Apple Did Not Eat That Food
Marco:
i've lost my uh my play pause shortcut on my keyboard like it just doesn't work anymore and i haven't debugged y yet and wow is that disruptive reboot i know i did i tried rebooting oh no yeah i've had some weird issues like sometimes my keyboard will stop being recognized until i unplug and replug the usb receiver so uh yeah it's it's a whole thing
Marco:
What's also very strange, I'm going to have even more pre-show unplanned follow-up.
Marco:
So this is my two-week anniversary plus one day of being fully vaccinated.
Marco:
So that means now I'm like fully, fully vaccinated.
Marco:
Hooray!
Marco:
And my town has also lifted the outdoor mask requirement as most places have now.
Marco:
So I have been walking around without a mask outside.
Marco:
And
Marco:
The first time I did it, it felt very much like this, but it still kind of feels like I'm walking around naked.
Marco:
It feels like I'm feeling air on a part of my skin that I shouldn't be feeling air on.
Marco:
It still feels like I have forgotten to put pants on or something.
Marco:
It's a very strange feeling.
Marco:
Have you guys gotten that?
Casey:
Yes-ish.
Casey:
I didn't go that many places in the past.
Casey:
Don't you have a dog?
Casey:
Yeah, but around the neighborhood, I never wore masks because our streets are very, very wide, and I would just walk to the other side of the street.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
It's probably...
Casey:
I'm sure hearing this, it sounds very selfish and very red hattie, but truly our streets are like, the streets in our neighborhood are like easily 30 feet, which is what, 10 meters, 30 feet wide.
Casey:
And it was not dangerous or disrespectful at all to just move to the other side of the road if somebody's coming and that's what everyone does and that's fine.
Casey:
So yeah, I didn't really have much of this and I haven't traveled in any meaningful way.
Casey:
So yeah,
Casey:
I definitely did put a mask on outside when the situation made it appropriate, you know, when I was close to people, when I was around people I don't know, etc.
Casey:
But that happened so infrequently that I never really got to the point that you're at.
Casey:
But I can't speak for how it was for you, John.
John:
It was similar here.
John:
So I got to take my dog for the walk, like for a walk in the park.
John:
Like there's literally no other people there and I'm just in the woods by myself.
John:
Right.
John:
So it was easy to just not have a mask on because you literally don't see another human and I'm outdoors.
John:
Right.
John:
I think it'll feel weird the first time I do it, like in a place with other people.
John:
But that doesn't happen yet.
John:
So I don't know.
Yeah.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
But you are fully vaccinated, to quote Gruber.
Casey:
I am fully vaccinated.
Casey:
John, remind me, where are you in the process here?
John:
Next week's show, I'll be fully all set.
Casey:
So you've already had your second shot.
John:
Yep.
John:
And this is the one week after my second shot, and next week's show will be two weeks after.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
I forgot that you and I did it on Wednesdays because we're amateurs.
Casey:
And then how was your day after second shot?
Casey:
Was it bad or not too bad?
John:
It was all right.
John:
I mean, I felt cruddy, you know, had a headache, had, you know, muscle aches in my neck and just generally felt like that whole run over by a truck feeling, which doesn't really make any sense because none of us know what it feels like or most of us don't know what it feels like to be run over by a truck.
John:
But you just feel like your whole body just it's more like being squished by a giant or something like you're just like, I felt like that for basically the whole day.
John:
And the next day I was fine.
Casey:
Alright, so what I'm hearing is after next week's show, then the three of us can all meet up somewhere and hug it out.
Casey:
It'll be okay then.
Casey:
In theory.
Marco:
You still have to make John travel.
Marco:
That's the hardest part.
Casey:
Well, I can't travel now.
Casey:
I can't even travel because apparently everyone in Richmond has bought all the gas in Richmond.
John:
Oh, there's a gas shortage?
John:
I wouldn't have known.
John:
oh you are such i've been keeping track of this story but like what is the yeah i saw i it's one of those things stories that i see by its third degree effects on twitter but i don't actually know what like why everyone is uh all super nervous about gas is there an actual reason or is it so yeah like you honestly don't know about this that's fascinating so
John:
I mean, I know people want gas and they're hoarding it.
Casey:
I don't know why.
Casey:
So I haven't dug into this too much.
Casey:
And as always, I might get the details slightly wrong.
Casey:
But the general gist, as chief summarizer in chief, is that there is a pipeline that runs from Texas to the northeast, I think, if not all the way to Maine.
Casey:
But it runs somewhere up to your guys' neck of the woods.
Casey:
And it got hacked.
Casey:
and ransomed and it got shut down.
Casey:
And this is, um, this is the, the pipeline that apparently provides, I would assume crude, but maybe, maybe it's, you know, refined gasoline.
Casey:
I'm not sure, but provides it for like most of the East coast, particularly the Southeast.
Casey:
And so, uh, gas stations on like Tuesday, I think it was started, started to run out of gas because they, I guess they get like daily shipments or whatever.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And they started to run out of gas.
Casey:
And so when I went, I met up with a friend of mine to have an outdoor lunch.
Casey:
We're both fully vaccinated.
Casey:
And I met up with him.
Casey:
And on the way there, I passed one of our local big box stores.
Casey:
And there was a line for the gas station all the way to like the street.
Casey:
And this is one of those situations where it's not unusual for there to be a line, but to go all the way to the street, that's very unusual.
Casey:
And so, yeah, apparently there are gas stations in my area that have straight up run out of gas.
Casey:
There's price gouging because, you know, capitalism.
Casey:
I filled up by pure circumstance on Monday and Aaron filled up, I think, over the weekend.
Casey:
And we typically only fuel once a month as it is.
Casey:
So I'm not particularly nervous, especially since I think I saw as we record on Wednesday night that the pipeline has just reopened.
Casey:
But nevertheless, there is a big scare and there's pictures and videos of people putting gasoline into garbage bags.
Casey:
And that's not a joke.
Marco:
Oh, God, please don't do that for long.
Casey:
Now, from what I understand, some of these are recycled from years ago, like their memes that went around and somebody would recycle and say, oh, look what these idiots are doing.
Casey:
But supposedly some of them are really honestly true.
Casey:
Um, so yeah, it's been a little bit of a mess, uh, again, thankfully because, you know, we never drive anywhere, never really go anywhere.
Casey:
It hasn't been an issue for the list family, but if it were to persist for another two to three weeks, then, uh, certainly it would be a bit of a problem.
Casey:
So if you want me to come to you, uh, anytime in the next week or two, I'm going to maybe have to wait on that.
John:
if you had a tesla you could just come here for free when the supercharger network the chat room says that the pipeline is back up and running like and for i can't for i don't know for how long but for most of the pandemic i haven't even been filling my gas tank up i think we talked about this before because i was afraid of the idea of like letting the gas get old in the car because i use my car so little that if i filled up my tank i was like i'll be i'm afraid it'll be eight months before i empty it and it's not good to have the gas sitting there for a
John:
And even then, even then I'm like, how many months has it been?
John:
I just, I never go anywhere.
John:
Cause like, well, you know, we have two cars and my car is always at the front of the driveway and I just never drive it anywhere.
John:
I mean, that's changed with the kids going back to school and I'm driving them back and forth there, but school is like 10 minutes away.
John:
So I can't remember the last time I filled up my gas tank.
John:
I am back to doing full tanks, but I think I did my last full tank fill up like maybe a month ago, a month and a half ago.
John:
So I'm, I'm not worried.
Casey:
But speaking of spending money on fire, if you wanted to set a little bit of your money on fire and you didn't want to get gouged with ridiculous gas prices, let me tell you about ATP shirts.
Casey:
Because the ATP store is closing soon.
Casey:
As we record, it is Wednesday night on Friday night, just two days from now.
Casey:
Probably the day you're listening to this, in all likelihood, the store will be closed.
Casey:
I tell this story every time.
Casey:
I know you're all frustrated with it.
Casey:
Imagine me, who has to live it?
Casey:
Every, every sale, somebody tweets, non-ironically, saying, oh no, oh no, oh no, did I miss it?
Casey:
Did I miss it?
Casey:
And typically this is but hours after the store is closed.
Casey:
Yes, you did miss it because you didn't listen to your friend Casey.
Casey:
And your friend Casey is telling you, pull the car over if you drive anywhere.
Casey:
Maybe pull over to the side of the road if you're walking.
Casey:
Go to atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
You can get our sweet, sweet M1 shirt, which speaking of lighting money on fire is not particularly cheap, and I'm sorry for that.
Casey:
You can get the M1 shirt, which has the beautiful six colors M1 logo on the front and the M1 kind of cutaway on the back.
Casey:
You can get a monochrome version of that as well in multiple different fabric colors.
Casey:
You can get the ATP Performance shirt, which is, I think the term is moisture wicking or something like that.
Casey:
Basically, it means if you're sweaty, you can take it off without it sticking to you.
Casey:
You can get my beloved ATP pint glass, which I'm super excited to get in hand.
Casey:
And of course, we have our logo shirt.
Casey:
Now, some of you have heard our plea on the last episode that, oh, the enamel pin is going to be sold out soon.
Casey:
Guys, guess what happened?
Casey:
It sold out.
Casey:
Guess what I heard?
Casey:
Oh, did I miss the pins?
Casey:
Oh, I missed the pins, didn't I?
Casey:
You missed the pins.
John:
This is how it works, kids.
John:
This is how it works.
John:
You only had two years and seven months to buy those pins, and you just missed it by a day.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So, if you look at my mentions shortly after the store closes, you will see all the people competing to be first to say, oh, did the store close?
Casey:
And that's fine.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
If it makes you laugh, go for it.
Casey:
But you'll also see a bunch of people saying, oh, no, did the store close?
Casey:
Yes, the store closed because you didn't listen to me.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
Now remember, if you're not already a member, please ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
Join, do it for a year, do it for a month.
Casey:
It's okay.
Casey:
Whatever you want.
Casey:
Go use the discount code for 15% off your ATP merchandise at Cotton Bureau.
Casey:
And then you can, you know, just cancel if you want to, but you don't have to do that.
Casey:
You can just continue to enjoy the bootleg and all the sweet, sweet perks that membership gives you like the bootleg.
Casey:
And an ad-free feed, if you so desire.
Casey:
Yeah, there's more stuff.
Casey:
So, anyways, atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
The time is now.
John:
And if you've already made a purchase from the store, we thank you.
John:
And now I would like to tell everybody, this is the time when you forget to cancel your membership.
John:
I told you in the last show, we make it really easy to cancel.
John:
You can get the discount and you can just cancel.
John:
It's really easy.
John:
New instruction.
John:
Now, everybody...
John:
Don't cancel.
John:
Just keep it.
John:
Just keep it going.
John:
Just keep the ball rolling.
John:
Get used to the show with no ads in it.
John:
It's awesome.
John:
Listen to the bootleg every once in a while.
John:
It's fun.
John:
Now is the time to not cancel.
John:
You can if you want to.
John:
We make it super easy, but don't.
John:
Well done, Sean.
John:
Some real-time follow-up for the chat room for people who don't know.
John:
I think I'm making a joke about gas getting old.
John:
This is what happens if you don't read enough books about the end of the world.
John:
If you read any post-apocalyptic books, inevitably someone does some little bit of research and three years into the post-apocalyptic world where the zombies have taken over, the gas doesn't stay good forever.
John:
It loses its combustibility.
John:
It oxidizes.
John:
Gasoline sitting in a gas tank of a car eventually becomes no good for making the car go after a certain amount of time.
John:
Um, we just, I just did a quick Google for it.
John:
And some people are saying like Exxon Mobil saying like six months or whatever, but certainly five years into the zombie apocalypse, you find a car on the side of the road with a tank full of gas.
John:
You're not going anywhere.
John:
So yes, gas does go bad.
John:
Sorry.
Marco:
Speaking of more ways to set money on fire, I have some air tag attachment follow-up.
Casey:
Oh, I actually just got my AirTag, my one and only AirTag, and I like it.
Casey:
And it's actually really fun for Declan to play hide and go seek where I hide the AirTag and he goes and finds it.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I haven't put it in any sort of mount.
Casey:
So Marco, tell me, how did you set your money aflame to get overpriced AirTag mounts?
Marco:
So, for science, I bought two AirTag mounting options from Apple.
John:
You were supposed to get the balloons for science, not the AirTag.
Marco:
I did not get the balloons.
Marco:
I also did not get the $350 Hermes one.
Marco:
I got an AirTag leather key ring in product red, which was $35.00.
Marco:
And I have here the AirTag Loop in white, which is $29.
Marco:
This is probably the worst way I've ever spent $64 or whatever it is.
Marco:
These things are such pieces of crap for how much they cost.
Marco:
First of all, they're both massive.
Marco:
When you compare them to the size of the AirTag, they're ridiculously large.
Marco:
And I would have loved instead, if you're going with the Apple Store provided options, the Belkin Secure Holder with Keyring for AirTag.
