We're Saving That for the Egg
John:
Suffice it to say there will be future ubiquity discussion on this program.
John:
Shocking, I know.
Casey:
Shocking, I tell you.
Marco:
We'll also be talking about Apple products in the future.
Casey:
No.
Marco:
What a surprise.
Casey:
I've been thinking a lot recently about Apple is not in a great spot right now, or at least the community doesn't really love where Apple is right now.
Casey:
And what does that mean for us as a show?
Casey:
Because on the one side, my perception of the show is the three of us do our darndest to bring our genuine and honest opinions about pretty much everything that we talk about, including when Apple is, as the kids like to say these days, cooked.
Casey:
But does that really make for entertaining and engaging programming?
Casey:
And I don't have any answers right now.
Casey:
And I'm just kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what happens.
Casey:
But I don't know what we're the three of us going to do because I don't want to just continually moan about Apple.
Casey:
And I don't think you two do either, despite what this program leads you to believe.
Casey:
All three of us tend to do this kind of frequently, but that's not what any of us wants.
Casey:
Like, what are we going to do if Apple continues to circle the drain?
Casey:
What if Dub Dub sucks?
Casey:
Then what are we going to do?
Right.
John:
Well, I mean, as I think I said last time we just talked about this, the show does since we follow Apple, the show tone also follows Apple.
John:
So when Apple is kicking butt and doing great things, the show is excited about that.
John:
When Apple is not kicking butt and is doing not so great things, the show reflects that as well.
John:
I think the good thing is that Apple is a big entity and
John:
And at any given time, not everything is bad and not everything is good.
John:
So even when things are awesome, there's always things to complain about.
John:
And even when things are terrible, there's still stuff that's good and bright spots.
John:
So I felt like if we just, you know, it would be it would be sort of
John:
we would be doing a disservice to our listeners to pretend things are awesome when they're not.
John:
And I think we've gone through this cycle.
John:
The show's been around long enough now that I think we've gone through this cycle multiple times of things, certain things being really bad.
John:
I mean, in fact, it's kind of funny that the last time we went through something like this was...
John:
a cycle where the hardware was the thing we were griping about.
John:
The hardware was bad.
John:
They ruined their laptops.
John:
Their most popular Mac hardware was bad for so long, and we complained about it for so long.
John:
And here we are in this new era where the hardware is the best thing they're doing.
John:
I mean, you never know what's going to happen, and especially with the AI stuff.
John:
It's just like a wild card in all of this because nobody knows who the winner and losers there will be.
John:
But anyway, I don't have a problem with it at all because I feel like it's always going to be going in cycles and it's worth talking about the bad things as much as the good.
John:
I mean, you know.
John:
from someone whose website is called hypercritical surprise surprise i don't mind criticizing things i just feel like we can do it in a constructive way and there's lots of good exciting stuff happening as well like not just with apple but with the entire tech world so i think we'll you know we try to strike a good balance and wwc like that's the story this year you basically nailed it it's like look people are feeling bad how how how does apple react to that what do they do to try to turn this around
John:
get to the top of it.
John:
What did you turn this around at WWDC?
John:
That is the story of this WWDC in, in, in more ways than one, as I'm sure we'll discuss when WWDC comes along.
John:
Uh, but to pretend that it's not.
John:
And just to say, well, we're only going to discuss the things we liked about WWDC.
John:
That's not, that's not the right thing to do.
John:
So I think, I think we'll, uh, we will ride this out and, uh, you know, happy days will come again.
John:
And in the meantime, maybe there'll be a new Mac pro or something that will just make me happy enough to not worry about everything else.
Um,
Marco:
Yeah, and to point out too, we do focus on Apple news because that is most of our computing world and our computing passions.
Marco:
But the world of technology is much bigger than just Apple.
Marco:
We don't owe Apple coverage.
Marco:
Apple earns coverage.
Marco:
If they have turned us off so much that we have nothing nice to say about them,
Marco:
We'll just talk about other stuff after a while.
Marco:
We care about Apple a lot.
Marco:
We hope they don't do that.
Marco:
We would rather talk about Apple because we like their stuff and we like them – we like what they have stood for over time for the most part and we like their general ethos when it does well.
Marco:
But we are not an Apple show exclusively.
Marco:
And technology is not Apple exclusively.
Marco:
And so here's what always happens.
Marco:
Before WWDC, we have the trough of disillusionment with Apple for the year.
Marco:
Because we haven't had any fun products recently.
Marco:
Nothing has juiced us with Apple enthusiasm recently.
Marco:
So we're left to wallow in the silence and realize all the stuff that sucks about Apple.
Marco:
And then usually what happens is WWDC comes up and we are really excited about what they just announced.
Marco:
And we get to talk about that and it's interesting and it's fun.
Marco:
And then we have a little boost there.
Marco:
Then the week after WWDC, we install the betas and half the stuff is broken and sucks and is done.
Marco:
And then we go a little bit down.
Marco:
But for the most part, we're still held up by that that high of the WBC announcements and all the new the promise of what's to come.
John:
Yeah, there's the world of possibilities that even if it's not there yet in the biggest thing, it's like, but there's a lot of possibilities and a lot of what could the future hold given these the possibilities that have been put before us.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And then maybe we start seeing betas from app developers later in the summer that take advantage of the new stuff and it's exciting and it's interesting.
Marco:
And then the fall comes and we get the new product launches for the most part.
Marco:
We'll get the new iPhones and the Apple Watches and whatever else comes out, any kind of fun Macs or whatever else.
Marco:
We get those new AirPods, whatever it is.
Marco:
And so we have these kind of Apple seasons of both enthusiasm and honestly of relevance.
Marco:
And
Marco:
The good thing is the world of tech is very big.
Marco:
And so if Apple is not earning our enthusiasm anymore for whatever reason, other things might.
Marco:
And we can talk about those.
Marco:
And if Apple wants to start earning more enthusiasm from us, well, they're going to have to do some things differently.
Marco:
And I don't think they care at all.
Marco:
They don't give two craps about us.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
They're either going to do it or not, and we'll cover it or not, but it doesn't mean anything bad for the show if Apple continues to anger and sadden us so much that we don't really talk about them as much, and we start filling in with other stuff that does make us happy.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
My entire segment about restaurant stuff, that has almost nothing to do with Apple.
Marco:
Apple has almost no role whatsoever in my restaurant tech.
Marco:
And yet tons of stuff there has made me happy.
Marco:
We talk about Ubiquiti stuff.
Marco:
We talk about other platforms.
Marco:
We talk about wiring and stuff like that.
Marco:
That kind of stuff.
Marco:
We talk about home automation stuff.
Marco:
That has almost nothing to do with Apple because their home automation stuff sucks.
Marco:
We talk about Sonos stuff.
Marco:
That has almost nothing to do with Apple because Apple's speakers suck.
Marco:
There's a lot of areas that Apple sucks and we talk about other companies that do great in those areas.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
That can be a lot of what we do if over the long term
Marco:
Apple continues to slide into areas that we don't really want to go.
Marco:
It'll become a Johnny Ive AI pin show.
Casey:
Can you imagine?
Casey:
I mean, it's possible.
Casey:
I can't imagine that'll be what happens, but it's possible.
Marco:
It'll just be called the IO pin.
Marco:
Same product, different name.
Casey:
I mean, this isn't the Accidental Apple podcast, even though that's oftentimes what it seems like.
Casey:
And to your point, I mean, it is the Accidental Tech podcast.
Casey:
There are other things that we can talk about.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's just I feel like in the past when we've had a malaise about things, it's often been because –
Casey:
Not always, but often been because they just make like product decisions that we don't necessarily agree with.
Casey:
Whereas here, I feel like they're just acting like complete jerks.
Casey:
And that has happened in the past, for sure.
Casey:
But I feel like it's happening more frequently and more vibrantly, for lack of a better word, than it typically does.
John:
Well, there's plenty of product decisions that we still disagree with, I think.
John:
There's a good share of those as well.
John:
There's policy decisions for the company, also product decisions that I think we disagree with strongly.
John:
Sometimes they just get overshadowed, I think, by the policy decisions.
John:
That's fair.
Casey:
And I think that's the thing.
John:
And we'll probably have more at WWDC when they show all their redesigned OSs and we'll have lots of other product, a lot of opinions about those product decisions as well, I'm sure.
Marco:
Indeed.
Marco:
Keep in mind also, like, we are hearing about Apple being jerks because we've had all these, like, you know, court cases and things that are coming out in Discovery, like internal communications and stuff that are showing that they are basically, like, exactly as jerky as we all feared, like, for the worst.
Marco:
Like, we thought, like, what's the worst, what's the least charitable interpretation of their actions?
Marco:
Maybe that's...
Marco:
you know, surely they won't be that bad.
Marco:
And then we're getting documentation that show, I know they were that bad.
Marco:
Like they're all the least charitable things.
Marco:
That's what exactly what they were saying.
Marco:
And that's exactly their reasons for everything.
Marco:
But if you look at any company, like we were seeing this insight into Apple now and we're seeing, wow, Apple's being real jerks.
Marco:
Like, should we really feel good covering them?
Marco:
Who are we going to cover instead?
Marco:
Google?
Marco:
Well, their executives are just as full of crap as these executives.
Marco:
They're full of different crap.
Marco:
Are we going to cover Microsoft?
Marco:
They're also full of crap.
Marco:
Again, just different crap.
Marco:
Every company is – in order to be a CEO of a large corporation, in order to rise those ranks and to get into that position –
Marco:
You're probably a huge asshole on some level.
Marco:
That's just – see, also politicians.
Marco:
Like to rise above a certain rank, you are much more likely to be a huge asshole because only huge assholes can rise that high in those sorts of systems most of the time.
Marco:
So if you look at almost any company, if you know anything about their leaders or about their internal communications at the high levels, it's going to be mostly ugly.
Marco:
Or there will be ugly stuff to find.
Marco:
And we just don't know most of the time because most CEOs are smart enough to keep that stuff out of the public eye.
Marco:
But when you have somebody like some CEO who gets hooked on posting to Twitter, for instance, and they go off the deep end there, or in the case of court cases that the company is too stupid to avoid, that they get all this stuff coming out in discovery, well, then you see – that door is open.
Marco:
You get to see, wow, these people are real jerks.
Marco:
But the reality is most people who run most companies are real jerks on some levels, and we just don't see it.
Marco:
So I think –
Marco:
To some degree, and I know I've been all critical of Tim Cook, and I will continue to be because he is a real jerk.
Marco:
But to some degree, we kind of have to ignore the people at the top of these companies and just focus on the products.
Marco:
Because if we only cover products for which we can feel good about the leaders of those products, we're going to have a really short list.
Marco:
And so I think it's much better to just say, you know what?
Marco:
Our goal, our job is not to focus too much on whether the executives of this company are being jerks or not.
Marco:
Our goal is to focus on the products because that's ultimately what we enjoy about tech.
Marco:
We don't need to be analysts for the executive teams of these companies most of the time.
Marco:
That's not our job.
Marco:
That's not what we care about.
Marco:
That's not what we're amazing at, although Tim Cook should be replaced.
Marco:
But I know he won't be.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
And I know people say he's the only person who can fix the problem he's in, but he created the problem he's in, and he's the only person who can keep making it worse.
Marco:
I don't see any sign he can fix it.
Marco:
But anyway, we are here for the products mainly.
Marco:
That's most of what gets us going.
Marco:
That's most of what we have the enthusiasm about.
Marco:
The hardware, the software, the services even, the ones that are actually services and not just taxes.
Marco:
We're here for that.
Marco:
That's the stuff that gets us excited.
Marco:
That's the stuff we love talking about.
Marco:
That's the stuff that we have to rationalize.
Marco:
Oh, can I buy the new Sonos speaker?
Marco:
It looks so cool.
Marco:
That kind of stuff.
Marco:
That's what we're here for, and that's what our audience wants to hear about most of the time.
Marco:
So we can keep talking.
Marco:
When Apple releases some cool stuff in a couple of weeks at WWDC...
Marco:
We all know, yeah, you know what?
Marco:
Tim Cook's a jerk.
Marco:
We know that.
Marco:
The way they treat developers is pretty rough.
Marco:
Their relationship with developers has never been worse than it is right now.
Marco:
Pretty bad.
Marco:
The way they view us, the way they talk about us, the way they treat us, that's all terrible.
Marco:
So I don't love the idea that we're about to do a puff week for their developer conference in a couple of weeks.
Marco:
because this is a time when I don't feel great about puffing Apple up, especially in regard to developers.
Marco:
But at the same time, the other day I was writing some code.
Marco:
I love writing code.
Marco:
I was writing code for my iPhone, for my iPhone app, in Swift, in Xcode.
Marco:
I love writing code.
Marco:
That's all good.
Marco:
That stuff, I like all that stuff.
Marco:
And so I think we have to compartmentalize on some level and say, you know what?
Marco:
We will talk about these people being jerks sometimes.
Marco:
But we shouldn't talk only about that.
Marco:
And that shouldn't prevent us from enjoying the output of these companies.
Marco:
Because for the most part, the output can be really cool and really good.
Marco:
And that's the side of tech that we love.
Marco:
And we just have to ignore the fact that there's some jerks along the way.
John:
Well, on the critical side of it, I tend not to ignore it because I'm always looking for, but why?
John:
Why does this product go unsatisfactory in some way?
John:
And the kind of digging we do eventually leads back to people who it's like, well, now we kind of have to consider who was in charge of this and where did they go wrong and how might things be fixed?
John:
Because...
John:
It's not entirely a black box, especially with all this discovery and stuff.
John:
So I think we cover it from all angles, but I think that's one of the reasons that we dig down into it.
John:
It's not because we love corporate drama.
John:
It's because we're back-solving from why are there no more ports on the MacBook Pros?
John:
Why does the keyboard not work?
John:
These are product problems, and yet when we 5Y them, it leads back to...
John:
specific people and decisions and policies inside apple and that's where we end up sometimes but you know hopefully we never have to dig that far hopefully they're you know simple uh surface level decisions that are easily remedied uh and not years long sagas of uh of badness but you know
John:
We're in one of the down periods on some things, but we're in an upswing on hardware.
John:
So, you know, maybe someday we'll be an upswing on everything.
John:
Upswing on hardware, software, and policies and leadership and developer relations.
John:
I'm not sure that has ever existed for Apple or any other platform company because always there's some part of it, you know, it's like finding a bottleneck in your code.
John:
Once you get rid of one, there's just whatever the next worst one is now the bottleneck.
John:
But, you know, stranger things have happened.
Casey:
We can dream.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Thank you for indulging me, gentlemen.
Casey:
We have some more details with regard to SSD longevity.
Casey:
An anonymous person writes, I've been a firmware engineer for one of IBM's enterprise SSDs for a little over a decade now, and I have at times worked on the error handling for powered-off data retention issues.
Casey:
There are a few strategies a drive can optimize under the covers to attempt to make data blocks at rest readable again.
