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I have more issues than that.
You can see in the after show.
I can tell you about them if you want.
Oh, no.
I just saw what it's labeled in the show notes.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Now I can't wait to get there.
Yeah, we got to hurry this along.
We got a pile of follow up to get through.
Should we just.
All right.
Hey, Apple did a bunch of stuff and they're dicks.
Let's go after show.
All right.
Thanks to Linode, Mint Mumble and Backblaze and our members.
OK, so John, let's talk after show.
Can't rush.
Got to go through the whole show.
We have a format.
Ostensibly.
Hey, all joking aside, I don't know what to say or what we should say or if we should say, but I think we should say something to reiterate, hey...
Black people are people too.
Black lives do indeed matter.
And it would be super cool if, like, police stopped attempting to murder them all the time.
Not just attempting, actually murdering.
And often succeeding in murdering them all the time.
Like, why is this still a thing?
I just... I just... I know I'm being incoherent, and I apologize, because I feel wholly unqualified to talk about any of this, but it's...
Well, I was going to say it's flared up again, but it never really went away.
It's just people are paying attention again.
And I just I feel like it would be wrong not to recognize and reiterate that I speak for all three of us in saying that we believe that everyone, irrespective of the color of their skin.
or where they come from, or what they believe, everyone is a person, everyone's life is valuable.
And it is inappropriate for any police officer to unilaterally decide to end somebody's life in almost every circumstance.
And I'm really disgusted that this is still a debate that we have to have and still something that we need to talk about.
And I don't know, Marco, if you need to cut all this out because I'm making no sense, I totally understand.
But I feel like I need to, at least for me, say that this grosses all three of us out deeply.
We're really upset by it.
And we want to reiterate again, Black Lives Matter.
Yeah, this is not something that's going to just go away.
I mean, that's part of the horrible, insidious nature of racism and of horrible police culture and misconduct and everything.
that it doesn't just go away with a couple of weeks of being in the news like it's a it's a systemic deeply rooted problem with lots of facets that all have to be addressed and it's good that people are still protesting it's good that this is still you know
on people's minds enough to actually make noise about it because it's not solved it didn't get solved in what was it june it didn't get solved because it can't get solved that quickly it's a very complicated set of problems and this is not news to black people they know they know very well too well that uh that this is not something that's just going to go away in two seconds um
And so I think it's important that we keep the spotlight on this, keep the spotlight on any kind of racism or bias or violence that we see like this, that we don't let up.
We don't move on to the next hot thing in the news and forget about all this stuff.
That's still very much a problem.
And it's not going to have a quick or easy fix, but we shouldn't give up and move on just because something else happened.
I had to look this up because I didn't know the source and I didn't get the exact wording.
I didn't know the exact wording off the top of my head, but here's Frederick Douglass.
This always comes to mind when I see these things.
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
So yeah, we can't be quiet.
Yeah.
Indeed.
All right.
And our hearts are obviously out for everyone who is living this.
I mean, the three of us are very lucky for a plethora of different reasons, but in no small part because of the color of our skin.
And that's really kind of messed up, isn't it, if you think about it?
Like, it's just wrong that that's even an issue.
But here we are.
We have a whole bunch of follow-up to go through.
In fact, I'll be impressed if we make it through the follow-up and anything beyond that.
But a lot of this stuff, I think, is important within the sphere of our little world.
It's not important compared to what we just talked about, but it's important for our little corner of the universe.
First, and maybe not importantly at all, I was going to say most importantly, but that's not true.
But first off, I'd like to just briefly mention a couple things about our post-show neutral last week.
First and least importantly.
Yes, exactly right.
I forgot to mention, we forgot to mention, one of the advantages of driving a stick is that you can bump or push start it, which is to say...
In certain circumstances, particularly with older cars where a lot of this was less computerized, you can actually push the car, physically push the car or send it down a hill, and then pop the clutch if you're in second gear and cause that to start the car.
And I'm leaving out a few details here, but that's a really neat thing that we didn't mention that I think you should look into if you're at all interested in that sort of thing.
Additionally,
I think a lot of people, and maybe this was our fault, I didn't listen back to the episode, but a lot of people took what we were saying, John and I particularly were saying, as this is the only proper way to drive a stick.
And that certainly was not my intention, and I don't think it was John's either.
We were saying, hey, we were asked, what are some ways you can level up being a driver of a manual transmission car?
And here's some things you can consider.
You can consider engine braking.
You can consider heel-toe.
and things of that nature.
A lot of people seemed very fired up that we thought that heel-toe was required.
No, of course not.
Absolutely not.
But it's just something that you can consider if you would like to level up driving a stick.
So, any thoughts on that, John?
I feel like people in Europe just need us to acknowledge that, yes, we know manual transmission cars are more common there.
I mean, I guess that's not clear from the history of the show, but maybe we didn't mention enough.
We know.
We know there's more than there.
I wish there was more here, but there's not.
We live in a
Very automatic filled world.
But anyway, lots of people from Europe and other areas told us not only a stick shift transmission is very common there, but you get a different kind of license if you can't drive one.
You get like a more limited license.
And a lot of the things that we were talking about, I know you just said, Casey, like, oh, these are things you don't have to do.
But some of the listeners were going to tell us if you don't do, for example, downshifting or engine braking, you will fail the driving test in their country.
So it's a big wide world out there.
But anyway, here I am in America with my stick shift cars.
One of the last holdouts.
You and me both, my friend.
Moving on, an Ask ATP last week was with regard to design resources for developers.
So, you know, hey, I'm a developer who wants to make better designs, but I'm not innately capable of it.
What can I do?
And Jesse Martinez wrote in and wrote, I'm a technically minded designer that loves supporting developers as a hobby.
There are a bunch of people like me lurking on subreddits like UI underscore design, we'll put a link in the show notes, where we help improve people's designs.
There have been several occasions where I've taken on unpaid app redesigns by developers following Reddit interactions.
And then additionally, a handful of people recommended, I have no experience with either of these things, neither UI design nor a couple of people that recommended refactoring UI, which is at refactoringui.com.
Again, it'll be in the show notes.
which apparently is learn how to design awesome UIs by yourself using specific tactics explained from a developer's point of view.
So that is something you can check out as well, and we'll put it in the show notes.
That was more than just a few people.
That was the most recommended.
Yeah, that got so many reactions, responses that endorsed it or mentioned it that I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but I think I definitely have to now because of just the volume of recommendations I got.
I looked at it a little bit, and I think the reason it got so many recommendations is because it's broken down into bite-sized pieces.
It's not like you have this big thing dumped on your head.
You can go there for 30 seconds, click on one thing, and learn something you didn't know about design and be like, wow, I learned something, and it took like 30 seconds.
I don't know how deep that rabbit hole goes and how much content there is there, but I would suggest checking it out.
It seems like a...
an easy to consume resource that a lot of people have benefited from because the people who are recommending it have used it.
And they say, I did this thing and it helped me with my apps, you know, maybe in just a couple of small ways, but even that feels good.
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Oh,
Moving on, Jason Stanfill writes, as a Fortnite player, I thought I should mention that there's a deadline of sorts with regard to the whole Epic Apple thing.
Fortnite has seasons that last a couple of months.
Each season has an updated map and the goal of getting to level 100.
And you start at one each new season.
The current season ends, as we record this, tomorrow, which is Thursday, the 27th of August.
Each new season requires an update.
Without being able to update Fortnite on iOS, it will become virtually useless at that point, which I did not know and I appreciate.
I think Jason was the first to write in about it, but certainly others have written about it as well.
I knew that and should have mentioned it because Destiny and many, many other games use this same model.
In fact, Destiny was a late adopter of this model.
It has lots of different names, but the idea is to keep the game fresh, that there's a...
Some kind of cycle according to the calendar where everyone gets reset back to a certain position or there's a – it doesn't really matter.
Either there's a new progression up to a higher level or you get reset and then you work your way through this ladder during the course of the season and you get a bunch of stuff during the ladder.
Anyway, it's a way to keep people engaged.
But what that means is –
There is a timed cycle for new content.
And in the case of Fortnite, as we'll see in a little bit, it's not just a little bit of new content.
It's like if you are not on the same season as everyone else, you can't even play with them.
But we'll get to that a couple items lower.
Lots of epic stuff from the follow-up.
Surprise.
So Epic has said, quote, Apple is blocking Fortnite updates and new installs on the App Store and has said they will terminate our ability to develop Fortnite for Apple devices.
As a result, Fortnite's newly released Chapter 2 Season 4 update, which is apparently version 14, will not release on iOS and macOS on August 27th.
Sad trombone.
And macOS.
Now, Fortnite for macOS, you download from the web.
There's no App Store stopping you there.
But Epic...
for some reason that may or may not make sense, is also saying, yeah, and if you play Fortnite on your Mac, you're not getting the new season either.
i don't think there is a technical reason for that to be the case but there may be a kind of screw you reason or a legal reason or like well anyway we'll continue but that's that's just bad news if you if you play this on the mac that you're also getting sideswiped by this whole ios incident even though there's nothing stopping epic from putting i think from just putting the new mac version up on their website and you are pulling it down or updating i don't even know if it updates in place whatever
That's kind of bad.
Indeed.
The Verge writes, quote, players on iPhone, iPad, and Mac will also lose cross-play Fortnite multiplayer with non-Apple platforms, Epic confirms to The Verge.
That means the players on Apple platforms will be stuck on the current version of Fortnite, and they'll only be able to play with one another.
Womp womp.
so they won't have all the new stuff for the new season and they can't even play with the people who do so I guess they can play with each other if you still have the game and maybe keeping the Mac on the old version 2 means that the Mac people will be able to play with the iPhone people and that makes the pool of people bigger so there's more players for matchmaking I don't even know the logic behind it but anyway these are the sort of we talked about this before well as this court case winds on Epic's got this you know
this non-compliant version of Fortnite in the app store that lets people buy things, bypassing Apple's, uh, in-app purchase system.
But the viability of that thing rapidly diminishes once it's not keeping up with the rest of the players.
Um, and I don't even know if there's going to be that many, you know, normally new seasons come with new things to buy with those V bucks.
So maybe you can still buy old stuff with the V bucks, but the value of having Fortnite on the store for as long as this court case last is very diminished by the fact, by the seasonal model.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, a couple people are pointing out in the chat, you know, maybe it's with regard to code signing on the Mac as well.
We'll get to that in a little bit in the follow up.
But right now, as we're sitting here right now, I believe there is nothing stopping.
epic from properly signing the mac os version like on august 26th they still have their developer account and i think they could sign the new version of fortnite and just give it to mac users um in the you know weeks and months in the future that may change but anyway we'll keep going there's more on this later
Oh, so three hours ago, Tim Sweeney writes, Apple has said that they will revoke all of Epic's Apple SDK access for game development on Friday.
If they do that, we won't be able to update Fortnite on the Mac.
We understand from the court that Unreal Engine and other non-game efforts will continue to have SDK access.
Again, this is three hours ago as we record this from Tim Sweeney himself.
But today's Wednesday, not Friday.
Hey, I'm just telling you.
That's what I'm saying.
