The Local Mooching Situation
Casey:
This most recent member special that, hey, guess what?
Casey:
Just dropped today.
Casey:
I don't know if we would make it, y'all.
Casey:
It was touch and go for a minute there.
Casey:
We got angry.
Casey:
We had things to say.
Casey:
You guys were, well, mostly John, was wrong about a lot on this member special.
Casey:
And so we had a lot of consternation and a lot of...
Casey:
A lot of difficult times, but we made it.
Casey:
We made it because like a marriage, the three of us are strong.
Casey:
Apparently, it's a polyamorous marriage, but here we are.
Casey:
We are strong.
Casey:
We are stronger together, and we've made it.
Casey:
And John, I love you just as much as I did a week ago and a month ago, even though you drive me absolutely insane.
Marco:
This member special that Casey's referring to is this.
Marco:
So this is one of those wonderful specials that John tells Casey and I, don't prepare.
Marco:
Just show up.
Marco:
I have something for us.
Casey:
Just to jump in very, very quickly.
Casey:
You said wonderful, and I don't think you meant it this way, but it sounded sarcastic.
Casey:
But just to be clear, not sarcastic.
Casey:
It genuinely is wonderful for Marco and myself.
John:
You just said that because you don't want to do work.
John:
But the real thing that's wonderful about it is that it allows you to, I'm trying to stop you from doing what you did before, which is like Casey's like, oh, I made my own tear list myself before we recorded.
John:
No.
John:
I want to be spontaneous.
John:
I want to get your legit reactions in the moment.
John:
And honestly, since it doesn't require any sort of pre-work or studying, I think that makes it worse.
John:
I'm trying to keep the spontaneity.
John:
I'm trying to keep the spark alive, speaking of marriage.
Casey:
In this 10-plus-year marriage.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
No, but it was a lot of fun.
Casey:
So what did we talk about, John?
Casey:
Since it was your idea, why don't you introduce the member special?
John:
Yeah, this is another one of our tier list things.
John:
We've done a couple of them already.
John:
We didn't re-explain it again, and we won't.
John:
Just look up what a tier list is.
John:
We did connectors, computer-ish connectors.
John:
And I thought it would be fun because we talk about connectors a lot on the show.
John:
We obviously have opinions on them.
John:
We have personal experience with them.
John:
But as was alluded to before, it was surprisingly contentious in a way that I won't spoil.
John:
You probably won't expect, because if you've heard our other tier lists or whatever, this one did not go like the others.
John:
It's not like we just got mad at each other about stuff, because for the most part, if you've heard us on the show, we agree about connectors a lot.
John:
When we talk about connectors, there's not much controversy, but
John:
Tier listing is a different task than just talking about connectors.
John:
And I think by the end of the episode, we uncovered or highlighted a universal truth about connectors.
John:
So I think we did important work in this episode.
John:
Please check it out, ATP Tier List Connectors.
Marco:
Yeah, and in case you're having trouble picturing this, what we mean by connectors is USB, firewire, HDMI, that kind of thing.
Marco:
The actual plug, those standards or those physical plugs and sockets, that's what we're talking about.
Marco:
And it's really quite something to debate.
Marco:
How would you grade USB-B versus mini-HDMI?
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
It was a lot of fun, even though, as it turns out, the three of us, I know, brace yourselves, listeners, the three of us tend to have opinions about things, and they tend to be relatively strong.
Casey:
And occasionally those opinions clash, and that's some of that.
Casey:
I'm probably overselling the drama here, but some of that happened on this episode.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, we mostly agreed and mostly delved into the connectors.
John:
We've talked about them before on the show.
John:
If you're a long-time listener, you've heard us talk about connectors, and you'll hear some more of that.
John:
But, you know, there's more to it.
John:
And also, as usual, we have a video version of this.
John:
It's on YouTube.
John:
The link to it is in the show notes for the special.
John:
So if you are a member and you open the special in your podcast player or on the web, you will see the show notes, a link to the video.
John:
We don't have any way to protect these links.
John:
Just don't share the link with people who aren't members, you know.
John:
Or do, and maybe they'll encourage them to become members.
John:
Anyway, the video is just me dragging things onto the tier list.
John:
It's not action-packed.
John:
The only good thing about the video is you could hear when I accidentally inhale some water and then have to talk for a while to get it out of my system.
John:
So think of it as kind of the bootleg version of the episode.
Marco:
Also, you can hear Casey swear within the first, like, three seconds of it.
John:
Yeah, it's bootleggy style.
John:
Anyway, it's there if you want it.
John:
And speaking of YouTube, we have another ATP YouTube-related announcement.
John:
For a while, people have asked us, can you put episodes of ATP on YouTube?
John:
And we looked at it a few times, and it seemed like kind of a pain for us to do.
John:
What we really wanted was just to be able to tell YouTube, hey, YouTube, we're a podcast.
John:
Here's our RSS feed.
John:
pull it and put the videos on the web for it.
John:
And now finally, YouTube has implemented that.
John:
So we are now currently cautiously attempting to experiment with this.
John:
We have pointed YouTube at our RSS feed.
John:
YouTube is in the process of grabbing all of our old shows and processing them into little videos.
John:
There's nothing in the video.
John:
It's just the logo of the show, right?
John:
It's just audio.
John:
But some people have told us that they essentially use YouTube like during their workday as an audio player, just in another tab or whatever.
John:
So if you wanted to do that for ATP, now you can, subject to however long it takes YouTube to pull all our videos.
John:
They did have some problem processing our show notes, and I've had to delve into the Google's YouTube data API to try to fix the show notes that they couldn't quite handle.
John:
We already got a...
John:
copyright complaint because apparently we included a snippet of uh what jimmy hendrix song in like episode 80 or something or whatever it was we got dinged for uh linking to a porn site because some link that we had in the show notes of a show like nine years ago uh that link doesn't work anymore and is now some porn spam page so we're working through issues but if you always wanted to listen to atp
Casey:
audio only on youtube uh you should be able to do so we will put a link to that in the show notes but it's just youtube.com slash at atpfm slash podcasts indeed and just to reiterate john has already said this twice but just reiterate there is no video component it is literally a static image of our logo this is not like what upgrade is doing where you can watch them and do little snippets or whatever
Casey:
We are still, as of right now, not recording any video for any of our shows.
Casey:
This is just the audio that happens to be on YouTube, just to be absolutely clear.
Casey:
No video, you're welcome.
Casey:
Yeah, you don't want to see the three of us.
Casey:
All right, so yeah, please check out the member special.
Casey:
If you're not a member, ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
You get access not only to this member special, but all the member specials before it.
Casey:
We would really love you to try it out.
Casey:
And just to reiterate, and so you can remember, you can also do gift memberships now if somebody has a birthday coming up or you just want to say, hey, thanks for being awesome.
Casey:
Thanks for being you.
Casey:
Then you can go to, what is it, johnhp.fm slash gift?
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
You got it.
Casey:
And then you can gift someone.
Casey:
uh, membership, which is thanks to a striking amount of work and a stunning amount of work from one Mr. John Syracuse.
Casey:
So thank you again, John.
Casey:
And yeah, so, uh, the member special is a lot of fun and I, we don't currently have a plan for the next one.
Casey:
Other than that, we'll do another one in about a month.
Casey:
So we'll see what happens.
Casey:
But, uh, I have ideas for some non dorky things to do since I feel like we haven't done a non dorky one in a while.
Casey:
So I don't think it's possible for us.
Casey:
Touche.
Casey:
Touche.
John:
Let's make it different people to do it.
Casey:
Yeah, fair enough.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow up.
Casey:
First of all, we got a lot of genuinely useful feedback about Marco's EPS issues.
Casey:
So Marco, can you just give me a brief recap of what the issue was, if you don't mind, please?
Marco:
Yeah, so I talked briefly about that I have solar panels and Tesla Powerwall battery backups.
Marco:
For my house, because I talked I was talking about a power outage and how apparently and the issue I have is that my UPS that powered my that also back to my networking gear, which was powered by the power wall, like behind it, like in its outlet, when the power wall had engaged to use backup power.
Marco:
the UPS behaved as though it had no power from the wall and started running off its own battery, beeping, and then eventually shutting down.
Marco:
And so I was asking people, what is it about running a Powerwall setup in offline mode that freaks out a UPS?
Marco:
And we got a lot of great answers about it.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So Patrick Warren writes,
Casey:
Patrick Niemeyer writes, under certain circumstances, the power wall can signal to the solar inverter to stop production by shifting the line frequency to 65 hertz.
Casey:
This is an old-school protocol that allows the battery system to say, stop, I'm full, stop generating, which may be necessary if you are off-grid and you have solar that can't be exported to the grid.
Marco:
Which was, by the way, exactly the situation.
Marco:
It was the middle of the day.
Marco:
There was tons of solar being generated.
Marco:
I was not drawing much off the Powerball, so they were full.
Marco:
And so the solar power had nowhere to go.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So most appliances, writes Patrick, and electronics don't care about the small line frequency shift, but some UPSs are sensitive enough to detect it as an abnormal condition and go offline.
Casey:
Jeff Strobel also writes, you'll note that long outages will make certain plugged in clocks run fast enough that they actually need resetting, which is hilarious.
John:
Because they're running off the battery power and the battery power is 65 hertz.
John:
And if you have an old school analog style digital clock, it's running at 65 hertz when expected to run at 60.
John:
And now it's running a little fast.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So now going back to Patrick Niemeyer, apparently the exact amount of frequency shift is something that you can configure in the Powerwall software, and Tesla has the ability to change it if it's causing a problem.
Casey:
Marco should contact his installer or Tesla about this.
Casey:
Then Adam Selby writes, Tesla gets this call to change power frequency often from us nerds and can adjust it as needed.
Casey:
You can test this with the off-grid switch once they make this change.
Casey:
Coming back again to Jeff Strobel, I've heard enough horror stories about dealing with Tesla that I decided not to go this route.
Casey:
Imagine that.
Casey:
The other solution is to get a UPS that's okay with 65 hertz.
Casey:
This is what I did.
Casey:
For the last couple of years, I've been using Eaton UPSs and can attest that they work great at solving this.
Casey:
This is one that I use.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
But Jeff adds, your clocks will still run fast, though.
Marco:
Yeah, and by the way, lots of people wrote in to not only tell us about, you know, this thing about how Powerwalls use, you know, they generate 65 hertz power for these various reasons, but also many people wrote in specifically to say that this brand Eaton UPSs are good with that power.
Marco:
And if you look in the Amazon reviews for the Eaton UPSs, many of them mention it's compatible with Powerwalls.
Marco:
So I'd never heard of this brand before, but it seems to be pretty well regarded for this purpose.
Casey:
Then finally on this topic, Joseph Quigley writes, regarding UPSs that are not using outlet power when on Powerwall backup, many UPSs are sensitive to dirty power that doesn't match the perfect sine wave that you should be getting from the grid.
Casey:
My APC and induction stove will not tolerate the power from my whole house generator, but my cyber power UPSs work just fine.
Casey:
So it could be a sine wave issue as well.
John:
Yeah, I can't tell if that one's just a 65 hertz thing all over again or if it actually is an issue with sine wave thing, but I just want to throw it in there because it is the one alternate theory that was not, hey, it's not 60 hertz anymore.
John:
That is by far the prevailing explanation.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Moving on, I'd like to formally establish and confirm that John was indeed wrong in the John V. Marco and Casey debate of last episode.
Casey:
Based on ANIC data and no other useful information, well, actually one piece of useful information,
Casey:
It sounds like it's somewhere between 6040 or 7030 team armless, which would be Marco and me, that the iPhone launch was indeed a big deal, even for non-nerds.
John:
I wanted to hear you introduce this thing because I wanted to hear what you think the issue was.
John:
By the way, it was 6040, not 7030.
John:
You actually kept track?
John:
Yeah, because I was just doing this off the cuff.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, here's the thing.
John:
Casey, I wasn't keeping track.
John:
I wasn't keeping track.
John:
But then Casey wrote 6040 in the show notes very early on, like the day after the episode.
Casey:
That's correct.
John:
And I was like, hmm, 6040.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
Is he just guesstimating that?
John:
But then he changed it to 7030.
John:
I'm like, wait a second.
Yeah.
John:
When did 70-30 happen?
John:
So then I went back and I counted.
John:
60-40 I can tolerate.
John:
70-30, no way.
John:
Yeah, well, I mean, it doesn't actually matter for the reasons I'll get into in a second.
John:
But not only was it 60-40, it's exactly 60-40 as of like two minutes before we recorded.
Casey:
That's incredible.
John:
It is literally exactly 60-40.
John:
No decimal points.
Casey:
John's description is 100% accurate.
Casey:
I did put in 60-40 originally, and then over time I was like, no, this feels closer to 70-30.
John:
You were mad with power, but you shouldn't have been.
Casey:
And I'll explain why.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I genuinely will give you a chance, John.
Casey:
I really mean that.
Casey:
But for what it's worth, one of my favorite pieces of feedback was Chris on Mastodon, who wrote, as much as it pains me to say this, this entire thread largely debunks John's comparison to iPhone at launch.
Casey:
I loved that so many of our pieces of feedback from John's Flying Monkeys, I mean, from our loyal listeners, was, you know what?
Casey:
I
Casey:
I cannot believe it, but John actually was indeed wrong this once.
Casey:
It does happen.
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
Another great piece of feedback.
Casey:
I don't know if you two noticed this, but we got the following pieces of feedback.
Casey:
This was two days ago via email.
Casey:
We got a piece of feedback from George S. This is the entirety of the feedback.
Casey:
The subject, John's correct about the iPhone.
Casey:
I am not providing any other justification because he did a good job.
Casey:
That was 11.27 p.m.
Casey:
my time on the 15th of January.
Casey:
11.44 p.m.
Casey:
my time, same day.
Casey:
MJF writes, hello, John was wrong about the iPhone launch in episode 569.
Casey:
Cheers, MJ.
Casey:
These two pieces of email, both of which were one line long, sat directly adjacent to each other in my inbox.
Casey:
This was so...
John:
Yeah, there was a lot of, and this is what I was getting at with, because you knew there was going to be, I knew there was going to be extreme opinions about this.
John:
And there were people, the farthest extremes you could possibly imagine.
John:
But again, I will say that none of this actually matters because of all, I look at all the feedback, right?
John:
I don't think, I'm pretty sure I did not see a single piece of feedback that claimed to disagree with me that refuted a position that I actually held.
John:
They all were complaining about things that I do not have and have not ever believed.
John:
And Casey himself, when he introduced this topic, was introduced in a way that does not match my idea of what it is that we were talking about.
Casey:
And I think that is genuinely all kidding and snotty.
John:
And on both sides.
John:
because i saw i saw emails that were in support of me and gave reasons that had nothing to do with what i was saying and vice versa right so then obviously i listened to every episode right so i went back and listened to the segment and that was instructive because this is one of the rare cases when i go back and listen to a segment with myself and i'm waiting for myself to say something and then i never say it so that is a bad sign right so uh that you know like when i listen back to the segment i'm like okay
John:
I can understand how someone who listens to the show could come away with the mistaken impression of the point I was trying to make.
John:
That's on me.
John:
I did a bad job communicating, and I heard it in myself, which, again, is rare.
John:
That's why I listen to the episodes.
John:
I heard it in myself.
John:
I'm like, wait a second.
John:
Did something get cut out here?
John:
I was like, no, I just didn't say the thing that was in my head or whatever.
John:
So that's on me.
John:
What's on you two is listening to what I had to say and then taking the least charitable possible interpretation.
John:
And assuming that I have no brain in my head and running with that assumption.
John:
And the listeners I excuse because, like, you don't know how long they've been listening, but you've been on every single episode with me.
John:
Why would you think suddenly I would wake up one day and have the opposite opinion of something we've talked about for literally 10 years?
John:
So that's on YouTube.
John:
But collectively, I think we did a bad job talking about this issue.
Casey:
Truth be told, as much as I'd love to give you more stick about this, and I kind of am, I think the problem was each of the three of us, and even though Marco were closer aligned, Marco and I were closer aligned than you were with either of us, I think each of the three of us was having a slightly different conversation all at the same time.
John:
That is true, but one of the anti-patterns that ended up with us talking about each other was very often I heard myself replying to something you two had said three sentences ago, but you thought I was replying to the very last thing that you said.