Marco:
That would be a much better product.
Marco:
And that's only $13, but that's backordered until mid-June.
Marco:
Oh, my.
Marco:
So I couldn't get those.
Marco:
so i have this like plastic kind of like you know rubbery loop thing that like loops into itself and tucks into itself and by the way the the location in which the um what is it called the air tag loop the the the location where it folds over onto itself like there's a very thin part of material there that will bear the entire weight of it when if it gets tugged or pulled in the wrong way and i don't trust that material thickness for a second i think this thing is going to break with any kind of you know stress on it
Marco:
Oh, neat.
Marco:
And these things don't feel good.
Marco:
The AirTag loop feels like a silicone-wrapped sheet of cardboard, and the leather key ring feels okay, but it's not soft or supple in any way like the way nice leather is because there's just not enough flexibility or room for the material.
Marco:
And the main thing with both of these things is that
Marco:
Again, they just make... I mean, not only does this double the cost of your AirTag, and frankly, I don't know why Apple's charging as much as they are for these things.
Marco:
Well, I know why, but it doesn't seem like it's worth what they're charging for it.
Marco:
But also, like, the resulting combined sum product of these things is so ridiculously large and bulky.
Marco:
And they're both designed to show off the AirTag, which I guess makes sense if you're Apple's industrial designers, but...
Marco:
I think in most cases you wouldn't want to show off your AirTag.
Marco:
Like, I don't know.
Marco:
But anyway, so these things got a big thumbs down for me.
Marco:
And I hope that in the near future, all of these like inexpensive key ring mounts like the Belkin one become more widely available.
Marco:
Or at least, you know, knockoffs from Amazon should be available pretty soon.
Marco:
Now, I also have some follow up on...
Marco:
I did actually attach two of these so far to our family bicycles.
Marco:
And the attachment method I went with cost significantly less than $29.
Marco:
I was thinking, like, I need to attach this securely to the bikes.
Marco:
Because what if the attachment method I use, like, breaks and the air tag falls off?
Marco:
I quickly realized, like, if my AirTag falls off, that's not that bad because I can just find it.
Marco:
Right, right.
Marco:
So I realized I don't need anything fancy and I wanted something small and discreet and weatherproof.
Marco:
So I just used electrical tape.
Marco:
I used vinyl 3M electrical tape.
Marco:
Duct tape is a little bit better for moisture, just FYI, but it'll be fine.
Marco:
I just wrapped them in electrical tape so you can't see them, and it's fairly weatherproof.
Marco:
And it's fairly salt and weatherproof, or salt and waterproof mostly, like salt and sand and everything, all the conditions it'll encounter.
Marco:
It's fairly resilient to those things.
Marco:
And when the battery dies in a year, I'll have to cut the electrical tape off and pull it out and put a CR2032 back in there and use about a dollar more of electrical tape to attach it.
Marco:
And
Marco:
The electrical tape is a far better attachment option than any of these weird $30 pieces of material from Apple.
Marco:
So overall, I can recommend electrical tape as your AirTag mounting option.
Marco:
Way, way more than any of the official accessories that I've seen so far.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Mack Weldon, reinventing men's basics.
Marco:
I love Mack Weldon's clothes.
Marco:
I am wearing Mack Weldon's clothes today, as I do literally every single day, because every single pair of underwear I have is Mack Weldon underwear.
Marco:
I threw away everything else once I discovered them.
Marco:
They're that good.
Marco:
I'm also wearing a Mack Weldon t-shirt right now and Mack Weldon socks.
Marco:
Their stuff is awesome.
Marco:
Look, this year, spring is a little bit different because we're all finally starting to get back outside and see friends again.
Marco:
No matter where your adventures take you, bring Mack Weldon's comfort and style along for the ride.
Marco:
Your closet will thank you.
Marco:
Whether it's their hoodies, their polos, tees, active shorts, they have such good stuff.
Marco:
This morning, I wore the Mack Weldon Ace sweatpants because they are super comfortable.
Marco:
I worked out in the ace shorts.
Marco:
I'm currently wearing the silver T-shirt, which I love the silver T-shirts.
Marco:
These are naturally antimicrobial and they hold up.
Marco:
I bought a whole bunch of them, I think five years ago now, four or five years ago.
Marco:
I haven't lost a single one to like wearing out or perma stink or anything like that.
Marco:
They're really well made.
Marco:
They fit really great.
Marco:
They look great.
Marco:
I love Mack Weld and stuff and it spans a wide variety of needs.
Marco:
You know, you can dress down, you can dress up, you can wear it to work.
Marco:
They have workout clothes, wide range of customized fabrics that really take advantage of, you know, different properties you might want for different contexts.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
They also have a guarantee.
Marco:
They want you to be comfortable.
Marco:
If you don't like your first pair of underwear, you can keep it and they'll refund you no questions asked.
Marco:
And they have a totally free loyalty program.
Marco:
Level one, you get free shipping for life.
Marco:
Once you spend $200, you reach level two and you get 20% off every order for the next year.
Marco:
So for 20% off your first order, visit macweldon.com slash ATP podcast and enter promo code ATP podcast.
Marco:
That's macweldon.com slash ATP podcast, promo code ATP podcast for 20% off.
Marco:
Mac Weldon, reinventing men's basics.
Casey:
All right, we have some other feedback that involves spending less money.
Casey:
We were talking about, I think it was NASC ATP, is that right?
Casey:
About unintended restart when you have FileVault enabled.
Casey:
And several people wrote in to give a couple of command line commands you can try.
Casey:
You can do using sudo fdesetup, space author start, we'll put this in the show notes.
Casey:
And unsupported hardware, this allows a restart of a FileVault-enabled system without requiring unlock during the subsequent boot.
Casey:
And that's by using this auth restart thing.
Casey:
Be careful, though, because FileVault protections are reduced during authenticated restarts.
Casey:
In particular, FDE setup deliberately stores at least one additional copy of a permanent FDE or full disk encryption unlock key in both the system memory and unsupported systems in the system management controller.
Casey:
And you have to run it as root, and it will ask you to unlock the FileVault password and so on.
Casey:
Additionally, Paul Gaylau writes, I regularly use this method to remotely update Macs via SSH or Apple Remote Desktop, running software update space hyphen ia.
Casey:
Again, it'll be in the show notes.
Casey:
we'll install all available software updates then follow this up with the fde setup author start to reboot your mac or you can also optionally do fde setup author start and then hyphen delay minutes and then a numeral so like hyphen delay minutes space five to delay five minutes
Casey:
And then Hugo Jobling writes, another interesting quirk about the FileVault login screen is that many, or maybe all, Bluetooth devices will not work here.
Casey:
For example, neither my keyboard, the Keychron K2, or mouse, the Microsoft Precision, will work at this logic screen.
Casey:
I keep my keyboard connected via USB as a result, according to Hugo.
Casey:
So that is something I did not know.
Casey:
Today I learned.
John:
Yeah, that's why I couldn't remember this command last time, but I was pretty sure there was a way to do it.
John:
And many people wrote in with this command line way to do it.
John:
So if you feel like you can't enable FileVault because you won't be able to do unintended restarts or you won't be able to do software updates, that's not true.
John:
Apparently you can use this method.
John:
And I don't think this is broken with the M1 Max.
John:
Lots of stuff related to booting has either changed or broken with the M1 Max and or Big Sur, but I'm pretty sure this one still works.
John:
So you have tools available.
John:
No more excuses for not enabling FileVault.
Casey:
And then a couple of people wrote in, perhaps first Matt Friedman, with regard to Apple TV and spatial audio.
Casey:
And Matt writes, in all of your discussions of the new Apple TV 4K, I'm surprised that you have not yet brought up its most obvious missing feature, no support for spatial audio.
Casey:
As Matt recalls, when discussing the AirPods Max, we had talked about how great spatial audio is, but the big downside is that you're limited to the iPhone and the iPad and how obviously it is needed on the Apple TV.
Casey:
I was shocked when the new one came out and it wasn't included.
Casey:
I would have been more perturbed about this had I ever experienced spatial audio, but I'm still on the second gen AirPods.
Casey:
I've never had the, what is it, the AirPods Max, the Max Pods, whatever they're called, the big headphone-y things.
Casey:
And I've never had AirPods Pro.
Casey:
So I've never experienced this, even though I've heard it's really delightful.
Casey:
I don't know if you guys have thoughts on that.
John:
So I have experienced it.
John:
And unless I'm entirely misunderstanding this feature, and maybe Marco can correct me if I'm
John:
getting it wrong but when I tried it and my understanding of what it's supposed to do is it's like so you put them I tried it with the AirPods Pro because my wife has them right you put them in you put in the spatial audio and then say you're looking at your iPad right it uses whatever various sensors and stuff to understand where the iPad is in relation to your head so that
John:
it fools you into thinking that sound is coming out of the ipad so if you take the ipad and move it to your left all of a sudden the sound is coming from where you move the ipad to and you take the ipad and move it to your right oh now it's coming from the right as opposed to just traditional headphones where no matter where you move the ipad if you have the headphones in your ear they sound exactly the same you can move the ipad up down left and right it doesn't change the sound right am i am i getting this right like this is what spatial audio is supposed to do
Marco:
Yeah, so that's one of the things it does, but then it also allows it to then act like surround sound.
Marco:
So not only does it sound like it's coming directly from the iPad, even when the things are in your ears and you're moving your head around, but the idea then is that it can also then position sounds around you or behind you like surround sound would.
John:
Yes, I haven't heard that part of it.
John:
I've heard the panning, you know, make it sound like the sound is coming from the TV part of it.
John:
Like, I understand where people are saying, like, oh, spatial audio, that should be used to trick me into thinking I have surround speakers.
John:
But I think the thing that makes it sound like the audio is coming from wherever you move the iPad or the iPhone to...
John:
I can understand how that would work, and I have experienced it, and yes, it does.
John:
It feels like that.
John:
It can trick you into thinking, oh, the audio must not be... You know when you forget that your AirPods don't connect or something, and the audio is coming out of the speakers of your device, but not your headphones?
John:
Very often, it feels like that.
John:
You're like, oh, I guess I forgot to... The audio is still coming out of the speakers.
John:
I forgot to change it to AirPods.
John:
But you didn't.
John:
You did change it to your headphones.
John:
It's just fooling you into thinking the audio is coming from the iPad or something.
John:
But...
John:
first on that specific feature that's pretty much never what i want when i'm like watching tv on my ipad or something i don't want it to sound like the sound is coming from the ipad i want it to sound like the sound is all around me right i don't you know like part of the reason of putting in headphones is it's a more quote-unquote immersive experience than sound coming out of the ipad that's sitting on my lap right
John:
So that is an anti-feature for me.
John:
And same deal when watching television on a big television.
John:
I don't want the sound to sound like it's coming from, you know, the person's mouth on the screen.
John:
A lot of modern TVs do this with their built-in speakers now.
John:
They take pride in the fact that they do, I'm assuming they do facial recognition or whatever and figure out where the speaker is, like the person who is talking.
John:
Not the audio speaker, but they figure out where the person who is talking is on the screen.
John:
And they try to make the sound with the built-in speakers come from that location because the speakers essentially shake the screen.
John:
The screen is like one big speaker diaphragm.
John:
But that's not what I want.
John:
That's not how I want audio to work.
John:
In general, for things like movies with surround sound, I want it to sound like you're in a movie theater where...
John:
Yes, I want all the sound to be even coming at me, but I don't want to think the sound is coming from a particular speaker.
John:
I want to feel like I'm completely immersed in it, right?
John:
So if people want spatial audio because they want the audio to sound like it's coming from their screen or really coming from their headphones...
John:
you know more power to them but that's absolutely not what i want if people that think that the sound that is able to simulate surround sound convincingly from headphones i haven't experienced that and i am very doubtful that it's going to like kind of like sound bars like yeah you can do tricks you can do bouncing audio and obviously headphones you could do more tricks but they don't have my head related transfer function how good could this possibly be you know what sony has taught us that just you know they can they can try their best but
John:
In the end, actual surround speakers, if you want that, are the way to go.
John:
And actual surround speakers do not try to make it sound like all the sound is coming from the television screen.
John:
They might make it sound like some sound is coming from behind you, because guess what?
John:
It really is because there's a speaker back there.
John:
i'm not shocked that it wasn't included and i'm not sure i would even want it to be included but all that said for the people who do want it to be included it does seem kind of silly that it doesn't support it this is a completely apple ecosystem and for the most part an apple tv doesn't move so it's not like they have to do complicated math and computation to figure out where everybody is like they're probably in front of the tv and that's where they're going to stay um
John:
And it seems like all the hardware in the Apple TVs must be there for this.
John:
I mean, didn't they put like a thread radio in the Apple TV?
John:
Like they couldn't put in whatever they needed for U1 or, you know.
Marco:
I'm guessing that's the issue right there.
Marco:
That they don't have the U1 in there?