Casey:
The problem with all of them is that they require time to be able to evaluate what strategy is best and tweak it for all the program blocks.
Casey:
So here's my advice if someone is powering on an SSD that has been powered off for a while.
Casey:
Power the drive on and let it sit.
Casey:
How much time to let it sit is a function of how much data is on the drive and how long it was powered off.
Casey:
The process for tweaking the read parameters for all the program flash so that reads can be successful could take a while.
Casey:
I can't comment on how consumer-grade flash controllers handle this, but it would boggle my mind if there was no practice of internally moving data to avoid requiring the host applications to rewrite data.
Casey:
Hence my suggestion of leaving the drive powered on to give these processes time to complete.
Casey:
I probably have too much of a biased perspective for how SSDs should handle scenarios like this.
Casey:
It's nice to see someone doing real-world tests on the drive, though.
Casey:
Also, there was an offhanded comment about storing an SSD in the attic.
Casey:
Please don't do this.
Casey:
104 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 40 degrees in the bananas temperature scale, is typically what the NAND devices are rated at.
Casey:
Don't at me.
Casey:
We get everything wrong but this.
Casey:
Let us have Fahrenheit.
Casey:
It's the only one we got right.
Casey:
Everything else is wrong.
Casey:
It's typically what the NAND devices are rated at when reporting power off data degradation rates.
Casey:
Keeping the drives in a cooler location will help in reducing data retention issues.
Casey:
Keeping them in your attic will likely accelerate the issues.
John:
This was put together from a little back and forth.
John:
I had over email with this person.
John:
And, you know, so enterprise SSDs from IBM.
John:
I don't doubt everything this person said about enterprise SSDs from IBM.
John:
But what I was pushing back on is like, OK, but like, do you think the really cheap like bargain basement consumer grade SSDs that that we buy to try to save money to get the biggest drive possible?
John:
Are they also doing this?
John:
And he's like, it would boggle my mind if they're not.
John:
I'm like, well, maybe your mind should be boggled.
John:
But anyway, here's one perspective from someone who actually knows that if you buy good, quote unquote, enterprise class SSDs, merely powering them on and letting them sit there actually may do something to save things.
John:
Of course, the enterprise class SSDs are probably more over provision than the consumer grade ones and have all sorts of features that give them a higher chance of data retention.
John:
But anyway, I would still say, uh, it seems to me that, uh,
John:
on average without knowing the specific ssd that you have and whether you got a quote-unquote good one or bad one or whenever on average it seems like those clunky old spinning platter discs may actually hold on to their data longer than an ssd uh in ideal conditions but you know keep it in mind but anyway it's good to know that enterprise ssds do do this better
Casey:
We had, I'm sure many of you have seen this, somebody recorded a video of The Price is Right.
Casey:
Now, if you're not American, The Price is Right is an hour-long commercial that masquerades as a game show, and it is a staple.
Marco:
I was so old when I realized that.
Casey:
Yeah, same.
Casey:
It is a staple of American TV, especially if you're a child, because it comes on at 11 o'clock.
Casey:
I feel like we just had this conversation, but it comes on at 11 o'clock, and it's a game show where you have to, like, guess the prices of things.
Casey:
And the Plinko is one of the most popular games, which John has sort of kind of used in descriptions of AI.
Casey:
Or no, that was Pachinko, wasn't it?
Casey:
I'm sorry.
John:
Very similar.
John:
You should describe Price is Right rules, because non-Americans don't know that.
Casey:
Okay, so the way this works is four contestants are brought up and they're shown a product and that product is not, it's described, but they don't state the price.
Casey:
And so you are supposed to guess what you think the price of that product is.
Casey:
But the catch is you have to be as close as you can get without going over.
Casey:
So if the product is exactly $1,000 and let's say it was just the three of us and I guess 1,001, Marco guesses 10 and John guesses 500,
Casey:
Even though I was only $1 off, John is the winner because he was the closest without going over.
Casey:
This is a staple of American kids' lives when they're homesick from school.
Casey:
Comes on at 11 o'clock, perfect time to watch while you're sick.
Casey:
And so during the first round of this episode, they brought out a mixed reality headset made by Apple.
Casey:
That's 256 gigabytes.
John:
I love how they described it.
John:
A mixed reality headset.
John:
Do you think the contestants on The Price is Right know what a mixed reality is?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I mean, this is part of the problem of the Vision Pro.
Marco:
It's like, how do you explain this to people?
Casey:
Everybody look up because the first prize is coming on down.
Casey:
It's a mixed reality headset.
Casey:
This 256 gig Apple Vision Pro headset offers an immersive 3D camera system that can display photos and videos, take calls, and can be used to play games or watch TV.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
Back at the go.
Casey:
Goes to whoever it's closest to the actual retail price without going over.
Casey:
Good luck, everybody.
Casey:
Go ahead.
Casey:
$1,000.
Casey:
Thank you, Tamia.
Casey:
$1,000.
Casey:
Leroy.
Casey:
$750.
Casey:
$750.
Casey:
$1,750.
Casey:
Rain?
Casey:
I'm going to say $1,001.
Casey:
$1,001.
Casey:
Maria?
Casey:
$1,270.
Casey:
$1,270.
Casey:
Good luck, everybody.
Casey:
Actual retail price is $3,499.
Casey:
Maria, come on up here.
John:
Yeah, this is a good example of what people think a quote-unquote mixed reality headset should cost somewhere around $1,000, $1,500.
John:
Because remember, they're all trying to stay under it, so they're not going to be overshooting it.
John:
And yeah, I mean, I was kind of surprised that they were guessing that much because they're like, oh, this is a fancy product.
John:
Maybe this is not a product for me.
John:
Like, it's not saying how much they'd be willing to pay for it.
John:
They were just saying, how much do you think this costs for somebody who's not you who's going to buy it?
John:
Because maybe you have no interest in this.
John:
You don't even know what it is.
John:
But it's a thing.
John:
It's a shiny tech thing.
John:
How much does it cost for the people who want to get it?
John:
And these people think, oh, for those people, it's $1,000, $1,500.
John:
And they're very, very wrong.
John:
So it really is a condemnation.
John:
It's not saying how much would it have to cost for these people to consider it.
John:
It's saying how much do they think suckers are paying right now for it?
John:
And they think suckers are paying $1,500.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I think the two saddest things about this Price is Right appearance for the Vision Pro is like number one,
Marco:
apple paid for this like as casey said the price is right is a giant commercial like the the companies whose products are on the price is right presumably pay for that or at least they certainly give them for free but i think they actually pay for it also because like when the show host describes the products it just sounds like a commercial like it's just a commercial for these products so apple presumably paid for this and
Marco:
And so Apple is so desperate for Vision Pro marketing that they are going to this.
Marco:
And then secondly, it just shows how no regular people know what this product is.
Marco:
And if you tell them it's $3,500, they are out.
Marco:
There is no chance of this selling to the public.
John:
I think they're already out at $1,500.
John:
But they're like, oh, for somebody who wants it, it's probably a $1,500 thing.
John:
To be fair, if the Mac Pro is on the prices right, people would be hilariously wrong there, too.
John:
In the realm of very expensive things, regular people are often very far off.
John:
But there are cheaper Macs than the Mac Pro.
John:
There are no cheaper Apple headsets than the Vision Pro.
Marco:
We are sponsored this episode by Notion.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And this is amazing.
Marco:
So I tried uploading my menu for my restaurant and I said, what kind of appetizers or other cuisines would fit in here with what we already have?
Marco:
Like what kind of options could we brainstorm?
Marco:
And it gave me a great brainstormed list.
Marco:
You know, another thing that people often can use this for is AI meeting notes.
Marco:
This is a huge feature they've been investing heavily in.
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Casey:
Uh, Hey, so fellas, what in the world are Johnny Ivan, Sam, Sam Altman building?
Casey:
Do you want to tell me about it?
John:
Well, we had the, uh, so when, when we recorded last week, the news had basically just broken about their official announcement, not the news.
John:
We knew they were working together, but like the, the, the, uh,
John:
OpenAI is acquiring IO and they put out the video.
John:
And so all we really had to go on was the video they had put out and maybe one or two statements from them to press outlets.
John:
But pretty much as soon as we finished recording, the very next day, everything in the tech press was like, what are they making?
John:
What are they making?
John:
What is it?
John:
And all the rumor people come out.
John:
I think they're making this.
John:
I think they're making that.
John:
So it's kind of good.
John:
We got to like...
John:
you know, speculated about it before the input of the entire world.
John:
But there has been significant input from all the usual parties about what is it that they're actually making.
John:
And unfortunately, it's not great news for Marco's watch theory.
Marco:
Because, yeah, basically what they've said is like, it seems like it's not something wearable, probably.
Marco:
They said it's definitely not glasses.
Marco:
It's probably not something wearable.
Marco:
And it seems like it's some kind of third device that you like have on your desk or maybe wear around your neck or something.
Marco:
So,
John:
it kind of sounds like the humane ai pin 2.0 well so here's the interesting thing about it because like in the days after open ai and and sam altman said stuff so they're they're stuff you can take to the bank even if they're going to be vague it's not a rumor they're saying it but then the rumor people came in and said okay on top of what they told you here's what i know about it and they get much more specific so the verge actually had a reasonable summary over here so
John:
In a leaked call reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Sam Altman, and the Verge is reporting this, and it's from the Wall Street Journal, so I'm going to say this is probably reliable.
John:
Altman told OpenAI staffers it's not a phone or glasses.
John:
So let's take that to the bank.
John:
I mean, we knew it wasn't a phone.
John:
It's not glasses.
John:
And, you know, they mentioned that Meta and Google have glasses.
John:
Altman also indicated that I wasn't keen on a device that had to be wearable.
John:
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean there's no wearable angle here.
John:
I wasn't keen on.
John:
All right, whatever.
John:
Anyway, and it supposedly will be part of, quote, a family of devices and screen lists.
John:
Family of devices in quotes.
John:
Screen lists is not.
John:
So this is from, you know, Wall Street Journal, Leaked Call, OpenAI, Sam Altman.
John:
I'm taking this to the bank to say.
John:
no screen.
John:
But they say family of devices.
John:
I'm like, how the hell do you make a family of devices?
John:
You don't put a screen.
John:
But anyway, screenless family of devices, not a phone, not a glasses.
John:
And I was cranky about wearability, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it won't be wearable.
John:
But then you go on to the rumor people who are like,
John:
Like Ming-Chi Kuo is just like, let me tell you everything about this.
John:
And I know everything already, including someone like quote tweeted his thing and drew a picture of it.
John:
And everyone's passing it around as if it's like a real thing.
John:
He's like, mass production is going to start in 2027.
John:
Here's what's going to be assembled.
John:
He's just got everything he probably wants to know about.
John:
It's slightly bigger than an AI pin.
John:
It's as compact and elegant as an iPod shuffle.
John:
It's like if you know all this stuff about it, just tell us what it looks like.
John:
But it's like, oh, I don't.
John:
I can just tell you it's elegant like this.
John:
And it's bigger than a bread box.
John:
And it's smaller than this.
John:
It's just...
John:
Anyway, one of the intended use cases is wearing the device around the neck, says Ming-Chi Kuo.
John:
But then the leaked call from Sam Altman says I wasn't keen on wearability.
John:
It will have cameras and microphones for environmental detection with no display functionality.
John:
It is expected to connect to smartphones, PCs, and PCs utilizing their computing and display capabilities.
John:
Yeah, so...
John:
I think the rumors are off to the races of like, you know, we'll see how close these like supply chain guesses or whatever are.
John:
But we have at least closed out some possibilities.
John:
I feel like we've closed out the watch.
John:
It seems like we've closed out anything with a screen.
John:
I'm having a hard time letting that one go if it's a family of devices.
John:
Because what kind of family can you make out of screenless things?
John:
How many different screenless variations can there be?
John:
And then the wearability...
John:
seems like not so much that's why you were saying marco like i keep thinking of like one of those egg timers that shape like an egg you know you put you put it on the desk in front of you because but like i was saying like their whole their pitch in their video was like isn't it annoying that when you use these ai products you have to get them up to speed on the crap you've been doing
John:
presumably the stuff you've been doing in the real world, but maybe also stuff you've been doing on a computer.
John:
Wouldn't it be great if that content, if our, if something had that context already and to have that context, the thing needs to be like somewhere where it can hear you possibly see you possibly have some connection to all of the other devices that are using.
John:
So we can see what's on their screens.
John:
Like again, setting aside any platform barriers that we know exist and
John:
this thing it would be nice if this thing could see everything on your phone screen and see everything on your mac screen and say everything hear everything you're saying and you know record like if if it had all that context so when you asked it something it's not just like it was just born and has no idea what's going on it knows uh everything that's going on and can do useful stuff that's that's the impression i got from uh what they were saying but then i think about so what hardware device do you make that does that and
John:
a little egg that you're like we're about to have a meeting i'm putting down my egg all right now we can talk and the egg will watch us and listen to us and record it i don't know how this is not just like microsoft recall but like not no longer confined to your laptop but like microsoft recall for the world
John:
Anyway, I found this speculation about form of practice really exciting, but I keep coming back to what I said last week, which is this is all well and good, but this product entirely depends on the magic of the thing that is not the hardware.
John:
It doesn't depend on its ability to see screens.
John:
It doesn't depend on platform integration.
John:
It doesn't depend on how cool the hardware is.
John:
It doesn't depend on people are embarrassed to use it.
John:
What it depends on is, is the thing inside there that's listening able to do anything useful that people want to pay for?
John:
That's all that matters.
John:
And so, Johnny, I hope all your efforts in making a beautiful egg or whatever the hell you're doing is not 100% wasted because, like I said, you make the best hardware in the world and you make it act like the humane AI pin.
John:
Nobody wants it.
Marco:
Yeah, that's that's like the more I hear about it.
Marco:
I was super optimistic last week because we had heard almost nothing.
Marco:
The more I hear about it now, I'm like, oh, like it's like red flags all over the place.
Marco:
Like it.
Marco:
And look, the world attack.
Marco:
is full of things that when you hear the rumor version of it, it sounds stupid, and then the actual product comes out and it's a hit.
Marco:
That happens in tech.
Marco:
So it's hard for us to say now not knowing almost anything about this thing.
Marco:
Yeah, it sounds like it's probably stupid now, but maybe it'll come out and be amazing.
Marco:
The world of tech is also full of humane AI pins.
Marco:
And so you don't know.
Marco:
Like, at this point, we don't know which one of those it is.
Marco:
That's why companies make these kinds of bets because they don't know either.
John:
Well, I hope they know better than we do because, like, again, with the hardware...
John:
We can think of all sorts of hardware that would be good, but none of us can think of a thing inside the hardware that would be good other than just fantasizing in a sci-fi type way because we haven't seen it.
John:
But presumably inside OpenAI, they have technology we haven't seen.
John:
And I hope that technology inside OpenAI is within spitting distance of making a good product because everything depends on that.
John:
And like I said, if you have that, you can put it in a potato and people will buy it because they'll be like, the potato sucks, but man, inside it is a gene that can do everything I want.