I mean, I understand the whole, anyway, we'll get to it.
The whole, you know, App Store versus your entire developer account.
That's a whole different thing.
All right, so tell me, John, about Epic, console makers, and corporate relationship management, Marco's favorite thing in the world.
That's such a great phrase.
Nutbunny's on Twitter.
By the way, if I use your weird Twitter name, it's probably because I couldn't find your real name or you didn't have a real name listed or your real name is too obscene to read on the air.
But anyway, Nutbunny's on Twitter correctly found the thing I was trying to think of the last show, which is like, I know Epic has sparred with console makers over issues like this, too.
And my example is like the console makers had found a way to...
work out their differences without triggering a lot more with Epic.
So we'll put a link in the show notes to two examples during the flare-up that I was thinking of, and it's related to cross-play.
So here's an article from March 2018 that says, Microsoft says they're working with Epic on possible Fortnite cross-play for Xbox One.
Cross-play is when people on a particular platform, like people on Xbox, are able to play Fortnite with people who have Fortnite for the PlayStation, right?
Yeah.
Obviously console makers, especially the dominant console maker, don't want that to happen because they want you to get a PlayStation and get Fortnite and tell your friends, hey, you should play Fortnite with me.
And they say, oh, well, the only way you can play Fortnite with me is you have to get a PlayStation, right?
And so they want more people to get PlayStations.
But if you're just a customer, that's not good for you.
You want to be able to play Fortnite even if your friend already has an Xbox.
You don't have to tell your friend, oh, you have to buy a whole new console, right?
This is still a problem on Destiny, by the way.
I have friends who play Destiny on Xbox, and I can't play with them because I play Destiny on PlayStation.
That's supposedly changing next year.
But anyway, that's what crossplay is.
Epic obviously wants crossplay to be a thing.
Because the more people can play with each other, the more likely a group of friends with different consoles at home are to get Fortnite and become customers and all play the game together.
It's actually surprisingly difficult to get any kind of reasonable-sized group of friends to sort of decide en masse to get the same console.
Most people don't buy every single console.
Most people just buy one.
And, you know, depending on the console generation, there's usually one console that is more popular than other, but it's still...
Significant percentage of people are going to end up with the other console, right?
So here is a couple months later in September 2018, an article that says, Fortnite cross-play on PS4 ushers in a newer era of the console wars.
And in the body of the text says, after months of bullish denials, Sony capitulated and will soon allow PS4 players to link up with people on Xbox, Switch, and mobile platforms.
Right.
This is a thing that Epic wanted that the console makers didn't.
And behind the scenes, much pressuring and arguing and perhaps even exchanges of money and promises and things happened.
And eventually, essentially, Epic won that battle and forced both console makers to enable crossplay.
Now, Microsoft probably wanted to enable crossplay because there are fewer Xbox players than PlayStation players.
They're in the minority.
And so they don't want, you know, those people to feel like, oh, well, you know, law of averages, most of my friends,
play fortnight on ps4 or you know whatever and i feel left out with my weird xbox so i gotta get a place in here but sony was the big holdout of saying we're dominating this generation why should we allow xbox players to play with us anything we can get to encourage even more you know we want to really lean on them when we're in the lead but the end result was epic basically won that and got cross play at least for their game and a few other games
across all consoles and that in turn opened the door for other you know vendors like other software makers like bungie to eventually work towards doing cross play as well like for the longest time they didn't even mention it and then when epic pulled this off bungie i think started to get the idea that you know this is a thing that we can do and they started negotiating with the console makers anyway this is an example of corporate relationship management
There's something that these console makers were doing that was clearly bad for users, like not being able to buy comics in the Comixology app on iOS for some strange reason.
Why can't I play with a friend Xbox?
It's the same freaking game, right?
And the other two parties were the platform vendor and the third party application maker.
And they were fighting with each other over this.
And in the end, the situation was worked out such that apparently the console makers and Epic all came to an agreement that they can live with and the users got the benefit.
That's corporate relationship management.
Apple should go to that school.
Microsoft has weighed in that they support a portion of Epic's injunction.
What?
Speaking of relationship management, hey, Microsoft, buddy, pal, remember we worked out that deal where, you know, well, we sold you Gears of War and you paid us a lot of money to develop stuff for your platform.
And, you know, there's money going back and forth between Epic and all these companies, a whole bunch.
It doesn't mean they're super big friends.
It just means they know that they need each other.
And in this case, Microsoft, you know, filed this brief that said, like, they didn't say anything about the App Store or anything about that, but it said basically Apple threatening to revoke Epic's developer, you know, account, basically stopping them from developing the Unreal Engine and everything.
That's bad for us because we, Microsoft, also have a bunch of games from third-party developers that use the Unreal Engine.
And anything that damages the viability of Unreal Engine in the market also potentially damages games that people are making for our stuff.
Because they say, well, we were going to use Unreal Engine, but now there's all this doubt around it.
So maybe we have to retool and use a different engine.
Or if we make it with this engine...
Maybe you have to pay us more money because now we can't we can't ever port this to Apple platforms because, you know, Apple won't allow it on there.
So suddenly the stuff we're developing is less valuable to us.
So we have to renegotiate our agreement.
So that's why Microsoft is chiming in here.
Right.
You know, I don't think they're super buddy buddy with Epic, but they recognize when their interests are aligned.
It's bad for everybody in the industry.
To some degree, if Unreal Engine becomes unviable on Apple's platforms, because the whole point of these engines is develop a game on this engine and potentially put it on multiple platforms.
And then as we record, it was a day or two back that a judge has ruled in the Apple Epic temporary restraining order.
And I think you will probably have more to say on this.
But my understanding is that Apple cannot prevent Epic from doing work that relates to Unreal Engine.
So in support of other companies and stuff like that.
But they are perfectly allowed to tell Epic to go outside and play hide and go screw themselves when it comes to Fortnite.
Since Epic made that mess and they made it for themselves, they get to clean it up themselves.
So that seems to be the short, short version, which I think makes sense.
I don't know.
I keep going back and forth on all this and I probably will for a while, but I think that that makes sense to me.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know all the legal stuff, but this is the type of thing where Apple was going to make changes.
You know, they had a deadline for terminating the account and they pulled the app or whatever.
And Epic did whatever the thing you do in court is basically says, hey, judge, tell us like before we're going to have a court case eventually.
Those things take forever.
But before that happens.
Like, while we're waiting for the court case to finish, stop Apple from doing these things that damage us.
And Epic, of course, said, we want our app back in the App Store, and we want not to have our account at Epic S for everything.
And the judge said, some of your requests are reasonable.
uh apple where is the quote um let's see this is a paraphrase of the judge's opinion during the hearing with respect to unreal engine that seems like an overreach the contract with epic international i'll get to that in a second is not in breach even if the contract with epic games is she says that it looks retaliatory to her so the judge thought as we said that that apple was being a bully and this is like a retaliation for you know the actual issue is let's talk about fortnight and what it did wrong and everything like that but because just because apple can
punish epic in this way it seemed like it was just retaliatory so again this is not a decision about like what is going to happen this is just while we figure out what's going to happen while this court case winds on and on for now apple you can't kill uh epics a developer account
Now, that's why I'm confused by the Tim Sweeney things because I know this temporary restraining order, you know, this isn't a decision on anything.
It just says while we figure out what the real decision is going to be on these things, Apple can't terminate the account.
That's my understanding of it anyway.
So I'm not sure why Tim Sweeney still says, oh, they said they're going to take away our stuff.
The nuance in this decision, we'll put PDF links if you want.
They're actually possible to read.
Like it's in regular English and not weird legally as you can actually read them and understand it.
is that there actually is a separate legal entity for Unreal Engine.
And there's these companies with different names that, you know, combine or whatever.
And anyway, Apple's argument is that Unreal Games, Unreal International, we understand this is all the same company behind the scenes.
And maybe you have two different developer accounts.
But as far as we're concerned, we take it as all the same thing.
And the judge's opinion is like, yeah, that's whatever.
I understand what you're saying.
But your beef is with this particular game, Fortnite, that broke your rules.
You can't just sort of do this, you know.
And now we'll do everything bad we can possibly do to you to retaliate for it.
At least not until some sort of court decision comes down.
And that's going to take a while, right?
And some other interesting facts out of the arguments that lawyers put forth.
I would suggest reading Sarah John's tweet thread about this because she's there just reporting what the different lawyers say.
So you can kind of hear their arguments.
And one of the arguments from one of Apple's lawyers, Richard Doran, he said, I think it's also a paraphrase.
Most of Epic's business has nothing to do with iOS.
The iOS platform is about 12 percent of Epic's revenue.
Most of their platforms are elsewhere.
Epic only went mobile in 2018 and they did so on Android and iOS.
All right.
So that was one of the questions of like, can Epic afford to just stick this out and say, you know, we're not going to fix our game.
We're not going to put an app purchase back.
We're just going to wait to see the result of this court case.
Right.
Even if our season ends and, you know, it becomes useless on not useless, but much less useful for people on Apple's platforms.
mobile gaming is huge mobile gaming i think is the majority of gaming revenue at this point like globally right but as far as epic's concerned they started as you know a pc uh developer and became pc and consoles and only recently entered mobile so even though ios and mobile are both huge uh ios specifically is a is only 12 and that's i mean that's a big chunk of revenue but it's not like it's 70 of their revenue or it's not even 50 so
That, I think, explains.
I thought it was much more of their revenue.
I didn't realize that their entry into mobile was so early.
And presumably Apple's lawyers would know how much it is of their revenue because they know how much they pay Epic and they know how much Epic's revenue is from their filings and they can figure it all out.
But anyway, tidbits like that are littered throughout this very short, maybe like six or seven page PDF.
So you should check it out.
It just makes me upset.
Every time Apple, in any way, whether it's a lawyer or one of their execs or a stupid study they do on the website, every time they try to defend their behavior around App Store rules and money hoarding, they basically set developers on fire.
they have such incredibly tone deaf characterizations and phrasing, you know, like their thing last month about, you know, or whenever that was, but the, Hey, about like how they didn't contribute to the app store with base camp.
Like the wording they choose to use, the arguments they choose to make, it makes me ashamed to be a fan of this company.
And it makes me extra ashamed to be a developer for this company and for this app store.
And yeah,
I love Apple so much in so many other ways for so many other reasons.
We're all such big fans of them, and it hurts me to see this company that I'm such a big fan of and that I'm so involved with be such a jerk in this other way.
They have such an incredible failure to read the room.
They have such an incredibly tone-deaf and...
a flat-out wrong view of developers and their role in the App Store and the App Store's role in contributing to the iPhone, it makes me so upset to see any of this stuff.
And they just keep digging and digging and digging.
Apple's arguments...
And I'm not even talking so much about, like, you know, the particulars against Epic.
Because, yeah, Epic's being a jerk in different ways, too.
I don't care about Epic.
That's not the thing.
Like, I'm talking kind of more broadly about their incredibly increased aggression towards in-app purchase in the last few months and, like, what they did with the word
press app like that's just like that's terrible like the the apple has been so much more aggressive um in general seemingly in you know the last year or so and especially in the last six months around like squeezing more and more out of in-app purchase uh exceptions and and rules i can't stand to be associated with them right now i just can't stand it like they are ruining their relationship among an entire generation of developers and
This relationship has always been strained.