John:
Which is a reasonable thing to assume.
John:
But again, it should have been modified by you saying, but wait a second, that would be idiotic.
John:
But instead you're like, oh my God, John's saying something idiotic.
John:
Anyway, to clarify for people who didn't hear the last episode.
John:
I'm going to say a bunch of things that I think we can all agree with.
John:
And if you hear me saying this and you're like, but that's not what you said last episode.
John:
I was trying and failing, but I was trying, right?
John:
And I did...
John:
And I did have a point, which I want to reattempt to make now.
John:
I did actually have a point.
John:
It's not a big point.
John:
It was just a tangential aside that occurred to me in the moment staring at the show notes.
John:
And then you guys derailed it with me.
John:
What are you saying?
John:
Anyway, so here, I'll go through the line items.
John:
And this, I believe, will pretty much knock out every single one that's saying John is wrong.
John:
Right.
John:
Let's start.
John:
OK, people were excited about the iPhone launch.
John:
Some of those people were people who are not Apple fans.
John:
In other words, it wasn't just Apple fans that were excited about the iPhone launch.
John:
Lots of people were, okay?
John:
The iPhone launch had more excitement than the Vision Pro launch.
John:
These are all just statements that I feel like I would never need to say in the show, but apparently I need to, okay?
John:
That's another thing I think we can all agree on, right?
John:
Being available on only one carrier was a deterrent to purchasing the original iPhone.
John:
The original iPhone, its price, its high price, was a deterrent to purchasing it.
John:
These are all statements that people will write in and say, I disagree with John.
John:
I think only being on Singular was a deterrent.
John:
Thanks.
John:
Great.
John:
Everyone agrees with that.
John:
If you came away thinking that I didn't, I apologize.
John:
So why did I say all those things?
John:
What was my point?
John:
The point that I was trying to get at was that...
John:
The iPhone at launch and before it launched had not yet convinced the world that it was the iPhone.
John:
Right.
John:
There were things about it that people who had never used a phone like this, let alone this particular phone, were still skeptical of.
John:
right and that is the parallel that i saw with the vision pro and other people will say but cell phones are around for ages and headsets are much newer yes that's i agree with all of that but that was the point i was getting i remember it was about the ads you know the the parallelism of the ads right because i thought it was interesting and by the way this is you know something a lot of people brought up and on support of my thing like one of the things people were skeptical about by the way was uh an on-screen software keyboard right because if you had never used one of those you're like well it could be cool oh
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
At the time, that was a major like, you know, everyone was worried about that.
Marco:
Is it really going to work?
Marco:
Because keep in mind, like what the iPhone launched into was a world obsessed with BlackBerrys.
Marco:
And so everyone was like, well, the iPhone was really cool, but I don't know how that keyboard is going to work out.
John:
Yeah, there's a lot of skepticism about that.
John:
And on the hype front, I'm very disappointed that literally only a single person brought up this term.
John:
I thought I was going to have this thrown into my face a million years after a million times after I heard, you know, what people thought we were saying in the past episode or thought I was saying.
John:
uh and maybe you guys weren't paying as much attention to the launch the hype around the iphone was insane not just within apple people but within mainstream media so much so that the uh nickname do you remember the nickname for the iphone you probably saw it on that one person who gave them the jesus phone the jesus phone that's right can you get any more hype the jesus phone
John:
Now, that was used teasingly, too, a little bit like, oh, it's the Jesus phone.
John:
Everyone's going to love it or whatever.
John:
But there's a huge amount of hype about that.
John:
And so you may be asking yourself, OK, but if that's true, how come when Marco and Casey said, well, what about it being singular?
John:
What about the high price?
John:
You said no.
John:
What I was saying no to was that those were not the only things stopping people from getting the iPhone.
John:
Because the point I was trying to make is that the iPhone was released into a world that was still skeptical about this idea of
John:
Hell, the world was skeptical about the idea of smartphones in general because there were so many dumb phones.
John:
And the people who did love smartphones had a hardware keyboard on their BlackBerrys.
John:
So that was the thing that, you know, this product had not yet convinced the world that it was a thing.
John:
And two other points are, if you're young and don't remember the iPhone launch, you may assume that it launched and it was a gigantic hit out of the gate and it was gangbusters and everybody loved it and everyone was immediately convinced that all cell phones would be like this.
John:
that's not what happened.
John:
Uh, if you weren't there for it, you might've thought that would happen because of how obvious it is to you that this is what cell phones should look like.
John:
But when it happened, the world was not convinced and they weren't convinced right away.
John:
And it actually took their competitors a long time to copy them or not a long time, but a little bit of time to copy them.
John:
Right.
John:
And even then there was, it was a slower buildup than you would have thought.
Casey:
Well,
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I mostly agree with everything you've said until right now.
John:
Slower than like, you know, and the next day everyone agreed the iPhone was amazing.
Casey:
Yes.
John:
But you can debate about the time.
John:
But for people who weren't there, they may think, oh, as soon as the iPhone came out, everyone realized every cell phone should be like this.
John:
It's like, OK, maybe they did.
John:
But they had to they had to make Android like, you know, well, just snap their fingers.
Casey:
Still, though, I think the spirit of your point is now fair, or perhaps always has been.
Casey:
I just didn't understand it.
Casey:
But I think the spirit of your point is now fair.
Casey:
But the way I remember it, and I will concede that I have a truly terrible memory, but the way I remember it is that at first, everyone, to your point, was like, eh, singular, eh, expensive, eh, software keyboard.
Casey:
But the moment you put your hands on some friends or some acquaintances or some family member's iPhone...
Casey:
Oh, that's it.
Casey:
That's what I want.
Casey:
I have to have it.
John:
But that doesn't make the market like turn around and say, OK, now I'm going to go buy that phone because all the you know, it took a long time for there to be phones out there that were like that.
John:
And I think the app store was a big thing.
John:
And you could get on the phone and think it's amazing.
John:
But you're like, well, what can I do with this?
John:
Um, at the time scales are a question.
John:
And even for people who were there during it, like all of us, um, it can, it, your fuzzy memory could be like, oh, the iPhone, the biggest consumer product, uh, you know, consumer electronics product ever created.
John:
There was still like a ramp, you know, there was still, it took off slower than you might remember.
John:
Um, and this is entirely coincidental because I'm sure that, you know, and speaking of like, you know, how long did it take, take it going?
John:
What was the launch like?
John:
But I'm sure that Gruber had not heard our podcast when he recorded this podcast.
John:
Um,
John:
But coincidentally, like at the same time we were either recording or releasing that episode, Gruber was on a podcast making a similar point about how when an innovation comes along, people don't always recognize it immediately and it takes a while to get going.
John:
And his quote, again, this is off the cuff, just like mine was.
John:
And you could argue about the timescales and I would argue about the timescales as well.
John:
But he said the iPhones was like, quote, a curiosity for the first four or five years after launch.
John:
that's the kind of you know that i don't know about that yeah i don't know about that but that's off the cup of i think what gruber and i are getting to because i think gruber and i were professionally paying more attention to apple maybe in 2007 than you two were uh when gruber what gruber and i were getting at was that it's easy in hindsight to think that the iphone must have been a smash hit from day one and everyone was knew it was perfect right people as a lot of people wrote and said they didn't even see an iphone until the 3g
John:
Like they had never even seen one or touched one until the 3G.
John:
So no matter how great an idea is, he was making the point about the Mac too, like the Mac has a GUI, but how long after the Mac and the GUI came out were people like, I don't know about this GUI thing, right?
John:
Until essentially Windows 95 convinced the whole world.
John:
It's like, oh, I guess the GUI is fine, right?
John:
Not that it was 10 years to be the iPhone.
John:
But anyway, that was the point I was trying to make.
John:
And the reason it's relevant to the ads is here you have two products being released into a world that is skeptical of them.
John:
again not to the same degree because everyone was convinced by cell phones i think it's quite a different degree here right right for sure for sure right but also it's not like vision pro was the first vr headset but i think vr headsets in general are not been convinced the world but anyway um they're both both products that are being released in to a consumer base that has some skepticism about not just this particular product but the whole concept in some regard and
John:
You know, with the iPhone, it was, you know, the software keyboard and being all screen and the concept of smartphone and vision part of all this stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
But then both of their launch ads didn't really spend any time trying to convince you.
John:
They just said, we assume you're already excited about the iPhone.
John:
Here's a bunch of people picking up phones and movies.
John:
iPhone.
John:
And then Vision Pro is like, OK, well, what they're going to do is piggyback on the glory of the iPhone, which now is retroactively the greatest thing ever, and say, it's just like the iPhone ad.
John:
But also, we're not going to really spend any time trying to convince you that you should get a Vision Pro.
John:
We're just going to show a bunch of people in movies putting things in their face.
John:
Vision Pro.
John:
That was the point I was trying to make.
John:
I hope it did a better job on it in a second try.
John:
I hope no one has to write into me anymore to tell me that being only on Singular was a deterrent to buying the iPhone and it was expensive.
Marco:
all right i will allow it i i love how how fervently you had to fight being wrong yeah also fair but i also think like i think you are still wrong in the even with your defenses in the sense of i think the iphone was was more anticipated and bigger earlier than you are saying more more anticipated i already said it was more anticipated okay i already said that but
Marco:
No, but then you were saying, and also I think the Vision Pro is heading into an even more challenging environment.
John:
I agree with that as well.
John:
I do not disagree with that at all.
John:
Yes, it is way more challenging.
John:
How many people do you see with VR headsets versus how many people had cell phones in 2007?
John:
That's the thing.
John:
100% agree.
Marco:
Yeah, like the iPhone was launching a clearly really great version of something that people already loved.
Marco:
The Vision Pro is going into a market that is extremely skeptical and doesn't really necessarily think they even need this product.
John:
It's not the market for VR headsets as skeptical.
John:
It's the world that is skeptical of that product, period.
John:
Like how many VR headsets have ever sold versus how many cell phones had ever sold in 2007.
John:
Like it's a huge difference in degree, obviously.
John:
But again, I was just trying to make what I thought was an interesting, funny aside about the parallels of the ads and how both products that you would think it would need to do some convincing decided no.
John:
Our launch head is not going to be about convincing you.
John:
We'll just leave that to the product, which you'll see for two seconds at the end of the ad.
John:
Good luck.
John:
And it worked out really well for the iPhone.
John:
Vision Pro remains to be seen.
John:
And by the way, people keep calling it Vision Pro AVP in short, in like slacks and online and everything.
John:
Every single time I see it, I think Alien vs. Predator.
Casey:
i have to reread it i'm like why is he talking about alien versus predator av apple oh i get it okay oh my god yeah you're gonna have to recalibrate yourself there big guy uh hey so i understand that we have an answer from somewhere that the apple vision pro or otherwise known as avp focal distance i just wrote vision pro in the notes you notice i'm violating the guidelines i noticed i almost went in and added apple all over the place you said the minute ago casey
John:
oh god we're a mess yeah well that apple's not the boss of us we can say though whenever we want unless they want to send us press pass and suddenly the boss of us yeah fair enough uh so anyway i think that ship has literally already just sailed like all the press relief reviews all went out already i'm sure when we get to our main topic today they'll come running back to us oh yes that's definitely gonna happen we have no grievances no further grievances there uh apple vision pro focal distance john what what do we got here
John:
1.3 meters that's what i am told anonymous sources say the vision pro focal distance is 1.3 meters or 4.265 feet uh and again uh this is the the idea is that in these vr headsets the focal distance is fixed doesn't matter how far something is from you really close to you in the virtual world really far to you from you in the virtual world uh the
John:
There is no refocusing because what it actually is is a bunch of screens in front of your eyeballs and there are no moving lens elements and there's nothing to bend the light a different amount.
John:
So there is a fixed focal distance inside that headset.
John:
And I wanted to know what the distance was because I wanted to know which of my many varying eyeglass prescriptions I would have to use.
John:
And now the answer is whichever one lets me see 2020 at 1.3 meters.
John:
So there you have it.
Casey:
And if you live in a barbaric place like ours that doesn't believe in meters, that's four, about four and a third feet, 4.265 feet.
John:
And interestingly, that's farther away than my monitor is.
John:
I mean, I bet for most people, they don't keep their monitors 1.3 meters away.
John:
And my computer glasses are essentially calibrated so I can focus on my monitor, maybe like, maybe a foot past it or whatever.
John:
And my distance glasses are so I can drive, right?
John:
So they're 20-20 at...
John:
All the way down the road, hundreds and hundreds of yards or whatever, or meters, whichever you prefer.
John:
So I do wonder if I pick the prescription for Vision Pro at some point, if I should go to my eye doctor and say, give me lenses that let me see 20-20 without eye strain at 1.3 meters.
John:
I may do that at max, or is it?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
With regard to Apple Vision Pro ordering, MacRumors has some ordering details.
Casey:
Apparently, when you order Apple Vision Pro, not the Vision Pro, not AVP, but Apple Vision Pro, you'll need to scan your face with an iPhone or iPad with Face ID.
Casey:
This helps us determine the right size light seal and headbands, which work together to give you a precise fit.
Casey:
MacRumors also adds that you should make sure your Apple Store app is updated as the latest version released on January 11th supports the Vision Pro face scanning.
Casey:
When you order, Apple will ask you a few questions to find out if you need optical inserts.
Casey:
If you do, you'll need to upload a valid unexpired prescription from a US eye care professional after checkout.
Casey:
MacRumors also helpfully notes that you can add and store your Vision prescription in the Health app on your iPhone.
Casey:
I don't know specifically where other than in the Health app, but hey, there you go.
Casey:
So that is what you need to look forward to if you are ordering in two days, right?
Casey:
It's this coming Friday, is it not?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's kind of interesting when you're like rushing to order, you know, the iPhone, you get the order all prepared, you know, the exact storage size, everything you want.
John:
You just go, go, go.
John:
This seems like the procedure might be a little bit slower.
John:
And given the performance characteristics, let's say, of Apple Store on the moment after launch of a popular product, I do wonder how well this is going to go for everybody.
John:
Good luck.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
May the odds be ever in your favor.
Marco:
I mean, look, I think they are definitely going to sell all that they're making, but it's just such a mystery how many they're making and how many they're going to save for retail availability.
John:
How many are made right now?
John:
You think, oh, they'll probably only do a million a year, but is the first batch 10,000?
John:
Yeah, that's fair.
John:
We don't know anything about that.
Marco:
Presumably.
Marco:
I mean, it has seemed...
Marco:
from lots of different places.
Marco:
It has seemed that the hardware has been finalized for quite some time.
Marco:
I would imagine they have been making them in, like, if they are truly supply constrained by some critical part, like the screens, as we've been hearing from the rumor mill, I would assume they have been, like, banking them for a while.
Marco:
So they probably have a lot of those built up, you know, whether it's the screens themselves or whether they actually have been banking up whole units.
Marco:
They probably have a whole bunch of them because, like, they showed it off in what appeared to be pretty much final hardware form
Marco:
seven months ago.
Marco:
So I think they've had a lot of time to make a big launch quantity.
Marco:
The question is how quickly that launch quantity will sell out and then how slowly they'll be trickling out after that.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So yeah, so you can expect all that when you order this coming Friday, if you are a crazy person to order this immediately, like probably two thirds of us.
John:
Again, or you're going to try.
John:
You may spend a lot of time bouncing off the Apple store and various platforms until you see the thing that says 12 weeks.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Then with regard to the Vision Pro demos, Mark Gurman has some information about this.
Casey:
If you recall, there's going to be demos apparently only on the first day or first weekend, is that right, of Vision Pro sales?
John:
We don't know yet, I think.
Casey:
Well, that's as far as we've been told anyhow.
Casey:
So Apple's prepared, this is Gurman, Apple's prepared its most sophisticated sales pitch ever, including a demo lasting up to 25 minutes.
Casey:
The demo begins, excuse me,
Casey:
With a retail worker scanning the user space with an app, this scan will tell the employee hosting the demo which light seal, foam cushion, and band size the customer will need.
Casey:
The light seal comes in more than 25 shapes and sizes.
Casey:
Cushions come in two sizes.
John:
But what is the band size?
John:
I mean, there's just two bands, but they don't come in sizes, right?
John:
They're just going to adjust the straps, I guess?
