Where Did Salad Go?
Casey:
We never decided if we had a pre-show.
Marco:
Oh, apparently we don't.
Casey:
I have a very boring pre-show.
John:
It's perfect.
John:
Perfect for the summer.
John:
Let's give it a shot.
John:
What do you got?
Casey:
Let me put it this way.
Casey:
There are times that I'll find out or notice that Marco has removed something that I've said from the show.
Casey:
I would say 70 to 80 percent of the time, it's a good call.
Casey:
It's for the best.
Casey:
10 to 15 percent of the time i'm like what the hell man and then five percent of the time you know it's just it's something else entirely but this is one of those things where i you you are probably going to remove it and it's for the best um but no i so is your pre-show something that you think marco is going to remove
John:
Yes, because that's not a good pre show because we can't use that as the pre show.
Casey:
Look at look at it this way.
Casey:
Anytime I try to come up with a pre show, we end up going off on the rails off the rails, not on the rails.
Casey:
It's opposite of that off the rails.
Casey:
And then we find something actually interesting to talk about.
Casey:
So here we go.
Casey:
And that's the pre-show that's only for the bootleg because Marco's going to remove it.
Marco:
Absolutely.
Marco:
Exactly as promised.
Casey:
Let's start with an apology tour.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
What happened with the theme song there, Marco?
Marco:
Okay, so last episode, I accidentally put in the old theme song about Twitter rather than the new theme song about Mastodon.
Marco:
My bad.
Marco:
Ending theme one, which I used for 10 years or whatever it's been...
Marco:
I have a bit of a habit on that one, and I accidentally picked that one instead of picking ending theme 2024.AAF.
Marco:
So, my bad.
Marco:
Sorry.
Casey:
It happens to the best of us.
Casey:
The offending parties have been sacked, as they say.
Casey:
No big deal.
Casey:
I would also like to go on an apology tour.
Casey:
Last episode, we were talking about Overcast and Call Sheet.
Casey:
And coincidentally, today is the day, is the one-year anniversary of Call Sheet.
Marco:
Hey, congrats.
Marco:
Hey, thanks.
Marco:
Are you looking forward to the App Store Connect report tomorrow morning?
Yeah.
Casey:
yeah i don't even know how this works i've never had a subscription app before so uh i'm scared to look to be honest with you um you know mike on on analog we talked about this and mike had advised uh just expect like half of what you had originally and i thought you know what he's probably right that's probably a good place to start is that whatever money i made a year ago just expect half that and hopefully that's a good place to reach and uh hopefully that that's hopefully i'll let
John:
Wait, don't you have to wait more than just like – I know it's like the anniversary, but like isn't there kind of – wasn't there several days between like the announcement and the publication of the episode where you talked about it and when people got around to listening to the episode?
John:
Isn't this going to be kind of smeared out over at least a week?
Casey:
Well, that's part of the reason why I didn't plan on looking tomorrow.
Casey:
I figured whenever –
Casey:
We hit like September ish is when I'll start like looking into it or just wait for, you know, hopefully a check from Apple that hopefully is more than ten dollars and say, you know, that went well or oh, wow, that really stinks, you know, one way or the other.
Casey:
So but I digress.
Casey:
So we were talking about call sheet and overcast and.
Casey:
I had made a comment that I thought was very clear what I was saying.
Casey:
And it appears that a lot of people did not understand, because I saw a lot of grumpy people on Reddit, which is arguably redundant, but here we are.
Casey:
And a handful of people reached out via Mastodon.
Casey:
And what I was talking about was, and admittedly, I used kind of like a mocky, dorky voice.
Casey:
But what I was trying to say was, whenever an app changes its interface, no matter if the change is better, worse, or whatever,
Casey:
Just by virtue of the fact that it is different, that pisses a lot of people off.
Casey:
And a lot of times what those people will do is they'll run to the App Store and do a one-star review.
Casey:
Oh, it's different.
Casey:
One star.
Casey:
I stand by that.
Casey:
Now, maybe my delivery wasn't exactly the best, but I stand by that.
Casey:
I still believe it.
Casey:
But a lot of people seem to hear me say, oh, anyone who whines about it being different is wrong.
Casey:
Which is not at all what I was trying to say.
Casey:
There are legitimate reasons why one could complain about Overcast, about Call Sheet.
Casey:
You know, John's apps are so simple, nobody could complain about them.
John:
If only that were true.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
But all kidding aside, you know, there are very legitimate reasons to complain about the changes that Marco has made or anything that I have done on Call Sheet.
Casey:
Like, they are not above reproach.
Casey:
And I think that that's what people got from what I was saying.
Casey:
I'm not really sure how or why, but here we are.
Casey:
But I just wanted to be absolutely clear.
John:
I think it was the funny voice.
John:
I guess.
John:
The funny voice, you're putting yourself in the place of the person complaining by saying, these people sound like this.
John:
I think that's the main source of the complaint.
John:
If you hadn't done the funny voice, I think it would have worked out a lot better.
John:
Because it's like you're making fun of the people who have this complaint.
John:
When you do that voice, you're saying, these people are not justified in their complaints.
John:
What if they do sound like that, though?
John:
You still shouldn't make fun of them, because that's just their regular voice, then.
What?
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, to be fair, there are a lot of people who do sound like that in their reviews.
Marco:
But also, I see why people do the one-star thing.
Marco:
Because if you think about the perspective of a typical iPhone user...
Marco:
What they are accustomed to is big companies redoing their apps all the time, messing up their habits, making their apps worse for their customers with their customers having basically no power whatsoever.
Marco:
So customers feel powerless and kind of helpless, and the one tool they have, the one lever they can pull that they know will have some effect on every single app –
Marco:
is the one-star nasty review.
Marco:
They know that.
Marco:
And so I understand why people jump to that because the entire rest of the market and industry has told them, has trained them, that is your only power.
Marco:
And by the way, we don't care about anything else you might do.
Marco:
If you just write into support for most companies, that's going to be even less effective than emailing me, which is really saying something.
Marco:
So I get why people do it.
Marco:
I still think it's not the nicest thing to do if... You know, so the one-star review...
Marco:
What they are often saying is, I dislike a change that's been made to this app.
Marco:
But what one star, like the lowest rating you can give an app, what that means ostensibly is this is a horrible, like broken or dysfunctional app.
Marco:
Like this means this app is like 0% useful to you or to me or to whatever app.
Marco:
And so I feel like it's part of the problem with the star rating scale.
Marco:
We see this all over.
Marco:
Everything uses star ratings, not just apps.
Marco:
You tend to get a lot of people who use five stars and one star.
Marco:
And what they really, I think, probably mean is like thumbs up or thumbs down.
Marco:
Um, but the, the scale, the, the rating scale gives the impression of more granularity and more kind of, you know, consideration on what, is this a two star?
Marco:
Is it a three star?
Marco:
Like it gives, it gives the impression of that and kind of the math is assuming that, but what people actually do does not really reflect that.
Marco:
So what, what I get annoyed by is when people are like, this app that I use every day, change something that I don't like one star and
Marco:
Well, you use the app every day and it's literally you're giving it the worst rating you can give it.
Marco:
Like that seems like an like an overreaction or a misrepresentation of the feelings that you're feeling or what you're trying to communicate.
Marco:
But I understand, again, why people do it, because they think this is the only chance I have to maybe do something that works, that gets noticed, that gets, you know, that affects change.
Marco:
So I see why people do it.
Marco:
It's a crap system, but it is the system we have.
Marco:
And so we have to deal with it as app developers, and we have no choice because of the way the App Store works.
Marco:
If you do what Apple thinks never existed and sell software on your website, for instance –
Marco:
You can choose whether you display star ratings from users or not.
Marco:
And you can kind of sell your products however you want to sell them.
Marco:
When you're on iOS, your only choice outside of the EU, I guess, but your only choice is you have to accept that there's going to be a star rating and random reviews from random people.
Marco:
very prominently displayed on your app page before anybody downloads it so you're stuck with the system that we have and you kind of have to play in it so that being said like the one star review dynamic is incredibly dysfunctional extremely harmful to lots of developers but also it's the tool people have and they use it for a reason and
Marco:
I wish they would use it with a little bit more consideration.
Marco:
I wish they would actually use the other ratings that are not just one or five more often.
Marco:
But hey, it's the system we got.
Marco:
We got to live with it.
Casey:
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Casey:
Although I will say, and I think I'm probably speaking for you, Marco, but you can jump in and correct me if not.
Casey:
For me, I don't actually pay close attention to reviews and star ratings and whatnot.
Casey:
I do glance from time to time.
Casey:
But to me, the best way to affect change in my apps is to use the in-app contact form, which is really just sending an email, but effectively send me an email and tell me what's bothering you and why it's bothering you and
Casey:
And for triple bonus points, if you have a suggestion as to what to do differently, you know, like, I don't like this.
Casey:
Well, that's not necessarily actionable.
Casey:
I don't like this because, well, okay, now we're talking.
Casey:
Or even better, I don't like this because whatever, and I suggest, well, you're my new best friend.
Casey:
Because now...
Casey:
Even if I don't agree, now I at least understand what the problem is, why it's a problem, and here is what you consider to be, and I don't mean this to be dismissive, I mean this genuinely, what you consider to be a worthwhile and reasonable fix for the problem.
Casey:
And that, to me, is way better and way more actionable.
Casey:
And I agree with what you were saying, Marco, that...
Casey:
In terms of leverage, the only real leverage anyone has other than stopping a subscription or something is a one-star review, and I agree with that.
Casey:
But in terms of actually achieving the goal you're looking for, then to me anyway, the best thing you can do is email me or use the in-app feedback or what have you in order to...
Casey:
Give me the justification for it, not because I'm the king and I don't want to be bothered, but because I don't understand otherwise.
Casey:
If you don't give me that justification and just say, well, I don't like the way this works, well, I don't know what to do with that.
Casey:
Obviously, this was the best option I could come up with, so explain to me why, or like I said, even better, give me a suggestion.
Marco:
Yeah, and the problem is, like, the one-star review thing does work in the sense that, like, I saw some news earlier, like, Sonos is really, you know, they're still kind of reeling from their big app thing, which, you know, scared the crap out of me when I saw it.
Marco:
And now, you know, I'm still seeing, like, my overcast reviews are terrible since the redesign.
Marco:
Like, they are awful to the point where, like, my business is on fire.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's a small fire on a pretty big building, but it is on fire.
Marco:
I need to react.
Marco:
I need to take action.
Marco:
This is not optional.
Marco:
If I do not take action, my business will go away soon.
Marco:
Well, not too soon.
Marco:
It turns out when you don't reset your star ratings over 10 years, the math works pretty well in your favor that it takes a lot to move the average down because it's like,
Marco:
Even a few straight weeks of one-star reviews, there's thousands of reviews to balance it out from the last 10 years, mathematically, with the average.
Marco:
But all of these one-star reviews that I'm getting are forcing me to take action.
Marco:
I am being forced to make changes, to consider...
Marco:
I had to re-add one-tap play.
Marco:
I'm having to make design changes.
Marco:
I'm going to have to add more options to the app.
Marco:
I'm going to have to add more buttons, compromise my design, compromise my simplicity.
Marco:
I'm actually going to have to make the app...
Marco:
In certain ways, worse, in my opinion, in order to placate the one-star review people because I have no choice.
Marco:
As an iOS developer, if you're getting a ton of one-star reviews over something, you have to fix it.
Marco:
If you care about the future of your app, because if your star rating goes down in a meaningful way on the average...
Marco:
you will get way fewer downloads.
Marco:
And it's really bad for your business.
Marco:
So the fact is, this method works.
Marco:
And I kind of hate that it works.
Marco:
But again, this is the system we're in.
Marco:
We have no choice.
Marco:
If there are that many people leaving you one-star reviews, you have to fix whatever they're complaining about, whether you agree with it or not.
Marco:
So it is kind of frustrating as a developer to have to give your customers that much power over what you do.
Marco:
Because your app design is not a democracy.
Marco:
but they kind of turn it into one in a way.
Marco:
And so I can, again, I understand why people use the one-star review lever because it's the only lever they have as users.
Marco:
But I also understand why developers are like, I kind of hate that they hold this over me because it is quite a dysfunctional system and there is no way to opt out of it.
Casey:
Just to put a bow on this, though, and to be absolutely clear, you know, I am sorry that I came across in a not so kind way that I try to be a decent guy and I think I failed there.
Casey:
But, you know, again, there's plenty of things that are worth complaining about.
Casey:
Just don't complain just because it's different.
Casey:
And that's all I was asking.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by RevenueCat.
Marco:
revenue cats developer advocate is charlie chapman who you might know from his launch podcast which i think is great and you should go listen to it it's wonderful um and so he's a listener of this show and he said maybe let's actually sponsor them so they got in touch and here they are this might be the first sponsored follow-up in a way so here's the deal with revenue cat they build an sdk and back-end infrastructure to make adding in-app purchases and subscriptions to your ios or android apps incredibly easy
Marco:
So let RevenueCat's engineers keep track of the constant changes to the store APIs.
Marco:
And they can even handle your paywall UI with their backend configurable but fully native paywall UI framework.
Marco:
So you can do stuff with this like run A-B tests with the experiments feature.
Marco:
And that's, again, with a native UI.
Marco:
You configure it on the backend, but then it's using native code in the app.
Marco:
So you can do full A-B tests with that feature.
Marco:
You can also use revenue cat charts to go way beyond what App Store Connect offers for understanding your business.
Marco:
And they're constantly improving.
Marco:
In fact, just this morning, they released a new chart called the Prediction Explorer that uses a predictive model to project how much revenue to expect from your users in the future, which is exactly the kind of information Casey was interested in last week.
Marco:
Also, if you're an indie dev, consider joining their hackathon they just launched this week.
Marco:
They call the Shipathon.
Marco:
They're giving cash prizes, swag, and even some digital billboard space in San Francisco for the winning apps, really.
Marco:
So this is a great thing.
Marco:
This is way beyond what I would ever be able to build myself.
Marco:
So check it out.
Marco:
Come see why thousands of top apps trust Revenue Cat to power their subscriptions at RevenueCat.com.
Marco:
And if you're interested in that hackathon, go over to their blog for the latest info on that.
Marco:
So once again, revenuecat.com to power your in-app purchases and subscriptions.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Revenue Cat for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
All right, so we had a lot of genuinely interesting feedback with regard to curbside charging in the United States.
Casey:
And I will try to make this as quick as possible, but a bunch of people wrote in and said, surprise, surprise, in some bigger cities, there is curbside charging.