The App Store has always... The whole concept of requiring app review and having all these rules and having rejections and all the different levels of enforcement they've had over the years and inconsistency.
This has already been a strained relationship ever since the App Store began 12 years ago.
But...
They have just taken a turn for the worst recently, so much so that I've considered the possibility—I know this sounds crazy—I've considered the possibility that, like, what if they want to get rid of some of these rules because they think it's a little much and a little wrong, too?
But they know that if they just do it, they might face a shareholder lawsuit.
So what if they are provoking government regulation by going so over the top that they are regulated and therefore then they can tell the shareholders we had to do this?
But I know that's unlikely.
Almost impossible.
I'm not saying that's what I think is going on, but I'm saying their behavior is so ridiculous in this area recently.
It's so over the top.
It's so insanely greedy and aggressive and hostile and just...
They're doing everything wrong from a developer relations point of view, from a corporate relations point of view, from avoiding any trust regulation.
They're doing everything as wrong as possible in this area.
So over-the-top ridiculous, so offensive, so just abrasive towards everyone, and so just awful.
unabashedly shamelessly greedy and stingy and just they're being such jerks about this whole thing I can only conclude as as like a hopeful point of view that where I hope this company has not gone insane that
I hope that this is all some big strategy to get themselves regulated because the more likely alternative is that they just are these massively greedy, horrible jerks now.
And I just can't stomach that.
yeah a lot of the the arguments when it comes to legal cases like it's a lawyer's job to find every possible argument and to use the ones that are most effective given the legal precedence and everything so if you see an argument in a court case and it seems really terrible in some respects it's like well but that's what court cases are about like you kind of have to check your shame at the door and say look do you want to win this court case that's why you pay me i'm a lawyer i'm telling you this is your strongest argument go with this and so they make arguments that
from the outside look ridiculous or silly or you know ineffective or put apple in a bad light but legally speaking may give them the victory they want and in general that's a calculated risk to say well most people don't follow details of court cases so that's fine problem in this situation is a lot of these arguments that marco was having a strong reaction to were made before a court case existed before epic sued them before any of this happened so you can't say oh apple was doing that because like in in a court case you use all the tools at your disposal
apple itself directly made these arguments essentially to the public as a form of pr and that's back when we were saying apple this is not this is not good public relations here you don't realize how you're coming off maybe to developers i mean maybe you're trying to appeal to users but developers see the same thing and in fact are paying more attention to it so that's that's a lot of the problem here and it's a lot of the exact same arguments like i think at one point there was a quote from somebody it might have been phil shill i don't remember of talking about how uh
how Epic uses metal, uh, in their games and how Epic was on stage with Apple, uh, saying how great metal was at very, you know, cause we've seen that at various, uh, WWDCs and other conferences and how Apple doesn't charge anything for metal.
And, you know, as one developer pointed out, it's like, this is not compelling.
It's not compelling for you to say, you know, all these APIs we give you, we let you have Xcode and we let you do these APIs and we pay to develop them.
It's like, yeah, you're a platform and we're third party developers.
That's how it works.
Like we, you know, like what do you expect to happen?
Like, you know, if you thought you could charge for them, you would.
you know it's a competitive advantage not to charge for them in your applications and anyway um open gl an alternative thing you deprecated so what are we of course we're going to use metal because you get rid of the API like you're going to not make a game it's like see how see how they love metal like that's i mean the whole conversion to metal that's an example of good corporate relationship management apple has strategic goals they want to switch to metal because they're going to make their own gpus their own system on the chips and they you know like
They want more control over their graphics destiny, but they need developers to go along with that.
So they found a way to work out a situation with the big game engine developers to say, we need you to get onto Metal.
I know you don't want to do it because your engine works okay in OpenGL now.
But here is, you know, the stick is we're going to take away OpenGL eventually.
And the carrot is, hey, you can be on stage and we'll show your games and whatever.
There you go.
You did it.
See?
Win, win, win.
Of course, now, when they're in a fight, that comes flying back and says, you seem to like us when you were doing the metal stuff, and we didn't charge you for metal.
Aren't we awesome?
It's like, that's not a good argument.
It doesn't make you look good, Apple.
Again, maybe in court that's good, but they made that argument before court of how great Apple is that they would provide these APIs for you.
We spend all this money to make these APIs, and you ingrates, and we don't even charge you for it.
I can't believe you ingrates, and it's just...
it's not it's not a maybe it's a good legal argument i don't know we'll see but it's it certainly doesn't play well with developers and i think uh users users who aren't listening to tech podcasts probably have no awareness of any of this other than apple and epic are fighting and fortnight broke on my kid's phone right and that's still not a good look for apple and
anyway well even that i i think that is you know we i don't think we because we are not like big fortnite players i don't think we fully understand the impact of that uh and i'm glad that you know listeners were in to explain things like the season which i didn't know about but like i i think often like you know right you know my kid has an ipad he uses it constantly the two things he uses the most for are youtube and minecraft
if you know he hasn't discovered fortnight yet he's a little young for it but i thought like what if this happened to minecraft what if minecraft stopped being available on the ipad and you know it stopped getting updates you couldn't play online anymore and maybe it even you know did the whole like you know developer revocation thing where it would stop launching
I think he would never touch his iPad again.
That would put him off the platform for a long time.
Like, here's what would probably happen.
You know, Minecraft is such a big part of his life that, like, we don't think is a bad thing.
And we support that, you know, with limits.
But, you know, we support that.
So it's such a thing that, like, if his primary Minecraft device stopped being able to run Minecraft, guess what we would do?
We'd probably get him an Xbox or a gaming PC, and he would just switch to that.
And he would never touch the iPad again.
So that would be a user on Apple's platform that they would just lose for a long time, possibly forever.
And I think while, again, while I don't give two craps about Epic, and I think they're being jerks in their own way throughout some of this, I do think that's not to be overlooked that, like...
It is going to be a significant cost to Apple's platform to have all these, you know, millions probably of gamers.
Now, like, you know, Apple's platforms have always kind of been second class citizens for major gaming.
But now this is like a major loss for them.
And all those gamers who were playing Fortnite on iOS devices, how many of those people are going to blame Epic for this?
Probably not a lot.
Epic's done a really good job of showing all of them this is Apple's fault.
Even though, again, I think it is mostly Epic's fault.
But that's beside the point.
What all these people are learning from this campaign that Epic is waging is that Apple's doing this to them.
This isn't just being fought in the tech press, in the developer press.
This is being fought in the public.
And Epic has brought all these users in.
And all those customers, all those gamers...
They're all going to have a pretty big reason to stop using their iOS devices or to beg their parents or to themselves buy a different system to play their games on now.
And that is going to hurt Apple to some degree.
It's not going to put the company out of business or anything.
But that is going to be felt like this is a significant difference here, like in this fight compared to other fights that mostly happen kind of like behind the scenes and closed business dealings.
And the companies didn't want to drag into the public or couldn't drag on the public.
This one is starting in the public and it's really, really big and it affects a lot of people.
And it's making Apple look like the big bad guy that, frankly, they pretty much are in this area.
To millions of gamers and millions of customers who before weren't part of these fights, weren't part of these discussions, didn't follow this kind of news, now they're in it.
And they're all going to get this horrible impression of Apple that could last a long time.
Yeah, I mean, something that's helping Apple a little bit here is that Apple's platforms are basically third-class platforms when it comes to Fortnite, right?
Because, like, the serious players are playing on PC because you can get the highest frame rate, the highest res, you know, and you can use mouse and keyboard and all that other stuff.
And then consoles are the second tier.
And touch input iOS devices is third tier.
Not that there aren't a lot of users because there are a lot of users or whatever, but, you know, it's only 12% of Epic's revenue, but 12% is still not nothing.
but in general i think apple has helped that like that people don't buy ipads to play fortnite right it's a thing they can do on the ipads that they have but if they get super into fortnite they are going to eventually get a game console or pc as they get older they will graduate from it because it's not the ideal platform for that type of game it's great that it's on there it's a
but it's not like, for example, losing Facebook on the iPhone because Facebook is natively like an iPhone.
I know this is a weird thing to say, but a lot of people read Facebook on their iPhone.
There is no first-class platform for Facebook that is not your phone.
That is the first-class platform, right?
So again, Epic is obviously not as big as Facebook and it's not as used by as many people or whatever.
Just to give an example, Apple's isolated from this a little bit because
It's bad if Fortnite never comes back on the platform, but every single one of those users can and probably was going to inevitably transition to playing Fortnite on a different platform.
I don't think anybody is willingly playing Fortnite on an iPad as they age out of childhood into teen years into adulthood.
If you're an adult, I don't know how many adults, unless they're really, really forced to and they don't have any other choice, are willingly playing Fortnite on an iPad.
if they have any way to get a game console or a PC.
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So, John, is it finally time to talk about antitrust in Apple?
Almost.
One thing I just want to clarify is I think I figured out Tim Sweeney's tweet.
Is this still a follow-up?
No, that's a topic, but this is finishing up the follow-up.
Tim Sweeney's tweet that I didn't understand.
All right, so this is more about Epic Games versus Epic International and Unreal versus Fortnite, right?
So Tim Sweeney is saying that Apple said they'll revoke all of Apple's SDK access for stuff on Friday, blah, blah, blah.
The temporary restraining order does not stop Apple from doing that to the account that owns Fortnite.
But there's a different developer account for Epic International that has the Unreal Engine stuff, and that's the one the judge said that Apple can't ditch.
So Apple can and apparently is still going to.
terminate the developer account that is used to build and deploy Fortnite, right?
Still doesn't explain why they didn't release one last version for Mac users right now because it's not Friday yet and you could put out the build, right?
And then the Mac users could have it.
And I suppose, you know, they can't do it for iOS because iOS is off the App Store, but there is no, you know, again, Fortnite's not on the App Store for the Mac.
But anyway, that's what Tim Sweeney is saying.
He's saying, oh, they're going to kill Access on Friday and that is true and the judge is not stopping them from it.
Anyway, that's how that works.
So I feel better that I understand the complaints now.
I still don't understand why the Mac version isn't out, but it's kind of a foot stomping like, well, if you're going to kill my account, I'm not going to rush for the last two days to try to get the Mac version out because what if there's a bug or something?
And then we'll no longer have a developer account for it to fix the bug and it'll be bad.
Antitrust.
Antitrust in Apple.
Marco has certainly talked a lot about this.
And I think, Casey, you weighed in on it a little bit.
But I've been avoiding...
the antitrust angle as in like the the legal government and just the general idea of the referees coming in and saying uh what you're doing is bad and we need to change the rules of the game so that you're not what you're doing is not damaging to the overall game and everyone who plays it right our economy um
And my opinion on antitrust is mostly shaped by my sort of formative experience of antitrust, which is the Microsoft antitrust trial, which was a very big deal in my life.
