Use Your Words
Marco:
We were supposed to record yesterday.
Marco:
There was a reason why we didn't that I'm not sure we want to share, but there was a reason why we didn't.
Marco:
And then today, massive Apple news broke from this DOJ lawsuit.
Marco:
And so we look really prescient.
Marco:
We look like we had a really good inside line to say, like, wait, hold the show until tomorrow.
John:
Well, we did.
John:
We did kind of know.
John:
I mean, everybody knew the rumors that the DOJ thing was going to be announced were known before we began recording.
John:
they yeah but i think they were like a little bit still squishy like it might happen it's rumored to happen maybe to be clear we wouldn't we would have just recorded as usual well because here's the thing you have to record sometime there's always going to be more news that comes after the show and you know i there was no way i would have said oh well because the doj thing is supposed to come out tomorrow we should delay no i would have said don't record and we'll talk about it next week but as it turns out
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
This is the advantage of us accidentally bumping a day is we can claim, like Marco's trying to do until you ruined it.
Casey:
We can claim that this is all just, that's how good we are.
Casey:
Your hosts are that dedicated.
John:
That's not being good.
John:
That's being, I don't want to have the reputation that we would delay the show because of news because everyone.
John:
Everyone's going to be like, oh, you should delay the show.
John:
There's news.
John:
And no, look, the show has to come when the show comes.
John:
It comes once a week, and there's going to be news that happens before it, and there's going to be news that happens after it.
John:
And guess what?
John:
All the news that happens after it is fair game for the next episode.
John:
You just have to pick one day during the week, and that's going to be the day.
John:
So we occasionally shift things around, but for the most part, I really just want to say we're very regimented.
John:
Wednesday, if possible.
Casey:
We are typically very regimented.
Casey:
Yes, it was my fault.
Marco:
Well, I don't know if it's your fault necessarily.
Marco:
It was your problem, though.
Casey:
Yes, it was very much your problem.
Casey:
It was very much my problem.
Casey:
There were some, let's just say, unexpected pyrotechnics, and so I needed to delay a little while.
John:
I'm going to check your diet if there's actual fire involved.
Casey:
No, there was no fire.
Marco:
Yeah, I think if fire is coming out of anything, you have a problem.
Marco:
It's a finger to pyrotechnics.
Casey:
Not literally.
Marco:
I do love the idea, though, like, you know, at some point we could like, you know, get called into a grand jury to testify how we possibly had inside information that leaked out of this lawsuit.
Marco:
And we might have to actually like put that on the record.
Marco:
Well, this is why we really delayed the show.
Marco:
It was not inside information through some illegal leak.
Marco:
Right, right, right.
Marco:
Well, it was illegal leakage, but it was not.
Casey:
It was indeed.
Casey:
Oh, Jesus.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's just move right on to follow up.
Casey:
Holy smokes.
Casey:
All right, so the M1 MacBook Air, that was dead.
Casey:
We had a funeral, what, two weeks ago?
Casey:
A week ago, I don't even remember.
Casey:
It was dead, and now it has risen again like a phoenix from the ashes.
Casey:
It lives on at Walmart and Best Buy.
Casey:
What?
Marco:
This is amazing.
Marco:
So here's so the news basically is Apple has directly stopped selling the MacBook M1, the M1 MacBook Air when they released the M3.
Marco:
But it was a two weeks ago, one week ago, whenever that was.
Marco:
We all thought they've been making this for a long time.
Marco:
It's a great computer, but it's pretty old now.
Marco:
And they have they've gone two chip generations afterwards.
Marco:
It's time to discontinue it.
Marco:
That made perfect sense to us.
Marco:
They've made some deal with Walmart where they are apparently going to still be making this for some interval into the future.
Marco:
We don't know how long, but I would assume at least a year or two.
Marco:
It's available, I think, seemingly exclusively at Walmart in the U.S.
Marco:
for only $700.
Marco:
And what was it about Best Buy?
Yeah.
John:
Well, so Best Buy has it on sale for $649, but as far as I know, the Walmart ones are not like they're just clearing their inventory or their refurbished models or whatever, but they are brand new in the box M1 MacBook Airs.
John:
For the Best Buy 650 one, I don't know that that is not just them clearing inventory.
Marco:
Whenever Apple wants to clear out excess inventory of something without doing their own official sale or price cut, it's almost always discounted at Best Buy.
Marco:
I don't know what they do around the rest of the world, but in North America, Best Buy is, first of all, a huge retailer.
Marco:
So it's easy to clear out inventory through there.
Marco:
And so you can always kind of tell like whatever Apple products, either they have too many of because they're about to replace them or they just did replace them.
Marco:
Or like in the case of the HomePod, they just they are not selling the way Apple needs them to sell or wants them to sell or they've made too many.
Marco:
And so that's kind of where they dump inventory without...
Marco:
Officially saying from Apple's side, we're going to cut the price.
Marco:
So my guess is the Best Buy thing is temporary for what was officially old stock, maybe Best Buy's own old stock.
Marco:
But the Walmart thing seems to be like Apple.
Marco:
And what's interesting is this is, I believe, the first time Walmart's selling a Mac, right?
Casey:
That's correct as far as I know.
Marco:
Again, for people not in the U.S., you might not realize how big of a deal this is.
Marco:
Walmart is massive.
Marco:
I know you've heard of it probably if you listen to American media at all.
Marco:
But there are so many American consumers for whom Walmart is the closest and unfortunately oftentimes the only retailer that is within a reasonable driving distance from their house.
Marco:
So because tons of rural America, there's just no big box stores, no Apple stores, nothing except Walmarts.
Marco:
There's a huge amount of the U.S.
Marco:
buying public that basically only shops at Walmart for most things.
Marco:
So to have not been in Walmart all this time is a pretty big deal.
Marco:
To be there now is now also consequently a very big deal.
Marco:
And what's interesting about Walmart, too, is that partly by just demographics of where they are and partly because of their own brand, Walmart sells things cheaply.
Marco:
That is kind of what they are known for.
Marco:
Oftentimes they sell crappy things in order to hit those prices.
Marco:
But, you know, when you go to Walmart, you know what you're getting.
Marco:
You're not going there to get like the best of the best.
Marco:
But they do have some brand name stuff.
Marco:
And so to have anything from Apple is interesting.
Marco:
And to have a Mac at Walmart for the first time is also interesting.
Marco:
And to have it be an M1 MacBook Air at a price that Apple has never sold official new computers at, you know,
Marco:
I mean, maybe, I guess the Mac Mini has hit those prices, but, like, nothing else.
Marco:
They haven't sold a computer with a screen at that price, I don't think.
Marco:
Yeah, a complete computer, let's say.
Marco:
So to sell that at $700 for what is actually a pretty great computer still, like, yes, it's old, but the M1 MacBook Air, let's not forget, like, we were just saying this when the M3 came out.
Marco:
We were just saying how amazing this computer is.
Marco:
So to have this as what seems like a...
Marco:
long-term inventory item that a retailer as big as Walmart means Apple is still making them and that they presumably don't want to sell it on their own site to kind of, you know, encourage people to go directly to Apple to get the higher price, newer offerings.
Marco:
It's an interesting form of market segmentation that I don't think they've really done to the public.
Marco:
They've had education-only items before, like, you know, less expensive iMacs, you know, the eMac and stuff like that.
Marco:
They've done that.
Marco:
But to do this, this is pretty new.
Marco:
And I think,
Marco:
I think this makes a lot of sense now that we have, you know, the Apple Silicon era jumped so far ahead.
Marco:
Even this, what is it, almost four-year-old computer, because it was the Apple Silicon era, it's still just really, really good.
Marco:
So this is a great computer people can now get for $700 from Apple.
Marco:
Well, an Apple computer they can get from Walmart.
Marco:
That's a really great new expansion for their market.
Marco:
I think that's a very good idea.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
What's also interesting is, you know, we heard those rumors about six months ago that Apple was preparing a new low-cost MacBook.
Marco:
Do you think this was it?
Marco:
Like, do you think, you know, something got confused in the rumor chain and it was just a rumor about this?
John:
I don't think the sourcing, like, this is the type of thing that would be easy to keep a secret probably because it's just two companies talking to each other.
John:
There's not like a supply chain or manufacturing or whatever.
John:
Not to say that other rumor is ever going to turn out to be true, but I don't think this would have led to that rumor.
Marco:
I don't know, because this probably would have caused a little bit of supply chain rumbling in the sense that they are going to have to manufacture this particular laptop for... But the supply chain would know that they're still making more of the same computer.
John:
The supply chain wouldn't be confused to think that it was a new computer.
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
But I think it is suspicious.
Marco:
If you only have a little bit of information from the supply chain, it is kind of suspicious to see that, hey, they're producing inexpensive laptop parts for way longer than one model would normally be produced.
Marco:
Maybe that's how it got started.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Well, we'll see as time goes on if they introduce a new cost model.
John:
Speaking of the cost of this one, the one thing against this is,
John:
if you're going to keep selling in the tim cook way keep selling your old models for just way longer than anyone ever thought you would keep selling your old models in this case it's fine because as you pointed out the m1 is still great or whatever um but if you are going to do that it's going to really really highlight the worst thing about your products if you're apple which is that you are so stingy with the ssd space not even the ram because whatever it's yeah it's a 700 computer eight gigs like but the ssd space like
John:
the thing about the ram is okay so it's got a small amount of ram but it's incredibly inexpensive and you can get by with it it will use swap right but when you run out of ssd space there's no more swap for that there's not a second ssd that you can swap like it's a hard limit and by the way going to swap because you have eight gigs of ram is just going to abuse that tiny thing even more so it's
John:
This is not the fault of that computer, but it's the fault of Apple for just being so stingy and holding the line on the 256 base model.
John:
Because I believe that Walmart will only sell the base model.
John:
There is no, like, BTO option.
John:
I don't think they have any other options for the sizing of it.
John:
And certainly the $700 price is for the base model, right?
John:
So...
John:
And if they follow Apple's typical pricing, as soon as you put a more reasonable size SSD in there, the price would go up tremendously.
John:
So I think it's just the base model.
John:
But yeah, like those decisions are bad at the time, but they get so much worse when the machine is two or three generations old and you're continuing to sell it as new, not even refurb.
John:
Yeah.
John:
that's that's a sin of apple's past that's again not the fault of this machine but it really it makes me wish that like for example the m3 macbook air should no longer come with 256 sd as any it shouldn't be an option at all like it's just apple being incredibly stingy and again putting all their margins into storage and ram which is painful for all of us and a bad move in the long term i would argue
Marco:
Please consider becoming an ATP member today.
Marco:
Membership is the best way to support the show and you get some pretty cool perks too.
Marco:
So we just launched this new feature called ATP Overtime.
Marco:
This is effectively a bonus topic every week.
Marco:
So we record the regular show and we record our one regular after show.
Marco:
And then after we go off the air, we record one more topic.
Marco:
Usually, we're aiming for 15 to 45 minutes of bonus content after each show, and it's a tech topic.
Marco:
It's an ATP topic.
Marco:
So last week's episode, our bonus topic in ATP Overtime was we talked about the Rabbit R1, that cool little Playdate-looking thing that's the little AI gadget.
Marco:
We've been wanting to talk about it for a long time.
Marco:
We never had time.
Marco:
We never got to it in the show notes.
Marco:
We finally found out a way to get to extra topics.
Marco:
It's called ATP Overtime.
Marco:
You can get it by becoming an ATP member today.
Marco:
ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we're aiming to do this pretty much every episode as far as I know.
Marco:
So we're still trying it out, still brand new, but ATP Overtime, bonus content for members on every single episode.
Marco:
Somewhere on the order of 15 to 45 minutes extra and a tech topic.
Marco:
So that's one of the benefits you get.
Marco:
You also get an ad-free version of the show, of course, with ATP Overtime now included in it.
Marco:
And you get the bootleg recording feed.
Marco:
If you want to listen to our raw live broadcast, that's in there too.
Marco:
And yes, Overtime is in that now as well.
Marco:
So, ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
Check it out today.
Marco:
Eight bucks a month.
Marco:
We have annual plans too.
Marco:
We have a couple different currency options as well if you're outside of the U.S.
Marco:
and it's easier for you that way.
Marco:
Check it out once again.
Marco:
ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
It's the best way to support the show.
Marco:
We really appreciate it.
Marco:
Thank you so much.
Marco:
And now, back to the show.
Awesome.
Bye.
Casey:
We have some genuinely fascinating feedback from an anonymous listener who writes, early on in the car project, a very large rack of server gear was loaded into the back of SUVs for development and testing.
Casey:
When the Apple Silicon team was asked to help, it was years before Apple Silicon shipped in Macs.
Casey:
The chip folks showed up with a literal black box about the size of a Mac studio.
Casey:
There were instructions on how to plug it in and an admonition not to open the box.
Casey:
All software was provided to the chip team and was already installed on the box.
Casey:
When connected, this Max Studio-sized box outperformed the rack of server GPU gear by an order of magnitude while consuming a fraction of the power.
Casey:
What was in the box was never shared, and it was taken away after the test.
