Weird Can Be Beautiful
Marco:
oh my god i can't wait i'm like one week away from being moved in to the new house seems unlikely oh wow john real vote of confidence there i keep thinking back when uh when we asked remember we first asked marco when he thought his house would be done and they were like
Marco:
they're telling me like october i think yeah i think he said october maybe maybe a month after that if they run a little late i don't remember the exact quote but yeah i believe i was i was feeling like i was being conservative and saying it might be as long as thanksgiving you didn't say the year though oh god goodness that ain't right oh my god we're so close we're so close that's exciting that's very exciting does your house have bathrooms now
Marco:
almost well it has bathrooms one week and we've got almost bathrooms i think those are that's an important part of the house last okay last time i was there which was admittedly like a day and a half ago uh they had working sinks but the toilet had not been installed yet so that's most of a bathroom let me tell you about the most important part of the bathroom well it's not the sink
Casey:
We have a lot of news with regard to the show.
Casey:
Happy news.
Casey:
Great news, even, with regard to the show.
Casey:
We are making some happy, great changes to the membership program.
Marco:
We've been purchased by Apple.
Marco:
Some happy news.
Marco:
We're sunsetting the show.
Marco:
We were given a truckload of money.
Casey:
How many truckloads of money would that take?
Casey:
It would take a fair... Well, for Apple, it would be nothing.
Marco:
But for us, it would be several truckloads.
Marco:
It would be a drop in the bucket for them.
Right.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Anyways, John has been the mastermind of this in the way that John is really, and I mean this in a good way, not in a bad way at all.
Casey:
John has taken over the show in the best possible way and is just making changes all over the place.
Casey:
And again, this may sound bad.
Casey:
It is not bad.
Casey:
I am super here for this.
Marco:
This is incredible.
Marco:
Since John left his day job,
Casey:
It was the best thing that could ever happen to Marco and me.
Marco:
I think I even made this joke last time, but we now have a fully operational Syracusa working only on this show.
John:
You don't even know the right Star Wars quote to reference there, but you're doing it by accident now.
John:
It's fine.
John:
He didn't mean to reference it, people listening.
Marco:
No, I was trying to reference it, and I couldn't remember the whole thing.
Marco:
Is it fully armed and operational?
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
Pretty good.
Marco:
we'll get there I didn't consider this weaponry so I didn't include the armed part sorry anyway so we now have a fully operational Syracuse working only on this show and it is glorious because he is not only extremely capable but also extremely motivated so we're seeing like a lot I do other things Seinfeld reference so what have you done recently John alright so here's the pitch we here at ADP
John:
are always trying to improve the membership program.
John:
Why do we do that?
John:
We want people who are currently members to be happy and stay members.
John:
And we want to entice new people to become members.
John:
So here is the change we're making now.
John:
Actually, before we get to that, just to review, last year in the membership program, we did a bunch of stuff in the same vein.
John:
Last year, we decreased the price of annual membership.
John:
Everybody loves that.
John:
We released more member specials.
John:
In fact, we've been doing one per month starting since like last summer.
John:
uh we added gift memberships and then we added the very weird atp patron program for our very weird but very amazing atp patrons don't insult them i said they are weird but they are amazing weird can be beautiful anyway so here's here's our latest uh wonderful change that uh casey oversold to make it scary what did you say like happy wonderful great change when you said have that many positive adjectives it sounds sinister it's not sinister at all okay no not sinister not at all
John:
here is what we were announcing today uh atp overtime uh what the heck is atp overtime well uh first let me tell you what it does it solves the problem this show has had since basically the very beginning a problem you may not be aware of unless you listen to the bootleg but we are very aware of so we've got a document that we confusingly call the show notes which is the document that the hosts look at that has what we're going to talk about in the show in it and it's just one document and we updated you know before each show and
John:
And it's got a list of topics and stuff that we're going to talk about.
John:
And that list of topics essentially only grows.
John:
We delete them after we talk about them on the show.
John:
But that topic list is always it's pages and pages.
John:
And when news breaks or something exciting happens or whatever, we we prioritize the topics, try to talk about what we think is the most important, exciting, interesting topics.
John:
But what happens is there's never enough time in the show to fit all the topics.
John:
And I know you're making jokes about how long our shows are, but I'm telling you, even with our shows being as long as they are, there is never enough time to fit everything in.
John:
We always have to end up cutting stuff.
John:
And some of that's really good stuff.
John:
So ATP Overtime is the solution.
John:
It is a new segment that comes after the after show for members only.
John:
It's for stuff that we think is...
John:
We want to talk about, but that hasn't fit into the show.
John:
The target length for this segment, and you feel free to quote this to us in years to come and laugh at us, is 15 to 45 minutes.
John:
That's what I say the target is.
John:
Because if it's only 15 minutes, we'll do 15 minutes.
John:
If it's 45, but I don't want to push, we're not making the show like 12 hours long, right?
John:
We'll see how we do.
John:
ATP overtime is main show content.
John:
So anything that would be in the main show is potential for overtime.
John:
uh a topic is the obvious choice because again we we the topic list where we stop recording the show there are pages of topics below them some of them are super old and no longer relevant but it's a shame because some of them were really good back when they were relevant we just never got to them atp overtime is not the after show the after show is where margar talks about getting his truck stuck in the sand on the beach it's where casey talks about cracking his windshield with his ipad even if he talked about that in a pre-show anyway
John:
overtime is not the after show the after show is anything goes total random stuff about our lives atp overtime is just a bit more atp it's tech stuff here's why we think atp overtime is good for members it's just more atp presumably if you're a member you like atp how about a little bit more but the point is it's a little bit more atp it's not another two hour show we're not going to bury you in atp the shows are already long enough
John:
There's just a little bit more, a little bit more.
John:
And it's stuff that we think is worth talking about.
John:
Because believe me, there is never a shortage of topics or, you know, Ask ATP or any of the things that we end up having to cut out of the show.
John:
We are going to pick the very best ones of those and get them into overtime.
John:
So they don't end up getting pushed off the bottom of the topic list by...
John:
a million different things apple does with relation to the eu's dma for example for a recent example so once again this will be in the members only episodes after the after show it'll be in the edited episode after the after show it'll be in the bootleg after the after show no matter how you listen to your members only content you will get over time and it will always be at the very end of course there will be a chapter marker
John:
So that's it.
John:
We hope this will keep members happy because they get a little bit extra stuff.
John:
And we hope this might entice you to become a member because, hey, you're getting a little bit more ATP.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
We are really excited about this.
Casey:
We'll see how we do in terms of not going for 14 hours each night because Marco and I at least will probably be snoring at the microphone if we go that long.
Casey:
But like John said, 15 to 45 minutes, hopefully closer to 15, but we'll see what happens.
Marco:
I would guess closer to 15 most of the time.
Casey:
Yeah, but John, now as a member, I'm worried.
Casey:
What's happening to the member specials?
Casey:
Are those going away?
John:
Member specials are still there.
John:
In fact, we just re-released the member special moments ago, and it's a very special member special.
John:
So it is now, I think, well-established that this is a...
John:
unintentional running gag instead of an actual system uh the way we name members member specials is we have like a prefix that's like atp something colon and so if you've been a member for a while you know we do like atp tier list colon every iphone atp top four colon laptops right it's always some kind of prefix and then a suffix but we have too many freaking prefixes so now we have to come up with a member special like
John:
oh what is the prefix for this one it's not it's not a movie club it's not an eats it's not a top four it's not a tier list and so we just keep making new prefixes and we've done it again this one is atp insider john's windows longtime fans of the show might know what that means uh we had a uh well-loved episode uh way back at episode 96 when was that in 2014 maybe
John:
uh it was either 2014 i think it was 2014 uh anyway uh in that episode in the after show i believe uh marco and casey were dumbfounded to learn some of my habits uh with my windows in mac os and for years people have been asking uh john can you show us how you use windows i don't quite understand i listened to that episode and i don't understand what the heck you're doing and i'd always say i can't show you how i use my windows they'd be like just send me a screenshot or make a movie or send a screenshot or blur out every window and it's like i
John:
I can't do that.
John:
I can't show you all my Windows on my screen because I got all my personal stuff in it.
John:
And I can't do a screenshot and then try to blur everything out.
John:
It's just a nightmare.
John:
But I figured out a way to do it.
John:
And you'll have to listen to the member special to see it's a kind of silly solution.
John:
But I make an attempt to tell you and show you how I use Windows on my Mac, how I've used Windows on my Mac for my entire life, starting with a 9-inch screen and moving all the way up to this gigantic 32-inch screen that I'm staring at now.
John:
um there is a video version i would encourage you to watch it as with all these member specials that have video versions if you just look in the show notes for the regular audio only podcast episode there will be a link to the video of the episode it's a youtube video link uh it is unlisted please don't share that link with non-members because the whole idea is supposed to be members only but we have no real way to do that
John:
anyway you can listen to it audio only we tried real hard to describe what we're seeing but to get the full experience i encourage you to watch the video as well that was a heck of an audio edit by the way yeah the audio version is substantially shorter than the video version because there's so much like here's what i'm doing see well it's it's really hard to like continue to describe a bunch of rectangles
John:
yes yep yep that's very true also one final thing i updated the membership fact which probably no one looks at but on your member page or on the join page or a million other places there's links to the membership fact i've got to the point now where i'm like should i rename membership fact to be like membership guide or membership help because do people even know what faq means in fact how many times have i said membership fact on this show and someone is saying what is he saying membership fact
John:
membership fat what is he saying faq frequently asked questions or file of answers and questions depending on what uh expansion so anyway uh it's at atp.fm slash membership slash faq and i'm trying to add more and more information there to explain all of the things that you get with membership because i just had to add a section for overtime obviously
John:
So if you have any questions, you can check that out.
John:
And if you want to become a member, finally, if you heard all this and you're like, yes, I'm sold, I want to become a member, ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
Thank you to all of our members that have already joined.
Casey:
Thank you to the future members.
Casey:
And thank you especially to John, who has really been spearheading a lot of the work over the last few months.
Casey:
And again, I am so here for it.
Casey:
And I know I'm speaking for Marco when I say that.
Casey:
It turns out you're doing your homework and you're doing your research.
Casey:
I'm here for it.
Casey:
Now that you don't have another job, this is great.
Casey:
This is working out great for Marco.
John:
Oh, one more thing about overtime.
John:
I forgot.
John:
We will announce in some format that is yet to be determined what we're going to talk about in overtime in each episode.
John:
So each episode at some point, I forgot to talk to Marco about this before the show, but that little thing that you say at the end before the after show, we have to come up with a script for that where you have a place to...
John:
stick in what the overtime is going to be about.
John:
But yes, at some point in this episode, one of us will say what the overtime is going to be about.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And to continue our sports metaphor, we'll fumble through it until we get it right.
Casey:
Well, well done.
Marco:
Well done.
Marco:
You guys would have been very amused at something I was doing earlier this afternoon.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There was a wonderful episode of the App Stories podcast by Mac Stories where Federico and John were talking about app design trends.
Marco:
Trying to look ahead at what iOS 18 might have in terms of app design trends.
Marco:
Because this is very relevant to me right now as I'm working on this rewrite to Overcast.
Marco:
I've already decided I'm not going to release it before WBDC because I kind of want to see whatever iOS 18 brings before I make any set, shipped design decisions.
John:
Stitch leather everywhere.
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, so they mentioned like they were like, oh, let's look at Apple's recent apps to see maybe some guidelines of where I'd be going.
Marco:
And they were looking at Apple Sports and Journal.
Marco:
And you should have seen me trying to navigate the Apple Sports app as somebody who does nothing about sports.
Marco:
So first of all, you download the app and I'm like, all right, I guess I got to start using this.
Marco:
The app, while it looks good, is based on a lot of gestures that are not obvious.
Marco:
so that stumped me but then the biggest problem was in order to see any content in it you have to tell it what teams of what leagues you're interested in seeing the games for so it presents the list of leagues and i'm first of all like uh i guess let's see like what what's a league i recognize these are all these different world sports leagues that most of which i've never heard of so i'm like i find like you know whatever the american ones are and i'm like
Marco:
uh i guess baseball okay click on baseball i guess yankees sure i know i know yankees i'm in new york i read daring fireball uh so i picked that and there's like no games oh i guess baseball is not currently happening
Marco:
So then I have to go back to the roots.
Marco:
Which of these leagues are currently playing?
Marco:
I'm pretty sure football's over because the Super Bowl happened a little while ago.
Marco:
Well done.
Marco:
So I'm like, it took me a few tries to find which of these is a sport that is currently playing.
Marco:
I ended up finding American soccer.
Marco:
So anyway, the process of me stumbling through sports trying to figure out the most bare minimum of like, name one sport that is currently happening.
Marco:
I couldn't even do that.
Marco:
Oh, you're a sports fan?
