac OS X interviews, like every 15th word is a link.
John:
That's just my style of writing on the web.
John:
I make lots of links.
John:
And those links all went somewhere when the review was published.
John:
But 15, 20 years later, a lot of those links don't go anywhere anymore, right?
John:
You click on them and they have 404.
John:
You click on them or they go to a page that doesn't look anything like it did before.
John:
Some of those you can pull from archive.org.
John:
That's what I was doing this weekend.
John:
I was fixing a bunch of broken links from FatBits posts, actually.
John:
linking a lot of them to the archive.org page just to say, hey, if you were reading this at the time and you clicked on this and it took you to this section of Apple's website, this is what it looked like back in, you know, 2002 or whatever.
John:
And that's fun to do.
John:
But archive.org doesn't have everything either.
John:
And then there are things that are just obscure or just don't exist in any fashion or were never spidered because of robot.txt.
John:
I feel so weird saying spidered.
John:
Kids don't say that these days, do they?
John:
They say crawled, I guess.
John:
Back in the day, we called them spiders because they were cool.
John:
yeah so but i would like to have sort of a modern local incarnation of my stuff just so i can point somebody to it and they can essentially just enjoy the screenshots or whatever and then i could fix some of the typos and remove the smileys yes in some of my earlier views i put literal ascii smileys it was a long time ago okay it was it was literally the 90s please have mercy on me
Casey:
I love that you say that as I was spending a few moments, just a few moments ago, choosing exactly the right emoji for the some membership housekeeping section of the show notes.
John:
Did emoji exist when I wrote the first one?
John:
I don't think so.
John:
Maybe in Japan it existed.
John:
I feel like we've had this debate before, but that's okay.
John:
But anyway, whether or not it existed, it certainly wasn't a viable thing that I could type into a webpage in 1999.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
Speaking of curious Apple decisions and that same decision made better by somebody else, Google Play has dropped commissions to 15% from 30% following Apple's move last year.
Casey:
This is from TechCrunch.
Casey:
Google is reducing the service fee for Google Play to 15%, down from 30%, for the first $1 million of revenue developers earn using Play billing system each year.
Casey:
The company will levy a 30% cut on every dollar developers generate through Google Play beyond the first million in a year, it said.
Casey:
This is the way it should have worked for Apple, but no, because they're either cheap or annoying or a combination of both.
Casey:
You have to join the small business program, then you have to get approved, and then you have to make sure you make less than a million, but you have to make less than a million in order to get the 15%.
Casey:
And then if you make even a dollar more than a million, you get 30% on everything, not 30% on the news.
Casey:
It's just preposterous.
John:
30% on everything the next year.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
That's true.
John:
You get punished the whole next year.
John:
It's not like it's not like a marginal tax rate where, you know, the your millions and first dollar is charged at 30%.
John:
I think you get 15% for that whole year.
John:
But because you went over a million that year, your whole next year is blown from day one of the next year.
John:
You're at 30%.
Marco:
No, you don't get it for the whole year.
Marco:
You get it until like the next payment.
Marco:
So it's like every month you get paid out.
Marco:
Oh, is it a monthly cycle?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, no, I think it's monthly.
Marco:
And for the rest of the year.
Marco:
But no, it's like people have run the numbers or estimated how many apps or developers are affected by Apple's new program and everything.
Marco:
And people try to figure out like what would it cost Apple
Marco:
to run their program the way Google's is running, which is like similar kind of deal, but way simpler and remove some of these weird, like anti incentives and removes the need to apply and try to get approved and everything just applies automatically.
Marco:
And yeah,
Marco:
It's not a small amount of money.
Marco:
It's a significant amount of money that Apple... By Apple doing it their weird way they're doing it, they actually are saving a lot of money.
Marco:
But it's not make or break the company kind of money.
Marco:
So it's something that I think you might notice it on the quarterly earnings report for some tiny percentage of one department would be smaller by a noticeable amount.
Marco:
But...
John:
it's not like it's the kind of thing like the reason apple is doing it the way they're doing it is because they're being cheap like that's that's the real that's the real answer and i would say though like i wonder if that estimate accounted for the extra cost of apple doing the bookkeeping for its byzantine program like this simple program you know because as you noted pretty much nobody makes more than a million dollars in terms of percentage on the app store like there's just so many developers only at
John:
tiny, tiny part is making that million.
John:
So who is a potential member of the small business program?
John:
Essentially everybody in the app store.
John:
That's a lot of stupid applications to deal with and doing the bookkeeping to make sure that you apply the rules and make sure you count their revenue when they go over than they have in the other bracket, but they want to get back into the other one.
John:
Like...
John:
it's complicated to run a complicated program one of the beauties of google's plan is nobody signs up these are just the new rules and the rules are so simple i can explain them in a paragraph that's it right it's easier to run that program because it is a uniform set of rules for everybody you don't have to like sign up all these people and you don't have to carefully watch and do the you know the monthly billing cycle rollover now you're in the 30 bracket or however it works in the apple one
John:
It's easier to run a simple program, and I don't think that any cost estimate is factoring that in.
John:
Now, I agree that even when you factor that in, it's still to Apple's advantage to use their ridiculous program because it saves them more money.
John:
I heard – I think Ben Thompson on Dithering was chalking it up to just –
John:
Simply, if you're incentivized to run your business in a way that you make the most money possible from the App Store, if you're in charge of the App Store financials or whatever, of course you're going to pick the complicated program because you want the goodwill, but you also don't want to give up too much money.