Casey:
One of the interesting notes on Project Titan is there was a huge effort to develop custom sensors, LiDAR, Vision, etc., that would also outperform industry-standard equipment in both performance and accuracy.
John:
What was in the box?
John:
Who knows?
John:
I mean, I guess it could have just been an M1 Ultra at that point back then, but I don't know what things they had in the server rack.
John:
But yeah, Apple Silicon participating in this process and the idea that they're making their own LiDAR sensors, just as with everything involved with Project Titan, it seemed like, you know, when you start a new project...
John:
the possibility space is big look at all the things that we could do because we do have a lot of money and there are lots of possibilities let's explore them with money and time but unfortunately for project titan they never really seem to narrow that to something that they wanted to do and so the project was canned but
John:
uh it doesn't surprise me that uh in especially in the early days they were like and we can make our own lidar sensors and they'll be better than everybody's and we'll have our own silicon and that'll be better than everybody's and they just really didn't know what they were doing in the end but that is interesting um again rumors of apple silicon for uh the car project rumored to be as powerful as what was it what did they say four m2 ultras or something like that something like that i don't i don't know what stage those designs get but like if they have anything that's in a box the size of a mac studio must have gotten far enough along that
John:
It was fabbed on a reasonable process that it could be cooled in, you know, I don't know.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I would love to hear more about this, but we have to wait for all these people to get old and retire.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Wade writes with regard to John Safari Hangs, when Safari gets into that state where it just stops doing network traffic, he described it as like as though it's out of file handles.
Casey:
It's because of a deadlock bug in the Safari networking sub process.
Casey:
If you kill that, for example, an activity monitor or with kill all, it relaunches automatically and the problem is temporarily fixed.
Casey:
Note that killing Safari networking can sometimes cause open tabs to essentially crash, requiring a full reload.
Casey:
It's funny you bring this up.
Casey:
Was this from the most recent member special?
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Yeah, that's when I was talking about why I use Safari and Chrome and that Safari still sometimes starts refusing to load web pages for me.
Casey:
So this happens to me.
Casey:
I don't think I said anything during the show because you were vibing in a great way.
Casey:
I didn't want to ruin your whole flow there.
Casey:
But this happens to me not often, but often enough that it's annoying.
Casey:
And coincidentally, it happened earlier today.
Casey:
And I tried to do exactly this and it didn't make a darn bit of difference.
Casey:
Now, it very well could be user error.
Casey:
Maybe I screwed something up.
Casey:
Maybe I didn't quit the right thing or kill it in the right way.
Casey:
But it didn't do anything for me.
Casey:
Now, have you tried this, John?
Casey:
Has this worked for you?
John:
No, I haven't had a hang since getting this, so I'm glad you tried the experiment.
John:
I mean, this probably worked for Wade.
John:
Maybe that's where the problem was there.
John:
Although I would say to the people who are writing the Safari networking subsystem, maybe use structured concurrency.
John:
Might help avoid those deadlocks.
John:
Make sure all the threads of execution are always making forward progress.
John:
yeah uh that's all like c++ though isn't it i don't think they can get there yeah i don't know i'm just saying like deadlock hmm yeah it's it's a problem concurrent programming is hard uh next time it happens to me i will try it and i hope it does work but i'm not particularly optimistic yeah i mean i'm gonna try it again because like i said maybe i was holding it wrong or i mean what else can you do like my alternative is i have to quit safari right or for me sometimes if i close enough safari windows it starts working which is very suspect
Casey:
Or wait like a really, really long time, perhaps long enough for like some watchdog to trip.
Casey:
And then it maybe does all this resetting itself.
John:
I've never had waiting work for me.
John:
I mean, maybe I haven't waited 24 hours or something, but I've waited.
Casey:
It was like 15 minutes or something like that, I think.
John:
Yeah, because I would like walk away from the computer.
John:
I'm like, oh, this is annoying me.
John:
I'll leave.
John:
And then I come back later in the day and I remember, oh, yeah, Safari is still misbehaving.
John:
So waiting has not worked for me.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we have a lot of legal news and part of it is with regard to Apple doing a nine hour workshop feedback session thing.
John:
It wasn't Apple.
John:
It was it was this was a nine hour feedback session about Apple run by the EU.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
So this happened somewhere overseas.
Casey:
I'm not even entirely sure where it happened geographically, but it was somewhere in Europe.
Casey:
And there was a whole bunch of talk about it.
Casey:
We'll put some links in the show notes.
Casey:
It seems like it went, it went, I don't even know if I would say it went well or went poorly, but it went, it was a thing.
Casey:
And I don't think anyone left exceedingly happy, although I'm not sure anyone left angry.
John:
Well, it's just a feedback session.
John:
So this is Gruber's summary of it from his post about it.
John:
He says, this was an opportunity for critics of Apple's DMA compliance plans to address questions to representatives from Apple.
John:
And there is a video, apparently, but it's behind a password, which Gruber gave himself.
John:
stick about for not being transparent and he says i can't imagine sitting through that even at 2x speed but lucky for us cage belly followed along and took copious notes in a thread on twitter so we'll link to the twitter thread of someone who was watching the video and writing the interesting things in tweet size uh bits uh steve trout and smith also used the whisper uh
John:
uh transcript generator thing to get text out of it obviously whisper is going to be a little bit confused by technical jargon and stuff but we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well he's got it up on github uh and then there is one video clip of a riley testutes question uh the alt store guy he was asking about um
John:
the idea that he was using an example from his life.
John:
Like he, I think he had like a, a viral hit application that was a free download on the, on the iOS app store when, when he was younger, like a college or high school.
John:
I was like, what if that happened to me today?
John:
And I'm like, I'm just a student and I make a free app, you know, no one app purchase.
John:
I think it's just a hundred percent free.
John:
And I put it up on one of these alternative stores and it becomes like a viral sensation overnight and everyone's downloading it.
John:
Cause someone talked about it on Tik TOK or something.
John:
I would owe Apple 5 million euros.
John:
And so I was questioned to the Apple representative.
John:
It was like a Kyle Andier of a VP of Apple legal saying, what would you what would happen?
John:
Would you try to extract 5 million euros from this student who had a viral head application?
John:
And the response was a bit of the end of the response from the Apple representative was, this is something we need to figure out.
John:
And it's something we're working on.
John:
So I would say on that one, stay tuned.
John:
Which is not much of an answer of just saying, yeah, that does sound bad.
John:
We'll figure something out.
John:
But I think feedback sessions like this, I mean, I feel like what Apple should have said is, well, if you don't want that to happen, stay in the App Store.
John:
Because we don't charge you anything for apps.
John:
And then the EU would have said, yeah, but the whole idea is we want the alternative App Store to be an actual alternative, not something that's always bad.
John:
And that was kind of what I imagine all nine hours of this was.
John:
If you look at the Twitter thread, there's a lot of...
John:
statements by representatives of the eu saying things like yeah we don't think that thing apple is doing is compliant like just as an aside like i forget if the core technology fee was one of them but a whole bunch of like large components of apple's compliance uh
John:
They would just offhandedly say, yeah, that's there.
John:
I don't think they can do that.
John:
So this was just a feedback session.
John:
And I don't think it's worth dwelling on the minutia of it because I think what will happen is, guess what?
John:
More changes.
John:
Last time, like, yes, they had nine hours of feedback.
John:
And surely in response to this nine hours of feedback and back and forth, Apple's going to have to change more stuff because there were big parts of their compliance that the EU representatives were like, no, yeah, that's not that's not it.
John:
And so I guess we'll, this topic is not dead and we will be revisiting it.
Casey:
Harvey Simon writes, this was weeks ago and it keeps getting pushed down in the show notes, but Harvey Simon writes with regard to magnets and Apple watch bands, uh, regarding its own Apple watch band with a magnetic closure.
Casey:
Apple says, quote, band contains magnets and may cause interference with compass on Apple watch quote.
Casey:
This is for, uh, what is this?
Casey:
The modern buckle.
Casey:
I think that's, yeah, that's right.
Casey:
Um, and so Harvey asked, you know, if magnets don't interfere with the compass, why does Apple say they may?
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And I presume the answer for that is, you know, in part liability, in part just general cover your butt.
Casey:
But one way or another, there is at least the possibility that there's some interference.
John:
I mean, yeah, they say they may.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think it's a butt covering as well, considering they sold that strap for a while and you didn't hear widespread reports of saying...
John:
My compass doesn't work on my Apple Watch, and I found out it's because of this magnetic latch.
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, I don't think they sold a lot of modern buckles.
Marco:
I've seen a very small number of them ever in real life.
Marco:
However, there are lots of other Apple Watch bands that have magnets in them, like, for instance, the Leather Link or now the...
Marco:
fine woven link full of magnets the milanese loop also has pretty big magnets in it so like there's there's not only one band like it turns out like probably a third of the bands have have either one or many magnets in them so i i just i don't think this is a big deal i think it's kind of interesting that they even say that it may interfere because especially on the modern buckle the magnet is on the opposite side of your fleshy wrist from the watch it's pretty big distance and you know so i don't know
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I don't remember how you stumbled onto this, John, but you have a very curious obsession with the widths of the streets in front of people's houses.
Casey:
How did we land here?
John:
I wasn't.
John:
When we talk about this in like in the member special or something, I don't remember how it came up.
John:
It was it was recent, though.
Casey:
It was in the last week or two, and I don't remember how or why this came up.
John:
The main issue is I'm basically complaining about how difficult it is to navigate my streets.
John:
And then, of course, Marco chimes in and said, we don't even have streets.
John:
We just have sidewalks.
John:
The cars go on.
John:
And then you take for granted your ridiculously wide streets.
John:
And I think you said, mine aren't that wide.
John:
They're not that much bigger than yours.
John:
So, as I said, I think when we first came up, we got to do some street measuring.
Yeah.
John:
And we did.
Casey:
We did.
Casey:
So we have some street widths.
Casey:
Marco is the winner at the beach with the tiniest streets.
Casey:
And having been there, I can attest to this.
John:
Streets slash sidewalk, let's say.
John:
We call them walks.
Casey:
Tiniest paved area, which, well, paved with sand on top.
John:
Paved in quotes.
Marco:
It's concrete squares.
Casey:
Eight feet wide.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Underscore chimed in from the UK saying his are nearly 20 feet wide.
Casey:
John, you measured yours and you got to about 23 and a half feet.
Casey:
And I'm sorry if you live anywhere with sensible units.
Casey:
We're not going to convert it.
Casey:
Just look it up.
Casey:
And for me, I rank at 35 feet or basically 36 feet.
Casey:
So I am the winner for sure.
Marco:
Well, the winner in the sense that you live somewhere where there's so much empty space that they're able to make the streets a third wider than most places.
John:
I think it's basically like new – obviously, so you're a special case, Marco, because you're not in like a normal street area or whatever.
John:
And so there's very limited space there and you got your little things and they don't expect there to be two-way traffic on any of these roads, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Underscore is obviously in the UK, which has notoriously narrow lanes, as they call them.
John:
And then Casey, I think the reason his are so wide is because he's probably in the newest development.
John:
Like all the houses around him were constructed like, you know, they're certainly constructed after mine and probably after Underscore's.
John:
And that's what I think determines it because the land that I'm living on was probably settled a long time ago and these streets and roads existed and were made back when maybe horse-drawn carriages were on them or much narrower cars.
John:
Uh...
John:
And so they're sized incorrectly for modern vehicles.
John:
They're maybe sized incorrectly for automobiles entirely, even more so than a lot of the roads on Long Island that were made for maximum speed of 45 miles an hour and like, you know, Model Ts or whatever going on them.
John:
But yeah, that's why the roads are wider.
John:
It's not that they have so much extra land, it's that land was not, there was no road there until some developer came and said, we're going to build a bunch of houses here.
John:
And at the time they did that, they used essentially the best practice for road widths, which is way wider than it was in the 1900s or whenever the heck my road was made.
Casey:
So, yeah, I didn't do the math.
Casey:
I meant to, and I completely forgot.
Casey:
I didn't do the math of, you had said to me, I don't remember if this was privately or during the show, but you had suspected that Aaron's truck, car, SUV, whatever you want to call it, SUV, I guess, could park perpendicularly across the road and have quite a bit more road left over.
John:
Yeah.
John:
perpendicularly across the road and then and then the space remaining after you parked sideways uh against the curb like your your rear bumper against the curb the the remaining space would be the width of my road that is incorrect but you are not entirely out of bounds like it is incorrect but it because i think her car is something like 15 feet which would make it like three your road is three feet longer than the the remainder there yeah that was back when you said your roads were 37 feet so
Casey:
Yeah, well, whatever.
Casey:
It was an estimate.
John:
Anyway, here's the point.
John:
We'll put a picture in the show notes, or maybe it'll be the chapter.
John:
Obviously, Marco's thing is not a real road, so disregard that.
John:
Underscore lives in Maryland, so whatever.
John:
Mine is not that much bigger than... That's a big disregarding right there.
John:
Mine is not that much bigger than Underscore's.