Casey:
So it turns out Gareth Edwards pointed us to Plug NYC, which was apparently in August 2021.
Casey:
reading from untappedcities.com.
Casey:
Some neighborhoods in New York City are welcoming Plug NYC, the city's new curbside electric vehicle chargers that are being tested as a pilot program run as a partnership between NYC, DOT, Con Edison, and FLO, one of the largest electric vehicle charging networks in North America, which is interesting because I've never heard of it, but that's right.
Casey:
And an initial 34 stations with 100 plugs are coming across the five boroughs.
John:
I do wonder, like, this is a story from 2021 where they had an initial 34 stations.
John:
How many stations are there now in 2024?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, it seems like there's a pilot program in New York City, at least one.
Casey:
Then James Brown, presumably not the godfather of soul from Berkeley, writes, Berkeley launched a pilot program in 2018 for homeowners to install curbside EV chargers.
Casey:
Part of why it's so impractical, they recommend a homeowner's budget between $5,000 and $2,000.
Casey:
$20,000 for the install.
Casey:
That's like, what, half a Rivian repair?
Casey:
Heyo.
Casey:
For the install, including $2,500 of permit fees.
Casey:
I've seen exactly one of these ever.
Casey:
And we'll link in the show notes something that James provided with regard to how to make this happen.
Casey:
Keel from Seattle writes, I drive an EV in Seattle and we have some city-sponsored curbside fast charging.
Casey:
Very convenient.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes for that.
Casey:
Volts is a great podcast about green technology.
Casey:
They recently had an episode about expanding curbside charging in the US.
Casey:
They provided a overcast link, which 404s.
Casey:
So I think I've dug up the right link and I'll put that in the show notes.
Casey:
But if it's wrong, I guess blame me and not Keel.
Casey:
Seth Karras writes, Baltimore has been installing curbside electric chargers.
Casey:
See the photo of the chargers along Boston Street in Baltimore's Cannon neighborhood.
Casey:
And I don't know if we're going to include the photo, but we saw it and it will look cool.
Casey:
Juan Boyce writes pole vault, P O L E V O L T. That's very clever.
Casey:
Uh, curbside charging in North Carolina is a thing and included a link to plug share where you can see like a photograph of that.
Casey:
And finally, Sam Grover writes neighborhood EV charging also exists in Portland, which I think we've kind of talked about already, but that's right.
Casey:
No, we didn't.
Casey:
Nevermind.
Casey:
It exists in Portland.
Casey:
And there's a link to the information on that from the city of Portland as well.
John:
Seeing all these things of like programs that were started many years ago makes me feel like there was some effort to get curbside charging in some U.S.
John:
cities and just maybe didn't quite get critical mass.
John:
Right.
John:
But it's good that they're trying.
John:
It's good that they're doing it.
John:
You know, every little bit helps.
John:
I just hope it really like starts to snowball somewhere, you know.
Marco:
Yeah, the problem with charging infrastructure is that I think it's kind of like when companies hired a bunch of consultants to make their iOS apps and then said, all right, thanks, bye.
Marco:
And then a couple of years later, like, wait, we need to update the app now because iOS changed and we have no idea.
Marco:
We didn't budget for ongoing maintenance of this expense.
Marco:
We just thought it was a one-time thing.
Marco:
We make an app, check, done.
Marco:
And that's curbside or any kind of EV charging infrastructure.
Marco:
The problem is it takes maintenance and follow through and it isn't just like a one time, hey, let's put a bunch of chargers there and then profit.
Marco:
It takes more than that.
Marco:
It takes ongoing maintenance as we will get to maybe in the after show.
Marco:
It's more difficult than you might expect to maintain these things over time and at least it seems to be according to the failure rate I'm seeing on Electrify America chargers.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the curb, the curbside ones is interesting case of that.
John:
And I kind of understand why Berkeley was doing the thing of like basically making the homeowners essentially pay for it and own it.
John:
Because if it's a thing that you paid for, you have some stake in keeping it going because presumably you're using it for your car.
John:
That's why you did it.
John:
And it's like it's your charger.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
And so that's sort of distributing the responsibility for maintenance.
John:
for chargers where you like destination charger i don't know what the right term is like chargers that are like gas station there's a place where you go that's a charger and there's a whole bunch of chargers lined up just like there'd be a whole bunch of gas pumps for those type of charger things dc fast chargers also called level three chargers right but like what i'm saying is they're not they're not like curbside where it's just like they're dotting the streets there's a place you go where a bunch of cars park and charge right yeah destination chargers are actually something else that's like the ones in the hotel parking lot at some hotels okay those are level twos yeah
John:
Yeah, although I would say for the hotel ones, that's an example of where you feel like the hotel presumably pays for and owns those chargers or maybe gets rent for them or whatever.
John:
There's some responsible body.
John:
For the ones that are like a place that you go, it's like a gas station.
John:
We would hope, and I think this was the hope, but apparently there are economics that don't work out for this.
John:
That whoever owns that place where the chargers are would maintain them in the same way that someone who owns a gas station maintains the pumps.
John:
How often do you go and see pumps out of order gas stations?
John:
It happens, but if you live near one, for example, one of the pumps is out of order, you would expect, like, by next week, the pump's not out of order anymore.
John:
The people who own the gas station got it fixed, right?
John:
And I know the economics of gas stations, at least I've read, I think the economics of gas stations very often has to do with selling things from the convenience store.
John:
And the gas is like a loss leader to get people to buy potato chips or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
And maybe there's just not enough places where you can buy potato chips at like Tesla chargers.
John:
And it's a bad example because they maintain theirs.
John:
But like, I feel like the failure rates on electric chargers are so bad is because people had that mindset.
John:
It's like, oh, it's electricity.
John:
It's not like a gas pump.
John:
that has to be maintained and inspected you know you see those inspection stickers and everything and it's like all this whole infrastructure of the big trucks come and they fill the big tanks and then you know the pumps are inspected and signed off on and people own things it's not like that it's just a plug so like the ios app you just described once we install the plugs we're done right it's like no someone needs to be looking at every single plug every single day just like at a gas station someone who works at a gas station notices if one of the pumps stops working
John:
Because they work at the gas station and someone says, hey, the pump's not working.
John:
And they're there all day and they say, oh, pump number three is out.
John:
And then they arrange to get pump number three fixed.
John:
And it seems like an electric charger thinks, A, there's nobody there.
John:
And B, when it breaks, it just sits there for months and months and months.
John:
And it's just like, is anyone ever going to like notice that this plug has not working, that the cord got yanked out, that it's fraying, that the machine is on the fritz, that the software update failed or whatever?
Yeah.
John:
They just need someone to take ownership.
John:
I'm holding up gas stations.
John:
It's a paragon of responsible stewardship of infrastructure.
John:
But honestly, I don't think it's asking too much.
John:
Gas stations, we're able to maintain those, and they're just, I would argue, mechanically more complex than chargers, if not technologically more complex.
John:
So I hope this does get better.
John:
It seems like it could, but maybe the economics needs to work out to pay someone to sit there and sell you potato chips at the Tesla Charger.
Casey:
All right, moving along.
Casey:
We've got some color information.
Casey:
Apparently, there's been some leaks over the last few weeks or week or so with regard to iPhone 16 and 16 Pro colors.
Casey:
So we've got a couple of posts from 9to5Mac that include some pictures for the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus.
Casey:
We've got white, very, very black, blue, green, and pink.
Casey:
And interestingly, this camera bump is different, right?
Casey:
Because it's vertically up and down with a flash kind of separated and not in the camera.
John:
So I was saying last week, like if you're expecting that just, oh, it's great when there's going to be top and bottom, it'll be a narrow opening.
John:
But no, because you've got to have that flash exposed.
John:
And unless you want to do like a punch hole cutout for the flash, which you probably don't want to do because it won't be exact and it'll throw shadows, it's going to end up being like a triangular cutout, don't you think, for cases on this design?
John:
Yeah, probably.
Casey:
Yeah, I think so.
Casey:
But the colors look good.
Casey:
Like the black and blue in particular look very good to my eyes.
Casey:
I can see why one would like the green.
Casey:
It's a little bit on the bluey, like turquoise-y side, just a touch.
Casey:
But it's, I mean, actually all of them look pretty good.
John:
They are more saturated than all, but they seem kind of like...
John:
It's still a little bit pale to me.
John:
And I kind of miss like my daughter's got the purple phone.
John:
I think that's more fun.
John:
There's no yellow.
John:
There's no red.
John:
But, you know, at least like you said, at least the black is black and the white is white.
John:
Like those seem to be more solid and saturated.
John:
And, you know, anyway, not a great color year, but.
John:
Not the worst.
John:
But that's, of course, the 16 and the 16 Plus, the phones for people who like colors.
Casey:
But if you are a professional, you don't like color.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
You still will not like color this September because according to 9to5Mac, your choices are...
Casey:
natural titanium which is what i chose and actually does look really good but that's neither here nor there you get natural titanium rose titanium white titanium or black titanium now in the defense of these colors i do genuinely think and i am biased that natural looks really damn good and this black is freaking black like this is a mighty black black titanium but still can we not have fun colors on professional devices yeah
John:
Not very colorful.
John:
Again, I do like the black and white, and I do like the natural titanium, and the rose one presumably is red tinted.
John:
We don't have a picture of that, but that's not really colors.
John:
It's just shades of gray.
John:
A nice set of shades of gray, and one of the shades of gray has a tint of color in it, but that's it.
Marco:
I mean, just like all the pro phones that pretty much have ever existed, it's like, well, you can have...
Marco:
Very light gray, which they call white.
Marco:
Very dark gray, which they call some form of black or space or whatever.
Marco:
Then you can have maybe a medium gray that has, you know, a color whiffed by it.
Marco:
But, you know, it's not, it's basically, like, and this year was even, this year was, like, comically bad, but the 15 Pro lineup, like, now we have, like, four different shades of gray and then a blue gray.
John:
yeah i mean people put cases on most time anyway it's not a big deal though like i said on my daughter's phone she has a purple 12 that she had a clear case on and we recently got a new clear case to replace the old yellowed one looks really good in a clear case clear cases do show off the color of the phone you know it's like that that purple is a great color she's going to be sad when eventually she has to replace that phone and her choice if she had to pick from these colors i don't know what she would do i mean maybe she would like the the pink or the pale green but that purple was great i miss it
Marco:
I wonder if, I mean, this is wish casting more than actual prediction, but I wonder if, assuming that the iPhone slim rumor actually has something behind it for next year, I wonder if they would take advantage of the likelihood that I think slim owners might be less likely to use cases than everyone else, just because they would want to kind of show off the slimness of it.
Marco:
Maybe it wouldn't need a case as much because it would be much lighter.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But
Marco:
Or maybe people would use more clear cases to help show it off.
Marco:
But I wonder if they would take the opportunity to maybe have some more desirable or more flashy colors in the slimline.
Marco:
We'll see.
John:
Well, like I said last week, if it is going to be the most expensive phone, that means no colors.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
I guess, yeah, following their trend, like the less expensive phones have the most color.
Marco:
The pros have only many shades of gray.
Marco:
So I guess maybe the slim would only come in like just an average, you know, 50% gray shade.
Marco:
Like that's it.
Marco:
Just the most average color that is no color.
Casey:
Ultimately, the pro phones have about as much color in them as my martinis have vermouth.
Casey:
You just wave it nearby and call it a day.
Casey:
CrowdStrike, we're there.
Casey:
We have a lot of feedback about CrowdStrike from various anonymous peoples.
Casey:
I will read at least a little bit of one.
Casey:
One anonymous person writes, I am not a lawyer, but I have quite a bit of experience in negotiating and then enforcing software agreements between security vendors like CrowdStrike and large organizations.
Casey:
I can say definitively the type of click-through EULA or end-user license agreement individuals are subject to are not in play when multinational giants do deals.
Casey:
Each contract is bespoke with vendors and customers going back and forth over months before inking deals lasting multiple years and millions of dollars.
Casey:
So any CrowdStrike lawsuits won't add or subtract a case law about EULAs.
Casey:
CrowdStrike Falcon isn't something they sell to just anyone and for sure not to individuals who would click through a one-sided EULA.
Casey:
The final contracts between giants always have clauses about things like software development lifecycle, supply chain management, security practices, and service-level agreements.
Casey:
It's very common to see these phrases like, quote, reasonable efforts, quote, and, quote, consistent with industry best practices, quote, scattered around.
Casey:
Once the deals are in place, there are often squabbles about what reasonable efforts look like.
Casey:
But customers generally win because vendors want to keep customers happy and have a hope of renewal.
Casey:
It's rare for disputes to see the inside of a courtroom since litigation is so expensive.
Casey:
Most of the time, if a vendor isn't meeting their obligations under the contract and shows no sign of improving, it's much cheaper to just migrate to a different vendor, providing similar capabilities, and then badmouth them to your entire security network.
Casey:
I guess that's the equivalent of a one-star, huh?
Casey:
This is not a typical outage, and there will be tons of litigation, both by customers directly and by their cybersecurity insurance underwriters, today I learned that's a thing, seeking to recover damages.
Casey:
CrowdStrike clearly fell down on the reasonable efforts part of many clauses around their development and release practices, so there's a pretty strong case.
John:
Yeah, I remember from my jobby job, we had a contract that basically said the sort of the downtime stuff of like, hey, I'm paying for you to do the service and you're like a web-based company, but what if your site goes down?
John:
That hurts my business.
John:
What's the deal there?
John:
And the deal was basically like, okay, we guarantee, you know, X...
John:
amount of uptime per unit you know for a month a week or whatever and if we fall below the amount that we guarantee we start paying you money for like every minute that we're down uh and it's just a negotiation to say like okay well how many hours per month do we need to be up like you can have one one hour of downtime a month five minutes of downtime a month and how much do we have to pay for every minute that we're down after that and that
John:
Yeah.
John:
On the the surface level agreement.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's one way to do it.
John:
But this type of thing is like, you know, in case of catastrophic failure like CrowdStrike, what is the what is the remedy there?
John:
What was written into the contract?
John:
What contracts do people agree to?
John:
Does CrowdStrike have the same contract with every single person that it sells to?
John:
Probably not.
John:
So this is going to be quite a mess.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Marius writes, the update was not released by time zone.
Casey:
It was released globally at the same time.
Casey:
I thought that's what we said last episode, but I guess not.
John:
No, we were thinking that people in New Zealand were noticing it first.
John:
So my assumption at the time was that it was released like by, you know, time zone, you know, so one part of the world got it first and then slowly as it went across time zones.