John:
I feel like that flies in the face a little bit of Apple's supposed philosophy from many years ago where there's just one profit and loss for the whole company, and we don't think about it as, okay, well, you in charge of the App Store, you're going to be judged on the profit and loss from the App Store itself.
John:
And so you are incentivized as king of your little kingdom here to make sure that you make the most money possible from those developers rather than thinking about big picture.
John:
What's good for Apple?
John:
What's good for Apple is to make developers happy, even if it is slightly worse for this specific aspect of App Store revenue.
John:
Right.
John:
Do you think Apple thinks that?
John:
I mean, that was the whole pitch with the whole we're a functional organization and we have one profit and loss.
John:
Like even in the Tim Cook era, you know, before Jobs, but also in the Tim Cook era, the idea that we don't have each individual department worrying about their individual profit and loss.
John:
And, you know, like at the end of the year when they do the big report, they don't say, OK, well, the Mac team did great, but the iPhone team did not so great.
John:
It'll probably be the reverse.
John:
But anyway.
John:
It's like, how do we do as a company?
John:
Because if you don't do that, you create perverse incentives for someone to make their little corner of the business very profitable at the cost of the big picture, at the cost of Apple as a whole, at the cost of the brand, the cost of something that doesn't show up on their individual profit and loss.
John:
That has always been the pitch in the modern, in the post-Steve Jobs II era was that's why Apple is great because they do this thing that other companies don't do.
John:
There are no little tiny subsets that are fighting for themselves inside Apple.
John:
It's all one big Apple and we all work together.
John:
And that way people aren't punished in their careers for, for example, foregoing a bunch of revenue in the app store if overall Apple does better because
John:
of it because developers are happier more developers come to the platform or whatever um all that said that sounds like a pretty ideal and there's a reason lots of other companies don't do it that way and i can imagine no matter how much apple says that's the case there's still a little bit of that going on inside it's still though it it baffles me why apple came up with this plan because
John:
Because I don't think it, you know, it's like if you had a company that was really ruthlessly every individual subset has its own profit and loss numbers and has to live and die on its own.
John:
This is the type of pricing system I can imagine it would come up with.
John:
But Apple, that's the other extreme.
John:
I refuse to believe Apple is at the other extreme.
John:
I can believe they don't necessarily achieve their ideals.
John:
But I think that is their ideals.
John:
And I think a lot of other things they do.
John:
I'll look that way.
John:
But here is Google showing Apple how it's done.
John:
We would have said this is the Apple plan.
John:
Oh, Apple doesn't do things complicated.
John:
They just want it simple, just like 70-30 was simple.
John:
We may not have liked it, but they said, well, it has that Apple feeling to it because it's like, look, it's just 70-30.
John:
Never mind about Netflix and everybody not getting 70-30.
John:
Ignore that.
John:
Everyone is treated the same in the App Store.
John:
Right.
John:
But to a first approximation, everybody except for literally companies you can count on your hand got 70-30.
John:
And it was not a complicated graduated scale where you sell this much and you get different.
John:
It was just 70-30.
John:
Very Apple-like in its simplicity.
John:
And when they did the small business program, it's totally un-Apple-like, both in its conception as let's pinch as many pennies as we possibly can, you know, and try to get goodwill at the same time.
John:
It's clear that we don't want that much goodwill because we don't want to lose that money, right?
John:
Right.
John:
And then Google does the Apple style, which is like, Google, there's nothing for you to do.
John:
There's nothing to install.
John:
You just get more money now.
John:
And it's easy for everyone to understand.
John:
Done and done.
John:
So I feel like Apple really embarrassed Google.
John:
Google really embarrassed Apple here.
John:
And I hope Apple responds to this.
John:
I hope Apple feels suitably chastened.
John:
by google doing the apple thing and i hope they realize you know like a part of it they're saying well yeah google has to do that because their store sucks and our store is awesome so we're we have more to lose so of course our plan is more complicated google's desperate right but google is doing the thing that actually produces more goodwill like why squander any of your goodwill if you're going to forego this money and have any kind of you know go from 30 to 15 why squander an ounce of that by making the small business plan and making people apply and having this rule that
John:
It incentivizes people to stop selling their application at a certain point so they don't go into the higher quote-unquote tax bracket or whatever.
John:
Which is dumb because tax brackets don't work like that.
John:
Tax brackets are marginal like the Google thing.
John:
Yeah, it's the opposite.
Marco:
I think the idea, first of all, that Apple is kind of more holistic in its incentives and everything and doesn't have these divisional, dysfunctional goals and everything –
Marco:
I think that's a wonderful idea, and I think many people at Apple think it's that way, but the reality that we hear over and over again from people inside is that it's very different than that.
John:
When they say that, though, Apple's saying in a formal, literal sense, like when they tally up the numbers at the end of the year and how they report things, they don't do individual profit and losses.
John:
That is a provably true statement, right?
John:
But what you're saying is, okay, that's fine.
John:
That's the financial reality, but...
John:
Everybody kind of knows that, you know, you have an interdepartmental rivalries and people, you know, wanting not wanting wanting to get glory for the good stuff and not wanting to blame for the bad stuff and wanting, quote unquote, their numbers look good, even though we all know that's not how Apple reports things.
John:
Right.
John:
But this is not just totally BS.
John:
Like this is how Apple reportedly internally physically runs its company in terms of, you know, financials and year end reports and all the type of things they do inside the company to keep track of things.