John:
Keep this in mind when you look at this, right?
John:
So Marco's road is essentially the width of his car.
John:
The R1S is that wide, essentially.
John:
Especially if you include the mirrors.
John:
I believe it is exactly.
John:
Yeah, if you include the mirrors, I don't think there's a lot of space left.
John:
I did look up the R1S width, and that's about it, right?
John:
So take that as being a car width.
John:
and take two we're looking we're both looking at this picture marco's road is purple and mine is green take two marco with purple stripes and try to arrange them on my green road so that two cars can pass each other going in opposite directions because i swear to you i live on a two-way street it is not a one-way road it is designed so that in theory two cars can pass each other one going one direction one going the other so give each car eight feet just like marco's thing here and lay out those two purple things and see how much room you have left okay and now consider this fact
John:
You are allowed to park on both sides of my street.
John:
Do you see how this doesn't work in a functioning way?
John:
Right?
John:
It's not even one side parking only.
John:
Even if it was one side parking only, I can tell you when someone parks one of their gigantic SUVs on one side of my road, there's not enough room for two cars to safely pass in the space remaining.
John:
especially if they don't literally have their rubber touching the granite curbs that are on my road right it is absolutely ridiculous and so that's why i'm always complaining about it because i'm constantly navigating these roads or trying to get one of my teen children to navigate these roads without scraping my wheels against the curb or killing us all there we go
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Casey:
So there is some news.
Casey:
The US, the United States have sued Apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones.
Casey:
And I don't know the right way to approach this.
Casey:
I mean, I think we can start going through little, I guess, snippets of what's in this lawsuit.
Casey:
Do we want to do, John, an opening statement of any sort, or do we want to try to establish the...
John:
I think we can go through it in the order is here with breaks at various points to expound on things.
John:
I mean, so we'll start with the summary from The Verge.
John:
This is the U.S.
John:
Department of Justice at DOJ and 16 states and district attorney generals have accused Apple of operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market in a new antitrust lawsuit.
John:
Right.
John:
And I don't like the headline.
John:
I copied this headline from The Verge.
John:
U.S.
John:
sues Apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones.
John:
But we'll get to it in a little bit.
John:
I saw the headline.
John:
I'm like, that could be better written because that's not quite it.
John:
So anyway, we will link you to the Department of Justice press release, the Verge article, and we'll link you to the actual complaint, like the legal complaint or whatever in the lawsuit that is a PDF that you can read through at your leisure.
John:
I read through the entire thing today.
John:
It's not that long.
John:
But there are various excerpts from it.
John:
This is...
John:
This is, well, here's the framing I would give it, okay?
John:
I have lived through, we have all lived through one other very significant Department of Justice lawsuit in the tech sector, which was the Department of Justice lawsuit, antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in the, what, 90s?
John:
Yeah, late 90s.
John:
Late 90s.
John:
So we've seen something like this before.
John:
And a lot of our discussion of monopolies and antitrust laws in the U.S.
John:
stems from that case because it's so similar.
John:
It's in recent memory.
John:
It's in the tech sector.
John:
It used the same U.S.
John:
law as the basis of the antitrust efforts, the same U.S.
John:
law that is very old and predated computers and any of this stuff, right?
John:
And so it's just been reinterpreted through the courts.
John:
But I guess the best way to set this up is that
John:
Unlike the EU DMA, you know, all stuff that we've been going through, this is something different.
John:
This is the government suing a private company saying you have violated some existing laws that are on the books, whereas the EU DMA thing is a governing body saying here are some new laws you have to follow.
John:
and that might seem like not a big deal like what's the difference it's basically boils down to the same thing telling apple they can't do stuff or whatever but it's very different because in theory in the eu thing a bunch of people can get together and say we think this is how it should be and then they write it down and then to give it to apple and apple complies with it now that's the idealized version as we're seeing that's not going that well right because apparently it's a really hard thing to do although i really feel like i could have helped them a lot if they had consulted me but they didn't um
John:
But the DOJ thing or any other lawsuit, this is what happens.
John:
The government says, company, you broke a law and we're going to go to court and try to prove that you broke a law and win a verdict from I don't know if it's going to be a judge or a jury trial.
John:
I don't know all the legal intricacies, but whatever, like it's in a court of law and they have to prove Apple, you broke this law.
John:
It's an existing law.
John:
And here's how you broke it.
John:
And we're going to prove it.
John:
Right.
John:
And then if they're found guilty, they just appeal forever and blah, blah, blah, whatever.
John:
Like, look at the Microsoft wing.
John:
The Microsoft essentially lost, but then on appeal got parts of it reversed.
John:
And then they came to a settlement.
John:
And legal stuff is always not right.
John:
But however the court case goes, first of all, there is a court case with all the U.S.
John:
rules of evidence and all that crap or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
And then after that, there's some kind of.
John:
Well, assuming they even go to like a verdict and a remedy or a punishment or whatever, which is not necessarily the case, they could end up settling because a lot of court cases end up with a settlement where they say, never mind the court case.
John:
The two parties have agreed to settle according to these terms.
John:
The government could do that as well.
John:
But either way, there's either going to be a settlement or some kind of verdict and punishment or remedy or whatever.
John:
And that is determined like what Apple would have to do as kind of like you lost the case, therefore X.
John:
is determined by the court case.
John:
Again, I don't know how the details worked out.
John:
It was determined by the jury, the judge, or whatever.
John:
But the whole point is it's not determined by lawmakers.
John:
It's not determined by a bunch of people getting together and saying, here's what we think Apple should do.
John:
Instead, they just say, you broke a law, here's the laws that you broke, and here is the remedy for you breaking them.
John:
um and that is one of the worst possible ways to get a result that you want right unless unless it's like a court case where it's like we just i just want money from you because you did something bad and now you're going to be fined or something that's not how this is going to go right it's so much better if you have well again in theory a bunch of people who get together and at their leisure come up with a new set of laws or regulations or whatever and say you
John:
there's a problem we're going to write a new set of regulations that will tell apple or whatever here's how it should be and we'll we can consult people we can talk to experts we can talk to all the other companies in a second we can talk to apple you know in theory what the eu did with the dma only the u.s version of it is make new regulations make new laws say what you actually want use your words
John:
Right.
John:
Instead of saying, hey, a law from 100 years ago, you actually broke that and we're going to prove it and then we're going to punish you somehow.
John:
And there are remedies listed in this thing.
John:
But I have to say, starting from zero, if you're wondering how this is different from the EU thing.
John:
I can't imagine that this is going to go better than the EU thing.
John:
And the EU thing is not going well, to be clear.
John:
But this is like, it's not the way to get the change you want to see in the world is suing somebody and having the punishment from this suit that you think you're going to win change their behavior.
John:
And that's why I'm extremely pessimistic about this entire thing.
John:
There are other reasons, which we'll get to as we start going through it, but I'm pessimistic about it.
John:
But setting aside the actual complaint, even if the complaint had been written beautifully and perfectly and was everything I dreamed it could be, in the end, if Apple loses this case, determining what they have to do as the fix for them breaking this law is so much worse than actually writing a new regulation where you can just say exactly what you want.
John:
And that has really got me not feeling great about this whole exercise.
Casey:
Yeah, having read this, I went through the whole thing, and I was using my iPad and highlighting in green when I was like, yeah, in red when I was like, oh, gosh.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, a lot more red than there is green.
John:
Even when you were going the yeah parts, when I was looking through the parts, and we'll get to them, the parts that we think, oh, they've actually realized something reasonable here.
John:
My question was always like, okay, so say you're right about that, and say you prove it in court, and say Apple loses.
John:
then what the then what is the hard part it's not like you can slap them on the wrist and say apple you are naughty give me ten dollars okay go on your way like they're going they're going to ask for changes in behavior and again there is a remedy section in this document but i looked at it and said this this is like yeah apple should probably do this that and the other thing and maybe some other stuff we haven't listed here anyway you'll figure it out court it's like no that's the hard part like
John:
This whole thing is like, you know, the government's going to prove that Apple was bad.
John:
And if they win, yay, we all celebrate.
John:
No, we don't celebrate.
John:
So you prove they did something bad.
John:
What is the fix?
John:
How do you make it better?
John:
That's the hard part.
John:
Just ask the EU.
John:
It's apparently really hard to even when you have the force of law with you and you could tell Apple, you have to do X, Y, and Z. Apparently even that is next to impossible to do with any competence.
John:
And here, I look at this document and I'm like...
John:
Let's just assume that you're brilliant and everything you say here is right and you win this case and it's a slam dunk and they appeal and you win on all the appeals.
John:
Then what?
John:
The then what is just like, oh, then then it's just probably going to either not do anything or make things worse.
John:
And it's just making me feel sad.
Casey:
To finish my opening statement here, I think the thing that's troublesome is that I don't think it's unreasonable for Apple to be regulated or be asked to change or forced to change or have something like
Casey:
what the EU is attempting and now what the United States is attempting.
Casey:
But I don't feel like either organization is doing a particularly good job of it.
Casey:
And that's frustrating.
Casey:
And the Americans, at least, having read the overwhelming majority of this document, it is clear that this is a bunch of people who don't really understand what they're talking about, shaking their fist at the air and going, but that just doesn't seem right.
Casey:
And there's very little justification.
Casey:
There's very little...
Casey:
And there's very little understanding of what's at play here.
Casey:
So I guess with that in mind, let's start peeling it apart.
Casey:
So from the PDF from the actual lawsuit, this case is about freeing smartphone markets from Apple's anti-competitive and exclusionary conduct and restoring competition to lower smartphone prices for consumers, reducing fees for developers, and preserving innovation for the future.
Casey:
And so, like, here, okay.
Casey:
Like, I don't know that Apple has a monopoly on smartphones, but okay, sure.
John:
Presumably the document will get to that eventually.
Casey:
Yeah, presumably.
Casey:
But in principle, you know, anti-competitive and exclusionary conduct.
Casey:
Yep, okay.
Casey:
Restoring competition to lower smartphone prices for consumers.
Casey:
Like, I don't see that happening, but okay, sure.
Casey:
I mean, I guess that sounds good.
Casey:
Reducing fees for developers.
Casey:
Okay, yeah, you've got my attention now.
Casey:
And preserving innovation for the future.
Casey:
I'm not sure that this is the right vehicle for that.
John:
But OK, sure.
John:
It's a vague enough.
John:
It's a vague enough goal.
John:
You can say, OK, so again, tell me how this lawsuit is going to do that.
John:
Like what's wrong?
John:
What?
John:
And speaking of like the stuff that's in the document, a part of what I was thinking, again, not being a lawyer is like.
John:
They have to show that Apple violated some existing law.
John:
And so I have to think that the things that they picked, and we'll get to the items that they picked to sort of highlight as examples, are focused on the things they think are violations of some existing law.
John:
And are not actually like kind of like the EU food focus on what are the things that are the most unjust or the most anti-competitive.
John:
But it doesn't really matter what is unjust or what is anti-competitive or what just feels long.
John:
It only matters what you can prove is a violation of an existing law.
John:
That's that's again, that's the big difference between this and the EU thing.
John:
They're not making up new rules.
John:
They're saying we have existing laws and we have to prove Apple violated one of our existing laws.
John:
And there is ample case precedent about what constitutes a violation of the law and what doesn't.
John:
So they have to pick things that's presumably as lawyers.
John:
If you want to run the case and you say they broke this law, this section of this law, you better have things that are going to show that they broke that.
John:
And those may be dumb things.
John:
because again the law is not tailored to deal with the smartphone market it was for standard oil right it's not i actually looked up the sherman antitrust act and looked at section two that they say they violated uh and it was not illuminating as you would imagine there's not there wasn't a lot of text and there wasn't a lot like this is it this is section two of the sherman antitrust act and like well i you know
John:
Anyway, obviously, just because those are the words in the law, there have been so many cases that have been based on that law that there is precedent.
John:
You know, it's complicated, right?
John:
So I trust lawyers to do that.
John:
But being hemmed in by having to show that they violated this specific existing law because it's the only one that's even remotely applicable makes this whole thing just so much more stupid, frankly.
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Casey:
So it continues, not directly.
Casey:
This is later on in the document.
Casey:
This structure put Apple in the driver's seat to generate substantial revenues through device sales in the first instance and subsequently the ancillary fees that it derives from sitting between customers on the one hand and the products and services they love on the other.
Marco:
Doesn't that just mean they've succeeded by making a good product that people wanted?
John:
Yeah, well, we'll get to that in a little bit.
John:
But like there's a lot of sections of this this complaint that read like a book report, a book report about the tech industry.
John:
And it should get like a C minus.
John:
Not well researched and is wrong about the facts in several cases and draws completely ridiculous conclusions that are not supported by any of the evidence.
John:
And it's – again, I don't know how legal complaints are written.
John:
Maybe that's just a thing you do as like background context or whatever because the complaint is not the court case.
John:
They'll go to court.
John:
Lawyers will argue things.
John:
They'll talk – like that will happen, right?
John:
So I don't understand like what are you supposed to put in the complaint?