John:
But according to Marius, that is not the case.
Casey:
Marius continues, the update propagation took a few minutes to almost all their customers.
Casey:
The source of this is the Risky Business Podcast, episode 756, which we will link in the show notes.
Casey:
But anyways, Marius writes, I'm not sure why Australia and New Zealand reacted first.
Casey:
Maybe it was during their afternoon, but all the customers were affected at the same time.
John:
Yeah, this seems even more bonkers to me.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I feel like – maybe we didn't say this on the show, but I feel like we knew this even last week.
John:
I didn't know it, so that's why I put it in there.
John:
But anyway, we have a source for it from the Risky Business Podcast.
John:
You can listen to the podcast inside, but that's – I believe it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So another anonymous person writes, a phased rollout approach for CrowdStrike updates has its risks unique to the nature of CrowdStrike's product, that bad actors will obtain the early rollout update and, through reverse engineering, obtain information about ongoing attacks or vulnerabilities and take that information and use it to attack unupdated CrowdStrike customers and also everyone else.
Casey:
CrowdStrike does a great deal of research on the most sophisticated threat actors in the world.
Casey:
They take that research funded by customers who are at extremely high risk, you know, government, news organizations, finance, et cetera, and funnel the results into the Falcon sensor product.
Casey:
The exploits used to get the malicious code running are captured and sent back to the CrowdStrike mothership.
Casey:
It's a virtuous cycle.
Casey:
That cycle is disrupted if CrowdStrike cannot respond to new threats in unison.
Casey:
By not having patches shoved down to all high-risk customers, blog posts with data, signatures, sample binaries ready for the entire industry, then CrowdStrike expands access to really bad vulnerabilities to everyone who wants them.
Casey:
All a bad actor needs to do is have a bunch of different CrowdStrike subscription accounts on a bunch of different machines and monitor those machines for updates.
Casey:
If you get lucky and get selected for an early update program, analyze the update.
Casey:
I get that.
John:
Yeah, this is an argument against the phased rollout.
John:
But I feel like maybe we weren't specific enough to this.
John:
Phased rollout doesn't have to mean like how Apple does it or some companies do it where you release to like 1% on the first day and 10% on the second day and whatever.
John:
Phased rollout can be over the course of 30 minutes for the globe, right?
John:
It doesn't have to be or an hour or whatever it is.
John:
whatever window is too small for someone to get your update, analyze your binary, figure out the exploit like this, you're racing against that.
John:
How fast can they figure that?
John:
If they can figure that out in 10 seconds, then yeah, phase rollout is difficult.
John:
But honestly, any kind of phase rollout, even if it's 10 second gaps between time zones, right?
John:
And you just do 24 time zones or whatever.
John:
Like, even if it's just like any, I know from experience, like when you're monitoring during a release and something goes wrong, especially something this catastrophic,
John:
Everything lights up within seconds.
John:
You don't have to wait for a long time, right?
John:
Phones start ringing.
John:
Emails start coming.
John:
Alerts start turning red on the board.
John:
Things happen.
John:
This is what you're looking for.
John:
And rolling out with a 30-second gap between time zones, you'll know four time zones in that this is catastrophic and you pull the big stop everything thing.
John:
And you can say, well, you stopped everything.
John:
Now they learned about your exploits.
John:
It's better than...
John:
bricking all of your customers like CrowdStrike did.
John:
So I still think that a phase rod is exactly what CrowdStrike should be doing.
John:
I can't tell them exactly what those phases should be and how long the gap should be and what the risk is or whatever, but all it wants to the entire world is a capability they should have in cases of emergencies, but should not be their standard practice.
John:
That's just my opinion.
Casey:
No, I completely agree.
Marco:
Well, it also seems like they didn't even have, like, a staging environment.
Marco:
Like, before you roll out to anybody public, why don't you try rolling out to some test servers or some test clients?
John:
Yeah, no, obviously their QA process all fell down or whatever.
John:
I'm just saying, like, as with all security things, it's a multi-level thing.
John:
You have...
John:
staging environments you have test customers you have a qa plan you have automated testing you have validation you have people signing off and you have a phased rollout those are many different layers of trying to make it so you don't screw something up right and yeah that they fell down in lots of places i mean you look at their analysis like clearly hey you pushed out a thing that didn't work that's the thing you could have determined before you pushed it out that is obviously what we're wrong here but like we're always looking at like the very last thing like the last line of defense is
John:
If it gets past all your other systems and you messed up your QA and all that other stuff, your last line of defense is watch as you roll it out and see if you're hosing customers as it goes up.
Casey:
Another anonymous person writes, CrowdStrike's driver is not the NVIDIA driver.
Casey:
I'm sorry, I should give some context here.
Casey:
This is with regard to how do you disable a crashing kernel extension?
Casey:
So back to anonymous.
Casey:
CrowdStrike's driver is not the NVIDIA driver.
Casey:
If the NVIDIA driver keeps crashing, sure, unload it and continue to boot.
Casey:
But not the cybersecurity driver.
Casey:
I imagine every IT admin's head exploded upon reading Tom Warren's quote-unquote brilliant idea to just unload endpoint protection.
Casey:
if it crashes enough times in a row.
Casey:
That machine not booting is a much better outcome than flying blind with my entire organization on the line.
Casey:
That's very much the vibe of a security professional, but I do understand what they're saying.
John:
But yeah, I mean, like, you still, like, this is, we're talking about what can Microsoft do?
John:
Microsoft isn't responsible for CrowdStrike's thing, but they make the OS, and the OS could be resilient against failure by, you know...
John:
if something keeps crashing on load, don't load that thing next time.
John:
But it doesn't mean silently don't load that thing.
John:
You know, the, it could immediately send out some kind of alert through some kind of windows thing to say, Hey, you know, I just booted into safe mode because this thing kept crashing and that should light up somebody's board somewhere anyway.
John:
Right.
John:
So you don't have to, this doesn't have to imagine that the worst case scenario of like, it silently doesn't load your endpoint protection and you're running unprotected for months at a time because you don't realize like a smart implementation of this feature would,
John:
light up people's boards in the knock just like any other thing would it's just that your machine wouldn't be down right maybe it would just be booted in a safe mode where it doesn't actually load anything but it just says i'm sitting here waiting for you to update me because i couldn't boot all the way and that is for some people preferable to it not booting at all and on that topic is the next item
Casey:
Right, so what happens if you need to recover an unbootable Windows machine?
Casey:
Enterprise Windows machines often have lights-out management technology.
Casey:
An IT department can reach out and touch Windows clients from anywhere.
Casey:
Just pull up the ILO, integrated lights-out, management product you use, and remote into your non-functioning client.
Casey:
You can push out an EFI application that boots the machine, decrypts the disk with the bootlocker key, deletes the bad crowd strike update, and reboots the host.
Casey:
You can script Windows itself, have your Windows clients boot into save mode, log in, delete the bad file, and reboot, all via integrated lights-out.
John:
Yeah, that is a cool feature that you can have, which is essentially like when they say pushing an EFI application, that's like the firmware that's like before the OS boots.
John:
It's just the firmware that's bringing up the computer before it even starts loading an OS from a volume somewhere.
John:
So if you have the ability to sort of remotely push something, push out an EFI application, you can get that part of the machine up and running.
John:
get the efi program to run and as they said decrypt the disk and do the that that is complicated and invasive but the thing is not everybody has that yes it's maybe it's industry best practice but as i think we're learning the delta lawsuit even big companies sometimes don't follow industry best practices that are up to date within the current decade that was what microsoft's big slam on delta was they said you know uh because delta is yelling at microsoft and microsoft was like
John:
Delta, unlike some of its competitors, has not updated its IT infrastructure.
John:
I think something I'm paraphrasing what they said.
John:
But yeah, best practices may provide a solution to a non-booting machine, but they're not ubiquitous.
John:
And even just reading this description, it seems fairly sophisticated and complicated.
John:
So I would imagine there are a lot of companies that don't have that capability, even though they technically could.
Casey:
And then finally, with regard to CrowdStrike, Michael Cook writes, do you think there is any chance the CrowdStrike incident will lead to requirements for heterogeneous systems in companies, either in OSs or security software, to try to prevent future incidents from taking out all systems at once?
Casey:
Or would it be judged too risky slash expensive for the benefit?
Casey:
I am not the most recent actually employed person, that would be John.
Casey:
But to my eyes, knowing IT folks to the degree that I do, I feel like this is a perfectly reasonable question.
Casey:
I think most IT security professionals that I've ever worked with emphasize simplicity more than anything else and making their jobs and lives simpler.
Casey:
So yes, what Michael's saying makes sense.
Casey:
Like if you have a bunch of Macs as well as Windows computers, and if you have CrowdStrike as well as one of their competitors, that does cover this base so that if CrowdStrike breaks everything Windows...
Casey:
you either have Macs that you can use or, you know, something that's not on CrowdStrike.
Casey:
But I just don't see that juice being worth the squeeze from the perspective of IT folks.
John:
Yeah, so there's two kinds of heterogeneity here.
John:
One is across the industry.
John:
And I think we kind of have that, like this affected like 1% of Windows machines, which, you know, there's obviously not some, CrowdStrike was not on 99% of machines, right?
John:
So
John:
I think across different companies, across the entire world, there's enough heterogeneity that not everybody is running CrowdStrike.
John:
Maybe they're running one of CrowdStrike's competitors.
John:
Maybe they're running nothing at all.
John:
So I think we have that.
John:
Within a given company, like should Delta Airlines not use CrowdStrike on all their machines, no IT person wants to do that, right?
John:
They really want a unified solution because running something, CrowdStrike plus a CrowdStrike competitor on half your machines, now you have two places where things can go wrong, right?
John:
it's not like the company can keep running successfully if only half of its computers are affected right you know 100 half any significant percentage even just a few in key areas is bad and i think in general people don't want to uh which is why like a ride crowdstrike is available for mac and linux and everything too they don't want to have seven different endpoint protection solutions deployed in their company
John:
It's a hassle to manage.
John:
It's difficult to keep up with all those different things.
John:
You have to sign seven different contracts.
John:
And now your user base slash machine base are divided into sevenths, all of which can fail for different reasons.
John:
I don't think this will change much.
John:
It may make vendors consider, may companies consider other vendors than CrowdStrike, obviously.
John:
And the contact renegotiations for CrowdStrike will probably be very interesting in the coming year for the company.
John:
If the company still exists in a year.
John:
But I think that actually the world of computing showed some resilience given that this company and this update was just as catastrophic as you can imagine it.
John:
And it was only like a story for a week and only affected 1% of Windows PCs.
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Casey:
there's been a whole kerfuffle as we record this today about um mac os sequoia and it apparently has added a weekly permission prompt for anything any app that takes a screenshot or does a screen recording or anything along those lines so
Casey:
Reading from 9to5Mac, with macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that need access to screen recording permissions will become a little bit more tedious.
Casey:
Apple's rolling out a change that will require you to give explicit permission on a weekly basis and every time you reboot your Mac.
Casey:
Multiple developers who spoke to 9to5Mac say they've received confirmation from Apple that this is not a bug.
Casey:
In the current Mac OS Sequoia beta, this prompt says, whatever the name of the app is, can access this computer screen and audio.
Casey:
Do you want to continue to allow this access?
Casey:
This application may be able to collect information from any open applications on your desktop while the app is running.
Casey:
Users can choose to continue to allow that app to have screen recording access where they can click open system settings and immediately be taken to the preferences pane for screen recording permissions.
Casey:
This prompt is designed to appear on a weekly basis.
Casey:
This has made a lot of people justifiably very, very, very upset.
Casey:
And Jason Snell did the Lord's work.
Casey:
He did the thing that nobody wants to do.
Casey:
He filed a feedback.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Which, generally speaking, is an entire waste of time for anyone outside of Apple, but here we are.
Casey:
Jason filed a feedback number 146-89927, asking for one-week permissions is untenable and insulting, which John then duped as feedback 146-98922.
Casey:
We'll put links in the show notes.
Casey:
And then, or I guess the numbers in the show notes, I should say.
Casey:
And then finally, Jason was so fired up, and my favorite Jason is Salty Jason, was so fired up that he wrote an entire post about all these features because it's basically the Windows Vista-ing of macOS.
Casey:
And it's gotten...
Casey:
bad it's gotten real bad but before we discuss it uh the rest of the news with regard to this is a dear friend of the show for craig hockenberry came up with a possible solution uh there's a new api or i guess a new entitlement entitlement yeah uh com dot developer dot excuse me com dot apple dot developer dot persistent hyphen content hyphen capture um this is an entitlement for persistent content capture uh craig writes the issue here is that apple's provided no documentation imagine that
Casey:
Or any other guidance on how to get this entitlement to prevent an app from becoming nagware.
Casey:
You know, in the defense of Apple, they've actually gotten much, much better with their documentation, but I feel triggered whenever I see something like this.
John:
Yeah, click through on the page.
John:
That's why the thing I quoted there, persistent content capture, that is the extent of the documentation of what this entitlement is for or does or anything about that.
Casey:
Well, was it no overview provided or something like that?
John:
No, it's not that bad, but you can click on the link.
John:
Take a look at the page for this.
John:
It's not particularly informative.
John:
So on this whole topic, just to give a brief review for people who are less familiar with this or just familiar from the perspective of an end user being annoyed by these dialog boxes, the thinking behind stuff like this, and it happens on iOS with a different system as well, is Apple's trying to prevent the case where someone gets an application and
John:
And that application asks for some very potentially invasive permission.
John:
Screen recording permission is a great one because that's like you're allowing this thing to record your screen.
John:
And you can imagine all the things an evil application could do with that ability.
John:
So they get this application.
John:
And on their initial run up to they were highly motivated to get it because it seemed like some cool game or thing or whatever.
John:
And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, whatever.
John:
The prompts come up to like allow, allow, go, go.
John:
And they want to play the thing.
John:
And they're like, do it.
John:
And they find out it's a scam app or it's stupid or they don't like it.
John:
Or they're just like, all right, they leave it and don't think about it again.
John:
But unbeknownst to them, they gave that permission, that app screen recording permission.
John:
And on the Mac, maybe it installed a background agent that they also said, yeah, allow, fine, or whatever.
John:
Now there's this thing that's on their computer that has the ability to record their screen, and they completely forget about it.
John:
And so what Apple's trying to do is every once in a while go, hey,
John:
I know maybe you forgot about this, but like a while ago you said that this app could do this extremely invasive thing.
John:
Do you still want it to be able to do that?