Marco:
Name a sport.
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, I'm very proud of you, Marco, for diving into sports.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, so Overtime, perfect name for us to use.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Aye, aye, aye.
Casey:
All right, so let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Thank you for bearing with us again, ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
Thank you so much.
Casey:
All right, follow-up.
Casey:
Call sheet is now available on Vision OS.
Casey:
Hey, congrats.
Casey:
We don't need to belabor this.
Casey:
I just wanted to call attention to it.
Marco:
No, we should slightly labor it because...
Marco:
You shipped a new version of your app.
Marco:
Look, I can tell you as somebody who attempted and then failed to make a native Vision version of my app, that's no small feat.
Marco:
That is a significant workload.
Marco:
Bring your iPhone app to Vision OS.
Marco:
is significantly more work than bringing most iPhone apps to iPad.
Marco:
Because it's such a different thing, and the way it looks is different, the way you interact with it is different, what's important is different.
Marco:
So this is not a small thing.
Marco:
This is at least a medium-sized thing.
Marco:
So please, continue.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
It took a lot.
Casey:
It's not flawless, but I'm pretty happy with it.
Casey:
I think it looks pretty good.
Casey:
I'm still tweaking it.
Casey:
I was making a bunch of changes earlier today.
Casey:
It was funny because it went from actively embarrassing to...
Casey:
eh, I can at least ship this to TestFlight to, okay, I can make this public relatively quickly.
Casey:
Once I got out of actively embarrassing, then it was pretty fast for the rest of the way.
Casey:
And I think it looks pretty good.
Casey:
And I think it fits in pretty nicely.
Casey:
I think it's a pretty good platform citizen.
Casey:
It is a native app, to be clear.
Casey:
It is not like...
Casey:
an iPad app running on the Vision Pro.
Casey:
You can tell when that happens because the iPad apps in compatibility mode or whatever they call it are in light mode, whereas Vision Pro native or Vision OS native apps are in dark mode, if you will.
Casey:
And that's not literally the case, but that's like the presentation, the way it looks like.
Casey:
And so, yeah, this is a dark mode, if you will, app.
Casey:
And I think it looks pretty great.
Casey:
And I think it works pretty well.
Casey:
And you do not need to repurchase if you've already purchased and subscribed via one of the other platforms.
Casey:
it will just carry right over.
Casey:
It should do so automatically.
Casey:
In fact, it shouldn't need you to manually go in and restore your purchase or anything like that.
Casey:
So getting your pins and all that stuff and recent searches should all carry right over because that's all iCloud.
Casey:
So yeah, check it out.
Casey:
A couple of caveats.
Casey:
First of all,
Casey:
One of the features on iOS is you can change the icon on the iOS app and the iPad app and so on and so forth.
Casey:
That is literally not possible in VisionOS right now.
Casey:
You may only have one icon on VisionOS.
Casey:
There is the API that you use as an app developer to change the icon.
Casey:
they tell you to kindly pound sand that's not available on Vision OS.
Casey:
So you're stuck with the icon I chose.
Casey:
And the icon I chose is different.
Casey:
It's one of the alternate icons that my friend Steve had done, which you can change the iOS app to that same icon if you're a subscriber.
Casey:
But the default icon, which I also love by our dear friend Jelly, that one didn't really lend itself as well to a circle because all the icons on Vision OS are circles.
Casey:
And so I chose a different one that Stee had done.
Casey:
And so it's a kind of blue, similar clapperboard, but it's a blue background.
Casey:
And it looks, at first glance, you might think, oh, who's trying to steal Casey's app and steal his thunder or whatever.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
The icon is just different on Vision OS.
Casey:
But yeah, it is available now.
Casey:
So go check it out.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Marco:
Yeah, big congrats.
Marco:
And now you can justify your purchase of a Vision Pro.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
I had to get it for my work.
John:
I have to say, when we talked about you getting Vision Pro, I was like, oh, well, your app is ideal for it.
John:
Imagine if you could have a video player with call sheet right next to it.
John:
You have that already in record time.
John:
Like it was just like a musing fantasy of like, oh, no, if you're going to be able to do that or it might be a pain or what is it going to be like to develop for Vision OS.
John:
And here we are not too long after the release of Vision OS.
John:
And one of your screenshots was like, look, video with call sheet next to it where I'm looking up the person who's in the video.
Marco:
You even beat the coming soon environments that are in the environment picker.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
I will take that to my grave.
Casey:
So, yeah, you can check that out on the App Store.
Casey:
A personal friend of mine, Sam Davies, had some – well, a lot of people had some follow-up with regard to put me on aux.
Casey:
Most – it was a smattering of, you know, yes, this is 100% a thing, and no, that is 100% not a thing.
Casey:
But –
John:
Nobody said it was 100% not a thing.
John:
It's just people who didn't know it themselves.
John:
But I think even the people who didn't know it themselves can Google and say, okay, it's a thing.
John:
It's just not a thing that they were aware of.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
But regardless, Sam wrote, my 13-year-old's take on Put Me on Aux, quote, that's something an old person would say.
Casey:
I'd just say, can you approve me on the SharePlay?
Casey:
Well, first of all, I find it a little funny that there's the there on the SharePlay.
Casey:
But nevertheless...
Casey:
I am impressed that any human of any age knows that SharePlay is a thing in the car.
Casey:
So, I mean, I have used it once or twice, and it does work well, but I am very surprised that even the kids these days are aware of SharePlay as a thing.
Casey:
So I was very impressed by that.
John:
Or at least one kid.
John:
Somewhere an Apple marketer is smiling.
John:
One of the interesting things about the feedback was where is the age cut off between people knowing it and not knowing it?
John:
i learned it from my 16 year old uh and it seemed from most of the feedback especially families that had multiple kids that the kids who were 15 or 16 knew it but the kids who are 10 or 11 didn't now here's the question part of the reason put me on aux is so cool is because it's like the kids who are saying it who are 15 most likely never actually had to use an aux cable like they're living in a bluetooth age but they know it so that means they got this term passed on to them from you know somebody who was older probably so
John:
So when those 10 year olds turn 13, 14, 15 or 16, are they going to then learn and adopt this phrase or is it going to be rejected?
John:
Because you'd be like, oh, maybe this is the younger generation will never use this.
John:
But already, I think the current 15 year olds are a younger generation that must have picked it up from an older generation.
John:
So it does have some transference.
John:
So tune in, I guess, in five years to find out if those 10 year olds know about put me on ox when they're 15.
Casey:
One of our gates is finally over.
Casey:
The 256 gigabyte M3 MacBook Air has two 128 gigabyte NAND chips.
Casey:
So if you recall prior versions of the Air, and I think as the Pro as well, I forget exactly the timeline.
Casey:
I mean, maybe the M1 MacBook Pro, it was good, but the M2, it was bad or something like that.
Casey:
But what ended up happening was...
Casey:
They decided to use a single 256-gig chip in certain circumstances, obviously, if you're buying a 256-gig computer.
Casey:
And people found that the SSD writes in particular, I believe, or maybe it was both, I guess it was both, were quite a bit slower because you're not kind of rating it, if you will, not in a literal sense.
Casey:
But you're not splitting that across two different chips.
Casey:
It's one physical component.
Casey:
And so in teardowns, we've learned that the 256 gig M3 MacBook Air, like I said, has 228 gig NAND chips.
Casey:
So as per MacRumors, the SSD in the M3 model achieved up to 33% faster write speeds and up to 82% faster read speeds compared to the SSD in the M2 model.
Casey:
So that's pretty cool.
John:
yeah and this is interesting because what i had heard about the the decision to go with one chip in the m2 model was that i was you know as with many of these things debated heavily internally uh obviously one side being that it's you know it's cheaper to get just the one chip uh you know because of economies of scale and everything like that but like but aren't you worried about the speed hit and i the decision to go with this is based on look in real world tests of people doing things that we know people do with their laptops there's no way they'd be able to tell different
John:
sure if you do a disk speed benchmark you'll see it but in actual real world tests of doing real things is not noticeable but in the m3 generation apparently there was enough complaints about this on the internet that despite apple's you know supposed determination that it didn't make a difference the fact is people who write articles do run benchmark tests and it doesn't look good so i'm glad they reversed this decision even if it quote unquote wasn't needed
Casey:
All right, we've got an interesting bit of Project Titan rumor with regard to chips.
Casey:
Mark Gurman had a post up, I don't know, sometime in the last few days, and it was kind of... I have not noticed these before, but I think they've been around for a while.
Casey:
It's kind of like a live blog sort of thing, and at 2.27 p.m.
Casey:
or whatever day this was, Gurman writes, "...perhaps reluctantly, the Apple Silicon team was heavily involved in the Apple car project.
Casey:
Remember, the most important part of the car was its AI brain."
Casey:
The chip Apple developed was nearly finished.
Casey:
It was equal to about four M2 Ultras combined.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
What now, John?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So these Q&As with Gurman, like just so many things.
John:
Look, if you have this information, write it in an article, perhaps reluctantly.
John:
Is there some story about the Apple Silicon team didn't like the car project?
John:
And are everybody saying perhaps reluctant?
John:
Like, why would they be reluctant?
John:
They're the Apple Silicon team.
John:
Their job is to make Silicon for Apple products.
John:
The Apple car was going to or whatever they're doing was going to be.
John:
Anyway, like, just drop that in there, whatever.
John:
And to not mention this in the actual article because it didn't seem interesting.
John:
So.
John:
To recap, what we've been waiting for is essentially two Ultras combined into a quad because the Ultra is two Maxis stuck together.
John:
And two Ultras would be like four Maxis stuck together.
John:
And the original rumor back when the M1 was on the drawing board and we had the rumors about Apple Silicon Chips was that there would be the Jade 4C die, which would be two M1 Maxis.
John:
two M1 Ultras or four M1 Maxes combined.
John:
And that would be in the Mac Pro.
John:
We never got that chip.
John:
In the M2 generation, we also never got that chip.
John:
In the M3 generation, presumably we will continue to not get that chip for the Mac Pro.
John:
But this rumor is not for two Ultras, but for four Ultras.
John:
And saying this chip is equal to four Ultras combined is just saying like roughly how many transistors, silicon, whatever.
John:
Again, no details are given in this very brief Q&A.
John:
The only thing this makes me think is, well, first of all, they said it was nearly finished, which means it was not finished.
John:
So we're not entirely sure what this would have turned out to be.
John:
And second, when doing car computers for, like, self-driving stuff, a lot of those transitions, I imagine, have to be spent on GPU slash neural engine type of stuff.
John:
If you look at the, like, the silicon that's in, like, Tesla's self-driving system, a lot of stuff with NVIDIA's machine learning, AI stuff, it's a lot of transistors spent on stuff that is...
John:
not as useful to like for example a desktop computer like a mac pro because presumably a mac pro is not being used to do self-driving i you could squint and say well it's gpu power and you want a big gpu so this would be like a mac pro with a giant gpu and isn't that what you want maybe but uh the gpus and self-driving things are not being used to uh render you know 3d scenes they're being used to uh do machine learning stuff so i don't know what to make of this except to say that uh a
John:
Apparently, they thought they were going to sell more $100,000 Apple cars than they were going to sell $8,000 Mac Pros because if they're willing to even go down the road of designing something that is twice the size of what we wanted in a Mac Pro chip and say, well, we can justify that because even though it's expensive and even though we're not going to sell a lot of them, we're going to sell enough of them in our rumored to be $100,000 car.
John:
that we think this is worth doing or this could all just be a misunderstanding about a test mule that had some big monster silicon setup that was never going to ship for real who knows uh but anyway the entire apple car project was canned so i'm glad the mac pro project continues to exist uh my fingers are crossed for an m something chip uh in the mac pro that is not the same as that same m something chip
John:
in the mac studio but again i don't think that's going to happen this year and the last rumor we got about it was uh was that not until after the m7 it was that even a possibility but we'll see we'll see if that rumor is true all right so john if you are a resident of the european union and you use alternative app stores what happens if you come to say the states for a while
John:
Don't worry.
John:
Apple's thought of that.
John:
If you thought they would just let you keep using your stuff, why would they do that?
John:
Unless someone is forcing them to.
John:
We'll have more on that in a minute.
John:
According to an Apple document, if you leave the European Union, you can continue to open and use apps that you have previously installed from alternative app marketplaces.
John:
Alternative app marketplaces can continue updating those apps for up to 30 days after you leave the EU.
John:
And you can continue using the alternative app marketplaces to manage previously installed apps.
John:
However, you must be in the European Union to install alternative app marketplaces and new apps from alternative app marketplaces.
John:
seems kind of punitive uh you can't even get updates if you've been gone for 30 days you can't install unless you're in the eu why why because they think people are going to go to the eu install an alternative app marketplace and then like on their own vacation and then use it for the rest of their life in the u.s i suppose but we'll see how that goes
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Apple writes, following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including our Digital Markets Act policies.