John:
But there's a lot of book report style like table setting and background stuff and just lots of stuff in there is like –
Casey:
if i had to if i was apple's lawyers and i saw this like again maybe they don't have to address this in the court case because i don't know how things work but like just as a person who knows the tech industry i'm like nope that's not not a thing not it we'll get to them we should keep going yep so today only apple and google remain as meaningful competitors in the u.s performance smartphone market we'll get to that in a second barriers are so high that google is a distant third to apple and samsung despite the fact that google controls the development of the android operating systems
John:
I pulled this bit out because it is an example of a very confused understanding of the smartphone market in the United States.
John:
Only Samsung and Google remain as meaningful competitors.
John:
Like what we all know on this podcast and anyone who is in the tech world is what, you know, who controls the smartphone world?
John:
The answer is Apple and Google.
John:
The only two platforms that matter in the smartphone world.
John:
Android, which is controlled by Google and iOS, which is controlled by Apple.
John:
and maybe regulators confused like but wait a second google's is open source and lots of people use it and google doesn't control them and blah blah well there's a whole other court cases about how how google actually does kind of sort of manage to control the people who use android despite the fact that it's open source and through the google play store and blah but like to a first approximation uh smartphone apple and google right but this thing is like you know google is a distant third to samsung samsung
John:
like I know that like they're saying they're just saying in terms of how many phones do you sell Google doesn't sell a lot of phones despite the fact that pixels are good like they don't sell a lot of them I understand how they came to this but in an antitrust suit I think one of the main things that they never touch again maybe for legal reasons because it doesn't help their case or whatever is that
John:
Google is the other big company in the smartphone world.
John:
There are two big smartphone platforms, Apple's and Google's.
John:
And Samsung sells a lot of phones based on Google's... I understand that technical nuance there, but I read this paragraph and I'm like, I would say for little Timmy, turning this into his book report, it's like...
John:
You're right about the number of phones sold and the company that makes those phones, but you're not you're not seeing the forest for the trees here.
John:
And again, maybe Google is irrelevant to the suit because this is not a suit against Google.
John:
It's just against Apple.
John:
But they do all this sort of background information.
John:
By the way, why isn't it also against Google is a good question.
John:
Well, I think I kind of know the answer to that, too, which we'll get to in a second.
John:
But that was just one excerpt.
John:
I have so many excerpts that I pulled.
John:
I can't do them all, but we'll get to them eventually.
John:
So the DOJ had a press conference about this where people got up on a podium and talked about things, right?
John:
And there is a transcript of, I believe, just the prepared remarks of the press conference.
John:
I'll put a link to it in the show notes.
John:
A few things that were in the press conference, which at that point I hadn't read the entire complaint yet.
John:
Um, so I was going by what they said.
John:
I was like, what?
John:
So what, like, why are they, what, why are they suing Apple?
John:
What is this under?
John:
And the person at the podium, I believe it was the, the attorney general, uh, Merrick Garland said there it's for violating section two of the Sherman antitrust act.
John:
So it's clear.
John:
That's what this is about.
John:
It's antitrust.
John:
It's section two.
John:
You can look it up.
John:
And they also mentioned that Apple has over 65 percent of U.S.
John:
smartphone of the U.S.
John:
smartphone market.
John:
Right.
John:
And I was like, OK, but like, so surely like the last again, the last time we had a big DOG antitrust thing against Microsoft, it wasn't because Microsoft had 65 percent of the PC market.
John:
Right.
John:
That number seems low.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
But I'm sure they'll support it in the document.
John:
But anyway, Merrick Garland is up there.
John:
Here's some more things that he said.
John:
Again, U.S.
John:
Attorney General said the Supreme Court defines monopoly power as, quote, the power to control prices or exclude competition.
John:
As set out in our complaint, Apple has that power in the smartphone market.
John:
OK, I mean, I'm I'm not a lawyer.
John:
So maybe that is the standard in the U.S.
John:
is just the power to control prices or exclude competition.
John:
I guess they'll talk about that in the document.
John:
As set out in our complaint, Apple has maintained its power, not because of its superiority, but because of its unlawful exclusionary behavior.
John:
So that is the key.
John:
That's why I think the headline is crappy.
John:
U.S.
John:
sues Apple for illegal monopoly.
John:
Monopolies are not illegal in the U.S.
John:
You can have a monopoly.
John:
It's fine.
John:
There's no such thing as an illegal monopoly.
John:
There is a such thing as using your monopoly to illegally stop people from competing with you.
John:
And that's what this is about.
John:
And there are two parts of that.
John:
One, you have a monopoly and presumably the U.S.
John:
has to show that's the case.
John:
And that's where they're going like, oh, how do we define monopolies?
John:
Because X, Y and Z. And two, OK, you've got that monopoly, which is fine.
John:
Did you use that monopoly to exclude competition in ways that are against the law, according to all of our legal precedents?
John:
Right.
John:
And that's what the DOJ case against Microsoft was about.
John:
And that's what this is about.
John:
It's not about it's illegal to have a monopoly.
John:
It's you've got a monopoly and you used it in a way that you're not allowed to.
John:
Right.
John:
Because basically what it comes down to is if you have a monopoly, different rules apply to you.
John:
And that's why in a lot of these cases, people, especially people in the US, will get indignant.
John:
They'll say and kind of market was getting at it before.
John:
Like, aren't you just complaining that Apple is too good at
John:
their job like they're too good at business right they're doing all these things and you may not like it but like that's business like they're competing this is what got them to where they are now you're saying they can't do it and the answer according to u.s law is yeah if you get game and not become a monopoly if you gain monopoly power you have a different set of rules that apply to you things that were fine for you to do when you were a little company when you were a monopoly those exact same things become illegal
John:
when you are a monopoly.
John:
So showing that Apple is a monopoly is a really important part of this case because if Apple was a tiny little company and not like the biggest company in the U.S.,
John:
And every single thing we talk about and the things we complain about on the show and things we've always complained on the show is like, well, we don't like it, but it's not like it's illegal or anything.
John:
They're just kind of being jerks or they're doing things that are not in their interest or they're annoying us as developers or whatever.
John:
But this antitrust law says when you are a monopoly, there are a bunch of things you can't do.
John:
And that is the U.S.-centric context of this entire thing.
John:
one more bit this is not from the merrick garland but this is from the complaint itself uh this says plaintiffs bring this lawsuit under section two of the germanian trust act to challenge apple's maintenance of its monopoly over smartphone markets which affect hundreds of millions of americans every day this is as close as i could find in the complaint to the government acknowledging a fact that i think
John:
is important maybe not to this case but is important to this situation because again what's important to this case just determine is based on the law and a lot of our laws are dumb or not applicable or never envisioned the situation they're being applied to right but the the bigger picture as i've said in many times is like
John:
I think, setting aside U.S.
John:
laws, that one of the reasons why a different set of rules should apply to Apple and Google is because, as this states, hundreds of millions of Americans have smartphones.
John:
It is not like an optional thing or a frivolous thing like a game console or whatever.
John:
You can get by as an adult in America without a game console.
John:
But it is very difficult to get by these days as an adult in America without a smartphone because so many parts of business and job and everything assume you have one.
John:
And if you don't, it is a hindrance.
John:
It's kind of like the telephone, right?
John:
There's no law that says you have to have a telephone back before cell phones, like a landline telephone.
John:
But at a certain point, if you didn't have a telephone, it would really impair your ability to participate in society and be a functioning person.
John:
It's like the bar for what you need.
John:
To have in society gets raised.
John:
And it's not like it's not illegal not to have a phone.
John:
It's not illegal not to have a landline.
John:
You know, it's not illegal not to have all sorts of things.
John:
But so many people have them that the phone, I think, should be treated differently than a game console or something like that.
John:
Right.
John:
That's not part of this lawsuit.
John:
There's no part of the Sherman Antitrust Act that says, oh, if you sell something that everybody needs, it's different, right?
John:
But I think it should be different.
John:
And this is one little bit of the lawsuit that leans in that direction.
John:
But unfortunately, that's irrelevant because it's not like we don't have any laws in the U.S.
John:
that say...
John:
If you if you sell something that's like super important that everyone kind of needs, a different set of rules apply to you.
John:
The EU is essentially saying that by saying we regulate all sorts of things, but we find it particularly important or interesting to regulate the smartphone market because smartphones are so important to our modern lives.
John:
That's why we in the EU are deciding that we should turn our attention to that.
John:
and not turn our attention to, you know, something that is not as significant to daily life or whatever.
John:
And so that's why I pulled that little thing out of there.
John:
And speaking of the Microsoft DOJ trial, at one point, back to the people standing up at podiums, I think this was Jonathan Cantor, who I think is like the antitrust, the head of antitrust division of the DOJ or whatever, said this at the podium.
John:
He said, I'd wager that everyone in this room has a smartphone.
John:
and that reminded me a lot of during the microsoft antitrust trial at one point i think this was literally during the trial uh like the prosecutor said uh everyone in this room who has a windows pc raise your hand and it's a giant audience of people reporters the audience people people government people everybody raised their hand this is the 90s okay who has a windows pc in a in a giant courtroom during the
John:
everybody has a windows pc of course everyone has a windows pc they had like 90 something market share i would not be surprised if there was like one mac user in that room of like 300 people right right and it's not again it's a court case you can showboat or whatever but raise your hand if you have a windows pc all the hands go up like yes as part of the msdoj trial the government had to prove that microsoft was a monopoly but let me tell you it's pretty easy to do
John:
In the 90s, people who weren't alive then or weren't involved in the tech sector do not realize how dominant Windows was at that point.
John:
Windows was everywhere.
John:
Everyone had a Windows computer, right?
John:
This is not saying raise your hand if you have an iPhone.
John:
This was who here has a smartphone, which is getting to my earlier point, which is like, look,
John:
We all, everyone has a smartphone.
John:
He didn't ask them to raise their hand.
John:
He just said, I assume everyone's room has a smartphone.
John:
I agree.
John:
I think everyone in the room did have a smartphone because it's just something that everyone has to have.
John:
And at another point from the podium, he said roughly seven out of 10 smartphones are iPhones.
John:
So they went from 65% of us market share to the seven out of 10 number, which is what they were saying.
John:
Well, in the performance mark, uh, smartphone market share or whatever, Apple has even more, right?
Uh,
John:
Still kind of fuzzy thinking from my point of view.
John:
It's like, okay, well, is there some percentage of market share you need?
John:
Or is it not about market share?
John:
Is it about how much money goes through the thing?
John:
Or is it just about the ability to exclude competition and control prices?
John:
This will all be hashed out in the court case.
John:
But I feel like just from the day of dropping this complaint, it's not clear to me that the government has a bumper sticker they can put on that says, here's why Apple's a monopoly.
Marco:
other than like everyone has a smartphone apple makes a smartphone something something samsung google monopoly yeah i don't it's hard for me to not get distracted when i read this complaint or the various coverage of it by little details of like wait that doesn't sound right or wait that shouldn't be illegal or that's common sense that however you know
Marco:
well-designed or well-thought-out product should be or that thing that they're saying Apple's doing.
Marco:
Yeah, of course they're doing that.
Marco:
That's what makes it good or that's their prerogative to do or things like that.
Marco:
But I'm trying to take a broader, higher-level view of this.
Marco:
First of all, I am not a lawyer.
Marco:
I don't study the law.
Marco:
I barely even had time to read this because I also happen to be moving today.
Marco:
So it's been a bit of a busy day, so I apologize.
Marco:
But it's important for me to keep reminding myself that
Marco:
What they've laid out here is not a complete version of what they have.
Marco:
It's not a complete story that's meant for necessarily people like us.
Marco:
What they've laid out here is a strategy.
Marco:
They've said everything they've said.
Marco:
They've used the words they've chosen very carefully.
Marco:
As a legal strategy, what they're trying to do is achieve a certain set of goals, and they're trying to fit the law, the precedent, and everything into supporting their goals.
Marco:
And so all the arguments they're making, all of the choices of how they've chosen to phrase things, what evidence or quote evidence they've chosen to cite –
Marco:
All of that is legal strategy to achieve the actual goals.
Marco:
I mean, it's a little hard to tell what specifically the actual goals.
John:
Well, the goal is simple.
John:
You just said the goal is to win the case.
John:
And that's part of the problem.
John:
Because that's the goal.
John:
The Department of Justice, their goal is to win their court cases.
John:
That's their job.
John:
Their literal job.
John:
And you say, OK, but the court cases are in service of a larger goal, right?
John:
Like they bring this.
John:
Why do they bring this suit?
John:
Because they must have some larger goal in mind.
John:
And in the end, the larger goal doesn't really matter because it's not like by winning the suit, they get to dictate exactly what Apple has to do.
John:
They can suggest remedies.
John:
But what's actually going to happen, especially if they like settle or whatever, it's just it's the wrong way to go about it.
John:
bringing about change if if the government has ideas about how this situation could be improved they can pass new laws they can pass new it happens all the time hey companies should not be dumping toxic waste into the river what can we do about that can we sue them for violating some existing law that we think they vaguely might be violating
John:
No.