Marco:
Yeah, I think the reality is that they're a big company, and whenever you have a company big enough, you're going to have inter-manager disputes and weird incentives that are bad for the company as a whole, but happen because they benefit certain people at certain ranks and everything.
Marco:
You're going to have all that, so set that aside.
Marco:
I also think that Apple does not...
Marco:
When Apple doesn't have their heart in something, you can usually tell.
Marco:
They're not good.
Marco:
From Steve on forward, they're not good at hiding when they are contemptuous or half-assed about something.
Marco:
And the developer small business program is clearly in this category.
Marco:
They clearly don't think they need to be doing this.
Marco:
They clearly hate that they need to be doing this, and they want to put in the least amount of effort possible.
Marco:
And the only reason they're doing this is because of regulatory pressure because if they don't do this, they're going to lose a lot more or they stand to lose a lot more.
John:
They want to lose the least amount of money possible, but they're doing that by putting in more effort to make this complicated program that they have to administer.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They probably had to hire people, perhaps temporarily, just to deal with the influx of applications to the small business program.
John:
They're making their lives more miserable because they want to pinch every one of those pennies.
Marco:
Yeah, well, if anything, they could... This probably shows that there actually is a decent amount of money in the App Store middle class, basically.
Marco:
The numbers in the App Store...
John:
the people who are affected by this there actually is like money there that apple is making for real i mean it's all the money i've made for them it's not the middle class it's it's it's everybody but like the top fraction of a one percent like isn't it like 99 of the store qualifies for the small business program like it is essentially the entire store you know because there's so many developers
Marco:
Yeah, but I think it also shows how much money the App Store makes as a whole, even though most of it is from that top 1% that is not going to qualify for this.
Marco:
It just makes so much money for Apple because they are doing so little.
Marco:
Yeah, Apple has...
Marco:
I'm sure a lot of people on staff for things like AppReview, and I'm sure maintaining the store has some costs, and they are spending some money on servers and bandwidth and everything, but it's such a massively high-margin business for them.
Marco:
They are making a killing on the App Store, even at 15%, let alone the 1% that's paying the 30% that's getting probably most of their money in.
Marco:
They're making billions and billions and billions of dollars from just being a rent-seeker, being in this gatekeeper position.
Marco:
They're putting in...
Marco:
very little relative to what they're making so there is enough money in there that they can afford to hire an army of probably you know relatively low to middle wage workers to actually go through these applications and and do all that and that's still worth it because they're still even at 15 making a killing from you know those of us who were in this you know app store middle class thing it it just shows like quite how egregious this whole scheme has been and how how incredibly profitable it still is for them
John:
I don't know if this falls under the category of rent-seeking, but it's the other common analogy here for how to make money.
John:
So yes, Apple certainly is gatekeeping and rent-seeking.
John:
If you want to get your thing on our platforms, you've got to go through us and give us our cut, right?
John:
But they're also doing the cliche thing of, oh, if there's a gold rush, you should be selling shovels.
John:
Because all the people who want to come and make their fortune, fame and fortune on Apple's platforms, make an iPhone app.
John:
Every one of those people has to buy Apple shovels first.
John:
Right.
John:
Like it's not it's not about rent.
John:
They haven't done anything yet.
John:
They haven't made any apps yet.
John:
It's like, well, come over here and pass our ninety nine dollars a year, which if you add up times the number of developers is not a small chunk of change just to get there to get your shovel.
John:
And then you get to start digging and then you get to try your luck.
John:
Try your luck in our market.
John:
Right.
John:
So field an app.
John:
And if you do well, we'll get a cut.
John:
But if you don't, you already did give us $99 and it costs us almost nothing for you to try launching your app on our platforms, right?
John:
So this is what we got into many times about the incentives for a services company are very different from the incentives of a product company.
John:
A product company wants to sell products that people like and a service company wants to find a way to...
John:
sell you a service or insert itself between you and the thing that you want and for customers you know they're inserting itself between them and the apps that they're going to buy and taking money from that purchase but for developers they're inserting themselves as the shovel salesman and saying okay well if you want to come and try your luck and pan in for gold and and then our hills uh start by giving us 99 dollars
Marco:
Not to mention, you know, the $1,200 you had to spend on our computer to build.
John:
Also buy all the equipment from us to develop for it, obviously, but you're going to buy that anyway.
Marco:
And your $1,000 iPhone.
John:
But I still feel like, you know, like, again, selling the products, the incentives are aligned.
John:
Do you want an awesome computer that you're happy with that helps you do your job?
John:
We will sell you that.
John:
And we are incentivized to make that computer more and more awesome for your particular job.
John:
And the incentives for running the store are very different.
John:
yeah oh don't forget about search ads still make a killing on that i almost feel good that apple is so bad at like doing things based on ads because they would say oh google does stuff based on ads but apple doesn't apple does they're just terrible they're just not good at making money from it can you imagine if google had the same plan for me
John:
if google had the same platform that apple has like it you know switch the management and now you told those google people can you figure out how to make money from ads given this platform google would be like are you kidding me yes yeah we can make a ton of money from ads look at all your customers look how much money they have we can sell ads and every but apple's like well we'll sell search ads just enough to make our search even crappier but not enough to really make us a lot of money and
John:
Didn't they have ads in your apps?
John:
They still have that?
Marco:
No, they discontinued the ads in your app.
Marco:
That was called iAd.
Marco:
Yeah, because they did a bad job of it.