Marco:
I'm guessing that – so, I mean, we know the Apple TV doesn't have a U1.
Marco:
But I think the bigger problem is the AirPods don't have a U1.
Marco:
And I think you can look at the AirTag as an example of –
Marco:
what's the smallest you could make something that is self-powered that has a U1 and any kind of basic logic?
Marco:
And granted, I'd say most of the AirTag's volume is that battery.
Marco:
Second to that is probably the plastic of the case.
Marco:
But if you look at AirPods and AirPods Pro, they don't have anywhere near enough space to add probably the U1 and whatever antenna that it uses to transmit stuff.
Marco:
So
Marco:
My guess is that the reason why this is not a feature on Apple TV is because the way it's done with AirPods Pro and iPads is probably with Bluetooth.
Marco:
And I'm guessing that at the distance that you would have an iPad in front of you on a table, that might be accurate enough.
Marco:
But if it's going to be like 12 feet in front of you across the room with an Apple TV, maybe it can't be precise enough for the effect to work very well.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Bluetooth range is pretty good.
John:
And the fact that they can fit the hardware to make this work inside the AirPods Pro, the tiny little things that go in your ears, there's no excuse for it not to be in the AirPods Max.
John:
Yeah, that's true.
John:
Anyway, maybe they'll get around to it eventually.
John:
But I am curious now, hearing that there is apparently a mode where it's supposed to simulate surround.
John:
I have not heard that myself.
John:
But if that is any good, I can see why people might want it.
John:
But I've tried stuff like that on my various gaming consoles with...
Casey:
gaming headphones that supposedly simulate 5.1 and you can watch a movie on your playstation with 5.1 sound and put on these headphones and it's just it has never it's never sounded any good to me so my hopes of this are dim so so optimistic all right and then umberto iris perera writes the new apple tv has wi-fi 6 which might improve connection speed and stability for some people especially given how frequently tvs have terrible connections
John:
Just looking for more reasons to be interested.
John:
What's new about the new Apple TV 4K?
John:
Why should I even want it?
John:
Hey, maybe if your current Apple TV has got terrible signal, maybe Wi-Fi 6 will help.
Casey:
All right, let's move right along.
Casey:
So as we record today on the evening of Wednesday the 12th, right not too long before we recorded, there was a whole lot of brouhaha about a new hire at Apple that
Casey:
and the three of us haven't really had much time to read into this so this is going to be really quick um we'll put a link in the show notes to a verge article that kind of talks about it but apparently antonio garcia martinez uh was the author of a book called chaos monkeys and i have not read this i'm not familiar with this particular gentleman but from everything i've heard chaos monkeys is extremely problematic like really
Casey:
Really, really, really problematic.
Casey:
And for anyone to hire this individual seems unwise, especially since from everything I've heard through the grapevine, again, not having done my proper research, is that he never really changed his ways.
Casey:
Like he's been doubly, tripling, quadrupling down ever since.
Casey:
And so this is a new hire that Apple made to lead their ad team, I believe, like their advertising team or something like that.
Casey:
And he's ex-Facebook, which kind of makes sense.
Casey:
But yeah, this is from, at a glance at least, this is super gross.
Casey:
And none of the three of us can endorse or are enthusiastic about it.
Casey:
And we just wanted to call attention to it real quick.
Casey:
But again, we haven't really had the time to properly look into this.
Casey:
I don't know if you guys have any further thoughts.
John:
Yeah, when I was trying to compile everything for this, I'm like, oh, it's people saying stuff on Twitter.
John:
And then I saw some quotes from his book and like these quotes are terrible, but I'm not sure I have the context.
John:
So I did a Google book search to make sure I had the context for this stuff.
John:
And it was just increasingly looking like, no, this is the story.
John:
This guy's terrible.
John:
Right.
John:
And what I assume would happen is that if he is this terrible, Apple eventually get rid of him.
John:
um and just before we started recording the verge article is basically apple employees who have been discussing this on twitter and i follow them saying like we're apple employees saying we're not taking this lying down they are circulating a petition within apple asking you know essentially demanding the you know apple to explain why they hired this person how their vetting process could have let this in and by the way if you're wondering like what did this person do that's so bad or whatever like
John:
Uh, he published a book that he wrote himself.
John:
It's not like hearsay or people saying bad things about this person.
John:
This is his own words.
John:
He is the author of the book.
John:
It is a nonfiction book.
John:
Uh, and in it, there are many passages that, uh, clearly, clearly, uh, label this guy as just a general sexist, uh, jerk, Silicon Valley jerk.
John:
Right.
John:
Um, and so, you know, Apple supposed to be an inclusive organization of these, this, uh,
John:
This petition from the Apple employees, I think, was very well written because it really highlights, like, why do we care about this?
John:
Like, why do we care if you hire a jerk?
John:
Well, actually, hiring jerks affects all of us.
John:
Like, what if this person who, you know, like, here, I'll just read you one of the quotes just to let you know what we're dealing with here.
John:
This is from his book.
John:
Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, causated and naive despite their claims of worldliness and generally full of stuff.
John:
I'm not going to do it so far if I have to believe me.
John:
Yeah.
John:
they have their self-regarding entitlement feminism and ceaselessly vaunt their independence but the reality is come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion they'd become precisely the sort of useless baggage you'd trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel oh there's so much in this one statement that lets you know exactly who this guy is aside from simply being a virulent misogynist and the idea that you know women are useless in the apocalypse and i'm a tough man and i would trade these women for shotgun shells and it's just oh my and just goes on from there right
John:
So anyway, so Apple hires a jerk.
John:
How does that affect me as an Apple employee?
John:
And this thing spells it out.
John:
How can you put this person in the organization and ever have them involved in any kind of person's performance review, right?
John:
Would you ever want this person managing other people or having any say in who gets promoted?
John:
Never mind just having this person in the organization with published works expressing their views of this type.
John:
It wouldn't really make you feel welcome.
John:
Here's an Apple employee responding to this saying, every day I go to work and I know that some people view me this way.
John:
This is a female Apple employee.
John:
I don't know which people, but I've heard stuff like this enough to know that it's ever-present in our world.
John:
It angers me to see these viewpoints expressed by someone in a leadership role at my own company.
John:
So Apple employees aren't taking this lying down.
John:
I think this is a sign of health of an inclusive organization.
John:
If the people you already have, like your existing employees, see something like this and say, this is not how we do things at Apple, and sort of from the bottom up, rise up and say...
John:
You know, what's the deal?
John:
What's going on here?
John:
Right.
John:
We want an investigation.
John:
We want to know how someone with these views got past our screening process.
John:
We want to understand how it's not like these are secret views that people didn't know about.
John:
And then people who are enemies of this person starting saying big things about it behind his back.
John:
This is a book that he published.
John:
It was a New York Times bestseller.
John:
It's not obscure.
John:
I'm not saying you have to read everybody's books, but you should really know who you're hiring.
Marco:
Honestly, I'm sure Apple has already decided to get rid of him.
Marco:
They're just looking for a way to do it without getting sued.
Marco:
Probably by the time that we publish this episode, I bet he's out.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Casey:
I think you're definitely right.
Casey:
But, you know, just because we like to, we want to make it clear that the three of us, you know, we, this is not cool to us and we don't support this sort of thing.
Casey:
And, and, you know, we, we don't necessarily need to get involved with every Apple hire or anything like that.
Casey:
But, you know, a lot of people have asked us, you know, Hey, what, what are your two cents on this?
Casey:
And our two cents is it's gross and shouldn't have happened.
John:
So hopefully it's like, and this is what happens when you hire people who have a high profile.
John:
Like, I mean, obviously, you know, you vet every employee and you try to hire people who you think will fit into your organization and will, you know, like it's the hiring process.
John:
Like we understand it's big, it's complicated or whatever.
John:
But when someone has a New York Times bestselling book, maybe look at the book.
John:
That's all I'm saying.
John:
Like, it's not, you know, again, everyone has enemies.
John:
Everyone has things.
John:
People change, too.
John:
Like, you know, that's also a thing.
John:
Like, that's why this thing goes about, you know, like just don't hold people's past against them forever.
John:
Maybe they've learned it.
John:
We talked about this last show.
John:
Everyone learns and changes and grows.
John:
Right.
John:
But I feel like that's worth discussing.
John:
Right.
John:
Like with the employee during the hiring process.
John:
Hey, we looked at your New York Times bestselling book and here's what you said.
John:
How do you feel about that now?
John:
Like, I feel like it should come up.
John:
Right.
John:
So as the story unfolds, we'll see.
John:
But I feel like this person's tenure at Apple may not be particularly long.
Marco:
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Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Some thoughts on Apple versus Epic.
Casey:
So I think John most especially had a few things that you want to talk about about Apple versus Epic.
Casey:
It is not our intention to go into a deep dive on Apple versus Epic.
Casey:
I would expect that we probably will at some point, but since so much stuff is still developing as we sit here and record right now.
Casey:
I don't think it's worth anyone's time going deep into what's happening.
Casey:
And a lot of the places are talking about it too.
Casey:
But John, you said you had some thoughts you wanted to bring up with regard to Apple versus Epic.
Casey:
So tell me about them.
John:
Yeah, I think we're like a week into this or whatever.
John:
To refresh everyone's memory, this is Epic, the game company.
John:
They got kicked out of the app store for trying to use their own payment method in Fortnite.
John:
That whole thing.
John:
We've talked about it past in the show.
John:
This is the court case.
John:
Epic suing Apple saying...
John:
Apple shouldn't be allowed to do what they did to us.
John:
And Apple saying we totally should be allowed to do that.
John:
And just, you know, the general consensus seems to be and it has always seemed from the beginning.
John:
Apple's going to win this court case because Epic doesn't really have much of a particular case to make, except for saying, hey, no fair.
John:
We don't like that.
John:
Right.
John:
But that's just the battle.
John:
The larger war is OK.
John:
But then what?
John:
You know, lots of people are viewing this as like even if Epic loses, they're kind of winning.
John:
by making apple look bad and by triggering sort of you know government regulation and you know regardless of how this court case goes apple is uh kind of getting it from all sides here and under a lot of pressure to change things and they have been changing things and i think that will continue right
John:
But setting that aside, part of the function of this court case, even if Epic loses, is the discovery process where we, you know, the public gets to see all sorts of things that we would never see otherwise.
John:
Emails from inside Apple about Epic, about the App Store, hearing people have to testify under oath about things that are at Apple, you know, current Apple employees, ex-Apple employees.
John:
That's why a lot of the coverage of this is like, you know, each day there's some new revelation about, you know, internal communications inside Apple, things that we wouldn't see without this court case, right?
John:
And I've mostly not been following it too closely because, again, I don't think this court case is anything consequential is going to happen.
John:
I think we just have to wait for it to be over and then see what the actual fallout is for Apple.
John:
But the one thing that has struck me with all of the stuff I have read, because anytime there's something juicy, like a good email or a good message or, you know, whatever, that gets highlighted in various articles.
John:
And the one thing that has struck me about all of it from like communications inside Apple between all the big name executives that we know.
John:
Finally, we get to see what were they emailing each other in 2008, in 2011, in 2015 about all these App Store controversies.
John:
A lot of them that we talked about on this show.
John:
What were they saying to each other inside Apple?
John:
Or about anything, not just App Store controversies, but just Apple corporate strategy and stuff like that.
John:
And the thing I've been struck by is that nothing anyone says is surprising.
John:
Like, they are saying all exactly the same things that you would expect them to say.
John:
Like, on shows like this where we're speculating about how Apple might think about things, you know, how does Apple... Like, the one that I cut and pasted into the show notes a couple weeks ago was, like, Eddie Q talking to Craig Federighi about the possibility of iMessage on Android.
John:
How is Apple talking to itself internally about those possibilities?
John:
We've talked about it on our show, and guess what?
John:
They're saying all the same things.
John:
Like, there's no... Like, it's shocking how...
John:
How similar the conversation inside Apple is to the conversation outside Apple in terms of what are the factors?
John:
What are the pros?
John:
What are the cons?
John:
The people inside Apple are just people.
John:
And they do not have it seemingly for most of these topics that are in this discovery.
John:
Anyway, there is no secret information that really changes the landscape.
John:
All of the factors that we would discuss in the show about the pros and cons of iMessage and Android, exactly what they discuss.
John:
And there are sometimes some people making a case on one side and sometimes people making a case on the other.
John:
Repeat for anything you can imagine.
John:
How do you think Apple was dealing with Epic?
John:
Does Apple treat big companies different than little companies, and why would they?
John:
Everything that has ever been discussed in the entire pundit sphere about Apple?
John:
That's exactly what's happening inside Apple, which reassures me that...
John:
You know, because it's always so hard whether a company is secretive as Apple.
John:
It's like, well, we're talking about all this stuff, but maybe there's stuff we don't know.
John:
And maybe the conversation inside Apple is very different.
John:
Maybe a lot of times people will say, though, like, you don't understand the secret factors that influence this decision.