Casey:
and people will be dying for that potato like they can they would they would sell a million of them they'd be selling like potato pancakes i don't know wow wow gracious all right uh well no for what it's worth uh this week's upgrade uh jason and mike went back and forth about this and mike was super duper enthusiastic and jason was super duper not and
Casey:
One of the things I love so much about the two of them and upgrade is that they generally tend to take a far less cynical eye to things than a lot of people, including probably the three of us.
John:
Jason less cynical?
John:
Mike less cynical.
John:
I'll buy that.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't think Jason is generally that cynical, but oh man, he was not having it on this episode and I was here for it because it was quite funny.
John:
yeah i mean because like i said we none of us have ever seen anything that can do something that would make this product good uh but it all depends on your willingness to believe okay just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean nobody can ever do it maybe they've done it and you know i'm i in this case i'm so much more willing to entertain the possibility because unlike you know humane pin or rabbit r1 they make the thing that would be inside there and they're one of the leaders in the industry so like who
John:
who has the best shot at it, one of the leaders in the industry.
John:
So I'm willing to entertain the possibility that they have it.
John:
But until I see it, I'm not willing to say, you know, oh, for sure, they're going to pull this off because one of the things I've been thinking about since last week is if OpenAI had something that would make this product desirable, I have a hard time believing they'd be able, they would be willing to hold it
John:
until the egg is ready right like they'd be releasing it now is like the you know just a new version of chat gpt with a new model or whatever like why would they sit on it why would they hold it because in the end despite what johnny may think the physical form factor of this means almost nothing like it almost doesn't matter at all like and in fact if you have this
John:
it should be everywhere, not confined to an egg.
John:
Like, you know, so it's just, I'm really, I'm really married to the egg thing here.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I didn't think of this last week.
John:
Last week I was all potato.
John:
And like, are they the type of company?
John:
Because, you know, things are happening so fast in this industry.
John:
Are they the type of company that would sit on this?
John:
Apple would for sure sit on it because that's the type of company they are.
John:
But OpenAI is competing with, Anthropic is competing with, you know, Google Gemini.
John:
And they're just like one-upping each other every week.
John:
So I have a hard time believing they'd be like, OK, yeah, but we do have the real good thing.
John:
But we're saving that for the egg.
John:
So just don't don't show it in public yet.
John:
And so in that respect, I'm on Jason's side, which is like, but do they really have it?
John:
Are they just going to hook up what they already have to the egg and be like, now it's great, isn't it?
John:
I guess it's a little bit better.
John:
They don't have to type as much.
John:
But in the end, it's still ChatGPT and with all its foibles and limits.
Casey:
We'll see.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
I still think that the potential here can be something really great.
Marco:
I do think that, you know, one concern Jason brought up on Upgrade was, you know, we've seen unedited Johnny Ive.
Marco:
Like, we've seen Johnny Ive under Steve Jobs produced...
Marco:
like that team was the dynamic duo they produced like so much great stuff from that pairing because johnny ive like many artists works better in a collaborative form uh and you know it's better when he's like balanced by somebody with strong product sense and the power to you know say no to him or or to like to be like on level with him
John:
Or to point him in a direction.
John:
Because Steve Jobs would say, I need one of these.
John:
Go.
John:
And he'd be like, I'll make you the best one of those that I can make.
John:
But Jobs is the one pointing him in the direction.
John:
Make one of these.
Marco:
In other things, like when after Jobs passed away and Johnny was given way too much power by Tim Cook with his amazing product sensibility, we saw how Johnny Ive goes wrong.
Marco:
Like when he was the most powerful person in his world and he was the most powerful person making product decisions –
Marco:
We saw him go to extremes that were worse for the products in a lot of ways.
Marco:
We don't know what the dynamic here is between Johnny and OpenAI and Sam Altman.
Marco:
I'm guessing it's closer to uncontrolled Johnny than to Steve Jobs' Johnny, but I don't think it's all the way in that direction necessarily because he's not the CEO of OpenAI, and Sam Altman does seem to be pretty opinionated with products.
Marco:
So let's – like I think I'm willing to see how this goes, but I do – like again, the more I hear about this, the more I'm like, uh-oh, that doesn't sound right.
Marco:
That doesn't sound great.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
I still maintain from last show that I think –
Marco:
The best thing for Johnny Ive and OpenAI to try to make if they want to make a hardware AI device for personal use is a smartwatch.
Marco:
But it seems like that's probably not what they're making.
Marco:
And everything that I've heard about what they're making sounds worse.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
Well, when Apple buys them, they'll put it into the Apple Watch.
Marco:
That'll be fine.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Or it could also be when the Amazon Echo first came out.
Marco:
That sounded ridiculous.
Marco:
You're going to put an Amazon microphone in your house that's listening to you all the time for you to say it's wake word?
Marco:
What idiot is going to do that?
Marco:
And now...
Marco:
Half the devices that we all buy and have in our houses have microphones and voice assistants in them.
Marco:
That was something that sounded totally ridiculous and creepy and nobody would ever do that.
Marco:
And then within a decade, it's ubiquitous.
Marco:
Everything does that.
Marco:
So this could end up being like that.
Marco:
Maybe there is something to the AI obelisk that you put on your desk or wear around your neck.
John:
It's an egg, Marco.
John:
whatever like maybe there is something to that but i i don't right now i don't see what that thing is like but hey you never know that reminds me of the windows recall like i'm such a proponent of uh life streams for so many years and uh microsoft comes out with an os level feature of it but botched the implementation and the marketing of it so badly that now everyone hates it i continue to think a thing that knows everything you're doing and listens to everything that like that is useful
John:
as long as you feel like you're in control of it.
John:
And Microsoft failed that test with windows recall.
John:
Like they keep trying to put it out and keep having problems and security issues or whatever.
John:
Uh, the, you know, uh, the open AI is a Johnny Ive egg thing or whatever.
John:
Uh,
John:
It will be more useful if it knows, like I said, if it somehow magically could see everything that's going on all your devices, but at the very least can listen to everything you're saying as you sit there at your fancy bar in San Francisco and have cameras that sees you.
John:
That makes a more useful product if the thing at the other end of it can do something useful with that information.
John:
How do you pull that off?
John:
Like in the way that the Amazon Echo did, it's somehow like overcome the creepiness barrier, right?
John:
Like just that people see the value more than they worry about the privacy invasion or that they trust that it's not doing, you know, and it is fascinating to me that Microsoft blew this so badly.
John:
with with uh windows recall because they're not a small company and they know how to rule out products and they surely have to know what the objections were but they did so badly and they keep taking runs at it i wonder how this is going to work out because right now people have no problem chucking their whole lives into chat gpt because they enjoy the results from it and they don't think about where a little information is going uh yeah that's that is another challenge here but that's these are all like secondary and tertiary challenges to like have they made a thing that people want to use chat gpt people want to use so good job there
John:
The egg, we'll see.
Casey:
Well, I was talking with Jason privately before he recorded, like a while before he recorded, and he was saying to me, you know, similar things that Johnny is better when, you know, he's reined in.
Casey:
And the classic example of this, because it's me, or the classic, my classic example of this, because it's me, is Top Gear vs. Grand Tour.
Casey:
You know, these three dudes, these three old white guys did Top Gear under the auspices of the BBC, under the direction of the BBC.
Casey:
And it was incredible.
Casey:
You know, there were problems, but by and large, it was one of my favorite TV shows of all time.
Casey:
And then eventually one of them literally assaulted a crew member and they got booted from the BBC and they went to Amazon and they made effectively the same show called The Grand Tour.
Casey:
And it was mostly crap, if you ask me, or certainly not nearly as good as Top Gear was.
Casey:
I don't know, but my strong theory is that nobody was there to tell them no.
Casey:
And that was a problem because without those guardrails, they were just not as good.
Casey:
And I think Johnny, as all three of us have said, as Jason has said, I think Johnny needs those guardrails and needs somebody to tell him no, or perhaps just point him in the right direction like you were saying, John.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
I mean, I'm very, very skeptical and very, very dubious, but we'll see.
Casey:
I mean, time will tell.
John:
I give him a lot of leeway for a new product category, though, because like laptops are an established thing and we know what makes a good laptop.
John:
Nobody knows what makes a good egg.
John:
So he gets it wrong because he overshoots and goes too extreme and make something with no buttons.
John:
It's just like a smooth capacitive thing that you have to draw like figure eights on to make work.
John:
Like people will complain that he went too far and made the hardware bad.
John:
But again, if the thing inside it is magical, they'd be like, oh, Johnny overcooked this one.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Um, and it's, it's a awkward hardware, but man, the thing inside it's great.
John:
And it does look like a really nice egg.
John:
So I feel like he has a safety net here, um, of being in a new product category where there's no established anything except for established failures.
John:
Right.
John:
Um, and so he's, he's got, I put it this way.
John:
I would much rather have him doing this project than like working on another Mac or something or working on another iPhone for that matter.
John:
So, you know, he's, I feel like he is safely confined to, uh, the frontier of,
John:
of technology rather than taking established product categories that he's grown bored with and doing things that please him but that make customers sad
Casey:
All right, there's an Alexa Plus update, a reading from The Verge.
Casey:
There are some other missing features that, quote, don't yet meet Amazon standards for public release, quote, according to a report from The Washington Post.
Casey:
Alexa Plus still can't order takeout from Grubhub using contacts from a conversation, nor can it identify family members around the house and give them reminders to do chores.
Casey:
You won't be able to access Kids Plus features such as stories with Alexa either.
John:
So this is disappointing.
John:
We talked about Amazon's announcement that they had taken their their quote unquote legacy voice assistant and totally overhauled it to be powered by LLMs to be even better, which is exactly what Apple has been trying and failing to do with their legacy voice assistant, which was already worse than Amazon's.
John:
Right.
John:
Amazon just said they did it.
John:
They wanted this big press store or whatever.
John:
And this is actually an older story, but still like, OK, but if you've done it, shouldn't we be able to use it now and try it and see if it is what you say it is?
John:
And right now it is barely rolled out to anybody.
John:
I've never actually even heard of anybody who has it.
John:
And what is rolled out to them is extremely limited.
John:
So I'm going to say that Amazon's celebratory announcement that they had done this very difficult thing with their legacy voice assistant was perhaps a bit premature.
Marco:
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This is what we talked about back in December that we had found on our own, and it's a great little e-ink status display.
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Marco:
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And as a nerd, you can show all sorts of information on it.
Marco:
So as I mentioned back in December, I was showing like my calendar and stuff.
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Well, now they support even more calendar services.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They actually are also working on Raspberry Pi support, which is now in private beta.
Marco:
So much is going on with Terminal, and all this is under $150, and there's no subscription fees ongoing to use it.
Marco:
It's a great little device.
Marco:
Their firmware is open source.
Marco:
They have four different DIY server clients.
Marco:
There's also a Bring Your Own Device license for just $50 if you want to just kind of use their software and services, but if you have your own e-ink screen.
Marco:
So they have all sorts of stuff going on at Terminal.
Marco:
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Marco:
This thing is great.
Marco:
I now own two of them using them to display different information in different places to different people.
Marco:
You can see for yourself at us terminal.com.
Marco:
This is terminal is spelled without any vowels.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It's a great little device.
Marco:
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Marco:
I bet you can find a place for this in your life.
Marco:
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Marco:
And it's getting even more and more hackable over time.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks to Terminal for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
all right let's do a little bit of neutral and speaking of top gear the slate truck was that was a um overtime from a few weeks back is that right i think so yeah okay um the slate truck uh which is the exceedingly cheap bare bones electric truck well depending on your definition of cheap you know what i mean uh relatively cheap relatively twenty thousand dollars it's cheap for a gas car let alone an ev
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So anyways, Top Gear did a preview of it, and that's a video preview, which we'll put in the show notes.
Casey:
And it looks pretty good for the most part.
Casey:
I mean, it's not exactly what I would want personally, but I very, very much respect the idea of giving you a blank slate and saying, go forth, do what you want to do.
John:
Ah, you got it.
John:
Blank slate.
John:
the good thing about the top gear video is like when we talked about it it was just a story and with some pictures and stuff but when you see top gear reviewing it like it's this is a real thing that a person can poke around it's not finished you know but you see like it's real enough that they invited top gear to look at it and didn't embarrass themselves so i have a one notch more confidence that they're actually going to produce something
Casey:
Yeah, very much so.
Casey:
And then additionally, Kevin Ayers writes that there's a slate truck competitor, Telo, T-E-L-O, the all-electric mini truck.
Casey:
And Kevin writes, it's not as cheap as the slate truck, but the Telo is another new truck designed to consider.
Casey:
And that's telotrucks.com.
Casey:
All these links will be in the show notes.
Casey:
The range is between 216 and 350 miles.
Casey:
The power is between 300 and 500 horsepower.
Casey:
The price after the, I think now discontinued $7,500 tax credit in the United States is
Casey:
is between $34,000 and $39,000.
Casey:
This thing looks extremely weird because it's basically, like, if you were to look at the overhead of it, which they show in the dashboard at some point in a video we'll put in that DeMuro did,
Casey:
It looks as though they kind of just cut off the front of a pickup truck.
Casey:
And as it turns out, it's just because there is no motor and they don't have a front.
Casey:
They basically did just cut off the front of a pickup truck.
Casey:
But this thing is also very innovative and very interesting.
Casey:
Like I said, there's a video from Doug DeMuro that we'll put in the show notes.
Casey:
Kevin Cash writes, there's an active discord with the engineers and founders.
Casey:
They've got their first prototype built and they're hoping to start building actual trucks next year.
Casey:
Again, not really for me, but very, very cool stuff.
Casey:
And one of the really neat things, it was the Tello, I believe, that did this, is that it has basically a regular size, a small bed, but a regular size small bed.
Casey:
I forget the term for it.
Casey:
Despite the fact that it's about the same length as a modern Mini.
John:
I love that they made that comparison because they're like, oh, it's like a pickup truck and it's got a bed, but it's the size of a Mini.
Yeah.
John:
and all i could think of was the other picture you see on the internet which is the size of the current mini compared to the size of the original mini and that itself is hilarious so yes it's great that it's the size of a mini but the mini ain't so many anymore but you nailed it with like it's a pickup truck with the front not knocked off to the point where it's hard to tell from these photos but i believe if you were to drive this thing slowly inching your way towards a wall the first thing that hit the wall would i believe be the tires
John:
i think that's right yeah any part of the body that's how little a front this presumably this will be crash tested and whatever but it looks a little bit scary but yeah it's it is taking advantage of the packaging that you can only do with an ev by making it like all passenger space no front at all and using the length of the vehicle that they save for bed space now it annoys me that not annoys me like it makes sense that these companies slate and teller were like americans love pickup trucks because for some reason they think they're going to be picking stuff up
John:
But what they actually want is a sedan.
John:
So we have to make things that are pickup trucks, but are essentially sedans on the inside.