I was very big into the Mac and PC wars when I was a kid and was very anti-Microsoft.
all the, the media and explainer articles and, you know, stories surrounding the antitrust, the Microsoft antitrust child really sort of let me, gave me a surface on which I could bounce all of my thoughts and opinions and antitrust off of.
Right now.
I don't, I'm not a lawyer.
I don't know what the legal situation for antitrust is.
And you know,
I didn't know all the nitty-gritty legal deals of the Microsoft one.
I'm sure I won't know the nitty-gritty details of whatever may or may not happen related to tech and antitrust in the coming years because there are rumblings in Congress about that and there were those hearings and all that.
So I don't know.
But my personal yardstick for antitrust and when it's being damaging is based on something that was repeated a lot in the Microsoft trial and the Microsoft case, which was lots of things that you do as a company in our semi-capitalist economy.
to try to get one up on your competitors are fine until you become so big that you are a quote-unquote monopoly.
And then suddenly all the things that you did to get there, a whole bunch of them become illegal because it's fine to do this thing like, okay, well, if you buy a product X from us, you also have to buy a product Y, right?
It's fine to do that when you're still little.
Because if your customers don't like it, they can say, you're making me buy X when I just want to buy Y. I'm going to go to someone else, right?
Because there are competitors and they can go to them, right?
But eventually, if you become a monopoly, you tell them, oh, if you buy X from us, you also have to buy Y. And they can't say, I don't want that deal.
I'll go buy from someone else.
And you say, who else are you going to buy from?
We're the only game out there.
Now, obviously, in most cases, a monopoly is never literally the only game in town.
But there was a particular moment I remember from the Microsoft trust trial, which had me going, yes, finally, because as a Mac fan at that time, it was so clear to me that Microsoft was a monopoly.
Like that wasn't even a question.
I just wanted them to get to the part where they said, OK, given that you're a monopoly, are you allowed to do X, Y and Z?
But they had to argue all this stuff about the monopoly.
And at some point, one of the lawyers for the government side said to a giant courtroom, which was then filled with people in these pre-COVID times, it was, you know, the audience in the courtroom and everyone there, they said, or maybe it was in Congress, I forget where it was, but it was a big room full of people.
And they said, raise your hand if you have a Windows PC.
And everybody in the freaking room raised their hand.
Like, maybe there's one person in the back who didn't, but, you know, maybe today in this world where Mac and PC doesn't matter or anything, if you didn't live through it, you don't realize how prevalent Windows PCs were.
Nobody had Macs.
People hadn't even seen Macs.
When you'd say you had a Mac, they'd look at you weird.
Like, what the hell?
Why do you have... Like, Windows massively dominated.
Windows PCs were the entire market and just a bunch of weirdos who wanted to overpay for a slower computer because it was pretty.
Like, this is all, you know...
Pre-iMac, pre-Mac OS X, before all of that, Windows massively dominated.
And that demonstration, even though it is just Anik data or whatever, was hammering home the point, it's like, look, we all know that Microsoft is a monopoly.
If you have some business and Microsoft forces you to take some deal or bundle something with something else or uses their power as a monopoly to crush a competitor, you can go, you know what?
I don't like that.
i'm gonna switch to mac and they'd be like what are you kidding me nobody has max right you and like it was it's ridiculous right and it was such an easy monopoly because windows pcs were physical things that you could see you could just walk into any building in any city in the world and just go to every single personal computer and say is this a windows computer yes or no and just count them up and sure enough you'd find like 90 something percent of them would be windows pcs it was so easy to do
There wasn't any sort of like nuance to it at all.
And so that always informs my, you know, opinion of of antitrust is like it's fine to do all sorts of hard nosed deals.
And the way you can tell your monopoly is you can make the deal awful and people still have to take it.
Like that's when the referees need to come in because it's anti competitive.
Right.
Competition means you can.
you know, demand the thing of your customers or raise your prices.
That's the easy one because people always say, Oh, is the price raised?
But there are so many other things that you can do.
You can crush competitors by saying, if you, my customer do any business with that other company, I won't sell you windows anymore.
And if I don't sell you windows anymore, your business is dead because you have to have windows.
Cause what the hell else are you going to do?
That's how you can tell when you're a monopoly.
Right.
And after the antitrust trial, like both before and after, you know, on the internet and use that back in those days or whatever, um,
People would have all these opinions that didn't make any sense to me.
Even back then when the Mac was like 3% market share or something, people would say, well, Apple has a monopoly on Macs.
I'd be like, I don't think you understand what monopoly means.
Does Honda have a monopoly on Honda cars?
Yeah.
That's not I mean, yeah, they're the only company that sells Honda cars.
They have 100 percent market share of selling Honda cars.
But like that's not how it works.
Right.
And so, you know, everybody has a monopoly on the thing that only they do.
Right.
So you need some other kind of yardstick.
And back then it was like it was so easy.
It was market share as in.
you know just count up all the pcs and see which all the personal computers and see which ones are max and which ones are pcs how many sold per year how many install base would i pick a number it was really easy to do um and a lot of the sort of app store apple walled garden apples being unfair apple is a monopoly two thing that never stopped from you know the days when everyone just you know was complaining about apple even when they were three percent market share and just got louder and louder i've always said well look
Apple, yes, has a monopoly on applications on its own platforms, right?
But Apple doesn't even sell the majority of mobile phones, for example.
Like, not only do they not have 97% market share, they don't even have 50.
The biggest, you know, platform for mobile phones is Android.
And Apple doesn't have anything to do with that, right?
So if your measure of whether Apple is a monopoly is not simply, oh, well, Apple has a monopoly in Apple products, which is dumb.
If you look at the model that we use for the Microsoft antitrust trial, which is like, you know, market share, essentially, how many phones are out in the world and how many of those phones are iPhones, you'll see that they don't have a monopoly.
So like if Apple does something that users don't like.
Like, for example, charging 700% commission on everything in the App Store, that would decimate their third-party application support because everybody would leave, right?
Except for Facebook.
They said, no more free apps, and we get 700%.
So if you sell it for $1, we get $7, right?
They made a terrible deal, right?
everyone would just leave I would argue the current deal is not that great but go ahead right but I'm saying like how like the test of monopoly power is how badly can you screw everybody involved and they have no choice and and for from a market share perspective
If Apple does things that developers and or customers don't like enough, people can switch.
And Apple, by the way, will absolutely argue this in the current antitrust trials or whatever comes.
They will say people can and do switch from iOS to Android.
It happens all the time.
It's a thing that you can do so that, you know, showing that there is competition.
So if we Apple do something that's actually really bad.
there is someplace else for them to go.
Unlike Microsoft, where it was just not viable for you to switch to the Mac, especially back in the heyday of the Wintel PC, because almost all the applications you cared about weren't even on the Mac.
If you're using this point-of-sale software or...
Custom software you have run for your thing or tons of other applications that are only available on Windows or DOS or whatever, you know, like, but on mobile phones, it's not the same way.
There's much more parity, right?
So from a market share perspective, Apple certainly does not have a monopoly, you know, using the sort of measuring yardstick that was used in the Microsoft Unity Trust trial.
And for the longest time, you know, before all this, you know, for years and years of the App Store, as we were creeping up to this, this was generally the reason why I ignored any kind of
apple needs to be investigated for antitrustings it's like they're not in a microsoft position they can't turn the screws on everybody and get away with it because they're not only is there a viable alternative there's a more popular alternative right and that ratio that market share like apple wasn't creeping up to eventually dominate have 90 market share they've been holding steady or declining compared to android like it hasn't i don't think there's ever been a point
Where the majority of mobile phones and use mobile smartphones and use in the world were Apple platform.
Right.
The thing that's changed for me in recent years is not Apple's behavior, because in many respects, Apple doing things that are, you know, that make users and or developers angry.
and then us having reactions to them.
Obviously, it's coming to a head now, but it's always been sort of simmering in the background.
But that hasn't changed the general equation for me of like, okay, but then if users don't like it and if Fortnite and Facebook and Netflix all leave the platform, everyone will just switch to Android, right?
So that shows Apple's not a monopoly.
The thing that's been bothering me a little bit lately is
is a different yardstick other than just installed base of phones and ability to switch.
And that yardstick is a different statistic, which is not installed base, but share of money flowing through the mobile phone economy.
And when you're selling a physical good, like a Windows PC that comes with a Windows license that you pay Microsoft for, it's really easy to say you sell one PC, you have to sell one Windows license for it, and you figure out how much that PC maker pays per license.
It's a very straightforward thing.
But just selling a bunch of phones into the world does not directly translate to revenue that passes through those phones.
So even though there are way, way more Android phones in the world...
My understanding is that the majority, in fact, the vast majority of revenue that are profit revenue or profit.
I don't know if it's both.
But anyway, the vast majority of the money that we care about that flows through the mobile economy actually does go through Apple phones.
Is it because people buy Apple phones have more money because the phones are more expensive in general and therefore they have more money to spend?
Is it because iPhone users are more likely to spend money of any amount than Android users?
Yeah.
But either way, that is a very different statistic than how many phones exist in the world.
And that would mean that Apple may, I mean, we're kind of in the process of finding out, may actually have monopoly-level power when it comes to forcing companies to do what it wants because they are the gatekeeper to whatever the percentage is, 80%, 90% of the money flowing through the mobile economy, right?
And it would be interesting to see if anyone makes that argument, maybe when the government case comes, probably not going to come up on this epic one, but...
All I'm saying is there's more there's more to monopoly than just market share.
And what really matters in monopoly is what kind of power you have.
Now, I don't think that Apple currently actually has the power that Microsoft had to basically get its way because these companies need Apple because they need that 80 or 90 percent of revenue just because I think it's.
a little bit more fragmented than that.
And I also think the revenue would go with these companies if they abandoned Apple.
So if Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Epic all left Apple's platform and went to Android, I think the money would follow them because the people who currently have iPhones and are spending all that money would switch platforms.
But right now...
Apple's, I don't know what you want to call it, money share, is way out of proportion with their market share.
And that's the thing I'm keeping my eye on.
Because you can imagine if Apple's money share got to be, you know, 99% or 100%, and Android was just that phone that people get who never spend any money through their phone,
Apple would have a lot more power than it does now.
I think part of the battle that we're seeing here is a test case to see exactly how much power Apple has.
And thus far, Epic, I think, has shown that Apple has less power than Apple thinks it has because Epic is willing to defy Apple.
And Epic's not even that big in the grand scheme of things.
Right.
How much does it?
But they are a small fish compared to the biggest company in the world.
And they're willing to go head to head.
They're willing to take the hit.
They're willing to battle Apple on this front.
And it's a couple items that got pushed out of fall because it was too long.
Talking about other companies doing similar things.
I think people smell blood in the water when it comes to Apple.
And I think that shows that Apple does not yet have monopoly level power.
And what and that's why most of my other discussion of this topic has been Apple, you're doing stupid things.
Corporate relationship management is bad.
What you're doing is not going to work.
Right.
I'm telling Apple as a customer that likes their products that you're making bad decisions.
But at no point that I said, Apple, what you're doing is illegal.
Or Apple, what you're doing is immoral.
It's just stupid business, right?
You're making people like Marco Superman at you.
That's bad business.