John:
And all of the discovery in this entire court case has revealed there is no secret information.
John:
All the factors that we were discussing, those are the factors, and these are the pros, and these are the cons, and we saw which decision they made, and they did weigh all of these factors, and there's no angle that anybody in the news pundit sphere is missing.
John:
It's dead straightforward.
John:
I mean, obviously, they're usually talking about it before we do, because...
John:
They do know about things before we do, but by the time a story comes out or a policy is implemented, when we back solve and say what must they have been thinking to implement this policy, it's pretty much been dead on every single time because there's no secrets.
John:
So I would encourage people to look.
John:
I mean, the transcripts are mind-numbing.
John:
That's why I wait for news articles to pull them out because I can't read that format with the monospace font and the deposition format.
John:
It's so painful.
John:
So I wait for people to pull out the juicier bits.
John:
But
John:
I encourage everyone to read it because it really does humanize the company and the people involved.
John:
And it reveals them to be also smart and even though they never talk about this stuff in public, they know about all of the pros and cons.
John:
They're just not going to come out in public and blab them to you, but it doesn't mean they don't know them.
John:
It's another thing I think confuses people about Apple.
John:
It's like, well, Apple never says anything about that, so maybe that's not how they view it.
John:
It's totally how they view it because it's the reality.
John:
They're just careful in what they say to the public.
John:
But when they talk to each other,
John:
They say all the things you think they would say, right?
John:
So that I find sort of reassuring and boring and interesting in its boringness.
John:
And then the other thing I'll add is that I am shocked at how bad people are at writing email in every company.
John:
Apple, Epic, everyone involved.
John:
Because...
John:
I mean, granted, I have high standards for this stuff or whatever, but I feel like most people I communicate with on a daily basis at my actual job are better at writing good, coherent, well-formatted, well-spelled, grammatically correct, organized emails than most of the bigwigs at Apple and Epic, right?
Yeah.
John:
I'm not asking for much.
John:
I'm asking for sentences, punctuation, like some sort of paragraph, some sort of reasonable formatting, some acknowledgement of organizing your thoughts and having respect for the time of the person on the other end.
John:
And instead it's just like, I randomly slapped this out like while running to catch a flight or something.
John:
Like I had no time to do capitalization or spelling correctly, let alone grammar, let alone formatting.
John:
people who try to communicate in bulleted lists but can't bother making any kind of bullets or they just put a hyphen touching a word of a sentence that's all in lowercase and then the next hyphen is on the same line instead of a new line and like it's just what an incoherent mess now granted this is not what they're hired for their job is not to be expert they're not copywriters right that's not their job i understand that is not everyone's forte but boy the standard is low the
John:
It's very low for expressing coherent thoughts in email.
John:
Maybe they're more articulate in person.
John:
Maybe the meetings that they have these discussions in are really where it happens and the emails are just dashed off.
John:
Executives are busy.
John:
I totally understand it.
John:
Not everyone is a writer.
John:
But it really makes me appreciate some of the people on my teams and in my sort of org chart and hierarchy at work of how well I should send them a nice thank you at work and say, you know what, I never say this, but your emails are always well organized and respect my time and have like a topic sentence and front load the important information and are formatted nicely and you always spell things correctly.
John:
Thank you for that because it could be worse.
Casey:
Oh, it's so true.
Casey:
I feel like the higher up you go in the org chart, the less craps you give about what your emails look like.
John:
For sure.
John:
Like, no one's going to yell at, like, I don't want to pick a name, but no one's going to yell at Eddie Q for being a bad emailer.
John:
Like, again, that's not their job, but...
John:
You feel like law of averages, like the people at work, like there are people who are better at emails and worse at emails.
John:
There are better writers.
John:
And, you know, like, again, especially if it's not your job, but you think law of averages, one of the big wigs at Apple would be good at writing emails.
John:
And based on this documentation, either none of them are or none of them want to spend the time to write a good email.
Marco:
Yeah, but I don't know.
Marco:
To me, I'm with you that there's not a lot of surprises coming out here, and that's interesting in its boringness, but I've been mostly trying to stay away from the coverage because it just keeps making me very, very angry.
Marco:
And I don't even want to go into it too much here because I'm in a good mood today and I want to keep that mood going.
Marco:
It was a really nice day.
Marco:
I had a good time today.
Marco:
But what we keep seeing from Apple in these things is an immense sense of entitlement
Marco:
to literally all commerce that happens on their phone platform.
Marco:
And I know from having posted about this on Twitter and having gotten hundreds of responses from people who think I'm wrong or an idiot or naive or whatever, my main criticism of this is that...
Marco:
I don't believe that Apple automatically deserves to be able to dictate terms for the entire world of mobile commerce that's happening on their platform.
Marco:
When the phone was new and when this world was smaller and more specialized and more competitive, you could argue like, well, they can dictate these terms just like a game console or whatever, and okay.
But
Marco:
I think, though, you can look at the history of what has happened in the world over time when a private company has built something that has become critical infrastructure for an entire world of commerce.
Marco:
And you can look at things like the railroads.
Marco:
Power lines, phone lines, broadband lines.
Marco:
There are lots of examples in history where a private company has built something that ended up being so incredibly important to such a vast amount of commerce and a vast part of society that even though it was built privately –
Marco:
Regulation had to be implemented or antitrust measures had to be taken because it just became too important to way too much of the commerce of the world at that time.
Marco:
And I think that standard should be applied here.
Marco:
And if you look in a vacuum and say, well, if Apple developed this platform, they can dictate whatever terms they want to for how everyone runs their business and they can take whatever cut they want to because they built it.
Marco:
That argument makes sense up to a point, up to an approximate limit of size and complexity and importance to the world.
Marco:
And
Marco:
The world of mobile apps is so big and such an important part to so much commerce these days that I think it has crossed that threshold where regulation or antitrust actions need to be implemented here.
Marco:
for the benefit of society.
Marco:
It is now too big.
Marco:
It has crossed that threshold where that's now warranted.
Marco:
And I don't think that we should have sideloading or alternative app stores or things like that.
Marco:
I actually think it would be better for the platform if we don't get those things.
Marco:
I do think in order to relieve this anti-competitive behavior and kind of relieve the pressure valve on this, I do think we need to allow apps to have alternative payment methods if they want to.
Marco:
A lot of people also misunderstand that argument that I'm saying.
Marco:
I'm not saying that everyone would stop using Apple's payment system.
Marco:
I wouldn't even stop using it in my app because Apple's payment system has a lot of merits.
Marco:
It is easier.
Marco:
As a customer, I do usually choose it if I have the option.
Marco:
It has a lot of advantages.
Marco:
As Ben Thompson often says, people tend to make sure that credit card is up to date.
Marco:
And so on subscription billing, you do get fewer failures and cancellations and everything due to expired credit cards and everything.
Marco:
So there are lots of value points in Apple's system.
Marco:
And I think if...
Marco:
Apple, if they allowed people to have their own payment methods in their apps, I think many apps would still use Apple's just because it is somewhat competitive on those areas.
Marco:
But I also don't think it is best for the world right now, including Apple.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
through the phone that doesn't fall under an app purchase rules things like physical goods services stuff like that like there's lots of things that you can buy by typing in your credit card details or using apple pay on the phone which is not going through the app store purchase system and people have no trust issues with that um so i i think the whole that whole trust issue thing i think that's that's that's a bs diversion um but going back to it i think the rule that you must use apple's purchase system is going to fall
Marco:
And I think Apple should let it fall, however that happens through lawsuits or government or both.
Marco:
Because if they don't let that fall, way worse stuff is going to happen.
Marco:
If they don't loosen control on that one point, they're going to lose way more control when governments step in and make them do things like allow side loading or alternative app stores.
Marco:
Because that's the next step.
Marco:
If Apple will not budge on the payment rule.
Marco:
that's going to happen long-term.
Marco:
And I think that's way worse for the platform if that happens.
Marco:
So I hope Apple loosens their grip on the payment processing rule because that, first of all, I think that's an overstep.
Marco:
I think Apple...
Marco:
should not be requiring that all digital purchases use their system i think that's overreaching that might have made sense 10 years ago it doesn't make sense now there are lots of problems with that including things like apple launching all their own competitive services that competitors literally can't match because of that pricing rule and everything so there's all sorts of problems with that now i think that rule needs to go as well as the rule that says that you can't talk about the rules around payment in your app
Marco:
Those two need to go.
Marco:
And I think if Apple loosens the grip on those things, it will save them from much more severe forced changes from governments down the road.
Marco:
And so it is in their best interest to loosen that grip.
Marco:
And I don't think they would actually lose that much money by doing that.
Marco:
Honestly, if you look at what people...
Marco:
do today you know what big companies you do today you got people like netflix and everything who just bailed out of in-app purchase years ago and so like you know many of the big companies that would be paying apple 30 percent have already left or already have their own alternative setup that they're trying to draw people to um
Marco:
many of the, you know, other companies like the big game companies would probably still offer Apple stuff as an option because many people, again, they have those credit cards entered.
Marco:
Uh, you know, they, they, their parents might have like certain like restrictions set, you know, if for kids purchases and everything.
Marco:
So actually I think Apple would still make a killing with their in-app purchase system if it got to compete on its merits.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
But right now, it's not competing on its merits, and that's anti-competitive, and it's causing major issues for everyone, including Apple.
Marco:
And if they just would loosen their grip on that one rule, all of this antitrust pressure would disappear.
Marco:
It would just vanish.
Marco:
It is the biggest relief valve in the world, and that would protect them from – it would let them retain control –
Marco:
on the app store and on distribution of software and ios still so and if they don't let go of that they're going to lose that control it might take a few more years but they're going to lose it now part two of what makes me incredibly upset following this story is apple's incredibly arrogant and entitled and greedy and dismissive attitude towards developers
Marco:
I have never been less excited about WWDC than I am this year because what Apple keeps showing in their statements around this, they think we owe them everything.
Marco:
They don't value our contributions at all.
Marco:
They think we owe them our entire business.
Marco:
And they think we should be kissing their feet and thanking them for enabling our entire business to function.
Marco:
And we need to be, quote, paying our way for the App Store and paying for their developer tools with our 30% commissions.
Marco:
We should be bowing down and kissing their feet.
Marco:
And that attitude, I'm telling you, man, that rubs me the wrong way so hard because we have our own businesses, thank you very much, and we add value to their platform.
Marco:
We add tons of value to their platform.
Marco:
How many people would buy iPhones if they didn't have third-party apps?
Marco:
I bet a lot less than how many buy them now.
Marco:
So we add value to their platform even if we don't give them a dime.
Marco:
And that's why they allow lots of apps on their store that don't give them a dime that are free or ad-based or whatever.
Marco:
That's why, because they know this too.
Marco:
Now, in addition to us, you know, to them not needing our 30% because we make the iPhone valuable and they make a lot of money off the iPhone, we do pay them in other ways.
Marco:
Every single developer pays $100 a year for the developer fee.
Marco:
And then there's search ads that many of us are paying now.
Marco:
I have spent a large part of the last couple of years paying absurd amounts of money to Apple for search ads.
Marco:
I do this willingly.
Marco:
I'm not being fooled by the system.
Marco:
I am sometimes being ripped off by it, but I'm not being fooled by it.
Marco:
I know exactly what I'm getting into.
Marco:
And I choose to pay.
Marco:
And here I am paying Apple some more.
Marco:
And they just literally, they just launched a new search ad unit, which I had a hilarious like overpriced experience with that I instantly stopped after setting almost $1,000 on fire accidentally.
Marco:
That was fun.
Marco:
But, you know, they make money from us in lots of other ways.
Marco:
We are paying our way by trying to get our apps visible in their store, which is not doing much for curation or promotion of our apps, despite what they say.
Marco:
So they make lots of money off of us already.
Marco:
They're trying to play this sad sap card that we owe them and we got to pay our way to fund the app store.
Marco:
No, the app store is very well funded, even without that 30%.
Marco:
And if they loosen that rule, they're not going to lose the entire 30%.
Marco:
They're going to lose some of it.
Marco:
But I honestly don't think it would be more than a drop in the bucket compared to all the other services revenue that they're making off of us, especially from things like search ads and everything else.
Marco:
So I think that the attitude that they are showing in this is both nearly delusional, as well as I think many of their arguments are made in bad faith to intentionally distract and distort the discussion.
Marco:
I mean, granted, they're lawyers.
Marco:
That's their job, but still.
Marco:
And I think finally...
Marco:
The attitude they have shown about the way they view developers and the way they view how much they think they're entitled to from us, how much they think we should be bowing down and kissing their feet, and how little they think of us overall –
Marco:
This year at WWDC, that's all I'm going to be thinking about.
Marco:
And when they have people up there on stage telling us how great we are and trying to rile us up, all I'm going to be thinking about is how much Apple has shown over and over again in their statements, in arguments like this, how little they really think of us and how much they think they're entitled to all of our money.