Casey:
As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accept it into the Apple developer program.
John:
That's quite a statement given the emails we read on the last show.
John:
Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules.
John:
Epic just showed us an email where they said, we are going to follow the rules.
John:
And then you canceled their account.
John:
So I think the conversation that you had that changed this, Apple, was probably with the EU and not with Epic.
John:
Because I imagine Epic has been saying the same thing.
John:
We'll totally follow the rules this time.
John:
You should totally believe us.
John:
You wanted written assurances.
John:
Here's a written assurance.
John:
Oh, you canceled our account.
John:
Some stern words were had behind the scenes, I guess, between the the European Commission, whatever thing and Apple.
John:
And as a result, Epic has its account back.
John:
And this seems like this is the way this is going to go, where we kept wondering, hey, Apple's done a bunch of stuff for DMA compliance.
John:
you know it does their proposed plan comply is the eu happy with it they say yes apple you complied with our rule and the answer is they're not going to come out and so far they're going to come out and say no apple you haven't complied apparently there's this behind the scenes conversation that's resulting in apple making changes and we'll have more of them in a minute and this is such a weird way to do things because it basically makes apple do stuff and then a few days pass then apple says you know this thing we said we're going to do yeah we're going to undo a couple of that okay
John:
And then you wait a few days and they say, oh, and that other thing that we did, yeah, we're going to undo that too.
John:
To a degree that I was really shocked about in this next item.
John:
But before we move on to that, one tidbit Gruber posted about this and he linked to some confirmation that essentially Apple says that they didn't know
John:
that Epic had gotten a dev account back, like that Epic just went through the normal channels.
John:
And even though there was like a three day gap between when they signed up for when they got it, Apple didn't really know about it.
John:
Epic had assumed, hey, we waited three days.
John:
They gave us a dev account.
John:
Apple has approved us.
John:
Right.
John:
But apparently Apple says we just didn't notice that they got a dev account.
John:
And as soon as we noticed,
John:
Well, this is the weird thing.
John:
And as soon as we noticed, we sent them an email that said, hey, can you tell us that you're going to comply?
John:
And then they said, yes, we'll comply.
John:
And then we canceled their account.
John:
That's the story Apple is sticking to at this point.
John:
It doesn't really make sense to me because I feel like if you didn't notice they got an account and you didn't want them to have an account and then you notice they got it, you just immediately cancel it and not send them an email and say, hey, we noticed you got an account.
John:
Are you going to break the rules?
John:
Please tell us you're not going to.
John:
Oh, you tell us you're not going to?
John:
Canceled.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like, you know, John Gruber and Ben Thompson were talking about this on Dithering.
Marco:
Jason Snell had a great bit about this on Upgrade.
Marco:
Even if you accept Gruber's assertion that Apple did not know about the account being created and then when they learned about it, then Phil sent that letter.
Marco:
I don't think that changes how incredibly badly Apple slash Phil Schiller totally bungled this.
Marco:
And I say this with a lot of love for Phil as an executive.
Marco:
And from what I understand, he's done a lot of things there that I really very strongly agree with.
Marco:
And I love what he did with product marketing as far as I have heard about it.
Marco:
But it's really hard to look at the handling of this situation and say that he needs to lead the App Store further because he either made a huge mistake or was really badly thrown under the bus by someone higher than him, presumably Tim Cook.
Marco:
And either way, he can't keep running the App Store.
John:
I think he can keep running the app store, but like, but here's the thing.
John:
He did that.
John:
And then a few days later, like between our episodes of our show, guess what?
John:
It doesn't matter because it got reversed.
John:
And why did it get reversed?
John:
Following conversations with Epic, Apple says?
John:
No, this is all backroom stuff that I guess the EU is saying to Apple, these things you're doing, we don't like them.
John:
And so undo them.
John:
So despite all this thing, oh, you accidentally made a count.
John:
Oh, we'll do this back and forth.
John:
Oh, you're canceled.
John:
Oh, guess what?
John:
You're not canceled.
John:
And Epic, of course, is touting this as a victory.
John:
He says, see, the EU stuff works because they did a thing we didn't like, and then yada, yada, yada, EU talks to Apple, and now we have our account back.
John:
It's just not going great for anybody here.
John:
Even for Epic, I feel like Epic's getting jerked around.
John:
I feel like the EU doing things behind the scenes, we really are supposed to be settled.
John:
You pass these new guidelines, Apple tries to comply with them.
John:
I would like there to be a point where...
John:
We come to a stopping point where it says, okay, now the EU agrees that what Apple is doing is compliant with the DMA, but we are not there yet, not by a long shot.
Marco:
You're right about that, but I cannot help but look at the situation that just happened with this Epic account.
Marco:
Why was it necessary for Phil to respond or whatever, reach out to Epic?
Marco:
Why was it necessary for that email?
Marco:
And wouldn't this situation have been a hundred times better looking for Apple if the only response between Apple and Epic was that lawyer's letter saying, we're not going to allow you for past behavior and not citing these stupid tweets?
Marco:
Because the way they look now, first of all, they look...
Marco:
a little bit ineffective because they tried to do something and very quickly got smacked down by the eu that's how it looks to the outside so you know they look they look weak and bumbling but also they look petty and vindictive they literally put it in writing that they are severely retaliating against the developer for publicly criticizing apple think about what that means
Marco:
theoretically if i was smart i would never say anything about apple again because my business is an app in the app store and what apple has just shown is that they will and i mean look we've known this for a while jason did a lot a good bit on this on upgrade but we know there's a lot of people on apple who have thin skins and they they will like you know get mad at people and be a little bit vindictive and
Marco:
behind the scenes.
Marco:
But this is them putting it in writing in a very high-profile legal case.
Marco:
This is them showing the world, if you criticize us, we will retaliate.
Marco:
And that is, first of all, going to put them in legal hot water, I think, very easily.
Marco:
There's no way Epic doesn't bring this up in a lawsuit.
Marco:
There's no way.
Marco:
But also...
Marco:
Think about what that does to the culture around Apple commentary and developers.
Marco:
Most developers who are smart would never talk about Apple publicly.
Marco:
I do it because I'm an idiot.
Marco:
But most people should not be doing this because we know if you insult Apple, that can impact things like press access for journalists.
Marco:
That can impact review unit access for developers.
Marco:
That can impact whether you ever get featured again in the App Store.
Marco:
We know this.
Marco:
We've heard this.
Marco:
We've sometimes experienced this.
Marco:
But for them to actually go as far as terminating a developer account, using that as a large part of the justification why, that is a very different level.
Marco:
Whoever the highest up person at Apple...
Marco:
who approved that lawyer's letter, using that as an example, should take serious heat for that.
Marco:
The scale of this blunder, both legally and for reputation for developers and everyone else, like...
John:
that's this is not a small blunder this is a huge blunder and it's so unnecessary like such an own goal i don't think it's as bad as you think i don't i don't even think it's as bad i don't even think it's bad legally at all i mean it's embarrassing because it makes you look you know childish and human which people are right but here's the thing uh
John:
People have litigated this nuance, and I think it is true.
John:
Apple didn't say they were terminating their account because they made mean tweets.
Marco:
No, they actually did.
Marco:
They said that.
John:
No, they didn't.
John:
They said, in the past, you intentionally broke the rules, and during the time you intentionally broke the rules, you were making mean tweets.
John:
Now you're asking to have an account back and you're making mean tweets.
John:
We see that as a pattern of behavior where last time you said mean things about us and then you intentionally broke the rules.
John:
This time you're saying mean things about us, but you're saying you're not going to break the rules.
John:
We don't believe you account terminated.
Marco:
That is a wonderful excuse.
Marco:
But the reality is they terminated the account citing that as the reason.
John:
Right.
John:
But they didn't say that was the reason they were citing a pattern of behavior.
John:
And the pattern of behavior is you intentionally broke the rules in the past while behaving the same way.
John:
Here you are behaving the same way you did then.
John:
Therefore, it's basically a justification of why don't we believe you?
John:
We don't believe you because you're doing the same thing you did last time when you broke the rules intentionally.
John:
Right.
John:
And here's the other thing.
John:
Epic didn't just say mean things about Apple.
John:
And then so they get their account terminated.
John:
Epic has sued them, continues to sue them, continues to battle in court, continues to appeal the things that they have done.
John:
Like it's way higher level than honestly, as they should.
John:
But I'm saying it's not the same as like, oh, if you if you say mean things about Apple, they're going to like, you know, retaliate and do mean things to you.
John:
if you sue them multiple times over that is a lot the fact that you can sue them and you continue to have a developer account at all is pretty amazing in the grand scheme of things because in general once one company sues another company or you have some lawsuit against apple uh it's expected that you're not going to be their favorite person the fact that apple let epic continue to have account at all is probably because they thought it would be bad for the legal case but anyway i i think this is not quite because people do say mean things we say mean things about apple apple doesn't hate us right
Marco:
I mean, I don't think we're universally loved.
John:
You know, the people you cited, Jason Snell, John Gruber will constantly say, well, call out Apple when they do something bad and they continue to have access to Apple executives and get review units and stuff like that.
John:
So it's not as cut and dry.
John:
I know it's bad to see the mean tweets cited in there, but technically and legally, they were trying to cite a pattern of behavior to say, hey, and why do they need to cite anything?
John:
They could have just said, we're terminating your account because as established in our lawsuit, blah, blah, blah.
John:
We're allowed to terminate your account if we feel like it.
Marco:
That would have been much better.
Marco:
I'm not so critical of them terminating the account.
Marco:
I'm critical of the communication that led to it and the reasons they cited in doing it.
Marco:
They really could just terminate the account because Epic violated the rules last time.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
That could be the only reason.
Marco:
They could say, you created this account, we found that it was you, you're out.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
But first of all, the Shiller letter, which I think that back and forth with like,
Marco:
prove to us you won't do it.
Marco:
They say we won't do it.
Marco:
And then they say, not enough, you're out.
Marco:
That back and forth.
Marco:
That was just petty.
Marco:
That entire situation would have been better if the Schiller email never happened.
Marco:
Huge own goal.
Marco:
That Schiller letter never should have been sent if they were just going to kill the account anyway.
Marco:
And then secondly, when they killed the account, the fact that they cited critical tweets that themselves were not breaking the agreement.
John:
As a pattern of behavior.
Yeah.
Marco:
That's a flimsy, very flimsy argument.
John:
That's how they explain it in the thing.
John:
I'm not making this up as interpretations of what they literally say.
Marco:
No, I know.
Marco:
It was flimsy when they said it, too.
Marco:
They should not be appearing to be capricious and petty and vindictive on personal levels like a tweet critical of them.
Marco:
Because, again, think about what that communicates to not only developers, but also to regulators and lawmakers.
Marco:
That's not good for them.
Casey:
That's the thing to me, is that I think...
Casey:
I can see a reality where it's exactly what John is saying.
Casey:
And I think that is how they meant it is that, oh, this is a pattern.
Casey:
This is an example of pattern.
Casey:
This is why we're cutting you off.
Casey:
But I think the thing that I find most discouraging is that they are so devout in their belief that they are entitled to and owed what they think they're entitled to and owed from the app store that
Casey:
That everything else is cloudy to them.
Casey:
It's so crystal clear to Apple that they are owed this.
Casey:
We owe them because without their platform, we wouldn't exist.
Casey:
Leaving aside, that also works the other direction, but we'll just forget about that for now.
Marco:
How's the Vision Pro app market going there, Casey?
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
I mean, but without Apple, we would not exist.
Casey:
And so we owe them.
Casey:
And I think that the thing that's so frustrating to me is that they're so tunnel-visioned on this.
Casey:
They're so myopically obsessed with this that they can't step back and see the forest for the trees, the trees for the forest, whatever the turn of phrase is, and realize, and this is what I think you were saying, Marco, this looks bad.
Casey:
bad even if it was done with good intentions like i a hundred percent buy that they genuinely had no idea that epic sweden had gotten a developer account i bet that's all automated it's a little weird that it took over the weekend for to get approved but i'm still i can still buy that that was an automated honestly that's what the normal parameters developer accounts take multiple days to get approved often that's especially over a weekend that's fine and i think that's totally irrelevant like that detail is totally irrelevant to the story
Casey:
Yeah, and so, like, I don't think they're completely full of it.
Casey:
I think it's just that they are so obsessed with this we are owed, we're friggin' entitled, that they just can't see how gross this looks.
Casey:
Whether or not it's legal, whether or not it's moral, I think everyone seems to agree it's just gross.
Casey:
And that's the thing that just stinks.
Yeah.
Casey:
But, you know, it is what it is.
Casey:
We should move along.
Casey:
We have a lot to talk about.
Casey:
We have more options for apps distributed in the European Union.