Casey:
I didn't think so, but this certainly seems to indicate that there are sizes.
John:
I think it just might be sloppy writing.
Casey:
A question that I have, just kind of taking a tangent off this for a minute.
Casey:
What's the exchange situation look like if you feel like your light seal isn't right, particularly if you're ordering online and if they do ship to home, which every indication is they are going to ship to people's homes?
Casey:
How do you exchange that?
Casey:
Can you just drive up to the Apple store and grab a new one?
Casey:
I'm not looking for active answers on this.
Casey:
I'm kind of just throwing it out there.
Casey:
I wonder what that looks like, especially for people not near stores.
John:
Yeah, I would hope that Apple will be fairly permissive with this first round and not give people a hard time because it's kind of like bread they bring to the table at a restaurant.
John:
It's not like they can reuse that.
John:
It's a bit on your sweaty face.
John:
It's basically got to get recycled.
Marco:
You would be surprised how many restaurants reuse the bread.
John:
I know.
John:
I know about restaurants.
John:
I'm just saying they're not supposed to.
John:
What they actually do is a separate story.
John:
Yes.
John:
Don't work in the food service industry.
John:
No.
John:
Or do and improve it for us all.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So, I mean, again, I'm not actively expecting answers or seeking answers right now.
Casey:
I'm just kind of wondering out loud.
Casey:
I wonder what that's going to look like.
Casey:
So, anyway, back to Gurman.
Casey:
If a person is wearing glasses, the stores will have a device to scan the lenses for prescription information.
Casey:
The system will provide those numbers, and stores will have hundreds of lenses on hand for demos.
Casey:
The employee then gathers all those details, and another worker in the store's back room assembles the DemoVision Pro with the correct accessories.
John:
Once the unit is in hand— Wait, wait, wait.
John:
On the lens scanning thing?
Mm-hmm.
John:
That is I mean, I know they're not going to go into super detail here, and I'm assuming the training that all the Apple employees have been given to do this demo will include this.
John:
But if you were to just take my glasses off my head and scan them to get my prescription, you'd be taking off my driving glasses because I probably drove there.
John:
And that is absolutely the wrong prescription for me to be able to see anything.
John:
six feet away because my eyes are so screwed up and i'm old um so i hope they will ask the person uh you know i mean i guess if you're only wearing your driving glasses what choice do they have but maybe they'll ask them hey do you happen to know what your reading offset is and um for people who don't have terrible vision and aren't old and don't know this when you get a prescription what they normally do is give you your prescription you're essentially your driving glasses prescription which is like you can see 2020 at long distances and then they'll have like an offset i don't know what it's called some optimist can tell you but they'll have like little offsets and like and by the way
John:
for their up-close or reading glasses or whatever, here are the offsets.
John:
Here are the, you know, adjusted prescription by this amount.
John:
So you essentially get two prescriptions, your main one and then deltas for your second one.
John:
But the second one is, you know, you can pick what the second one is.
John:
You just talk to your eye doctor and say, hey, I want the second one to... I tell the doctor...
John:
I want the second one so that my screen is in focus and here's how far away it is for me.
John:
You can tell them anything for the second one, but in the absence of explicit instructions, I think most eye doctors will prescribe the second prescription for essentially reading, like you're holding a book in front of you, which is not, to the earlier point, 1.3 meters away.
John:
If you're holding a book 1.3 meters away when you read it, you have very long arms.
John:
So this is another factor that I'm sure they're including, but that isn't incorporated into this description of the demo.
Casey:
Righto.
Casey:
So continuing on with Gurman, once the unit is in hand, the employee will explain how the interface works.
Casey:
This includes how to control the pointer using a user's eyes, how to gesture to make selections, and how to hold the headset.
Casey:
The staffer will also show how to adjust the so-called fit dial on the main headband and how to use the digital crown for moving between virtual and augmented reality.
Casey:
The employee will have an iPad to view what the user is seeing on the Vision Pro.
Casey:
Once the headset is on, customers will need to calibrate the device with various tracking and tapping exercises so it can follow their eyes and hands.
Casey:
That includes looking at a circular dot pattern set at different brightness levels and a hand scan in the field of vision of the device.
Casey:
After all that, the roughly 20 to 25 minute demo can begin.
Casey:
Parts of the demo are photos or video and video, normal panorama and spatial video, placing multiple app windows in space, scrolling, 3D and immersive movies, including clips of wild animals, the ocean, and sports.
Casey:
There's also a compelling scene that makes users feel as if they're on a tightrope.
Casey:
And that is apparently what's going on.
Casey:
A lot of this, having never, and this is genuinely the truth, I'm not being coy, having never experienced the official marketing demo for the Vision Pro, this sounds a lot like the way it has been described, that a lot of these same things were demoed back in June at WWDC to the press that got to see it.
Casey:
I don't think it's identical, but it seems very, very similar from what I can gather.
John:
Yeah, and we don't have the link for it here.
John:
We should probably dig it out.
John:
But Apple's been dropping these press releases to, you know, hype up the Vision Pro.
John:
And one of them was like entertainment software that's available.
John:
Look at all these movies and movie experiences and stuff.
John:
And I was reminded reading that of something that they said at launch, but that I had forgotten about, but now has rekindled my interest.
John:
And I'm like, oh, yeah, they're doing that thing, which is 3D movies.
John:
Um, I've never been a big 3d movie watching fan.
John:
I've seen a lot of movies in the theater in 3d.
John:
I used to have a 3d TV and I did some stuff with it, but there's always weird limitations with that 3d stuff in particular.
John:
Uh, both of the technologies that I've used for 3d, both the one in the movie theater and the one on my home television set reduced the light output because it was essentially, uh, have half the light going to your left eye and half the light going to your right eye.
John:
And so everything would be twice as dim or whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
Same thing with the television one.
John:
It literally had glasses that would have LCD shutters that would black out one of your eyes back and forth, back and forth really fast and just make everything half as dim.
John:
Don't have the problem inside the Vision Pro.
John:
So they're hyping a lot of the 3D movies they're making.
John:
And those 3D movies, they'll have full brightness in each eye.
John:
And it's perfect.
John:
You know, you'll never have any crosstalk.
John:
There's one scream for your left eye, one scream for your right eye.
John:
All at full brightness, full color fidelity, full frame rate, like just everything about it should be amazing.
John:
So it should essentially be the best 3D movie experience anyone has ever experienced.
John:
If you haven't used another VR headset doing the same thing, obviously.
John:
And I'm actually kind of looking forward to that because I would like to...
John:
see 3d on by the way some of the 3d movies are even going to be higher frame rate so you so it might not especially if it's like a computer animated movie they can do a 60 fps or maybe even a 90 fps version i'm really interested to see that to see if 3d becomes more attractive to me when when a lot of the downsides have been removed
Casey:
You know, that reminds me that someone I was talking to, I want to say it was Jason, but I might have that wrong, pointed out to me a very interesting point.
Casey:
Rather than getting the Phantom and forthcoming potentially OLED iPad so you can watch TV in bed, why wouldn't you want to get one of these?
Casey:
I mean, leaving aside that it's extremely expensive.
John:
Big, heavy, big, heavy thing on your face.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
But you're laying down anyway.
Casey:
Who cares?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe I won't care.
John:
Maybe I will.
John:
I've never had one on my face.
John:
All I can tell you is that one of the things that I enjoy about watching my iPad in my bed is that I get to take off my glasses.
John:
And so I don't have my glasses frames on my face.
John:
Like it's nice at the end of the day just to not have glasses on your face anymore, right?
John:
Or not have contacts in your eyes.
John:
uh and wearing a vision pro is essentially the opposite not having glasses on your face that's fair so i don't know maybe maybe you know maybe it won't bother me maybe i'll think it's amazing maybe it will be less comfortable but it'll be so compelling uh but i i won't know until i try it again that that is one of the more attractive things to me about this but the oled uh is a proven solution or the ipad is a proven solution to me so that is definitely going to be my first stop
Casey:
Uh, actually, so briefly before we get to the next followup item, uh, I think it's been established, Marco, you were going to try to buy one on Friday.
Casey:
Oh yeah.
Casey:
Sitting here now, the, the family CFO was not in love with this idea, but I think it's happening anyway.
Casey:
Um, I think I'm ordering this, this coming Friday.
Casey:
Um, and then John, I, you said you're not going to order, but out of curiosity, I think you don't sign up until a couple of weeks from now, but are you going to attempt to get a demo at one of your local Apple stores?
John:
I might.
John:
I mean, we'll see.
John:
I don't relish the idea of having it demoed in that environment, but I'll also check around to see what the local mooching situation is like.
John:
Do I know someone who has one who will let me try it?
John:
Obviously, again, that won't be ideal.
John:
They won't have the same prescription.
John:
It won't fit my face or whatever, but we'll see.
John:
I'll consider it.
John:
It depends on how everything goes.
John:
Again, I don't relish waiting in a long line and going through a big demo thing, but...
Casey:
if it's my only chance it's my only chance no fair enough all right justin yost writes a note on the high index lenses apple notes that not all prescriptions are covered mine certainly isn't for the meta headsets and justin provides a link to the meta quest 2 inserts which i looked at this earlier and i want to say one from like negative 8 to positive 8 or something like that which is a big range which is a big range uh the sph prescription range is zero to negative eight
Casey:
uh total power zero to negative eight in sil cylinder perhaps prescription range obviously i don't know what i'm talking about is zero to negative two and you couldn't say that would be out of your range if not for your contacts right uh i forget i think i'm flirting with eight ish i don't remember exactly and but yes i think your point is certainly fair that it would probably be outside of what i could do if i didn't have my contacts in
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, this is so this is, you know, this is the difficulty in all things.
John:
Like, again, iPhones are not made in sizes that are readable by a lot of people with poor vision, which my mother is currently experiencing and she hates voiceover.
John:
So there's that.
John:
It's difficult to make something that is largely visual.
John:
in output device work for people all people with bad vision but that is part of the challenge to be able to expand the range like like what is what does accessibility look like in vision pro is just making things inside the lenses bigger uh that doesn't help if you can't see the things inside the lenses because your prescription is too thick or whatever
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Casey:
Breaking news.
Casey:
Apparently, well, as we record this, which is the evening of the 17th, Apple is going to be denied Apple Watch sales tomorrow, I believe is accurate.
Casey:
But certainly, it seems as of a couple of days ago, as we record, they were planning to drop the software portions of the blood oxygen sensor.
Casey:
in order to avoid the ban that seems to be coming on the 18th regardless.
Casey:
And by the time you listen to this, the story will probably be different again.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think there was a new story that just came out.
John:
We didn't quite get into the notes, but like basically the Apple Watch ban is in effect again.
John:
And the only way they're going to get past the ban is by disabling this feature in software.
John:
right or licensing the patent which they apparently just refused to maybe that's not going to happen by tomorrow but like that and we talked about this before that they had a soft they had a software fix i mean they've had some warning yeah and the theory the theory was that the software fix was not going to be simply disabling the feature but rather working around the patent somehow but apparently they either that was not true or they could not figure out how to do it so the easy solution is disable it in software uh and
John:
That's not great for a product that was, you know, partially sold based on this feature.
John:
I wonder how they're going to handle that in terms of advertising and, you know, like the text on Apple.com, buy the Apple Watch because it does blood oxygen.
John:
This is only in the U.S., by the way.
John:
It is not in other countries, so that's another complication.
John:
So this is a tricky situation for Apple to be in, and as usual, they are exhausting every possible avenue, but it seems like this watch is...
John:
Going back to being not for sale, but then coming back immediately because they disabled the problematic feature.
John:
And then the negotiation that we assume is happening will continue.
John:
This is such a mess.
Marco:
Like, they should never have let it get to this point.
Marco:
Again, we all know we're not fans of the patent system on this show.
Marco:
But the reality is...
Marco:
it's still the law it's still a system apple has to work with apple takes full advantage of it themselves and has lots of their own patents that they wield against other companies um so the fact is this is a system that they have to work in and they gladly participate in this company got them on one and it's too bad like but here's the reality like apple is so stubborn about this that they are going to
Marco:
actually remove a feature of the watch that they've that they've had for a number of years now now you know the details of this i mean who knows how this is going to end up because it's changing minute by minute but you know what what appears to be the case is like i guess they're going to somehow know i guess by serial number like which ones are sold from tomorrow forward
Marco:
Because I would sure as heck hope they wouldn't have a software that disabled all of the existing ones.
Marco:
So I assume it's like only the watches that are sold in the U.S.
Marco:
in this date range would have this disabled.
Marco:
And I guess they're going to try to work it out and then hopefully be able to re-enable it later.
Marco:
I thought they were going to disable it on all watches.
Casey:
That was my assumption too.
Casey:
But I don't remember having read that.
Casey:
That was just my assumption.
Marco:
i mean i would certainly be pretty upset and i think a lot of people would because this is part of the reason that i have the watch and and when i purchased it this was not a problem yeah these are all problems that apple should have kept in mind when considering the negotiation but i i would assume that's not what i i would be very surprised if they disabled everyone well i mean it
Marco:
keep an eye on your watch i guess i know maybe don't run the update no like yeah i would be very surprised if they disabled all existing ones but i'm guessing they have some kind of like you know registration database of like which numbers are sold by their stores or manufactured after this date in the u.s market and whatever else but that's just such a mess like i mean they can't deactivate it on existing watches unless people run an off software update of
Marco:
Yeah, but just like, I mean, look, Apple, you tried.
Marco:
I admire the fight.
Marco:
You tried to not have to license this patent or work with this company.
Marco:
You put up a really good fight.
Marco:
Good job.
Marco:
Here's a pat on the back.
Marco:
Now just do what you have to do.
Marco:
Like just freaking buy the patent.
Marco:
You tried your best.
Marco:
Just throw money at this problem and make it go away.
John:
Not that I should tell Apple how to negotiate things, but your negotiating leverage is higher when the outcome of the legal situation is still in question.
John:
Right.
John:
So because if you exhaust every possible avenue and Mossimo knows that nothing is left and they've won in every legal forum that exists, they're going to name a higher price than if Apple said, well, we can go to courts with this, but we don't know how it's going to turn out.
John:
How certain are you that you're going to win, Mossimo?
John:
That gives you more negotiating power for the price.
John:
And I feel like their price negotiating power is rapidly disappearing.
Marco:
yeah like just buy the patent or license just throw money at the problem make this go away again you fought the good fight good job pat on the back it's over you lost keep this from affecting your customers that's it like you tried your best it is now going to affect your customers stop already i mean it's i think the precedence i was thinking about this with this was the um i'm probably vaguely remember this forgive me for mangling it but like the uh
John:
The lawsuit over Rumble and console controllers.
John:
Do you remember that?
John:
Vaguely.
John:
I think I forget who had the patent.
John:
Some company had it.
John:
But anyway, the upshot was that I think Rumble was like removed from a popular consoles controller until the patent situation had been brought back and the next gen had it back.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
I don't remember the details, but it's another patent customer impact thing that it was like.
John:
Look, Rumble has been around long enough that it's obvious to everybody and patents are stupid.
John:
And but they literally took it out of the controller.
John:
And it was like now this for this generation of controller for this, you know, people who bought this thing, they don't have Rumble.
John:
Why?
John:
Because patents.
Casey:
But yes, I agree.
Casey:
Apple, you've got the money.
Casey:
Fix it.
John:
All right.
John:
So... Where does Apple get the money from?
Casey:
Well, thank you, John.
Casey:
That's a perfect segue.
Casey:
Where does Apple get their money from?
Casey:
Us.
John:
Well, they get it from Google, that search deal.
John:
Well, yeah.
Casey:
The 25% of it, anyway.
Casey:
They get it from Google, and they get it from the Apple tax.
Casey:
And it's not the one you're thinking of.
Casey:
It's the Apple tax that all developers are paying, whether we want to or not.
Casey:
So we were talking before we started recording, even before the bootleg, about how we were going to handle this subject.
Casey:
And I'm torn because John very rightly pointed out when we were talking privately that we've tread this water before.
Casey:
We've been through this before.
Casey:
Most of this is not new, and I'll explain in a moment.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm real frigging fired up again about it because it makes me so angry.
Casey:
So what's going on?
Casey:
And we'll see how much of a tear the three of us get on.
Casey:
So what's going on?