Marco:
Everything they say at WWDC, as far as I'm concerned, about what they think of developers is total bullshit as long as these people are still in charge.
Casey:
You know, I have a lot of thoughts about this.
Casey:
And I should start by saying that I pretty much agree with everything you just said.
Casey:
I am, you know, at best, I am a teeny tiny itty bitty indie developer on the App Store.
Casey:
I am nowhere near the position that you're in.
Casey:
And in fact, I bet you John is probably a bigger developer than me at this particular moment.
Casey:
But yeah, something I've been thinking about, to go back to the earlier part of your conversation, Marco, and then I'd like to come back to what you just said.
Casey:
I've been thinking a lot over the last week or two about the Epic lawsuit and a lot of the things that Apple has been saying lately and whether the 30% is fair.
Casey:
And I've been thinking about this even since the small business program, whatever they call it.
Casey:
And it's funny you bring up what I think is basically common carrier here in the States.
Casey:
But what you were saying was, you know, at some point you reached a threshold where this infrastructure is too important and it becomes kind of a public good to a degree.
Casey:
Even though it's a private company's thing, it's so important to so much of the country, if not the world, that it becomes kind of de facto public.
Casey:
And I definitely think...
Casey:
that the App Store is at that point, without question.
Casey:
And I definitely do not think, as you were saying earlier, that early on it was.
Casey:
I think early on in the first, I don't know, two to four years of the App Store, I don't think it was in this like common carrier de facto public position.
Casey:
And I don't think it's unreasonable for Apple to have set the terms to even potentially just, you know, the 30% may not have been so unreasonable then.
Casey:
But
Casey:
But at this point, now that it's a seemingly well-oiled machine, and now that Apple gets to, on one side of its mouth, say, oh, look at all the money we've paid all these developers.
Casey:
You're welcome, everybody.
Casey:
Look at all this money that we got for you.
Casey:
If they're going to say all those things, then I feel like
Casey:
they should show a little more goodwill than they have.
Casey:
And the problem I have with this whole common carrier argument that I've been building in my brain is at what point did we cross that threshold?
Casey:
And I've yet to come up with a good answer for it.
Casey:
I don't know if it was after two to four years.
Casey:
I don't know if it was just 10 minutes ago or presumably somewhere in between.
Casey:
But I completely and utterly agree that we are at that threshold where I think more regulation is probably necessary.
Casey:
Even if Apple does the right thing, even if they do the things you said, which I agree, even if they say, OK, you're allowed to talk about the rules in app and OK, you're allowed to use your own payment method in app.
Casey:
Even still, I kind of wonder if regulation would be necessary and or helpful to prevent them from reneging or to prevent them from coming up with some cockamamie scheme like search ads that makes things gross again or grosser, if you will.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
It's just I definitely think and I was planning to bring it up tonight.
Casey:
So great minds think alike.
Casey:
I definitely think we've reached that threshold, though, where this is a de facto public good.
Casey:
The other thing I wanted to comment on, I completely and utterly agree with you saying that Apple is looking for us to kiss their feet and saying, oh, you owe us, you owe us, you owe us.
Casey:
100% agree.
Casey:
However, for the sake of conversation, are they saying that because they're thinking of Facebook and WhatsApp and people like them and they're not thinking of the yous and the me's and the johns of the world?
Casey:
Again, I agree with you.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
I'm just trying to play devil's advocate here.
Casey:
you know, do you think that they're confusing the message a little bit because they're saying these things without any caveats or asterisks or daggers or double daggers, but really what they're thinking of when they say these things are, screw you, Facebook, look at all the money we've made you with our app store, where what you and I are hearing and John is hearing is, screw you, John, Marco, and Casey, you should be thankful we gave you a darn cent, much less the tens or hundreds or hundreds of thousands or whatever dollars that any of you have made.
Casey:
Do you think it's that they're thinking of an entire different niche of developer or do you think that they just are thinking of every single developer on the App Store?
John:
I mean, I'm not thinking of that directly.
John:
And Marco already touched on this.
John:
So I think Marco knows, at least intellectually, partially what's going on here, although it doesn't make him less pissed about it.
John:
Remember, this is a court case.
John:
And the lawyers who are working for Apple have to make the strongest possible argument, which is another reason I will cite that even though it looks like Epic is going to lose this court case because it doesn't seem to have particularly good legal standing,
John:
The damage done to Apple is by forcing Apple to make their quote-unquote strongest argument, which requires them to dump all over developers.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, they're saying, like, this is our store.
John:
We run it.
John:
You owe us.
John:
Apple is making all these arguments that make Apple look bad because they are the best legal arguments, like, given the current laws, right?
John:
And so every time an Apple lawyer gets up there and just...
John:
dumps all over developers and basically says epic should be epic should be thanking us and i can't believe the nerve of them trying to say that they want to run a store within our store and don't they understand what we're doing for them or whatever it's because this is the strongest argument in their favor legally speaking and probably why they're going to win but it hurts apple's reputation with developers so much because like we can hear you you know apple like we hear you saying these things right
John:
And so, yeah, definitely it hurts a lot if you're a developer to hear all this stuff.
John:
Now, when we look at these stuff from discovery, you do see that same thing echoed in emails within Apple over the decades.
John:
So I'm not saying this is just a lawyer thing, right?
John:
The lawyers have to be out there today now making the strongest possible argument.
John:
And also probably, you know, the lawyers don't run Apple.
John:
They're just making they're just trying to win the case.
John:
Right.
John:
But then you see those same arguments inside Apple over the years, but you also see the other side of those arguments inside Apple over the years.
John:
So it's clear that at various times, various people have brought up like, you know, one of them that's been circulated a lot is Phil Schiller saying just years and years ago saying, do we really think we can stick to 30% forever?
John:
I know we kind of just did 30% as like it seemed like a good deal, but like as the years go on and as the store gets bigger, do we really think it's tenable to keep it at 30%?
John:
Or should we maybe think about lowering it like on our own from a position of strength rather than being forced to lower it?
John:
And it seems like Phil lost that argument because the answer is we're not going to do it until Congress essentially starts making noises and we get scared, right?
John:
Maybe that's why he's on the roof.
John:
Even then we'll do it in a jerky way that makes it complicated to make people apply and have all these dumb rules.
John:
And, you know, we've talked about this in the past, right?
John:
So –
John:
Like this is another example of the boringness of like when we were all talking out here of like it seems like Apple really doesn't respect developers and it seems like Apple is thinking of developers in this way.
John:
You could people could say like, oh, that's a very uncharitable interpretation of Apple.
John:
You don't know what they're saying internally just because you see this policy doesn't mean that they have this dim view of developers.
John:
But now that we see the discovery, we're like that dim view of developers exists within Apple and was a factor in these decisions.
John:
Right.
John:
also we get to see the other side and that you know apple is a group of a big group of people not everyone agrees all the time and at various times people have had different ideas about what they should do the iMessage thing is a great example i didn't dig into that because i guess we'll put a link in the show notes you can look at it or whatever but it was like you know eddie q was saying like we really need to bring iMessage to android right like he like he wants to like he realizes iMessage is a big thing and by keeping it apple only we're stopping ourselves from like becoming dominant and
John:
the dominant messaging platform kind of like you know like cross-platform messaging sort of own the world of messaging seems like we could do that we're doing real well and the other side of that is like yeah but iMessage does keep people on the iphone right and it's a thing that keeps people from buying their kids cheap android phones because they want to be able to do iMessage and like again both sides of the the issue are presented one side is kind of like oh you know
John:
we're leaving money on the table we could become the dominant force and the other side is but we need to protect ourselves right and all these developer issues are the same thing someone's saying we've had 30 for a while and like there's no real reason for other than we can get away with it is it a great policy to just see how long we can get away with it until the the peasants revolt or should we now so we can look magnanimous and again i think this was like 2011 or 14 like this is not like last year they were discussing this longer time ago
John:
And the pitch was, let's do it now.
John:
We can see like, oh, everyone will just be so happy.
John:
Imagine that WWC, whatever year it was.
John:
If like in 2011 or 2014 or something, Apple had just come out on stage and said, remember the 30%?
John:
Now it's 15 for everybody.
John:
People would have gone nuts.
John:
We would have loved it.
John:
Because it wouldn't be because Congress is investigating them.
John:
It wouldn't be because they're being sued.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
It would be because Apple sort of read the room and figured...
John:
let's do this now so we look like the good guy.
John:
But, you know, that faction or that idea didn't go anywhere inside Apple and they had to wait until it came to this.
John:
So anyway, I feel differently than both of you about
John:
the whole sort of monopoly aspect and how important Apple is and all that other things or whatever.
John:
But I agree on the important part, which is we can make new laws and we should.
John:
And Apple is going to be subject to them.
John:
So Apple really should get out ahead of this even more than they have.
John:
And even when Apple wins this case,
John:
They should really strongly consider the things that Marco is suggesting or other things like that, because, you know, just ask Microsoft.
John:
If you try to take a hard line, it may not kill your company and they may not even break you up.
John:
But there was a long period where after the Microsoft antitrust trial where Microsoft was like wounded, let's say.
John:
It was limping for a while.
John:
It hurt Microsoft to go through that and it took them a long time to recover.
John:
And they never were what they were before, which is probably a good thing because we didn't need that in the world.
John:
But if Apple wants to learn from that, and I think Apple has learned by doing stuff.
John:
They did the small business program.
John:
They're trying to loosen things up or whatever.
John:
But at the same time, they have a bunch of lawyers every day spouting stuff in news stories that makes Apple look so bad to
John:
many of its stakeholders right to the public too i think it makes apple look bad but certainly to developers and i've seen so many sour attitudes about the how developers are feeling and i feel like apple could say we're just the lawyers are just saying that and i know we said that in an email but look here's the other email we discussed it internally but just don't pay that into the lawyers they have to say this to win the case and they're going to win the case but but don't feel bad developers and it's like nah i don't think humans work like that apple we're still kind of pissed at you
Marco:
Well, and it's not just the lawyer saying it.
Marco:
It's the executive saying it.
Marco:
It's the press statement saying it.
Marco:
It's all the little PR studies they put out about, look how many jobs we're creating.
Marco:
You can see it, and it's in those emails from higher-ups and everything.
Marco:
This is not just something the lawyers are saying.
Marco:
The attitude that Apple reflects— It is in the emails, but the other side is also in the emails.
John:
The other side is not from lawyers' mouths ever.
Marco:
Fair enough, but there's not a lot of that other side of the emails.
Marco:
At this point, it's hard to quantify how much developer goodwill Apple has set on fire in the last couple of years, but they just keep digging and digging and digging.
Marco:
I don't want to speak out of turn here, but occasionally Apple has asked me for some kind of quote or possible thing they could use in a press release.
Marco:
I wouldn't give it to them now.
Marco:
They haven't asked recently, but I would comply in the past.
Marco:
I would gladly try to help them out because I had a better image of what that relationship might have been.
Marco:
that goodwill is gone now.
Marco:
I would not cooperate with them on that kind of stuff now because the way I view my relationship with Apple as a developer is completely different now than it was a couple of years ago.
Marco:
And I see now really what it is and how they see it.
Marco:
And I see that they don't value me very well.
Marco:
They think things about our relationship that I don't think.
Marco:
I see things very differently.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I can't imagine looking across the industry how many developers feel similarly.
Marco:
How many developers might do something to work with Apple or to help them out who now won't?
Marco:
How many apps that developers were thinking about making that they now just won't?
Marco:
How much developers are motivated to adopt Apple's newest technologies, to support Apple's newest devices, who now just won't?
Marco:
How many developers out there who might have tried a cool new business model in one of their apps but can't because of the stupid internet purchase rules or won't even go near it because it's near the edge of the rules and they know better than to even step near them because they know Apple will just bite their head off at any moment?
Marco:
It's really hard to quantify all of this, but this is real massive damage Apple has done to themselves out of sheer greed.
Marco:
I have very little respect for the leadership of Tim Cook.
Marco:
I know a lot of people out there like him.
Marco:
I really don't.
Marco:
And this is one of the areas that I think he has really put short-term gains above long-term value.
Marco:
And I can't imagine how they're going to recover from this.
Marco:
It's going to take a decade to recover from this if they turn around now.
Marco:
The opinion developers have of Apple, I don't think, has ever been lower than right now.
Marco:
They're going to have to really change a lot of things to turn that around.
Marco:
And I don't see them changing any of them.
Marco:
And furthermore, and I do very much agree, as I was saying earlier, and as you were touching on, John, a minute ago...
Marco:
I can't imagine it would be a good thing if the government had to step in and really slap Apple down in a big way with things like alternative app stores or sideloading.
Marco:
That would be a very bad thing for the platform.
Marco:
I really hope that Apple sees that too and that Apple pulls their own relief valve before government has to do that to them because that's not a good thing if that happens to the platform.
Marco:
But again, why Apple hasn't pulled this relief valve yet I think is entirely down to just short-term gains.