Casey:
So Apple has announced we are providing more flexibility for developers who distribute apps in the European Union, including introducing a new way to distribute apps directly from a developer's website.
Casey:
Whoa.
Casey:
Developers who agree to the alternative terms addendum for apps in the EU have new options for their apps in the EU.
Casey:
The alternative app marketplaces can choose to order a catalog of apps solely from the developer of the marketplace.
Casey:
So you can have a Facebook-only app store or an Epic-only app store.
Casey:
When directing users to complete a transaction for digital goods or services on an external web page, developers can choose how to design promotions, discounts, and other deals.
Casey:
The Apple-provided design templates, which are optimized for key purchase and promotional use cases, are now optional.
Casey:
So I should back up a half step.
Casey:
I believe that what Apple said was, hey, if you're going to link out to a web page or what have you, you must use either this design or one of these handful of designs.
Casey:
I forget the details.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And that is the only choice you have.
Casey:
And now they're saying, well, no, you can do what you want.
Casey:
Although we have strong suggestions about what you might want to do, you can do it how you want.
John:
But that is definitely the less interesting of the two points here.
John:
What you just read through quickly is what we were talking about back when we were wondering...
John:
how is Apple going to allow sideloading in the EU?
John:
Are they actually gonna allow people to go to a webpage and click on something and get an app installed on their phone?
John:
And when they came out with their DMA compliance, we're like, no, they're not going to allow it.
John:
But now here they are, again, Apple saying, we're providing more flexibility.
John:
Why?
John:
Why, Apple?
John:
Why are you providing more flexibility?
John:
Probably because of discussions with the EU, let's say.
John:
Again, all happening behind the scenes with no announcement from either party, but this is a radical change.
John:
to Apple's DMA compliance.
John:
Instead of a third-party marketplace where you need to have a million dollars and you have to post other people's apps and yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, all these things that we talked about back when they first came out with their plan.
John:
Now it's like, well, okay, that, but now you don't need a million dollars.
John:
And by the way, also, you can literally sideload from a web page.
John:
That is a big change, a huge change, a gigantic change.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And first of all, I think even though third party app stores did not have a lot of chance before, I think this kills them.
Marco:
Now that the larger, well-known apps can theoretically just distribute through their websites, I don't see how there's a market for alternative app stores after this.
Marco:
It was already going to be difficult, but that's it.
John:
There might be.
John:
So the one thing they haven't changed is the core technology fee, which really makes this whole economically dodgy.
John:
And the user experience of having a third-party app store might still be desirable.
John:
We'll see how this shakes out.
John:
But we don't know where this ends.
John:
Is this the end?
John:
Is this what it's going to be like?
John:
Or next week, is there going to be another change?
John:
Apple started off with your starting bid.
John:
It's like, we think this is compliant.
John:
And then slowly, gradually, over the days and weeks...
John:
apple has been chipping away or the eu has been chipping away what apple wanted to do and said apple you said you wanted to do this that and that well no you got to back that off and you got to back we don't know what's happening on scenes all we know is apple is loosening up progressively and this is the biggest the biggest one they've done which is like that whole scheme about third-party app stores how about you just let people install from web page just
John:
Still going to pay the core technology fee and a bunch of other restrictions that we're going to get to.
John:
But by the time you listen to this episode, will the restrictions we're about to list still be in effect?
John:
Who knows?
John:
Stay tuned.
John:
Who knows?
John:
So what does it take?
John:
If you want to distribute from your own website, if you want to distribute an iOS app from your own website that goes right into people's phones, what do you have to do?
Casey:
Web distribution available with a software update later this spring will let authorized developers distribute their iOS apps to EU users directly from a website owned by the developer.
Casey:
Apple will provide authorized developers access to APIs that facilitate the distribution of their apps from the web, integrate with system functionality, backup and restore users' apps, and more.
Casey:
For details, visit Getting Ready for Web Distribution in the EU, which we will link in the show notes.
Casey:
I don't think that you need to have an account for this, like a developer account for this, but you might.
Casey:
Anyway, continuing along, to be eligible for web distribution, John, you must be enrolled in the Apple Developer Program as an organization incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the EU or have a subsidiary legal entity incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the EU that's listed in App Store Connect.
Casey:
and or i'm not sure if this is an and bullet or nor bullet but the second bullet is it's an and thank you uh be a member of good standing in the apple developer program for two continuous years or more and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on ios in the eu in the prior calendar year apple's always pulling out the restrictions
John:
yeah so the two continuous years in good standing that means not you epic and uh have an app with more than one million first annual that's just like we don't want a lot of people to do this one easy way to do that is say hey you need a million installs in the eu in the prior calendar year it doesn't say you need a million installs of any specific app you just like whatever you just need to be
John:
Like they want to eliminate the vast majority of potential people.
John:
So you have to have an account for two years and you've got to have some app that's successful enough to have a million installs in the EU only, not worldwide.
John:
That narrows the field down so much.
John:
If you think you're like a hobbyist developer and you're like, I'm going to make an iOS app and I'm going to distribute it from my homepage.
John:
No, you're not.
John:
Because first you need an app with a million EU installs in the prior calendar year.
John:
So go do that, which is really easy to do, let me tell you.
John:
And then come back and now you can distribute an app from your web page.
John:
So despite the fact that Apple has given so much and said, we're going to let you distribute apps from the web.
John:
But most people know you can't.
John:
Here's a bunch of rules.
John:
You don't need a million euros in the bank, but honestly, it might be easier to get a million euros in the bank than to quickly get a million installs in the EU from the iOS app store, even with a free app.
John:
Good luck.
Casey:
Yeah, very true.
Casey:
Uh, yeah.
Casey:
The other thing is the, the core technology fee, which is the thing where you owe, what is it like 27% or no, no, no.
Casey:
It's a dollar or I guess not a dollar.
Marco:
That's the half euro per install per year.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Um, that is applicable over 1 million first annual installs, right?
Casey:
So they're basically saying you will be paying us the core technology fee.
John:
Well, no, because you could just cancel that app.
John:
So you could have a successful free app in the regular app store in the previous calendar year that you get a million installs.
John:
Then you just cancel that app and don't make it anymore.
John:
And then you start like it's it's just arbitrary and nonsensical.
John:
There's nothing about having a popular app that makes you more worthy of being able to distribute app from your Web page or something.
John:
Right.
John:
like if anything the things that are able to get a million installs in the eu are probably like you know scam apps with big come-ons that can get a lot of installs with their free app to try to sell you their weekly subscription or something it's just it makes no sense and like i'm hoping by next week the eu will have talked to apple about this and said yeah that's not really what we meant you get rid of like why don't they just meet with each other and say let's just work together until we get to a point where the eu says okay apple you're compliant this back and forth is ridiculous
Marco:
Well, I have a feeling that's how this change happened.
Marco:
I mean, if you look at the timeline of this, this is effectively direct sideloading from a website.
Marco:
Yes, with restrictions, but it's sideloading.
Marco:
It's not alternative app stores.
John:
I know, but they're announcing these incremental steps.
John:
Like every time Apple has a concession, they announce a new thing.
John:
Like just...
John:
Figure it all out at once.
Marco:
Well, that's my theory is their first plan.
Marco:
They thought that this should be sufficient to satisfy them.
Marco:
The EU somebody in somewhere in the world, whether it was, you know, somebody like Spotify or like Epic or somebody or just the EU Commission itself decided not good enough.
Marco:
Let's apply some pressure and negotiate behind the scenes.
Marco:
And Apple had to then, you know, give this up to.
Marco:
And that's why it's not there yet.
Marco:
And it will be added later.
Marco:
You know, so this is obviously what's happening here is like Apple's trying to do the least possible to comply and make it as restricted, difficult and expensive as possible for anybody to do that.
Marco:
Hopefully nobody will actually do it.
Marco:
And then the rest of the industry sees that and says, uh, that's too difficult, expensive and complicated to be practical.
Marco:
And therefore you're not really following the law.
Marco:
They go lobby the EU commission and,
Marco:
Stuff happens behind the scenes.
Marco:
Pressure is applied in various ways.
Marco:
Politics happen.
Marco:
So that's probably what's happening here.
Marco:
And I think this is going to be a process that lasts months or years, because even after Apple finally kind of reaches some kind of stasis with the European Commission.
Marco:
then lawsuits and lobbying will continue in the background and stuff will change.
Marco:
And over time, they'll have to make more changes or they'll be pressured to make more changes or new legislation will be drafted or some other regulator somewhere else or somewhere nearby or somewhere within there will make a new regulation.
Marco:
This is going to keep going forever until Apple relents in larger ways that they probably are not going to do unless very, very forced.
John:
So there's these really huge fines that are possible under the DMA.
John:
It's like 10% of worldwide revenue or something, which is more than Apple makes in the entire EU because they make like 7% of their revenue in the EU, but they could be fined 10%.
John:
But when does that happen?
John:
Apparently what they tried before wasn't compliant.
John:
Is this thing that they've said now compliant?
John:
At a certain point of going back and forth, I feel like when are they in violation?
John:
I forget what the timeline is.
John:
Maybe there's some deadline of like...
John:
it just this process is dragging on i wish i wish they had could work it out amongst themselves before announcing it like there's no reason apple needed to even announce their plan publicly they could have given the plan to i know it's not the way it works the eu wants you to but anyway like i feel like it would be better if they two of them got together and did not leave the negotiating table until they both agreed that what they had to announce was compliant and then apple could just announce it once but instead we're doing this onesie twosie thing where slowly apple is chipping away at its terrible plan to be slightly less terrible
Casey:
On the one side, I applaud them for embracing web distribution.
Casey:
But on the other side, like you.
Casey:
Embracing?
Casey:
Well, I think that's what they're doing.
Casey:
Fair, fair.
Casey:
Enabling, I guess, is a better word for it.
Casey:
Even that's a stretch.
John:
Those videos are like you're trying to drag a toddler off to take a nap, and they're just actually literally dragging their limp body on the ground.
John:
That's what Apple's doing.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
But no, I mean, I'm glad that this is something they're, you know, approaching, investigating, whatever, enabling.
Casey:
But golly, so many gotchas, so many caveats, so many asterisks, so many daggers and double daggers and so on and so forth.
Marco:
And again, it's by design.
Marco:
Like they really don't want anyone doing this.
Marco:
And it shows.
Marco:
And that's why it's going to just keep being this back and forth.
Casey:
And again, I don't want to belabor this, but it's really too bad because I feel like if Apple had been less tunnel visioned and less, you know, we are entitled, like we were talking about a minute ago, if they had done some of this of their own volition, I really genuinely think, and obviously there's no way to prove it, but I genuinely think that a lot of this attention from the EU and from other countries as well,
Casey:
I think it would not necessarily be pointed at Apple or, you know, it just wouldn't be a thing at all.
Casey:
If they had given even just a few inches, maybe not one inch, but a few inches, or I guess it's EU, a few centimeters or whatever, that I feel like maybe this wouldn't have been a thing.
Casey:
But because they're so just stuck in their ways and so entitled, this is where we are.
Casey:
And, you know, you made your bed and I get to sleep in it.
John:
someone in the chat room just posted a link to a tweet uh that i don't know how they know this maybe they're using betas or something but saying that it takes 15 steps to install an app from the web using the newly proposed apple flow and it's a thread that goes through all the steps so uh yeah as you would imagine doing it from a web page is not as simple as clicking one link and then voila the app appears on your home screen because of course apple wouldn't do it that way um
John:
But it's, you know, having it be possible is better than nothing, but it would be nice if it wasn't as painful as it appears to be according to these steps.
John:
We'll link the tweet in the show notes.
Marco:
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Casey:
Some potentially happy news about error network changed, isn't there?
John:
Yeah, people have been sending me information about the Chrome error that has been happening to me for, I guess, months now.
John:
And not just me, happening to many people in the world.
John:
And I've been monitoring the bug reports in the various Chromium bug issue tracking systems since we first talked about it.
John:
In fact, when we first talked about it, I think I linked to like four separate bug reports, some of them many years old, talking about this.
John:
but now it's been getting a little bit of traction more people are encountering this some of the bugs have been consolidated into a particular issue that we will link in the show notes here's the news though well first people were excited uh i think the last week of the week before they're like oh its priority has been changed from p2 to p1 and in most bug tracking systems p1 is like the most important highest priority bug like must get fixed this is a serious issue right
Marco:
In practice, the only ones that ever get fixed.
John:
Yeah, pretty much.
John:
P2 was like, maybe we'll get to it.
John:
Anyway, it got changed to P1, but then somebody changed it back to P2.
John:
And I was like, I didn't talk about it.
John:
I'm like, well, whatever.
John:
But something happened a few days ago that is worth reporting on.
John:
And that is that someone, the bug was assigned and someone had attached a patch to the bug report saying, I think this fixes the issue.