John:
And I'm glad they're bad at that.
John:
It's just too bad they're not bad at services too.
John:
Not in the sense, we used to say Apple needs to get good at services.
John:
We meant like reliably running iPhoto in the cloud.
John:
We didn't mean finding a way to insert itself in every transaction in your life so they can take a cut.
Marco:
But they're really good at that.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That's flatfile.io.
Marco:
Our thanks to Flatfile for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Can we do some Ask ATP?
John:
Let's do it.
Casey:
Let's start with Matt Fenselow, who writes, Listening to your 10th anniversary discussion about photo libraries, I return to a question I've always had.
Casey:
Why aren't photos just treated as files, which can be selectively shared using any file sharing approach, iCloud, Dropouts, etc.?
Casey:
When was the fundamental decision made to treat photos as anything other than files, John?
John:
I think we covered that last time we were talking about what is the difference between like an album and a library, right?
John:
The photos themselves are files, although they do have embedded metadata right in form of the exif and everything.
John:
But what makes something a photo library is the photos are just the starting point.
John:
Those files, that's just the starting point.
John:
Then there's everything you apply on top of them.
John:
All of your edits, all of your crops, all of your adjustments, all of that stuff, metadata that you add to them, adjustments that you make.
John:
Maybe you make adjustments to the date, but you don't want to actually change the exif data that's embedded inside the file.
John:
You want that adjustment to be outside, right?
John:
You want to sort of manage your collection of things, tag them, favorite them, file them away, adjust the ones you want, rotate, crop, duplicate, do all sorts of things to it.
John:
That's what makes a photo library.
John:
That's what makes a collection.
John:
You curate the collection.
John:
You sort things into bins.
John:
You put them into subsets.
John:
You modify them.
John:
All of that is metadata that is attached to the data that is your photos.
John:
Even the adjustments is metadata because a good photo library will not destructively make those changes.
John:
Your original is always there as the file.
John:
But the value you're adding to it is the metadata.
John:
And so you can't just have it be files.
John:
You've got to keep all that metadata somewhere.
John:
The metadata could also be in files, but it's probably in some kind of a database as well.
John:
And that's what makes something a photo library.
John:
So it's not a decision of them not being treated as files.
John:
If you want to curate a collection of thousands and thousands of files, you need some form of metadata.
John:
And photos in particular is a bunch of obvious kinds of metadata that go along with photos.
John:
That's why you've got photo libraries and not just folders full of files.
Marco:
I think it's also, you know, you have the technical realities of doing this.
Marco:
You know, for many people, their entire photo library doesn't fit on their local drive.
Marco:
And so you have to have some kind of like dynamic functionality to be able to offer the photo library, but not have it all stored there.
Marco:
Additionally, you have the issue of
Marco:
fast browsing through thumbnails of photos and if all the photos are just like you know one-to-one files on your hard drive then it's going to be really hard for the display mechanism however you're viewing these whether it's just you know finder windows or whatever um to be able to render a whole bunch of thumbnails all very very quickly for you to scroll through and scan for that one picture you're looking for
John:
um even if it pre-renders them and puts them off to the side like essentially to try to solve this problem like say you take photos in raw which is the thing that people actually do you like you can't if you do the math i'm like i'm gonna scroll through this collection of thousands of photos but i don't have thumbnails but they're all on disk it's just just plain files i'll just read all the raws figure out like the io in terms of gigabytes per second that you would need to read and decode you know because if they're if they're compressed raw or like a jpeg or something and
John:
to be able to scroll smoothly and say, okay, well, I'll just do that ahead of time and I'll cache the thumbnails.
John:
And you're well on your way to making a photo library.
John:
It doesn't take long.
John:
Once you start trying to solve this problem, yeah, you're making a photo library.
John:
That's why photo libraries exist.
John:
Once you try to accomplish the tasks that you think should be able to do them with JustFiles, like, oh, JustFiles in the Finder.
John:
I just have thumbnails.
John:
That works up to a point.
John:
And then beyond that point, the finder starts doing things like making thumbnails and hiding them from you in either an in-memory or a file cache or something.
John:
And the scrolling is still a little bit clunky.
John:
And then you're just like, well, I wish this was better.
John:
And you're slowly inventing iPhoto.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And then also, you know, you have the issue of different ways to browse photos.
Marco:
Like sometimes, most of the time, I'm browsing photos just in a big chronological list just by time.
Marco:
And I can scan back.
Marco:
Well, but sometimes I want to browse by location.
Marco:
So somewhere there has to be an index of all the locations from all my photos.
Marco:
And I want some interface to be able to browse them by that.
Marco:
Sometimes I make albums and want to share them.
Marco:
Oh, you want to share this photo?
Marco:
Oh, well, you're going to need now a few versions of this photo to be shared.
Marco:
You're going to need like the Heek original.
Marco:
And then you're going to want a JPEG that was rendered for sharing.
Marco:
Maybe a smaller sized one to be shared in certain ways.
Marco:
Where are you going to put all those?
Marco:
Right next to it?
Marco:
Oh, what if it's a live photo?
Marco:
That's actually two different files.
Marco:
Do you store the little H.265 video clip next to the JPEG, or do you store them both in some kind of weird complex heat format that nothing reads?
Marco:
And so, again, you get into all this complexity of how you want to actually use this data most of the time, or across different devices, or across different technical needs, and it becomes...
Marco:
very hard to just have them be a set of files and folders and also offer the kind of functionality that most people want these days.