It's their right to do things that are bad for their business.
But I, you know, I'm going to say that I don't currently think that anything Apple is doing, specifically Apple, requires antitrust.
intervention based on their current power in the market but i will say that writ large there needs to be new regulation in the tech sector to control the actions of all companies because when you go look at google it's like oh well google you know that's the place where you can change right google does all the same stuff or mostly most of the same stuff
And it's not because there's collusion or anything.
It's just because there are too few players.
And those players have found things they can do that make them tons and tons of money and give them tons of power.
And even though they are themselves are deadly competitors, you know, all the big tech companies are themselves deadly competitors with each other.
There's just not that many of them.
And that is too much power concentrated in too small an area.
And that's why we need new regulation to protect customers, to protect, not to protect developers specifically, but to protect customers and their data and their rights and everything having to do with that.
So I think absolutely there needs to be new and better legislation, which will be really hard for our broken system of government to produce it anytime soon.
But anyway, there needs to be that.
But I don't think Apple itself...
I could be convinced otherwise, you know, I'll see your evidence in court eventually if this ever comes to court, right?
But I don't think Apple specifically, anything that it's doing demands legal intervention.
I just think they're being stupid.
So what would you, if you were allowed to make changes to the App Store rules, what would you do?
It's not a question of like App Store rules.
I think there just need to be, it's so hard to do because there's so many different ways you can go with this, but like,
The example I'd always use is like everyone always wants to use consumer harm and they are so focused on prices like, well, the prices in the app store are low, like that downward price pressure that we always complain about from the software developers.
That's good for consumers, right?
Downward price pressure.
That's good.
Like the same kind of argument you make for Walmart.
Hey, Walmart's able to sell goods really cheaply.
Isn't that great?
But the power that Walmart wields over its suppliers and the power that Apple wields over its suppliers and the power that Apple wields over its developers, even though it results in low prices for consumers, is not good for sort of the ecosystem of our general economy.
So I would mostly be trying to target rules that require some kind of – require the big companies to –
certain certain rights of consumers need to be preserved like you can't do a thing that prevents like here's an example i don't necessarily agree with this one but it's an easy one to pull out you can't do a thing that stops people from being able to install whatever software they want on their phones right so side loading for example again we talked about this before i don't necessarily agree with it but it's an easy thing to say customers it's their phone they bought it you as a company shouldn't be able to stop them from installing stuff on it by voiding their warranty or whatever like you know like
DMCA and everything makes that difficult because of the whole anti-hacking crap or whatever.
But anyway, that's an example.
And that would be a protection of consumers because that would provide some pressure for Apple to make the App Store better, something they would never do on their own because they don't want to enable sideloading, but there was law that it forced them to.
That's a bad example because I don't agree with it, but that is an example of sort of a thing that would apply to everybody and that it would force more competition and it would force more innovation, right?
Because lots of things that aren't allowed on the App Store will never know what could have been created and what somebody bailed on because they thought it was an awesome idea, but they said, oh, that'll never get past app review, so they didn't do it, right?
And maybe we'll never get that review, but you can do it on Android then and have everybody sideload.
And then, yeah, but, you know, it's a thing that makes money and most people have money or an iOS.
You'll never know the innovation you're losing by having these closed platforms.
So things like that are right to repair is another example.
Like you should be able to bring your iPhone to someone else and have them repair it.
Right.
And.
Apple would complain it's a safety concern and only Apple can do it or whatever.
You know, and some of that is true, but a lot of it is just a way for them to preserve the money for themselves.
And that's anti-consumers.
So we have these consumer laws in various states that say if you make a hardware product, you can't actually stop people.
And this applies to like Tesla cars and everything else.
And you can't actually stop people from taking it to someone else and paying them money to fix it.
Right.
Right.
laws like that that are not oh you should have this rule in the app store but that are instead here's a class of things that we understand companies want to do that makes them tons of money but in the end if everybody does it it makes the world worse for all of us
Like that's the role.
That's the role of government.
Find the things that, you know, they're all the companies in some ways are, you know, competing for our dollar and doing all these things.
But eventually companies get enough power to start do things that benefit the company, but don't benefit literally anybody else.
And that's when you need, you know, laws to regulate the game to make it.
So, you know, I know you can do that move and I know it makes everything for you better.
And I know no one can stop you.
But the fact that no one can stop you means we're going to make a law that says you can't do that.
Right.
So I don't have any specific recommendations, but that's the type of thing I'm thinking of.
Yeah.
I don't know.
To answer my own question, I don't know.
I don't know what I would recommend.
I feel like I feel like this distinction, this seemingly arbitrary distinction that Apple has come up with where you can sell something in the quote unquote real world and
And you can do that in a very user hostile way without Apple taking a cut.
And that's all right.
Like you can sell stuff on Amazon.
You can book an Airbnb rental.
You can take an Uber or Lyft.
And Apple doesn't necessarily need a cut of that.
You can schedule an in-person and pay for an in-person gym class, but it's in person.
So it's okay.
Okay.
But suddenly, if it's virtual or fake, if you will, I don't literally believe that, but for the sake of discussion, fake or electronic or what have you, suddenly Apple deserves the money, according to Apple.
And that distinction...
While it may have made sense early on, I don't particularly understand it now.
And I finally had the time earlier tonight to read Ben Thompson's last couple of posts about this.
I think they might have been members-only posts if they weren't.
I'll link them in show notes.
The big one wasn't.
Okay, thank you.
But one of his points was, and I'm going to butcher it because I'm not as smart as Ben, but basically if the marginal cost for selling the thing is effectively zero, you don't have to physically create another one.
then, okay, Apple gets 30%.
But if there's a non-zero marginal cost, you actually have to have room in a building to teach this exercise class.
You're actually staying at somebody's Airbnb.
You're actually buying something tangible from Amazon.
Then maybe there should be some other tier wherein Apple gets a cut, but maybe it's not 30%.
And maybe...
Those companies should be allowed to offer their own payment systems and so on.
And I feel like I understand the spirit of what Ben was going for, but I think it gets really complicated really quickly.
And I think that in order for it to be fair for everyone, for users, for developers, for Apple...
Whatever the system is should have a really, really simple elevator pitch.
And to be fair, the elevator pitch or the summary of today's system is everyone pays 30%.
Asterisk.
Asterisk.
Double dagger.
Yeah, exactly.
But I think you take the spirit of what I mean, though.
And I don't know what that simple answer is.
I just really don't.
I mean, I don't think it's possible to draw that kind of distinction in a reliable, enforceable way.
I'm actually being a little bit more ambitious with what I hope to happen now.
Not that it will.
There's, I think, almost no chance of this ever happening, even with regulation.
But I think one of the big challenges Apple has always had with App Store rules is
is that many of the rules are fairly straightforward, objective rules of like, you know, the app can't crash during app review.
That's bad.
You know, it has to do what it says it does, etc.
You know, it can't be malware.
It has to, you know, adhere to certain, you know, restrictions on how it uses certain hardware features.
And, you know, like there's so many parts of the rules that are sensible, defensible, and objective.
Yeah.
and therefore should be fairly easy to enforce consistently and fairly and in a way that everyone can predict before they go and develop an app or submit it.
So it's fairly easy to avoid stepping on the straightforward, obvious parts of the rules.
And most of the App Store review rules, and I would even say most of the value of them to customers, falls under that category.
we're only really talking about a relatively small handful of very vague, very controversial, unpredictable, and inconsistently enforced rules.
And I think it would be better for everybody, including Apple, eventually long-term, but better for everybody, certainly better for developers, and I think even better for users and for the whole ecosystem,
if the only rules that were enforced were objective, easily defensible rules.
And so that's why I don't think you can really make a lot of strong cases for any of these rules that have to do with whether Apple can demand 30% of your money based on how and why and for what your app is processing payments.
So what I would actually hope to see long term, and again, I know this is really optimistic.
I don't think it'll ever actually happen.
But what I would hope to see long term is for Apple, and I know that sounds crazy.
Give me a moment.
I will explain.
To just drop the requirement and let people do in their apps whatever the heck they want to do with payments and credit cards and money and anything else.
You know, this sounds crazy.
I know.
Oh, my God.
What if there's all these scams and people take their credit cards and everything?
Well, you can do all that in Safari.
And the world has functioned.
You know, yes, there are some scams.
There are also lots of scams in Apple's in-app purchase systems that use subscription billing and misleading things.
Like, yeah, there's a lot of scams in the App Store, too.
And, again, the world has functioned and gone on with it.
Like,
Credit cards are pretty protective about fraud and people blow money on stupid stuff all the time through legitimate and illegitimate means with credit cards and with games and everything.
So I don't think there would be a meaningful consumer harm.
And you can look at the web, again, bringing this as another example because it's a huge one.
You can look at the web and you can say, okay, well, the web, you can buy things with your credit card on sites.
However...
There's recently, you know, relatively recently, been this additional option that Apple offered called Apple Pay on the web.
And Apple Pay on the web is awesome for me as a consumer.
Whenever I see a way to buy something with Apple Pay on the web, I always choose that option.
And I've even occasionally not bought something because it was too hard to do, especially if I'm on my phone.
I don't want to type in on my billing info, whereas I probably would have bought it more easily if there was an Apple Pay button.
And so there's actually a big incentive for people with web checkout or purchase things to add Apple Pay support.
And Apple does get some kind of, I think, very small percentage of those sales.
I think it's on the order of like 0.1% or something like they get some kind of small commission as part of the credit card merchant fee.
But, you know, they don't get a lot of that.
But, you know, Apple's paid for that.
And, you know, there is huge benefit to me as a customer of using Apple Pay.
There is pressure, therefore, on the website to integrate it.
And it has this wonderful user experience.
I don't see anything wrong with a long-term vision in which apps can do whatever they want with payments in their app.
If they're scams, app review can still take care of that.
I'm not pushing for sideloading still.
Again, even in my crazy new world here, this thing's never going to happen.
I'm not pushing for sideloading or alternative app stores because that's a whole can of worms.
I don't think we need to go there necessarily.
So AppReview can still function as a way to filter out scams and bad actors and things that are breaking more objective, easily defensible rules.
But it's just too messy in the real world to try to govern in a way what they ostensibly do with these rules, to try to enforce rules that are consistently and predictably and across all apps.
They just can't do it.
For instance, I recently learned from Tiff, actually, who bought an Instagram ad, that Instagram ads are purchasable directly in the app.
i have no idea how like how this is okay like instagram is owned by facebook i'm not sure you know that yeah right instagram facebook is bigger than epic facebook ads i i have no idea if this is true or not but i would bet you can probably buy facebook ads and ads in their app too because you can buy them in instagram and like why hasn't apple demanded 30 of all of instagram's ad revenue on ios
Oh, because they can't.
Because, yes, John, they're too big.
Like, Apple couldn't anger them that much.
I have no idea why it's okay for Instagram to sell ads in their app, and yet it's not okay for a lot of these other things that Apple has rejected.
And this, this kind of inconsistency is never going to go away.
You know, you look at the WordPress rejection from, from last week and it's like, and even that's like, it's a weird, vague, blurry line of like whether this should have been allowed or not.