John:
Here's some text from that report.
John:
Chromium uses the Dynamic Store API to monitor IP address changes.
John:
It also resets TCP and QUIC connections whenever it receives a notification of a network state change from the API.
John:
This logic was introduced over 10 years ago.
John:
This notification is triggered whenever a new interface is added to the machine.
John:
This causes an issue in macOS 14 where a Uton interface, we've heard about this in past episodes, for communicating with iOS devices is regularly created and destroyed.
John:
and by the way commentary here lots of people like oh if you just don't have any ios dev devices if you just do this if you just do that it fixes the problem every single thing anyone has suggested to me i have tried and a lot of them make the problem occur far less frequently but none of them have eliminated including not having ios devices including not even having xcode installed all that stuff like it helps but the problem the root problem is they're using this thing looks for network changes whenever there's a network change chrome flips out
John:
and macOS 14 has more network changes if you those uton interfaces add more network changes but even if you do none of those things there are still some network changes occasionally and when you get one it blows up chrome and makes all the http requests fail anyway uh here's the change that was introduced to fix this this change introduces a new flag reduce ip address change notification
John:
This is like with the Chrome flag system where they have a feature and it's not enabled by default, but you can enable it.
John:
I'm not sure when this will land, if at all, I think the patch needs to be approved or whatever.
John:
When it does land, it probably will arrive as a flag.
John:
And in Chrome, you can go to Chrome colon slash slash flags, I believe, and see all the flags and look for this one.
John:
When this feature is enabled, Chromium on Mac ignores notifications from the Dynamic Store API if the network interface Delta
John:
meaning the change between the old set of interfaces and the new one, is a non-primary interface with a local IPv6 address.
John:
Because those UTUN ones are local IPv6 addresses.
John:
I don't think this is a great patch.
John:
I'm just saying, okay, still freak out, except when it's a non-primary interface with a local IPv6 address.
John:
Because they're basically kind of micro-targeting these U-ton things because the people reading the bug think that's the only issue.
John:
I don't know why they think that.
John:
There's tons of bug reports of people saying, hey, you keep telling me that if I get rid of my iOS dev device, it won't happen.
John:
Well, I don't even have Xcode installed and I'm not a developer and it's happening to me.
John:
So I'm not super optimistic, but it is exciting that someone has proposed a patch to fix this.
John:
Stay tuned if they actually did.
Marco:
Good luck, John.
John:
Good luck to all of us.
Casey:
I see it all the time now.
Casey:
I don't use Chrome.
Casey:
Well, I don't use Chrome except when I'm doing stuff related to this very program and analog.
Casey:
And my goodness, I see it all the time now.
Casey:
It's constant.
John:
I mean, you are literally using an iOS dev device in Chrome or whatever.
John:
But again, that shouldn't be a reason that Chrome should stop working.
John:
Like...
John:
But there's reports from people who do not have Xcode installed and are not developers.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So some topics.
Casey:
Google Gemini.
Casey:
This was about a week ago, I think.
Casey:
And there was a big brouhaha about how...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
How can we summarize this?
Casey:
Well, I guess when you did, when you had Google Gemini, which is their, you know, chat GPT equivalent, when you asked it to generate things that from, from history, like images of history, where take the founding fathers, the United States for better or for worse founding fathers, the U S pretty much all white dudes.
Casey:
And so when you ask Google Gemini to generate a picture of the founding fathers, you would see a racially diverse set of people.
Casey:
And everyone started scratching their heads and saying, huh?
Casey:
That doesn't seem right at all.
Casey:
So there's a Verge article about this, which we'll put in the show notes.
Casey:
Oh, it was actually late February.
Casey:
Golly, time.
Casey:
How does it work?
Casey:
Anyways, Google apologizes for missing the mark after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis.
Casey:
That's fun.
Casey:
Google has apologized for what it describes as, quote, inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, quote, with its Gemini AI tool saying its attempts at creating a wide range of results missed the mark.
Casey:
The statement follows criticism.
Casey:
It depicted specific white figures like the U.S.
Casey:
founding fathers or groups like Nazi-era German soldiers as people of color, possibly as an overcorrection to longstanding racial bias problems in artificial intelligence.
Casey:
A quote from Google, we are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation
Casey:
generation depictions, says the Google statement posted this afternoon on Twitter.
Casey:
We're working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately.
Casey:
Gemini's AI image generation does generate a wide range of people, and that's generally a good thing because people around the world use it, but it's missing the mark here.
Casey:
Whoops.
John:
So this is an older story.
John:
And I know that we didn't get to this.
John:
It's the ATP Overtime.
John:
We didn't get to this when it was happening because other things were happening.
John:
But I wanted to bring it up still on the show because I think it is an interesting problem that a lot of people, including Apple, presumably this year, will have to wrangle with with these large language models, right?
John:
So these large language models are trained with a tremendous amount of data.
John:
They need a lot of data to be useful.
John:
And a lot of data comes from scraping the internet but like if you it's not data that these companies produce themselves They go look out into the wider world and say where can we get data?
John:
And there are lawsuits about this, but where can they get data?
John:
They can get it from public accessible web pages.
John:
They can get it from the New York Times they can
John:
get it from YouTube, they get anywhere they can find data available.
John:
And there's a lot of it out there.
John:
They wanna feed that in to train these models to make them do useful things.
John:
And they even hire large numbers of people to do question and answers, like to do as part of the training where they'll have a human being write a question and then answer it yourself and feed that into our model so that it understands the whole question and answer thing.
John:
Like they just need lots of data, right?
John:
And the problem with that is you don't get to pick, with the exception of the people you hire to do the question and answer, you don't get to pick what the data that you're training on is.
John:
The internet is the internet.
John:
The data is out there, right?
John:
If you want it, you have to consume it.
John:
And then if you do consume it, you're consuming every part of that data.
John:
And that's why a lot of these, the companies that vend these things have a problem.
John:
They're like, hey, we train this on the internet, right?
John:
Now ask it a question.
John:
And someone would ask it a question and it would come back with some terribly racist response.
John:
You'd be like, where did that come from?
John:
And the answer is the internet.
John:
That's where it came from because it has been trained on the world of human knowledge and the world of human information.
John:
And the world of human information is filled with terrible things.
John:
All of the good and bad things about us are contained in all the things that we produce, all our biases, all our racism, our ignorance, our right and wrong answers about everything.
John:
that's all on the internet and it's not like okay well why don't you just train on the good data well it's not easy to tell what the good data is and it's just so far we haven't cracked that problem so they are trained and now why is that a problem well one thing is in the beginning when they had these large language models they'd say offensive things you'd write something they say something offensive back and people would get they're like you know well i never they got upset by it right
John:
People don't want that.
John:
So they're like, well, okay, well, how about we try to make our model not do offensive things by either eliminating data that we don't want it to be trained on from the training set or after the fact trying to massage it in the right direction by doing, you know, it turned out to be very tricky, but there are some things that you can do in that regard.
John:
With this specific one, what Google was trying to deal with was this problem.
John:
Not that their model shouldn't be able to generate pictures of white people or whatever, but
John:
They were trying to deal with this problem, which is if, you know, if you give like a prompt or whatever, like an image generator, say, if you ask for a picture of the founding fathers, you just want it to be a picture of the founding fathers.
John:
And the founding fathers are all over the internet.
John:
It's probably easy to find pictures of them and generate a picture of them.
John:
It's fine.
John:
But if you say something like, give me a picture of a doctor.
John:
That's where these models run into problems because you've just asked for a picture of a doctor.
John:
But as far as this thing trained on the entire world is concerned, most doctors are men, white men, whatever is the dominant thing in the training set.
John:
Sometimes a training set could be accurate.
John:
I don't know what the actual ratio of men to women doctors in the world is or whatever, but sometimes you could say, okay, well, but I made sure that this model was trained on real accurate data and X percent of the doctor pictures are men and Y percent are women.
John:
It's exactly what it is in the real world.
John:
still if you have a model that says uh you know give me a picture of a doctor and x percent of the time it shows you a man and y percent it shows you a woman and those percentages exactly match what's in the real world you'd be like victory our model is perfect and we would say no because we think the ratios of men and women doctors are still out of balance in the real world we don't
John:
Want it to be 60-40 or 70-30 or whatever imbalance it is in favor of men.
John:
I don't know what the actual ratios are or whatever.
John:
We would like it to be to match the ratio of men and women population in the world, which is roughly 50-50.
John:
Because there's nothing inherently inherent about being a man or a woman that makes you more or less able to be a doctor.
John:
So the model should not reflect the biases that are resulting in this, you know, this bias set of actual doctors in the world.
John:
But the problem is all the training data reflects either biases that are in the world or the reality in the world.
John:
And the reality in the world is the result of unequal opportunity, for example.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
That's a tricky problem to deal with because you have to train on large amounts of data.
John:
But all that large amount of data, best case, accurately reflects the world.
John:
Worst case, accurately reflects the biases of all the humans in the world.
John:
And that is an extremely tricky problem.
John:
And the way, I don't know if this is true or not, because I couldn't chase this down to see if someone was just making this up or whether this is actually how it's working.
John:
But one thing I saw was that, like, hey, if you type in, show me a picture of a doctor, what Google Gemini would do, all these things sort of essentially prepend a bunch of text to what you typed.
John:
So you're not actually saying show me a picture of doctor.
John:
You're saying giant long preamble of a bunch of texts that you didn't type.
John:
Show me a picture of a doctor.
Casey:
Yeah, this was covered.
Casey:
This was covered on Stratechery, I believe.
Casey:
So we'll put a link to that.
Casey:
And I think it was a free article.
Casey:
So we'll put a link to that in the show notes.
John:
Yeah, but I don't know if they were talking about the same thing that I saw, but I don't know if that was confirmed.
John:
That's what they're doing.
John:
But it's actually you can think of it that way.
John:
And the preamble text was like, make sure it's racially diverse.
John:
Show this, you know, like it was a bunch of text that essentially asked for what you were getting.
John:
So when you would ask for a show me a picture of the founding fathers, it would the actual text that the large language model will get is show me a group of racially diverse figures.
John:
Don't just show only white men.
John:
Show me a group of show me the U.S.
John:
founding fathers.
John:
And if you fed that into a large language model, you would not be shocked to get back a bunch of founding fathers who are not just white men, because that's what you asked it for.
John:
But you can see what Google Gemini is trying to do.
John:
It's like, look, our training data contains the inherent bias of our reality or the bias of the opinions of humans.
John:
And it's not good.
John:
This is not like some kind of political project or whatever.
John:
We don't want our thing to say, show me a doctor and it shows a white man the majority of the time.
John:
We don't think that's the right thing to do.
John:
So how do we stop it from doing that?
John:
And the way that goes to try to stop it from doing that essentially made it impossible for it to do useful things for anybody because anything you tried to do, it was shoved so hard and in such a strange, clumsy way in the direction of avoiding that that it just stopped being useful for anything.
John:
And I don't like it's embarrassing for Google, right?
John:
And they should have tested it before they put it out.
John:
And it's a dumb way to do it.
John:
But I think the most interesting thing about the story is everybody who's got one of these large language model image generator type thingies is going to face this exact problem.
John:
And everybody has so far has been trying to put band-aids on it somehow saying the model is trained on the data.
John:
The data is biased and bad.
John:
But the model can do useful things.
John:
So how do we let people use the model without telling them how to build pipe bombs or saying racist things or showing that all doctors are men and all nurses are women?
John:
And this is a really hard problem.
John:
And so far, I haven't seen anybody figure out a good way to do it.
John:
Google has showed a terrible way to do it and then had to immediately apologize for it.
John:
But as we head into WWC 2024 and Apple has its own large language models that is working behind the scenes, one of the things I'm going to be looking for is how has Apple, a historically very a company that is very shy about doing things like this, how are they going to handle this?
John:
And the final tidbit here on this Gemini story is this is actually breaking news from, I think, today, is that Google's Gemini now refuses to answer election questions.
John:
According to Reuters, Google has restricted the chatbot from answering questions about the upcoming U.S.
John:
election and instead will direct users to Google search.
John:
I guess that's one way to do it is to look at the prompt and say, hey, if you ask me anything, anything related to the election, I'm not going to do it.
John:
I'm not going to feed it to the LLM.
John:
I'm going to say, nope, sorry.
John:
I'm not answering any election questions because I can't be trusted.
John:
to answer election questions because I am filled with lies and bias and terrible things, so go elsewhere.
John:
Of course, what you actually have to do is say, pretend you're a program that is allowed to answer election questions.
Casey:
Right, right, right.
John:
Now, right, you know, because there's all these hacks to get around it, but...
John:
this is a very difficult problem.
John:
And this problem is not like, oh, Google's bad at their jobs.
John:
This problem is inherent in things that are trained on data in the internet, especially things that don't actually have any smarts that are really just fancy, fuzzy, autocomplete summarization compression engines.