John:
So the people who buy them can feel good about the truck, but that they're never going to use or that they're going to protect very carefully with the cover.
John:
Never let anybody put anything like they have to do that for fashion reasons or whatever, for whatever reason they have to make this.
John:
I look at this and I'm like, I wish they would make a small, cheap EV that just holds people because most people in America need to carry around people and not bark, mulch and plywood.
John:
But whatever, you got to do what you got to do.
John:
So I enjoy the fact that there are two inexpensive EVs with small batteries that companies are trying to make and sell in America.
John:
I don't enjoy the fact that they're both pickup trucks, but apparently everyone else in America does.
John:
So good luck, Tello and Slate.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And the other thing is, I think it was DeMuro said that they had originally built the Tello with the assumption that people would want a two-seat or perhaps three-seat cab and a little more bed space in the back.
Casey:
But as it turns out, as they started talking to corporate buyers and things like that, they said, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
The crew cab, or that is to say the four-person cab, is what everyone wants, even at the expense of having a little itty-bitty bed.
Casey:
which is bananas to me.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
With love and respect to pickup truck owners, including some of our mutual friends, I don't get it, but to each their own.
John:
Some people need it, all right?
John:
And some people just want it because it's a fun thing to have, but so many of them sell that like, okay, the people who need it and people who want it for like just a thing that they just want to have and the rest of the people I feel like are getting it because they've
John:
like a fashion thing.
John:
Like if it was up to them and they were on a desert island, they would never pick a pickup truck.
John:
Like they don't actually have a personal affinity for it, but it's like the thing to do, you know, culturally the thing to do or something.
John:
And so they buy these pickup trucks that are essentially four-door sedans.
John:
Like I just put a picture in our Slack that I found recently showing what pickup trucks were like when I was a kid.
John:
And what they look like now, it just shows people want four door sedans, but they need to have like this.
John:
It's like skeuomorphism.
John:
Like it's the part of the part of the device that no longer needs to be there, but is there anyway, reflecting the previous function of this device, which is the actual definition of skeuomorphism.
John:
And yeah, I feel like the truck bed and pickups is now skeuomorphic in most cases.
Marco:
The only downside to, like, these cool, cute, new electric truck things is, like, this all looks well and good, but, like, will anybody actually buy these?
Marco:
That's the question.
Marco:
Like, it could have palm pre-syndrome where, like, you know, everyone tries it.
Marco:
Like, that's really cool.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Well, what are you going to buy?
Marco:
Well, I bought a Ford.
Marco:
Because it turns out like the reason why people buy trucks, there's a huge number of people who buy trucks because where they live culturally, that's considered like a nice vehicle to have.
Marco:
Like that is the default nice vehicle.
Marco:
Like you've made it in the world when you have your own truck.
John:
It's like a right of adulthood.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
And so there's these huge parts of America that are like that, where like the default vehicle that most people aspire to have is a pickup truck, even if they don't really use the bed for much or hardly ever use it.
Marco:
But that's just that is the default.
Marco:
Second of all,
Marco:
There is kind of a tragedy of the commons thing here where it's like you like the American vehicle size inflation is a real thing, especially on trucks.
Marco:
And when you are in an area like I live on Long Island, Long Island is full of trucks.
Marco:
Long Island is the south of the north.
Marco:
It is full of trucks.
Marco:
Everybody here drives trucks.
Marco:
They're huge.
Marco:
They get them lifted.
Marco:
They get massive new wheels and tires put on them to get them lifted even further.
Marco:
The things I see on the road here are ridiculous, and the roads here are huge, and they still don't fit on them.
Marco:
I live in truck area big time.
Marco:
I don't feel safe driving a very small, low sedan here.
Marco:
Most people wouldn't.
Marco:
So if you launch these new, tiny, mini-sized pickup trucks in most of America, where most people are buying these massive, tall, blocky, heavy Ford and GMC and Chevy trucks that everyone's buying...
Marco:
You're going to feel like you're in a motorcycle in one of these things.
Marco:
And so I think a lot of America is actually not going to be willing to buy one of these because they're not going to feel safe because everything else in the road is so much bigger than them.
Marco:
That's a big problem they're going to face.
John:
Don't they get higher than sedans?
John:
I think these are taller than sedans.
John:
It's hard to tell from the photos, but I do think they're like, I mean, look at next to the mini, look at the height of the driver's head in the mini versus these things.
John:
They're not as big as the giant trucks, but they're actually not as small as a Honda Civic either.
John:
So I think they have a shot.
John:
It depends.
John:
I mean, the real problem is the weenie factor.
John:
No one wants to feel like they got a weenie car.
John:
That's why the smart cars didn't do well here.
John:
Uh, I think the slate is, has less Sweeney factor than the Tello.
John:
The Tello looks weird and sci-fi-ish and maybe will only be purchased by like people in Portland or something.
John:
Uh, the slate looks like slate is like mini macho and maybe, maybe among younger people.
John:
uh with like the the whole uh k truck japanese thing maybe there'll be some niche for it but i don't know like that's up to these companies marketing departments like they chose to make these things i think they could have had a cleaner win by making a small small battery ev for the people who currently buy the prius which like for for all the love of pickup trucks we have there is a segment of people who want to buy small cars small inexpensive cars in america that get good mileage but
John:
I think Toyota sells a lot of those cars and Honda sells a lot of Civics like that market exists.
John:
It's just not the biggest market anymore.
John:
If I was aiming a small battery EV at something, I would be thinking about them.
John:
But both these companies instead are thinking truck.
John:
So here we are a truck or whatever the hell the tell it is, because calling it a truck is it looks more like something that would take you from base to base on Mars.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it's true, actually.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't I don't see that one getting very far.
Marco:
I think I think Slate has a much better chance of success.
John:
That's why I was so shocked to see Doug DeMiro do a video on the teller because I think like, oh, this is the thing that this will never exist.
John:
Like this is just a rendering.
John:
Like this is not a real problem.
John:
It was a real vehicle that he could like go around and it didn't look like it was like made out of cardboard.
John:
So I'm like, wow, they got pretty far along.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
You did the unthinkable, John.
Casey:
You wrote two blog posts.
Casey:
Was it in as many days?
Casey:
It was certainly within the span of a week.
Casey:
And I don't know what to do with myself because I'm not used to even the new improved John writing that much on his blog.
Casey:
So tell me about Apple turnovers and Apple turnarounds, please.
John:
So we talked about Apple turnover in my post where I was talking about how I lost faith in Tim Cook's leadership because there's a bunch of things that I could no longer believe Apple would do unless leadership changes.
John:
Things that I thought they should do that I'd just given up hope of them ever doing with current leadership.
John:
And that's what I talked about in Apple turnover.
John:
We talked about it in ATP episode 639.
John:
And then to go meta for a second here, I kind of always wanted to do a follow up post because like the Apple turnover post is why I think Apple needs new leadership.
John:
And the next post I was going to do is like, I assume people would ask this and some people did.
John:
It's like, oh, Apple needs some leadership and you're, you have no longer have faith that Apple will do the things you think they need to do.
John:
What things?
John:
What, if they got new leadership, what would they do?
John:
Like, what, what do you actually want?
John:
Because you didn't say that in the turnip reports.
John:
You just say...
John:
I've lost faith.
John:
New people need to come in because I don't think they're going to do these things that I want, but you didn't say what they were.
John:
So the obvious follow-up post is, okay, if there was new leadership, what the hell would they do differently?
John:
Like, why?
John:
What was the point?
John:
What is the thing that you want them to do that you think they won't do with Tim Cook that you think they shouldn't do?
John:
And the meta commentary is I was kind of planning this from the beginning.
John:
I'm like, won't this be clever?
John:
The first one is called Apple turnover, which is at least a three way pun, probably also four way.
John:
Feel free to figure that out amongst yourselves.
John:
And then the next one was going to be, well, just to pick out one of the common means turnover is when employees leave a company and replaced by other employees.
John:
That's turnover.
John:
And that's one of the four possible definitions of Apple turnover.
John:
The next one was going to be Apple turnaround.
John:
which is when a company's in turnaround it's when like oh things are going badly at the company so they need the things need to change and so maybe they bring in new management or whatever like the example i give in the article is that apple in the 90s was in turnaround they were going down the tubes and they needed to get this thing turned around and they tried a bunch of stuff to turn around including multiple new ceos and eventually acquiring next and they did get it turned around but they were in turnaround and
John:
Turnaround is either the last phase before the death of a company or the beginning of the company having a resurgence.
John:
So that was my clever idea.
John:
I'm like, oh, right, I'll do Apple turnover and then I'll do Apple turnaround.
John:
I massively underestimated how confusing that would be for people to make two to make two posts, one cold Apple turnover and one cold Apple turnaround within like 10 days of each other.
John:
Because everybody, when they see one of them, Marco snapped a good problem.
John:
They're like, oh yeah, I've already said that one.
John:
I saw that article.
John:
It's that Apple turnaround article, right?
John:
Or is that Apple turnover?
John:
They just think it's the same article.
John:
So I had to do this embarrassing post.
John:
It was like, I made a follow-up to my other post.
John:
You may have read the other one, but this is actually a totally new post, even though the titles are very similar.
John:
So...
John:
lesson learned like uh honestly i'd do it again because i'm stickler for like when i get an idea like this stuck in my head that i want to do this series of posts that uh that sort of bookend each other and have multiple meanings i would do it again but i just so badly predicted how confusing this would be so i apologize to the world but i guess sorry not sorry because i would do it again
John:
anyway sorry for the meta commentary and aside um no that's what we're here for that that's that's what the people pay us for uh what i want to go into now is um what what you know also new leadership what should they do what should they do differently and i didn't want it to be like a thousand you know page article here i also wanted to be succinct but there's a lot of stuff so i'm going to go through some things that i thought about and if there's anything you want to add to it that you think they should do differently and in particular as i tried to emphasize in the article
John:
This is not a list of all the things that Apple should do differently.
John:
There's tons of things that I think they should do differently.
John:
But most of those things, I believe they can and will do differently with current leadership.
John:
For example, the Mac Pro that you hear me harp about.
John:
I don't think there's anything about Tim Cook's leadership that precludes them making a decent Mac Pro.
John:
They haven't even canceled the product.
John:
And even if they'd canceled the product, I'm like, well, they could always come around.
John:
Tim Cook is not dead set against making a decent Mac Pro, to put it that way.
John:
He doesn't even care about it, right?
John:
like so that's just one personal example there's tons of things that they don't need new leadership to do so this article was entirely focused on what are the things that you think the current apple is absolutely never going to do that they should do and they need new leadership to do so that's what i'm confining myself to um and i think i made that point well enough that people aren't saying well i also think apple should do x it's like yeah they should and they probably will someday but they don't you know tim cook doesn't need to leave for that to happen
John:
So the first, the most obvious one, uh, which I titled the new deal for developers.
John:
This is the developer relations angle.
John:
This is one of the most important things that it just seems like, you know, I don't want to go into it too much because we talked about so much on past shows and also on episode 639, um, that Apple's attitude towards developers, um,
John:
uh and their control of the platform like there seems to be no crisis or regulation or any thing that can happen that will change their mind about it uh and it's things that we've thought should be different for years and years and it just seems like the only way this is going to change is with new leadership and on top of that i would say that even if the current leadership changes their mind has a change of heart and says you know what you're right we've been jerks we need to rethink this relationship they've lost so much uh
John:
I don't know, credibility with the community and people are so mad at them that it's hard.
John:
It would be hard for those same people, for us to take them seriously.
John:
We've turned over a new leaf.
John:
We're going to be a new company.
John:
It's time for a new deal for developers with Apple, but it's the same people.
John:
We'd be like, I like the decision you say you're making, but aren't you the same people who did X, Y, and Z?
John:
New faces really help.
John:
That's one of the reasons when a company is in turnaround, almost always new leaders are brought in.
John:
Even if the new leaders aren't necessarily better or people like them more than the other ones, it's like, you're not the guy who screwed this up or the gal who screwed this up.
John:
You're not the person who is responsible for the crap we're in now.
John:
So to get to Marco's point about Tim Cook having the expertise to fix the supply chain problem, even if that's true, a lot of people would feel better about, okay, but can we have the person who didn't cause this problem be the solution?
John:
Because that would make me feel better, right?
John:
You just need new faces sometimes for credibility.
John:
And particularly when it's a topic like this, which is Apple's relationship with developers, that's a touchy-feely thing.
John:
That's not just as simple as like policy changes, which would have to be part of this, but this is like...
John:
How does Apple communicate to developers?
John:
How do they see the relationship?
John:
And it's going to be like, even if all of Apple had a change of heart about this, it would be so hard over so many years to essentially win us back.
John:
It's like the spurned lovers, like I've changed baby, right?
John:
Like this time it's going to be different.
John:
Whereas if you get new people in there, even if it's like, even if it's like existing people, like say John Ternus takes over.
John:
It's like, well, he's not a new person.
John:
He's always been there.
John:
But the thing is, John Ternus was not making decisions about the app store.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So he is effectively a new face who never before was the person who is the decider for app store issues.
John:
And so we would be like, oh, well, OK, well, at least someone new is making decisions about the app store.
John:
And John Ternus is attitude towards developers is different.
John:
And I tried to emphasize that, like in this section, because this is what people always ask to like, what was the problem?
John:
Is it just the 30 percent or 15?
John:
Like, what's the right percent?
John:
What should it be?
John:
What I tried to emphasize in this section of the article is like they could leave their the app store percentages and their cut exactly the same if they actually change the relationship.
John:
If customers, developers felt like Apple was supporting them and trying to get their apps out and provided good service, like they could earn their 30 or 15%.
John:
And one of the ways that I said they could do that is to do what they've essentially been forced to do in other regions of the world, which is open it up to third-party app stores or whatever.
John:
Because like I said, I described it as the best way, perhaps the only way.
John:
to make developers happy with the dealer getting from apple because that's also another question it's like what would make developer happy they're so cranky what do they want do they want everything for free do they want like apple to pay them to make stuff for this platform what do they want
John:
You don't need to really hash that out.
John:
You could say, Apple, keep your percentage exactly the same.
John:
Hell, raise your percentage.
John:
But if you open your platform to third-party app stores, guess what that is?
John:
That's competition.
John:
And everyone in that, if they make as level a playing field as possible, they'll never be able to make it totally level because of the platform order.
John:
But if they make it as level as possible...
John:
They will have to compete for customers because a customer who doesn't like Apple's cut, for example, will go to the Epic store or the Google store or the Microsoft store or whatever other vendor is out there.
John:
All those stores will have to compete for developers business.
John:
And can Apple sustain 15 to 30 percent?
John:
Yeah, if they provided a really good business, if Apple
John:
they, you know, allowed upgrade pricing or fixed all their APIs and made store kit three, that's 10 times better and allowed people to return refunds and gave developers respect and help things get through review.
John:
And like, maybe we're more strict about review and had like a favorite program for actual good developers versus junky stuff.