Casey:
If you recall, Epic Games, who are the makers of Fortnite, among many other games, have a very...
Casey:
a powerful CEO because it's a private company, Tim Sweeney.
Casey:
And Tim Sweeney has gotten to be in his bonnet, to take on Apple and take on their regulations and rules and developer licensing agreement with regard to the app store.
Casey:
So like a year ago, maybe two years ago, Epic just decided to up and add payments into Fortnite.
Casey:
That is their own system that did not go through an app purchase, which is clearly and unequivocally against Apple's rules.
Casey:
Whether or not you think that's right, it is clearly against the rules.
Casey:
They did this, and Apple booted them from the store, which is exactly what we all expected.
Casey:
So then this became a legal thing.
Casey:
Epic sued Apple or something like that.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter the details.
Casey:
And that got run all the way up the flagpole as high as it could go.
Casey:
And apparently in the last few days, the U.S.
Casey:
Supreme Court has said, yes, we hear you.
Casey:
We see this is a thing, and we don't care.
Casey:
It's already been settled.
Casey:
Buzz off.
Casey:
So what does that mean?
Casey:
That means that the one thing that Apple was told they really had to do was loosen up on their anti-steering thing.
Casey:
When what that means is, as developers, you know, Marco and I cannot, or John even, I forget that, you know, John, you are a developer as well.
Casey:
In your apps, John, you cannot say, hey, go to hypercritical.co slash, you know, pay me directly and
Casey:
pay me directly and I will give you the same apps for less money.
Casey:
Same thing with Overcast, with CallSheet, etc.
Casey:
You cannot point people to your own payment system, even if it's on the web.
Casey:
There are exceptions for what they call reader apps.
Casey:
So like Netflix, for example, and other things like that.
Casey:
But generally speaking, you cannot say, hey, you can get this cheaper on my website.
Casey:
Here's the URL.
Casey:
And the courts have said, no, you should be able to do that.
Casey:
You should be able to, as a developer, point your users to your website and you should be able to take money through that website.
Casey:
And that was about all the legal jargon said, as far as I understand.
Marco:
Yeah, it was surprisingly and probably intentionally limited in what the decision was actually stating.
Marco:
It didn't seem to place a lot of specifics about how this should be allowed, whether and how much Apple is allowed to charge as a commission or what kind of restrictions are allowed to place on it.
Marco:
It was pretty light on the wording, presumably to leave further interpretation down to the future.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So that was what was stated.
Casey:
And so it had run up the flagpole.
Casey:
The U.S.
Casey:
Supreme Court said it's already been solved in lower courts.
Casey:
So that means the decision of lower courts is the decision.
Casey:
And I think Apple has until like the end of the week or something like that.
Casey:
in order to make this happen.
Casey:
So Apple today, I believe it was, as we record, announced what they're going to do.
Casey:
And what they're going to do is, to be clear, exactly what we all expected.
Casey:
We are going to go on a tear about this in all likelihood.
Casey:
That doesn't mean that the three of us didn't expect this.
Casey:
Anyone who has been paying attention to Apple, who has been paying attention to Apple, even the littlest bit, knew exactly what was coming.
Casey:
And yet, I'll speak for myself, because I'm a frigging idiot,
Casey:
I hoped maybe it would be a little better than this.
Casey:
But oh, no.
Casey:
Oh, no, it's not.
Casey:
So here's the deal.
Casey:
So Apple has basically said we will do the bare minimum that we can possibly do in order to make us legally compliant with United States law.
Marco:
And to be clear, all of this— I would even say maybe legally compliant.
Marco:
Fair, fair.
Casey:
And this is only applicable in the U.S.
Casey:
This is not applicable anywhere else except kind of sort of the Netherlands for dating apps.
Casey:
And this is where this all started.
Marco:
And Japan, right.
Marco:
Wasn't the Japan rule similar to this?
John:
Yeah, I think they might have done something similar in multiple jurisdictions to make the lives easier.
John:
But I'm going to say that when you said they're doing the bare minimum, what you mean is the bare minimum of nice things for developers.
John:
But what Apple actually did is a ton of extra work to ensure that the aperture through which developers must travel is as narrow as possible.
John:
Yes, and as treacherous.
Casey:
Yeah, it's a treacherous and narrow aperture through which we must pass if we so choose.
Casey:
So what they've said is, all right, fine.
Casey:
You want to do your payments on your own?
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
Here's what we'll do.
Casey:
We're going to say that you can do payments on your own.
Casey:
You can put in one and only one link, and it may not be in your purchase flow.
Casey:
It can only happen on one screen.
Casey:
Can't be the IAP purchase flow.
John:
Oh, you forgot the first part, which is you have to apply to get an entitlement.
John:
Oh,
John:
Sorry.
John:
It's a special entitlement for people who aren't developers.
John:
If you want your app to do certain things, you have to sort of register for an entitlement.
John:
Like, I want to use the camera.
John:
I want to access the file system, which sounds ridiculous.
John:
But anyway, like, so that's an entitlement.
John:
So they have to have a technical mechanism through which you must pass before you get to the point where you're linking anywhere.
John:
Just say, yeah, I want this entitlement so I can do this.
John:
And I'm not sure of the details, but I think they also have an API around this as well.
John:
Is that true?
Marco:
Yes, because they are going to track the clicks.
Marco:
Because, look, anybody from very, very early iOS SDK, I think maybe even the first iOS SDK, it's been very easy to open URLs from your app to external things like the browser.
Marco:
It's one API call.
Marco:
It's like UI application, open URL, and you give it a URL, and it kicks you out of the app and goes to that URL.
Marco:
So this is not a technical, you know, that they had to build an API to launch a URL.
Marco:
No, they've had that for over a decade.
Marco:
What they had to build was this special entitlement that will basically tell Apple, take a look at this app.
Marco:
And it is... So Apple is requiring only by policy that if you're going to do this type of link from your app where you're linking out to an external purchase, you must get this entitlement for your app, which kind of marks it for us to know that it's looking at this.
Marco:
And then you must follow all these different rules about it.
Marco:
But again, there is no...
Marco:
technical need for this um it does seem like from what people have reported it does seem like apple is basically going to track clicks through the link and that way they they probably that will probably inform what we'll get to in a little bit which is their auditing arm indeed so let's hold on so let's get there so apple has said that yes as as you two have pointed out you need to apply for an entitlement and
Casey:
I presume getting that entitlement will not be terribly difficult, but you need to apply for the entitlement and you need to set up your project.
John:
You say that, but applying for entitlements is the same black box as everything else is.
John:
You're like, well, there's no approval process, right?
John:
I just apply for it and get it.
John:
Yeah, pretty much that always happens, except when you apply for entitlement and never hear back.
Casey:
Well, that's true.
Casey:
Now, that being said, I actually have a special entitlement for call sheet because I need to do local network requests over broadcast.
Casey:
And that is something, you know, for UDP broadcast, that's something that requires an entitlement.
Casey:
And that did turn around in the span of just a few days.
Casey:
I don't remember how long it was.
John:
No, they usually do.
John:
Like we're saying, it's not.
John:
But because of things like AppReview, you always hear about the one developer who's like, yeah, I applied for this routine entitlement.
John:
I just haven't heard back.
John:
And they don't know how to escalate it because they don't have a podcast.
John:
It's just like the system is not great.
Casey:
No, you're exactly right.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So you apply for this entitlement.
Casey:
Hopefully you get it.
Casey:
Then you have to put a bunch of stuff in your project, which fine, whatever.
Casey:
And then, yes, actually, you are right, John, that you need to be able to call a new API that puts up a scary, scary warning when the person clicks on the link and says, oh, my gosh, this developer is probably going to steal all your money and all your data.
Casey:
But you do you.
Casey:
If this is how you want to pay for this, have at it.
John:
And that interstitial, by the way, like that's Apple's code running.
John:
Apple's code knows where you want to send them.
John:
But before it sends them there, it shows this dialogue.
John:
And that means Apple has the ability to track.
John:
how many times people clicked on a thing and where they're going.
Marco:
And to try to scare them away before they get there.
Casey:
You're about to go to an external website.
Casey:
Apple is not responsible for the privacy or security of purchases made on the web.
Casey:
That is in like, you know, 40 point font.
Casey:
The rest is in a normal font.
Casey:
Any accounts or purchases made outside of this app will be managed by the developer.
Casey:
You know, what developer name?
Casey:
Your app store account, stored payment method and related features such as subscription management, refund requests will not be available.
Casey:
Apple can't verify any pricing or promotions offered by the developer.
Casey:
Learn more, continue or cancel.
Casey:
That is the scare sheet that they use in the example on their documentation.
Marco:
I love the term scare sheet, by the way.
Marco:
That's perfect.
Casey:
So yeah, so you can go through this, you click continue, and then you get to the vendor's website and you can do what you want to do.
Casey:
So Apple said, fine, you want to do this?
Casey:
Here's the deal.
Casey:
You can do this, but whatever purchases that your users make on your own website, well, baby, we get a cut.
Casey:
And how much of a cut do you ask?
Casey:
Well, we get 27% because fuck you.
Casey:
You can save on the payment processing fee, which is 3%, but you're using our intellectual property, baby.
Casey:
So if you think you're getting away scot-free, uh-uh.
Casey:
And not only that, double f*** you, because any purchase that this person makes in the next week, we get a cut of that too, baby.
Casey:
27%.
Marco:
Which, by the way, means you have to track them for a week too.
Marco:
That's my favorite part.
Marco:
Apple is so anti-tracking.
Marco:
Oh, by the way, if you do this, you are required to track the person so that if they follow this link, you've got to track them for a week afterwards.
Marco:
And any purchases they make from you for that entire week, Apple gets 30%.
John:
That's a great parallel with the app tracking transparency thing because it was actually almost exactly the same thing that Facebook was doing.
John:
Facebook had links where Facebook would provide a link to an app, and if you followed that link and bought the app, because Facebook had all this tracking stuff, Facebook would know, hey, I know this user clicked this link, and I know this user then bought the thing at the end of that link because I have tracking and I can see that chain of events.
John:
So I'm going to charge you for that click and purchase or whatever.
John:
some larger rate than I could otherwise because I can prove that someone clicked this link and bought it.
John:
And Apple's like, we don't like you tracking users like that because they started out in an app and then they clicked and then they went to the web and Facebook is so invasive that they track you no matter where you go and they can connect those dots.
John:
We don't like that.
John:
So we got to change, you know, change the rules about tracking.
John:
But when it comes time to track that exact same thing, did this person click this link and then buy it?
John:
Apple's like, well, when you have to track it for the purposes of paying us 27% of the purchase, yeah, that's fine.
Casey:
So you've got to track all these people.
Casey:
Then you've got to report into Apple every month what people have bought what and pay them, pay Apple, 27% of anyone who's made a purchase.
Casey:
And to be clear, even if nobody makes a purchase, well, you know what?
Casey:
I want to see your report anyway, says Apple.
Casey:
I want to see you say none of your users made a purchase because I might want to come and audit your ass.
Casey:
And I might want to come and see and make sure that you're paying us the money you're supposed to pay us.
Casey:
It is completely expected.
Casey:
I'm going to say this again because I bet you some of you already fired off email saying, how did you not expect this?
Casey:
We did.
Casey:
We 100% did.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it is so gross and so unnecessary.
Casey:
It's so gross that this is the approach Apple is taking.
Casey:
So much, to your point, John, so much extra work has been done just to say, f***.
Casey:
you and it's so unnecessary it's just so unnecessary why can't apple just compete if your product is so good be that the app store be that the iphone whatever then friggin compete then compete why i i understand i do get it oh well because because they won't they don't have to i mean it this
Marco:
Apple, I hate to make light of something as serious as addiction in real life and outside of corporate discussions, but it's hard to not make that analogy of Apple is addicted to this revenue in such a way that it damages their goals and strategic priorities and the health of the company in other areas.
Marco:
But when you look at Apple as a company, as the corporation, the finance, the growth, the stock, all that stuff...
Marco:
It's very clear that Apple is very dependent on that services category of their revenue to basically keep themselves looking like they have a lot of growth potential ahead of them.
Marco:
We've seen over the last many years, the devices, while they sell well, there's decreasing amounts of growth available because they're mature product categories and mature markets.
Marco:
And, you know, it's hard to get hardware growth forever when you're that big and that successful.
Marco:
So they've been beefing off services.
Marco:
And services is this wonderful euphemism for what the revenue actually comes from, you know, because Apple has a bunch of services that face the public.
Marco:
And so when Apple says we're growing our services revenue, I think what most people would assume that means is things like iCloud and Apple TV Plus and Apple Arcade and, you know, the public facing services.
Marco:
And so when Apple says every quarter, we got services revenue, it's going great.
Marco:
That sounds like Apple is really building these amazing things that are just going like gangbusters.
Marco:
And the sad truth is that Apple services are actually pretty good on the whole and actually do pretty well.
Marco:
But that's not what most of that money is.
Marco:
Most of that money is from two things Apple really doesn't want to talk about because it doesn't look very good for them.
Marco:
One is that Google search deal that makes Google the default search engine, which Apple makes a huge chunk of that services revenue from.
John:
I think it's 25% of the service revenue is that search deal, I believe.
Marco:
That's just Google paying Apple to be, you know... That's just one big fat deal.
John:
That just comes in the form of cash.
John:
Apple does nothing for it except for not change a string somewhere.
Marco:
And the other part of services revenue that's not what people think of as services...
Marco:
It's another huge part of it.
Marco:
I don't know if we have good numbers on how huge of a part this is, but it's the app store cut.
John:
It's games because games are 85% of that.
John:
So it's games, essentially.
John:
Games in the app store.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So like that, Apple's services revenue, one of the biggest and most important public-facing drivers of growth for this company when people analyze their finances and look for stock growth and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's a huge, a huge chunk of that is the Google search deal and the 30% cut mostly from games in the app store.
Marco:
That's where Apple's making very large amounts of money in a category that is very important for them to appear to keep growing.
Marco:
So that's the stakes on the line here.
Marco:
What that makes Apple do is bend over backwards and twist themselves in these ridiculous contortions to justify keeping that money flowing at any cost.
Marco:
And I do mean anything.
Marco:
any cost the app store which is largely like abusive casino games preying on children and dumb people like it's like making money off of casinos like it's yeah you can make a lot of money but like there's a lot of asterisks on that that you probably don't feel good about that's where Apple's making so much of their money
Marco:
And watching them do these ridiculous things, I see exactly why they're doing it.
Marco:
And the company just keeps bending over backwards to defend that and try to rationalize the continuation of it.
Marco:
Because to even examine it for a second, they would get pretty uncomfortable.
Marco:
So they just don't.
John:
There are a couple other angles to it.
John:
That is definitely one of them, especially the growth one, because there are people in high positions in the company that are motivated to show growth.
John:
That's kind of part of their job.
John:
Like, you know, you run a public company, you don't want to stagnate, you know, like you have to look for the next growth opportunity.
John:
Like that is definitely in there.
John:
And if you want to call that greed, you can.
John:
But back when Apple was selling the iPhone and that was the growth thing, they were funneling all their energy into making sure the iPhone grew.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
So like they're always going to do that.
John:
Just now that they're using to grow something that we find distasteful.
John:
But when I look at this, I think the there's two other big motivators in addition to that.
John:
One of them is one you just alluded to, which is like the pride thing.
John:
We deserve this money.
John:
We made this amazing platform.
John:
You should be grateful to be on it, which sounds like such a petty and such a human thing.
John:
You're like, well, that's something an individual human might say on the stand at a trial, for instance.
John:
But individual humans aren't the company.
John:
Yeah, but there are a small number of individuals who do run the company, and that is in their heads.
John:
It's not so much that they think greed, money at all costs, we need growth.
John:
But there are people, again, who have testified in court basically that we deserve this money because we made this platform.
John:
Right.
John:
And that that sense of pride and that sense of who are you to tell us how to run our business.
John:
It's our thing.
John:
We can charge for access to it.
John:
All right.
John:
There's there's that pride angle.
John:
And the other one is, again, related to the small number of people who are tend to be older who run the company.
John:
uh is the recollection of what has happened to other companies that have lost essentially a linchpin of control and having control over the iphone platform this platform they've sold billions and billions of iphones it's a huge platform they control it giving up any part of that control letting someone else
John:
make anything close to as much money as you make on that platform, they've seen technology companies make that mistake.