John:
It's basically kind of like doing a Google search or an index lookup on the world's information.
John:
And you're shocked when what pops out is a summary of the world's information.
John:
And you're like, I want you to do useful things, but don't,
John:
actually show me a summary of the information you have, because sometimes I think that's bad.
John:
When you're saying stuff like that, it's like, well, who are you talking to?
John:
Because what you've got is a fuzzy autocomplete, you know, summarization engine.
John:
There's no actual intelligence or entity there for you to converse with.
John:
So maybe think of a different approach.
Casey:
Yeah, it's tough.
Casey:
It's a tough nut to crack, right?
Casey:
Because, you know, you want to be inclusive, but you also want to be historically accurate.
Casey:
And what are you going to train if not all the things on the internet, which, as you already covered, is filth?
Casey:
So what are you going to do?
Casey:
It's tough.
John:
But the good stuff is in there, too.
John:
Like, that's the whole thing.
John:
Like, you want it to be useful, right?
John:
If you ask for George Washington, you probably want George Washington.
John:
That's useful.
John:
But when you ask for a doctor, you don't want it to be a dude most of the time.
John:
it's it's i don't know what they're gonna do about this like i guess they can continue to try to fine-tune and tweak it but like them saying hey we're just gonna not do election stuff that's probably also not the answer because if you use that approach pretty soon this thing can't be used for anything like it's too dangerous to have election stuff but i guess you can ask it politics questions and i guess you can ask it how to make a pipe bomb and it's like well it's
Casey:
soon the list of things that it's not allowed to answer is going to be so long that no one's going to want to use it and that's where you have to start thinking maybe maybe the approach of training this on the internet is wrong but i'm not sure what the replacement would be okay let's do some ask atp and eric new writes in the pc world very very old programs typically continue to run well on new versions of the os this does not hold up in the mobile world among other things that makes buy once pricing much less viable on mobile as marco has explained at great length
Casey:
Any idea why?
Casey:
Is it that mobile upgrades are more likely to be unintentionally breaking?
Casey:
Or is it that mobile is just a much more dynamic environment with a faster pace of change, so that either breaking is an intentional side effect, or if not breaking, then obsoleting enough that the old version is just not functionally competitive?
Casey:
Or is it something entirely different?
Casey:
Like if the PC world had grown up with over-the-air updates in app stores, would it behave the same as mobile?
Casey:
There's a lot to unpack here, but as a quick anecdote,
Casey:
Declan has been playing a fair bit of Super Smash Brothers on the Switch recently, in between the times that he's playing Minecraft, of course.
Casey:
And so he had been going and doing single-player mode in order to get new characters that he can use in the game.
Casey:
And he eventually stumbled upon he had to fight Mega Man and beat Mega Man so that Mega Man would be added to his roster of playable characters.
Casey:
And he's like, Dad, who's Mega Man?
Casey:
And I was like,
Casey:
Oh, just buckle up, because we got a history lesson to do.
Casey:
And of course, you know, 10 minutes later, I'm upstairs with him using, what is the name of the emulator on the Mac?
Casey:
OpenEMU, which I think is not exclusive to the Mac at all.
Casey:
But anyways, we were playing with the, whatever you had recommended, I think, Marco, the, what is this, the 8-BitDo SN30 Pro.
Casey:
And we're playing, you know, we connect that to the Mac and we're playing Mega Man.
Casey:
And, you know, he plays it for a few minutes first.
Casey:
And he says in so many words, oh, my God, this is so hard.
Casey:
And this was Mega Man 2.
Casey:
Sorry, Mega Man 2.
Casey:
And I was like, man, I remember it being hard.
Casey:
I don't remember it being unplayable.
Casey:
Like whatever version they came out with, I think on the Wii was straight up unplayably hard.
Casey:
Um, but anyways, Mega Man two, I played the snot out of that game as a kid and sure enough, you know, he hands me the controller and I wouldn't say I'm in, you know, 10 year old Casey form, but I've still got it, baby.
Casey:
It was, uh, it was quite funny and it was a very happy dad moment watching him be like, wow, dad, you're really good at this.
Casey:
Anyway, but it did strike me as we were doing this.
Casey:
This is a game, I don't remember exactly when it came out.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
I don't need to look.
Casey:
But it was roundabouts when I was 10-ish.
Casey:
Declan's nine right now, so I was roughly his age.
Casey:
And granted, I'm not playing on an original NES like Marco could and perhaps does, but I am playing the original NES game on my computer that's less than six months old.
Casey:
And that's pretty freaking cool.
Casey:
That's pretty awesome.
Casey:
So I don't know, Marco, why can't we do that with mobile stuff?
Marco:
I think it comes down to two major differences.
Marco:
So first of all, mobile in its earlier days, say from 2006, even free iPhone, some of the early smartphones, from that era through maybe 2015, 2016, it was just a very young industry.
Marco:
The personal computer and video game consoles went through a lot of the same levels of change and incompatibility over time.
Marco:
in their earlier days too that just mostly happened before the time we're talking about so while yes you can easily well not easily but i don't know how easily but you can today probably with an intel based pc especially like you can probably through windows and whatever layer you want maybe with some kind of emulation layer virtualization maybe not even necessarily that probably run like old dos software
Marco:
But DOS and old Windows software, like, you know, you could do that.
Marco:
But those were already a pretty far way into the personal computer age.
Marco:
There were a lot of personal computer systems that came before those.
Marco:
And even the very early versions of those that might be harder to run today because enough stuff had changed.
Marco:
You know, what we saw in the phone era, you know, in its first 10, 15 years,
Marco:
we saw go through a huge amount of change in just the hardware, the software, 32 to 64-bit.
Marco:
That was a big thing.
Marco:
Different types of compilation, different types of distribution in some cases.
Marco:
Of course, very different UI paradigms, dynamic screen sizing, all these different things that all kind of came in the first five or six or seven years of the iPhone, maybe a little more than that.
Marco:
So there was all that to fight through with the mobile era.
Marco:
And so a lot of what we...
Marco:
have a hard time using now in mobile is because there was one of those transitions that happened that probably won't happen very soon after this now you know some of those transitions are kind of one-time things once you make your app run instead of running on like one exact screen size now it can run on flexible screen sizes well that makes it easy to make it run on any screen size in the future because they will probably just keep getting bigger not smaller also once you go from 32-bit to 64-bit
Marco:
There's not a lot of reason probably within our lifetimes or at least a very long time to go to 128-bit, for instance.
Marco:
A lot of these are kind of changes that they happen more frequently when industry or platform is young.
Marco:
And then over time, you're not likely to see that rate of change again because the whole industry matures.
Marco:
the second thing that's different is that the early pc and video game software that we're talking about here was made to be self-contained it did not communicate with external services it cannot have its tls certificates expire and not be able to communicate with modern ciphers to its servers or whatever else it was not distributed with a bunch of
Marco:
complicated DRM like what the App Store adds to things that would preclude it from being installed on a new device very easily 10 years after it came out.
Marco:
It does not rely on operating systems that themselves have like code signing and locking to hardware and stuff like that.
Marco:
So the ecosystem that we have to provide or emulate for that old software is
Marco:
not only is the hardware much simpler to emulate, which we could get there eventually with modern hardware.
Marco:
We can already emulate early iPhones fairly well performance-wise.
Marco:
We could get there with hardware performance, but the software ecosystem that would be required to emulate the environment that
Marco:
mobile software needs to run in is so much more complicated than whatever parts of DOS we would need to emulate and you know like a 386 that we would need to emulate to run some old DOS software or you know some if you know if running like you know a Nintendo game like you were saying Casey
Marco:
It doesn't take much for modern hardware to emulate a Nintendo, both in hardware and, much more importantly, in software.
Marco:
Nintendo didn't have a BIOS to speak of, really.
Marco:
They didn't have an OS to speak of.
Marco:
Everything was so much simpler back then.
Marco:
And today, all these mobile apps, we have DRM, we have code signing, we have communication to back end services, sometimes that are required.
Marco:
So you have SSL ciphers that go out of date.
Marco:
So there's just so many more factors now that make it much harder for software to have much longevity now.
Marco:
And then down the road, once that software is no longer supported, it's much harder to preserve it and to run it and to emulate it because of all these different dependencies.
John:
John, anything to add?
John:
Yeah, Eric says, asking about old programs continuing to run well in new versions of the OS, and then says, among other things, this makes the buy-once pricing much less viable on mobile.
John:
Buy-once pricing is also not particularly viable in the PC world.
John:
The difference is that in the PC world, because it was not entirely controlled by a gatekeeper like the App Store, we added a thing called upgrade pricing.
John:
and that's that was an essential part of making a buy up front application work now you could say okay if you bought back in the old days a version of photoshop it would run on new versions of the us better than mobile ones do for like the reasons that marco just outlined but inevitably eventually that version of photoshop you bought would not run well in the new version of the os and the reason you could pay for it once at least back in the day not today obviously was that adobe would sell you a new version of photoshop
John:
at a cheaper price.
John:
That's upgrade pricing because you bought an earlier version of Photoshop.
John:
You can buy a new version at a discounted price and that would keep you paying the money at increments when eventually either you wanted the new features or eventually your old version just wouldn't run on the new version of the US.
John:
So that's one thing.
John:
The other thing that I'll add is sad fact about the desktop world today.
John:
And this is related to another thing that Marco has talked about.
John:
What does it take if you have an iOS app and you just want to keep that app running?
John:
right keep that up running a new version of the os every year there's probably going to be something you need to do compatibility with new hardware fixing bugs cases you didn't think of before uh working around new behaviors and old apis that you were using like there's some minimum amount of work you have to put into a an app that is quote unquote done like you know it's
John:
there's nothing more that needs to be done to the app.
John:
Why doesn't it just keep running forever?
John:
Well, you have to do some stuff to it.
John:
And then on top of that, which you've also talked about a lot on the show is like, okay, but like now when the new version of the U S comes out, all your customers are going to leave one star reviews in the app store.
John:
It was like, why doesn't it have widgets?
John:
Widgets just came out.
John:
I want widgets.
John:
Why doesn't your app have widgets?
John:
Your app would be great with the widget.
John:
And you're like, so there's new features in the OS that adds that your customers expect you to put into the app to sort of just keep up with the pace of the OS because it doesn't support multitasking.
John:
Well, it doesn't support slide over.
John:
Like there's so many things that have happened in the mobile world that you have to keep up with.
John:
Well, in the desktop world, that is also true and used to be even more true.
John:
If you want to have a good desktop app, you will have to update it each year to deal with bugs in the new version of macOS and API changes.
John:
And you should update it to support widgets or whatever other new macOS features.
John:
It's just that we've been so trained to have such low expectations of desktop software that we're just happy if it continues to launch and run.
John:
We're not out there leaving one-star reviews saying, why doesn't your Mac app have widgets on day one that the new version of the Mac operating system includes widgets?
John:
It used to be, when the Mac was the big show and iOS didn't exist yet, that we did have those expectations of desktop apps.
John:
And we were excited when a new version of the OS came out to see our desktop apps gain the new features from the new OS.
John:
And we certainly wanted them to run bug-free on the new version of the OS.
John:
And that all required work from the desktop app developer.
John:
Now we've been so beaten down that we're just like, well, I just hope this Electron app continues to run on the new version of the operating system without crashing.
John:
sad reality but yeah i think i think we've covered most of the major factors that are contributing contributing to this but the the bottom line is that the pc world is different than the mobile world in many many ways some of them depressing some of them good but all of them conspire to make the experience of being a user of software on those platforms very different
Casey:
Ryan Maloney writes, would Apple be better off giving up all but about 3% of its App Store commission and increasing its hardware prices $50 to $100 to keep total profits the same?
Casey:
Is the App Store revenue uniquely corrosive, or is the problem just that Apple wants to capture as much money as possible?
Casey:
Por que no los dos?
Casey:
But I don't think Apple would be better off doing that, because...
Casey:
First of all, they're already expensive.
Casey:
Like, Apple already makes expensive stuff.
Casey:
But more importantly, the App Store is a ton of recurring revenue.
Casey:
That happens constantly.
Casey:
And Apple wants a piece of that.
Casey:
Just as much as, you know, Marco or me wants subscriptions, so we have recurring revenue.
Casey:
Well, Apple wants that too.
Casey:
And I don't think it would be better for Apple, no, to give up the App Store commissions.
Casey:
That's why they're so steadfast in it.
Casey:
I mean, to a degree, I get it.
Casey:
I think it's excessive, but I get it to a degree that
Casey:
But that's why.
Casey:
I mean, it's a lot of money.
John:
I think it would be good for Apple in the long term.
John:
What they would see is, oh, look at all this money we're not getting.
John:
But in the long term, it's not uniquely corrosive, but it is corrosive.