Casey:
All right, Dan Young writes, what's your take on Apple's awful user experience with modern Mac OS updates?
Casey:
As someone who knows the value of OS updates, I already procrastinated on installing them.
Casey:
This seems like it will teach people that OS updates are bad and should be avoided.
Casey:
I'm not really sure what Dan's going for here.
Casey:
Can one of you translate...
John:
It's good you didn't read the links.
John:
So this is on the Eclectic Light Company, which is a good website diving into details of this.
John:
And the person who writes it has been very annoyed that the OS updates that have come recently, there's been a bunch of security type packages, have been like two gigs.
John:
Like, no matter how small the change is, oh, we're just...
John:
patching one or two files and it's just a minor security update you still have to end up downloading like two to three gigabytes uh and he's been blaming this on the uh what is it called sealed system uh disk or whatever you know the catalina i think introduced the read-only uh system volume and now it's like cryptographically sealed and apparently it is easier or more straightforward to just ship a huge wad of the entire os and
John:
And install that as the new sealed system snapshot rather than trying to, you know, mount read only one of, you know, mount the system volume read only, put in the delta changes and reapply the cryptographic signatures and stuff like that, right?
John:
That's my guess as to why these updates are big.
John:
Now.
John:
That doesn't make a lot of technical sense to me because part of the beauty of APFS and the snapshotting system and the ability to do diff streaming snapshots, all that should make it much easier to send smaller updates because we can...
John:
They don't have to make their own system like, oh, how do I send the deltas?
John:
And we have to write our own code to figure out which files we have to patch and make sure that the checksums are exactly the same after the patching.
John:
Snapshot diffing already does that.
John:
With the snapshot diffing, since Apple knows that you have a sealed system volume and we know every single bit that's on your Mac OS 11.1 system volume, like down to the bit because it's read only and it's cryptographically signed.
John:
So we don't have to speculate about what you have.
John:
It seems to me that they could make macOS 11.2 do a snapshot diff locally in Apple's headquarters between 11.1 and 11.2, and then they would ship that snapshot diff and have it applied because they're applying it to a known target.
John:
There's no mystery about what's on people's disks out here in the world.
John:
But apparently that's not what they're doing.
John:
Apparently they're shipping the entire new image no matter what change.
John:
So I hope this is a technical limitation where they're just being cautious with how they do this.
John:
And I can understand why people are annoyed.
John:
And I know it is nice for me to sit here with my gigabit fiber connection and go, oh, I don't care how big the OS updates are.
John:
But it does matter.
John:
And one of the supposed promises of the quote-unquote new update system that Apple touts, which I think I mentioned in the past show is really important.
John:
mobile update from ios and ipad os and tv os and probably watch os anyway mobile update one of these supposed advantages faster more secure updates the more secure part i buy the faster not when you're making us download 2.6 gigs so
John:
I think it is it seems like it's it's something that should be better, but it also seems like it's the type of thing where especially how slow they've been moving on this, where this seems like the sort of first most cautious, most naive implementation that is wasteful.
John:
And I hope the underpinnings are all there to make this better over time.
Casey:
Finally, Matt Ewins writes, you're given the green light by your spouses to take down all the walls and rewire your home networks.
Casey:
How do you plan your new networks?
Casey:
What is installed for now and what is installed for later?
Casey:
What Ethernet or networking gear would you use?
Casey:
This is actually extremely pertinent and it might as well have been written by me because sometime in the next couple of weeks, we're going to get to the point on our house edition to do electrical and also a couple of Ethernet drops.
Casey:
So tell me, Marco, what do I need to glean from your terrible, terrible mistakes and do differently for this?
Marco:
I've gotten various bits of advice over the years, some of which I've followed, some of which I wish I'd followed, some of which I regret following.
Marco:
One of the things that I heard from people was to have them run conduit, like little tubes in the wall, as opposed to just running the wire straight in the wall.
Marco:
The idea being that, obviously, no matter what wiring you pick...
Marco:
sometime down the road and you know it takes a while for these things to change but sometime down the road the wiring you have will be obsolete and you will want to change it and ideally you'd want to change it without tearing open the walls again and having to run all new wires in like you know a very invasive way so the idea is if you run conduit through the wall and put those little like pull strings in along with the wires the idea is that you could just
Marco:
pull out the old wires and run some new wires in through these little tubes in the wall.
Marco:
And then you can have modern wiring down the road without tearing open all your walls.
Marco:
In practice, I've been told by many people who install these things, that's not really going to ever work.
Marco:
And I actually did install it in part of my house, and the installer was like, yeah, we probably can't ever actually pull the wires through the bends and everything.
Marco:
So I think in practice...
Marco:
If you have a very – if you have very simple like wall geometry in a reasonably like straightforward construction, maybe that might work.
Marco:
In the real world, I think you're going to have like a bend or two here or there that has to go around something and it's going to be very hard to get anything through there in practice.
John:
The real barrier to conduit though is usually that walls and houses –
John:
are not large enough to accommodate conduit without like entirely you know separating your two by four framing or whatever conduit is is much more commonly used in offices where it's actually used like that like you you can't open up the walls every time you want to rerun wire so they have to be conduits
John:
especially during, it's like roads, like the major highways are conduit and maybe some of the branches are not so much, but because office buildings get reconfigured a lot, there's room in the gigantic office walls and floors and ceilings to run big conduits of networking cable everywhere.
John:
In houses, your walls just aren't thick enough for you to put a giant PVC pipe in that run your wires through it.