John:
Think of IBM, Microsoft, and Intel.
John:
If you don't know the history of those three companies and how power shifted among them at the dawn of the personal computing age and how it progressed,
John:
There's a lot of power ships mostly having to do with one company not realizing or realizing but thinking it wasn't a big deal that they were giving up control, giving up a particular linchpin of control over their own future, not realizing they just opened the door for their competitor to come and suck all the value out of the platform that, quote-unquote, they made, right?
John:
And I think a lot of people in a position of power at Apple think –
John:
Not so much, you know, like that, you know, those other factors are there.
John:
But another thing in their mind is if we ever open the store, even a crack and essentially in their mind, lose control of our platform.
John:
In other words, now anyone can accept payments from anything.
John:
And now people can load apps from places other than our app store.
John:
We are giving up a huge amount of this value we created because we created this platform.
John:
We sold billions of phones.
John:
We want to leverage that to our benefit.
John:
We don't want to distribute billions of phones and let some other company make higher profit per iPhone sold than we make.
John:
Because again, those people who are running the company have seen that happen to companies in our industry who have not been careful about retaining control.
John:
And they've seen the success when people do retain control.
John:
The person who ends up having the control in the end makes most of the profit while everyone else kills themselves for smaller and smaller margins, right?
Yeah.
John:
And I have to think that is also one of the factors.
John:
And so this is a stew.
John:
Pride, wise, history-informed, strategic attitude of like we need to retain this control and we have to show growth and this is the area that's growing because we're the different part of the S-curve and all our other product lines.
John:
And those all combine to make them –
John:
downgrade the severity of the things that are happening negatively.
John:
I don't think they are totally like oblivious to them.
John:
I think they do see the strategy tax, the cost.
John:
I think they don't like the scammy games.
John:
They see all of that, but they, they feel like they can mitigate those.
John:
If we just have a better app store policies, if we try to keep the worst of the games out of there, if we pursue other avenues, if we make new products like the vision pro, like we just have to kind of hold the line, mitigate the bad stuff and,
John:
and deal with any of the fallout.
John:
Oh, Epic's not our thing.
John:
That's not such a big deal.
John:
We'll just have Unity be the 3D engine of choice for Vision Pro.
John:
What did you say about Unity?
John:
How are they doing?
John:
What did they do?
John:
What?
John:
Maybe we should talk to... Oh, we can't really talk to Epic and see NVIDIA for the GPUs.
John:
Anyway, like, there are lots of things that they did that sort of were strategically, like, in service of maintaining their control over the platform.
John:
And the negatives that happen, like...
John:
That's not that big a deal.
John:
They see the negative.
John:
They don't see that it's... You know, they know it's there.
John:
Like, they would rather have Fortnite on their platform than not.
John:
But they're not willing to pay that price so, like, we can weather that storm.
John:
After all, how big a deal could it be if we anger Epic?
John:
And it could be that 10 years from now, someone looks back and says, oh, in hindsight, them severing their relationship with Epic was an incredible strategic mistake because of X, Y, and Z, right?
John:
Or not.
John:
Maybe it'll be fine.
John:
But, like...
John:
we're out here seeing that they're making mistakes and justifying them to themselves.
John:
And I don't think it's entirely clear who will end up being right, but I'm once again, you know, since this is the same situation as when I, when I wrote this originally, it's the same situation come up again.
John:
Um, a hypercritical post about the art of the possible, um,
John:
We're out here saying, you know, developers, users, everybody saying, we find certain aspects of this arrangement not to our liking, right?
John:
There is dissatisfaction.
John:
There's dissatisfaction in Apple's customer base.
John:
There's dissatisfaction in Apple's developer base.
John:
Even, as we said before, even customers who don't know
John:
You know why they can't buy Kindle books inside the Kindle app.
John:
I don't even know if that's still a deal.
John:
I actually always use this as my go-to example, but things change so much.
John:
Maybe that's possible now.
John:
But anyway, people who don't realize that something that is needlessly frustrating and obtuse in an app is that way because of an Apple rule, they are dissatisfied with Apple devices.
John:
Even though they don't know why.
John:
Right.
John:
And that is one of the most difficult things to measure.
John:
Right.
John:
Because they don't know why the app is more annoying than it has to be.
John:
They don't know why they have some scary payment screen or they don't know what to do when they see a sign in post and they don't know where they're supposed to sign in because this is before they're allowed to link out to the things.
John:
Right.
John:
All those negatives are taking place and it's it's this game of chicken.
John:
there's dissatisfaction but apple thinks net net we're still going to come out ahead and it's better to retain that control and so we've just been gliding along in this state of apple assuming that the world will bend itself to the rules they make because they sell billions of phones and thus far the world has tried to bend itself to fit into that mold and
John:
but they're annoyed about it.
John:
So it is sowing dissent and displeasure.
John:
Like it is, it is making people grumbly and annoyed a little bit at a time.
John:
And Casey gets all upset about it because it's like, it's, it's, you know, it's not death by a thousand cuts.
John:
It's a, it's, you know, it's a thousand cuts and you're still alive, right?
John:
Like we, we keep, we keep going, we keep using this platform.
John:
The good outweighs the bad, but there's this constant low level annoyance about this stuff.
John:
And yeah,
John:
does it build up is it cumulative or does it just essentially make an environment that is like not as friendly as it used to be there's the the part in uh jason snell's like annual like apple report card um that i think will be coming out soon and every year when i fill it out there's a section about like how do you feel apple's developer relations are going and for the past few years i always look at what i wrote last year and i'm like yep
John:
it's the same as that and what i what i wrote i have like the snippet that basically says like that apple and developers don't feel good about each other and don't trust each other and it's an adversarial relationship and there's bad blood and uh you know it's just it's not healthy and every year that's the same i'm not sure if it's getting worse or better or staying the same but it's just not it just doesn't seem tenable to be long term there's this all you know sort of it becomes culturally accepted that
John:
There is this there's this upset between particular developers and Apple that both parties are willing to tolerate, but the developers feel like they're getting the short end of the stick on.
John:
And it's not so much that they're fleeing the platform, but it's enough that they're mildly annoyed.
John:
And that just doesn't seem sustainable to me.
John:
And I feel like those chickens are eventually going to come home to roost.
Casey:
Well, that's exactly the thing.
Casey:
And I think part of the reason I'm so worked up about this, I don't have any desire to take payments outside the App Store.
Casey:
Like, selfishly for me, do not care.
Casey:
But it's the principle of it.
Casey:
And it's so striking to me that here it is, the landscape I feel like from where I'm sitting has changed fairly considerably in the last couple of years.
Casey:
I think legislation is coming from many different angles.
Casey:
I mean, that's literally why we're talking about this in the first place.
Casey:
It's happening locally.
Casey:
It's happening in the EU.
Casey:
It's happened in Japan.
Casey:
It's happening in lots of different places.
Casey:
And so I feel like the specter of more legislation is right around the corner.
Casey:
And yet Apple is saying, eh, we don't care.
Casey:
We're too big to be pushed around, even by governments.
John:
Well,
John:
Well, thus far, they've been able to, in their opinion, comply with it in such a way that it is a moot point.
John:
Because why would anyone, no one would want to do this.
John:
You end up paying the same amount and it's more a hassle for you.
John:
And Apple's like, see, don't you just want to use our payment method?
John:
It's like, yeah, you have essentially not allowed any form of competition because you get to control the terms of the competition and you set those terms such that there is no reason for anyone to use a third party payment.
John:
It's just like the Dutch dating app, which is the exact analogy you used the last time we talked about this.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And, you know, Gruber handled this really well in a post, I think, from earlier today.
Casey:
So Gruber writes, Apple should have been looking for ways to lessen regulatory and legislative pressure over the past few years.
Casey:
And in today's climate, that's more true than ever.
Casey:
But instead, their stance has seemingly been bring it on.
Casey:
Confrontational, not conciliatory.
Casey:
Conceding, not an inch.
Casey:
Rather than take a sure win with most of what they could want, Apple is seemingly hell-bent on trying to keep everything.
Casey:
To win in chess, all you need is to capture your opponent's king.
Casey:
Apple seemingly wants to capture every last piece on the board, even while playing in a tournament where the referees, in this case regulators, are known to look askance, give side eye, at blatant poor sportsmanship, which in this case is greed.
Casey:
I think he absolutely nailed it.
Casey:
This whole piece is very good.
Casey:
But that one paragraph absolutely nails it.
Marco:
it's so true and it's just it leaves such a gross feeling in my mouth so here it is they've got this led this legislative and regulatory pressure from all different angles and they're saying you know we don't care come and come at us you know catch me outside yeah they're literally like inflaming like the fight i mean and and honestly like if i was working at any department in apple except app review or or i guess the app whoever whatever department is like app store revenue collection and
Marco:
If I was literally in any other part of the company, I would be pissed at that part of the company for this.
Marco:
Because here is Apple on the eve of launching a massive, hugely influential product.
Marco:
Now, I mean, yes, it's going to have limited market, etc., etc.
Marco:
But, like, the Vision Pro...
Marco:
It has been so much effort over so many years bringing it together.
Marco:
All of the other parts of the company in so many ways.
Marco:
They have poured so much into this.
Marco:
And here we are on the eve of the launch of this revolutionary product.
Marco:
And we're talking about the App Store's BS again.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
Again, I'm not saying that Apple shouldn't make money.
Marco:
I'm not saying that they shouldn't try to keep some of this money or most of this money.
Marco:
And like Casey, I also, as a developer, have zero plans to try to use my own payment processing, even if they removed all of these restrictions.
Marco:
And even if I could literally just link out and not pay them anything and not have any restrictions, I still wouldn't do it just because that doesn't make sense for my app.
Marco:
But it's almost, you know, it's kind of like, you know, I will defend to the death.
Marco:
You're right to say it.
Marco:
Like, I don't want to do this.
Marco:
I don't have any need for this in my current app with its current business model.
Marco:
But maybe someday I'll need it.
Marco:
And I certainly would want it to be allowed and available for all developers.
Casey:
And so let me jump in right here because I think what you're saying is important.
Casey:
You personally, who now at this point in your career, have written against the Stripe API, which is the thing that probably most of us would turn to in order to collect money,
Casey:
You have done this.
Casey:
You have enough knowledge.
Casey:
You have already been down this road.
Casey:
If there was any indie app developer that I can think of that would be best equipped to start to not compete with, but you know what I mean?
Casey:
Like go on your own and take money on your own for Overcast.
Casey:
I feel like name me someone at this level.
Casey:
You know, I'm not talking about a huge corporation.
Casey:
I'm saying name me an indie that's better equipped to do this than Marco Arment.
Casey:
And you're saying, and I agree with you for the record, you're saying, I don't think I would bother, at least not for Overcast.
Casey:
And that's the thing, like compete, Apple, just compete and you'll be fine.
John:
And speaking of competition, though, like what Apple's I mean, the thing that would make both of you switch if Apple actually did open up payments to third party payments in a non dickish way is that third parties would pop up and say, hey, we have an in-app purchase flow that looks just like Apple's.
John:
There's an SDK for it.
John:
We have a website.
John:
We'll run it all.
John:
And we just take less of a cut than Apple.
John:
That's called competition because it's not it's not Apple making Marco write his own thing himself.
John:
Yeah, that's onerous.
John:
And then on top of all these restrictions.
John:
But if it was actually open, it was actually a competitive marketplace.
John:
And Apple wasn't maintaining control over the linchpin of its like future, which, by the way, control over this platform is not just for this stuff, but for the stuff you haven't even thought of, like maintaining control of a platform is like we don't even know what's going to be the big thing 20 years now.
John:
So we better maintain that control.
John:
But anyway, if it was open, third parties would pop up.
John:
And they would be third-party payment processors with an SDK for iOS apps that have an in-app purchase flow and features.
John:
They'd have to compete on features.
John:
All the features that you use in an in-app purchase, like free trials and upgrade pricing.
John:
Third parties would make something like that.
John:
And then you'd be like, huh, I don't want to do this.
John:
But insert name of third-party here.
John:
Has a way for me to do it that is actually easier than Apple's and a better experience for my users.
John:
And I don't have to do anything.
John:
And they take a slightly smaller cut.
John:
That's competition.
John:
And that's what Apple doesn't want to happen.
Marco:
Well, and I think we can see it already if you look at purchases on like in web browsers using Apple Pay.
Marco:
You know what's a better experience than Apple Pay for me most of the time?
Marco:
Shop Pay.
Marco:
And I bet Apple doesn't like that, that that's a thing that can exist.
Marco:
But like, you know, it's much harder to control in the web browser.
Marco:
But the reality is like Apple Pay is less reliable and slower and generally a little bit worse for me on when making my purchases than ShopPay.
John:
And has fewer features, fewer features in their UI, for example.
John:
That's another thing that ShopPay has, you know, it's not a complicated form, but it has more buttons and knobs and multiple shipping addresses and this and that.
John:
Apple makes that a little bit more difficult.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so I think, John, you're right.
Marco:
If this was allowed to just happen in-app and not kick out to a browser or whatever, absolutely.
Marco:
Somebody would come along and make the SDK drop-in replacement that could be big enough, theoretically, to actually compete with the convenience and speed and everything about Apple.
John:
apple payments i think it would be pretty easy to compete because you just have to beat 30 right it's not i don't know like there's the 15 and so on but like but the percentages are big right and the the infrastructure that you need is not that much more than the infrastructure than let's say stripe already runs right there's the sda component or whatever but i mean that's part of apple's point is like hey we had to pay to develop ios and
John:
these people didn't have to pay to develop iOS.
John:
They're just mooching off our platform with their, uh, payment processing.
John:
That's, that's their view of it.
John:
But, um, I think the competition on percentage cut would be more than enough to fund a bunch of good competitors.
Marco:
Oh yeah.
Marco:
And, and also, and to be clear, like, you know, going back to like what we're doing, we are plans with our apps.
Marco:
Apple's developer relations department is not this department.
Marco:
Like the developer relations team is not the team that decides the cut and is making these decisions.
Marco:
This is happening, I think above their heads.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
The developer relations team cares about developers like the three of us.
Marco:
The people making these decisions above the developer relations team, I don't even think developers like us even enter the conversation.
Marco:
They are deciding this for people like Amazon, Netflix, Google.
Marco:
They're deciding this for big companies, Facebook.
Marco:
That's what they're focused on because there's so much more money there than there is from developers like us.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
When they're deciding, like, you know, is Casey's List's app, you know, going to have a different payment sheet or whatever, like, that's never in the conversation.
Marco:
They're trying to figure out, like, how can we get 30% of, like, HBO Max or whatever the hell it's called now?
Marco:
That's the scale they're operating at.
Marco:
Like, we don't even register with this decision.
Marco:
And so, but the reality of that, too, is, like,
Marco:
All those big companies, they either never adopted in-app purchase or adopted it a long time ago and then have since dropped it.
John:
Or they're powerful enough like Netflix to essentially wait it out and force Apple to allow them to do something that no other apps are allowed to do, which is to tell you to go sign up on their website or whatever.
John:
There's a bunch of companies that have just...
John:
You know, opted out of the entire system, but they're so big and important that Apple had to make concessions to them with weird provisions like the reader app clause and all that other stuff.
John:
And it's still not great.
John:
It's still worse than it could be.
John:
It's still not satisfactory for users.
John:
It's still not satisfactory for Netflix.
John:
And Apple is probably annoyed, too.
John:
So great.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But again, and this is...
Marco:
It's so hard for me to try to balance my feelings about what this company does and makes because, again, it's a big company.
Marco:
There's lots of different people, lots of different departments.
Marco:
And, again, I have to imagine many people who work there either are really pissed or I honestly think should be really pissed that the people making these decisions –
Marco:
keep dragging the company through so much mud, generating so much negativity in press, in the eyes of regulators and lawmakers, certainly among developers.
Marco:
And it has a pretty substantial strategy tax on the rest of the company.
Marco:
Yes, they are making good money on this growth area of, quote, services slash taxes.
Marco:
They're making good money with that.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Everyone's stock options will be a little bit healthier.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
But
Marco:
How do the effects of that negatively impact the rest of the company and its products and the other things they care about and are trying to do?
Marco:
I think the executives making these decisions are not fully considering that long-term and short-term cost of that.