Marco:
It's a services revenue company now.
Marco:
Look at all the services revenue growth.
Marco:
What services revenue mostly means is the Google search deal and App Store taxes.
Marco:
That's what that mostly means.
Marco:
It's not everyone buying Apple TV Plus.
Marco:
News break, you know, it's not everybody buying like, you know, Apple Arcade.
Marco:
That's not most of that revenue.
Marco:
Most of that revenue is the, you know, Google search deal and App Store taxes.
Marco:
That's what that... So when Apple says services revenue, that's what they're talking about.
Marco:
So I can't imagine...
Marco:
the current leadership of this company doing anything that would reduce that number that quarterly number even though it is really very much like you know a short-term quarterly numbers game that we always make fun of other companies ceos for you know focusing on the short-term gains at the expense of long-term you know values and things but that's what i see apple doing with services revenue and and i don't see anything changing anytime soon unless the leadership changes
John:
I think that they'll – you don't need to change the leadership for them to change this.
John:
They'll react.
John:
They'll change.
John:
I mean they already have with the reduction of cuts and I think they're going to go more in that direction as they realize what's going to happen.
John:
And if you think the developer faith in Apple has never been lower, you haven't been an Apple developer for enough decades because –
John:
If we had to pick the real low point, I would probably say like either just before Jobs came back or right after he came back because like the various modern OS efforts they made and the various new APIs they introduced and trashed.
John:
And like I think that was probably the lowest point because they had so few developers and they were just jerking them around constantly with like, you're going to do this and you're going to use this new API.
John:
Never mind that one.
John:
But here's no OS.
John:
os plan it'll be out next year never mind we're doing a different plan where here's this thing never mind we bought next and it was just like wow like it was i mean if you want to watch that the you know the famous q a session with steve jobs at wwc 1997 the anger in that audience uh is it's just like you can you can feel like heat coming off the seats like it's just
John:
And for good reason, because it was a giant mess.
John:
At least that was Jobs saying, look, I didn't make this mess.
John:
I wasn't even here for the past few years.
John:
But let me just explain to you how we're going to fix it and having everyone in the audience not believe him.
John:
It's a great thing to watch, by the way.
John:
We should find a link to that.
John:
Because in that 1997 Q&A with Steve Jobs, can you imagine a WWDC session where Steve Jobs gets up on stage and just takes free-form questions from the audience?
John:
Not a thing that would happen in later years, right?
John:
But when he did it, he essentially outlined his entire plan for what he's going to do with Apple.
John:
And it sounded ridiculous and no one believed him.
John:
They all hated him.
John:
And then he essentially did it all.
John:
And it's like you watch it now in hindsight and you're like, what?
John:
And the audience just does not believe a word of it.
John:
They're just like, we've been burned too many times.
John:
you make all these promises, we do all this work, and then you pull the rug out from under us, and you just keep asking us to do a new thing.
John:
So anyway, it has been worse, but that was decades ago.
John:
Who cares?
John:
I did want to say that I looked up the email that I was trying to refer to.
John:
It was 2011.
John:
2011 from Phil Schiller.
John:
The App Store was, what, 2008?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Right?
John:
So this is three years into the App Store.
John:
Phil Schiller comes out with his own infinite timeline thing.
John:
Food for thought.
John:
Do we think our 70-30 split will last forever?
John:
I mean, he's going to say, sure, it's good now, but is it going to be forever?
John:
um and then you can read the email we'll put a link in the show notes some of these stories it says whatever 2011 so it's not even like they were waiting until like you know like wow there's a little bit of pushback from the app store and and like you know around 2017 or so this is 2011 it's only three years the three the app store is three years old and it's like maybe once we start making one billion dollars a year in profit from the app store we could think about lowering the uh the rate because you know hey if we're making a billion dollars in profit i think we can afford to lower the rate
John:
Anyway, look at the email.
John:
As he said, just food for thought.
John:
Apple did not eat that food.
John:
Apple spit that food back out.
John:
And again, Discovery doesn't show you every single relevant email to these discussions, and I'm sure there's lots of discussions in person over the years, right?
John:
So it shows me that these thoughts are in Apple's mind.
John:
But we know what they did, and we know the only thing that actually caused them to act has been this government pressure.
John:
And the thing you were talking about, Marco, of developers' sentiment turning south and all the things they're missing out on, I think the biggest reason that I'm rooting for some kind of regulation in this area that affects not just Apple but everybody is the idea behind, like, hey, if you can't make your business plan work in the App Store or if you don't like Apple's terms or whatever –
John:
like although apple i think is not a monopoly and therefore not subject to all the restrictions that these court cases seem to want to put apple under saying hey apple shouldn't be allowed to do this i don't think apple is a monopoly but there is a duopoly for sure which is google and apple right and so if you don't like apple oh why don't you try google google's not that much different they are different in some important ways but not that much like both of them have a fairly strong grip on their app store and it really makes it so that
John:
You know, this is what, Mark, you were getting out of like the entirety of the mobile landscape.
John:
I don't think Apple is the entirety of the mobile landscape, but Apple and Google, to a first approximation, are very close to the entirety of the mobile landscape in the United States.
John:
Right.
John:
And that is a problem.
John:
It's not as big a problem over when Microsoft had 90 something percent market share, but it's not great when Apple and Google have combined again in the U.S.,
John:
90-something percent market share, because it means that if you don't like something about the App Store, it's like, well, fine, just go someplace else.
John:
Where else am I going to go?
John:
Should I make my own mobile phone platform and try to compete with Apple and Google?
John:
Or is it not possible to participate in the ecosystem of the most important computing device that everyone on the planet uses, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I think this is a perfect, you know, the right way into this is not to say Epic demands that Apple does what it wants because it's illegal for Apple to do this because they're a monopoly.
John:
I don't think they are.
John:
And I think Epic's going to lose this case because you can't make a company do a thing that you want them to do by saying it's not fair that they're allowed to do this.
John:
I think Apple is allowed to do it.
John:
I just think it's dumb for Apple to do it.
John:
But that's why we have a place where we can make new laws and say, hey,
John:
The situation is what it is, and I think we should – just like when there were, you know, five movie studios or, you know, five music labels or a small number of phone companies even after the breakup of AT&T, we apply regulations to industries even when one company doesn't have a monopoly just because we know that a very small number of companies encompass the entire world.
John:
Like there used to be much more sane regulations about owning multiple television stations and also newspapers in the same jurisdiction and everything to try to prevent –
John:
anyone from getting big enough to be a threat and here i think we've let the world of mobile platforms get to a point where there is essentially a duopoly again in the united states it's slightly different perhaps in china and other places um and that we need new laws to address that new restrictions on this industry to make it so that their power is slightly lessened without saying oh you need to be broken up and
John:
the app store needs to be a separate company without saying, uh, any disgruntled developer can demand that you do what you want within your app store.
John:
Because again, that doesn't make any sense when we don't have an actual monopoly, but regulation makes sense when, you know, there are a small number of companies that are completely defined an important section of the economy and this surely qualifies.
John:
Um, obviously anytime any laws are made in this country, it is a very fraught endeavor because our lawmakers, uh,
John:
I was going to say our lawmakers are dumb.
John:
Some of them are dumb.
John:
Many of them are bought and sold due to our dumb laws that allow them to be bought and sold.
John:
It's kind of a cycle there.
John:
You see?
John:
Anyway, I'm not optimistic that we're going to do the right thing with these laws.
John:
Witness every law related to the internet that came out in the 90s, right?
John:
But I think that is actually the right remedy for this situation.
John:
Aside from Apple, you know, doing the right thing by itself, but like relying, and we've talked about this before, relying on the benevolence of the powerful for Apple to preemptively do the right thing.
John:
That's the right move for Apple.
John:
But who knows who will be running Apple in 20 or 50 years?
John:
I would much rather have some laws on the books that sort of define what is and isn't acceptable.
John:
within this space so that any new company that springs up say apple goes down in flames google disappears in 100 years like whatever company pops up in this space that these regulations apply to them and you know give privacy protections uh protect the economy and don't allow the companies that control the platforms to control all the profits
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Jason Bates Brownsword, what a great name, writes, love the show.
Casey:
I was listening to the show on my way to work, and you grabbed my attention when you were talking about hiding the icons in the menu bar.
Casey:
As soon as I got home, I started getting rid of the icons until I got to Dropbox.
Casey:
How do you get rid of it?
Casey:
Well, for me, I got rid of Dropbox.
Casey:
I think I explained last episode that I'm using a combination of Synology Drive, of which there are like eight different things that Synology has done that they call Drive.
Casey:
But there's one of them that is basically their de facto Dropbox clone.
Casey:
And then that in combination with, I think it's called Synology Cloud Sync, which will synchronize on your Synology a folder on your Synology with your Dropbox.
Casey:
So my Synology drive is my quote unquote Dropbox.
Casey:
It's my shared file structure.
Casey:
And one of the folders within there is where I synchronize my Dropbox.
Casey:
And so that's how I've done it.
Casey:
And if you happen to have a Synology, I cannot recommend it enough.
Casey:
But for those of you who don't, I don't know, bartender, what do you guys do for this?
John:
yeah that was why i put this item in here because when we were discussing the population of your menu bar and i was helping you get rid of icons that you didn't need to be in there lots of people said and you guys should check out bartender so anyway yeah we all know about bartender but just for the listeners if you don't and this is the actual answer to this question if you actually don't want to stop using dropbox there are multiple utilities bartender being the most well known that will let you hide collapse condense and otherwise manipulate the icons that are in your menu bar like
John:
bartender is itself a third-party application and what it does is it goes into your menu bar and lets you rearrange and collapse and hide icons that are there so if you have an icon like dropbox and dropbox itself doesn't let you hide the icon but you still want to be running dropbox check out bartender i what's the other well-known one i forgot the name of the other one but anyway there's multiple users do this but bartender is very well known i've
John:
I've had it for a long time.
John:
I've run it in the past.
John:
Now my monitor is so freaking wide I don't have to worry about it anymore.
John:
But if you want to hide Dropbox, check out Bartender.
Casey:
Yeah, there's also, I think it's Vanilla, if I remember right.
Casey:
It's by the same fellow who does Rocket, which is itself a must-have in my personal opinion.
Casey:
Rocket is a system app, it's a menu bar app that lets you do Slack-style typing of emojis, basically anywhere you can do text entry on your Mac.
Casey:
uh so i'll put a link to that in the show notes as well and i'm not going to stall for time and look it up at the moment but i believe that it's vanilla that does a similar thing uh this is by matthew palmer that does a similar thing to bartender it's a little bit different in the mechanism by which it does it but yeah i mean rocket gets my highest recommendation vanilla i haven't tried in a while and it was a little glitchy for me when i was using multiple monitors um but you should definitely check it out and see what you think
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
And for people who don't know, like if you hold for the Apple icons, I know it's confusing in Big Sur when they added the control center thing or whatever.
John:
Anyway, if you hold down the command key, you can drag most Apple menu bar icons off of the menu bar.
John:
You hold down the command key, you drag them off, you drag them down a little ways and then eventually you get like a remove thing and you let go.
John:
Right.
John:
So for first party ones, you can rearrange them by holding down the command key and dragging them and you can also remove them, which essentially hides them.
John:
Most of the Apple ones also have a checkbox that's buried in some preference pane where you'd never think to look for it.
John:
Third-party apps usually have a checkbox in some preference setting somewhere within their app that might be hard to find.
John:
But the Apple ones you can usually just drag off.
John:
I think it might work for third-party ones too.
John:
Let me see.
John:
No, it gives me the little buster icon.
John:
I just tried to drag Skype off.
John:
you can hold down command and drag it down and when you get down when you get it like two inches below instead of showing the little thing that says it's going to be removed i just get a little circle with a line through it which is the os's way of telling me skype does not let you remove that icon by dragging it but the apple ones can be removed that way um and the skype one if it can be removed at all would be a drop box it would be a checkbox rather and if it can't be removed bartender or vanilla
Marco:
By the way, some real-time follow-up.
Marco:
According to Mark Gurman, Antonio Garcia Martinez has already been fired from Apple.
John:
Oh, we didn't even make it through the show.
John:
Didn't even make it through the show.
John:
See, this really does bring up exactly what the people were saying in the petition, which is like, how does this get past our hiring process?
John:
It's not obscure.
John:
It's not a secret.
John:
It's not hearsay.
John:
It's a literal New York Times best-selling book.
John:
Maybe he wasn't a high-profile enough...
John:
Maybe the whole ad organization is filled with sleazy people and we just don't know it.
John:
Like that's, you know, again, it's not Apple will work out internally.
John:
I assume that because that's essentially what they're demanding.
John:
The people are Apple weren't saying you need to fire this guy right away.
John:
Although I'm sure they thought that what they were saying is,
John:
How did this happen exactly?
John:
Let's look at our process because it seems like our process is falling down.