John:
And I think on iOS it says like, no, uninstall the app or whatever.
John:
Like it's kind of like preventing people from clicking through something and then forgetting about it, right?
John:
That's the motivation for features like this.
John:
Like why wouldn't they just take my answer and just say, I told you it's supposed to be allowed.
John:
Don't bother me about it again.
John:
Because human nature is that people will sometimes click through those things without reading and they want to remind you, right?
John:
The reverse side of that is, and Apple made fun of this in its famous Windows Vista ad, the more of these dialogues you throw in someone's face, the more you are training them to just say, okay, allow, okay, allow, whatever, okay, just let me use my computer.
John:
And doing it once a week, plus on every system reboot, is way, way, way too frequently.
John:
that is annoying people to death.
John:
Not only will that make people click through dialogue boxes and say, okay, okay, okay.
John:
They're going to be so annoyed and really to our previous topic, they're probably going to think it's the developer doing it.
John:
And the developers has no choice because this is an Apple thing or whatever.
John:
Uh,
John:
This is way too frequent.
John:
I just, I can't even believe that they would think that this is okay.
John:
And this is on a system, like Jason's now been riding this hobby horse for a while, like on the Mac where in recent years, they've been getting worse and worse throwing more and more dialogues.
John:
At least when iOS does it, I don't know what algorithm it uses, but it's like, you know, just so you know, Google Maps is allowed to use your location while on the background.
John:
You want it to keep doing that?
John:
I see stuff like that occasionally, but it's not every week.
John:
It's not every time I reboot my phone, and it seems to, like, basically take my word for it after I've said yes to it maybe once or twice, right?
John:
So, like, it's a balancing act.
John:
Like, that's what the title of Jason's blog post about this is, that Apple's permissions features are out of balance, right?
John:
It's not saying that they're good, bad, indifferent.
John:
There's a balance to be struck between making something secure while still...
John:
not annoying people and also not inducing uh alert fatigue approval fatigue and they're just way over that line on macOS and i really hope that's why i duped the feedback like i wrote my own feedback and i didn't reference this but i basically filed the exact same bug that said this thing where you ask every week and every reboot
John:
It's terrible.
John:
You need a way to allow someone to say, you know, allow permanently.
John:
And when Jason was really angry about it on Maston, I was basically saying, and I agree with him, what you're basically saying, Apple, is that I as a user can never be trusted to give an application permission to record my screen permanently.
John:
That's what you're saying to me, that I am so infantile, that I am not a fully, I cannot never make this, not that I have to be asked twice, fine, ask me twice, ask me, are you sure, whatever, but that at no point will I ever be qualified to say, yes, I swear to you, macOS, it is okay for this application to record my screen.
John:
It is my preferred screenshotting application.
John:
I've been using it for years.
John:
I'm saying yes.
John:
What you're saying, Apple, is you are never going to be able to do it.
John:
You are never competent to make that decision.
John:
And that's insulting.
John:
That's insulting your users.
John:
Your users aren't babies.
John:
Like, yes, your users are human and fallible or whatever, but there's a difference between making sure people are aware of what's going on and deciding that they are not legally capable, not mentally capable of ever making that decision.
John:
That's absurd.
Casey:
Yeah, it's real bad.
Casey:
And it's incredibly frustrating when you have a new computer.
Casey:
And at least last time I did an OS upgrade, it was the same story.
Casey:
Just, okay, I'm finally ready to go.
Casey:
I'm excited.
Casey:
I'm going to use this brand new machine.
Casey:
It's so pretty and beautiful.
Casey:
Oh!
Casey:
Oh, yep.
Casey:
Yes, that's loud.
Casey:
That's loud.
Casey:
All right.
John:
There's good news here on that front, though.
Casey:
Well, apparently, yes.
Casey:
So Jason writes on Mastodon, I haven't verified it yet, but it's my understanding that permissions now survive a system migration, meaning that when you migrate, you won't have to approve 200 dialog boxes and checkboxes and settings to get apps up and running.
John:
That'll be great because that is one huge source of a barrage of these dialogues because you kind of do them gradually over time as you install apps, but then you migrate to another Mac or something and suddenly you get them all at once.
John:
And this is what we were saying when we discussed this topic last time.
John:
If they can migrate these settings to say, OK, if you already approve these on your old Mac, they're also approved on your new Mac.
John:
That will be great.
John:
So hopefully if they did that work and that seems like it would be a lot of work, hopefully.
John:
They are willing to hear feedback on this and are trying to make changes.
John:
But this weekly screen recording thing, right?
John:
And that the entitlement, right?
John:
If they're doing this weekly screen recording thing, they should have A, documented it, B, announced it, and C, said.
John:
And by the way, if you don't like this, please request the new persistent content capture thing.
John:
Because I don't even know if that persistent content capture thing is the entitlement that will stop these things from coming.
John:
And how hard is it to get that entitlement?
John:
How long would it take to get that entitlement?
John:
You know, Sequoia is going to come out.
John:
I don't know, maybe not soon, maybe in October, but whatever.
John:
This seems like people who have applications that require screen recording permissions are kind of getting caught with their pants down here of like, wait, what are we doing?
John:
What is my app throwing up now?
John:
What can I get?
John:
Can I get this entitlement, this undocumented entitlement?
John:
Is that the thing I should be asking for?
John:
This is just not a great way to support your developers in their applications.
John:
And if there is this one that allows you to do persistent, what's the whole point of alerting for weekly?
John:
Because won't all the bad actors have requested someone?
John:
How will you stop them from getting it?
John:
maybe it's all re-resolved by next week, but it is an upsetting regression in Apple's handling of permissions on macOS.
Casey:
Yeah, it's just, it's one of the things where I don't think any of this happened in
Casey:
you know, spitefully or anything like that.
Casey:
But if you look at a security professional, as we've spoken a lot about this episode, a security professional's job is to come up with effectively infinite amounts of dialogues and nag screens and so on and so forth because their job is to make sure that their users are as safe as possible.
Casey:
But as you said, it's a balancing act.
Casey:
And ultimately, I think this pendulum has swung way too far in the bad direction to the point that I...
Casey:
don't often pay attention to these.
Casey:
And I'm the kind of nerd that usually reads every dialogue, you know, and reads every word of every dialogue.
Casey:
And most of the time I'm just like, yeah, whatever, whatever, whatever.
Casey:
It's just so disruptive and so frustrating.
Casey:
And it's, you know, Apple was right to poke fun at Vista because it really was that bad.
Casey:
I mean, I don't, I think Marco was mostly gone at this point.
Casey:
I was like half.
Marco:
I never used Vista.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
I was half in that world.
Casey:
Like at this point, it was real bad.
Casey:
It was real, real bad.
Casey:
And I would, my recollection anyway, and admittedly I have a terrible memory, but my recollection is that this is worse.
Casey:
Like it's just incessant and it's not helping anyone.
Casey:
And hopefully somebody with a little bit of, I was going to say design sense, really just like empathy for the user.
Casey:
Hopefully someone will be the voice of reason with an Apple and say, well, let's pump the brakes on this and figure out a better approach because that's
John:
It's not just empathy for the user.
John:
It is in in the service of better security because, you know, alert fatigue or approval fatigue reduces security.
John:
Like it's a thing you want to avoid for security purposes.
John:
So if you're in the security team, your job is to increase security.
John:
You should know enough.
John:
And I'm sure they do that.
John:
Too many dialogues reduces security, doesn't increase it because people that's because that's how people react to them.
John:
Right.
John:
It's it's people don't react the same way to one alert that as they do to 100.
John:
It changes how they deal with alerts and it changes that, you know, on a going forward basis for the like from now on, they will be less inclined to read any alert that you put in.
John:
Even if you reduce the number massively, you've trained them.
John:
I never want to read these.
John:
OK, OK, OK.
John:
You make them angry about it.
John:
Right.
John:
That's the last thing you want.
John:
That's bad for security.
Marco:
Well, and I can see why – I'm sure Apple's engineers and product people who are making these decisions to add these alerts, I'm sure they have all the best intentions because the reality is, yes, some of these alerts, especially on iOS, you look at the possible attack surface, the possible damage done, some of the actual sleazy things that companies, big and small, have done.
Marco:
So you can kind of see why they think they have to do this or why they think this is the best approach moving forward.
Marco:
But because there are these downsides and these costs to having these controls and warnings and everything both to the user experience and, as John was just saying, to security itself –
Marco:
I feel like there has to be a known amount of damage that was being done or that we've seen in the wild being done to prompt this kind of change.
Marco:
And I just don't... I've never heard of that level of damage happening on the Mac that would cause anyone, any user to say, oh, thank God they're making this harder for me.
Marco:
I don't think we're seeing...
Marco:
where is the justification out there in the wild for tightening these things down now obviously you don't want to just you know let security problems happen to your users and then only react to them afterwards but i feel like there has to be like some balance of like is there really like a a significant threat that's really actually even ever being seen to have happened here like is there a lot of
Marco:
Mac malware that's using screen recording permissions and not just security holes to cause problems for people?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
We've never heard of that.
Marco:
Maybe it happened or was starting to happen and Apple tamped down on it and that nip in the bud, who knows?
Marco:
But we've never seen any evidence of that.
Marco:
So it's hard for us to see as the users what justifies this level of annoyance and alert fatigue.
John:
I think the right tool for that, if you have, if there was that type of outbreak, and again, maybe Apple would be quiet about it.
John:
The right tool for that is having Apple having the ability and they probably either already have this ability or could make it easily to essentially cause all the Macs to reprompt for, you know,
John:
a screen recording permission because like a due to it, like an acute outbreak to sort of nip it in the bud.
John:
But that's so different than every week and every reboot forever, right?
John:
That's situational.
John:
That's like, here's a situation.
John:
Everyone, here's a one-time push to every Mac out there that's on the network.
John:
Uh, reapprove, uh,
John:
the apps for screen recording, right?
John:
Maybe you could even have a system where you could put a message to that effect that says just, you know, due to a recent outbreak or whatever.
John:
I don't know how you do it.
John:
But anyway, like a one-time thing, it's understandable.
John:
It's justifiable.
John:
Even Apple doesn't want to talk about it.
John:
Everyone would just be like, huh, it's weird.
John:
I got re-prompted for screen recording.
John:
But anyway, going on with my life.
John:
It's so different than, as Jason was snarkily putting it, making a schedule on your weekly, making a slot on your weekly schedule to re-approve screen recording of the application you've been using since the 90s.
John:
Right.
John:
It's just, it's absurd to say then the solution is weekly and on every reboot, that's the wrong frequency.
John:
I don't know what the right frequency is, but that ain't it.
John:
Right.
John:
So think again.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Somebody just wrote in and wondered, could this be in response to rewind.ai or limitless or whatever they're calling themselves right now?
John:
No.
Okay.
John:
I don't think Apple has anything against Rewind.
John:
That product is so clear.
John:
You know it's recording your screen.
John:
It's part of the functionality.
John:
You go back and look at the recordings to find things.
John:
That is not the threat actor that Apple is worried about.
John:
It would make using Rewind super annoying because you're like, I love Rewind.
John:
I use it all the time.
John:
It's important to my workflow and I have to approve it every week.
John:
If you're like Jason, who I think still, which bothers mine, reboots his Mac every single day, you're approving it every single day, not every week.
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Casey:
Google is apparently a monopolist in a U.S.
Casey:
antitrust case.
Casey:
This is reading from The Verge.
Casey:
A federal judge ruled that Google violated U.S.
Casey:
antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.
Casey:
Quote, after having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion.
Casey:
Google is a monopolist and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly, according to the court's ruling.
Casey:
It is violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
The prospect of losing tens of billions in guaranteed revenue from Google, which presently comes at little to no cost to Apple, disincentivizes Apple from launching its own search engine when it otherwise has built the capacity to do so.
Casey:
Time and again, there's another quote, time and again, Google's partners have concluded that it is financially infeasible to switch the default general search engine or seek greater flexibility in search offerings because it would mean sacrificing the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars that Google pays them as revenue share, the judge wrote.
Casey:
In 2022, Google paid Apple $20 billion to be the default search engine in Safari.
Casey:
During the closing arguments, the judge honed in on these payments, wondering how other players in the market could possibly displace Google from that position.
Casey:
Quote, if that's what it takes for somebody to dislodge Google as the default search engine, wouldn't the folks that wrote the Sherman Act be concerned about it?
Casey:
then uh continuing uh in a different post from the verge according to eddie q apple senior vice president of services there's no other meaningful alternative to google during the trial he said that quote there's no price that microsoft could ever offer to apple to get the company to preload bing and safari quote i don't believe there's a price in the world that microsoft could offer us he said at another point they offered to give us bing for free they could give us the whole company
Casey:
Jeez, Eddie.
John:
Sick burn.
John:
I think you might want to talk to Tim about that because I'm pretty sure Microsoft is worth more than $20 billion.
John:
But maybe before you turn down Microsoft offering to give you the whole company, Eddie, maybe run that.
John:
Obviously, he was humorously exaggerating there, although it is a quote that ended up in a bunch of stories.
John:
I love it.
John:
Thank you.
Casey:
According to the judge, it's not just that Google pays Apple not to challenge its search supremacy.
Casey:
It would be unbelievably difficult for Apple to get in on the action at all.
Casey:
Unsurprisingly, both Google and Apple have looked into this, and their own internal estimates came out at trial.
Casey:
Apparently, Apple has calculated that, quote, it would cost $6 billion annually on top of what it already spends developing search capabilities to run a general search engine.
Casey:
Meanwhile, in late 2020, Google estimated how much it would cost Apple to create and maintain a general search engine that could compete with Google.
Casey:
Apple would have to spend something in the rough order of $20 billion in order to reproduce Google's technical infrastructure dedicated to search.
John:
I do like that.
John:
I love the stuff that comes out in trial, like the fact that both Apple and Google had done some math to say, you know, if we did, if Apple did make a competitor to Google search, how much would that cost?
John:
And Apple's estimate is like $6 billion a year, and Google's estimate is $20 billion.
John:
And you would think Google would know more because Google has built Google.
John:
And Apple's like, yeah, probably six billion dollars, like not even as much as the car we never shipped.
John:
So this this is I mean, these things take years and years to go.
John:
So there'll be more about this trial or whatever.
John:
But this is a verdict.
John:
And the verdict is, does Google have a monopoly in search?
John:
And did they abuse it?
John:
Yes.
John:
That's the straight up like there was even quotes in the thing of like, I think some some Google argument in court was like, you know, this isn't illegal because we've been doing this for years.