John:
Pass a new law that says you can't dump toxic waste into the river.
John:
That's the solution.
John:
The solution is not to say, well, technically they're violating this law of, like, they're in violation of the Constitution because they're, you know, stopping people from their pursuit of happiness.
John:
No, just pass a law that says you can't dump toxic waste into the river.
John:
That's the solution, but we're so bad at passing laws, and apparently so is the EU, that that is not what we're doing.
John:
Instead, we're going to sue them under the Sherman Antitrust Act because if you squint, it's like they're...
Marco:
buying up the entire supply chain so that no one can compete with them except for Google who has more market share but I don't know well well and the thing is like and I think you know obviously you know the Sherman Antitrust Act is the tool we have in the US to deal with monopoly behavior and so again I'm sure there's a lot of legal strategic reasons for this but
Marco:
What I've heard a lot of other people report on who know more about this is that obviously a lot of the success or failure of antitrust cases in the U.S.
Marco:
relies on the market definition.
Marco:
And what they have done here is try to define this premium smartphone... Performance smartphone.
Marco:
That's right, performance smartphone market as a separate market from all smartphones.
Marco:
I don't...
Marco:
I actually like a lot of their arguments in it that said basically it's a little bit different from other market definitions in the sense that when people buy the phone, they're buying it for reasons like the camera, the specs.
Marco:
They're buying it for reasons other than the parts where they're being accused of being anti-competitive, like App Store, private APIs, stuff like that.
Marco:
So
Marco:
I kind of get that argument.
Marco:
It's not a terrible argument.
Marco:
What I hope to see here – I don't know their chances of winning this case.
Marco:
I don't know the law enough and the tricks and the details enough to be able to make any kind of call on how good their chances are.
Marco:
They're very smart people.
Marco:
They probably think they have a pretty good chance.
Marco:
Otherwise, they wouldn't have brought it.
John:
Yeah, they said on the podium, essentially, the DOJ wins most of the cases it brings because it doesn't bring cases unless it's pretty sure it can win them.
John:
So I would trust them on that, that if you're going to place betting odds, will the verdict come in favor of the DOJ, especially on the initial one before appeal?
John:
Like their odds seem reasonable based on historical precedent.
Marco:
And I don't know how much of it is also like can they – maybe they'll just win part of it and win some claims or some remedies.
Marco:
I'm sure this is going to be hashed out over a while.
Marco:
But however they have chosen to wedge their arguments into the existing legal frameworks that they have to use –
Marco:
I do agree that Apple does engage in a lot of anti-competitive behavior and that Apple has a scale and an importance in the market and to so much of commerce and so much of modern life, as you were saying earlier, John, with everybody having a smartphone.
Marco:
And I've said over the years, I've said many times –
Marco:
I do think this is very different from a game console just because of how much of modern life and commerce runs through this gatekeeper.
Marco:
And that's why I don't object at all to the EU DMA kind of focusing on this idea of a gatekeeper and basically making a law that's targeted at only a very small number of companies because it does control and restrict so much of modern life.
Marco:
That is exactly...
Marco:
The sort of thing that regulation is made for like regulation is ostensibly usually to protect consumers or markets or the environment or something else from what capitalism would normally kind of do naturally.
John:
What would be in the self-interest of the company if their goal is to just make more money?
John:
It's way cheaper just to dump your toxic waste into the river than to have to pay lots of money for someone to ship it away and safely dispose of it.
John:
And so without that regulation, a company with a soulless evil company that just wants to make money is going to say, yeah, just dump it in the river.
John:
Like, why would we do anything different?
John:
And that's what you bring the regulation.
John:
And it says, well, they're just being a smart company.
John:
They're saving money.
John:
They're increasing profitability by not paying those expensive fees to dispose of toxic waste.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's what regulation is for.
John:
And so, yeah, that would be a much better tool to do this.
John:
And it's what the EU is trying to do.
John:
But in the US, that's not how we've chosen to do it for the second time.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And also, you know, you can look again at things like, you know, the phone networks, like the original, the landline phone networks, and how, you know, government regulation was required there to kind of to ensure...
Marco:
good competition and use of those lines because the phone networks, while they were built by private companies, became so important to modern life and to everything in modern life that it was in the best interest of everybody, like the whole society, to have some basic regulations on how those were used so that the very small number of companies that built them couldn't dictate modern life.
Marco:
Look also at the railroads.
Marco:
Similar problems.
Marco:
And this is why these mechanics exist.
Marco:
And if you look at Apple, their size today, they are so big.
Marco:
They are so important to so much of the world and so much of commerce and so much of society.
Marco:
They do need to have governments looking at them for regulation because the governments, because of Apple's size and influence over so much –
Marco:
Governments should be holding Apple responsible for making sure they use their power in a way that's not going to really damage commerce, the economy, companies, etc.
Marco:
A lot of this complaint, I think, reads very poorly to those of us watching it because we look at it and say things like I was saying earlier, like, well, this thing that they're being accused of, that's just making a good product.
Marco:
Why should that be illegal?
Marco:
And to a lot of extent, I believe that.
Marco:
But you can also look at a lot of Apple's behavior over the last decade and you can see a lot of anti-competitive and also I would say needlessly anti-competitive behavior that really just comes down to greed or just extracting whatever they can, which itself is not necessarily inherently illegal.
Marco:
But again, once you reach a certain scale, tighter standards have to be applied to you for the good of the entire economy.
Marco:
So I do believe Apple has reached that scale and that they still are doing certain anti-competitive behaviors that warrant government intervention.
Marco:
So even though I disagree with a lot of the specifics and the examples they cite, I think
Marco:
That what the DOJ is getting at has a decent amount of merit, and maybe the reason their arguments seem a little bit absurd at times is because they're trying to wedge the current situation into these very old laws that have a hard time directly applying.
John:
yeah that's because everything you just mentioned is not in the sherman antitrust act there's nothing in the sherman antitrust act that says if the thing you supply is used by like most of the population and is required to be a part of daily life that's not in the sherman the sherman antitrust act is very succinct and to the point and does not make any distinction between like well what if you make a game console how important is your product to society how big are you as a company in terms of like it's it's
John:
It's not about that.
John:
It's much simpler.
John:
And everything, all those nuances that are about that have been established by case law.
John:
And the case law leading up to this, including very recently with Microsoft, has not really made that distinction that we're making here, that it's like it really does make a difference
John:
whether you make a smartphone or, you know, a blender, right?
John:
You can, you know, every adult in America doesn't need to have a blender to be able to function well in society, right?
John:
But a smartphone is just, it's like a landline phone used to be.
John:
It's so necessary that we feel here on the outside of the legal system, it's like, it makes sense to give that more scrutiny.
John:
It makes sense to apply different rules to that.
John:
But to win the legal case, if that's not in the law,
John:
There's no point in bringing any of that up in the court case.
John:
They could have brought it up in this document because lots of random crap is brought up in this document.
John:
So I'm kind of disappointed not to see it here.
John:
But when it comes to proving they violated a law, I'm not sure.
John:
I mean, they can make that case.
John:
They can say, well, judge, because that's how precedent gets set.
John:
You know, well, judge, even though Apple only has 65% market share, it's so important to have a smartphone.
John:
And they do make the point in the document that it sounds silly to us, again, in the tech world, but they make up this term for it.
John:
I forget what they call it, like multi-homing or something.
John:
They're like, look.
John:
People don't use more than one smartphone.
John:
They either have an Android phone or an Apple phone, but they tend not to have both of them.
John:
So basically, they're basically saying like if you make an app and you want to address the entire addressable market for smartphone users, like if you're a DoorDash or Uber or something, you have to be on Apple's platform, even though Apple only has 65% market share.
John:
because people don't own two phones you can't expect if i just make it for android everyone will be able to to use uber right you have to make it for both platforms it's a weird way of getting at the point of like saying look there's there's essentially a duopoly but we don't really have any laws about duopolies and a duopoly and something is important in the smartphone is arguably worse than having a monopoly because they can both point to each other and say see there's competition which they absolutely will do in the court case i'm sure yep like our our laws are insufficient to capture the moment but
John:
DOJ is going with the laws they have and I guess trying to win based on those things.
John:
And that's why a lot of this does not ring true to us.
John:
So I agree with Marco.
John:
I feel that something needs to be done.
John:
But I look at this complaint and I'm like, yeah, this is not...
John:
it this is not what needs to be because it necessarily can't get at the heart of the problem it has to instead prove that apple violated this law and that's you know so here they gave five examples and they were clear in the complaint they said this is not exhaustive these are not the only things that we're saying apple did that's bad i'm sure the court case will the government will roll out many many things that i think apple did that was bad right but they did give five specific examples and they're so weird
John:
so here we go here we go disrupting quote-unquote super apps that encompass many different programs and could degrade ios stickiness and make it easier for iphone users to switch to competing devices wait what is this i love all right so maybe this is a term of art that i don't know so bad on me for not being familiar with the term of art about super apps but i didn't know this either if you're if you're listening to this and you think i've never heard of a super app once we start naming examples you're gonna be like oh i know what that is i just never heard it referred to as a super app
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So what they define a super app is, a super app is an app that can serve as a platform for smaller mini programs developed using programming languages such as HTML5 and JavaScript.
Casey:
Super apps can provide significant benefits to users.
Casey:
For example, a super app that incorporates a multitude of mini programs might allow users to easily discover and access a wide variety of content services without setting up and logging into multiple apps.
Casey:
Not unlike how Netflix and Hulu allow users to find and watch thousands of movies and television shows in a single app.
Casey:
So I think what they're actually referring to, though, is WhatsApp, isn't it?
John:
WeChat.
Casey:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Casey:
Yes, we chat.
John:
But basically, here's what they're talking about.
John:
Anytime we've ever talked about, like, app store rejection and stuff like that, where some person wanted to make an app, and then inside the app there was, like, a little miniature store where you could buy a bunch of individual, like, sub-games, like Roblox, but those aren't games.
John:
Those are experiences.
John:
It's fine.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Roblox is, by the way, a pretty good thing to bring up here.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it will.
John:
I'm pretty sure it'll be brought up, right?
John:
But anyway...
John:
roblox is allowed but like things like wechat like wechat my understanding is in china you get wechat and you can do so much stuff from that you can get a taxi you can pay for your meal you can pay your electric bill like it's all inside one super app right now this is weird in some ways because
John:
Well, so it's weird because things like Roblox exist and sort of are in violation sidelines.
John:
And the examples they have, Netflix and Hulu, you log into your Netflix thing and there's a whole bunch of things you can watch there within a single app.
John:
Netflix doesn't have to put out a separate app for each individual show, which sounds dumb to you, but that's what Apple was making people do for things like, we'll talk about cloud streaming services, but I think that could also kind of be under super apps of like,
John:
If you're inside an app and there's like a sub store, if it's like another level of abstraction, there's other things you can do in there.
John:
Apple tends to not allow those unless it feels like it.
John:
But this is one of the things I cite is here's what Apple does.
John:
And it's anti-competitive because things like WeChat essentially can't exist in the US.
John:
I would say, you know, again, as a consumer looking at this in the big picture, I think super apps like WeChat are not what I want.
John:
I would much rather have...
John:
android and ios with individual apps for all of those things competing in sort of a more fair open playing field i do not want one super app where my phone is just a wechat device and wechat owns every aspect of my life because that's just another all you're doing is shifting the
John:
antitrust problem to a different place that is not what i think that is not an example of competition but in the doj's complaint they're like look apple doesn't allow these things to exist uh elsewhere in the world they do exist and even in the us there are companies that want to do this and apple says no and we think that's stifling innovation and i think doj pick a different example because all you're doing is setting up your 2038 lawsuit against the dominant super app in the us
Marco:
Yeah, this is one area where I think this, and this is going to be a common theme to a lot of Apple fans' responses to these complaints, is like, we actually want it this way.
Marco:
I think we're actually better off to not have these big super apps because all that does is just create other monopolies that just sit above the smartphone and then can even be stronger monopolies because they can make that same super app for iOS and Android.
Yeah.
John:
Alright, so the next one is related to that.
John:
Blocking cloud streaming apps for things like video games that will lower the need for superior hardware.
John:
This is basically saying the cloud gaming services where there's like a streaming game service like Microsoft's Xbox thing where the games run in a data center on big gaming PCs and you stream the input and output to your phone, right?
John:
And Apple for a long time has rejected those and it's
John:
I think this is one of their starter cases was like, look, why are you rejecting this?
John:
Is there a safety concern?
John:
Is there a security concern?
John:
Is it confusing to customers?
John:
Are they going to be exploited?
John:
It's like, no, no, no, no.
John:
Apple doesn't want this just simply because, first, it makes a little mini store where you can go in and buy individual games, which I think is fine with the concept of gaming.
John:
Apparently, Roblox can do it, but those are experiences, not games.