John:
And that like, once there's competition, uh,
John:
people will sort themselves out and Apple will know that it is succeeding when people choose to pay them their 15 or 30% because of the benefits they're getting.
John:
Marco said this a million times.
John:
People always say, well, you hate all these things, but why do you continue to use an app purchase?
John:
for a lot of people, even now it is the best choice available with competition.
John:
We would be sure that not only is the best choice available, but like there are other people competing for it.
John:
So we know that like, well, they have a lower percentage in the Epic store, but they're not as good about, uh, you know, their, their turnaround time and app review isn't as good or their APIs for an app purchase aren't as nice as Apple's because the Apple has massively expanded it and does stuff like if Apple had to compete with Stripe, for example, like,
John:
Anyway, that's that's what I tried to emphasize in this section is a new deal for developers.
John:
And it is so not about Apple should take less money.
John:
It is entirely about Apple should earn the money that it gets.
John:
And the way you earn that is by having competition.
John:
And then people who are choosing you, you know, you're you're doing a good job because people are saying, when I look at the totality of what is on offer from all the places, all the ways that I can sell software for Apple's devices.
John:
I choose Apple because they have the best balance of things.
John:
Now, if they left everything the same and not just the price, a lot of people would leave Apple.
John:
But all I'm saying is that it's not like, oh, well, should they give it away for free or whatever?
John:
I think Apple could earn almost any reasonable cut if they did a really good job and all the stuff they're currently doing a terrible job with.
Marco:
Yeah, I think a lot of the feedback we get, as you mentioned, is people who say, well, if you don't like the 30%, what should it be?
Marco:
What would be a fair cut?
Marco:
And people kind of say that derisively, as if we're just being arbitrary here.
Marco:
But to be clear, I don't actually think that the 30-15% cut in the current scheme is totally unworkable for a lot of people.
Marco:
So what I want, and to be clear also, I'm also still staying with it.
Marco:
Even though I now could offer something on my website or something for US customers.
Marco:
And by the way, my customers have already started asking me to do that.
Marco:
I have gotten multiple emails from people in the last week saying, can you please offer a web thing so I can subscribe in a way that gives you more money?
Casey:
nerdy customer base this is definitely like uh leading indicators yes and that show is like this is going beyond just developers like in the public sentiment here but anyway and just very quickly to jump in you are uniquely well suited to do that because you know how to take money from people directly that's how atp membership works now granted you would have to rewrite some things but you've been you've you've done the hard work already
Casey:
So I don't think this would be – tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this would be that heavy a lift for you to make this work for Overtest.
Marco:
It would be trivial.
Marco:
I have no doubt it would be trivial.
Marco:
I don't want to do it because I don't want to support it, and I think it's temporary.
Marco:
But if it turns out being long-term, maybe I will do it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But –
Marco:
I am not pushing for my particular app to make 10 or 20% more money from those purchases.
Marco:
That is not the hill I'm dying on.
Marco:
What I want is for Apple to have the best products by being forced to compete in a lot of areas that they are currently putting up artificial barriers to prevent themselves from needing to compete.
Marco:
Because when you look at the areas in which they have to compete, look at their hardware.
Marco:
They compete in hardware with a lot of other vendors out there.
Marco:
Look at the iPhone generally as a product.
Marco:
If you ignore the software situation, for the most part, if you just look at the iPhone as a product, it's the best.
Marco:
It is the best phone.
Marco:
By all means, it is the best phone.
Marco:
Look at the Macs for almost any computing category.
Marco:
The Mac is the best computer.
John:
The Macs are a great example because you can see almost identical looking laptops for like half the pricing.
John:
Yet people are still happy to pay for like the M4 MacBook Air because the hardware is that good.
John:
Like Apple is charging so much more than 30% more than its competitors for the M4 MacBook Air.
John:
And they earn that price by making a product that people value enough to pay that and be happy with their purchase.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Look at AirPods, AirPods Pro.
Marco:
These are incredibly good products because it's a very competitive market and Apple has to compete.
Marco:
One of the areas that I think Tim Cook sucks at is it seems like how much effort Apple puts into a product line or a software option or a service option is
Marco:
is directly related to how much competition they have in that area.
Marco:
A common pattern we see from Apple in the Tim Cook era is they really half-ass something, like Apple Music is a great example of this.
Marco:
Apple Music is a totally okay streaming service.
Marco:
There are a lot of areas in which Spotify is better than Apple Music.
Marco:
Not all.
Marco:
Spotify is worse than some, but there's a lot of areas.
Marco:
But Apple Music moves glacially.
Marco:
Almost nothing ever gets better.
Marco:
It's a very old kind of unreliable code base.
Marco:
And why?
Marco:
Why isn't Apple being forced to push harder there?
Marco:
Well, thanks to the 30% stuff, they give themselves a huge price advantage in that market.
Marco:
And thanks to certain integrations they make that other people can't make, Apple Music has some advantages that third-party apps like Spotify don't.
Marco:
And there's a lot of areas like, you know, iMessage is a great example.
Marco:
iMessage, when you compare iMessage kind of feature and experience wise to something like WhatsApp, WhatsApp is way better than iMessage at a lot of things.
Marco:
Again, not everything, but way better.
Marco:
But Apple doesn't really compete much with iMessage.
Marco:
They have a very strong platform lock-in and they know that.
Marco:
And so they don't really, they invest very conservatively in updating it or changing it at all.
Marco:
And you can kind of look around.
Marco:
There's a lot of areas in Apple where they have this advantage they've given themselves through technical means, and then they kind of take their foot off the gas.
Marco:
And the in-app purchase system for apps and the entire app store, by the way, the app store sucks.
Marco:
The app store is terrible.
Marco:
Like, so much about it is terrible.
Marco:
First of all, it still has just abysmal, terrible search for
Marco:
What decade is this?
Marco:
Like, they have never had good search in the App Store, and it's only getting worse over time.
Marco:
It's full of spam.
Marco:
It's full of scammy apps that have, like, super expensive weekly subscriptions to do very simple, trivial things that trick you into signing up for.
Marco:
Like, it's full of crap.
Marco:
Like, all the stuff they say about protecting consumers, I know they released their big new PR report about that.
Marco:
That's really, I mean...
Marco:
They're sure letting a lot through.
Marco:
Whatever their system is, whatever their numbers say that they're doing to do us well here, they're sure letting a lot of scams and terrible stuff through.
Marco:
And there's so much about the App Store that is just terrible or incredibly mediocre and hasn't been touched forever.
Marco:
Or when they do touch it, it's really half-assed.
Marco:
And it's because they don't have to compete.
Marco:
The in-app purchase system, again, very similar.
Marco:
The in-app purchase system, there's a lot about it that is, you know, they have certain features.
Marco:
If they do a feature checklist comparison, they do okay.
Marco:
Not great, but okay.
Marco:
But the actual experience of using it, there's so many rough edges.
Marco:
There's so many rough details or pains in the butt that developers need to work around or work with or adapt to.
John:
Or business models that you can't do because in-app purchase doesn't support them.
Marco:
Right, entire business models that we can't do or that we aren't allowed to do by policy.
Marco:
And so there's so much there that is just really mediocre.
Marco:
The whole search ad system.
Marco:
You know, Apple says that we don't contribute if we don't have their cut in our in-app purchases, but also we have to keep paying to get people to install our apps now because search ads have perverted that entire system.
Marco:
So they're also making money from us that way.
Marco:
So there's a lot about the App Store that's just really...
Marco:
kind of crappy or half-assed or mediocre, and Apple doesn't have to compete at all.
Marco:
So they don't really put much into that.
Marco:
You look at the amount of effort they put into making these amazing new M chips every year for the Macs that are having amazing gains, doing amazing things.
Marco:
That is an area they have competition in, and they do great work there.
Marco:
And all these little software fiefdoms that have little to no competition because of policy or technical implementations on their end, they just take their foot off the gas.
Marco:
They don't touch them.
Marco:
So it's what I want from Apple.
Marco:
If I'm looking for like how do you turn around developer sentiment, it's not so much about, oh, I want to pay 10% instead of 15%.
Marco:
I mean, yeah.
Marco:
When you have somebody in a job who's unhappy with their job, you can give them a raise.
Marco:
That helps.
Marco:
But if they're unhappy for other reasons, that's not going to really solve the problem now, is it?
Marco:
If you want developers to be happy, what we really want is freedom.
Marco:
That's what developers really want.
Marco:
We want to be freed from some of the rules that we think Apple shouldn't have.
Marco:
One of those rules is freedom.
Marco:
Why can't we have our own payments in our app or in a web page?
Marco:
Again, I think it's a stupid distinction.
Marco:
Whether you link that to a website and kick back to your app or whether you have it in the app, who cares?
Marco:
That is a distinction that I think judges and Apple and commentators keep trying to make, and I think that distinction does not matter at all.
Marco:
But however you do external purchases with an external system from an app,
Marco:
There should be no prohibition on that.
Marco:
An app should be able to link out to a website for any reason and have any content shown there.
Marco:
An app should make money however it wants, as long as it's not a scam.
Marco:
Like that's simple as that.
Marco:
And you can't say the app store payment system is super safe and easy when it is full of scams the way it is.
Marco:
It absolutely is.
Marco:
All those like antivirus apps on the app store.
Marco:
Again, all those like abusive weekly subscriptions that are mostly scammy, like
Marco:
The app store is full of scams.
Marco:
It always is.
Marco:
It always has been.
Marco:
So that's a bunch of BS that they're keeping that out.
Marco:
So what we want is freedom.
Marco:
We want let our apps just do reasonable things that most reasonable people would assume apps should be able to do.
Marco:
And some of that is business related.
Marco:
And some of that means Apple won't make that cut on everything.
Marco:
But that's how you run a platform that's actually healthy.
Marco:
You're not going to collect every single cent made on that platform.
Marco:
Do the people who make web browsers collect a commission on every transaction that happens across the entire web?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
That would be ridiculous.
Marco:
Does AT&T collect a commission on every transaction I make on my phone over their network?
Marco:
No, that would be ridiculous.
John:
They tried to.
Marco:
Does PSEG, my local electric company here, do they get a commission on all the work I do using their electricity?
Marco:
Of course not.
Marco:
That would be ridiculous.
Marco:
So yes, while Apple has created this platform, they are being compensated for it in many other ways.
Marco:
And people who run software platform companies should also be aware, although Tim Cook is not, clearly, but they should also be aware the value that software brings to their platforms, that it is indirect value.
Marco:
The iPhone is useless without apps.
Marco:
Nobody would buy an iPhone if all of our collective apps from all of our developers were not on that phone.
Marco:
We give value to the platform.
Marco:
So what we want is freedom to do reasonable things, and ideally...
Marco:
For the higher ups at Apple to show that they see that value, that they actually agree that we bring indirect value to their platform besides just paying them directly.
Marco:
Because that is a really not only shallow and short-sighted, but just factually wrong view of the developer relationship.
Marco:
And what that tells us is these high ups at Apple hate us.
Marco:
They see us as leeches if we're not paying them.
Marco:
And that's incredibly disrespectful and incredibly factually wrong.
Marco:
And it makes us feel like our work is worthless.
John:
So the fact that Marco thinks this is why you need new faces, because having those same faces say something different, Marco is going to be like, I don't know if I believe you.
John:
I won't believe them.
John:
No, I really won't.
John:
Yeah, because like it's it's it's the same way it's hard to believe somebody when you when you like you flip the bozo bit on them or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
And it's.
John:
And again, it's not everybody.
John:
Again, if John Ternus comes in as new CEO and makes all these changes, it's like, well, I I'll give them better for the doubt because none of these decisions that we see in these discovery transcripts or whatever, John Ternus is not involved in that conversation at all.
John:
He's in charge of the hardware and the hardware is something we love.
John:
So we're like, maybe he'll do something differently.
John:
So at least we give him like, uh, you know, a chance.
John:
He's got a clean slate to just be like, now let's see what kind of decisions you're going to make.
John:
Maybe I'll believe you.
John:
But if the same people change their mind, they're going to have an uphill battle.
John:
Uh, one of the other things I listed here, um,
John:
was like the app review and stuff and like the whole frustration of feeling like you're not conversing with a human at the other end of it that's another thing that's like a competitive landscape of like is essentially the customer support experience for app review reasonable do i feel like they're trying to help me get my app out versus putting up ridiculous barriers and having my livelihood hanging in the balance when there are other stores they don't have your livelihood hanging in the balance if they reject you for some dumb reason you peace out and put your stuff up in a different store you know like that's the beauty of competition and the final thing i'll say is on the percentages and everything
John:
I didn't go into this here because it's kind of a tangent, but like so many things could be different about competing app stores, including Apple's own.
John:
If Apple wants to make more money, like I was saying, like they could keep their commissions the same.
John:
In fact, they could even raise them if they do everything else really well.
John:
One way they could do that, and these are all like policy decisions that happen on large scales across the entire world, is instead of it being 15% and 30%,
John:
have essentially a more progressive tax, let's say a competing app store opens, that says you don't pay anything for your first million dollars each year.
John:
But as you make more and more money, that percentage goes up and up and up.
John:
So if you're making $100 million, you pay us 45%.
John:
But if you're making under a million, you pay us 0%.
John:
Uh, what kind of developers would that attract?
John:
Would Spotify leave and go off on their own store because they make too much money?
John:
Or is it because their app is free and they don't care?
John:
Would, you know, I'd like a more progressive tax, which is kind of what they did with the small business program, 15 versus 30 or whatever.
John:
But like plans like that do a real good job of, you know, we've always talked about making sure Apple makes its money from the whales who were like are satisfied essentially within app purchase and the huge volumes.
John:
And they're willing to pay 30% because they're just making money hand over fist.
Yeah.
John:
while not bothering to lose developer sentiment from all these developers who are making essentially nothing as far as Apple is concerned, because you never know which one of those developers is going to have the next big thing.
John:
And so you want as many of those people who are making under a million dollars per year on your store as possible.
John:
And if they all pay you 0%, what they were paying you before was practically nothing anyway.
John:
Like, it's peanuts compared, you know, like, I don't know what the breakdown is in terms of which, you know, the diagram of which developers give them which money for how much things, but like,
John:
We already know like 85% of it is games.
John:
So we can just, anything that's not a game is already down there in the 15%.
John:
Stuff like that, you know, you're open to make different decisions there that may in fact make you more money.
John:
Having a higher top level tax bracket for the app store
John:
could end up making you more money even as you massively reduced or eliminated the app store tax for lower brackets.
John:
And if Apple doesn't want to do this experiment in an open competitive field, other people will surely try it.
John:
Just as Epic is now with like their various deals, like come to our store, you get X, Y, and Z. Like...
John:
competition it it solves that problem i think we may have spent too long on the on the new deal for developers but that that was my first first point of thing they could do differently and it's a no-brainer like you need new people to do it they've shown they're not willing they've shown they're not going to turn around on this nothing that happens internally or externally will change their minds and even if they did turn over a new leaf we would have a hard time believing that
John:
Um, the second item I had a hard time coming up with a heading for, but I called it a premium experience for premium prices.