Marco:
So, for instance, right now, they are launching a brand new platform.
Casey:
That's exactly what I was going to say, Marco.
Casey:
You took the words right out of my mouth.
Marco:
They're literally launching it in two weeks.
Marco:
It's coming out.
Marco:
And I think the developer story on that platform is pretty shaky.
Marco:
So what they really need is a lot of enthusiasm.
Marco:
What they need right at this moment is for developers to be really happy with Apple, both small and large.
Marco:
Now, Apple's actions over the past, you know, decades, especially decade, have really alienated lots of the big companies to the point where the big companies are basically saying, F you, like, why should I develop for you?
Marco:
And it's kind of hard to make an argument against that.
Marco:
And small developers already, like, this is already a tough sell for us because the thing is pretty expensive and it's going to have a small market and all the reasons we talked about.
Marco:
But if you have enthusiasm among that crowd...
Marco:
The reason we all developed for the iPhone up front was a mix of sheer numbers.
Marco:
Yes, there were a lot of iPhones when it first started.
Marco:
But also, we all just were so enthusiastic.
Marco:
We loved the platform.
Marco:
We loved the idea of developing for it.
Marco:
There was a huge, enthusiastic, and highly qualified Mac developer community before that that kind of helped jumpstart the iPhone developer community.
Marco:
It was a huge enthusiasm effort.
Marco:
That's why, even still to this day...
Marco:
Android apps, even though Android has massive volume of the number of devices out there, Android apps tend not to see the level of awesome apps that iPhones get and also the early adopter apps.
Marco:
The early adopter apps usually are iPhone first and they come to Android later or not at all.
Marco:
And there's a reason for that.
Marco:
So developers, yeah, we need numbers of an install base to make it work for us.
Marco:
But enthusiasm for the platform and making things for platforms that we want to use ourselves is really important.
Marco:
And that actually really drives the market.
Marco:
That drives what kind of apps come out.
Marco:
That drives where new cutting edge work is being done.
Marco:
It's a huge important factor.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of factors like that that Apple is just throwing away and violating in many disgusting ways by their actions in this one area.
Marco:
And again, yes, that's why this is a hard thing.
Marco:
When you look at how much money they make and how important that money is for their financial performance, you can see, okay, there's a reason why this is kind of a tense debate.
Marco:
But I don't know how the rest of the company is not rebelling against this.
Marco:
In backchannel, why are these people at the top shitting all over everyone else's work to save this one factor?
Marco:
And by the way, if they gave a little on this rule, they wouldn't lose all of their App Store money.
Marco:
They would just potentially make a little bit less.
Marco:
And even that, I think, is unlikely.
John:
And by the way, I think my personal opinion is that the control part is the most important aspect of it.
John:
But that apparently is not Apple's opinion, because if it was, they can maintain that control by giving concessions.
John:
Right.
John:
Because what you what you don't want is to lose control.
John:
You don't want to lose this, you know, this this linchpin, this this lever that you have.
John:
Right.
John:
especially as I said, because you don't know how important it's going to be in the future.
John:
Right now it's about, you know, 85% of it is selling games.
John:
Who knows what it will be 20 years from now, like, or just like making it sort of accepted that, Hey, we control all our app stores.
John:
So like they'll control the vision pro app store or whatever, like that control is what's important.
John:
it's not so much important that they get this exact percent and allow this to happen.
John:
So like giving concessions that don't give up control, like essentially, you know, doing things on your own terms that seem like they're favorable to developers, but really you don't give up a bit of your control.
John:
And one way to do that, if you make voluntary changes, you can always change them back later.
John:
But if a court tells you that you have to do X, you can't just later and say, Oh, we changed our mind.
John:
We're not going to do that anymore.
John:
Right?
John:
So yeah,
John:
If Apple really believed that control was the most important aspect and not the growth stuff, right?
John:
And not just like the money, right?
John:
Not the pride aspect.
John:
If they really believed, as I do, that the control over the app store is the most important thing to maintain, they should be bending over backwards to maintain that control by doing anything they can to prevent things like governments and lawsuits from making them do anything.
John:
And that's where I think they're really losing on this is I don't even think they would lose any money.
John:
In fact, I think they'd be making more money because of more developer enthusiasm in the medium to long term.
John:
They should be is like saying, what do we have to do to avoid essentially being told what to do with the app store?
John:
And they should give concessions like crazy.
John:
They should give too many concessions.
John:
Give till it hurts.
John:
But the whole time you'd be like, but we voluntarily gave that.
John:
And that means we can take it back, right?
John:
Especially with new platforms.
John:
Like, you know, we keep talking about the iPhone is such a big platform.
John:
Some people are like giving scare stories like they can do the same thing on the Mac.
John:
It's like, no, they can't because there just aren't enough Macs.
John:
Right.
John:
They can do it on the iPhone because the upside is big enough that developers aren't fleeing.
John:
Right.
John:
Billions of iPhone users.
John:
They spend a lot of money.
John:
It's irresistible.
John:
Not true on the Mac.
John:
So I think they literally can't do what they did on the iPhone and the Mac and say, okay, well, you can't buy a Mac App Lessons through the Mac App Store, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like they would destroy their platform.
John:
They don't have that leverage.
John:
They don't have that power.
John:
Vision Pro has no users yet because it hasn't shipped.
John:
When you have a brand new platform, I don't think you can start with the set of rules that's on the iOS App Store.
John:
You've sold zero of them, right?
John:
Wait until you get a few billion, then turn the screws.
John:
Look at Amazon.
John:
You give it all away in the beginning, and then you turn the knobs and start making the money after 20 or 30 years, right?
John:
I mean, maybe don't do it like Amazon did.
John:
But, you know, like that type of view.
John:
But instead, they launch everything with default with the same restrictions as iOS.
John:
Like, maintain the control of the Vision OS App Store.
John:
make sure everything that's in there is because you decided and not because somebody made you but start off with better terms than the platform that has a billion users right but they don't do that they're just like vision west it's just like the ios app store everybody knows and loves it it's great it's like yeah but you haven't sold a billion of them yet or 10 billion i don't know how many iphones like you can't you can't start from that right and you know we talk about game consoles all the time but like
John:
and people like don't understand what the difference is like game consoles do exactly the same thing the difference as i said in the art of the possible thing is like game consoles the people who run those and the people who buy them they figured out an arrangement between the consoles the developers and the customers such that if you were asked the average console user like what their opinion is of their console maker or whatever it's like they they accept the
John:
the way it works they accept the way maybe apple's like we just got to hold out for this generation to die or we'll just accept that how the app stores work but like wow you know developers you know console developers and console makers are incredibly contentious acrimonious with each other and often sue each other and do terrible things or whatever but users are out there going like oh i wish the game was available for my platform oh well this is cross-platform but i like this and game people buy two consoles sometimes and it's like gamers in general don't feel like
John:
there's so little competition in the game console market or that like one particular console owner is keeping, you know, is doing anything unjust as what Apple's doing, but they are, they're doing exactly the same thing.
John:
And it's Apple must be looking at that and saying, but why are their customers and developers able to tolerate this in a way that ours aren't?
John:
Why does it, why does the ecosystem of game consoles look overall happier than our ecosystem?
John:
And it's not fair.
John:
I feel for Apple.
John:
It's not fair.
John:
It's exactly the same thing.
John:
Game console developers are worse, right?
John:
But, you know, like, okay, Apple, if you want it to be like the consoles, figure out a way to make it like that.
John:
And they've been trying, but they've been failing.
John:
Is it because Apple's platforms are based on, like, you know, came from the PC market where the culture was different?
John:
Maybe.
John:
Is it because phones are less like game consoles than Apple likes to think they are?
John:
Maybe.
John:
But whatever the reason, Apple hasn't been able to turn it around.
John:
And they just feel like if we just keep doing this, eventually everyone will be convinced.
John:
And eventually our customers and our developers and everybody will have the type of harmony that we have in the game console market.
John:
And it seems like that's just never going to happen.
John:
So I just, I wish they would...
Casey:
try something different indeed it's just you know marco you had said this a few minutes ago but i just want to reiterate what you said you know here it is apple is in a position that they could really use developers and probably not the indies although obviously i'm going to think about indies as well because that's where we are but they need developers to be enthusiastic about the vision pro and
Casey:
You know, I got to tell you, it's been super easy for me to build a version of Call Sheet for the Vision Pro because I definitely got a dev kit just like you did.
Casey:
Right, Marco?
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I didn't hear of any like I know I heard like that.
Marco:
They went out to like big companies.
Marco:
I didn't hear of any indie developers getting one.
John:
Yeah, same.
John:
And I mean, to be fair, that's probably mostly a wise allocation of limited resources.
Casey:
Yes.
John:
But like maybe they should have given one of the dev kits to Netflix.
John:
Yes.
Casey:
There's that as well.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It still strikes me that – I guess I'm probably – I'm trying to take the emotion out of it and trying to be more logical now.
Casey:
I'm probably overselling the influence of indies.
Casey:
I'm not just talking about me because I mean whatever.
Casey:
I have little to no influence.
Casey:
But like indies broadly –
Casey:
I feel like the way I reflect on the iOS App Store, particularly early on, was that it was the indies that really bootstrapped it.
Casey:
And it was the people, like, I think it was Marco that said it, but one of you said, you know, it was the Mac developers that were enthusiastic about this new platform.
John:
And already knew Objective-C.
Casey:
And that already knew Objective-C that bootstrapped the App Store way back in 2008 or whatever it was.
Casey:
And I feel like there's not a lot of that for the Vision Pro.
Casey:
So Apple is saying, well, you can't have a dev kit.
Casey:
And whether or not that's reasonable, I'm not really saying it's unreasonable, but it's a fact that it makes it more challenging for someone like Marco or me or Underscore to build these apps.
Casey:
So you can't have a dev kit.
Casey:
You can, at considerable expense, go to a lab once or twice, which is good.
Casey:
That is good.
Casey:
And I will say that my lab experience was very good, and I'm probably not even supposed to say that, but here we are.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
You're out of the program.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm out of the program now.
Casey:
So that was good, but you can have a dev kit.
Casey:
You can go at considerable expense and oftentimes considerable distance to a lab.
Casey:
you're going to get your radars filed and fixed immediately.
Casey:
Oh, never mind.
Casey:
We can't talk about radar.
Casey:
And don't worry, the app store is your friend, right?
Casey:
Because look at all the nice things we do for you.
Casey:
It's such an unbelievable amount of hubris to be thumbing your nose at all of these third-party developers that you really need right now
Casey:
And then also the regulators and also, you know, all the legislators.
Casey:
Like, it's just, I cannot believe that they are thumbing their nose at all of these people.
Casey:
So there was a really good, very short post by Tyler Hall called Modern Day Apple.
Casey:
Tyler concluded it.
Casey:
And yet, as I move on to read, this was about two posts from Gruber back to back.
Casey:
And yet, as I move on to reading John's post about the new App Store guidelines, all I can think of is how modern-day Apple is one giant corporate contradiction.
Casey:
The same company that builds the technology to watch a movie in front of a Tatooine sunset is the same company removing all the joy and fun out of the process of building that sunset.
Casey:
Modern-day Apple is its own binary star, one fueled by creativity and another fueled by arrogance.
John:
So that's another one person.
John:
Everyone likes to attach those three things I listed.
John:
Everyone latches onto one of them.
John:
Marco seems to mostly attach to the greed angle of the addiction.
John:
This is attaching to the pride angle.
John:
Arrogance, right?
John:
It's like, what do you see?
John:
What's the Rorschach test of Apple?
John:
You see them making decisions that you think are not good for you personally, not good for the Dell community.
John:
And many people think they're not good for the future of Apple.
John:
If you care about the platform, they should be making smarter moves.
John:
Why are they doing that?
John:
And you personify the company and you say it's because they're greedy, it's because they're arrogant, it's because they have this need for control, right?
John:
I think it's all three of them.
John:
But depending on which one annoys you more, that is the one you will listen to.
John:
This person is clearly more annoyed by the pride slash arrogance angle.
Casey:
And then finally, Brenton Simmons writes, just like the sixth finger in an AI rendered hand, Apple's policies for distributing apps in the U.S.
Casey:
that provide an external purchase link are startlingly graceless and jarring, but not surprising.
Casey:
A reminder that Apple is not a real person and not worthy of your love.
Marco:
I think the indie developer angle that you were talking about a second ago is particularly relevant here because when you're looking at what Division Pro is heading into here with the market, the big companies, I think, are going to be the hardest to convince to develop for it.
John:
You can't even get them to make an iPad app.
John:
iPads are not $3,500.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, and a way bigger install base has been around for a very long time and way less custom work compared to your iPhone app.
John:
Well, they're not $3,500 yet.
John:
We've got to wait for the OLED one.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Again, that's a great market.
Marco:
You look at that market, for example.
Marco:
The big companies are going to instantly uncheck that box that says, make my app available on Vision Pro, and they're not going to make it because it's going to be not worth it because they don't want to have something custom just for this with a small install base or anything.
Marco:
You know who doesn't care about all that stuff?
Marco:
Indie enthusiast developers.
Marco:
We are the ones that Apple needs to make apps for this platform.
Marco:
Now, granted, yes, it would be more impactful to them if they could get somebody like Netflix to work with them, because the Vision Pro, I think, is going to definitely start out as mostly an entertainment device, like movie-watching and experience-based device.
Marco:
And I think it's very wise.
Marco:
We're kind of seeing Apple's initial PR at Launch Provision Pro is really focusing on entertainment.
Marco:
I think that is very wise because the productivity story is just not going to be there for a while, if ever.
John:
Even Apple.
John:
It's not like Apple even ported all of its apps.
John:
They have Keynote and that's it, right?
Marco:
And Freehand, I believe.
Marco:
Or what's the... Freeform.
Marco:
Freeform, yeah.
Marco:
It's not going to be...
Marco:
really adopt it.
Marco:
You're not going to see Google porting over Google Docs and Google Sheets to it.
Marco:
That's not going to happen.
Marco:
All the big companies are going... Imagine the iPad, again, a great example.
Marco:
All the hoopla around trying to get big companies to try to port their apps to the iPad, for God's sake, take away the entire install base.
Marco:
How hard is that argument now?
Marco:
It's indies who are going to be the only ones making apps for this for a while.
Marco:
And indies are willing to put in more work than the numbers justify.
John:
Because the upside to them is potentially, it's not large upside for Netflix.
John:
This means it's a rounding error to Netflix, but to an indie developer or a small developer group, that number that Netflix doesn't care about is life-changing to them.
Marco:
If your entire install base is 500 people and you're trying to get it to be 1,000 people, hey, this could be your path there.
Marco:
Because you know people are going to buy these things.
Marco:
The first year allocation will definitely be sold out.
Marco:
But there will come a time when Apple has to try a little bit to get people to buy this thing.
Marco:
And maybe that time isn't this year because of just, you know, shortages.
Marco:
But like there will come a time and I think it will be pretty soon after these shortages get a little bit lifted.
Marco:
Because again, it's kind of a hard sell to a lot of people.
Marco:
So there will be a time when Apple has to actually attempt to get sales.
Marco:
And at that point, they're going to want a software ecosystem to have been built to try to give people more justifications to buy it.
Marco:
no big company is going to be there so you might as well try to embrace the enthusiast developer community that is there to try to build a library of good software and again everyone else in the company besides the very small handful of people deciding this you know app store tax bs everyone else in the company probably wants this kind of thing too because it benefits them like
Marco:
Obviously, of course, developer relations wants indie developers to have a healthy relationship with the company and to be building great software for their platforms.
Marco:
The hardware makers at Apple who have made these great platforms, they want great software to take advantage of the hardware.
Marco:
They want people to be buying the hardware.
Marco:
They want this too.
Marco:
The software organization, do you think...
Marco:
Craig Federighi really wants to be making the software to that dumb link scare box.
Marco:
Like, do you think like, is that a good use of his time?
John:
He was also the one who said that they shouldn't port iMessage to Android because it might be no longer be a motivating factor for iPhone sales.
John:
So I think when you reach that level of the corporate hierarchy, you're kind of thinking at the C level.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, maybe that was a bad example, but there's all these people putting all this work into making what is almost entirely really great stuff.
Marco:
That's why we're all here.