John:
And the judge pointed out it's like things
John:
that you did when you weren't a monopoly were okay.
John:
But then when you become a monopoly, they become illegal.
John:
And guess what?
John:
You're a monopoly.
John:
And this is like the Windows anti-trust case where it's like, there is no question that Google has monopoly size market share.
John:
Like how many people run Windows?
John:
It was like everybody, right?
John:
90 something percent.
John:
Google search has just the massively dominant play, like 90 plus percent in search.
John:
It's fine to be a monopoly.
John:
Did you abuse that monopoly to extend or maintain it?
John:
And the courts say, yes, you totally did by...
John:
Various things you do, including making contracts that, for example, dissuade Apple to the tune of $20 billion a year.
John:
You shouldn't make a Google search competitor.
John:
Now, there have been rumors for years that Apple was considering making a Google search competitor.
John:
And I always looked at those, especially in the early days of like, that is not Apple's strength.
John:
But one of the strongest arguments with respect to that is the very early spat between Apple and Google over maps.
John:
And Apple said, you know what?
John:
We're going to make our own maps.
John:
And they were bad.
John:
And Apple wasn't good at it.
John:
But Apple kept plugging away because they were, you know.
John:
There was apparently no reconciliation between Apple and Google with regard to Maps.
John:
And today, Apple Maps is a viable competitor to Google Maps.
John:
Who would have thunk that several times?
John:
I mean, it took years and years, right?
John:
And still some people like Google Maps better, but I use both of them on a regular basis.
John:
And I'm not going to say Apple Maps is better than Google Maps.
John:
I'm not even going to say it's as good as Google Maps, but it is definitely a viable competitor.
John:
It does some things better.
John:
It does many things worse.
John:
But Apple built that with tons of money, and that's a competing product to Google.
John:
What if Google had been paying Apple $20 billion a year to make Google Maps the default mapping service?
John:
Apple would have never made that.
John:
That's anti-competitive, right?
John:
I mean, we're not talking about mapping.
John:
We're talking about search.
John:
But, like, that's what – you know, the judge isn't saying – there's no remedies here.
John:
It's not like, what are we going to do about this?
John:
That's a whole other phase and they're going to appeal and they could appeal all the way to the Supreme Court and it might be overturned and, like –
John:
With court cases, you don't know what's going to come of this, if anything.
John:
Change administration could change stuff like there's so many factors here.
John:
But this is a significant finding and victory for the Department of Justice of saying, Google, you're a monopoly.
John:
You did stuff that's against the Sherman Antitrust Act to maintain it.
John:
And we're going to figure out what that means for you.
John:
And the reason this is fun to talk about is because Apple's over there going, wait, what?
John:
We get $20 billion a year for Google for having like a URL and a P-list somewhere.
John:
It's the easiest money we ever made.
John:
It has essentially 100% profit margins.
Yeah.
John:
And this is relevant because Apple's services revenue and the story about services, services where the growth is for Apple, as it came out in the earlier trials when we all kind of learned the magnitude of this, a huge chunk of Apple's services revenue and also services profit, services income, is that $20 billion.
John:
It's like 25% of their services profit.
John:
That's not a small amount.
John:
It's not like a 2% thing or whatever.
John:
And if Apple's whole story for their company is like, yeah, the phones aren't growing anymore and other stuff is kind of stable too, but, you know, services is growing like gangbusters year over year.
John:
What if I told you, Apple, that potentially in five years some court decision could say, yeah, 25% of your services revenue, that's going to zero starting now.
Yeah.
John:
That would be bad for Apple, for their stock, for their story about services growth.
John:
I mean, that I mean, and what did Apple do to bring that about?
John:
Like, did Apple do anything wrong by taking that 20 billion?
John:
Like the courts would say, no, Apple, you know, the courts would potentially say they could say agreements like the one you made with Apple.
John:
Those are illegal.
John:
So you got to cut off that deal.
John:
And Apple's like, oh, they have to cut off that deal.
John:
We like that money.
Yeah.
John:
But according to the courts, and I can see their point, that money is Apple or Google using its monopoly in search to prevent competition, to say we are dominant and we are going to use that dominance to make sure nobody else ever challenges our dominance.
John:
We're going to make sure that Bing doesn't get to be the default because they can't match our 20 billions that we're paying Apple.
John:
We're going to make sure Apple never makes a competitor, one of the few companies in the world that could potentially even have the funds to try to make a competitor.
John:
We're going to make sure they don't do that because we'll literally pay them off every single year to the tune of $20 billion to make sure they don't even think about making a competitor.
John:
That's anti-competitive.
John:
uh but you know looking at looking at from apple's perspective it's like this sucks we like getting 20 because i don't think apple wants to make a search engine and eddie q's there in court saying i don't know what his motivation was but he's basically saying honestly it's like from his perspective apple thinks or eddie q thinks that google is better than bing and apple saying we want to ship the best product to our users when it comes time to choose the default search for safari
John:
We're going to pick what we think is the best one.
John:
And we think Google is the best one.
John:
And, you know, the $20 billion doesn't hurt.
John:
But he's making the argument that, like, you know, Microsoft could give it to us for free and we wouldn't take it because it would be making a worse experience for users on our phone.
John:
And, you know, obviously, you know, the EU would say, why not give them a choice screen where they get to pick what their thing is?
John:
And honestly, that's always been a question about the $20 billion.
John:
It's like, Google...
John:
If Apple just gave people a choice of what they want their default search engine to be, even if they randomize the list, most people are going to pick you anyway because you got to your dominant place not through like illegal deals or anything, but because people love Google search.
John:
So if you just let everybody pick, 95% of the people are probably going to pick
John:
google anyway but still uh you know good business is like why would i give them that chance why would i take that risk why when i can that 20 billion dollars is money well spent because it prevents apple from ever wanting to do this it puts us as the default search engine in the handheld platform where people spend the most money it's no bringer that we should do this so if the remedies of this court case if one of the remedies is that they can't do deals like that anymore i think it makes sense and i think it kind of sucks for apple but honestly
John:
You know, we've talked about Apple's how services revenue have been distorting Apple for a while, not with respect to this so much, much more with respect to like, what are your incentives when you when you're in when your growth is service revenue in terms of like product design and how many ads you throw in people's faces and how many come ons you have.
John:
But this is another aspect of it.
John:
It's like.
John:
What is this money preventing Apple from doing, right?
John:
How is this money causing Apple to become misshapen in its decision-making to say, well, we could do X and we think it would be better, but $20 billion.
John:
$20 billion is a big counterweight to lots of people who might have notions about things inside Apple.
John:
Like, oh, what about this?
John:
What about that?
John:
And someone says, $20 billion.
John:
You're like, okay, never mind, right?
John:
Little things like that.
John:
How many little things just never got going because $20 billion, right?
John:
So I think in the end, although it will be painful to remove this $20 billion from Apple, it will make them a more effective organization that makes better decisions.
John:
It doesn't at all solve the problem of Apple being motivated to throw stupid come ons for their services in our face constantly, which I think is the worst aspect of their services revenue, like sort of focusing on how can we extract more money from people on a monthly basis rather than how can we satisfy people.
John:
But that's a whole separate issue.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, I feel bad, not for Apple, but for I think Mozilla, people have said repeatedly that almost all their revenue comes from their own Google search deal.
Casey:
And even though I haven't personally used Firefox in 20 years or something like that.
Casey:
uh, nevertheless, it's just, it's too bad.
Casey:
Like I think Mozilla by and large is doing pretty good work.
John:
And for them, like you haven't been keeping up with the Mozilla thing.
John:
They've been, they've been doing, they've been like building like adware into their browser to try to like essentially get money from like this.
John:
They're,
John:
the same thing happened to them like this revenue sort of enabled a set of leadership that's like you know we got the Google gravy train and now we can get the whole you know ad tech built into our browser gravy train and like Firefox users are like we hate this the reason we use Firefox is not to have to deal with this stuff you're betraying us or whatever and it's like
John:
If Mozilla didn't have that money from Google and had to find some other way to find itself, one argument is like they'd be gone and there'd be no Firefox.
John:
Doesn't that suck?
John:
But the other argument is they would have been forced to find some other way to make money.
John:
And maybe that would have led them down this ad tech thing faster.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But like having this amount of money from monopolists dissuade you from ever thinking about doing anything except for using them.
John:
is not healthy for anybody involved, even though it seems like it is like, oh, it's keeping Firefox alive.
John:
That's good.
John:
And, you know, it's kind of it's from Google's perspective.
John:
It's a it's a double benefit of kind of the same way that like Microsoft invested in Apple to keep Apple alive so they could say, see, we have a competitor.
John:
We're not a monopoly.
John:
Didn't work out really for them, but, you know.
John:
Chrome being able to say Firefox exists.
John:
See, we're not the only browser.
John:
People have lots of choices.
John:
You use Edge, you can use Firefox and, you know, but I don't like getting that kind of money.
John:
It's not healthy to be getting that money for essentially doing nothing from a monopolist.
John:
Right.
John:
And I think it just it makes an unhealthy organization.
John:
If only because now your organization is susceptible to like, guess what?
John:
If that money went away, do you no longer have a business?
John:
And what were you getting that money for anyway?
John:
We were getting that money because Google thinks it's important for there to be some tiny browser that they can think of, that they can point to that says, see, there are competitors.
John:
And also to make sure no one will ever, ever, ever compete with their Google search monopoly, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
that's that's not healthy like it's you know ripping that money away is going to be bad but again this is going to be a multi-year case and it might even get overturned and who knows what will happen so maybe this will all come to nothing but uh apple uh mozilla all these companies now have a lot of time to think about this and although i did i don't think these are connected i don't know i don't know if these connected at all so take this as pure speculation but a related story that i forgot to put in the notes is that uh
John:
Warren Buffett, who owns a just absolutely tremendous amount of the Berkshire Hathaway company, owns a tremendous amount of Apple stock, sold half of his Apple stock like a few days before this verdict came out.
John:
And for years, he'd been saying, like, I love Apple.
John:
I'm going to hold it.
John:
Nothing.
John:
You know, unless something extraordinary happens, I would never get rid of it or whatever.
John:
Then he sold half his Apple stock.
John:
And then this verdict comes out.
John:
And.
John:
I don't know if they're related, but if Apple's story for the past many years has been service revenue, it's where the growth for the company is.
John:
And this one story says maybe 25% of that service revenue is now gone.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Is that a reason for Warren Buffett to sell half a stock?
John:
I don't, I don't even pretend to know what goes through the mind of someone like Warren Buffett when deciding to sell.
John:
And why would he only sell 50% and not all of it?
John:
And he's really old and how much money does he need?
John:
And it just confuses me in many ways.
John:
Right.
John:
Um,
John:
But I don't think this is good news for Apple's services narrative, and I hope it makes them reconsider.
John:
Honestly, I wish they would break that out somewhere else and not even include it in services revenue, because what service are they providing there?
John:
It's like monopoly agreement, monopoly maintenance payments, right?
John:
It's not a service that Apple is providing.
John:
Even without that money, they can leave that same value in the P-list and still have Google search as their default, so...
Marco:
It makes sense if you are a professional investor.
Marco:
This suggests that Apple's revenue in a high growth area has a pretty high chance of going down all of a sudden.
Marco:
So I see why somebody would sell the stock.
Marco:
That being said, I think it would be better for Apple as a whole in the long run to not have this giant chunk of this revenue being on their books in this place.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because, again, as you're saying, it kind of suggests a different source of revenue than what it actually is.
Marco:
I'd say it's actually somewhat misleading.
Marco:
Even calling it services revenue, I would suggest is kind of misleading shareholders.
Marco:
I mean, I don't know if that legally qualifies as that.
Marco:
I'm not a...
Marco:
shareholder-ologist, but it definitely seems like it is a little misleading to say, we are providing all these wonderful services to our users, things like Apple TV Plus and iCloud.
Marco:
And it's like, well, where does it come from?
Marco:
A huge amount of comes from the Google Commission and App Store taxes.
It's like,
John:
Is that services?
John:
And at least the App Store taxes, you can say, well, this is we run the App Store and this is the commission we charge.
John:
At least there is a service there, which is the App Store and the in-app payment thing.
John:
And Apple will tell you a million different ways about how that's such a wonderful service.
John:
But at least it's a thing that Apple is doing and made.
John:
This is just like we accept the check.
John:
And in exchange for the check, we do not change this string in our source code.
Marco:
I think it is not good for Apple, like kind of psychologically almost.
Marco:
And certainly it creates some weird incentives that I think it would be better for them if they didn't make a huge chunk of this money this way.
Marco:
So even though – like if there is a transition away from this that is forced by the government or whatever –
Marco:
I think that will be some short-term pain for the stock and the earnings and things like that.
Marco:
But I think longer term, it will be better for them.
Marco:
But unless a government intervenes, this will never change.
Marco:
It's kind of like an addiction for them.
Marco:
But it's understandable why.
Marco:
Of course, they would take this money if they can.
Marco:
But it would be better off if they were forced not to.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the whole point of this thing is like, so, you know, Eddie Q was saying like, you know, Microsoft could give us Bing for free and we wouldn't take it.
John:
Right.
John:
But say this money goes away.
John:
Right.
John:
Say this actually does happen, which is, again, is still not a foregone conclusion.
John:
Um,
John:
At that point, I think Apple would be receptive to accepting a few hundred million from Microsoft to be in a choice screen, for example, or to be an option in settings, right?
John:
Like, deals could be made.
John:
Like, one of the things deals like this do is they don't even allow competitors to get a foothold.
John:
And suddenly, if Google is legally forbidden from paying off Apple to stay as the default, the door opens to other people being willing to pay Apple...
John:
more than zero dollars to say just put us in a choice screen just let us have an extension that you know like like anything like how much money can we give you in exchange for how much leave google as a default fine right whatever but like can we have like a one button press way to switch us where we can put on our website do you want to use bing as your default press this and we'll pay you 100 million dollars for that or whatever because bing is not a monopoly you
John:
search market right how do you how do you ever get more competition right google has abused its monopoly is you know has used its monopoly to maintain and extend itself in ways that are legal according to this act according to the judge or whatever uh and the remedy is let's try to bring more competition back to the search market it doesn't mean apple is going to suddenly make a search engine because i still think that is not apple's strength and it'll be very very very difficult right and
John:
But Microsoft already made one, right?
John:
It's called Bing.
John:
It exists.
John:
It's not as good as Google, but it's never going to get anywhere if it's like boxed out of even being a choice on platforms like iOS, right?