John:
So normally the conduit has to be smaller, and that's where you get into, okay, well, the conduit is barely the size of the wire.
John:
All that said, if you don't have conduit and someone just takes a drill and drills a hole that's the size of an Ethernet cable through one of your 2x4s, there's no way you're ever getting anything back through that.
John:
As difficult as conduit may be to navigate some corners, at least you have a fighting chance.
John:
Whereas if you don't run conduit and just someone literally drills holes, it's good structurally in that you're not compromising the structural integrity of your wall framing.
John:
But you can't even get the RJ45 back through that hole because it's literally the thickness of the wire.
John:
And it's also, by the way, embedded in your wall that you don't want to open up.
John:
So it really depends on, you know, how much... Do you plan on ever yanking out the wire and putting in new wire?
John:
If you do...
Marco:
it is a good idea to see if you can use conduit at least for the major runs but don't compromise the structural integrity of your house by putting a giant three-inch conduit through a load-bearing wall because that's not a good trade that's not a good trade-off right um and and yeah and i mean heck the first time i did this i did it in a wall that was then later being spray foamed and they just spray foamed right over the bare wires and so those are those are in there forever yeah those are
John:
Those are not coming out.
John:
And that's the beauty of conduit.
John:
If you have spray foam insulation with the conduit, just spray over the conduit.
John:
That's fine.
John:
That's the whole point of it.
John:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
So anyway, yeah, so that's all right.
Marco:
I would say the easiest way to do this is to have –
Marco:
as little wiring running through the walls as possible and to have it instead all go like straight up to an attic or straight down to a basement where then it can run in a more accessible place so like you have all the runs that just are like you know straight you know which is similar to how usually you run ducting for air conditioning and stuff
Marco:
is that you have most of the main trunks and the runs of it are mostly in accessible areas, and then you shoot straight up a wall to get to a room, but you're not running side to side within the deep parts of the wall.
Marco:
Otherwise, kind of just accept the fact that, okay, whatever I'm going to put in there now...
Marco:
in x number of years it's probably going to be at least partially obsolete uh and it'll and i'll just i'll have to live with it or we'll have to move by then or whatever or i'll have been chewed through by rats yes right because that's the other problem with things in the wall that's true
Marco:
But that being said, the first set of this wiring I did that got spray foamed in, that was at this point almost 10 years ago.
Marco:
And that was at the time I said put in the best in at the time, that was Cat6.
Marco:
And Cat6 today is still fine.
Marco:
It can still do a lot.
Marco:
I've never had a problem with those wires on those walls.
Marco:
They just work 100% of the time as good network wiring tends to mostly do.
Marco:
And it's been great.
Marco:
So the amount of time you have is potentially long.
Marco:
and so even despite all this like it's probably still worth doing so uh and and the time you might have longer than you think before you actually are hitting problems with that and and you know even though right now 10 gig ethernet stuff exists and i think those old cat six wires uh i don't know exactly the tolerances that makes it so i can't do all these things but like i'm pretty sure i can't do 10 gig i might be able to do like 2.5 or something like that
John:
No, I think you can do 10 gig over a Cat 6 just over shorter runs.
Marco:
Yeah, but who knows if they accidentally bent it too close to a power line somewhere or something.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But anyway, it does gigabit just fine, and still now, 10 years later...
Marco:
That's still fine.
Marco:
And when I put it in 10 years ago, gigabit wasn't new.
Marco:
It was well into its lifespan.
Marco:
But gigabit networking is still really fast.
Marco:
It's still the fastest internet connection you can get in a house.
Marco:
So the wire, at least in the US in most places, and even that, you're lucky if you can get that.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I'm not being held back for internet connectivity by that.
Marco:
The only thing that's really holding back for me is computer-to-computer file transfers.
Marco:
And that's not something I do so often that I need that to be super fast.
Marco:
As long as my internet connection is fast, which it is over Cat6 just fine, then I don't have any problems with that.
Marco:
And so if I'm going to continue to use Cat6 for another 10 years...
Marco:
it would probably still be fine, and I probably would still not really be feeling a lot of, like, I'm being held back by the wiring on my walls.
Marco:
That would, at that point, be almost 20 years old.
John:
I would plan for 10 gig, though, because I feel like 10 gig is going to come around, and not just because I have a computer with two 10 gig Ethernet ports on it.
John:
Just because I feel like it's in shouting distance.
John:
And it's kind of sad now, I saw this pointed out recently, that the crappy USB connections on our computers are now significantly faster than our Ethernet connections.
John:
Because, you know, whatever the current, pick your Ethernets, pick your USB standard.
John:
It can do 10 gig, 20 gig, 40 gig, right?
John:
And forget about Thunderbolt.
John:
Thunderbolt, I guess, is the 40 gig one.
John:
Like, USB is surprisingly fast.
John:
And we think of that as a thing we use to connect, you know, a mouse and a keyboard, right?
John:
So 10 gig ethernet, you know, in the data centers, there are much faster variants of ethernet that are in common use all the time, but those are obviously super expensive.
John:
But I feel like 10 gig, we're in shouting distance, right?
John:
But that said, you know, the chat room just looked up the distance.
John:
Apparently cat six can do 10 gig up to like 50 meters or something, 55 meters.
John:
Most houses are not that big.
John:
Right.
John:
So just look at the length of your runs.
John:
I think it is worth future proofing for 10 gig.
John:
But to do that, you might not have to do anything more than do cat six in reasonable runs.