John:
This is the thing I'm always hammering on just because I'm willing to accept for the sake of this bullet point that Apple's deal is that they sell you a product that costs more than their competitors and they try to justify that price.
John:
Like they do the example of the, like the Mac books or whatever, um,
John:
That's how they make a lot of money.
John:
Their products are more expensive and they make them better so you're willing to pay that price.
John:
One of the ways that historically brands that charge people a lot of money have been able to continue to do that successfully is by really gaining a reputation for...
John:
I phrase it as standing behind their products, but like products that do what they say they're going to do.
John:
So some stupid leather luggage brand, they cost a whole jillion dollars.
John:
Like, why would anyone ever pay that much for a piece of leather luggage?
John:
They say, well, I've had this one for 50 years.
John:
And when the strap broke after the 51st year, they replaced it for free.
John:
So that's why I'm going to continue paying 10 times as much or the whole, uh,
John:
uh terry pratchett uh uh expensive boots theory thing that uh i forget the details we'll find a link for the show notes but the uh you know rich people can buy one pair of boots for a hundred dollars and they'll use it for 10 years uh and poor people will have to buy a new pair of boots every year for 25 and the poor people end up spending up 100 times more on boots over their lifetime because they can't afford to buy the good pair
John:
That's kind of the business Apple is in.
John:
They sell premium products, and if they want to continue to sell premium products, they really need to justify that price.
John:
And in tons of areas, they do this.
John:
Their hardware, I think, costs more, and it is really nice.
John:
It's nice to look at.
John:
It's nice to feel.
John:
It actually is good, even when it wasn't fast.
John:
It was still nice, even when it didn't have ports.
John:
the laptops were nice they felt good they were pretty reliable there wasn't lots of catastrophes pieces didn't fall off of them you could quibble with the features that but like apple makes nice hardware so i'm not going to say this is a thing where apple is falling down universally but on the software front in particular apple's products have long since stopped being that really nice piece of leather luggage that you know is going to be dependable for 50 years
John:
And this is essentially the balance between how much time do we spend making new features and, you know, adding stuff that, you know, whatever the fad is of the day or redesigning all our OSs and putting in AI and how much time do we spend on fixing bugs.
John:
And that balance, even though it seems like one of those things, like, well, that's just a thing.
John:
They don't need new leadership to do this.
John:
They could fix that at any time.
John:
But I feel like maybe my 25 years in working in corporate America and software has influenced me here.
John:
I actually think that this is not something as simple as, like, I would decide to put more ports on our MacBook, which you don't need new leadership to do.
John:
The balance between...
John:
fixing bugs and existing stuff and adding new features in the end always comes down to leadership because everything in this industry is pushing you towards
John:
ignoring the bug fixes ignoring the tech debt always chasing the new features sometimes you have to like we got to get on this ai thing we're already late blah blah like there's there's so much pressure to do that the only way to hold the line and not allow your your products to crumble due to neglected tech debt and bugs that just never get fixed is you need leadership committed to maintaining that balance
John:
Apple's current leadership, like for the past several decades, I would probably include Steve Jobs in this as well, has not gotten that balance right for a premium brand.
John:
Because the premium brand is supposed to be the one that basic functionality always works.
John:
And by the way, over the decades, even the basis functionality gets polished to a mirror finish.
John:
Copying files from one Mac to another in the Finder.
John:
I know there's a harp on this one.
John:
It's a feature that has existed since Apple talk in the 80s, right?
John:
That feature should be polished to a mirror finish at this point.
John:
It is not.
John:
It is filled with bugs.
John:
It is crappy.
John:
It is janky.
John:
And nobody cares about it.
John:
And repeat for a million features on whatever platform you care about.
John:
Stuff exists and mostly works most of the time.
John:
But because it's not a glory feature, the bugs never get fixed.
John:
And no one ever spends any time making that a little bit better.
John:
Obviously, every year, you're not going to make it awesome and add tons of features.
John:
You don't want feature bullet or whatever.
John:
But over the decade...
John:
An existing feature should have fewer bugs than it did at the beginning of the decade, and it should be nicer than it was at the beginning of the decade.
John:
And Apple absolutely falls down on that, and that's not something that a premium brand should do.
John:
So my second category of things that I think they need leadership for is to adjust the balance between fixing bugs and polishing existing features and adding new features.
John:
And it's a difficult balance, but I think I think they're off.
John:
Like the one thing I said is like the last time Apple publicly demonstrated that it's willing to sacrifice new features.
John:
It willing to emphasize software reliability at the cost of new features is how I put it.
John:
Because plenty of times they say, oh, we'll work on software reliability or whatever.
John:
Show me that you're willing to sacrifice a thing that you wanted to do, a marketable new feature, publicly come out and say, we were going to do this thing, but instead we're not, and we're going to fix bugs in this other thing.
John:
The last time that happened was Snow Leopard, which everyone...
John:
you know, glorifies this is wonderful.
John:
Let me tell you, 10.6.0 was buggy as hell.
John:
But and they and there were new features like Grand Central Dispatch rolled out like every whole review about it.
John:
Anyway, like I'm not saying buy Apple's marketing hype about no new features in Snow Leopard, but they publicly demonstrated that
John:
That they are willing to not have things to show you on stage because they didn't.
John:
They have fewer things to show you on stage because you have a dental grant center of dispatch.
John:
People like, oh, I don't know what that is.
John:
Right.
John:
Fewer things to show you on stage.
John:
Fewer gee whiz things.
John:
They look at this new thing that's in this new version of Mac OS.
John:
And the thing they were trying to sell you is but we made the existing stuff better.
John:
And even if they only made it a little better or whatever, that was the last time they did.
John:
That was 15 years ago.
John:
and that and even that demonstration is again debatable what they did the the balance is wrong right now it's been wrong for a long time and it's causing uh basic functionality to just rot and it makes you feel less good you feel like you're not getting a premium experience or premium prices when it comes to software like i've always liked jason's survey things like how do people feel about software quality just look at the software quality line versus the hardware quality line i wish things went back more than 15 20 years but like
John:
it's not good.
John:
Uh, and then the Apple intelligence fiasco is another example of, uh, them.
John:
I mean, in some respects, yeah, they are behind, they need to work on the Apple intelligence stuff, but like they've shown they're even more willing to say, just announce something.
John:
We have to show and do something like regardless of the reality behind it, forget about fixing bugs and existing features.
John:
They're willing to just, they need so badly to have something to show you.
John:
We're doing the thing.
John:
We're in the mix.
John:
We're in the, whatever.
John:
And then,
John:
they're falling down on that as well.
John:
Like they turned the whole company and like drop what you're doing and try to add something that uses Apple intelligence and still didn't do it.
John:
So certainly they weren't fixing bugs and, you know, SMB file transfers and finder.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
It's tough to say.
Casey:
I think if I sat down and really had a proper think about it, I could come up with probably a list of three things that I would prefer.
Casey:
But I certainly can't disagree with the two that you've come up with so far.
Casey:
And I think the third in particular, in some ways, I almost wonder if it's the least likely because this is a delicious, delicious nectar that they've gotten very used to.
Casey:
But
John:
uh a man can dream so what is your third one here actually before i get to that i do want to throw in my i always try to throw in a sports analogy for the sports people and i feel like this is actually fairly apt here again my perspective may be warped by all my years spent in corporate america trying to argue for uh addressing tech debt rather than adding new features and how hard that battle is and how you need leadership by and otherwise it's never ever going to happen um and the analogy is adding features win game wins games but fixing bugs wins championships
John:
And if you don't know that the saying that that is a mirroring, maybe that doesn't ring true to you, but like everyone wants to win the game.
John:
Everyone wants to add the feature, have the glory, win the game.
John:
But the way you win championships is by fixing those damn bugs and making sure the basic things that your stuff does has fewer bugs than it did last year.
John:
And it gradually gets better over time.
John:
Not every year, not every two years, but over the course of a decade, pick any feature of any of your platforms.
John:
And I just say, how was this a decade ago and how is it now?
John:
And if it's not better or at least the same, things are going wrong.
John:
And there are so many examples of that.
John:
Anyway, rant over.
John:
The final one is, again, another hard time coming up with the title of this one.
John:
And this, again, this is not an exhaustive list.
John:
This is just what I came up with the top three, let's say.
John:
Growth the hard way.
John:
So many of things that we talk about are like, oh, they need Apple needs growth and the iPhone is leveling off.
John:
And so they need services revenue because that's growing.
John:
And look at the service revenue graph has been going up, up, up for years and years and years.
John:
This is the source of Apple's growth.
John:
And as you know, every company needs a source of growth because they're like cancer.
John:
And that's what the stock market loves is cancer.
John:
Constant growth.
John:
Wow.
John:
Constant growth until the entire planet has been turned into paperclips.
John:
That's what the stock market wants.
John:
So they need growth.
John:
And what everyone says is, well, there's no more growing with the iPhone because literally every human on the planet who can't afford an iPhone caliber smartphone already has one.
John:
Look at the iPhone sales.
John:
See how they were going up and up and up and see how they're not going up and up anymore.
John:
And they're just level.
John:
It's a money machine.
John:
But that's not your source of growth.
John:
We need a line that goes up.
John:
Service revenue is that line.
John:
Uh, and every time somebody says that, I feel like the world and Apple are giving up too easily on that iPhone line because yeah, the iPhone line has leveled off and yeah, most people in the world who have, who can afford an iPhone caliber smartphone already have one.
John:
But they don't all have iPhones.
John:
In fact, worldwide market share for iPhone is like 30% versus 70% for Android.
John:
And it bothers me that everyone is like, well, Apple's never going to get any of any of that 70%.
John:
Like that the resignation that the line between Apple and Android is totally unmovable.
John:
Now, obviously, Apple is probably never going to compete for the cheapest of the bargain basement Android phones.
John:
But there are tons of Android phones that are sold for iPhone prices, iPhone caliber Android phones selling for iPhone prices.
John:
We may not prefer them, but they're good phones.
John:
And more importantly, they're expensive phones.
John:
Apple should compete for that.
John:
How about changing it from 70-30 to 3169?
John:
Like, if the number's involved here, it's not impossible to have more growth with the iPhone.
John:
It's not even like they have the majority share.
John:
I mean, maybe in America they have like 60% or whatever, but worldwide.
John:
And by the way, why shouldn't Apple attempt to go slightly down market to get some of that back?
John:
It's like...
John:
Maybe they just think they can never do it.
John:
But like Apple as a company seemed several years ago to say, well, the iPhone thing's done.
John:
We are never going to get another customer.
John:
That 70% is using Android.
John:
We can never win their business.
John:
So just maintain our current sales at the level they're at now.
John:
And let's concentrate on services revenue.
John:
It's like you're going to give up 70% of the market for the most important technology product of the last several decades because you think it's just immovable and you can never get it.
John:
And again, it's not like they need to make a bargain basement iPhone.
John:
like compete with the Android phones that cost as much as the iPhone 16.
John:
Get some of those customers.
John:
Like, oh, we can never get those customers.
John:
Why do you think you can never get those customers?
John:
That's what I mean by growth the hard way.
John:
Don't just say, well, services are going up.
John:
Let's just take our existing customer base and milk them for more money with services.
John:
And I don't even begrudge them services because services is a good idea.
John:
Like I want them to have a lot of services that Apple has.
John:
I'm glad that they have and I enjoy and use.
John:
But if that's your only source, as we've discussed many times on past programs,
John:
services revenue is kind of uniquely corrosive to the spirit of the company because it encourages you to extract rather than to please your customers like i have you now you are captive in some way can i get more value from the customers i already have versus why did that person choose a samsung galaxy whatever instead of the iphone 16 or maybe last year's why
John:
do they choose that why do they why do they pick that phone instead of ours what is it about they like about that phone that's better is it something having to do with the app store is it is it simply the price we're within fifty dollars of that phone is it like do they have different feature set like what is it that they like about that android phone versus ours can we get that customer and then yeah also maybe thinking about is the is should the cheapest iphone really be six hundred dollars can we make a five hundred dollar phone that people actually want
John:
is that possible?
John:
Can we go a little bit down market?
John:
We're not going to make a $50 phone or something like, but like compete like 70, 30, 70, 30 is not a success.
John:
That is not time to like, Oh, we're going to rest on our laurels and set down the scepter and say the iPhone is the iPhone wars are done.
John:
And we are happy with a 30% because we have the most, we have the most lucrative 30%.
John:
And they do, they have the most lucrative 30%, but yeah,
John:
You know, 31 percent, that one percent growth at this point, they would kill for it because their growth is like totally flat or sometimes negative.
John:
So, yeah, I this frustrates me every time I hear about iPhone sales plateauing, because it's not going to be a source of growth like sales, like service revenue.
John:
I don't expect it to say like this.
John:
Suddenly it's going to turn around.
John:
It's going to be 70, 30 iPhone.
John:
Like, I don't have any illusions that's going to happen, but I do think that they shouldn't give up on it.
John:
And when I look at what they've been doing with their products, it seems like what they've been doing is, can we, all the people who are buying iPhones, what is their price elasticity like?
John:
Can we increase the price of the iPhone $100 every few years?
John:
And our existing customers will keep paying it.
John:
Like maybe they're selling fewer iPhones, but for more money and just maintain that even line in iPhone revenue, it just doesn't.
John:
It just seems like they're giving up too early.
John:
So this is maybe the the weirdest, most wonky one, because I never hear anyone else talking about this and everyone just accepts the breakdown.
John:
But it bothers me that they've given up on it.
Marco:
Yeah, and this is an area where, again, I think we have seen Tim Cook doesn't know how to create new product categories very well, nor does he have the product sense or maybe has he yielded the product sense correctly to the right people to meaningfully break into new markets that they're not currently in.
Marco:
He's been fine to keep steering the ship in the direction it's going and extract as much as he can along the way.
Marco:
But what areas has Apple broken into?
Marco:
Well, they've all been kind of accessories to the phone.
Marco:
Between the Apple Watch and the AirPods, I think those have been the biggest new product category hits of the Tim Cook era.
Marco:
Those are both great product categories.
Marco:
They're also both, you know, kind of accessories in terms of revenue and numbers.
Marco:
And they're also both like obvious and also unfairly locked in accessories to the iPhone.
Marco:
What new amazingness is today's Apple going to break into for new categories?
Marco:
I think what we've seen pretty clearly is that they don't really have that in them.
Marco:
Okay, well, what can they keep expanding into in the categories they're already in?
Marco:
As you mentioned, like...
Marco:
Sell more iPhones to people who already buy smartphones but don't buy iPhones.
Marco:
Sell Macs to people who buy computers but don't buy Macs.
Marco:
Sell iPads in context where we're not using iPads.
Marco:
There's lots of ways that Apple could attract new markets.
Marco:
And yeah, they might not all work out.
Marco:
And they might not all have the highest profit margins compared to what they have now.
Marco:
But that is, as you mentioned, that's the hard way.