LAUGHTER
John:
and second like like who cares like the only reason apple doesn't want this is because they make so much money with individual native games and like that's they're like well if we did this and we let them in then all gaming on the phone oh first of all i think this is wrong-headed because i don't think streaming gaming would actually dominate i think apple this is another one of those cases where i think apple if you actually competed and allowed this you'd be fine but whatever they're scared to find out right so they just said no to this and i think this is actually a good example of anti-competitive behavior because they're going to be able to say apple
John:
remind me again why people aren't allowed to do this?
John:
Like, even if they were willing to pay you the 30% and do whatever, it's like, no, we just don't allow things like that in the store.
John:
Well, why not?
John:
And the answer, effectively, is because we make more money from the other things.
John:
It's not, there's no privacy angle, there's no security angle, there's no, like, there's no anything.
John:
It's just they were disallowing this.
John:
And, of course, they changed this rule very recently to say, okay, Microsoft, you can't, remember that thing we told you you couldn't do for years?
John:
You're allowed to do it now.
John:
And I think the reason they changed it is because of, you know, all of the
John:
pressure that they knew was going to arrive or was arriving from the eu or was coming from the us or whatever like they didn't change it out of the goodness of their hearts right so this is i think a reasonable point although maybe it's undercut by the fact that apple already allowed this but it's an historical example here's the thing that we're doing to stifle competition um the next one i think this is going to be tough for the government for a variety of reasons suppressing the quality of messaging between the iphone platform and competing mobile platforms like android here's what they mean in the complaint
John:
because only messages on the phone can do sms that makes it difficult to use any other third-party messaging platform as sort of you're like you can do everything because the point of the thing is like if you have to message someone you can just go to messages you type in their phone number and you send the message and one of two things going to happen either it's going to send through sms
John:
because that's all they have and it's the common denominator or it will send through iMessage because they have an iPhone and their argument is they have a whole bunch of bogus arguments with the beeper thing that we've talked about in the past episodes right but their argument is like no other third-party messaging app can do that because Apple doesn't allow third-party apps to use the API for sending SMS messages they could they just don't allow that API to third-party access
Casey:
This whole section drove me nuts because what they're saying, depending on how you interpret it, is either just straight up wrong or just a poor way of describing it.
Casey:
Because the whole point of fast text, may it rest in peace, was to send text messages.
Casey:
And there is an API to do that.
Casey:
Now, I think what they're saying is there's no mechanism to go in and have a replacement for the messages app.
Casey:
There's no mechanism for my app to become the system SMS app, which...
John:
Not even that.
John:
I think they're saying you couldn't make a client app like a full.
John:
Yes, you can send messages, but you can't basically be a client app that's sitting there running in the background waiting for someone to send you a message and like, you know, and just being an interactive client.
John:
Like I that's basically I feel like what they're saying is that, yeah, there may be an API to send a message, but there's you there's not enough APIs for you to write.
John:
uh essentially write your own version of messages forget about it for replacing it as a system default i think that's what they're saying i think that's true right that you couldn't write messages yourself make your own set of servers make your own everything make your own like it's all your own infrastructure but just write an app that looks and feels just like messages it's not the default app on the phone but it does the same stuff i don't think that's currently possible
Casey:
No, you're right.
Casey:
And the other thing that drove me nuts about this section is that they were complaining and moaning incessantly about how, oh, you can't run anything in the background.
Casey:
So you wouldn't you wouldn't receive your messages in a timely fashion or whatever.
Casey:
And that's also mostly not true.
Casey:
I mean, granted, it's because of APNS.
John:
But yeah, I think I think I pulled pull the quote out about that, which is I was like, there's I really want to see them.
John:
I mean, this is not maybe what they're going to say in court, but I really want to see them try to support the statement.
John:
Let me see if I can find it.
John:
All right.
John:
Here, this is directly from the complaint.
John:
For example, third party messaging apps cannot continue operating in the background when the app is closed, which impairs functionality like message delivery confirmation.
John:
Cannot continue operating in the background when the app is closed.
John:
I don't think there's any way you can interpret that sentence for it to be technically valid in iOS today.
John:
like and then the the second part is which impairs functionality like message delivery confirmation push notifications exist and can be used by third-party apps i swear they can like you can get a push notification or like this none of this is true i don't think any of this is true and it is such a weird thing to be harping on that like
John:
third-party messaging apps can't continue operating in the background this is news to every third-party messaging app that does exactly that and notifies you when people send you a message like i don't i'm just flabbergasted that this is in here it makes no sense like the one point they have is hey they're private apis they can have to make this point several times they're private apis that apple keeps for themselves and those apis would be useful to third parties if apple let them use them but they don't and it gives apple a competitive advantage because only apple can make the app that does its own proprietary messaging plus sms
John:
And this is a weird thing to bring up as well in their five examples because it's not like there's a lack of competition in messaging apps on iOS.
John:
There's a lot of them, and they're popular.
John:
Like, the one strike they have against them is, oh, yes, they can't do SMS.
John:
But...
John:
And I guess there is a point to be made there.
John:
I think they will successfully make that point in the court case, but it's not one of their stronger points.
John:
So, so far, we've got super apps, which I think is wrongheaded and bad.
John:
Cloud streaming, which is pretty good, but Apple's already reversed that.
John:
No SMS use of API, which I think is just one case of them keeping APIs themselves.
John:
Maybe they can bring that in that direction.
John:
again these are just examples in the document um the next one is i think it gets worse again limiting the functionality of third-party smart watches with its iphones making it harder for apple watch users to switch from iphone due to compatibility issues these are summaries essentially but like uh they're basically saying uh apple watch can only be used with iphones and it's hard for third parties to make smart watches they can integrate with the iphone the way the apple watch does
John:
That's all true.
John:
And to Marco's earlier point, we look at that and say, yeah, because they're Apple and it's their watch and it's going to be tightly integrated with the operating system because they make all of it.
John:
What's wrong with that?
John:
And the government's going to say, well, when you're a monopoly, the rules change for you.
John:
And what would previously have been a smart business move now becomes illegal because you're not letting other people compete.
John:
But this is...
John:
The example they're going to use is like there were smartwatch APIs before the Apple Watch came out and Apple essentially just didn't ever improve or expand them.
John:
And Apple Watch got to use its own fancy APIs.
John:
And we look at this as Apple fans and be like, yeah, that's how Apple works.
John:
That's how the tech sector works.
John:
They made those APIs for like the Pebble smartwatch or whatever.
John:
Because Apple didn't have its own watch.
John:
And then when it made its own watch, of course, you don't get to use those APIs.
John:
Only Apple does.
John:
And those APIs are better.
John:
And tough luck because Apple's going to Apple.
John:
And I guess the government's going to say that's illegal because monopoly.
Marco:
Yeah, this is a weak one.
Marco:
This is why, again, you can look at Apple and you can find instances of anti-competitive behavior, I think, fairly easily.
Marco:
But I think the examples they have chosen to highlight are not great examples.
Marco:
They seem to be trying to frame the case against Apple as Apple makes it too hard for consumers to switch to Android.
Marco:
And I don't think that's that strong of an argument.
Marco:
You can make lots of other arguments about Apple's anti-competitive behavior.
Marco:
I don't think that is a good way to go.
Marco:
But what I can't tell is like, do they also, would they agree with that?
Marco:
And this is just how they're going to give it the best chance of winning within the legal framework that we have?
Marco:
Or is this actually what they're trying to argue?
John:
They're not they're not they don't actually they do a different angle out there and actually saying Apple makes it too hard to switch Android what they're essentially saying in several parts of the document is they say this change that Apple made was not made to make their products better.
John:
It was instead made to demotivate people from switching.
John:
That's subtly different than saying Apple is stopping you from switching.
John:
It's basically saying, oh, Apple, here's some internal email that says the reason you did this is because you were afraid if you did this, there would be less reason for people to stay on your phone.
John:
Which again, you would look at that and say, isn't that Apple's job to make their phone the most attractive platform so people want to stay on it?
John:
And you're saying, because they did that, it shows, well, you only made this change because then people would like the iPhone better.
John:
And if they left it, they would miss it because things are only on the iPhone.
John:
And you're like, yeah, that's just business.
John:
Isn't that great?
John:
And again, it's saying, yeah, that's great right up until you're a monopoly.
John:
And so if you're a monopoly, you're not allowed to do those things.
John:
But they use that angle constantly by quoting from emails in Discovery, like the Epicase or whatever, saying,
John:
Here you are, Apple saying you're not going to do this thing that we DOJ thinks would benefit consumers.
John:
And the reason you say you're doing it is because you're one of your executives says we did this.
John:
People would have less motivation to stay on iPhone.
John:
It would be easier for them to get their kids Android phones.
John:
Right.
John:
And that does not look nefarious when I read it, because, you know, I understand Apple and how things work.
John:
And a lot of times.
John:
I agree that they shouldn't do that because it would make the iPhone worse.
John:
But the DOJ comes out and flatly states in this complaint, this would have been better for consumers.
John:
I'm like, already I disagree with you, DOJ.
John:
But anyway, then they go on and say, and the reason you did it was to make it harder, not to make it harder, to make it so people don't want to switch because they switch, they'll be leaving behind this good thing here, right?
John:
Is there something only on the iPhone?
John:
Oh, well, they even say about the services, like all these services you have.
John:
It makes it so that if people leave, they're sad because they're like, oh, but all my things that I see on this service, I wouldn't have them anymore if I wanted Android because it's not available there.
John:
It's... It's so confused when I look at that and I say, Sherman Antitrust Act?
John:
And...
John:
third-party watches can't integrate with the iphone like i'm trying to connect those dots real hard it's just not it's not working for me the final one they had here which i think maybe is one of their strongest ones but it's so dead simple and of course the eu beat them to it as with all these things
John:
uh blocking third-party developers from creating competing digital wallets with tap to pay functionality remember the whole hubbub i guess years ago was like hey there's going to be nfc and apple phones but oh only apple can use it for these certain purposes uh the eu i think already made apple not do that anymore and say hey it's part of the dma i think hey apple you have to let third-party apps have access to the nfc thingy so that other companies can have an app on your phone so that when you smush your phone against the thing you can pay with them
John:
But in the US, I believe it is still the case that only Apple can access that through whatever APIs they're protecting.
John:
That is kind of like a level playing field within the iOS market type of argument of saying there are features, there are hardware features of the phone that you don't let other people use.
John:
And why?
John:
Is it because it's better for consumers?
John:
Apple will surely argue that having only a single wallet app is better for consumers because it's simplifying, yada, yada, yada.
John:
But the DOJ is going to argue that
John:
It's better if Apple really is doing it to basically make sure that all commerce on the phone goes through them and they get a cut of it and it has nothing to do with simplifying things for their customers.
John:
I suspect a lot of the DOJ case will be exactly that and not just this point on all of them.
John:
The DOJ saying you're doing this Apple because
John:
It gives you a cut of all transactions and Apple saying, no, we're doing it because having a single wallet is better for consumers because it's simpler and it's better for security and yada, yada, yada.
John:
And I think both of those things are true.
John:
It is simpler and easier for consumers to understand.
John:
And also Apple is also doing it.
John:
so they can get a cut of all those transactions like they're literally both true it's not like they're they're not they're not in opposition to each other at all those are two reasons that apple does it in probably equal measure and neither one of those reasons is wrong but the doj has to i guess prove that the money reason is more important than the uh being nicer for consumers reason and repeat that for all these points
Casey:
And it seems so weird to me that the DOG really has a burr up its ass about the fact that people want to use alternatives to Apple Wallet.
Casey:
And who?
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Like, I don't really get that.
Casey:
And in fact, I would argue that compelling all of these different apps and Ticketmaster and everyone else, if Apple is even compelling them to add things into Apple Wallet— I'm sure they are.
Casey:
Which I don't know that they are, but I would expect that they are—
Casey:
I actually why is that bad?
John:
So I see I see the DOG case.
John:
I think they have a strong case in terms of the law.
John:
It's going to make sense to people who aren't Apple nerds.
John:
Here's the deal.
John:
Like from our perspective, we're like, this is a simplification.
John:
And because we trust Apple, we prefer this scenario.
John:
But from a strictly business scenario, it's basically Apple saying.
John:
No commerce can happen unless we mediate it.
John:
So you're a bank and our phones have NFC and you would love it if you could boop and do your bank stuff.
John:
But we're saying, actually, you've got to go through us.
John:
I know you're already a bank, but it's got to go through us because we need to get our cut.
John:
Right?
John:
And because we need to have control.
John:
And Apple would say, and it's not because we need a cut.
John:
It's not because we need control.
John:
We do it for security reasons.
John:
That's why Apple Pay is better.
John:
We have these temporary, you know, credit card numbers.
John:
You were just going to send the same number constantly back and forth.
John:
It was totally insecure.
John:
Ours was better, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But from a strictly business perspective, it's like...