John:
So I mostly agree with the verdict here that what Google was doing
John:
was distorting the market and reducing competition and they shouldn't be allowed to do it despite the fact that it's going to end up you know hurting apple and you know i agree with marco that like it it's that apple should take this pain and move forward from it and you know jason snell has a bunch of charts on uh his story about this that we'll link showing just how big this is revenue not income but just how big services revenue is for the company now uh used to be when you look at the graph of
John:
Where does Apple's money come from?
John:
It was like the biggest piece is iPhone.
John:
And it used to be, I think, even closer to bigger than 50% or whatever.
John:
And then you'd see like the Mac and iPad and whatever the other categories were.
John:
And there used to be this little wedge called services that was a similar size.
John:
And then services started growing and growing and growing.
John:
And now it's like iPhone and the second biggest category, services.
John:
Now this is...
John:
you know to the earlier point what apple lumps into these categories you know mac makes sense it's max iphones makes sense as iphones but wearables contains a lot of stuff ipad makes sense there and then services a whole bunch of other things right but services is getting worryingly large if you don't like the things that apple has been doing in response to its services and remember services is really 20 billion dollars from google uh in-app purchase for games
John:
other app store stuff.
John:
And then that's most of services.
John:
And then, oh, everything else, a whole bunch of little pie wedges for like Apple TV plus and blah, blah, blah.
John:
People hear services and they think it's like it's Apple music and Apple TV plus.
John:
It's not.
John:
It's app store.
John:
It's this $20 billion payment and it's mostly games on the app store stuff, right?
John:
So it's not even what it appears to be.
John:
And then the other graph was products, profits versus services products.
John:
If you combine all the products, profit from all the products, Mac, iPad, wearables, iPhone,
John:
That profit and compare it to the services profit, the product profit is spiky because it's like holiday season and stuff or iPhone launch.
John:
I don't even honestly know what the spikes are.
John:
But anyway, the product thing is spiky.
John:
And when the product line spikes up, it's way higher than services.
John:
But at the current state where we're not in a spike in the yearly product thing, the services line is getting real close to the product line.
John:
So as Snell said in his article, Apple made $22 billion in profit from products and $18 billion from services.
John:
This is in the last quarter.
John:
$22 billion versus $18 billion.
John:
I think services are a thing that Apple should provide.
John:
And I agree with their new slogan of like the best providers are hardware, software, and services.
John:
I just think they need to be more careful about not distorting the other two, the hardware and software, in service of the services.
John:
Like services should be, it's a prerequisite.
John:
You sell hardware and software, today that's not enough.
John:
You have to also sell services.
John:
Because
John:
Just as hardware is useless without software, hardware and software these days in the internet age are also essentially useless without services.
John:
And if you're not going to provide them, somebody else will.
John:
So why not make your own services that work the best with your hardware and your software?
John:
It's a thing they should do.
John:
They should do it even better than they're currently doing it, right?
John:
It doesn't mean they have to make Apple TV Plus, but all the iCloud stuff, all those APIs, like all, you know, the email address they provide, the Apple ID system, you know, and expanding on to, you know, the developer program.
John:
And yes, Apple TV Plus and Apple Music, like Apple should be making those things.
John:
But they should be careful, like the values that led them to make great products and great software on those products.
John:
They should be careful to say those values don't matter anymore because services are growing.
John:
So screw those values.
John:
Whatever we need to do to make services grow, we're going to do it.
John:
So we're going to start putting ads for our own stuff in settings, right?
John:
That is the anti-pattern they should be voting.
John:
So I don't really care that the services line is getting close to the product line.
John:
I care what that services line represents.
John:
I care if that services line represents a new set of values that are not the values that led them to become the Apple that has these great products, right?
John:
Because services can infect the products with an incompatible set of values and philosophy.
John:
That's the problem.
John:
I don't care if this graph looks like services are more than 50% in 10 years.
John:
that's great.
John:
Let them be a services company that sells hardware and software that work on them.
John:
I just want the whole unit to work together based on the values that led to the creation of the original iPhone.
Marco:
And I think also just continuing to call the services I think is really fundamentally dishonest and misleading.
Marco:
I think a better word for most of this money, which is the App Store taxes and the Google Search deal.
Marco:
Because remember, keep in mind, the Google Search deal
Marco:
The way it is apparently structured is not a flat $20 billion a year.
Marco:
It is a commission from Google's ad income that results from Safari searches from being the default in Safari.
Marco:
And I think maybe part of that contract, which is part of the DOJ's problem, I think part of that contract is that Google is the default.
Marco:
But –
Marco:
The way it's structured also – Apple has $20 billion of motivation to keep them default because it is a commission from ad income from Google searches.
Marco:
So I would actually call this category – I would not call this services.
Marco:
When you look at – it's coming from the commission from Google searches and it's coming from the App Store tax.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
This category should be called commissions, and they should either break it out separately from services, which would look real bad, or call it what it is, commissions and services or just commissions.
John:
I think they could leave App Store stuff and services because that's a service they run, though.
John:
At least App Store, they run that.
Marco:
Yeah, I think that's a very tough call to say the App Store tax is considered a service.
Marco:
Again, I think this is fundamentally misleading.
John:
I don't think they would like the characterization of calling it an App Store tax, by the way.
John:
I think their preferred terminology would be different.
Marco:
And Tim Cook's terminology was our commission.
Marco:
So I think, hey, let's call it what it is.
Marco:
It's commissions.
Marco:
Because otherwise, I really do think you're misleading investors into thinking that things like Apple Music and iCloud and Apple TV+, you're misleading investors into thinking that that's driving a bunch of revenue to the company that it's really not.
Marco:
While those are successful services, that is not 28% of their revenue.
Marco:
That is not even close to making all that up.
Marco:
I really do think this continued, quote, services narrative is fundamentally misleading to investors and to analysts like us who don't look too much into it.
Marco:
Because when you look into where this money is coming from, I think most people will be hard-pressed to describe that as services.
John:
I don't think that would consider it misleading, like both legally and just like practically speaking, because one of the things that all companies do, including Apple, is they don't necessarily break down their finances to the granularity that you as an analyst might want.
John:
This is for every company.
John:
This is true.
John:
They don't tell you exactly of how many of each widget of each color of each style of each whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
And so by lumping things into these larger categories, always the analyst job is to try to suss out.
John:
what percentage of that is x y and z and they can have guesses and their guesses may be wildly wrong but i don't think you can say that apple is misleading it's just a it's a form of like look how much information are we going to give you like apple could say you're lucky we're telling you what iphone mac we're you know hey we break it down at all we don't have to do that we could just say here's our profits here's our revenue here's our margins and we can let you figure it out and there is a trade-off there of like the more apple tells analysts uh
John:
the more control over they have what analysts say about them and the more they control control they have over what analysts think about them.
John:
But the less they tell them, the more they can hide a bad thing here or a bad, you know, you know, a product that didn't sell well there or whatever.
John:
Like where's vision pro hiding in this thing?
John:
I guess it's in wearables or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
So like you don't want to tell them everything because that highlight that can cause them to like, you know, zoom in on your weaknesses or whatever.
John:
But if you tell them nothing, if you just said, here's our profits, here's our revenue, here's our margins,
John:
just as one big pie thing and we're not going to break it down any farther.
John:
Then they're left to wildly speculate about how everything is doing and they could have weird notions that cause the stock to go way down.
John:
So this is a dance that Apple has always been playing.
John:
And in general, as Apple has become more successful, they have reduced the granularity of the stuff that they tell.
John:
Like a while ago, I think they even used to give unit sales on stuff and they don't do that anymore at all, right?
John:
So I, you know, you could say it's it is not as informative as if they broke it down more and the name is misleading because of things they put in the categories.
John:
But the names of the categories and the categories themselves have changed so much over the years.
John:
Like this is just this is part of the analyst game of like.
John:
can I back solve to figure out this stuff?
John:
And what we know about this from the, like the billions in service revenue from the Google search thing.
John:
We only know that because it came out in discovery in court cases, right?
John:
Like Apple didn't offer that up.
John:
Like it was wrenched from them by the law.
John:
That's the only reason we even know that.
John:
And now suddenly we can see into that pie wedge and be like, Oh, that wouldn't have been my guess.
John:
Like people didn't think it was that high or like that wouldn't have been my guess to what it is.
John:
But now we know that.
John:
And now we're like peering into it or whatever.
John:
So yeah,
John:
Again, I don't think it's specifically misleading.
John:
And I agree the name is not great.
John:
The Google thing definitely doesn't belong in there.
John:
Maybe App Store is arguable.
John:
But things like Apple TV and Apple TV Plus and Apple Music certainly are in there.
John:
And iCloud and stuff like that.
John:
Do you pay Apple for iCloud storage?
John:
So you can use iCloud photo library.
John:
That's a service.
John:
They run a bunch of servers.
John:
It's a service that works with the hardware and software.
John:
That should be services revenue.
John:
But...
John:
Yeah, without knowing about this stuff, a lot of people can look at that service as revenue, like you said before, like just think like Apple TV and Apple Music must be doing great.
John:
They're killing it.
John:
Not that great.
Marco:
Yeah, well, but the thing is like, you know, you're right.
Marco:
Obviously, you know, they control the messaging around this for lots of reasons.
Marco:
And, you know, they try to figure out what they have to and should break out and what they don't.
Marco:
And they, you know, they keep a lot closer to the vest, of course.
Marco:
The thing is, though, like by making a lot of your money in a way that's kind of cagey and not what people expect can actually work against you as well.
Marco:
So, for instance, now, first of all, I should go back and clarify because the Google revenue is a commission on Google search revenue.
Marco:
If Google is forced to stop the exclusivity clause, that doesn't mean $20 billion needs to go away from Apple's books.
Marco:
What that means is probably something like Apple has to have some kind of choice screen like they do in the EU.
Marco:
It's probably going to be something like that as the remedy to fix this violation.
John:
Yeah, guesses about remedies are like, I mean, remember, one of the guesses about remedies is like on the table is Google could be broken up, right?
John:
Obviously, that's probably not going to happen.
John:
But like, but I'm saying the spectrum is wide of possibilities.
John:
So yeah, they could say you have to have a choice screen, or they could say Apple and Google can't do any kind of deal related to search, or they could say Google is broken up, like, or they could say nothing because it's overturned on appeal, right?
John:
So the possibilities are numerous and wide.
John:
But you're right, one of the possibilities is that it could be like, oh, you can still have the deal, you just need a choice screen, which, as I said before, everyone pick Google anyway.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so if that's how this goes, if Google just can't be like exclusively the provider anymore, then Apple puts up a choice screen and almost everyone picks Google.
Marco:
And then Google continues to pay Apple a commission on the ad rates.
Marco:
They probably won't lose much at all.
Marco:
You know, so I mean, obviously, maybe Google is willing to pay a lower rate per user if it's not exclusive because it's, you know, long term, less valuable to them.
John:
Or if Google was smart, maybe we would say our price is this, you know, nothing right now.
John:
We're not going to pay you anything.
John:
What are you going to do now?
John:
Just give people the choice.
John:
They're going to pick us anyway, right?
John:
Because the whole thing is we were paying you to be exclusive, and now if we can't be exclusive, we'll take the 90% we're going to get anyway.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
So there's lots of things that could go there, but here's the problem.
Marco:
With Apple calling this services when it's clearly commissioned,
Marco:
Then, if they do lose a big chunk of money from this, then the analyst narrative that they have been crafting for years, that Apple services are a big revenue base and growth area for the company, then everyone starts saying the wrong thing.
Marco:
Everyone starts saying Apple services took a huge hit.
John:
But the analysts would know and Apple would explain to them.
John:
Apple would say, we have a 25% decline in services income this quarter because of the DOJ Google thing.
John:
And the analysts would know that and subtract it out.
John:
And then what analysts would be doing is saying, okay, we understand where that hit came from and your stock's going to go down.
John:
So tough luck.
John:
But also next quarter, what we're going to look at is of the remaining pie wedge, is that growing?
John:
And that's where they would take the hit if that's not growing.
John:
And I don't actually honestly know and I don't think anybody knows because we just have these points in time of like –
John:
you know how what percentage of that pie wedge is google's revenue and is the google percentage of the pie wedge growing or shrinking i don't think we actually know if you if you subtract out the google payment from services what is the rate what has the rate of apple service growth been over the past three years maybe it's been declining minus that and maybe that's been keeping it up or maybe actually the google revenue has been declining and it's been growing faster than that but we won't know that until it's subtracted out so the first time it disappears
John:
They're going to explain it and the analysts are going to be, yeah, this is the DOG thing.
John:
You didn't get the money.
John:
You didn't renegotiate a deal.
John:
We're going to punish your stock for it because everyone, you know, you lost $20 billion or whatever.
John:
Fine.
John:
But the next time they're going to say, now we can look at the remaining services and say, is it actually growing?
John:
And I don't actually know.
John:
I'm not sure anybody actually knows.
John:
Again, maybe services is growing faster than it has been on a percentage basis without the Google thing.
John:
Or maybe it's been growing much slower and all the growth has been in Google.
John:
But we'll find that out only after it is removed.
Casey:
I mean, ultimately, I don't think the classification is really that big a deal because any investors worth their salt or any analyst, I should say, that's worth their salt is going to be able to figure out what this is about.
Casey:
And average day-to-day investors, you know, like the individuals, if they decide to sell because the revenue is down, then so be it.
Casey:
I don't really think they're going to sweat that part of this.
Casey:
I mean, I think they're going to sweat losing that money.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I feel like they can talk their way through it in a way that would probably be satisfactory, at least at first, to anyone that's paying attention.
Casey:
And then, like John just said, the rubber will hit the road the following quarter to see, you know, can they make up some of that space?
Casey:
And that's fine.
Casey:
I mean, ultimately, I don't have terribly strong opinions about this.
Casey:
I think...
Casey:
People choose Google, like you both have been saying.
Casey:
They choose Google because Google is, in many ways, the best.
Casey:
And I think where it becomes gross, and this is what Ben Thompson's been saying on Dithering and on his own website, where it becomes gross is when Google is contractually entrenching themselves as a monopolist.
Casey:
If you got to be a monopolist by being really good, then, well, okay, so be it.
Casey:
But if you stay there by way of contracts and law...
Casey:
Or maybe not law, but contracts.
Casey:
That's where it becomes gross and apparently illegal.
John:
Yeah, and also Google is the best partially because they have done everything they can to box out competition.
John:
So they'll stay the best if you never let anybody who could potentially compete with you from getting better.
John:
It's it's sort of you can't just say like, well, Google is the best because everyone picks them and everyone picks them because they're the best.