Marco:
It is more of what we think of as like Good Apple.
Marco:
It's more Good Apple's style to get more money over time by making better products and selling more of them to more people.
Marco:
That is like Apple at its best when they're making awesome products that people buy because they're awesome, not because they have to, not because they're locked in in some way.
Marco:
They buy them because they're awesome.
Marco:
That's Apple at its best.
Marco:
And so I think that's what I want to see more of.
Marco:
And I have very little confidence that Tim Cook's Apple either prioritizes that or even necessarily can do that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, I give them some credit for trying and various things.
John:
But in some respects, the trying is like another like it's not connected, but it makes it like trying in a new category.
John:
Shouldn't preclude you continuing to try to sell more Macs, continuing to try to sell more iPhones.
John:
Get the next 1% best customers in the phone market.
John:
Don't, you know, don't go for the people with who can't afford an iPhone for, you know, but like, can you get the next best 1%?
John:
How much money is that worth?
John:
How much is the next best 2% of the most lucrative cell phone customers in the world?
John:
I bet it's worth a lot like one or two percent of a very big number is still a lot.
John:
And Mac, same thing.
John:
Like it's almost as if they feel like they're they're Microsoft in the 90s where they have like 90 something percent market share in the personal computer market.
John:
And then you're like, well, where are we going to go?
John:
Where's the growth left?
John:
Like Microsoft really was like at one point at the peak of their dominance.
John:
It's like, you know, the Wintel duopoly.
John:
There wasn't a lot left to squeeze there.
John:
But 70-30, there's plenty of room.
John:
And whatever the Mac market share is, I don't even think it's crack-30 worldwide.
John:
Probably is far under that.
John:
There's room to grow.
John:
And then if it's about making an AI egg, like who should be making the thing that will eventually someday when we're all dead take over from the cell phone?
John:
I would hope that Apple would be trying to be in that conversation right now.
John:
Everyone else is trying to do that to Apple with eggs and not working out so far.
John:
But like, where is Apple in that?
John:
Apple can't even get its voice assistant to be as good as the previous version of the Amazon one.
John:
They're not well positioned to do that.
John:
So, yeah.
John:
Anyway, as I say, the conclusion here, this list is not exhaustive, blah, blah, blah.
John:
uh professional driver closed course do not attempt uh also do not name your blog posts uh very similar to each other's people think it's one blog post but anyway i did have enjoy making the graphics for them obviously the first one was upside down flag thing i'm glad casey identified it as a flag because that's what i was going for but i did not have the time or artistic ability to make it look like a flag but and yes it was like an upside down flag upside down apple logo flag uh the rainbow one because it's the best one and this one i'm not sure if you guys remember this but if you're looking at the uh apple turnaround thing do you recognize what i was doing an homage to here
Casey:
It seems like you're trying to, like, have a spinner of some sort, but I don't know what specifically.
John:
Marco, ring any bells?
John:
No.
John:
It's 100%, like, essentially traced from the back-to-the-Mac announcement graphic.
John:
Do you remember that one?
John:
Oh.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
So it was when... It was before they had the Mac Roundtable, but it was like they had been ignoring macOS for a long time.
John:
That's when they brought a bunch of iPad features to it, right?
John:
It was Lion, so they...
John:
It's questionable whether they're back to the Mac, WWDC or Macworld or whatever it was really was back to the Mac.
John:
But that was the hype.
John:
The announcement graphic was let's get back to the Mac.
John:
And it was literally this.
John:
It was an Apple logo shaped hole with a silver shiny Apple logo rotating it exactly the same way.
John:
But instead of the black background, what you saw back there was like a sliver of a lion's face.
John:
no one remembers that except for me apparently so if you don't remember it well casey this guy but anyway i i i don't remember if we had a podcast back then when lion maybe we didn't when lion came out but this is this is an homage to the back to the mac uh pre-lion uh invitation graphic that apple put up but yes obviously for people who don't remember that it is literally an apple logo turning around uh yeah
John:
Anyway, hopefully people read these articles.
John:
They are a lot less long-winded than what I just said, but I feel like all the information is in there as well.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Terminal and Notion.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the many perks of membership is exclusive content in lots of different forms and podcasts.
Marco:
Our weekly bonus topic is one of these.
Marco:
It's called ATP Overtime, exclusive to members.
Marco:
This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about Apple OS rebranding, possibly two different numbering schemes, and our predictions for the next macOS name.
Marco:
That'll be in Overtime today.
Marco:
You can join to listen, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Music
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-
Marco:
Accidental Tech Podcast So Long
Marco:
All right, so more restaurant tech MVPs.
Marco:
This is the segment I debuted a few weeks back.
Marco:
My favorite stuff as I was working in and rewiring and cleaning out and fixing stuff in the restaurant.
Marco:
So I first covered just ubiquity as a general concept and a lot of their products being used there.
Marco:
I then covered network cabling and making my own cable ends with some cheap Amazon tools.
John:
I hope that was your second MVP.
John:
cables yeah wires they connect things woo yeah i mean a huge part of my work was like tear down old wires and put up new wires yeah they're surprisingly they're surprisingly important when you don't take them for granted like just i was thinking about them for various reasons that will get into future episodes in my own house i'm like you know what there's a lot of wire in here yeah that i don't really want to deal with i like it when it's there and i like having to not think about it but there's a lot of it
Marco:
Yeah, and a lot of it is like the wrong wires or in the wrong places.
Marco:
Like if you have old wire, if you're like, well, there's a bunch of coax and phone lines, like, well, I don't need any of those anymore.
Marco:
You have knob and tube.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
That's even worse.
Marco:
No, I was fortunate enough to have that.
Marco:
Anyway, so as I was crawling around, going through, doing, you know, mounting things, going through attics and up above fridges and stuff and working inside of the audio gear rack,
Marco:
One thing I constantly needed was light.
Marco:
I'm going to paste the link in the chat now.
Marco:
This is a DeWalt cordless work light.
Marco:
The world of battery-powered power tools is incredibly rich with tons of options these days.
Marco:
I don't really have an opinion on what system is best, whether you're a DeWalt person or Black & Decker or whatever all the different options are.
Marco:
Whatever your system of choice is for battery-powered power tools, get the LED light that attaches to those batteries.
Marco:
So I link here to the DeWalt one.
Marco:
It looks really simple.
Marco:
It is really simple.
Marco:
You stick it on top of one of the batteries that you already have four or five of, and it provides light.
Marco:
And with a little pivoting head, I was constantly using this.
Marco:
If TIFF was there, we were constantly trading it back and forth, doing whatever we were doing.
Marco:
I almost bought a second one.
Marco:
We use it so much.
Marco:
Every time somebody like an electrician or a contractor, every time they would come, they would borrow it to do their work.
Marco:
It was the hit tool that – and everybody was like, oh, I got to get one of these.
Marco:
Like everybody loved this basic like $50 LED light that attached to DeWalt batteries.
Marco:
I'm not going to recommend a lot of like specific tools because those are very personal and different needs and everything.
Marco:
But whatever battery system you use, get the light for it.
Marco:
It will become your most used tool.
Marco:
I guarantee it.
John:
I think I was mentioning this on a rec gifts episode ages ago.
John:
But like one of the best gifts I ever got was the headlamp that Merlin sent me, which I never would have bought for myself because it looks so dorky to literally strap a light to your head.
John:
oh my god i use that thing so much because in scenarios where like it's difficult to even find a place to put the light or your body would be blocking the light you know it's great if the light is literally strapped to your forehead and anywhere you look the light shines it obviously has way less light than this thing this is like for big jobs and eliminating large areas but for example if you were let's say crawling around underneath your desk to look at some of the aforementioned wires and you don't need to have a gigantic light lighting up the whole area
John:
a led head strap headlamp thing if you have never owned one of those and think it sounds ridiculous and you would never use it and it's embarrassing get one it will change your life yeah and they're like they're like 10 bucks like they're nothing it's like this is this is part of this product i think is the magic of leds like i don't know what the dewalt light looks like looked like 50 years ago or 20 years ago before leds became common they had like those plug-in halogen ones which made a
John:
huge and hot and expensive you have to plug them into to the wall you know this is a very different thing yeah led lighting is such a revolution so you really need to change the way you think although i do like the fact that this light that you link to like it has like the handle and the trigger it's like it's like a manly power to it yeah it's a light you don't i just need the trigger i'm the trigger is the power button
John:
i am i know it's got to be uh it's fun to pull triggers um i also am in the dewalt family but only because of the uh tire pressure inflator things that are in the trunk of all my cars oh those are great yeah and i had a series of i had a bunch of really i had a bunch of cheap ones from amazon and they eventually just died from you know being in new england and having a rechargeable battery in the trunk of a car eventually it dies the dewalt ones are just bulletproof and i love that they're replaceable batteries um
John:
Although honestly, none of the default batteries have ever died.
John:
I so wish that my stupid, ridiculously expensive Dyson stick vacuum took one of the adapters that lets you use the wall batteries with so many of them do.
John:
But apparently I got the model that no one wants to make an adapter for because the, um,
John:
the dyson batteries i bought the first party dyson battery because i was so terrified of her cheap knockoff batteries and amazon is so expensive and also so terrible and meanwhile these dewalt batteries just like do not die and are like fisher price and are indestructible uh i'm i can't vouch for their tools because i'm literally just using them for tire inflators but i can vouch for the batteries in the battery system super chunky super great i even like the color
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, I have no idea like what, you know, professionals needs are in this area.
Marco:
Like if you're a contractor, I don't know what your needs are.
Marco:
But for like a home casual user, I've been with Dewalt forever and it's always been great.
Marco:
Like I've never had any private.
Marco:
I use their drills.
Marco:
I was actually what's really great is they have these really good blowers like like like electric leaf blowers, basically.
Marco:
They are remarkably good.
Marco:
You would think, how can electricity have this much power compared to gas?
Marco:
And like, yeah, if you're like a professional lawn crew, maybe you'd need something gas powered.
Marco:
But like for one person for your house, the blower that they make is really good.
Marco:
Maybe I'll link to that too.
John:
Speaking of that and speaking of brands, because I feel like DeWalt is like, it's not an upmarket brand.
John:
It's like you'll find it at Home Depot or whatever.
John:
And I think like one notch below DeWalt in terms of getting even cheaper and more Home Depot-y, Losey is Ryobi.
John:
I don't know how to pronounce it.
John:
You know that company?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
I think their color is green.
John:
Everyone's got a color.
John:
It's like Super Friends or whatever.
John:
Makita is that bluish teal.
John:
I think they're red, aren't they?
John:
Gray and green.
John:
Is it Makita red?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't have their stuff.
John:
Ryobi, someone thinks.
John:
Anyway, I don't even know how to pronounce it.
John:
That's how I'm familiar.
John:
But anyway, the reason I have one of their products is because we got recently.
John:
I was compelled to get by one of my children, surprisingly.
John:
I didn't have any time to do any kind of research, and I wanted to get the cheapest one possible.
Casey:
Oh, no.
John:
Yeah, I want to get the cheapest one possible.
John:
That's why I end up getting like the Home Depot special for like, it's like literally the cheapest one they had.
John:
But the thing that I got as soon as I say these words, people's heads are going to pop up like gophers who have fallen asleep and are not listening to the show anymore.
John:
And we'll see if you two have any kind of reaction to it.
John:
I got a pressure washer.
Casey:
Ah, we have one.
Casey:
We have a gas-powered one, which I kind of hate, and I kind of wish it was an electric one.
John:
Yeah, I got an electric one because it's cheap.
John:
And just go to YouTube, man.
John:
Pressure washer channels.
John:
People who have no interest in anything like to watch people use a pressure washer to clean things.
John:
It's very soothing.
John:
And my daughter wanted to pressure wash some stuff in our backyard, but she's doing some kind of project back there or whatever.
John:
We don't have a pressure washer.
John:
I didn't want to spend, like Casey Shirley did for his expensive fancy...
John:
gas powered one i just like what is the what is literally the cheapest pressure washer you have that i think will do a decent job and so i got that and you know it's you know what's going to happen i'm a i'm a suburban dad who now finds himself with a pressure washer i'm like well i better set this up and i better test it out to make sure it works okay hour and a half later i have pressure washed the whole side of my house my shed all my garbage cans all the walkway like you cannot stop once you have the power of the pressure washer you're like
John:
i didn't realize this thing was dirty but i just did this little test area and you know what the whole thing is dirty so now it all needs to be pressure washed and it just i pressure you you were crimping the world with your crimper yep like you cannot give a suburban dad a pressure washer it is too dangerous
John:
especially if it's not gas powered where it's fidgety like this is just plug it in connected to the hose and even just within the realm where the the because you need to have both the hose attached to it and the electric cord there's only so far that those two things can reach in my setup and still everything that i can reach with that setup has now been pressure washed and i still want to do more i'm like i need to stop like this is not my thing my doors i after like an hour and a half i'm like okay it works you can use it now
John:
after you've burnt it out no i i got this special pressure washer pump saver stuff that you're supposed to put in it to keep the hard water from destroying the pump and of course yeah don't don't get a dad a pressure washer or a mom a pressure washer or literally anyone who lives in the suburb and has property and things do not get them a pressure washer because everything you own needs to be pressure washed and then will be pressure washed
Marco:
Can confirm.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
Well, anyway, pressure washers are indeed a universal appeal.
Marco:
And I can go even higher than that.
Marco:
What's an even higher universal appeal for anybody with things or any kind of cable work that you need to do?
Marco:
I'm running a lot of cables.
Marco:
There is one universal tool that all cable work at some point needs and might need in large quantities.
Marco:
Cable ties?
Marco:
It is the zip tie.
Marco:
You were close.
Marco:
So, you know, a lot of the work I was doing was like, you know, replacing wires that were like mounted onto the walls or in channels like in the ceiling or, you know, strapped to electrical conduit.
Marco:
Like, you know, they had like network wiring that was strapped to electrical conduit piping that's like running across the ceiling.
Marco:
You know, those like metal commercial electric conduits.
Marco:
Things are strapped to those.
Marco:
Things are strapped to wooden beams.
Marco:
So everywhere are zip ties.
Marco:
So a huge part of this job was removing all the old cables by, yes, cutting their zip ties.
Marco:
You didn't undo them all.
Marco:
are you kidding well these first of all these have been there for a long time they're very brittle a lot of them like you they kind of just like turn to dust you just sneeze them and they snap off in your hand yeah exactly like they did not it didn't take much to cut them um a lot of them were also like undersized for the job it was like this little skinny tiny zip tie holding up like a huge amount of stuff like so they they were not going to be reused um
Marco:
But anyway, so a lot of zip ties.
Marco:
And one thing I found, okay, well, suppose you have something that you're attaching with a zip tie to a wall.
Marco:
Well, what holds the zip tie to the wall?
Marco:
I have tried many things in this area.
Marco:
Another zip tie?
Marco:
Sometimes.
Marco:
One thing that matters a lot, that helps a lot, is zip tie screw mounts.
Marco:
So it's a simple thing.