And it's all these complexities about how, how do you define the purchase and what is WordPress versus the app and the service?
Like there's all these, all these blurry lines.
Cause that's the real world.
In the real world, we have a few, you know, we have some simple cases where the rules are clear cut and make sense.
Then we also have a whole bunch of really complicated things where it's kind of vague as to whether it should be allowed or not.
They're never going to win that fight.
They're never going to find a way to consistently enforce this rule without the problems they have now of just being just angering everybody, get constantly getting in disputes, having unpredictable, inconsistent enforcement of everything.
And that has always gotten them in trouble with the app store always since day one.
And their recent incredible increase of aggression in this particular area, which seems to me like a desperate way to drive up service revenue when everything else is constant.
But hey, that's just me.
Their incredible aggression in this particular area to squeeze out another few percent of profit margin for this quarter or whatever.
I don't think it's worth it.
I think they're doing so much more damage.
So long term, I would be totally pleased and happy if they would just have a consistent, easily enforceable rule of do what you want in your app and you can use our payment system if you want.
And then Apple, again, as I mentioned a few episodes ago, would be forced to compete.
Because their payment system has a lot of big advantages.
For the same reason why I love using Apple Pay on the web, I also love buying subscriptions to things with Apple's system instead of someone else's system.
Because it is easier.
It is faster.
And I know that when I want to cancel it, I'm not going to have to call anybody or do any weird jumping through hoops.
I can just cancel it and that's it.
And so there is still that consumer pressure that like app developers will still have huge incentives to use Apple system because their customers will demand it and they'll get higher conversions as a result.
That's why I would still use it for overcast.
That's why I would still use it as a customer of as a user of all these other apps.
And I would, I would subscribe more readily to something that offered Apple system than something that doesn't.
That alone would be a reason why most apps probably would still choose to use Apple system.
And that would be totally defensible on Apple's part.
They could still charge their same rates on that because they are providing legitimate value.
And they're convincing you to use it not because of a giant stick that they wield, but on its merit.
Imagine how nice that would be to choose to use Apple's net purchase system.
because of the merits it brings you, rather than to have to be forced to use it and have all this crap going on with all these rules that you have to tiptoe around.
Otherwise, Apple will demand 30% of your entire business that has nothing to do with them.
And I frankly like Apple's counter arguments to this hold so little water.
Their counter arguments like the consumer harm side is mostly not there.
Like if they would allow other payments, it's mostly not there.
And I think the market would sort that out just like it has on the web.
And any argument that goes towards paying Apple to fund the App Store is 1,000% BS because whatever revenue the App Store brings in from Apple squeezing this 30% out of developers, that makes up a few percent of their quarterly revenue.
compels in comparison to the value of the app ecosystem to the iPhone, which is way, way more of the company's revenue.
Because the iPhone wouldn't sell at all if it weren't for all these third-party apps.
How many people do you know who would buy an iPhone if it couldn't run any third-party apps?
I bet it's not a very big number.
I know, yes, the original one, blah, blah, blah.
That was a long time ago.
These days, the value of a phone is the apps it runs.
And in particular, a handful of very big company apps that everybody wants to run.
And a phone that can't run those apps is not going to sell.
And Apple, without the iPhone, is a shareholder lawsuit.
That's for sure.
A new CEO.
Everyone gets fired if the iPhone is not selling.
So that's way more important.
And the value of the apps is such a massive part of all of Apple's hardware platforms that they make way more money from than this stupid services category that keeps having them screw their customers over.
They're framing it as like, oh, you have to pay your way, and that's how we justify this.
But that's not the reality.
That's not why the App Store is here.
You know what's also really important to Apple?
The bathrooms on their campus.
How much money do the bathrooms bring in?
You can see it's a ridiculous argument to start separating things out when like, okay, there's a lot of value to that in other ways.
They're pretty important.
Sometimes you've got to just fund something because it's important to the rest of your business that makes money.
The App Store, they're double dipping.
They have found a way to make significant money by squeezing all of us from something that they would be running anyway because it has massive value to their hardware platform that makes them way, way, way more money.
Apple would be in great shape and would have huge motivation to run the App Store for free.
They don't deserve any percentage of our money for running the App Store.
We are in a symbiotic relationship here.
We have software that we sell or make money from, and Apple has a platform full of users.
By us having our software on their platform,
Everyone benefits.
The users, Apple's platform, and therefore Apple, and us by making the apps.
We all benefit from that.
That's why they do it.
And so Apple doesn't need any percentage.
All they need to do is cover their credit card fees, and they can do that with 5% or less.
They don't need all this from us.
They're taking it because they can.
And again, it's a bad look for so many reasons.
And the really, truly sad part about all this is that this is like a drop in the bucket to them still.
They're destroying their reputation.
And by the way, Sean, you know, being an Apple fan for so long...
We've had a fight a long time to try to convince the world that Apple is not just greedy jerks about everything.
And they are now showing the world that they totally are greedy jerks about everything.
this kind of reputation takes so long to shake off i i just i wish they wouldn't put themselves in the position like it's it really is it's it's like your best friend is like in front of a crowd start and starts to tell a racist joke and you're like oh no oh god no no no no stop stop please don't do this because you don't want to see them look like a jerk
And then they just keep digging and digging and digging.
You're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, stop, stop.
This is how it is being an Apple fan right now.
They just keep digging and digging and digging and just looking horrible.
And they don't seem to know or care or even realize it because they seem to be living in an alternate world where their behavior is defensible.
But anyway, so to answer your question...
the rule would change after all that um i think long term the all these like weird subjective distinctions they try to make about when they deserve their 30 and when they will permit you to not contribute to their app store um are mostly bs and unenforceable and
It's full of vague edge cases.
It always has been.
It always will be.
And there is no way out of that that can be consistently enforced and reasonable to everybody except giving up that revenue as a requirement and actually just earning it competitively.
So what you described is actually pretty hard to turn into legislation.
But giving your examples there, you came across two things that are not related to antitrust, but are examples of the kind of legislation that we should have but don't.
One example, and we have laws like this all over the place, but we don't have this specific one.
You complained about when I subscribe to something and then it's like a pain in the butt to get unsubscribed because like you have to, you know.
you know send a letter or call someone on the phone or whatever a very simple straightforward consumer protection law that companies would fight tooth and nail but that i think we could actually get past even in this country is uh you companies must allow you know for any subscription service customers must allow unsubscription through the same venue that subscription happened so if you subscribe by mail companies must allow unsubscription by mail if you subscribe by phone companies must allow unsubscription by phone
You can offer all the alternatives, but the law is whatever venue the subscription takes place in, you must also be able to do the subscription.
So if you subscribe on a computer.
I think that is a law in California already.
Right.
But this is an example of a very straightforward consumer protection law that industry hates because they don't ever want to be told what to do.
But consumers would be like, yeah, that seems fair.
And so they get passed.
Right.
Another example that you gave of, you know, when we talk about Instagram selling the ads or whatever, Facebook owns Instagram.
For many, many years now, the part of our government that's supposed to decide whether it's okay for one company to allow another has been just saying, sure, whatever.
Yeah, you can buy them.
And we all know big, powerful companies like Facebook –
Right.
Right.
Right.
that and this was true of microsoft that if any company starts to get some kind of momentum say in the social networking world maybe with a photo sharing app facebook will come along and say if we can't exactly copy what you're doing and do that we'll just buy you because we have so much money and it's worth the money for us to just buy you and then absorb you into our hole and now we don't have to worry about you as a competitor anymore that's exactly the type of thing that our government is supposed to examine and say that doesn't seem like a great idea to me
Buying television stations used to have all of these, you know, precedent of like, well, we don't want you to own too many television stations or television and radio combined.
All these rules that used to exist to try to not let anyone get too much control over the media.
In recent history, it's been a free-for-all to the detriment of everybody.
So those are examples of non-antitrust laws that are relevant to the tech sector that could be passed that could help all of us and help provide a more competitive market.
And I think those kind of targeted things, like targeted laws like that that have nothing to do with antitrust but just have to do with, like,
regulating the marketplace we need laws like that for this new marketplace relatively new marketplace of apps and digital things and i think we can come up with reasonable common sense laws in that realm a few of those they would they would affect all stores not just apple and those those would go a long way towards helping settle this um one of the things that casey said before and you touched on as well about apple deserving revenue for like
You know, or you buy a physical thing and Apple doesn't get a cut of that.
But if you buy a digital thing, suddenly Apple deserves it.
It's and I was thinking I think about this a lot of like, you know, I don't know.
I don't remember if this was any of the court transcripts, but like what must the reasoning have been inside Apple when deciding on the initial sort of decision of like, well, physical stuff that you can just enter a credit card and whatever.
We won't touch that.
But for digital stuff.
Um, you know, initially just the apps themselves, but eventually in-app purchases and subscriptions and all that, any digital stuff will get the 30% cut, right?
How do they come up with that rule to begin with?
Does it make any sense?
It doesn't make any sense from a deserved perspective at all, because the deserved perspective in Apple's made these arguments in itself is like,
Well, you know, it's customer acquisition.
Like we're giving you access to our billions of users and that's how you're getting new purchases of your thing or new subscribers to your thing, right?
But that is exactly true of the physical stores as well, right?
We're giving the people who sell physical stuff access to all these users too.
But somehow we don't deserve the acquisition of that customer, but we do deserve it when it's a digital thing.
It's the same customers, right?
It's not like, you know, so deserve is not a factor at all.
Not that that's even a concept that really,
matters in anything because it's all just about relationships and power dynamics but forget about deserve what i think i what a what i can imagine might be a reasonable rationale for this rule to begin with was uh when apple comes on the scene with their new app store or whatever
But like non, you know, physical good businesses have established business models already.
Whatever you're selling, if it's a physical thing, if you're renting space, if you're teaching a class, if you're selling, you know, a car, like whatever, like physical goods, those business models are established.
So Apple, I think, would have correctly recognized we can't parachute in and say we get all we get 30 percent of all car sales now.
Like, there's no room for you, Apple, in the car sale business model value chain for you to take pretty much any percentage, but certainly not 30%, right?
And repeat for any kind of physical good.
It just, there's no way they could insert themselves into that.
That would have been too much of a barrier to the growth of their business.
They say, fine, physical goods, existing business plans.
But for digital stuff, a lot of which Apple, quote unquote, invented, not really, but like,
They develop themselves.
They developed a subscription system for their app store.
They developed just the purchasing of apps.
They developed, you know, in-app purchase, like all these things they developed.
That's not an existing business model and relationship because, again, the parties are the consumer, the developer, and Apple, and they're making this thing together.
and so there is no existing business model with no room for apple to take a cut so that's they said okay well digital we're going to take our cut and you can even think i'm saying okay well physical goods are going to be physical goods but the future of our business is digital goods and more and more games are more games more more things are becoming digital like for example games which when they were rolling this out were still mostly sold on plastic discs and today are mostly sold digital or i imagine they're mostly so difficult but anyway the trend is clear
digital is the future so if we're going to put our stake in the ground we'll say physical goods you have your business models we can't insert ourselves in digital we'll we'll you know we'll try to take a cut of everything doesn't make any sense from a apple deserves perspective doesn't make any sense from a yeah but why what is different about this even from a marginal cost perspective
Like the things that Ben was saying about you could come up with percentages based on whether the thing has marginal cost.