John:
they are basically saying hey you want to you bank can't have an app that uses our phone to pay for things you can do it on android phones it works fine but here we're saying no everything has to go through us and for the doj's case and i think they're going to be able to make this pretty strongly to a non-tech savvy audience is like why does apple get to insert itself there and i think apple's
John:
obvious claim that this is a simplification it's better for security it's better for privacy may fall on deaf ears because they're going to say like yeah that's exactly what you would say if you wanted to get yourself between every single transaction and again i think both are true i think it is more secure and i do trust apple more than a lot of these banks and it is better for consumers but also apple does want to go to that right both things are true and i don't quite see how this is going to
John:
how anything useful is going to come out of this because you know if you if you have if that's if the government makes this case and the things they're saying are true and apple goes on the stand and the things they're saying are also true it basically comes down to the judge and or jury however this trial is going to go deciding which one of those two completely true things is dominates the other and it really just depends on are you looking at apple as a big evil corporation are you looking at the government as incompetent and tech ignorant
Casey:
What if it's both?
Casey:
Por que no los dos?
John:
Yeah, that's a difficult thing.
John:
And that's why you never want to leave this up to a freaking legal case.
John:
Just, again, use your words.
John:
Government.
John:
Right regulation that tells Apple what you want it to do differently.
John:
And Google, for that matter, because they're kind of important in this scenario.
John:
So bad.
John:
Anyway.
John:
I don't want to pull this one down.
John:
Let's go to Apple's response, because I have a bunch of other excerpts that I want to just do quick hits on.
John:
But here's Apple's...
John:
Terse response, obviously the day of this thing coming out.
John:
You want to read this, Casey?
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
At Apple, we innovate every day to make technology people love, designing products that work seamlessly together, protect people's privacy and security, and create a magical experience for our users.
Casey:
This lawsuit threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets.
Casey:
I like that they throw in the fiercely competitive part.
Casey:
If successful, it would hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple, where hardware, software and services intersect.
Casey:
It would also set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people's technology.
Casey:
We believe this lawsuit is wrong on the facts and the law, and we will vigorously defend against it.
Marco:
I think this is better off being read through gritted teeth.
Marco:
At Apple, we innovate every day.
John:
I can do that if you'd like.
John:
I can do a second take.
John:
I feel like this is a canned thing that they have ready to go, probably had ready to go for ages, kind of like when you're pre-write obituaries.
John:
But this is a tangent, but it's my favorite thing about this.
John:
We've talked many times in the show about how Apple Style Guide wants you to say like Apple Vision Pro and not the Apple Vision Pro, and they want you to say iPhone, not the iPhone.
John:
Like, we believe iPhone is the best platform for blah, blah, blah.
John:
We don't want to just say we believe the iPhone, right?
John:
That's in all their style guides.
John:
It's the way they do PR or whatever.
John:
So in this statement, they say, it would also send a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand.
John:
And when I originally read that, I'm like, did I miscopy and paste this?
John:
Shouldn't it say empowering the government to take a heavy hand?
John:
But no, the government gets the iPhone treatment.
John:
It's called, it's empowering government, not empowering the government.
John:
We don't say the government.
John:
We just say government.
John:
Here at government, we believe that Apple...
John:
is an illegal monopoly.
Marco:
I understand Apple's attitude here because, look, Apple does not like being told by external forces how to design their products.
Marco:
And, I mean, I can't blame them.
Marco:
I wouldn't like it either.
Marco:
But the reality is, again, they do actually anti-competitive behavior all the time and have for a while that I think is easily avoided.
Marco:
And they have brought this on themselves with this behavior.
Marco:
they have been so brazen and so comprehensive with their anti-competitive behavior over the years that they have invited governments to... They've effectively forced governments to try to regulate them by behaviors that are not core to their products.
Marco:
Behaviors like various anti-competitive app store policies and third-party service policies.
Marco:
If you look at that whole area of their behavior,
Marco:
That has invited most of this regulation and most of these lawsuits, and that has nothing to do with their products being good and well integrated with each other and secure and private.
Marco:
They're using that, and actually the complaint directly addresses this, they use the security and privacy angle as an excuse to cover a lot of behavior, and a lot of times it's warranted because Apple products really are pretty secure and pretty private compared to everything else in the industry, and
Marco:
For the most part, we appreciate that.
Marco:
But they also use that same cover on behavior that is not great and where those are not the reasons for that behavior.
John:
Or very often they are reasons, but they're not the only reason.
Marco:
And maybe not even the primary reason.
John:
And that's kind of like what you mentioned about trusting Apple, though.
John:
That's part of the reason why I think this has a strong chance in a legal setting.
John:
We like a lot of these moves because we trust Apple more than we trust some stupid bank, for example, right?
John:
But the law is not just the law for Apple.
John:
It's for all companies.
John:
So if you say it's legal for Apple to insert itself between every transaction, we think that's great because I'd rather have Apple in there because we trust Apple more.
John:
But if you just remove the names and just say anonymous company A, B, and C...
John:
Do you want that to stand?
John:
Because what if the company that's doing this in the middle was, for example, Microsoft or whatever company you have less nice feelings about than Apple?
John:
Facebook.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Facebook, right?
John:
Whatever, right?
John:
The law has to be, you know, whatever the law.
John:
They're not writing laws.
John:
This verdict is going to apply to all companies, not just Apple.
John:
And so while we may actually prefer Apple to insert itself because we trust Apple more because of their proven track record and also because of how Apple makes money is not the same way that Facebook makes money.
John:
And so their incentives are differently aligned.
John:
They have a strong legal case to say it's all well and good because you like this benevolent dictator, but it should be illegal for anyone to do that, even though Apple's being nice about it.
John:
And I think they might have a strong case there as far as that goes.
Casey:
Yeah, so I think Joe Rosenstiel retweeted or retweeted an account, Glyph, which I'd not been familiar with, but I think this is a perfect distillation of kind of how I feel about it.
Casey:
Even if you're an Apple stan and think the company really has no motivation but a sincere desire to protect users and government regulators are bad product designers and this will make things worse, even so...
Casey:
This is Apple's fault.
Casey:
The handwriting has been on the wall for years.
Casey:
They should have figured out a way to self-regulate by now, but because the appearance of impropriety clearly exists and has now been called out on multiple continents, this is not one regulator with a bias.
Casey:
I mean, it's so true.
Casey:
The three of us have been saying this for years.
John:
Yeah, we've talked about it for years.
John:
We said we said this was going to happen.
John:
And lo and behold, it has.
John:
And I still part of when we had these discussions years ago, what I always said is that Apple's calculation is not that they're going to avoid regulation, but that they're going to survive it.
John:
And it is better to essentially force it to happen and then like settle or like essentially they're making the calculation that, yeah.
John:
We know we're bringing on the bad thing.
John:
We're doing it to ourselves.
John:
But we think in the end, because we're Apple and we're so huge, that we will still come out in a more powerful position than if we were to give concessions manually.
John:
I don't think that's true.
John:
I think the reputational damage is what they weren't taking into account.
John:
But that has always been like a plausible...
John:
Not that Apple's just dumb and didn't, oh, they should have self-regulated themselves.
John:
Why are they so dumb?
John:
I think they're constantly making the calculation.
John:
Like, I think we can come out ahead if we just hold firm, bring on the lawsuits, fight it in every continent.
John:
Because effectively, that's what they're doing.
John:
And no one's forcing them to do it.
John:
They're choosing to do that.
John:
So their calculation must be, this is actually the better way to go.
John:
Even though there's going to be short-term pain and we're going to look bad, in the end, we'll come out ahead.
John:
uh i don't think they are going to come out ahead i think it was the wrong choice but clearly they feel differently yeah i mean let me do my quick hits with these i don't know how quick they're going to be i'll probably stop eventually but there's some some choice snippets that i pulled out of the uh complaint that i thought were interesting we already did a couple of them um
John:
This one, I mentioned Beeper before.
John:
I'm not going to go through it all.
John:
You can go look through old episodes when we talked about the Beeper thing, but this paragraph is essentially about Beeper.
John:
This is the DOJ saying, "'Recently, Apple blocked a third-party developer from fixing the broken cross-platform messaging experience in Apple Messages and providing end-to-end encryption for messages between Apple Messages and Android users.
John:
By rejecting solutions that would allow for cross-platform encryption, Apple continues to make the iPhone less secure than they could be otherwise.'
John:
This is entirely Beeper's framing what was going on, but it was ridiculous when Beeper said it, and it's ridiculous when the DOJ... Beeper was trying to use Apple servers in an authorized manner to run a messaging service where it didn't have to run the servers.
John:
Like, that's what they were doing.
John:
Nothing to do... It's like... But this is... It's as if Beeper wrote this, right?
John:
I think they will not do well at that point in court because it is ridiculous, but it's funny that they shoved it in there.
John:
Um...
John:
All right, so this is about the NFC banking thing.
John:
Apple acknowledges it is technically feasible to enable an iPhone user to set another app, for example, a bank's app, as the default payment app.
John:
And Apple intends to allow this functionality in Europe.
John:
I read this and I say, hmm, DOJ, why does Apple allow that functionality in Europe?
John:
Did they just decide to do it in Europe because they like Europe better?
John:
Or is something else going on there?
John:
Maybe some other way to change Apple's behavior other than suing them based on ancient antitrust laws.
John:
Like, it's right there in front of them.
John:
Apple intends to allow this functionality in Europe.
John:
It's like...
Marco:
the bell ringing somewhere although i mean keep in mind like it does kind of work in the sense that like you know remember when apple announced they were switching to our they were going to add rcs support um and remember how they announced when they were doing when the dma plan came out they announced also oh by the way the game streaming apps thing that's okay everywhere now uh-huh
Marco:
I mean, we thought at the time, I mean, maybe it was China, maybe, you know, and maybe that might be true.
Marco:
But there is now it's very clear, like Apple did both of those things strategically to to kind of get ahead of this.
Marco:
Like they definitely got wind of these specific things the DOJ was going to cite.
Marco:
Right.
John:
also i think that helped with the eu stuff right like oh yes it helps them everywhere people are complaining but the whole point is that apple is citing something that that that they are apple is intending to allow in europe they're intending to allow it in europe because europe actually passed regulations that forced them to that's why they're allowing this in europe not because they decided to be nice to europe
John:
Europe did the thing where you have regulations and you say, Apple, you must allow banks to use the... So if the US government want that to happen, there's a way that the government can make that happen besides suing them and hoping somewhere in the remedy that they're forced to open up the NFC chip on phones.
John:
Just say that's what you want.
John:
They have an example.
John:
If you want that, Europe showed you how to do it.
John:
This is so targeted and so specific that I believe even our lawmakers...
John:
could pass a targeted law or regulation saying that apple has to allow access to it but that's just not the level the laws work here like it's absurd to even think that that would go through because it's just so many things are aligned against it let's see what else i have um so they have a bunch of stuff uh anti-steering stuff in there which i don't
John:
I mean, it's anti-competitive behavior and presumably it would be a legal maintenance of a monopoly if you can prove they have a monopoly, which is its own challenge.
John:
But this is where Apple even prohibits developers on its app store from notifying users in a developer's app that cheaper prices for services are available using alternative digital wallets or direct payments.
John:
yeah anti-steering they mentioned anti-steering they mentioned that that there had been court cases that in the u.s that have said apple you can't do this anti-steering thing and they basically say we had those court cases they told apple they can't do it but still people are complaining that even though they lost that case and the court said that apple had to do a thing the thing that they did is not satisfactory like see court cases are a bad way to make apple do things
John:
already epic is like you know continuing that in the legal system saying hey apple lost the case and they did a thing and we think they think they did doesn't actually comply with the judgment so that continues to rumble on this is all like in their own complaint it's evidence that the thing they're trying to do does not work well to get the end they want so frustrating
John:
So I guess the relief section, just to quote a few things from the relief.
John:
Again, I don't know how this works legally speaking and who decides what they have to do.
John:
And all this is a moot point if they settle out of court with the government, in which case there will actually be a negotiation back and forth about what Apple's supposed to agree to do or whatever.
John:
But near the end of the document, it instructs that what they want is the DOJ wants is to enter relief as needed to cure any anti-competitive harm, including but not limited to
John:
preventing apple from using its control of app distribution to undermine cross-platform technologies such as super apps and cloud streaming apps among others prevent apple from using private apis to undermine cross-platform technologies like messaging smart watches and digital wallets among others and prevent apple from using the terms and conditions in its contract with developers accessory makers consumers or others to obtain maintain extend or entrench a monopoly that is all so vague as to be almost entirely useless like if they if they followed the letter of that
John:
Super apps are allowed.
John:
You could do cloud streaming, which they already allow.
John:
Can Apple not have private APIs?
John:
That's absurd.
John:
But they can't use them to undermine cross-platform technologies like messages, smartwatches and digital.
John:
What does that even mean?
John:
Do they have to open up all their Apple Watch APIs to somebody else?
John:
I guess they have to open the NFC thing.
John:
They have to allow messaging apps to use SMS.
John:
And then don't have terms and conditions in your contract with developers that are anti-competitive.
John:
There are so many of them in there.
John:
Which ones are you talking about?
John:
That's the extent of the section where I don't know if it's the job of these documents to suggest what should change.
John:
But I really wish they had a clear-headed vision of here's what needs to change.
John:
Because if they had that, they could have just written a law.
John:
And there's a different branch of government that does that.
John:
And that's not what they're doing here.
Yeah.