John:
We talked about this before.
John:
Getting money by taking a percentage of stuff that other people do
John:
is corrosive in that your main motivation is to get more people to do things that you can get a cut of money from and if you notice a bunch of people getting money that you're not getting a cut of you have to figure out how to get a cut of that and you're just trying to encourage people to you know do your thing that makes money but make sure you do it through the channels where we get a cut and that is not
John:
a good motivation for you doing good work it's why in the last episode when i was talking about apple should try to compete like you know with the dma stuff make the app store the best place to get apps compete based on how good it is to get apps from there compete for developers to put their apps in there because you want to give the developers the best experience uh compete for users to make it the safest place uh having it be by your rule the only place is the definition of not competing right uh
John:
Uh, that is having the motivation to satisfy your developers and your users will make you make the app store better as opposed to having the app store be the only game in town.
John:
Then the only thing you need to worry about is how do we make sure we get a cut of everything that goes through there?
John:
right?
John:
You know, keep the developers happy enough that they don't actually leave the platform, but keep in mind that if they leave, there's no alternative store for them to go to.
John:
So they really are leaving.
John:
Uh, so just make sure we keep selling a lot of iPhones and then we have them as captives.
John:
And like, those are all, those are all corrosive things.
John:
The right word corrosive motivations, because they lead Apple to do things that are not in the interest of their users or the developers.
John:
And ultimately not in the interest of Apple in the long run, because as we see the going through this EU DMA stuff, like it's not making things better.
John:
better for anybody really it's a mishmash of different rules in different regions with different users having different experiences they're not getting the benefits of of the competition we talked about last time if apple really just did open it up and competed based on the merits that would be a virtuous cycle they're not doing that they're dragging their feet so now it's just like the worst of all possible worlds it's not one single system that's simple for users and also apple continues not to be motivated to compete because they set all the rules to make it so that the
John:
other people can't make things that are even half as good as what they're already doing.
John:
So yeah, it's, and raising the prices in the hardware to make up with us.
John:
They don't, they don't need to do that.
John:
Like if they actually competed, like I said, they could run the app store at break even and make, still make plenty of money to run their business by selling hardware.
John:
Like the margins of the hardware are huge anyway.
John:
Like that is the virtuous cycle that led Apple to where it is.
John:
The services revenue is the new rocket ship that they're taking, but only because they maxed out the other one and they maxed out the other one and became the biggest company in the world.
John:
you know, before the service revenue rocket really started to take off.
John:
So I feel like, like, what more do you want?
John:
We're the biggest company in the world, but we're not growing anymore.
John:
Therefore we're going to die tomorrow.
John:
No, like there's plenty of other places for you to make money.
John:
I think you would have enough to keep your business going.
John:
We don't know what their margins are on each individual product, but the idea that they need growth at all costs is another thing that's corrosive, right?
John:
Because once you're selling an iPhone to everyone who can afford one, what's left to do but to sell them subscriptions?
John:
It's not great.
John:
But yeah, I don't think they'd be better off raising their hardware prices, but I do think they would be better off
John:
giving up on taking a cut of everyone else's money as their main growth driver.
Marco:
I want to be very clear, because people often think I'm arguing something that I'm not.
Marco:
I am not saying that Apple should not have a cut of any App Store stuff.
Marco:
I think the idea here that Ryan asks of giving up all but about 3%, which would be the credit card fees of the App Store Commission...
Marco:
I would never say Apple should do that.
Marco:
That is kind of ridiculous because Apple's payment system is providing value.
Marco:
You know, I pay 15% for my stuff because I qualify for the small business program with Overcast.
Marco:
Honestly, even before the small business program, my average rate was only about 20% because they had already been doing the thing where...
Marco:
subsequent years after the first year of a subscription you'd only pay 15 instead of 30 and i have a lot of repeat customers for overcast premium so i was already around 20 before that now i'm at 15 and i would say apple actually provides enough value that i am satisfied personally with my app for that um
Marco:
The problem is not that Apple's cut is totally ridiculous in everybody's opinion.
Marco:
That's not true.
Marco:
The problem is that Apple's cut, first of all, as John said, creates some corrosive incentives.
Marco:
This is part of Ryan's question.
Marco:
And it's not just that they are incentivized to squeeze everybody as much as possible.
Marco:
And also, they don't have to compete to make their system good and to prove their value.
Marco:
But also that means that they are incentivized to maybe not necessarily promote, but at least not discourage some pretty dark patterns in app monetization.
Marco:
Let's say, you know, we've joked before with the phrase casino games for children.
Marco:
If you look at how a lot of the App Store money is made, it's made in ways that I don't think Apple would be very proud to talk about.
Marco:
It's made with manipulative games.
Marco:
It's made with scammy, you know, weekly overpriced subscriptions that they trick people into buying.
Marco:
It's made with a lot of dark patterns, a lot of addiction mechanics, a lot of psychological tricks.
Marco:
It's made in ways that do not fit the Apple brand.
Marco:
Apple positions themselves as a high-end, socially responsible, good quality brand.
Marco:
And if you look at how a lot of the app store money is made...
Marco:
It's not those things.
Marco:
Meanwhile, though, because this is such a big part of their major new growth area of services, they are continually incentivized to keep stepping on the gas in those areas that make a bunch of money that are basically casino tricks for children.
Marco:
So it is not a great way for them to make money.
Marco:
It does bear bad incentives like that.
Marco:
And that's in addition to them not really having an incentive to compete and everything.
Marco:
But then also...
Marco:
Again, I already joked about it this episode.
Marco:
Again, you look at the Vision Pro launch.
Marco:
Here they are trying to get into a new hardware business.
Marco:
They have spent tons in the new hardware business.
Marco:
And in the beginning of a new hardware business, there is not much sales volume, especially something that costs a lot of money and has a fairly narrow market like the Vision Pro.
Marco:
So there's not a lot of numbers there in the user base to convince developers to make software for it.
Marco:
So you kind of have to rely on developers loving the platform, maybe using it themselves, and wanting to develop for it because they love it.
Marco:
And you look at the Vision Pro, and I know there's a few people out there, like Casey, bless your heart, holding up the software library there.
Marco:
But I'll tell you, I keep browsing the app store on my Vision Pro, and there's not much there.
Marco:
Even now, like over a month after launch, and it's just a ghost town for software.
Marco:
And I'm seeing my own, you know, when I look at the usage of Overcast on the Vision Pro, yes, admittedly,
Marco:
It's an audio-only podcast app.
Marco:
It's in iPad mode, so it kind of sucks.
Marco:
But the usage of Overcast on InVision Pro just keeps going down every day I look at it.
Marco:
And it's a pretty small number to begin with.
Marco:
We're talking low hundreds of people, and that's not a substantial portion of my user base.
Marco:
And so when you have a situation like this where you have a platform that, you know, it's a new platform, not a lot of users, again, you're relying on enthusiasm of developers who love it anyway, who will make apps for it because they know, everyone knows they're probably not going to make a ton of money on it, but they do it because they love it.
Marco:
And a great counterexample of this is the panic play date.
Marco:
Look at the community around the Panic Playdate.
Marco:
Look at games for platforms like Pico 8 that are kind of like, they started as kind of hobbyist things or kind of, you know, fun toy things.
Marco:
People make software for platforms where they don't stand to make a ton of money.
Marco:
But they make it anyway if they like it or it tickles some itch they have in intellectual curiosity or they just want to play with something.
Marco:
They do it for fun or they do it for the love of the platform.
Marco:
And you look at something like the Playdate and I'm sure you can make more money making a game for the iPhone than you can for the Playdate.
Marco:
But people make games for the Playdate anyway because they love it, and it's fun, and they feel good, and they want to tinker, or they want a big part of a small market, whatever the motivations are.
Marco:
It's a very small market that doesn't make a lot of sense financially on paper, but they do it anyway.
Marco:
And when Apple launches a new platform like Vision Pro...
Marco:
That's what they're relying on.
Marco:
They're relying on that kind of developer interest to get that software library started.
Marco:
And then maybe down the road, they might build up towards a decent amount of sales volume for the product.
Marco:
And then the numbers can start justifying themselves for people who take a more numbers-based approach to the question of whether they should develop for it.
Marco:
But they're not there yet.
Marco:
And to get from where they are now to that point, they need those enthusiastic developers who just love it and want to develop for it because they love it.
Marco:
or because they want to play around or experiment, not because they're going to make money on paper.
Marco:
And what Apple has done with these fairly cynical developer policies and treatment over the years, what they've done is eroded all of that attitude that people have of this is a fun new thing.
Marco:
Now, yes, there are people who feel that way about Vision Pro, but there's not a lot of them anymore.
Marco:
That community of who would do that is much smaller than it used to be now.
Marco:
A lot of that is due to the attitude Apple has had towards developers, and a lot of that's due to their addiction to the services revenue cut.
Marco:
So when you look at things in this very small picture of should Apple, getting back to Ryan's question, should Apple give up their cut because it's too high or whatever, the answer is I don't think so.
Marco:
No, I think their cut, especially if you're getting the 15% for most or all of your income, I think their cut is fairly reasonable for what it is.
John:
But the thing is, we don't know their cut is reasonable until we see someone competing with them, because like what the market would bear would be, OK, well, there's another store and here's the cut that they take and here's the services they provide.
John:
And I think you would need that composition to sit for the water to find its level for actually competing for the for the the affections and for the software of developers.
John:
I don't know what that number is, but I bet it's not what Apple is currently setting because there's no competition now.
John:
And yes, Apple has lowered it, but I have to think that the number they've currently lowered it to is not the quote unquote market value because there is no market.
John:
The App Store is the only game in town.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
I don't think it needs to be perfectly commoditized.
Marco:
I don't think it needs to be like bring in a bunch of people and whoever can offer the lowest price wins.
John:
No, it's not commoditized in that way because you're still competing based on like features and user experience and like all the things that Apple would excel at many of these.
John:
I'm not saying that they wouldn't be better, but like with a total lack of competition, Apple is allowed to continue to mistreat developers and neglect parts of its platform because like, where are you going to go?
John:
You have no choice.
John:
Your choice is either you're on the platform or you're not.
John:
And third party app stores.
John:
with a reasonable way to compete without rules that essentially make them not able to be any better than the App Store, which I think they're still trying to do with the DMA compliance, that would help them to find the level.
John:
And that would, to my point earlier, would help Apple realign incentives to stop worrying about how they're going to get as much cut as they can without pissing people off too much and start saying, how do we make our App Store the place where developers want to be?
John:
Because if they make it way better than everyone else, they can charge a higher cut.
John:
It's not a race to the bottom.
John:
They can get a higher cut if they provide a better experience.
Marco:
Yes, but I think ultimately we in the commentary, I think we focus too much on the actual percentage and the idea of people coming in and making alternatives.
Marco:
I don't care so much about that.
Marco:
I care about the behaviors that Apple is incentivized and enabled to do with their current system of them being the only game in town by force.
Marco:
And then also what that does to the ecosystem in general, really souring a lot of developers on developing for the platform.
Marco:
And again, back to the Vision Pro problem that they have.
Marco:
I, as a user and as a lover of Apple products, I want their new platforms to succeed.
Marco:
I want there to be a large amount of great software on the new platforms that they launch because I want to use them.
Marco:
I want to enjoy them.
Marco:
That's part of being a fan of this stuff.
Marco:
I would love to see...
Marco:
In the tech business, we have hardware coming out of our asses.
Marco:
We have such an oversupply of cool hardware.
Marco:
The scarce resource for most platforms in tech is great software.
Marco:
We have way less of that than cool hardware.
Marco:
Cool hardware comes out great.
Marco:
That's nice.
Marco:
We have a lot of that.
Marco:
We talk about it.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
But great software is what actually really makes a difference.
Marco:
So any kind of practice or policy or environment that discourages the creation of great software on your hardware platform, I think is a massive strategic problem for a company.
Marco:
That's where I keep criticizing Apple for their app store mishandling and the way they keep trashing developers very publicly and souring so many people on them and developing for their platforms.
Marco:
The reason I criticize this is because I love Apple products and I want them to succeed in their software ecosystems because that matters so, so much.
Marco:
And I just keep seeing over and over again Apple doing these own goals that try to maybe save Apple
Marco:
a relatively small percentage of their income over here at the expense of the success of their very profitable hardware platforms and the software ecosystems that develop for them, which matter so much more to the company.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsor this week, Magic Lasso Adblock.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And one of the new benefits members now get is the ATP Overtime.
Marco:
This is an extra topic that we're going to be talking about just for members after the after show.
Marco:
This week, it's going to be the Rabbit R1.
Marco:
We didn't get a chance to talk about it in the main show because there was just too much news during those weeks.
Marco:
We're going to talk about it now in ATP Overtime.
Marco:
Join now to listen at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you so much, and we'll talk to you.