That makes sense from a corporate relationship management perspective because that's an example of a compromise that you could come to that has rationale to say, we understand that you have to pay some incremental costs for every one of these things.
Therefore, our percentage has to be less.
Like that's the way Apple can work that deal out.
But that's more of like an internal deal making thing and less of, you know, less of a philosophy for the entire structure.
And a good example of the physical versus digital thing is e-books, right?
E-books are entirely electronic and Apple didn't invent them.
But it just so happens, stupidly, as I wrote about in an article about e-books ages ago.
ebooks decided that they're going to take the business model of physical books and just use that one.
Like there is an existing business model for physical books involving publishers, authors and retailers and all that stuff.
And when ebooks came around, the industry grew up saying, oh, yeah, the paper book model ebooks were going to use that same model.
Royalties, publishers, authors, retailers, you know, the whole nine yards down to the point where when the book went from hardcover to softcover, the ebook price would decrease.
Because the models were so joined at the hip, right?
I can find a link to my old e-book thing.
You can read about it.
But it was grim.
It's better, slightly better today.
But the book business was very dumb in many ways, right?
But that's an example of a digital business.
where Apple has had a lot of problems and where they haven't been able to get such a big foothold because it was a digital business that would model itself on a physical one.
And like I said, in the physical businesses, there's no room for Apple to parachute in and say, 30% for us.
Because all the parties involved are like, who the hell are you?
You don't get 30%, right?
And obviously, because e-books aren't physical, eventually, through wearing them down, you can kind of, you know, because there actually is 30% there because there's no actual book.
Like this...
It works itself out, but it was interesting to look at as an example of Apple's possible rationale for the physical versus digital divide, which is, what can we get away with?
Can we get away with asking for 30% for physical businesses?
And you just look around and say, no.
Can we get away with digital?
And the answer was like, yeah, probably.
But it turns out...
In a bunch of cases, not really because the digital businesses that are like the physical ones say no room for you.
And then eventually in the digital businesses where there are big, powerful players, if Apple tries to hold the line as they are now, it turns out maybe not really there either because no one wants to give you 30% of the Fortnite V-Books and no one wants to give you 30% of the Instagram ads and Facebook on Instagram.
And it's like their rationale was like, it's not flimsy, but like so sort of, it's non-principled.
It's like literally what can we get away with?
And it just so happened that what we can get away with had this kind of dotted line down the middle.
It's like it kind of looks like physical versus digital.
We can make that argument.
But that I don't think is the reasoning at all.
So it's not about what they deserve.
It's about what they thought they can get away with.
And what they thought they can get away with and what they can actually get away with, I think, are diverging.
I would even say it's probably even simpler than that for like why they don't take physical good commissions is they probably – that probably puts them in a much messier and more risky place with disputes and chargebacks.
I think it could be that simple where like when you have an Apple in-app purchase transaction, Apple is the merchant.
You are paying Apple directly.
If you have an Apple Pay transaction on the web, you are paying the merchant directly, and Apple Pay is just like part of the credit card intermediary system.
And so when there's a dispute on a credit card payment, the merchant is the one who gets screwed out of that cost, not the credit card company, not the customer.
The credit card company will refund the customer, and they will pull that out of the merchant's account, and the merchant just gets screwed.
And so any dispute that would arise from an in-app purchase, Apple would be screwed out of that money.
And I think it probably puts them in an easier position with the credit card companies when negotiating what to do about chargebacks that I bet if Apple just is only doing digital goods, then they can probably defend a lot more chargeback things.
Whereas for physical goods,
If a merchant ships you a physical thing that costs money and then you do a chargeback, the company has to be a little bit more careful and there's probably different rules and different procedures and different amounts of liability that everybody has in that process.
So I think it probably is much more likely as simple as Apple didn't want to get involved in the physical goods disputes area.
Whereas with digital goods, disputes are much more straightforward and the cost of what somebody is out who gave you an e-book for free is zero instead of some kind of massive amount of money that they paid to build a car that is now somehow missing in the dispute process.
So part of what Apple can get away with is dictated by laws.
And again, laws about the sale and refunding and liability and physical goods, lots of those, very well established.
Physical goods have been around for a long time.
Laws surrounding the sale of digital goods and the rights of customers and everything like that.
very practically non-existent compared to the laws of involving physical goods.
So again, what can we get away with?
Where can we insert ourselves?
And where will we be limited?
If they were trying to do things in the physical world, like you said, there are many, many laws and regulations and things that they would have to do right off the bat, right?
It's much harder to deal with that, right, than the digital world where – and I think the idea was because this is a digital world that Apple in its envisioning of itself is inventing, right?
Like we're inventing this world.
We're innovating.
We're doing digital subscriptions or whatever.
we can do whatever we want we make all the rules because everything is just bits and we're the bit company and there are so few consumer protection laws and laws relating to refunds and everything like that that if we decide that developers can't give refunds then we'll just we'll be the only ones who give refunds and if we decide that if we don't want to give you the refund we won't no one's going to stop us because there's no laws surrounding refunds based on and again
There are state laws and there, you know, there are digital laws related to digital commerce more than there were before.
But compared to the world of physical goods where there's so many regulations down to the specific regulations for specific kinds of physical goods, like if you're, you know, I mean, to give an example, if you're buying fertilizer, there's much more in different rules now than there were like a couple of decades ago for lots of very sad reasons, right?
Right.
buying anything like live animals, buying power tools, buying cars, like specific, very targeted laws.
If you think about all the laws involving buying and selling physical goods and how detailed they are and how specific they are, then compare them to the laws surrounding the buying and selling of digital goods and you realize –
The digital world is extremely unregulated, which is great for competition when everything is working well, but when a few large players come to dominate, it means they get to set all the rules.
And it just so happens they all seem to pick rules that look very similar to each other.
Again, not because of collusion, but mostly because...
Those rules benefit the big companies and give them more and more power with which they can crush their competitors, leaving only one company being, what, by and large?
MomCo?
Pick your... What's the Mom1 in Futurama?
Anyway, that's the future we're trying to avoid.
And whether they know it or not, that's the future these big companies are trying to achieve.
And I think everyone would be sad, including them, if they actually achieved it.
They just, you know... We've said that Apple thinks of itself as a scrappy upstart.
But I think all these companies...
have have a difficult time envisioning themselves as as bad or evil except for facebook they probably recognize that they're bad right i know i bash on facebook so much some a lot of it is joking but a lot of it is not i'm sorry i don't like them but they deserve it they deserve all of it facebook facebook makes apple look like saints like like apple is like you know your good friend who's really being a jerk recently facebook is like the devil themselves like it's like
There's a very different level of evil there.
I mean, I think even Facebook, probably even at the very highest levels...
They're losing sight of their effect on the world, but I think they probably mostly believe that what they're doing is good for the whole world.
Obviously, they're playing the game.
Like, we want to win.
We're Facebook.
We want to defeat our competitors.
And they have no problem doing the Microsoft-style tactics of buying your competitors or crushing your competitors through Facebook.
quote-unquote anti-competitive mean and all that stuff or whatever but the end that they're pursuing is a connected world where we can all communicate with each other and yada yada and yes they get a big cut of that but in the end i think they actually buy into that division they're just very very mistaken about what it is that they're actually doing and that's that's why i get angry at them because it's like i'm i'm done i'm
I'm not going to be able to convince you that what you're doing is bad.
I just need to stop you somehow.
Speaking of anti-competitive monopoly thing, you know, if you're worried that Apple has a monopoly in the mobile market, like...
social media like twitter exists and but facebook i feel like is they're not at microsoft level still again it's hard it's hard to convey exactly how dominant microsoft was at its peak uh facebook is not as dominant as microsoft was but
it's it's much it's much closer facebook at least in the u.s anyway obviously the rest of the world has different social networks but in the u.s and i thought the last stats i've seen recently like facebook however many billion users facebook has it was a extremely visible uh chunk of the pie of human population of the planet and that is disconcerting
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All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
And James Andrews writes, John, when you did your Mac OS reviews, how much actually was that OS 10 still at that point?
Or did you were you during the Mac OS era?
No, I was in the Mac OS X era and the OS X era.
Okay, see, there you go.
Wow.
Gosh, it's been so long, John.
It's been so long.
Literally, as Casey was reading that question, John went into the show notes document and put a space between Mac and OS.
because i feel like you could still say generically mac os which is the mac operating system there isn't there was no product name that that was based on next step unix blah blah there was a classic mac anyway yeah it looks gross when it stuck to you who is it that always insists on capitalizing the m does gruber do that gruber does it yeah yeah no i don't like that anyway i hate i hate the lowercase m don't get me wrong but i feel like if that's what they named it then that's anyway go on there's a question
Let me just try this all over again.
John, when you did your Mac OS reviews, how much of the review changed between the review content based on beta releases and final release?
Or how much of the OS could you bank on staying the same versus stuff that changed?
Was it consistent?
I remember during the run of this show, you complaining and moaning unjustifiably about screenshots and how you had to take them 84 times because every single time you took them, something changed.
But I would assume that some of the content also changed as well.
So what do you say to James?
I can say that it definitely wasn't consistent.
That's for sure.
The fear was always there.
And the worst case scenario, I mean, screenshots were bad and just gave you that sinking feeling when you'd see the GM build and they change some subtle thing that appears in every single window.
And you're like, oh, because it takes so long to arrange those screenshots and everything.
Yeah, that's bad, but it's kind of a known quantity.
The worst ones, though, were if there was some, and this is, you know, I had so little access to Apple back then, not that I have any access now, but I had even less access to Apple back then, like zero access to Apple.
It was just me out there in the wild, and it wasn't even like social networks like Twitter where I had a chance to bump into and talk directly to Apple engineers, you know, secretly or in public, right?
So there'd be things in the OS, and I'd be like...
is this supposed to be this way or is this just a bug or is this policy here an intentional policy change in this subsystem or is it unintentional right and so or you know behaviors like anything that i can think about
It was never clear to me whether it was on purpose or not.
And the worst thing that would happen is there would be some kind of new change in behavior or UI or whatever.
And it would be like a thing that I had a lot to say about.
And I would say I would spend like a page and a half explaining why this is bad or, you know, a page and a half explaining why this is good or whatever and just make it a big part of the writing.
And then three bit is in.
They would totally change that.
It's like, but I was just building my review around this thing, but it turns out you changed your mind or it was just a bug or that feature isn't shipping in those OS and you pulled the code for it out.
And then you have to rewrite.
And as hard as it is to make screenshots over again, at least you say, here's the old screenshot.
I just got to make the new one look like that.
It's a fairly mindless activity.
Rewriting, especially, I always try to have some kind of narrative structure to these reviews.
Rewriting the review, especially at the last minute-ish, like as in the second to last or, you know,
maybe even the final beta or whatever, and they change something, you're like, oh, even if it's a bad thing, like I spent, you know, three pages yelling at you about this and you just pulled the feature.