Marco:
We love this company's product so much.
Marco:
They're so good most of the time.
Marco:
The hit rate's pretty damn high.
Marco:
And then you have this one tiny little asterisk of the company doing all of this damage.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Is it worth it?
Marco:
Is it worth it for the entire rest of the company's efforts to constantly have crap rained down upon them from legislators and the press and users and developers for whatever tiny amount that you're keeping by doing things exactly the way you're doing them?
Marco:
Again, like...
Marco:
This is not great long-term thinking.
Marco:
And it really does a disservice to all the people in the company who are doing really great work on stuff that's really good.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Couldn't agree more.
John:
You mentioned leveraging the Mac developers to bootstrap the iPhone app ecosystem.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I know people probably have already written in this feedback, so I'll just add it in now and you can hear it later when you unpause the show.
John:
Obviously, Apple is leveraging, trying to leverage its entire developer user base of, you know, entire developer community who make apps for iOS and the iPad and to a lesser extent the Mac to bootstrap the Vision Pro.
John:
because it uses similar APIs, uses Swift UI, uses the same language.
John:
Like we've got this ready-made developer base of literally millions of developers who already have apps and we've made it pretty easy to port them over or as easy as possible.
John:
And they already know the language, they're familiar with the tools, they're familiar with the platform, right?
John:
So they should have a massive advantage over trying to bootstrap the iOS app store.
John:
uh but that's not how it feels to you know you know even again even big companies are like yeah i don't know not not into it like you know netflix not making an app they can use the web browser it'll be fine and why not like what what what's changed what's different now is there was huge enthusiasm for the iphone among developers because it was a platform they'd never been able to develop for they were excited about it and the iphone in the beginning i mean first didn't have an app store at all but once it did have an app store the app store did not start off
John:
having a reputation for being developer unfriendly.
John:
It was restrictive, but in the beginning, those restrictions were like, well, these are the limitations.
John:
It's a very young platform.
John:
It's a very new API.
John:
So people were just excited to have their apps on the platform, right?
John:
And that changed over time.
John:
It's the same app store it's ever been, but the attitude about it changed.
John:
And again, that may seem unfair to Apple.
John:
It's like everyone's so excited about the app store in the beginning and the app store now is not that different than it was.
John:
So what changed?
John:
And it's like,
John:
You know, relationships evolve, right?
John:
You just, you have to constantly maintain them and see, you know, it's not just all about the exertion of power, right?
John:
And maybe after many years in the iPhone getting bigger and bigger, you know, maybe Apple thinks it's unfair that developers feel more entitled to more value out of that platform, just as Apple thinks it's unfair.
John:
They say Apple thinks we made the platform unfair.
John:
You should be grateful we're allowing you on it.
John:
And developers are saying, well, you should be grateful to make apps to your platform.
John:
And obviously the truth is somewhere in the middle.
John:
And where that balance is may be unsatisfactory to everybody involved, but you have to find a meeting place.
John:
You have to find somewhere in the middle where you get a win-win and everybody's happy.
John:
And Apple is getting farther and farther away from that.
John:
and on vision pro like despite so many advantages they didn't have with the phone these you know the unity of their apis and their languages and their tools is so much better now than it was then like the developer story for vision pro like that's people aren't not making things to vision aren't you know saying i'm not gonna make it for vision pro because it's a weird new language or they can't figure out the api or just they don't have the skills or no that's all you know ready from waiting for them
John:
But what's, you know, the reason they're not doing is a Apple hasn't sold a lot of them, which, okay, fine.
John:
That's a chicken egg thing.
John:
Apple has to deal with that.
John:
And B, they're like, we've been on other apples, apples, other platforms.
John:
We know what it's like.
John:
And we're, you know, maybe we have a contentious relationship with Apple and we just feel like we have to be on iOS because they sold billions of them, but they haven't sold billions of the vision pro.
John:
And I mean, this is, it gets to the point where, you know, like, uh, Amazon making deals with music companies and everything.
Uh,
John:
At a certain point, the bigger the company is, the more they think is, do we want to give Apple another platform like iOS?
John:
Do we want to help them?
John:
Do we want to help Apple make another platform that would give them as much power as they have for the iPhone platform?
John:
Like, no, because we see what they do with that power and we don't like it.
John:
So why would I help you, Apple?
John:
get another one over on us in a new platform.
John:
We already have to deal with you with the iPhone.
John:
Like we can't, we have to do it.
John:
It's just, we have to be on the iPhone.
John:
You won that one, you sold billions of them, fine.
John:
But I'm not really enthusiastic about helping you do that again, especially if there's some other competitor, some other alternative.
John:
that I think would be better.
John:
Who's right?
John:
Who's wrong?
John:
Will Apple be successful?
John:
Will the company be successful?
John:
When I look at Netflix not having an app at launch, honestly, if you had asked me when the Vision Pro was introduced, do you think there's a possibility there won't be a Netflix app for that at launch?
John:
I would say, no, Apple would never let that happen.
John:
they have apple has let it happen and i put this at apple because like look apple if you can't convince netflix to make an app for vision pro like what hope is there for you like throw money at them do like i'm not you know i'm not saying you have to give casey and marco dev kits but like talk to netflix and get them to it's just a video player it's so easy for them to pour they've already got it if you can't get netflix to do it
John:
man, like what must be going wrong in these, you know, in the big back rooms between these corporate... It's not like Netflix's relationship with Apple is bad, but Netflix is like, eh, wake me up when you sold a few hundred million.
Marco:
Yeah, and like...
Marco:
Ultimately, what this runs the very high risk of is this brand new platform that has massive potential for coolness and amazing new things.
Marco:
The software ecosystem is probably going to end up being like the Apple TV.
Marco:
It wouldn't do this platform justice.
Casey:
No, it wouldn't.
Marco:
They've done such amazing work.
Marco:
It can do some really cool stuff.
Marco:
And because of all of this that they've done over the years with these terrible developer relations and their relationship with big companies especially...
Marco:
The big companies don't want to enable Apple to push them around even more on a new platform.
Marco:
They're like, F it, I'm out.
Marco:
The small developers, we've just been squeezed so many times.
Marco:
There's a lot of us who are also having a similar attitude.
Marco:
The result is really very risky.
Marco:
It runs the risk of this ending up just like the Apple TV.
Marco:
The Apple TV is a great product.
Marco:
I use mine almost every day.
Marco:
I love mine.
Marco:
Yeah, but it's hardly a software success story.
Marco:
Nope, it sure isn't.
Marco:
And if that's all this ends up being, that's going to be a tough sell for such a high-end product, and it certainly does not do justice to its capabilities.
John:
Apple TV has a Netflix app, though.
Casey:
It's true, John.
Casey:
You know, the good news, though, is, Marco, if you're right, and I don't know if you're right, but I think there's definitely a universe in which you're right.
Casey:
But if you're right, and the third-party software ecosystem is lacking, the good news is I'm sure Apple will come back to all of us with hat in hand, humble, and with incredible humility and say, hey, what can we do to make this experience better for you?
Casey:
Surely that's what Apple will do.
Casey:
There's no question.
Marco:
No, there's not a chance of that.
Marco:
But I hope that... The thing is, as much as all these people writing these blog posts are correct, that we shouldn't care about this corporation, the fact is I do care about this corporation.
Marco:
And so I want them to succeed.
Marco:
I'm rooting for them.
Marco:
The reason why we complain about when they do stuff that we think is bad or harmful to them...
Marco:
is because we like this company and we like their products and we care.
Marco:
And it hurts to see something you care about making mistakes or failing or being harmful to itself.
Marco:
And that's how a lot of this stuff looks.
Marco:
That if they would just...
Marco:
give a little on some of these things, you could avoid 90% of these problems, and they won't even give a little.
Marco:
And it's much to their detriment, whether they see it or not.
Marco:
And it's a shame, because it really does do a lot of harm to them that I think they'd be better off about.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so let's try to turn that frown upside down.
Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Seppy Rutten writes, my parents are using iPads and iPhones.
Casey:
I do struggle sometimes to make their devices as easy to use and safe as in prevent phishing as I possibly can.
Casey:
How would you set up a device for elderly people so that it is safe for them to use it?
Casey:
I'm not talking about the standard accessibility features.
Casey:
I need them to use the devices in the most simple or easy ways and prevent them from getting scammed.
Casey:
I...
Casey:
don't have a good answer for this.
Casey:
I know, Marco, you've done this from time to time.
Casey:
And John, you just recently mentioned talking to your mom about voiceover.
Casey:
So maybe let's start with Marco and end with John.
Marco:
I don't have a lot here because what I found over the years, like trying to set up, you know, iPads for my grandparents.
Marco:
It's been a while.
Marco:
They're no longer with us.
Marco:
But earlier in the iPad's life, tried it for a while.
Marco:
And it was always a bit of a struggle because what happened is that they just got more complicated over time.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I would set it up.
Marco:
It would work for a while.
Marco:
Then some weird problem would happen, and I didn't live nearby, so it was a little hard to troubleshoot.
Marco:
It was complicated.
Marco:
I'm hardly an expert in this area, but I found that there really weren't many good options, whether you're looking at different software toggles or restrictions on the iPad itself to different products entirely.
Marco:
In particular, as my grandfather got dementia, we tried to get him...
Marco:
a phone that was simpler that he could just use to call the handful of us.
Marco:
And there have been a couple of these products over the years that are targeted at elderly people who need limited controls and everything to help use things.
Marco:
And even, I mean, this was only, I think, like five or six years ago.
Marco:
It was not that long ago.
Marco:
And even then, there was almost nothing on the market left.
Marco:
So it seems like a fairly underserved market.
Marco:
The products that are there tend to be not good in a lot of ways.
Marco:
I don't really have a great answer for this.
Marco:
I mean, you could do some of the like, you know, the screen time restrictions.
Marco:
Some of that stuff could help a little bit.
Marco:
But ultimately, if you're worried about elderly people trying to keep them from being scammed, you're going to have to be a
Marco:
There are so many scams targeting elderly people, it's disgusting.
Marco:
And they come in through every possible venue, the mail, phone calls, they come in through everywhere.
Marco:
And so that's going to take more vigilance than any software setting you can do.
John:
My advice is to first try to make a clear-eyed call as to whether this is a thing that everyone involved is up for.
John:
Does the person actually want this or do you just wish that they wanted it?
John:
Are they capable?
John:
Is it going to be successful?
John:
Because at a certain point it's not.
John:
Whether the older person is just not into technology or they're not as with it as they used to be or they could do it but they just don't want to.
John:
You won't be successful if you don't meet that minimum bar.
John:
If you think you've met that minimum bar, everyone involved is willing and able to do it.
John:
You're still worried about them being scanned, worry about the complexity.
John:
My best advice of what to do with a device is to just remove everything.
John:
I kind of wish you could just leave three icons on the home screen of an iPad and make them huge.
John:
Unfortunately, you can't, but you can get rid of everything else.
John:
Pair it down to almost nothing.
John:
Rehearse with them.
John:
But the most important thing that you can do, again, if you have a person who's willing and able to do this, is...
John:
to make sure that you have some way to help them or somebody has some way to help them.
John:
Right.
John:
So because I feel like anybody who's dealing with a weird technology thing, if they know that there's someone who they are very comfortable with, who they can contact whenever they have a problem, who will help them out of it, it removes a huge amount of stress.
John:
Right.
John:
Because they're like, something's not working or it's broken or I can't figure it out.
John:
I'll just call Timmy tomorrow.
John:
and we'll get it sorted out.
John:
And you need to have somebody, I mean, and I would say a telephone call is not probably going to be that because if you've ever tried to coach someone through fixing a problem on their iPad when you can't see the screen and you're doing it over a telephone, it is not good, right?
John:
So do you live close to them?
John:
Can you go over there?
John:
uh are they willing and able to do some kind of facetime or screen sharing thing this is one of the one of the legs up that the mac has is if you have a relative for example somehow they have a mac and they want to use it and but they are having problems being able to use screen sharing through iMessage is a godsend i don't think there's a great equivalent for that for ipad i know from helping my own parents with their ipad and very often they're trying to have them holding their phone and doing facetime to the ipad let me tell you that does not work well
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Goodness.
Marco:
Been there, done that.
John:
They live many states away from me, so I can't be that in person.
John:
But I would say making things safe for them is essentially the most important thing is make sure they know someone they can contact.
John:
And I guess the secondary thing is and make sure they know when they should.
John:
So you have to basically rehearse with them.
John:
If you see an email and you think it's weird.
John:
call me.
John:
If you, you know, call me and I'll come over.
John:
If something's broken, call me and I'll come over.
John:
If you can't figure out how to do something, call me and I'll come over.
John:
And if this is sounding like a lot of work to you, yeah.
John:
But this is the most important thing.
John:
Having a human being who they trust accessible to them at all times so that if they have any question, any doubt, any frustration, they can call on you and you can come help them.
John:
And that is really the only way to make this work.
John:
Because if you think there's a software setting that's going to prevent phishing, I'm sure IT departments all over the world would love to know what it is.
Casey:
You know, I was thinking about it when I think it was Marco said, you know, you can't have, or one of you said, you can't have a huge phone icon on the home screen.
Casey:
Maybe it was John.
Casey:
I'm sorry, John.
Casey:
But anyways, I was thinking, wait a second, that is possible now.
Casey:
What the hell was that called?
Casey:
And thank you to Abelops20 in the chat who pointed out it's assistive, what is it, assistive access, I believe that's called, something along those lines.
Casey:
And so there is a mode you can choose to turn on, I think,
John:
think it's already out where you can do a lot of this stuff and just remove other apps and make the home screen basically like a table view of different apps it's no it's no longer springboard and it is a separate thing so it's kind of like at ease for the old mac users i was thinking like when on spring with springboard only has three icons that you should be able to just like make them bigger but you can't
Casey:
oh man this would have been great yep this would this would be super helpful so check that out uh moving right along wilson martinez writes could you explain why some apps that have no audio or video stop a playing podcast or music when open for example the levi's denim shop app or that maybe maybe that's not the right name but we'll put a link in the show notes um i i don't know other than maybe it's i think can't you marco can't you ask it to be
Marco:
abduct yeah okay so here's here's the reason so the way ios apps work with audio you have to tell the audio framework like all right here's the kind of audio i'm going to play and you can say all right i'm playing long form talk or i'm playing brief sounds or i'm playing sound for a video like you can you can give it like there's a few different categories and each of those categories has different behavior and you can set certain flags you can say for instance like what you were
Marco:
just about to touch on casey you can say like hey if some other app plays a sound while i'm playing my music you can duck my music down like reduce the volume let that sound play over it and then bring my volume back up that's called that's what ducking is or you can say like in the case of a podcast app you don't want to be ducked because you don't want like you know your ways direction to be like turn left ahead talking over a podcast you want the podcast to pause let it say turn left ahead then resume the podcast and
Marco:
There's all these different options you set, but the reason why certain apps will stop background audio dead on their tracks is if they just use these APIs wrong.
Marco:
So when you are about to play audio, you can set all those flags on the audio session whenever you want.
Marco:
You can say, all right, the types of audio I play are this, this, and this.
Marco:
Here's how I want to be treated.
Marco:
But then when you are about to play audio, you have to activate the session.
Marco:
Activating the session can occasionally block the main thread.
Marco:
It can occasionally fail in weird ways, depending on conditions.
Marco:
It can occasionally cause weird little snags.
Marco:
So some lazily written apps and frameworks, and especially ad frameworks, some of them will, upon launch, just activate the session.
Marco:
which the system doesn't know yet that you're not playing audio.
Marco:
All the system knows is you activated the session.
Marco:
And therefore, anything else that was playing audio that said, don't duck me or don't mix me with other apps, those all get paused.
Marco:
The answer to the question is why certain apps that don't appear to be playing audio will stop other playing audio in their tracks is they program their audio session calls wrong and they're activating their session before they're actually needing to play audio.
John:
You're telling me the Levi's app isn't well-written?
Marco:
Shocking.
Casey:
And then finally, Syfe Khan writes, Apple is so close to making a HomePod mini Wi-Fi router.
Casey:
Why don't they just make HomePod mini into a mesh router network?
Casey:
I mean, I get you, but they're just out of the router game, unfortunately.
Marco:
Yeah, this is the problem with the router business and the idea of combining it with either HomePods or Apple TVs.