John:
Kind of like the umpteen emails that you will see in Discovery from the Epic trial of some Apple executive or another saying, look at this scam app that's number one in the free apps right now.
John:
How are these getting past review?
John:
There are so many emails where people are angry and credulous about that.
John:
And yeah, we feel you, Apple executives.
John:
We have the same questions.
Casey:
Moving on with more SKTP, Chandler Kent writes, with more of the computer moving on to a system on a chip architecture, would it theoretically be possible to swap out a system on a chip to upgrade a computer?
Casey:
What would be the disadvantages to allowing that to happen?
Casey:
What design considerations would exist to keep backwards compatibility with the interfaces to the system on a chip?
Casey:
What are the tradeoffs?
Casey:
Chandler writes, Apple would never do this, but I thought it would be an interesting discussion.
Marco:
Can we just start saying sock?
Marco:
I know no one says sock, but I feel like this is too awkward of a thing.
Marco:
We have to shorten it.
Marco:
Stop trying to make mob happen.
John:
I get the reference.
John:
You're the king of bad pronunciations of computer acronyms.
John:
It's S-O-C, sock.
John:
How would you say it?
Marco:
We don't.
Marco:
We say S-O-C.
Marco:
It's pretty short already.
Casey:
I believe it's pronounced soak.
Marco:
Every single acronym or things that we've had that have been that short, you always have people start saying it as a one-syllable word.
Casey:
Yeah, but then you have the GIF-JIF war, where there's the people who are right that say GIF and the people who are wrong that say JIF.
John:
But you also got SOX.
John:
I mean, you probably don't know this, but people who work in big companies know SOX is already a thing.
Marco:
What is it?
Marco:
Standard Operating Procedure?
Marco:
No, S-O-X, Casey.
John:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Oh, is that – what am I thinking of?
Casey:
No, I don't know what it is.
Casey:
What's the – no, I'm thinking of Oxford.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
What's the – Sarbanes-Oxley.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
Is that it?
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep, there you go.
John:
So it's a little bit of a sound-alike.
John:
Anyway, SOC is what we're calling it.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So if one were to do this, I mean, the very first thing you'd have to do is make it socketable, right?
Casey:
Or whatever.
Casey:
Yeah, socket it.
Casey:
Socket it.
Casey:
Yeah, whatever.
Casey:
Bop it.
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
Casey:
Oh, it's so bad.
Casey:
You would have to make the system on a chip or SOC, Marco.
Casey:
Easily pluggable.
Casey:
So a way to eject it from the motherboard or the logic board and then plug a new one back in, which is a thing that one could do, but particularly on a laptop, or even more so on iPad, I don't think you're really going to want to do that.
Casey:
And plus, you know, technology marches on quickly and, you know, there's different inputs and outputs and interfaces and so on.
Casey:
I just, I don't see it happening and I think there's too many trade-offs.
Casey:
You're dedicating yourself to the inputs, outputs and socket of the day when you make this chip and you can't change it for years if you want to stick with it.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, if you look at the world of socketed CPUs, like this world exists, it's existed for quite some time, you know, in the PC and formerly Mac world, we can see already what the trade-offs are.
Marco:
You know, first of all, you need, as Casey, you kind of need like physical bulk, you know, you need a socket and then like some kind of mounting mechanism that can hold the chip to it.
Marco:
You need some kind of interface that's like, you know, a bunch of pits of metal or little pins or something for them to touch each other to interface with the stuff around it.
Marco:
And so that's cost, it's bulk, it's points of failure.
Marco:
But then also, you look at the world of... Suppose you have some Intel or AMD motherboard.
Marco:
After how many years can you still use that motherboard with new CPUs?
Marco:
It's not that many years usually.
Marco:
They change the sockets or things get upgraded because...
Marco:
the components around the processor change.
Marco:
Now, you know, you might have things like faster RAM buses and stuff like that.
Marco:
You might have different IO ports that come in and out of fashion, you know, different amounts of PCI lanes or whatever.
Marco:
Now, as you move into a SOC lifestyle, I'm going to go with it.
Marco:
As you move into the SOC lifestyle,
Marco:
Some of that stuff moves onto the chip.
Marco:
So some of that stuff you could theoretically swap out with an upgrade.
Marco:
Like if the memory is on the chip, stuff like that.
Marco:
Some of that stuff you could make interchangeable.
Marco:
The problem is that there's still all that other stuff around it.
Marco:
So for instance, you have things like just basic power and heat requirements.
Marco:
You design the system with a certain amount of capacity for whatever socket comes with.
Marco:
But then if you want to upgrade it in a couple of years...
Marco:
maybe the new one needs more power or makes more heat and then the stuff around it no longer will supply that uh maybe it's just a different size maybe it got bigger or economies of scale worked and it got smaller you know then you have that issue to deal with and you also have other things like you know the the things that it's talking to not everything is on the sock you still have like you know in in some cases you have ram that's off of it if you need to have a lot of it you've got to stop i can't i can't even parse what you're saying stop saying so you're killing me
Marco:
And you have things like the SSD or the cell modem or stuff like that.
Marco:
There are other things that are still pretty large things that are not being socketed.
Marco:
So there are a lot of other things around it that wouldn't go with it still or wouldn't have necessarily a very long lifespan.
Marco:
So I think in practice, even though this would probably never actually become a thing, I think if it was a thing,
Marco:
you'd have a similar problem that you have with the PC motherboards today, where you might be able to upgrade it within a year and a half or two years or whatever, but once you go past that, your motherboard wouldn't be compatible with the new SOX anyway.
Marco:
And so it wouldn't be a very long-lived upgrade path.
Marco:
It would be much more like today, where today if you buy a processor...
Marco:
You could use it with the motherboard you bought it with.
Marco:
Chances are by the time you want to upgrade the processor, you're probably going to need a new motherboard as well for all the surrounding stuff.
Marco:
So I think it would work like that if it ever happened.
Marco:
But again, there are the realities of making this happen that would probably never actually happen.
John:
Yeah, I think you covered most of the points.
John:
I mean, what Chandler, I would say to Chandler is that, yes, an SOC does make it easier because it has more stuff on it.
John:
But there's other trade-offs are still there.
John:
And some sockets live longer than others in the PC space.
John:
And you can make kind of a forward-looking socket.
John:
But the main reason Apple wouldn't do it, aside from them never wanting to upgrade stuff, is...
John:
As we've seen so far with all of the ARM-based Macs that they've put out, they are really emphasizing the size.
John:
And so that one thing that Marco mentioned, hey, you got to make it bigger and thicker and have more stuff for the socket.
John:
They don't want that.
John:
They made the iMac as thin as an iPhone.
John:
They don't want those extra millimeters, right?
John:
Never mind, they don't want you to upgrade it or whatever.
John:
Now that said, Apple itself, even though there is no official supported socket...
John:
will surely reuse motherboard designs and, you know, things that, like, there will be an M2-based Mac, maybe we'll talk about it next week, that the motherboard of which looks very much like the M1 motherboard, but the place where the M2 goes is a little bit different than the place where the M1 went, because they don't have to have a standard socket, but they do end up reusing a lot of stuff.
John:
So there, you kind of, Apple gets the advantages of having a system on a chip, in that all
John:
so much stuff the gpu the ram all the bus stuff is on the soc that they can reuse the same motherboard for a couple years all right it's not for you to swap out the soc on it's for them to do it so i think they will take advantage of that and speaking of sockets uh yeah i'm sitting next to a computer right now that has a socketed cpu uh the 2019 mac pro has a socketed xeon um and maybe we'll get to in a future show but uh the new zeons are out they use a different socket so i
John:
If I wanted to put the new Zeon on my Mac on that motherboard, I can't because we just crossed over a socket.
John:
I don't know if Zeons change sockets every single time or every two years or every three years.
Marco:
Pretty often.
Marco:
Well, because they don't get updated that often.
Marco:
And so when they do, usually it's time for a new socket.
John:
yeah so you know i feel like socketed things are kind of like upgradable ram and other sort of upgradable components have their place in the market for you know if you're building your own gaming pc you would expect to be able to swap out the ram maybe you'd expect to be able to upgrade the cpu one or two times before you get an entirely new motherboard or whatever but that's not the market that apple operates in and you know we know which direction everything goes at apple you know that
John:
The battery gets enclosed, the SSD gets soldered to the motherboard, the CPU stops being socketed, right?
John:
It depends on the machine, though.
John:
The Mac next to me, again, has everything in it can be torn out.
John:
The CPU, the RAM, the GPU, the SSDs even.
John:
It's all removable because that's the role of this machine, right?
John:
But Apple makes very few of these machines, and even that may be changing with the new Mac Pro, so stay tuned.
Casey:
Finally, John Larson writes, now that Apple's out of the time capsule business, what options are there for MacBook owners that can't duct tape an SSD to the back of their machine?
Casey:
Marco, is that SSD or is it SSD?
Casey:
It's SSD.
Casey:
Okay, good to know.
Marco:
We always pronounce them.
Marco:
It always happens.
Marco:
I see.
Marco:
I've been on the wrong side of this so many times growing up.
Marco:
I would say SATA or serial ATA.
Marco:
That became SATA.
Marco:
It always happened.
Marco:
People always shorten stuff on me.
John:
Well, so you should learn from that and just always do the opposite of what your instinct is and just say SOC.
John:
Nah, sock.
John:
I'm going with sock.
John:
Oh my gosh.
John:
iPod socks.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
Anyway, what can you do for a MacBook and you want to have some sort of time machine backup?
Casey:
I mean, I would just leave something on your desk or get a network attached storage like the Synology.
Casey:
Apparently this show is also sponsored by Synology.
Casey:
But I would say just leave something on your desk and plug it in, remove it when you leave, which is not fun.
Casey:
But I mean, I guess you could get one of Marco's 17 docking station things that you've tried.
Casey:
You could do that too.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
What do you guys have for this?
Marco:
Well, you can also, any other Mac on your network, if you happen to have a stationary Mac, those can offer time machine sharing to other things on the network.
Marco:
And yeah, Synology offers, because there's open source packages that can offer the same network service over the network, so lots of other hardware will also be able to do that over the network if you want to.
Marco:
And I've always had no problems with the Synology one when I've used it.
John:
And this person says if you can't duct tape an SSD to the back of your machine, right?
John:
But I think it's worth revisiting why you think you can't do that because drives get smaller and smaller.
John:
If you get a sort of USB-C slash Thunderbolt bus powered SSD that can hold everything in your little laptop.
John:
You don't have to tape it to the back of it, but it's so small and unobtrusive, and especially if you don't have any other kind of docking station, it's not that big of a deal just to plug it in when your laptop is on your desk, especially if it spends a lot of time at your desk.
John:
It won't really get in your way.
John:
They're so small now.
John:
No, they're not the size of a Logitech RF dongle, right?
John:
But although...
John:
We'll probably get there pretty soon because you can buy like a thumb drive that is actually shockingly small and holds a huge amount of data.
John:
So what I'm saying is don't dismiss the idea of attaching a drive.
John:
It's not like it used to be where you have to like get a spinning hard drive in a big case with an external power supply and plug it in.
John:
You can get something that looks like a stick of gum that can hold the contents of your, you know, 256 gig laptop or something.
John:
you can get something that looks like a book of matches that can hold your two terabyte thing again completely bus powered small reversible cable it's not actually as bad as you think and if you do want to tape it to the back of your thing you could probably do that and not have it be particularly chunky because you know things just keep getting smaller so don't discount the idea of actually having local storage uh for your laptop it is viable but yeah if you don't want to do that network attached storage or another mac
Marco:
also don't discount the idea of using the sd card slot in your old laptop or hopefully soon to be future laptop sd card uh like you can get i just looked you can get a one terabyte micro sd card for 200 bucks right now like that's these things are big and cheap and i worry about the durability of an sd card for the type of traffic that time machine puts out but you know
Marco:
That's fair, yeah.
Marco:
They're not made to do a whole ton of writes, but still, that's a really good solution.
Marco:
If you want something on a laptop that is seamless and you have an SD card slot, that's a great use for the SD card slot.
Marco:
In fact, there have been companies over time, I don't know what's still on the market today, but there have been companies over time that back for the 2012 through 2015 MacBook Pro line, you could get a little...
Marco:
flush mount that would go into the sd card slot would hold a micro sd card kind of i think sideways or something and it like nothing would stick out from from the slot it was amazing yeah like that and that's that's this is yet another reason why i really hope they bring these back because there's so many cool uses for the sd card slot even if you don't have like a camera that uses it it's really nice to just have that really quick removable storage that's not taking up a port and having a cable sticking out of it constantly
Marco:
That being said, TIFF's laptop has exactly that arrangement.
Marco:
TIFF's laptop has a cable sticking out of it constantly with a drive duct tape to the back of it.
Marco:
And it's kind of annoying that this cable is always there and you lose a port.
Marco:
But otherwise, it's fine.
Marco:
It works.
Marco:
You know, it's it's very ugly, but it does work just fine.