John:
If you don't also acknowledge like, OK, well, then how is someone supposed to get better and start competing with Google when there's exclusive contracts exist that prevent competition?
John:
And so I think things like this have been holding back Bing.
John:
It's all speculative.
John:
You can say, well, Bing would suck no matter what.
John:
Maybe, maybe Bing would suck even if these things didn't happen.
John:
Right.
John:
But we don't know.
John:
Right.
John:
The whole point is we actually want to have a more level playing field.
John:
Do not let the dominant player use their dominance to prevent you from ever getting good enough.
John:
Right.
John:
And so even though we're all dismissively saying, well, if you put a choice screen, everyone's going to pick Google anyway.
John:
It's like maybe part of the reason that's true is because Google has made sure no one can compete with them.
Casey:
Yep, that's a really good point.
Casey:
And I think the thing that I'm most interested in about this is what it means for Apple's perspective on services.
Casey:
We glanced off this a few minutes ago, but this is what Jason's post was largely about.
Casey:
And I think the thing that kind of...
Casey:
gives me pause, and creeps me out isn't really the right turn of phrase, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it, is that we just had a discussion about how the security dialogues, which are user hostile, are constantly being thrown in our faces, and there's becoming more and more and more of them.
Casey:
And as we discussed already, at a detriment to the user, we're seeing more and more of these.
Casey:
And whoever used to fight against these sorts of things isn't winning that fight anymore.
Casey:
We're also seeing more and more and more, hey, have you heard about Dark Matter?
Casey:
Hey, have you heard about that thing with Jake Gyllenhaal?
Casey:
Hey, have you heard about MLS whatever, whatever?
Casey:
Hey, have you heard about Friday Night Lights?
Casey:
We're getting more and more and more of these advertising and push notifications and things in settings and whatnot.
Casey:
In a way that that doesn't feel like the apple that, not that I grew up on, but for lack of a better term of phrase, that I grew up on.
Casey:
And the fact that all these things are happening, that the people who used to say no to these things apparently can't or won't say no anymore, or maybe just aren't there anymore—
Casey:
That's what gives me pause and gives me the heebie-jeebies is that I don't want Apple, and this was the thesis of Jason's post, I don't want Apple to lose sight of what makes Apple so great and why we are so enthusiastic about Apple that we have done damn near 600 episodes of the show largely about this silly company.
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't want them to lose that.
Casey:
And, and I fear that I'm starting to see a little bit of smoke around them losing sight of what makes them so special.
Casey:
And, and, you know, things happen, you know, sometimes mistakes are made and maybe they'll course correct and maybe it'll be fine.
Casey:
But I don't love this feeling that I just got this like, that,
Casey:
that they're prioritizing services to the detriment of other things, that they're prioritizing security in some ways to the detriment of other things like the user experience.
Casey:
And I just, I don't love that.
Casey:
And I feel like they're going too far on a few of these things.
Casey:
And I want there to be a better balance.
Casey:
And this is one of those things where I want a better balance.
John:
Yeah, it was one of the places where some aspects of Apple's corporate structure have helped it in this way.
John:
And I'm not quite sure how this works with the services things.
John:
I mean, in a company that was really divided up by like division, you can say, well, the people in the services department are totally incentivized to throw ads in our face because their whole point is make the line go up on their services, right?
John:
It makes sense.
John:
But like Apple has...
John:
had counterbalances against that by, for example, having back in the old days, you know, despite some of his bad decisions, Johnny Ive is the head of user experience or UI or whatever for the whole company, for everything, every single product, hardware and software.
John:
At one point, it was like Johnny Ive and his department.
John:
It's like,
John:
There's no division like, you know, oh, you're an Apple TV.
John:
Oh, I can't tell you anything.
John:
No, I cut across the whole company.
John:
And I say, and I am in charge of the user experience of the Apple experience of using our product.
John:
So whether it's a Mac, an iPhone, a pencil, the, you know, the music player, you know, music app on Mac OS, like software, hardware, anything, you know, someone was overseeing that and that group,
John:
well had expertise and incentives to make good user experience because they were judged on you know like don't do people like apple's products do they think they're easy to use and pleasant to use do they in in you know induce surprise and delight right that's what they're motivated to do and maybe you in the apple tv plus thing is motivated to get more subscriptions but guess what you got to go through them because you don't have your own ui team you've got to go through the apple wide ui team i forget what they call that type of organization but it's like
John:
It's the opposite of divisions, the opposite of having the Mac division, the iPhone division, the iPad division, and having them just have their own little kingdoms and their own little worlds and own motivations because that can distort each one of those products because the people in that group are motivated to like sell more iPhones or sell more iPads or whatever.
John:
And for example, if you had iPod as a division, they'd be motivated to sell more iPods.
John:
But sometimes iPods
John:
The best thing to do is not to sell more iPods.
John:
It's to have the iPhone totally cannibalize the iPod.
John:
That's the best for the company.
John:
But if you had the iPod as a division, they'd be fighting tooth and nail to prevent that from happening.
John:
And that's not healthy.
John:
Right.
John:
And I look at things like how the hell do come ons about like, you know, Apple payment and the Apple card and MLS get into the settings app.
John:
Like, where is the cross-cutting user interface design team on that?
John:
Because I know why, like, the Apple Card people want that to be there.
John:
But to your point, Casey, like, shouldn't there be the user experience team saying, you may want that, but you can't have that?
John:
And how are they losing that fight now?
John:
Like, is that not taking place?
John:
Where is that?
John:
Like, I know Johnny Ives gone, and maybe they just know, but, like, that department still exists, and it still, as far as I know, cuts across hardware and software.
John:
Does it not cut across services?
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is this is a structural thing that's too much like sort of inside baseball about how Apple works that I'm too far removed from that I don't actually know.
John:
But I would hope that the structures that prevented this when with the hardware software divide would like not having the iPod team, you know, fighting to keep that product alive when it was so clear that the iPhone should sweep it away.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
whatever allowed that to happen i would hope those same checks and balances are still in place but everything from the services side makes me think that somehow they are excluded from from this these checks and balances and somehow are able to infect the rest of the products which is not great
John:
And like I said, it's not about the revenue.
John:
I'm not worried about the services line going up and the product line going down.
John:
I would love it if the products were sold at cost or were loss leaders and then made all their profit from high margin services as long as the holistic experience was the Apple experience that I know and love, right?
John:
And it wasn't the throw ads in your face, you know, crappy experiences that the services people seem to want.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Revenue Cat, Squarespace, and Delete Me.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of our member exclusive perks is that you get a bonus topic every week called ATP Overtime.
Marco:
This week, members are going to hear about COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, and the role of government in keeping kids safe online.
Marco:
It's a pretty interesting kind of thorny topic.
Marco:
We'll be talking about that in overtime.
Marco:
You can hear it by joining as a member, atv.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
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, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
Marco:
So Marco doesn't really believe in the show notes for the most part.
Casey:
And every great once in a while, little snippets will arrive.
Casey:
And sometimes I just, I don't even know.
Casey:
And sometimes I don't even want to know what they're about.
Casey:
In the after show section of our internal show notes, I see the following.
Casey:
Marco's Rivian drama.
Casey:
I'm sitting down.
Casey:
I'm leaning back.
Casey:
All right, Marco.
Casey:
What's going on?
John:
I feel like we already did Rivian drama.
John:
Could there possibly be more Rivian drama?
Casey:
Narrator says, oh, wait, there's more.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So there's two areas of drama.
Marco:
One is, remember when John said after I got half of my car disassembled, he's like, oh, no.
Marco:
He's like, at some point, if that happened in my car, there would be like rattles and stuff everywhere.
John:
I don't think that's a fair paraphrase, but I always said I worry about if a large amount of a complicated product is disassembled, like in a shop, I worry that it's not going to go back together the same way it was.
Marco:
Well, I now have a substantial amount more wind noise coming from the right side of my car than I did before.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Marco:
So I'll have to get that looked at.
Marco:
It was not perfect before.
Marco:
Before the repair, if Tiff ever rolled down the passenger side window while the vehicle was in motion...
Marco:
When she rolled it back up again, you'd hear wind noise.
Marco:
Until we stopped, she would open the door and close the door, and that would fix it.
Marco:
So there's obviously somewhat of a seal issue on that window.
John:
So strange.
John:
It seems like such an aerodynamic vehicle.
John:
It's brick shape.
John:
It's the wind.
Marco:
Now there is substantially more wind noise from the right side and some occasional hums at certain speeds.
Yeah.
John:
You just need to back into a stump with your other side of the bumper.
John:
Yeah, that'll fix it.
John:
Then you balance out the wind noise.
John:
It will cancel out like force-canceling woofers.
Marco:
Yeah, so I have to deal with that at some point.
Marco:
God knows if it's going to be a mess of like, who deals with it?
Marco:
The body shop or Rivian service?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
We'll find that out.
Marco:
That's part of the problem.
Marco:
So I took a long trip with the Rivian this past weekend.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
After the first fast charge at a Rivian charger, the Rivian Adventure Network charger, which is very good, I pulled away from the charger, and I got a bunch of warnings on the dash saying, battery fault, service SUV immediately.
Casey:
Oh, that's definitely reassuring as you're presumably two to three to four hours away from home.
Marco:
On a multi-hour trip that I intend to keep going on, going to an event that, you know, we were going to a friend's wedding in Canada.
Marco:
So, you know, it's a bit of a drive.
Marco:
So I'm like, well, let's see if I can just defer this service till I get home, try to go.
Marco:
And I noticed the car's going extremely slowly.
Marco:
this sounds all too familiar and i am having real bad flashbacks right now it's running on half the number of cylinders so i pulled into a gas station i'm like what like it's barely usable i'm like what do i do so i thought let me try this is a computer product yeah you gotta reboot it i'll try rebooting it that's it
Marco:
Never fails.
John:
Never fails.
John:
Number one diagnostic technique.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
And I had to do this for, you know, for Tesla on a fairly regular basis as well.
Marco:
You know, you figure out like, oh, you push the steering wheel button and something else for a few seconds.
Marco:
So with Rivian, it's so funny.
Marco:
It's like you push the left steering wheel button and the emergency flasher button on the roof.
Marco:
So it feels just like control, delete for a car.
Marco:
Like it is.
John:
You should have to hold down the horn as part of it.
John:
Holding on the power button and the horn is like, what is that else?
John:
I'm just rebooting the Rivian.
Right.
Exactly.
Marco:
So it's this ridiculous process, but I did the full reboot.
Marco:
And they even warn you when doing that.
Marco:
There's a couple of minor reboots.
Marco:
But if you do the big reboot, they even say, don't do this more than once an hour because certain subsystems might take that long to come back up.
Marco:
like okay that's that's a little disconcerting as well but fine we'll deal with that so anyway i do the full reboot the car you know reboot it takes like five minutes to reboot it comes up it's fine okay this is basically what happened with us if i recall correctly when it when it came back up it was not fine for just a moment and then within moments of you driving away if i recall correctly it was fine
Marco:
Yeah, this was fine immediately this time.
Marco:
So I'm like, okay, well, I guess I need to get service, but maybe I can continue this trip and get service like next week and not right now and canceling this trip or getting a rental car and leaving my car in Newburgh or whatever.
Marco:
So anyway, so continue on the trip, fine.
Marco:
At the next charging stop,
Marco:
When I plugged in the fast charger, now I should clarify, at the next charging stop, this was the only charger in a pretty big area.
Marco:
I knew it was there, and so I kind of took a risk to get to it.
Marco:
I arrived at it with like 10% charge.
Marco:
It's a pretty low amount of charge, and it was like if I really had to go to another charger, I could maybe make it, but it would be a stretch.
Marco:
I really needed to charge here.
Marco:
So I get there, 10%, and I plug in, and the charger will not start.
Marco:
Every time it's about to start, the car shows a message saying, battery fault, please service immediately.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Marco:
So I'm like, oh, now my car won't charge.
Marco:
on a trip, when I'm in the middle of nowhere, at 10%.
Marco:
This is not good.
Marco:
So, I try, let me, let me reboot again.
Marco:
After the reboot, it comes back up.
Marco:
The problem is fixed.
Marco:
I can charge again.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Woo!
Marco:
On the way home, I arrive at this charger.
Marco:
Now, I should clarify what this charger is.
Marco:
This is an Electrify America charger.
Marco:
Now, when I first got the Rivian a year ago, I believe I said on this show, Electrify America chargers are fine.
Marco:
They're plentiful.
Marco:
They work.
Marco:
Some of them are pretty fast.
Marco:
So it's fine and it's competitive with the superchargers in terms of utility that it offers on a long road trip.
Marco:
And a vehicle that has a CCS plug and has no supercharger access is fine to own because Electrify America stations are pretty decent.
Marco:
And I believe I gave an update to that statement a few months ago that my experience with them was declining rapidly.
Marco:
That it seemed like even within the span of one year that Electrify America's chargers, which are the primary decent fast chargers that are not Tesla's port in the U.S.,
Marco:
But that Electrify Micros chargers were, in my experience, declining quickly, that there were way more breakages of them.
Marco:
Like you show up and like, you know, half of them aren't working to our earlier conversation and way longer lines.
Marco:
You have to actually wait to get to them sometimes because there's been so many EVs sold in the last couple of years in the US, which is great.
Marco:
EVs are taking off.
Marco:
They're everywhere, especially in like wealthy areas like New York.
Marco:
They're getting very, very common.
Marco:
But the problem is that the Electrify America network and chargers not only have not scaled to address the growth, but also are actually getting worse because they keep breaking and it seems like no one is fixing them.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
This is what this station was.
Marco:
I stopped there.
Marco:
On the way up, it has four chargers in the middle of this giant parking lot surrounded by big box retail stores.
Marco:
Four chargers.
Marco:
On the way up, only three of them were working.
Marco:
And I had to wait 20 minutes.
Marco:
And then when I actually finally plugged in...
Marco:
It was it advertised that it could go up to 350 kilowatts and it went 90.
Marco:
So, OK, not a great showing.
Marco:
When I get to the same station on the way home, only two of them are working.
Marco:
So why would you go to the same one?
Marco:
Go to a different one.
Marco:
There's nothing else around.
Marco:
That's why.
Marco:
So I get there.
Marco:
Only two of the four are working.
Marco:
They're all full, of course, when I get there.
Marco:
Now, of course, I do what everyone does when they pull up to an Electrofire America charger that has two open bays because the things are dead.
Marco:
I pull into the one of them and say, let's try it.
Marco:
What the heck?