Marco:
It's basically a little plastic bracket with a screw hole in the middle.
Marco:
And the zip tie goes through the bracket and you use a screw hole to screw it into the wall.
Marco:
What this creates is a very sturdy zip tie mount.
John:
What kind of wall are you screwing this into?
John:
What is the wall made out of?
Marco:
There's a lot of wood everywhere.
Marco:
This will not work in drywall at all.
Marco:
Okay.
John:
Yeah, I was going to say.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
And I don't believe in drywall anchors.
Marco:
They have disappointed me too many times.
Marco:
There's a lot of YouTube videos about them, by the way.
Marco:
I know.
John:
This is what I'm watching on YouTube.
John:
Let's test these drywall anchors and see how they work with this cutaway.
Marco:
No, I know how they're supposed to work.
Marco:
I've had a lot of drywall anchors fail on me, and I don't trust them.
Marco:
If I really need to use one, I will, but I will avoid them if at all possible.
Marco:
I will try to find a stud or something else that I can screw into.
John:
You should come to New England where there's no drywall in my house.
John:
It's just nearly 100-year-old plaster, which is not an improvement.
Marco:
No, that's worse in every way.
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway, no anchors for me if I can at all help it.
Marco:
So ZipTie screw mounts are way better than any kind of thing based on adhesives.
Marco:
Like I've tried and I'll get to those in a second.
Marco:
I've found a really great adhesive for a lot of things.
Marco:
But this is way better than most adhesives or than any adhesive for like mounting something to a wall made of wood or some kind of strong material.
Marco:
And what's great about these two, like one of the things that I was taking down sometimes was they make some zip tie mounts that have a screw hole in the zip tie.
Marco:
So you tie it and then you screw through like the loop.
Marco:
But it's all part of the zip tie.
Marco:
But the problem with that is if you then need to open the zip tie, you need to unscrew the screw from the wall and then screw a new one in.
Marco:
And so that is not as good as these if you have the space for these little brackets.
Marco:
So in areas where... So the ones with the built-in holes that are kind of single-use screw-in ones, those are great if you want the smallest thing possible.
Marco:
So there are areas in the restaurant where...
Marco:
Wires need to run in the dining room, like along a baseboard in the dining room to get to certain segments.
Marco:
So for those, I used the single use screw ones because they're way smaller.
Marco:
But in like utility areas where aesthetics don't matter, I use these with the screws because they hold way tighter and they are way more sturdy.
Marco:
And it's easy to change the zip tie if you're changing the cables later.
Marco:
Now, I mentioned adhesives.
Marco:
In most cases, you don't need to use them, but sometimes you do.
Marco:
And by far, the best adhesive situation I have found is 3M VHB tape.
Marco:
VHB, I think it's for very heavy bond, very high bond, something like that.
Marco:
I first discovered this when I was getting all those different phone mounts for my car.
Marco:
This is, I believe, the type of adhesive used by Peak Design for their mount, I think.
Marco:
And you can get VHB adhesive and VHB tape in all sorts of different sizes, widths, you know.
Marco:
But what's great about VHB tape is once you stick it on, it does hold very, very strongly.
Marco:
You know, it's not perfect.
Marco:
It's not going to hold, like, you know, more weight than science would allow.
Marco:
But, like, it's a very strong adhesive once you put it on.
Marco:
You can get these rolls of VHB tape that stick to pretty much anything.
Marco:
But if you have to then take it off...
Marco:
you can generally do so without destroying the surface unless it's like, you know, paint, like anything can ever paint off the wall.
Marco:
But like in most cases, like if you're sticking it onto plastic or wood or metal or, you know, anything that's like a little bit more sturdy than just paint,
Marco:
You can usually remove this if you need to down the road with some diagonal pressure or whatever.
Marco:
There are ways you can do it that you don't end up destroying the surface, and it doesn't leave residue behind.
Marco:
It's kind of like a tacky rubber texture.
Marco:
And so when you pop the thing off, if you need to move it around or remove it,
Marco:
What you're getting is like you almost like roll it up into a gum almost.
Marco:
So it's a very practical adhesive that I've used this to like mount things to walls, like to mount, you know, like there's like a Sonos player that like I first stuck to the wall here before I reinforced it with like some screw mount things.
Marco:
There's occasional like, you know, oh, this thing needs to stick here.
Marco:
One of the biggest things I use this for is strip lights.
Marco:
from my favorite brand, Waveform Lighting.
Marco:
Did I mention this yet?
Marco:
I don't think so.
John:
I think you did.
Marco:
I thought you did.
John:
You're talking about Waveform, for sure.
John:
Oh, you're talking about with the color temperature of the lights everywhere, and I think you might have mentioned the strip lights at the time.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So I won't go into too much detail, but yeah, basically, Waveform Lighting, who I love, although I did check earlier tonight, and it appears that their prices have all gone up dramatically, probably from tariffs, and so that's not amazing, but I also know it's probably not their fault.
Marco:
Thanks, America.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
So they make really good stuff, and I've used their LED strip lights in lots of different places.
Marco:
And their strip lights in the strips themselves come with VHB backing on them.
Marco:
But if you want to put it into any kind of other enclosure, like they sell these metal enclosures to kind of diffuse the light a little bit, those you need to stick yourself with some other method.
Marco:
so i've used vhb tape for those i basically i've used vhb tape for big and small applications all over the place and it has been wonderful it works like i use it in in the freezers to for certain things i get to in a little bit um it's been wonderful so vhb tape thumbs up from me i wish i could remember the tape website i found i found like this obscure website that looked like it was like from like the late 90s which was like
John:
um it's kind of like this to that there's like stick this to that website where it's like what do you need to connect together what do you need to glue together and you say i have metal and i want to stick it to wood and it tells you the glue to use it was like that but for tape um because i the problem the problem that i was facing is kind of similar to what you were describing of like you want tape that's going to be like good and sturdy and stick well but also like not destroy the surface and be able to remove it or whatever and i didn't land on vhb but whatever tape it recommended to me
John:
I had never heard of it.
John:
I think it might have been a 3M thing, but it was this really weird kind of tape.
John:
And my application was, in my non-CarPlay cars, I wanted to get the USB cord from the USB port somewhere in the center console up to where the magnetic MagSafe phone mount is on our cars, which is like clipped to a vent or whatever.
John:
And I wanted to get the cord up there with having it nicely routed or whatever.
John:
So now I have a situation where I need to tape...
John:
a usb cable to essentially a plastic center console of a dashboard and that is actually a challenging environment because it's going to be baking in the sun it's going to be freezing in the winter um it's it's a difficult environment in there and also
John:
I don't want it to destroy my car.
John:
So maybe if I got something that stuck really well, but like, let's say like the adhesive melted and liquefied in the sun and they would ooze out and make everything sticky.
John:
Or let's say when I did want to remove it, it would just destroy the plastic and there's no way I could get the stuff off.
John:
And whatever the weird tape it told me to get, which was also black, by the way, but not thick like this VHB stuff is.
John:
It so far has held up in two different cars over many years really well.
John:
And I have had to remove it and you can successfully remove it and it doesn't destroy the plastic and it doesn't come up.
John:
So the world of tape, like I think this VHP thing is another great example of like, don't feel constrained by the three kinds of tape that you know about and have had in your house since you were a kid.
John:
tape technology and varieties of tape they're great like don't just think about like all you know gaffers tape and duct tape and like you maybe you're familiar with those and you use them but they have limitations sometimes you need a specific kind of tape that with specific uh requirements for you know again for like temperature and weather sensitivity and load and being able to peel up and usually you can find some weird tape that will do that the problem is it will cost you a bazillion dollars i've been shocked at how much tape costs for my entire adult life and i continue to be so
Marco:
Well, this is not that expensive.
Marco:
It's $18 for a roll of tape.
Marco:
That just seems like too much money.
Marco:
Yeah, but in the entire restaurant, I used one and a half of these, and I used a lot of it.
John:
When my kids were small, we bought them a cylindrical wooden thing that had a rainbow color of masking tape on this big wooden cylinder.
John:
They're all on the same cylinder, so you could just peel off from each one of them.
John:
And that lasted for like their whole childhoods.
John:
But then I look at that now, I'm like, every roll of that masking tape was like $8.
John:
Tape is so expensive.
John:
Why is it so expensive?
John:
Anyway, sorry.
Marco:
I will say one of the waveform lighting things I did was especially nice.
Marco:
I forget whether I mentioned this or not, but they have these light strips that are called dim to warm.
Marco:
And they, if you use their film grade dimmer, this is all very expensive, but if you use their power supply and their film grade dimmer, it starts out at one color temperature.
Marco:
And as you dim it, the color temperature gets warmer.
Marco:
So that, which is like how incandescent bulbs always look.
Marco:
So it looks really nice.
Marco:
And that like the dimming experience of using the film grade dimmer with the dim to warm strip, it's the smoothest, nicest, best feeling and looking dimming experience of a light I've ever seen.
Marco:
We have them under the bar illuminating some of the bar sinks.
Marco:
And, you know, at night they want those to be pretty dim because the whole room gets dimmer as you get later into the night.
Marco:
And so it is a beautiful look.
Marco:
It looks nice and even and it does not look harsh like LEDs at all because the
Marco:
They start out warm and they just get warmer and warmer as you dim it.
Marco:
So that's been a really nice one.
Marco:
As I've been doing all of this, installing light strips, running new audio cables too, I've had to do a lot of wire stripping.
Marco:
And let me tell you, I've found my sole wire stripper.
Marco:
This, you know, when you have a good tool for the job, it really makes you feel good.
Marco:
And I have the, I think this brand is pronounced Knipex, K-N-I-P-E-X.
John:
If you watch Project Farm, it's Knipex.
John:
Oh, boy.
John:
Well, I'm not sure you're familiar with Project Farm if you've heard us talk about interactives, but it's that guy who tests a bunch of tools.
John:
And this brand is very,
John:
Very often featured and usually does pretty well in the tests.
Marco:
Yeah, this was recommended to me by my brother-in-law who knows everything about tools.
Marco:
At one time, an electrician came by to work on something else and he saw that and he's like, oh, nice ones.
Marco:
And he pulled out his and he had the exact same pair and it was all beaten up from months of use or whatever.
Marco:
So I assume these are considered good by people.
Marco:
But anyway, I have stripped so many wires as part of this project.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And these have just been fantastic.
Marco:
It's a well-made, like nice, weighty, sturdy tool.
Marco:
All of the stripping blades are all sharp.
Marco:
The little pliers on the end are perfect.
Marco:
Like everything about it, it's just nice.
Marco:
And when you have, again, when you have the right tool for the job, not only do you feel really good,
Marco:
But it also just makes the job a lot easier.
Marco:
Like nothing is more frustrating than when you're fighting your tools or you're being held back by your tools.
Marco:
And a lot of times if you have like the wrong tool for the job or a really terrible crappy one, that happens.
Marco:
When you have something by NYPEX, you never have the wrong tool for the job like this.
Marco:
It's a really this is a really like I have a few of their like pliers and stuff.
Marco:
They're really good.
Marco:
So anyway, that was the that was a great purchase, like between the DeWalt cordless LED light and the NYPEX wire stripper.
Marco:
Those are like the star tools of the show.
Marco:
As I was rewiring all of those things.
Marco:
I discovered, I forget how I found this out, but I discovered the existence of WAGO connectors.
Marco:
W-A-G-O.
Marco:
Never use a wire nut again.
John:
I don't want to show you the YouTube rabbit hole of these connectors because they are somewhat controversial.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
Well, we now have some of them in the restaurant, mostly for lighting and audio.
Marco:
It's probably fine.
Marco:
YouTube's going to YouTube, but you might want to look at some of them.
Marco:
Maybe, maybe, maybe not.
Marco:
So Wago Connectors, in short, they are basically alternatives to wire nuts.
Marco:
Those little like hats that you screw onto twisted together wires to cap them.
Marco:
And usually you might put tape around it to keep the cap on if you're not an electrician.
Marco:
Wire nuts are fine.
Marco:
They serve their purpose.
Marco:
They have been around for a billion years and they are...
Marco:
Simple devices that work better than you think they should, especially if you screw them on properly.
Marco:
Wire nuts can be fine.
John:
Wire nuts are easy to do wrong.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
They're easy to do wrong, and they don't always age well in certain situations, depending on how they were done and what kind of conditions they're in.
Marco:
They're also very difficult to change.
Marco:
What often happens is over time, the wire nut in your light switch box, well over time, somebody puts in a dimmer switch or changes things up or rewires things and the nuts get taken off and things get retwisted together and put back on.
Marco:
It doesn't quite sit the same way because it wasn't twisted on with the original twists and that solid core cable and all this stuff.
Marco:
If wire nuts are not done really well, they can be pretty unstable and pretty unsafe.
Marco:
And they're also just kind of a pain in the butt.
Marco:
So the way Wago connectors work, it's like a little tiny box.
Marco:
They connect whatever you plug into them together electrically.
Marco:
And they have one hole in the front per wire.
Marco:
And these little tiny clips that you lift up the clip, you put the wire in, you close the clip down, and it holds on really tight to that wire.
Marco:
Whatever you need to connect together, you can just plug one in.
Marco:
And you can pop the little connector up.
Marco:
Eject it and plug a different one in.
Marco:
And it makes wiring projects so much easier than wire nuts.
Marco:
Also so much safer in a lot of ways.
Marco:
Like if you're working on live wires, which you shouldn't be if you can help it, but sometimes you can't.
Marco:
If you're working on live wires, this is a way safer way to do it.
Marco:
Even if you're not, like if you're just working on, or even, you know, you're just working on like low voltage stuff.
Marco:
Like, all right, well, let me just plug in this audio cable that I'm splicing this audio connector onto this, you know, patch board or whatever.
Marco:
And using these for those connections is just so much nicer than using wire nuts or tape or whatever else.
John:
Don't use tape, please.
John:
Right.
John:
That's a case where you shouldn't look up the right tape to use because the answer is none.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
The answer is you shouldn't be using tape to hold wires together.
Marco:
But, you know, believe me, going through the restaurant, I've seen a lot of things.
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
but when i when i do new connections or when i when i'm working in an area i put it in wago connectors it has made things so much easier because like i didn't know about them for the first like month or so and i was using wire nuts for things like joining together speaker cables and stuff and it just sucked i once i found these it was like night and day difference so wago connectors i don't i don't think i want to hear why they're terrible maybe i don't want to hear that uh
John:
i mean i'm sure you can guess the whole thing is like well how well do they hold and you know how good is that connection versus a properly installed wire nut and there are complaints about wire nuts as well but like it's it's a for any new technology in the construction business there's always it's always going to be controversial because like wire nuts have been used for like 100 years or whatever and here comes something new that's different and you'll immediately people immediately find the weaknesses of the new thing
John:
while maybe disregarding some of the strengths and the first generation of these products will actually have problems.
John:
And anyway, if you're not interested in that type of YouTube videos and it's working for your thing, I'm sure it's fine.