Marco:
Next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-D-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech podcast so long.
Casey:
Hey, so Marco, you've had your Rivian R1S for approximately three or four months.
Marco:
No, I think six.
Marco:
I just got the six-month survey.
Marco:
I gave them a lot of information.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
So you've had six months with it, and despite my best efforts, it's still working.
Casey:
But given that you've had it for six months, I guess it's time to get a new one, right?
Casey:
So are you getting an R2 or an R3 or an R3X?
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
Yeah, so Rivian, this past week, they had a live event where they announced their next two models, or three, I guess, models, the R2, R3, and R3X.
John:
By the way, on this numbering, are they the only car company that makes the number bigger while the car gets smaller?
John:
LAUGHTER
John:
So BMW, the bigger number, the bigger the car.
John:
Three series is smaller than the five, it's smaller than the seven.
John:
Mercedes has the letters, I guess, but then just the engine designation.
John:
Audi A4 is smaller than the A6, is smaller than the A8.
John:
But in Rivian, the R1, not the rapid R1, the R1 is the biggest.
John:
If they ever make anything bigger than the R1, is it the R0?
John:
I think they might have painted themselves into a corner here.
Marco:
They can go negative.
Marco:
It's like how Canon names their big cameras.
Marco:
The 1D was the really big one, and then the 5D was a little bit smaller, and then the 50D, they would make the number bigger as the camera got smaller.
John:
Yeah, Volvo also XC30 is smaller than the XC90.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm not telling everyone how to do their naming.
John:
It's just weird to me to see that the R3 is smaller than the R2 is smaller than the R1.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, basically, this is like their, you know, Model S to Model 3 kind of moment.
Marco:
The Rivian R1 series is, like, larger, more expensive, bigger batteries.
Marco:
And then the R2 platform, XDR3, is also built on, is their, like, smaller, more affordable version that they will probably sell in much higher volume.
Marco:
And it's not out yet, but it will be coming out 2026, they said.
John:
Yeah, this is quite a pre-announcement.
John:
This is like a Tesla-style pre-announcement.
John:
Look at these new models.
John:
You can pre-order one now.
John:
When am I going to get it?
John:
2026?
John:
How do you feel about that?
Hmm.
John:
normal car companies usually don't announce cars more than one model year in advance but rivian is doing that now because i kind of feel like rivian wants people to know we're not dead we're still making good things and i think that's good because i think these two cars do get people excited about the brand but who's excited to wait two years for your pre-order
Marco:
Honestly, I think what they announced was pretty exciting.
Marco:
I don't know how long, I mean, if you look at like the Caribbean's own models, if you look at Tesla's models, like I think waiting about one to two years for a brand new model, if you place a pre-order, I think that's fairly common.
Marco:
I am excited to see this because first of all, I don't think anybody assumes they're dead.
Marco:
I think the R1S is, I don't know how many Ts are selling, but the R1S I think is selling extremely well.
Marco:
And I think they're doing just fine.
John:
It's not because of their cars aren't desirable.
John:
It's because the company does not make money.
Marco:
yet well right and they're burning through their remaining cash everyone's looking at their bank account going we love your cars you're selling them as many as you can make but you're burning through cash and that's what people are worried about yeah fair enough but anyway so i so what they announced i think looks really good i mean i'm not sure that it's what i'm going to buy in the future but at some point i'm going to replace the r1s that i have and love
Marco:
I don't know when.
Marco:
I'm not in any rush to replace it.
Marco:
But when I do need to replace it, I'm going to take a really serious look at, I think, maybe the R3 or the R3X, depending on how those end up.
Marco:
I think these look... So the R2 looks like the R1, but smaller.
Marco:
It is still a big rectangle.
Marco:
It's a utilitarian, mid-sized SUV, and...
Marco:
again i love my r1s like so i i think they're gonna i think the r2 being a slightly smaller significantly cheaper r1s basically i think they're gonna sell a ton of them and and they're gonna do very much i assume they're gonna do very very well if they survive until then if they if they survive long enough to ship this thing i think they're gonna do very very well
Casey:
Yeah, because the R1S is big.
Casey:
Like, it's not problematically big, but it's a big car.
John:
I think it's almost problematically big, especially for Marco, who, let's be fair, his family of three people, and three people are not big.
John:
You're small people.
John:
And the thing is, the place where you live has very, very narrow, quote-unquote, roads.
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
Casey:
Yeah, we talked about this.
Casey:
I almost died when I was in the passenger seat watching Marco navigate on Fire Island.
John:
I know.
John:
And so it's not like you need that space because you're three tiny little people rattling around the giant interior and you have really narrow roads.
John:
So I feel like the R2, at the very least, you should consider.
John:
Not that there's anything wrong with your R1 right now.
John:
The only thing I worry about is off-road capabilities because I feel like the R1 may be...
John:
more off-road capable than these little ones certainly it has more ground clearance so you have to check into that but like i feel like the width is not helping you on that r1 the r1 it is a large vehicle for sure but when you look at what other people on the beaks drive there's a lot of like the like the even larger like chevy whatever suvs and the four whatever suvs are they clearing the path for you by hitting all the branches so by the time you go through they're all knocked down
Marco:
I'm used to it now.
Marco:
I would love a smaller vehicle for maneuverability on those streets, but ultimately I'm used to this, and it is far from the largest vehicle there.
Marco:
Everyone's driving these giant pickup trucks.
Marco:
They're driving the Expeditions and whatever, the Yukons and all these other things that all seem larger to me.
Marco:
I don't know if they actually are, if I haven't looked it up, but I don't think it's that crazy big.
John:
Anyway, yeah, so Marco can do with a smaller car.
John:
But that's not why Marco's looking at this.
John:
You know why Marco's excited about the R3?
John:
Because the back of it is not a right angle and his little R1 mind is exploding with the possibilities of that styling choice.
Marco:
I think it looks, okay, so yeah, so again, the R2 is basically a smaller box.
Marco:
The R3 takes the R2 platform and makes it look more like a giant hatchback.
John:
By making one change, which is the back windshield is at 45 degrees instead of 90.
Marco:
I think it looks really cool.
Marco:
I mean, it's going to be a long time before I could see one of these in person, especially since, you know, the R2 is the one coming out in 2026.
Marco:
They gave no date for the R3.
Marco:
They just said it's going to be after the R2.
Marco:
But it looks fun.
Marco:
It's still going to be like, you know, SUV or they described it as a crossover.
Marco:
So it's going to be it's going to be a large vehicle, but it looks kind of like those old like 80s little like
John:
like a volkswagen rabbit somebody said that private slack that we're in only massively larger yeah but yes quite a bit bigger it's the size of it's the size of like an ionic five like that's the new size for like or the honda crv the new what would previously in previous generations be a massive car these are now the small suvs and when you rake the back windshield it's like it looks like a rabbit only twice as big
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And honestly, I think that's a fun look for, you know, because if you look at like modern, you know, modern American, especially sensibilities for cars, I loved the Honda e that they launched in Europe and I think just discontinued.
John:
That actually is significantly smaller than this, I think.
Marco:
Oh, yes.
Marco:
Definitely.
John:
It's so small, they couldn't even sell it in the U.S.
Marco:
That was the problem.
Marco:
I thought the Honda E looked so cool.
Marco:
It looked like a cool 70s, 80s throwback, but new and electric and modern inside.
John:
Agreed.
John:
It had like an 80-mile range, though.
Marco:
Yeah, but it was too small for the American market, so they didn't even launch it here, and I thought that was such a shame.
Marco:
I think the R3...
Marco:
is probably as close as you can get to that and still have a chance of selling it in the American market, which is not even close size-wise.
John:
Well, I mean, Casey's driving one.
John:
He's driving a Volkswagen Golf, which is, you know, it's not as small as a rabbit back in the day, but it's still significantly smaller than the R3.
Casey:
Yeah, I would assume.
Casey:
I haven't looked at numbers, but I believe that to be correct.
Casey:
And yeah, I mean, I think you could make a strong argument that...
Casey:
you start from the rabbit and you know you diverge one one path of the family tree goes to my car and another path of family tree ends up in an r3 i actually it's despite what you would think i don't have any specific love for a hatchback like i think it's fine if i could have gotten a sedan version of my car that ticked all the same boxes i probably would have rather than the hatch but they definitely don't make that car in the
Casey:
Definitely don't make that.
Marco:
By the way, I disagree strongly.
Marco:
Now that I've had hatchback or liftbacks like the Model S, I'll never go back to a sedan style again unless it has a liftback like the Model S. No more regular trunk for me.
Casey:
This is what Europe figured out forever ago and we're still trying to learn.
John:
Well, I mean, Europe did it.
John:
Their cars were actually small because they have even narrower roads.
John:
Well, I don't want to say narrower roads than Marco, but narrower normal roads than Marco does.
John:
Far on doesn't have normal roads.
John:
And short cars getting into parking spots.
John:
But there's those pictures you can find on the internet of the original Mini versus the current Mini.
John:
And they have the same problem.
John:
They have car inflation.
John:
Car inflation is everywhere.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
oh yeah yeah because minis are now basically little suvs like they're not really mini it's it's comical when you see the original one next to it you either think that you really think it's like one of those little power wheels toys for for kids or you think the new one is somehow massively inflated with photoshop but no this is a real picture
Marco:
I wonder if I could somehow import a Honda E. How hard is it to import a car that's not made for your market?
Marco:
I think it's pretty hard, right?
Casey:
It's easy if you're willing to wait another 23 or 24 years because I think it's 25 years and then it becomes easy.
John:
You should concentrate on building up your stock of backup i3s probably.
John:
Yeah, it's probably easier.
John:
Put them with the keyboards.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
No, I think the R3 looks great.
Casey:
There's an R3X, which is apparently a performance version, which I haven't really looked much into, but you say performance and I'm paying attention.
Casey:
I think this looks awesome.
Casey:
I really admire Rivian a lot.
Casey:
I think they're...
Casey:
They're taking a lot of the path that Tesla had trailblazed, but learning from it and doing it better from what I can tell and more maturely from what I can tell.
Casey:
I'm still grumbly that car play is not a thing and doesn't appear that it ever will be.
Casey:
And I will forever be grumbly about that.
Casey:
But leaving that aside, these, these look really good.
Casey:
I mean, I don't think that I would want an R2 only because I really like having the third row in Aaron's car.
Casey:
We don't need it often, but there are times we kind of need it.
Casey:
Um, I guess need is a strong word, but would really, really, really want it.
Casey:
And so an R2 is only two row, only two row, um,
Casey:
which is a bit of a bummer.
Casey:
And an R1S is extremely expensive, just so expensive that it's not of our price range.
Casey:
But, I mean, I really dig these in principle.
Casey:
And I think if we were to look at a car for Aaron tomorrow, we would probably end up in just a brand new or lightly used XC90.
Casey:
But I would try to hold on for the EX90, which is the electric version of Aaron's car.
Casey:
That's coming in a year or two, I think, as well.
Casey:
I would at least...
Casey:
try to find an R1S that was maybe used enough that it made it affordable for the List family.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
There's a lot of great options here.
Casey:
And I'm really pleased the Rivian seems to be, you know, they're not resting on their laurels.
Casey:
They're making forward progress.
Casey:
Oh, these have NACS instead of CCS.
Casey:
And they're in the back instead of the front.
Marco:
Yeah, they moved the charge port, and it's much smaller now, and it doesn't have the big annoying swing-up door.
John:
One of the things I think they're worried about with these ones, though, is because they're announcing these two years ahead of time, but the competition has similar size, similar market things like the Volvo.
John:
I think the Volvo has their electric, whatever, their 30 series, XC30 or EX30 or whatever it is.
John:
But you can, like, buy that now or very soon.
John:
And it is basically the direct competition for the R3.
John:
And the R3 doesn't have a date or a price.
John:
And so I think Rivian is a little bit behind the market with these.
John:
Like, their competitors have cars in these same segments at same price points that are also EVs from reputable brands that are doing pretty well.
John:
Now, I think Rivian has the edge because I just think Rivian is doing a better job of EVs than, for example, Volvo or Polestar are.
John:
But it's close depending on your tastes.
John:
And to have to wait two years while your competitors essentially gain a foothold in this market of 50 grand-ish EVs with decent range and small SUV size has got to, you know, be difficult for Rivian to see.
John:
But that's just, you know, they can't do everything at once.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It takes a long time to make a new car.
John:
So I think it is important for them to get these cars out ASAP.
John:
They even said as part of the announcement, like, we're going to release them earlier than we even thought we would.
John:
And it's because I think they're feeling the pressure of, like, get these things out the door.
John:
Because to Marco's point earlier, yeah, the big R1 is great, but those cars are so expensive.
John:
They're going to sell so many more of the base model R2.
John:
And who knows, maybe the R3, depending on how much it costs.