John:
Like Marco said, like having from a central point, everyone just drops down into in between two studs and comes out of port.
John:
And you're done, right?
John:
So if you don't have a gigantic house and each individual run is not longer than 55 meters, not 55 meters total wiring in your walls, but like from the switch to wherever you're going, then you're all set for 10 gig.
John:
And I think that is reasonable future proofing.
John:
Given Marco's experience with the weird Cat 7 connectors and the videos I saw of the Cat 8 ones, I think it is not worth...
Marco:
messing with that just because of the the weird grounding sheath that you have to do and the the size of the connectors but i wouldn't go below cat six no i think there's a cat six a now or something that i don't think that existed when i did my first set but um anyway yeah from what i've heard cat six a is is totally fine for almost any modern use so that's probably what i would do if i was doing it again now
Marco:
Now, that being said, the second half of this question was about networking gear and stuff like that.
Marco:
And I have been a fan and user of Ubiquity for quite some time now.
Marco:
I would never recommend it to a typical home user, but if you're listening to this podcast, there's a greater than average chance that you're a nerd.
Marco:
And for those of you out there who like to have networking nerdy stuff, Ubiquity is pretty cool, but it is very nerdy.
Marco:
That being said,
Marco:
Their latest generation of stuff, the Dream Machine router and Dream Machine Pro, have had problems.
Marco:
I'm using one now, and the other day I had to reboot it to let new devices join the Wi-Fi network.
Marco:
And part of the reason why – and this is not the first time this has happened.
Marco:
And part of the reason why I've loved Ubiquiti for so long is that the previous gear I had, the old, like, edge router and then the old security gateway that I had after that, the previous Ubiquiti gear, I would set it up, and it would just run for years.
Marco:
And I had never – there was never a problem that I had that was solved by rebooting my Ubiquiti router.
Marco:
Like, I never had to do that for any reason except, like, occasionally a firmware update or something or, like, it would lose power and then it would reboot.
Marco:
But, like, the uptime my routers had was ridiculous and –
Marco:
I always knew that the Ubiquiti gear was so rock solid that that was never the problem.
Marco:
Whatever problem I was seeing, it wasn't the Ubiquiti gear's fault.
Marco:
And that was a great place to be.
Marco:
I can't say that right now.
Marco:
And that's very disappointing to me.
Marco:
And a lot of Ubiquiti people are kind of having a bad time right now because their recent gear, they're moving very fast on the software front.
Marco:
The software is like, you know, move fast and break things kind of philosophy, it seems like now, which is not what you want out of your router.
Marco:
Like that's not, you want something a little more slow and non-breaking and conservative and, you know, and that's what Ubiquiti used to offer.
Marco:
And their newer stuff, it seems like they're not there yet with the stability and it might be getting worse.
Marco:
And they're going through a lot of changing and everything keeps like, oh, now this new control panel is this new version.
Marco:
It looks totally different.
Marco:
And a third of the features are missing in the new version, but just wait or go back to the old version to access them.
Marco:
Like there seemed to be a lot of flux going on with Ubiquity right now.
Marco:
That's not good.
Marco:
And I hope they work this out and get back to the level of reliability that they've had for years that they built their reputation on.
Marco:
The whole reason I buy this stuff is because it was, in the past, rock solid and low maintenance.
Marco:
And right now, it's not.
Marco:
So, I really hope this is a temporary thing.
Marco:
Right now, with what is offered, I can't recommend it.
Marco:
I'm using it, and I'm tolerating it, and it works well much of the time, but...
Marco:
It doesn't have the appeal that their old stuff had when it just was super reliable.
Marco:
It doesn't do that right now.
Marco:
So hopefully they move past this and get better right now.
Marco:
I don't know what I would recommend.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Backblaze, and Flatfile.
Marco:
And thanks to our members.
Marco:
You can now get an annual membership or you can get euro or pound billing.
Marco:
And you can join with any of those options if you want to at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you all next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Casey:
So my birthday was last week and my parents got me a new dongle for my car.
Casey:
They got me the CarLink kit wireless CarPlay adapter.
Casey:
So this is something that I think I had obliquely mentioned many, many, many, many episodes ago.
Casey:
as an adapter that you plug into the USB port in your car that is designed to accept a lightning cable for CarPlay purposes.
Casey:
Well, you plug this adapter in, and then your phone talks to the adapter, the adapter talks to your car, and that means you can leave your phone in your pocket and have CarPlay even if it's not physically connected to the car.
John:
Does it come with a lowered, what is this, an R8?
John:
A lowered R8 with a giant wing holding a canoe on top of it?
John:
I'm confused by the marketing of this website.
Casey:
So here's the thing.
Casey:
There are several different manufacturers that do the same thing.
Casey:
They're probably just, you know, different labels on the same guts.
Casey:
But this particular website.
Marco:
Yeah, I actually have one of these, but for like my dev kit, I bought one of these.
Marco:
Not this brand, but I bought like one of the other brand ones that said it might work and it didn't.
Casey:
yeah well so if based on this website i i would not have bought this particular one because it is it is rough some of the product photography but here we are um and so i had the occasion to be in the car for about five hours today and i used the carlink kit adapter for uh four of the five hours that i was driving and uh it worked actually quite well it was
Casey:
I feel like I can tell, and maybe it's all in my head, I feel like I can tell that it's not hardwired CarPlay anymore, in the sense that there's a little bit of lag, a teeny bit.