John:
yeah after all this and this is going to go on for years and it's just going to be a disaster and it's going to cloud everything that apple is trying to do with its company over you just asked microsoft how much the doj trial was a distraction and did reputational harm it took them years to recover from oh one other thing i guess it's the final i this i don't know where i have this in the excerpts or whatever but here there's this whole section of the document
John:
where the doj tries to do a victory lap for its microsoft case saying you know that microsoft case that we won even though it was partially overturned on appeal anyway you know the microsoft case that we won uh that basically let apple become the company it is today because we did that thing you just if you know anything about the tech industry you just have to look at the document look at the absurd conclusions they're drawing of like and because we did this apple could ship itunes on windows
John:
Okay.
Casey:
Sure.
John:
But here's the thing about the DOJ MS trial.
John:
If any of these people had any clue about anything having to do to the tech sector, here's how that shook out.
John:
It was a huge distraction for Microsoft.
John:
It did a lot of reputational harm to them.
John:
But in the end, it did not change the shape of the personal computer market.
John:
Microsoft dominated personal computers in the 90s.
John:
And you know what changed about that?
John:
Nothing.
Nothing.
John:
nothing significant you know what changed the pc market became less relevant because the mobile market was where the new show was but what happened in the pc market did windows disappear did linux on the desktop become common no the only thing that happened was the pc market became less relevant but the shape of it did not change this did not fix the doj trial did not fix microsoft's dominance of the pc market it stayed basically the same apple eroded it slowly over many years or whatever but it
John:
fundamentally didn't change.
John:
It was Microsoft dominating with Apple with a tiny market share.
John:
And now Apple's market share is like 10 times what it was then, but still small.
John:
And that took decades, right?
John:
The DOJ trial, if it was supposed to fix the PC market, it didn't.
John:
The PC market, it was like Microsoft dominated and there's literally nothing this court case can do to fix it.
John:
Even if Microsoft loses, they have the settlement, blah, blah.
John:
It did not change the PC market.
John:
What happened was
John:
New market, the mobile market, and that is what this whole case is about.
John:
And so if they think that somehow by massively winning this thing, they're going to quote unquote fix the phone market, if they're using the Microsoft DOJ trial as their precedent, the best case scenario is that phones are replaced by...
John:
digital holographic rings or some crap and then even though the phone market never got any better and it stayed microsoft and android and it stayed the way it always is eventually decades later a new market came along and phones became less relevant and don't hold your breath for that i'm just giving you an example right yeah it's it's so bad that they think like see what we did with the microsoft case like 10
John:
DOJ, do not cite that.
John:
You did not fix the PC market.
John:
You were rescued by the fact that the PC market became less relevant.
John:
That's it.
John:
You did not fix anything.
John:
That's the part that makes me give them a C- on this paper because they do not understand.
John:
They don't understand their own.
John:
I mean, these people weren't the people who did that.
John:
Obviously, those people all retire, but they they do not understand history and what the MSDOJ case meant.
John:
It is not what allowed Apple to become the iPhone company at all.
John:
And it's not fixed the PC market.
Casey:
Nope.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you so much to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Trade Coffee.
Marco:
Thank you also to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Our new member benefit is what we're calling ATP Overtime.
Marco:
This is our special bonus topic at the end.
Marco:
After we recorded the regular stuff, we have a special bonus topic after the show.
Marco:
Tech topics about 15 to 45 minutes.
Marco:
This week, we are talking about Apple's AI updates.
Marco:
There were some AI stuff, AI updates from Apple this past week, so we're going to be talking about that in ATP Overtime.
Marco:
Thank you, everyone.
Marco:
You can join in here at atp.fm slash join, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-
Casey:
All right, let's do a post-show brief Ask ATP because we didn't get a chance to talk about it in the main show and we needed something, a little bit of a palate cleanser.
Casey:
So we have a question that ostensibly is from Tony, but may as well be from me.
Casey:
And Tony writes, I've been listening to the show for years and there's a question I've been dying to know the answer to.
Casey:
Why do John and Marco only use one monitor?
Casey:
Is it aesthetics?
Casey:
Is it the cost of monitors?
Casey:
Is it comfort level?
Casey:
Because that's what they're used to.
Casey:
Do they hate slightly turning their heads that much?
Casey:
I know not everyone wants triple 32-inch 4K monitors set up like I have, connected to an M1 Max MacBook Pro, but the thought of working on just one monitor seems oppressive to me, and the amount of window management I'd have to do makes it a non-starter for me.
Casey:
And then I will briefly add that...
Casey:
In the same way that I can work on one monitor.
Casey:
I mean, I did on my iMac Pro for years.
Casey:
I really prefer having two.
Casey:
The three that I have now is admittedly overkill, but I have it, so why not use it?
Casey:
But the other thing that we haven't really talked about, and if I ever do my own version of John's video, is I'm also a devout Spaces user.
Casey:
And to the best of my recollection, I know John very much isn't, and I don't think Marco is either.
Casey:
So what's the deal with monitors and Spaces?
Casey:
Let's start with Marco.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
I don't use Spaces.
Marco:
I tried virtual desktops over the years here and there.
Marco:
Not much because it just did not click with me at all.
Marco:
So I never spent a lot of time doing that.
Marco:
Multiple monitors I did run for years.
Marco:
I ran first two 17s and then eventually two 24s or I would do like a laptop and a 24 or a laptop and a 17 at various points during that time as my setup changed and evolved over the years.
Marco:
So I did dual monitors for a long time.
Marco:
The reason I stopped is that once I switched to first a 30-inch 1X monitor, an old HP thing that was basically HP's version of Apple's 30-inch monitor, and then once Retina happened, that's when those all became 27-inch 5Ks, which doubled the resolution, made it a little bit smaller, and now on the XDR.
Marco:
The reason I switched to a single monitor is that
Marco:
I was able to have enough space and I got a whole bunch of benefits of having one monitor.
Marco:
And so for me – and again, this is so personal.
Marco:
It really depends on how you work.
Marco:
But for me, one of the big benefits was there's a whole bunch of little subtle bugs and paper cuts when you have multiple monitors that you just don't get when you have one.
Marco:
So the windows are never on the wrong screen.
Marco:
A bunch of weird bugs that could maybe occasionally happen never happen.
Marco:
So there's a whole bunch of little paper cut things you avoid.
Marco:
But just generally, I like the flexibility that if I want to see one thing really big, I can do that.
Marco:
Or if I want to have it subdivided however I want to have it subdivided, I can do that too.
Marco:
When I had multiple monitors, now, admittedly, I never did more than two.
Marco:
So maybe, you know, if I could do, like, the XDR in the middle and then maybe two smaller ones on the side, I mean, that would be... I would need a larger desk and, I think, a larger office, but I could maybe make that work.
Marco:
But that much screen space, I could do it...
Marco:
But I don't think I would make good use of it because I even found even when I was just using two 24s, I would find that I kind of had like a junk drawer style of window organization where I would – one would always kind of be my primary one where I'd have like the main stuff I'm working on.
Marco:
And the stuff I would put in the second one would be stuff like my music app, maybe like a chat room.
Marco:
I'm in a chat room.
Marco:
Maybe I'd put email over there.
Marco:
Kind of like rarely used or accessory apps, not the main thing I'm working in.
Marco:
And what I found is that I was better just doing those things on one big monitor because I didn't need those to be constantly showing.
Marco:
I wouldn't even necessarily say moderate to heavy window management.
Marco:
I would say any window management.
Marco:
You can pretty easily keep your mail and your music player and stuff hidden when you're not using them and then bring them up when you want to use them.
Marco:
That to me is not that much friction.
Marco:
And so I found that when I had like accessory monitors off to the side, I would have those things up there, but I really didn't need them to be there.
Marco:
So it was kind of wasted monitor space.
Marco:
And it encouraged me to keep more stuff open, even though I wasn't really using it all at the same time.
Marco:
So it was more just like an alternative to hiding windows that I didn't really need.
Marco:
And meanwhile, you have all those paper cuts.
Marco:
You have the complexity.
Marco:
You have the physical complexity.
Marco:
And also, frankly, that was mainly a thing I would do at work.
Marco:
Now that I work at home, one of the wonders that I have partaken in as a home work setup is speakers on my desk to play music sometimes when no one's around.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
And I like big speakers because they sound better, frankly.
Marco:
And I don't think I could put two monitors on my desk and also have speakers in a reasonable location to sound good to my ears at this distance.
Marco:
So all of these things combined to basically be the benefits of multiple monitors I found I didn't use very well.
Marco:
You know, anything that was outside of my periphery of like if I had to even slightly turn my head, I would just never use it.
Marco:
Like I would never do anything useful on those monitors.
Marco:
And I also, going back to what I said earlier, I greatly like the idea of having one giant one so I can have one giant window sometimes when I need that.
Marco:
And that can be things like if I want to see my entire calendar month and not have any days be truncated, I can do that.
Marco:
If I want to edit a photo and see the entire resolution of this giant 100 megapixel photo, I can do that.
Marco:
If I want to have a huge Xcode window and a huge documentation window and three different simulators running, I can do that.
Marco:
I have tons of space to do that, but I have the flexibility that it's one big monitor.
Marco:
So if I want to have one app, it can be one app.
Marco:
If I want to have 10 apps, it can be 10 apps.
John:
John?
John:
It's a lot of similar reasons.
John:
I...
John:
I do want to have the most stuff in front of me that I possibly can.
John:
And I always feel like multiple monitors is just putting a strip of monitor bezel in the middle of that.
John:
And then you say, well, but there's no way you can have a single monitor that is as big as two of these monitors.
John:
And when you get to that size, it does become about head turning.
John:
Like, I don't want to look to my left and look to my right.
John:
that much like that i have to because i do want the biggest possible thing right in front of me so i've got the xdr in front of me any monitor that i put to the left or the right of the xdr i'm gonna have to turn my head and the way i work
John:
doesn't like it doesn't lend itself to that now that's not to say i haven't had multiple monitors in fact during the whole classic mac era i had my se30 and then i had a color monitor and so i had two monitors and yeah one of them was nine inch black and white so what could you put there but you could put small stuff there i had like an irc window there back in the early internet days like it's just text it's fine it works um but i i didn't like the whole like
John:
It's not so much knowing where things are and which monitor or whatever, but I wouldn't want to do active things that far to my left.
John:
It's kind of like driving a Viper, for a little post-show neutral here, where you're offset because the transmission tunnel is so big.
John:
You're not even sitting sort of facing the direction the car is moving.
John:
You're kind of sitting sideways because the pedal box is offset by the giant transmission tunnel.
John:
I don't want to work looking to my left for any amount of time.
John:
So then you're like bringing the window over to the monitor that's in front of you to work on it.
John:
Then you got to remember to bring it back.
John:
It's just a vast simplification for me to have one big monitor.
John:
As I've said in the past, we've talked about this.
John:
there's a limit if i had if the monitor in front of me was 100 inches now i'm turning my head to see one monitor right i know there's a limit but i can tell you it's not 32 inches because i've got that now and i find this perfectly satisfactory and i love it i think i could go with a slightly larger size than this in particular height wise i could probably take three or four more inches of height and probably a couple inches on either side before it gets to the point where i feel like i'm turning my head
John:
But it's close.
John:
I feel like it's close to the limit.
John:
So I'll let you know, you know, if Apple ever sells a 48-inch monitor that's retina resolution, that's probably too big for me, especially as my vision continues to decline, right?
John:
So there is a limit.
John:
But in general, I want the biggest single monitor in front of me that I can handle.
John:
And because I'm not constrained by the need to have every single window that is open visible at the same time,
John:
I'm fine with windows being on top of each other.
John:
I'm fine with hiding windows.
John:
I'm fine with hiding entire applications.
John:
I don't use spaces, but I do hide things a lot.
John:
That solution allows me to have a tremendous amount of stuff on just one monitor.
John:
I often think that a lot of times when people have multiple monitors, it's like, but what if I want to have all these things open at the same time?
John:
It's like, dude.
John:
I have all those things open at the same time.
John:
But what if I want to see them all at the same time?
John:
Well, you can only be looking at one place at once.
John:
So you're not actually looking at the thing that's on your far left monitor and the thing that's on your far right corner at the same time.
John:
You're just looking at them in turn.
John:
And guess what?
John:
You can look at them in turn when they're on your main monitor if you know how to manage windows because you can bring one to the front and now you're looking at that one and you bring the other one to the front and now you're looking at that one.
John:
There's so many ways to do that.
John:
Spaces is one.
John:
command tab clicking your mouse hiding apps right i don't feel constrained by that i definitely feel a lot of people like i definitely i need two monitors to help them work because i gotta have this here and i gotta have that here and i gotta see them all at the same time and it's very often the case that they're not seeing them all at the same time they're seeing them in turn and the way they're doing the in turn is by literally turning their head
John:
Which is valid.
John:
I'm not saying that's the wrong way to do things, but the way I work doesn't require that.
John:
And so I managed to get by with only the Pro Display XDR.
John:
Only?
Casey:
And a little help with your friends.
Yeah.