Marco:
And so that option is not that bad, really.
Marco:
But certainly if you can get something that's like, you know, in the machine or over the network, that's obviously better.
John:
i remember one of my blog posts a while back i made the argument this was back in the spinning hard drive days that apple should sell machines with uh with double storage in them essentially like i think i said raid one but like basically like however big a mac you get say oh i got a macbook air with a 512 gig drive that it should actually come with two completely separate internal 512 gig drives and one of them would be your main drive and the other one would be your sort of backup
John:
time machine drive obviously that would cost money people wouldn't want to pay extra for it like there's tons of good reasons why they didn't do it but again with my whole argument of like is there room in the lineup for one machine that's like this like the idea that this would it made much more sense back before everything was in the cloud but imagine a world where we didn't have cheap cloud storage and everything
John:
It was like literally the only way you're ever going to get people to back up is to secretly give them twice the storage and just do automatic time machine to the other thing.
John:
So when they come into the Apple store and say, my thing doesn't boot, it looks like I lost all my data.
John:
You can go, surprise, you didn't.
John:
It's all over here in time machine because we've been backing it up every hour unbeknownst to you.
John:
Nowadays, the solution is to instead not really to do the Casey thing and have your Macs be ephemeral and have most of the stuff in the network or the Chromebook thing or whatever.
John:
So time has moved on from that solution, but.
John:
I was reminded of it when these people were talking about duct taping drives to the back of their laptop because it's like, you know, there is actually room inside that laptop for one more set of chips, especially on a big 16-inch one.
John:
You could have doubled the storage internally, but, of course, if you gave people that, they'd be like, oh, I don't want to use it for backup.
John:
I want to use it for stuff.
John:
And now you're just back to the same situation.
John:
Human nature.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
To go back to the flush mount SD card, like hard drive, my very first thing that I backed on Kickstarter was the nifty mini drive, which was exactly that.
Casey:
And it was a flush mount thing.
Casey:
So you could add effectively another drive to your MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And I loved that thing.
Casey:
It was great.
Marco:
Yeah, if the SD card does come back, as it's rumored to, that's something I actually plan to do, just to have that there as a backup or extra capacity.
Marco:
I did it in the past with the 2015 model.
Marco:
It's a very common thing for people to do that, and it's a really cool thing to have.
Casey:
I wonder if I still have this because I haven't used it in probably a decade.
Casey:
I probably tossed it, but I loved it when I had it.
Marco:
In an even older laptop, back when you could easily get to the drives inside of it, I got one of those brackets where you could replace the optical drive with a second hard drive.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
You ever do that?
Casey:
I knew people who did, but I did not.
Marco:
That was awesome.
Marco:
I had two hard drives on my laptop.
Marco:
Not great for noise.
Marco:
Anyway, thank you to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Mac Weldon, Remote, and Memberful.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
If you'd like to join them, go to atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech podcast so long.
Casey:
So in the after show notes, there's a very interesting line item, which honestly we probably should have talked about last week, but we just ran out of time given that we were talking about Basecamp.
Casey:
And the line item reads, Marco tried to use Ruby.
Casey:
Now, I should say up front that I've never really used Ruby.
Casey:
Like, the only real exposure I have to Ruby is CocoaPods, and I hated it.
Casey:
So, what are you up to, buddy?
Marco:
this is not what you think it is okay it is the language but it's not it's not anything exciting okay so i for for my town i i wanted to set up like a little like you know three page static website
Marco:
I thought this would be a good excuse to try out GitHub Pages.
Marco:
I knew there was some way to host static websites on GitHub.
Marco:
I didn't know anything else about it, but I knew that sounds like something that would make things easier.
Marco:
I don't want to have to keep this running on one of my servers for this stupid static page thing.
Marco:
Let me see what this GitHub Pages thing is about.
John:
By the way, quick aside, did you see the story about being able to use SQLite databases on GitHub Pages?
John:
What?
John:
So GitHub Pages is static hosting, right?
John:
So it's like, how can I, SQLite, for people who don't know, makes a database as a little file, right?
John:
So what they do is they made a library that does HTTP range requests into the SQLite file on GitHub Pages.
John:
to essentially do client-side SQL querying of your SQLite database.
John:
This is my understanding.
John:
Your SQLite database on the static web hosting.
John:
So if you want to have a database, all I'm saying is you want the world's most inefficient way to query SQLite, you can do it with HTTP range requests with the library.
John:
Anyway, continue.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Fortunately, I don't need that.
Marco:
But I'm sure nothing can go wrong with that.
Marco:
But anyway, what this ends up being based on is Jekyll, which is a static site generator that I've never used.
Marco:
And Jekyll is written in Ruby.
Marco:
Now, GitHub being a site designed around one of the least user-friendly programmer tools that's ever been made, I guess it's no surprise that the documentation for how to actually use Jekyll and their static site generation is pretty sparse.
Marco:
and pretty pretty incomplete and so i just wanted to make a very simple site now the templates they give you to start out with like by default put a whole bunch of stuff in like by default like in the sidebar and everything that's all about like the github project that you are hosting which
Marco:
which is not anything i wanted to be on here like i just wanted you know just a a site with basically no template like let me just like make my own like basic navigation bar and like a list of pages on the side or something and that would be it um that was very hard to do and so one thing i realized is like oh well it says like let's start this becomes a lot easier if you can run jekyll locally on your own machine and that way you can like
Marco:
build it yourself without having to commit stuff to GitHub before you can even try to see changes.
Marco:
You can at least run it on your local machine and play with templates and everything there.
Marco:
So I thought, okay, great.
John:
Quick question here, Marco.
John:
Why did you just not make three webpages?
John:
That's a good question.
John:
I mean, I know the old ways seem barbaric to you, but back in the day, the way we would do this is by literally writing each page by hand.
John:
We didn't even have server-side includes.
John:
It's like, oh, but you mean you would write the navigation each page and then on one page you'd have one item highlight?
John:
It's like, yeah, we would just write it all from top to bottom in a text document because...
Marco:
it was the old anyway well like that's what i that's what i was trying to avoid i was trying to avoid like first of all having having to you know do either either write raw xgmail or make my own markdown build script and i was trying to avoid having to like you know if i wanted to edit the template or the navigation sidebar or something having to edit five pages
John:
but but it's yeah it's i know i know what you're thinking like as your programmer there's a good xkcd about this about creating a generic tool for passing salt right it's like we all think this way but if it really is going to be just three pages for even if it's five you would have saved a lot of time anyway continue i would have saved so much time because this it ended up taking me like five hours
John:
because you could have you could have written those pages a hundred times over i know you know copy and paste works too so you don't actually have to retype the nav so it's so first i'm like all right let me try to set up jekyll on my mac
Marco:
this was a bad idea title so first thing you run into is like all right you have to get ruby to like the right version and then it's like okay well first you can't you can't just over you have to install this bundler thing now keep my i've never worked with ruby you know well i i worked with it for two seconds back in 2005 but like otherwise not since then so like i i've never done any of this stuff i so i don't know any of these tools so i'm starting from nothing
Marco:
So first, you've got to install Bundler or something.
Marco:
And then Bundler is like a package manager.
Marco:
Then you have to install Gem.
Marco:
And then Gem is the package manager installed by Bundler or for Bundler or with Bundler.
Marco:
Gem has to then install the Gem file from Jekyll that will make the Jekyll build the right Gem.
Marco:
But, oh, it's requiring this GitHub Gem, which I don't have here.
Marco:
I have to use Bundler to install the Gem file to install that Gem.
Marco:
And it's like...
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
And getting through all of that to even try to get it to run Jekyll without errors on my local Mac just to start a new empty site.
Marco:
I spent hours on this in package management hell.
Marco:
Then I thought, oh, it says you should use Homebrew instead.
Marco:
Okay, I tried that.
Marco:
But then Homebrew starts conflicting with all the other crap that's all over my system and all over Homebrew.
Marco:
And then I eventually, a couple hours later, got the Homebrew version to run, at which point Jekyll gave me a bunch of new errors that were still errors and just different.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
It was the most obtuse experience I've had in a long time with software.
Casey:
The reason, Marco, is because apparently you just need to use R-B-E-N-V and then it magically just works.
Casey:
Or so says every Ruby person I've ever spoken to, even though I have tried using it in the past.
Casey:
And granted, I'm a dunce when it comes to Ruby specifically, but it didn't help me at all.
Casey:
And all the Ruby people said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
It fixes everything.
Casey:
It's the best.
Casey:
It's a panacea, and it's a silver bullet, and it's so great.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I hated, oh, I hated using Ruby so much for CocoaPods.
John:
Somebody already came over in the chat room and came in with the line that I was going to say, you don't want RBN, but you want RVM.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Because, of course, there are two competing things that do that job.
John:
Of course.
Marco:
In Ruby.
John:
And really, Marco should have just learned Docker back when we told him to, because he probably could have downloaded Docker container, which Jekyll already set up in it.
John:
But apparently, he hasn't crossed that bridge yet.
Marco:
You're right about that.
Marco:
It took me, and eventually, I got it to work.
Marco:
And then I had to figure out how to use Jekyll, which, again, the documentation is pretty sparse.
Marco:
And it's funny, GitHub actually has, in their Pages documentation, they link to a few example repositories of using GitHub Pages to make a real website.
Marco:
And they're all so incredibly complicated and inconsistent and poorly documented.
Marco:
And this entire system was so...
Marco:
comically overwrought and just filled with just massive time things and all i was trying to do was save myself the trouble of like running a basic you know document directory on one of my servers like serving a virtual host serving one more virtual host and you know other stuff you know they take care of the uh ssl for you and everything so like there's other other like little niceties of it but
Marco:
Oh my God.
Marco:
And the good thing is I finally did figure out, okay, here is a very basic template.
Marco:
Here's a very basic include.
Marco:
Here's how I can make these things work.
Marco:
It's not pretty.
Marco:
It's not fancy, but it does finally work.
Marco:
And I cannot believe how long it took me to get there.
Marco:
Now, I did finally reach my goal.
Marco:
I have this stupid one-page or two-page information site running.
Marco:
I can add to it easily in the future if I ever need to, which I probably won't.
Marco:
But if I ever need to, I can.
John:
If you wait too long, the environment that you use to build these two pages will no longer work.
John:
And you'll have to do another two hours of work to get that extra page in.
Marco:
Oh, well, but the thing is, I, sorry, to clarify, I never got it running locally.
Marco:
I just committed to get, and I just, you know, I did like, you know, server-side development here, just kept committing to GitHub and, you know, reading the error messages and committing again and figuring it out.
Marco:
I literally never got it to run locally.
John:
That's very efficient.
John:
Oh, my word.
John:
The other one, by the way, is chruby.
John:
So you've got RBM, RMV, and chruby.
John:
Oh, my God, I hate this so much.
Casey:
Oh, I hate this.
John:
Even Perl's got one of these, although I don't use it.
Marco:
yeah i'm no thank you i i do not foresee myself using jekyll in the future but the good thing is if i ever need to host like you know another like one or two page website i know how to do that on github pages at least like now i have a template i can show you how to do a new html document in bb edit that might save you some time it gives you a little template you just type your html right there and you save it
John:
we used to make entire websites like this my first big website did not even have server side includes like there was no templating engine there was no building the site there was no server side includes we would literally type the html for every page on every page and we wanted to change the navigation yes you changed it on every page to do that you could do bb edits multi-file search and replace so it wasn't that bad uh but yeah the web the original web was very often built that way
John:
that's right no css font tags and we liked it because it was all we had tables for layout that was a fun time yeah we're lucky to have tables for that we're excited when you can get an image to appear to the left or the right or in the middle center tag i think i've talked about this on multiple podcasts but one of my most profound moments like so you know when like you're learning something new
John:
especially during your formative years, you very quickly come to accept whatever it is that you're looking at as just the way things are, right?
John:
And so I discovered the web in 1993 or whenever it was, and you could have text in H1, H2, and ULs, and you could have images, right?
John:
And images would just display in line with everything else or, you know, like against the left border or whatever.
Yeah.
John:
And the very first time I saw Netscape or not Netscape, Mosaic, it must have been, whatever the first browser to this was, probably Mosaic on X11.
John:
And the demo, the wow, like the tech demo, wow, blow your mind page was a page that had five images arranged like the five dots on the five side of a die, you know?
John:
like one two and then one in the middle then one two and i was like you can't do that you can't have two images next to each other and a centered image what is this witchcraft and it blew my mind because in the in the four weeks that i had seen you know the original version of ncsa mosaic or whatever where you couldn't do that and then saw whatever this version was whether it was netscape or mosaic 1.1 where you could do it it's like they've broken the rules of the web
John:
images are next to each other what's next for the web it was mind-blowing and a few things have impressed me as much as that did and that was and that was because like you know i had so accepted the the parameters and limitations of the web and in like the the month that i'd been using it that breaking those was like the whole world just cracked open anything is possible now images are next to each other