Marco:
This is always what people are saying.
Marco:
Why don't they turn the Apple TV into a router or turn the HomePods into meshes?
Marco:
There's two big problems with this.
Marco:
Number one is that to make good routers these days, it's kind of a bigger play now.
Marco:
To make good mesh router, you need the whole meshing technology.
Marco:
That's a whole thing.
Marco:
Routers now have all these services you can add on for ad blocking and stuff, and it's kind of a big deal.
Marco:
To be competitive in that market, they would have to spin up a decent amount of a business unit to really do that.
Marco:
I'm not saying that can't or shouldn't, but it would be kind of a big deal to do anything that would matter in the market.
Marco:
Then the second big problem is...
Marco:
Where people place HomePods or Apple TVs often is not where you would place a router.
Marco:
Now, the idea of a mesh network is better than the original ideas that people would come up with, like turn your Apple TV into a router, because like at least then you can kind of place them everywhere and they can kind of act as a big network of repeaters.
Marco:
But like most people would not be so lucky that the ideal placement of their Wi-Fi access points happens to be where they would also want the HomePod.
Marco:
So finally, the HomePods are already expensive enough compared to their peers and adding more hardware into them for Apple to keep their same margins.
Marco:
And we know they're going to do that to add more hardware into it to do another function would probably bring that cost up even further.
Marco:
And that would not be good for that market.
John:
And it would be way bigger.
John:
Like, people don't realize that, like, oh, why don't you just make it a router?
John:
Like, you've already got a little computer in there.
John:
That's enough, right?
John:
Like, no, you need, first of all, you need all the analog electronics, antenna stuff or whatever.
John:
But then the whole rest of the thing, like, if you look at the size of, like, an Eero router, and they're among the smaller ones that are good mesh things, they're already bigger than a HomePod Mini.
John:
And there's no HomePod in there.
John:
There's no speaker.
John:
And you would think like most of the HomePod mini is taken up with the speaker, and it is.
John:
But now you have to take – you've got the speaker and the magnets and everything, and now you need Wi-Fi antennas and all the other stuff.
John:
It would make it bigger and more expensive.
John:
I think Apple should make a mesh router system, period.
John:
No need to combine it with your Apple TV or your HomePod or whatever.
John:
And if they wanted to incorporate it into the big HomePod, they could.
John:
But honestly, that's really kind of like a turducken situation where it's like –
John:
but like why are you making like what if someone just wants a big home pod are you making them pay for in space and cost the wi-fi router right like you have to it narrows your market so you now need someone now you need someone who's willing to pay the extra money and the exercise for this thing that they might not want so it seems like it's a good idea but it's not like you're gonna oh we just get it for free and all these home home pod minis that we sell like how many home pod minis do you think people are buying anyway like they're not scattering them throughout their house
John:
And if they were, it's probably because they're small and cute and they wouldn't be if they had a Wi-Fi router in there.
John:
So it's sad that Apple no longer makes Wi-Fi routers for youngsters who don't remember.
John:
Apple used to do that.
John:
And they were pretty good.
John:
But that was way before the mesh network time.
John:
It was a simpler time.
John:
Right.
John:
And they did combine, you know, the time capsule thing.
John:
They threw a whole hard drive in there.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Right.
John:
But and even that, I think, was probably not a great selling product for the reason that I stated, because one of you didn't want both of those things, but they sold one without it.
John:
They sold a separate one as well.
John:
Like, so it is harder now.
John:
I think it's something Apple should do, especially with their focus on security.
John:
I think ceding that entire market to companies like Euro was foolish, especially now that they've been purchased by Amazon.
John:
But instead, Apple's trying to make a car.
John:
are they still doing that i can't imagine i mean it's not dead i believe me if they cancel project titan and lay off all those people we'll hear about it i mean but didn't they cancel it like every two months like it just it seemed like they were always reorganizing it it's just it's changing kind of like the the vision pro project like oh apple's making ar glasses right that was like the rumor you know eight years ago or whatever and if they're still making them this is not glasses but
John:
Like, what does the product actually become?
John:
What is the original idea?
John:
Hey, we should do something with AR, VR, XR, whatever.
John:
What actually ships this?
John:
The car, Project Titan, who knows what it's been in the past, but I don't think it's currently dead.
John:
Because again, when you lay off that many people, it's kind of hard not to notice.
John:
But anyway, they've invested a lot of time and money in that.
John:
And in the meantime, I'm using Euros.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Notion and Squarespace.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
Bye.
Casey:
So last week, I think it was, I don't know when it was, it was sometime, we were talking about trucks.
Casey:
So it was about your Rivian, Marco, and we were talking about trucks.
Casey:
And you had said, oh, I think you at some point had made mention that your Rivian is a truck.
Casey:
And I did not blink an eye.
Casey:
Now, to be clear, your Rivian is not the R1T, which has a bed, like a pickup truck.
Casey:
Yours is the R1S.
Marco:
It is an SUV.
Marco:
Right.
Casey:
Strictly speaking, it is an SUV.
Casey:
And my local friend, Brad, who is born and raised in Virginia, and I think Erin would have said the same thing if she listened to the program.
Casey:
But nonetheless, he was getting all worked up about how wrong John was.
Casey:
I think it was John was saying, oh, you know, or one of you was saying, oh, if you put gas in Marco's truck, it's going to stink up the truck.
Casey:
And Brad drives a pickup truck and was like, what are you doing?
Casey:
talking about, you absolutely will not stink up the truck if you put gas in the bed.
Casey:
And we were going back and forth via text message about this for a minute, and I was like, why are you so worried about this, Brad?
Casey:
And then it occurred to me, oh, Brad heard truck, and he heard pickup truck.
Casey:
Now, maybe it was me that said it, maybe it was Marco, but I thought it was Marco that said it, and I didn't blink an eye, because to me,
Casey:
A truck is anything that rides higher than a sedan, right?
Casey:
It's anything that rides up in the sky, you know.
Casey:
And I understand that, strictly speaking, there's a difference between a pickup truck and Aaron's, you know, Volvo SUV.
Casey:
I get that.
Casey:
But colloquially, I just think of a truck as anything that's taller than my Volkswagen Golf.
Marco:
So is an El Camino not a truck?
Casey:
Oh, that's a very good question that I was not prepared for, but I don't think it is actually.
Casey:
I think it's just a truck.
Marco:
Neither is a Subaru brat.
Casey:
Deep cotton and I'm here for it.
Marco:
I would also bet the El Camino is definitely not a car though.
Marco:
Like what?
Marco:
I mean, no one, no one ever knows what it is.
John:
It's an ugly, dumb car.
Casey:
Isn't that what the Aussies call it?
Casey:
But anyways, but yeah, it got me thinking.
Casey:
And I was curious what you're in, you know, channel robot or not here.
Casey:
I was wondering, what is a truck anyway?
Casey:
And I'd like to start with Marco and then John is as the official, you know, robot or not historian slash participant slash host.
Casey:
You can give us the actual answer.
Casey:
But Marco, do you agree with me that a truck is just anything tall?
Casey:
Or where do you sit on this?
Marco:
What I agree with is different from how I use it, and I'll tell you why.
Casey:
Okay, fair.
Marco:
I am with the truck purists that SUVs are not trucks.
Marco:
In my opinion, the modern SUV, including the R1S that I drive, that is an SUV.
Marco:
That is a different thing.
Marco:
And if you say, like, oh, I got a truck, I think most people would reasonably assume that you got a pickup truck.
Marco:
The problem is, I don't know how universal this is across the country, but where I live...
Marco:
First of all, where I live on the beach, everyone drives either SUVs or trucks because you have to because regular cars can't make it out here.
Marco:
So it's like it is the vehicle that everyone has is one of these two things.
Marco:
But also, everyone here calls them both trucks.
Casey:
Okay, so I'm glad you said that, because my theory, which I don't have anything but anecdated to prove, my theory is that it's a Northeastern thing, and I'm sure John is bursting, so I'll give you a chance here in a second, John, but my theory is that it's a Northeastern thing, that anything that rides tall
Casey:
is a truck.
Casey:
Now, I've already gotten some feedback on Mastodon because I put a poll up on Mastodon asking this very question.
Casey:
And some people said, you know, maybe not so much like Zach Katz said that they're from Vermont and they think it's exclusively a pickup.
Casey:
But then again, I mean, Vermont is basically Canada, so who knows?
Casey:
And so maybe my theory is wrong, but I feel like anyone that I talk to around here, the
Casey:
vehemently says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
A truck has a bed or, you know, there's semi trucks and things like that.
Casey:
But, you know, amongst a civilian, regular people, cars, it, a truck has a bed and SUV is not a truck.
Casey:
And I get that like from the strictest definition that is accurate, but I use truck colloquially to mean anything that's tall.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the problem is, like, I agree with those people, but no one around me does.
Marco:
And so, like, you know, when like and everyone is here, everyone here is always talking about each other's vehicles.
Marco:
It's always news when someone on the beach gets a new vehicle and everyone wants to talk about it.
Marco:
And they will constantly, hey, how's the new truck?
Marco:
Like, that's that's how they refer to it.
Marco:
So, like, there's only so many times that I can try to steer it like.
Marco:
oh the yeah the the Rivian it's great you know yeah it's a it's a great new SUV like you know there's only so hard you can steer that conversation when everyone around you is using this word this one way it's out of your control really so if I I don't even remember if I actually said that because I don't think I do that by default but if I did that's why because I've had to start talking that way so people around here like so I so like they know like I fit in with the language here
Marco:
Like that is that is the language that people speak here.
Marco:
They call them all trucks.
Marco:
And I disagree with it, too.
Marco:
I think it's wrong.
Marco:
But that I've had to start speaking that way around here because everyone does.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, John, is it is it a truck or is it not?
John:
So as with a lot of these things, a lot of these robot or not style things, context really matters.
John:
The context of discussing a neighbor's purchase is very different from the context of if I give you like, you know, a card sorting thing, like here's a bunch of vehicles, sort them and decide what headings you want.
John:
in a car magazine a car and driver um they might divide things up into cars trucks and suvs uh if like like sections of like a review or talking about things uh and the suvs are going to go suvs and the trucks are going to go under trucks right so you may look at that and say well you know that's problem solved like we have our answer the trucks are under trucks and the suvs are not under there they're under the suv section but the context of a car magazine is very different
John:
Yeah.
John:
But I do know that, oh, first of all, when I say it in this program, I'm usually saying it in a derogatory way to talk about Marco's big truck, you know, or his, like, big pocket truck thing or whatever.
John:
But I think about things like...
John:
extremely truck-like SUVs, let's say.
John:
So things with very flat, upright fronts on them, like if you think of older Toyota 4Runners, that's an SUV, right?
John:
But if you saw a Toyota 4Runner pull up or whatever, you might casually refer to it as a truck, right?
John:
Or you might not, right?
John:
But it might be just like a truck-like car.
John:
But like in those contexts, people aren't in the same mindset as sort these things into categories, make a hierarchy, make a taxonomy, right?
John:
When you're in that mindset, I think even the people, Marco's neighbors, would –
John:
If they were given, especially if they were given categories that said car, truck, SUV, they would sort out most of their neighbor's stuff under SUV.
John:
And think about Jeep, for example.
John:
Are Jeeps trucks?
John:
Well, they're not cars.
John:
They're Jeeps.
John:
Do I need to put a new heading that says Jeep?
John:
Well, if you sort them under cars, trucks, or SUVs, maybe there'd be some debate.
John:
But it's not clear cut, right?
John:
And I'm kind of surprised to hear that I referred to the R1S as a truck, but when I think about it, I probably did it either A, in the derogatory way, or B, in the kind of, if that's not a truck-like SUV, I don't know what it is.
John:
It's got straight sides, it's a front, you know, it's just like, it is a big rectangle, and it's very truck-like, right?
Marco:
Yeah, and the differences between the R1T and the R1S are not, like, they're not massive differences.
John:
Yeah, they're the same car under the cover.
John:
It's not like, oh, it has to be body on frame to be a truck.
John:
It's like, no way.
Casey:
Which, by the way, that's what Greg Pierce said.
Casey:
And I thought that that was a very interesting distinction.
Marco:
But very outdated.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, aren't there a lot of pickup trucks that are not body on frame anymore?
John:
They all, like a huge amount of them are, right?
John:
So speaking of pickup trucks, that's the big factor here.
John:
I don't think this is a Northeast thing necessarily, but here's the thing.
John:
In the parts of the country where the pickup truck reigns, which is not the Northeast, although it's more than it was when I was a kid, but it's still not the Northeast.
Marco:
It is Long Island.
John:
No, not like, think about like, you know, the Midwest.
Marco:
Long Island is the south of the north.
Casey:
Oh, man, shots fired.
Casey:
Oh, this is going to be good.
John:
We still have way too many Mustangs and really old Oldsmobiles to account for that.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
That proves Marco's point, for goodness sakes.
John:
No, no, that's a northeast thing.
John:
It's totally different.
John:
No, it is not, John.
John:
In the parts of the country where the pickup truck reigns,
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The truck car distinction in the land where the pickup truck is like seemingly more than half the vehicles on their own is extremely important and extremely specific.
John:
That's why I think your friend in Virginia is probably part of that culture of like truck means a truck.
John:
Manly men buy trucks even though they're stupid and they don't need them and they're most idiotic vehicles on the world.
John:
Oh, shots fired.
John:
They buy them.
John:
And the bed shrinks and shrinks and the rest of the car gets, it's just, it's the world, it's like before SUVs became less convenient cars, trucks were the less convenient cars than they still are, right?
John:
They're going to spend $100,000 on the world's worst four-door sedan with a tiny little bed in the back, right?
John:
But it is so important that you know that they have a truck and you will hear them use the word truck
John:
exclusively when referring to their vehicle whereas i feel like marco will interchangeably say he's never going to say suv but he might say i left i left my iphone in the car yeah and go get it out of his r1s it does and for the record it does feel weird whenever i refer to it as my car because i'm it's not what i think of as a car but you do because you're like it's not important for you to say to somebody oh i left it out in the truck
Marco:
Yeah, but I'm not going to say I left it in the review because it makes me sound like a douche.
John:
If you were in the land of the pickup truck, it would be really important for you and the world to know that you have a truck and not a car because that would be part of your identity.
Marco:
And by the way, there is a lot of that on Long Island, a lot more than I think you realize, John.
John:
Well, it's probably worse than it was when I was there, but yeah.
Casey:
And in Brad's defense, I don't think he's one of those people that defines his existence around his pickup, which is, what is it, a Ford Ranger?
Casey:
I don't know pickups for nothing, but it's the biggest Ford that is not the F-150, which I think it's a Ranger.
John:
And by the way, lest you think that, I mean, I think trucks are dumb, but lest you think that I'm being derogatory towards people who have part of their identity wrapped in their truck, when I refer to my computer, you can be sure that I say it's on my Mac.
John:
I'd never say it's on my PC.
John:
I never say it's on my personal computer.
John:
I always say it's on my Mac.
John:
It is important to me to make that distinction in the same way that it is important to pickup truck people to say that they own a truck and something is on their truck.
John:
I always say my Mac.
John:
So I'm not saying that everyone has parts of their identity wrapped up in different things.
John:
Mine is a lot wrapped up in the fact that I have a Mac and not a PC and not a personal computer and not just a plain computer.
John:
It's a Mac.
John:
So, you know, we all have our thing.
John:
Pickup trucks are not mine.
Casey:
In retrospect, I should have gone back and listened to the segment to see if either one of you actually did refer to the R1S this way.
Casey:
And maybe it was only me and maybe I'm the one.
John:
I can totally see myself doing it because, I mean, it looks like a Tonka truck.
John:
It's a big yellow, you know, like it looks very much like a Tonka truck if Tonka trucks were SUV-ish.
John:
And it is a very trucky SUV.
Yeah.
Marco:
Really, it's a failure of language that SUV is this clumsy three-syllable thing.
Marco:
That's also fair.
Marco:
We don't really have a good word for them.
Marco:
Is it Australia that says Utes?
John:
We should just be calling them cars at this point because of the majority of vehicles sold and have been for so long.
John:
Discounting pickup trucks, sorry.
John:
I just exclude them from the entire category.
John:
For things that aren't pickup trucks, they're all SUVs.