Marco:
Maybe it'll work for me.
Marco:
And of course, I pull in and it doesn't work for me.
Marco:
So I back out and I kind of get in a position that suggests I'm in line.
Marco:
Because see, this is the problem with car chargers.
John:
It's like the Apple store.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Imagine the Apple store, but with way higher stakes and everyone's mad and there's no one working it.
John:
And they're the size of cars.
John:
Right.
John:
So you can't easily jockey for, you know, jostling around to form some amorphous blob of checkout.
John:
Imagine that, but with pieces of steel, it can't touch each other.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Or it'll cost $20,000.
Marco:
So anyway, so the problem with EV charging.
Marco:
Now, again, I've before this, I had Teslas, of course.
Marco:
So I've done a lot of EV charging.
Marco:
EV charging logistics, when you're at a fast charger on a highway trip, again, these are unstaffed.
Marco:
No one is working the chargers.
Marco:
No one is watching the chargers.
Marco:
No one is policing the chargers.
Marco:
It is just unstaffed, like almost public infrastructure kind of, you know, you show up and you hope that nothing bad happens and you hope your car can get there and people won't mess with it and other people won't be a problem because, again, there's no one working it.
John:
That's why they should be selling potato chips in a little hut with the Charlie teenager in there because then he at least knows, hey, one of the things went out and, you know, send an email to somebody who comes and fix it eventually.
John:
But with nobody there and with like Target doesn't care.
John:
Like, you know what I mean?
John:
It's just there's literally zero people to notice.
John:
Hey, everything is breaking.
John:
Call the people who come and fix it.
John:
Like that probably happens on like a week or a month lag when just enough people get angry about showing up there and having it not work and send some angry email when they get home.
John:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
And so here's – the thing is like when I was first in the EV world, it was pretty much only Teslas that were getting any kind of traction and certainly at Tesla's own chargers, it was only Teslas.
Marco:
So superchargers tend to be built with lots of bays.
Marco:
Even back when I first got the Tesla, I mean 2016 I think was my first one.
Marco:
It was a while ago.
Marco:
So even back then, the superchargers would be built with like 6, 8, 12 bays.
Marco:
So there were a lot of bays.
Marco:
And because it was only Teslas and because it was so long ago, there was never a wait.
Marco:
There was always capacity.
Marco:
And you would show up and the only other car that would be there would be some other like nerd or hippie who bought a Tesla.
Marco:
So it was a very different crowd and a much smaller one than what is at a modern Electrify America charger today.
Marco:
So today you show up to these chargers and they are almost always full or almost full.
Marco:
Now, the entire idea of like an unmonitored, unstaffed, unpoliced charger totally falls apart when you have to wait.
Marco:
Because now it's anarchy.
Marco:
Like when you have to wait, now it's like, okay, we're going to like kind of form like a weird queue and everyone's going to kind of keep track.
Marco:
Oh, you were here first, then you, then you.
Marco:
But like what happens if someone jumps the line or is a jerk or, you know, has a dispute over who was first?
John:
You should just put your quarter up on the charger.
John:
Kids listening, a quarter is a unit of currency that comes in coin form.
John:
See, I thought I was going to explain the arcade thing, but now I'm trying to explain coins.
John:
Yep, I sure did.
John:
Because how many kids know what coins are?
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
I mean, they barely even know what cash is anymore.
Marco:
Anyway, so we arrive at this Charger on the way home.
Marco:
Again, I have something like 12%.
Marco:
I'm not going to make it to the next one.
Marco:
And the two that are working are, of course, taken.
Marco:
And there's another car waiting.
Marco:
So I'm going to be the second in line for the next one.
Marco:
And of course, there's nowhere to park that would form a natural line.
Marco:
It's just like these things on the side of a parking lot with one of those kind of parking lot through streets right in front of it.
Marco:
So there's not even really space around it to form a weird queue.
Marco:
So we just kind of pull up near it and hope for the best.
Marco:
The car on the end, one of the active cars, is parked comically diagonally across two spots.
Marco:
It's chaos.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right, I'll wait.
Marco:
And because EV charging takes half hour or whatever, most people who charge their car don't stay in it.
Marco:
They get out of the car and they go over to one of the big box stores that's nearby and go to the bathroom, do some shopping, whatever.
John:
Now it's the communal laundry machine at college where it's like the person's not there, but their load is done.
John:
So you take those wet clothes out and you shove it on top of the machine and you put your clothes in.
John:
But kind of hard to do that with a car.
Marco:
Interesting that you mentioned that.
Marco:
So as we're sitting there waiting, this is a pretty long wait.
Marco:
And so everyone's upset.
Marco:
So the one car waiting is upset.
Marco:
Everyone else is upset.
Marco:
Eventually, you know, one of the cars finishes.
Marco:
The one person in front of me, they get to take that spot.
Marco:
Okay, so now I'm next in line.
Marco:
The diagonally parked car is still there.
Marco:
It's been there for a while.
Marco:
So I'm like, I wonder how close they are to finish.
Marco:
Let me get out and look.
Marco:
I get out and walk over.
Marco:
Their screen says like 81%.
Marco:
I'm like, great.
Marco:
That means this person is going to be done really soon.
Marco:
I'm going to get this spot next.
Marco:
This will be great.
Marco:
And a few minutes later, a woman walks up to this car and I'm like, yes, this is it.
Marco:
Finally going to be us.
Marco:
She walked over the car.
Marco:
She opens the door, pulls out of the car.
Marco:
One of those like clear square to go containers full of salad, opens it up and starts eating the salad and closes the car door and walks away with the salad and
Marco:
to disappear into like the nearby shopping center no and yeah and i'm like uh-oh she's not leaving but her car's at this point probably well into the 80s like what's gonna happen like what where is she going no go she wants that 100 and so tiff and i are like where like and of course so we name her salad like where did salad go like where when salad coming back and like surely the car has to be like in the 90s by now and then as we're wondering where salad went another car pulls up
Marco:
and two dudes get out and i i use the term dudes with some emphasis here these are the kind of guys who if they walk up to a bunch of people at an elevator who are standing waiting for the elevator to come they're the kind of guys who will tap the button like this
Marco:
like really like just like tap it a thousand times just because they assume of course none of you thought to push the button and not only do you not think to push the button but if you push the button very aggressively maybe the elevator will come faster it's those kinds of dudes who come up they come up of course they try both of the other spots that don't work because again it doesn't work for anyone else the app says it doesn't work but hey maybe maybe that maybe it'll work for these dudes of course not then they look over at salad's car
Marco:
and they unplug it.
Casey:
Wait, that's possible?
Casey:
I didn't think that was possible.
Marco:
Some of them have locking mechanisms, but not all of them.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Some of them, the cables lock in for this reason.
Marco:
Keep in mind, and this is one of the things, all Teslas lock their cables in.
Marco:
The reason why is because, first of all, things like this, but when Tesla was first entering the market...
Marco:
There was, and still in some places is, but especially back then, there was a lot of kind of, let's say, conservative people who would even vandalize or try to vandalize EVs.
Marco:
Their mere existence angered certain people in the U.S.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
Tesla had to design their systems to be a little bit defensive.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons why the Tesla plug locks into the vehicle and why you can't stop a Tesla from charging if the car is locked and the person's not there.
Marco:
I mean, you can try to cut the cable, I guess, but that would be quite an operation.
John:
Don't do that, please.
Marco:
Yeah, please.
Marco:
And for lots of reasons, you will probably kill yourself and also you shouldn't do it for lots of other reasons.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
salad's car is unplugged now we are in line right behind salad and we're like when she comes back she's gonna think we unplugged it sure is and then there's gonna be like a conflict that i really don't want and like i'm like oh god like i don't like this makes me look really bad because these dudes came in unplugged it and oh and the dudes motion to me to say oh come pull up next to her and start plugging it so they want me to pull up diagonally next to her diagonally parked car oh no which of course i'm like
Marco:
Then I'm going to walk away.
Marco:
She's going to come back thinking I did this and maybe like vandalize my car or something.
Marco:
There is another $20,000.
Marco:
There's so many parts of this.
Marco:
I do not want this.
Marco:
I'm like, now what?
Marco:
So I told these guys, no, I'm going to wait for her to come back.
Marco:
I'm not taking that.
Marco:
I'm not doing that.
Marco:
But they had unplugged it.
Marco:
They even then closed her flap to the plug.
Marco:
And I'm like, I can't believe the gall of these dudes.
Casey:
What were they driving?
Marco:
The Kia thing that I like, the hatchback-y one.
Casey:
The EV6?
Marco:
No, the good one, the 5, I think.
John:
The Ioniq 5?
John:
Yeah, that's it.
Marco:
Yeah, okay, Nokia, right, okay.
Marco:
Whatever, yeah, the Ioniq 5.
Marco:
Anyway, now the car's unplugged.
Marco:
It's starting to rain.
Marco:
We're like, where the heck is Salad?
Marco:
Now it's raining, she's stuck in the mall somewhere.
Marco:
Like, now what do we do?
Marco:
Like, oh, God, she's going to come back.
Marco:
Like, she's going to see us.
Marco:
We're going to have to explain to her.
Marco:
Tip's like, don't worry, I'll explain to her.
Marco:
Like, I'm a woman, she'll get it.
Marco:
Like, no, that's not...
Marco:
I don't want any of this.
Marco:
I'm freaking out.
Marco:
Tip's going to get beat up.
Marco:
If there was any other Charger nearby, I would have just left.
Marco:
I'm like, I don't want to deal with this, but I couldn't go anywhere else.
Marco:
Eventually, the other car, eventually, the other one that was working, that car finishes.
Marco:
Thank God.
Marco:
I'll take that spot.
Marco:
I position myself, I would say, extremely aggressively as they pull out so that the dude car does not take this spot.
Marco:
suddenly you don't care about another twenty thousand dollar repair yeah i'm like i am not gonna have a conflict with salad over this unplugging incident that i would never do so finally i like i pull in i get my spot i start of course the dudes immediately go diagonally park next to salad and take her cable um i'm like you know what fine but you plugged in we got out the dudes get over there and of course like tip was like the way
Marco:
the dudes use their car was the car version of man spreading like they open they like park next to salad and they opened up every door and the trunk and it's the car was just like spread out across like the whole we're like of course these dudes but anyway so we get out and we're like this is perfect now when salad comes back she can deal with these dudes who actually did it we are out of here
Marco:
so we go you know do some shopping ourselves well you went to do some shopping i would be in that car waiting for salad to come back there's no way i'd want to miss that yeah i would want to watch absolutely i i want the op i'm so conflict avoided i'm like i don't even want to see this i don't want any part of this you could get splash damage from the conflict though
John:
You have to defend your car.
Marco:
So, you know, so anyway, we're shopping.
Marco:
The charge is going actually impressively fast.
Marco:
That time I went, it went to 150 kilowatts.
Marco:
Like, all right, that's good.
Marco:
And then I get a notice as I am shopping that charging has stopped on my car at about 82%.
Casey:
Oh, that's not so bad.
Marco:
I'm like, well, I'm like, I mean, I need it.
Marco:
I was hoping to get into like 85, 90, but okay.
Marco:
You know, that's weird though.
Marco:
Why did the charger stop charging my car?
Marco:
And the app just said like waiting on charger or something.
Marco:
I'm like, I bet they tried to unplug me.
Marco:
Does the Rivian lock in?
Marco:
It sure does.
Marco:
But if you push the release button on Electrify America charger, it stops charging.
Marco:
So you are able to stop someone's charge, but if their cable is locked in, you just can't take it.
Marco:
So you've just now stopped it for no reason, and then you're just wasting time.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
So sure enough, I go back to the car.
Marco:
Those dudes have since left.
Marco:
Now there are two new vehicles waiting.
Marco:
One of them is, of course, a giant truck with a guy who is exactly what you'd expect the kind of guy to be driving a giant truck.
Marco:
And the other one is just some other dude.
Marco:
And you could tell they are having a heated discussion, possibly over who goes next.
Marco:
And I walk up and Tiff and I get in the car and I unplug my charger and we just get the hell out of there.
Marco:
I said nothing.
Marco:
I didn't look at them.
Marco:
I said nothing to them.
Marco:
I'm just like, you know what?
Marco:
Screw these guys.
Marco:
They can fight it out themselves.
Marco:
I am getting the hell out of here.
Marco:
We went to the next charger down the road to top off.
Marco:
And it was one of those that's a combo supercharger and Electrify America in the same parking lot.
Marco:
And there were 12 chargers.
Marco:
Four were occupied.
Marco:
There was a family like playing catch in a field next to them.
Marco:
It was like an oasis of peace.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, all that is to say, the Electrify America charging experience is really, I think, degrading quite a lot to the point where even as my car is braking.
Marco:
Oh, and I did have to reboot it two more times at different chargers on the trip.
Marco:
Even as my car is weirdly braking and I have to maybe get it serviced.
John:
Maybe get it serviced?
John:
You have to get it serviced.
John:
I hope it's already in the shop.
Marco:
Well, it's not yet.
Marco:
I have to schedule it now.
Marco:
I've been traveling until yesterday, so it's been an ordeal.
Marco:
But I will never buy any EV for the foreseeable future that cannot at least also use Tesla's superchargers.
Marco:
There's so many great options on the market right now that only have CCS plugs for the next year or two or three maybe, and then they'll convert to NACS.
Marco:
There are certain brands that have deals with Tesla or can use adapters.
Marco:
I will not buy any other EV, and I cannot recommend that anybody else buy any EV that cannot somehow, either natively or through an adapter, use Tesla superchargers in the US because the rest of the charging scene is getting bad very quickly.
Marco:
it's only going to keep getting bad.
Marco:
And like, you know, what if you were in a situation where you have to kind of, you know, stand up for yourself in a charger and say, you're a woman and the other people at the charger are kind of aggressive seeming dudes.
Marco:
Like this could be really bad.
Marco:
Like this could cause bad situations for sure.
Marco:
Again, I have had only positive experiences with Tesla superchargers and I have had so far only quite negative experiences with Electrify America and other, you know, CCS chargers.
Marco:
And so,
Marco:
I got to say, use Tesla chargers whenever you can, people out there with EVs.
Marco:
And do not buy any more EVs that can't use them.
John:
I hope this whole experience has made you more prepared for the coming water wars.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
What?
John:
Climate change.
John:
You know, the water wars.
John:
Come on, keep up.
John:
Science fiction.
John:
But not really science fiction.
John:
Now it's science fact.
John:
Yeah, resource scarcity brings out the best in everyone, said no one ever.