Casey:
When I would play audio after Siri was talking, I feel like the bit rate was really low for a second or two, and then it would figure itself out, and it would be regular quality.
Casey:
But, that being said...
Casey:
It seemed to work just fine.
Casey:
This thing is about $130.
Casey:
And it's the perfect kind of gift, right?
Casey:
It's the sort of thing that you don't necessarily want to spend $130 on, but you don't mind if somebody else spends $130 on you and gets you this thing that may or may not work well.
Casey:
And actually, it's worked fine.
Casey:
What's nice about this particular one, I presume the others are the same, is that it also has a USB power pass-through.
Casey:
So it has USB-C to USB, what is it, A or B?
Casey:
I always get it wrong.
Casey:
A?
Casey:
A. Thank you.
Marco:
If it's a printer, it's B. Okay, there you go.
Casey:
So it's USB-C to USB-A.
Casey:
It's a little stubby cable.
Casey:
And the USB-A goes into your car.
Casey:
USB-C goes in the little dongle.
Casey:
And then it also has a USB-A receptacle on the other side of it so you can plug in your lightning cable and charge your phone while you're using CarPlay.
Casey:
Now, I don't think it will use CarPlay.
Casey:
It's not like a pass-through for wired CarPlay when that happens.
Casey:
I think what it's doing is it's just charging with... The power is there.
Casey:
The data is not...
Casey:
But it worked well.
Casey:
And for the last hour I was in the car, I took it off the charger just to see how it did.
Casey:
And my battery plummeted by 15%.
Casey:
But also consider I was listening to Overcast at the time.
Casey:
And more importantly, I was using Waze.
Casey:
Hey, don't blame me.
Casey:
Just hold on.
Casey:
Don't throw it in the bus.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
And more importantly, as I was starting to say, I was also using the GPS and Waze.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Casey:
So that, I think, is the actual culprit.
John:
Overcast, GPS, Waze, they're equal battery hogs.
Casey:
Totally, yeah.
Casey:
You know, so thankfully, Apple has this little thing where you can see what your battery usage is.
Casey:
And it so happened that it was 11 to 12 this morning that I was on battery and using CarPlay and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And it was Waze at 23% and Overcast at 21%.
Casey:
so says apple i i concur with you i i think that seems a bit ridiculous i would expect ways would be the overwhelming majority of it but nevertheless uh i don't actually have that much else to say about it to be honest it is definitely a hack and it wouldn't surprise me if this hack is somehow closed up in the future but for now it works and i'm pretty satisfied with it and it's nice to be able to use carplay always so so
Casey:
The way I treated CarPlay in the past was if I was going in the car for like more than just a few minutes, I would probably plug in.
Casey:
Or if I'm in the middle of a text conversation where I want to be able to easily dictate and so on and so forth, I would plug it in.
Casey:
But otherwise, I just would use Bluetooth to the car, like no CarPlay involved at all.
Casey:
I would just use Bluetooth to the car and stream Overcast or music or what have you.
Casey:
And now every time I get in the car, I have the full CarPlay experience, just like BMW drivers have had for years.
Casey:
And I think Audi is now starting to do wireless CarPlay.
Casey:
There's a few other makes that are doing it too.
Casey:
But yeah, it actually works.
Casey:
And I'm really surprised.
Casey:
And the super discerning among you will definitely be able to see the difference.
Casey:
But for me, I'm willing to trade a little bit of latency and lag for a lot of convenience.
Casey:
And that works for me.
John:
The website says, suitable for 98% car models.
John:
Not for 98% of car models, it says suitable for 98% car models.
John:
So assuming that they're not talking about 98% cars, things that are 2% non-car, I guess that would be every SUV maybe else, probably higher than 2%.
John:
I would really want to know, is my car one of the 2% that I can't use?
John:
What is it?
John:
If it's a CarPlay adapter, why would it care what the car is?
John:
Isn't it just tricking all the cars into, I don't know.
Marco:
Well, no, first of all, the way it works, it doesn't work with everything.
Marco:
Second of all, the website has other gems as well.
Marco:
Have you have you scrolled down a little bit to the row of documents that includes things such as their U.S.
Marco:
trademark document?
John:
I've scrolled into a heading that says if the product work normally, no need update.
Casey:
I did see that.
Casey:
Yeah, it's something, but it worked for me.
Casey:
That's all I care about.
Casey:
Actually, it's down to $110 right now.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
John:
I seem to recall a long succession of kind of not particularly nice-looking
John:
Car related accessories that I've purchased for things like iPods and iPhones in the past, especially back when cars were not as savvy about connecting to any kind of electronics.
John:
And they all look similar to this.
John:
They're all like a, you know, nondescript plastic box with maybe a light on it and some wires that you connect to it.
John:
I mean, they serve me well.
John:
Like I'm not putting down these type of products.
John:
Like when you need a thing that does the thing and you just need it, want it in your car and you just stick it in there and forget about it and either, you know, shove it up inside your glove box or inside a little console or in the case of like adding aux audio input to like my original Honda Civics and Accords, just like, you know, it's all entirely hidden underneath the plastic of the center tunnel.
John:
yeah so it's money well spent it improves the uh the functionality of your car and you never need to think about it again and then when you get rid of that car the thing leaves with it and your next car has this built in and so i think that's a uh is the reason this market exists right uh modify a car to get a new capability and don't worry about it this thing doesn't last too long because you're probably going to get rid of that car eventually anyway and your new car won't have this problem and there you go