Now I got to remove all that and fix it all together.
You know, it's just, that was the worst.
And no, there was nothing you could count on.
Like things would change up to the last second.
Like you could never rely on, even if it's like, oh, this is the GM build.
No, the really real GM build, you always had to go for every build and more frantically as time went on.
Install it as fast as you can and go through every single thing you wrote about over and over and over again and say, is this the same?
Is this the same?
Is this still true?
Is this still true?
It was it was really bad.
It was a little bit better in the early days when I could publish my review like a week after the OS came out and nobody cared.
because you'd have to go into a physical store and buy it and whatever.
But eventually it became downloadable and eventually it became free.
And eventually I had to have the review up the second the thing was downloadable by consumers.
So the timing of making sure that you got the final build and verified everything in it and rewrote and retook screenshots and had it ready to go the second the thing was released.
That's why I still have like, you know, you have those school nightmares.
I have like the Mac OS X review deadline nightmares.
Just not cut out for that kind of pressure cooker and stuff.
It's the reason, you know, I'm kind of glad I'm no longer in that business.
It was exciting, but also terrifying.
And yeah, Apple really didn't do anything to help there.
Michael Boyle writes, what approach or tools do you use to filter spam email?
Do you use G Suite on your domain and use built-in Google spam filtering?
Other third-party email hosting services?
Third-party dedicated spam filtering services?
Built-in email services on a basic web host plus spam assassin or other?
Client-side filtering like Spansive or just the built-in Apple Mail filtering?
For me, I have a Google-backed email address and I rely on their stuff and the stuff built into Apple Mail and that's it.
What about you, Marco?
I've gone through a bunch of things over the years.
I used to do Apple Mail junk filtering back forever ago.
It was always okay.
It was never great.
I never used a lot of the alternatives out there.
I've never used Gmail, but I have used Fast Mail for a very long time.
And for a while, I used their built-in spam filtering, which is just running, you know, I assume it was like, you
um, either swim assessment itself or something like that, some kind of, you know, server side Bayesian, uh, filter thing.
Uh, and then for a long time after that, I used mail route.
Uh, they were a sponsor of ours a few years back.
Um, and I, and they gave us free accounts.
And so I, I've been using mail route coincidentally, literally for that entire time until this week, I literally just switched away from it this week.
Um,
and and it's not that they did anything horribly wrong but they've had a few additional um false what's the thing where it reports good mail as spam is that a false positive or a false negative it's a false positive yes okay it's confusing because spam isn't positive but what's supposed to be doing is identifying spam and it has identified something as spam a positive identification but it's false
Got it.
Anyway, so MailRoute has been great for all these years.
But in like the last month or so, there's been a noticeable increase in the false positive rate.
And so I decided to try switching away from it.
I haven't actually ended my account or anything.
I'm just like temporarily appointed my MXs directly at FastMail.
And I'm trying FastMail's built-in stuff only.
One of the good things about FastMail's thing is it allows you to train it.
Like you can set like you can tell it like, you know, this folder, which I've set to my archive folder.
Use this as the training example of not spam.
So anything I archive is, you know, trained to be not spam.
And then there's a separate folder.
There's one folder, which is like what they've filtered as junk.
There's another folder that you can designate any folder in your IMAP account.
You can designate as like, learn that this folder is spam.
And so I'm putting stuff into that folder that I manually catch that they didn't catch, which honestly is not that much stuff.
They're actually catching most of it.
So I've only been doing this for a few days.
So take this with a grain of salt.
But so far, FastMail's modern spam filtering, which is, I think, significantly more advanced than the old spam assassin type server, I think it's pretty good so far.
um and it's also noticeably faster than mail route for for new stuff to come in and everything i don't think they're doing gray listing as aggressively and everything so it's actually quite nice so anyway that's my solution is currently fast mail just they're built-in filtering uh with my training boxes for for some minor adjustments but up until very recently fast mail with mail route in front of it john
So I use Gmail and Gmail spam filtering, and it's mostly OK.
I mean, I still have to wrangle it a little bit, and there are certain things it just doesn't seem to want to learn.
But in general, it doesn't bother me.
But I have many email addresses, so I have exposure to a lot of other ones.
Back in the day when I was using POP and IMAP and everything, I used SpamSiv and loved it.
But, you know, it's kind of my, as I talked about before, my sort of switch from client side to server side.
I'm happy to have it all server side.
For server side, I also use MailRoute on one of my addresses.
I think MailRoute was a former sponsor.
And I'm happy with it, how it works on my one account that I use it on.
I get the emails that show me the messages that it's not sure about or whatever, and it's right 100% of the time.
But that's a low-volume account, so it's pretty easy to do.
But I'm happy that I have that because it catches a ton of stuff.
What I want from a low-volume email, I want it to actually be low-volume.
But if you get any publicly accessible email address, it suddenly becomes flooded with spam.
Instead, what MailRot does for me in that account is...
I have several accounts actually going through it.
It makes it so they are low volume.
Only legit emails get through.
The thing I want to talk about, though, is I also have, you know, multiple.
But anyway, Apple iCloud accounts and iCloud accounts come with their own email address.
Right.
And I use Apple Mail on my phone to receive them because I have no choice because it's the only thing I can use is my outgoing email client.
So I have to set it up.
And so it's set up with one or more of my iCloud accounts.
I use Apple mail on my phone and I'm surprised when this question said, uh, where is it?
The, you know, built in Apple mail filtering and you two referred to it as if it's a thing.
As far as I've been able to determine my iCloud Apple email address does no spam filtering whatsoever because the spammiest messages in the entire universe come in like a flood to that email address.
Um,
like viagra russian mail order brides mesothelioma like that like the worst kind of spam things in languages that i don't understand you know chinese language things russian italian just like how can you not tell this is spam this is the easiest to detect spam in the world and it's like 100 of it comes through
And then what I do in reaction to that, what I still do is I use this horrible Apple Mail interface and hit the little reply button and scroll down to find the file as junk thing.
I do that hoping against all hope that hitting that button somehow tells something in the Apple Mail world.
Yeah.
Thumbs down for Apple Mail.
Slow down.
Why do you need it to send outgoing mail from your phone?
To send outgoing mail, you have to configure an account in the Apple Mail client.
So I have to configure a account.
Oh, because you're saying you use Gmail normally, so you're using the Gmail app normally.
right yeah well you could but why not just add gmail though because apple mail and ios can't handle my gmail account are you kidding it can't handle that much mail it would just like i i think i did that in the early days there's no way there's no way like i don't want apple mail anywhere near my gmail account and i just there's no way it would be like i don't even want having to try to download that amount of mail each day in the background or whatever it's doing it like just
Like, in theory, the accounts that I use with my Apple Mail thing, I just use my Apple ones because I'm like, well, I know the Apple Mail client will work with the Apple Mail server.
So I feel like they're a match set.
But I have to have one configured because you can't send outgoing mail through it until you configure an account.
Fair enough.
Finally, Chris Anderson writes, like many listeners, I'm sure I've amassed quite the collection of cables over the years.
USB-A, micro USB, lightning, Ethernet, HDMI power, etc.
The list goes on and on.
Any suggestions on how to effectively store and organize all those cables at home?
I'm sure one solution would be to downsize the collection, but you never know when you're going to need 20 USB cables all at once.
I don't really have a good answer for this.
So, Marco, do you have something good here?
I would suggest not storing or organizing too many of these cables.
Whatever you are currently using, I would say, and you might be using more than you think, like actually add up what you're using and keep in reserve like 20% more.
For the very common types.
For the very uncommon types, I would say keep one to two of each one that you still have any potential use for in your house.
Obviously, if you don't have any devices that use FireWire anymore, you don't need to keep any FireWire cables.
That's an easy one.
Not everybody practices this, but that's an easy one.
Just throw away any cable that you no longer have a device for.
But yeah, for stuff like, you know, USB cables, well, yeah, we do need a lot of USB cables, but almost everything that needs a USB cable comes with a USB cable also.
So you don't need to keep that many in reserve.
You're basically keeping in reserve like either cables for specialty needs, like super long or super short ones, or cables to replace other cables that get worn or broken or lost.
And that, unless that happens a lot in your house, like if you're burning through, you know, maybe keep the USB-A to lightning ones that your kid's iPad uses because those will get burned through a lot.
But otherwise, like, you know, you don't need to keep most of these cables.
At any given time, like everyone's had one of these stories in life.
I've been there, trust me.
where you don't have the right cable.
Right now, I actually have this going on right now.
I don't have an HDMI cable.
I need one.
I don't have one.
I have to order one.
It's going to take three days to get here.
Had I just kept an extra HDMI cable at some point in my life, maybe I wouldn't be in this situation.
Anyway, we've all been in a situation where you need a cable and you have to go to Best Buy or something.
And you have to get the stupid gold-plated one for $45.
And you're just like, oh, I know I'm being ripped off, but I need this cable today.
I can't get any drones or trucks to deliver it to me same day.
So I have to just eat it and just buy it.
And then that scars you for life.
And then after that point, you'll never throw away a cable.
Because what if you need this someday?
Because you were burned once.
And it's important to be able to...
examine this feeling and this trauma and this past battle that you fought and learn this lesson from and try to unlearn it because chances are that doesn't happen very often for almost any cable type and you're probably doing yourself a disservice by keeping like three bins worth of cables of which you will only ever use maybe three or four of and
Most of those cables are going to sit around for years and years and years until you finally realize, oh, it's been a while since I've used a parallel cable.
I guess I can finally throw this away.
So ideally, don't let it get to that point.
Ideally, go through that process of throwing things away as you get them.
almost every device that i buy that comes with a micro usb cable i just throw it right away like literally like i like empty the box out over the trash can i take the device out and i empty over the trash can the manual the usb a to micro cable and like the little plastic thing that holds it in the box like just dump it all out all that's garbage get rid of it
There's no reason to even keep a micro USB to A cable for me now because I have so many of them all over the place that when a new one comes into the house, it just goes straight into the garbage.
I'm almost to that point with Apple's lightning cables, Apple's lightning to A cables.
But again, we're burning through those because we have an iPad problem.
So we're burning through those kind of quickly these days.
So I'm keeping those.
But like...
Even like certainly a USB A to B cable, almost anything that has USB B port comes with a USB A to B cable.
As you're transitioning to USB C, we need even fewer of these old cables.
If it's something that I'm bringing with me for travel, it doesn't need to be USB A at all because my travel setup is all USB C. Adopt a strategy of aggressively throwing things away as you go.
how many ethernet cables do you really need you know it's more than zero probably but i bet it's less than 15 um you know how many hdmi cables do you need well how many hdmi inputs do you have in your house three to eight probably total like like so do you really need more than eight hdmi cables total including the ones that are already connected to the tv probably not
You can kind of do this kind of exercise.
Anything that you think odds are pretty low I'll ever actually need this many of this thing, just throw it away.
And ideally, the cable collection that you should be left with after doing that kind of thorough and ruthless purging of your collection should be so small that you don't need to put much effort into organizing it.
It should organize itself because there should only be a handful of cables left.
John, how is your attic in terms of cable management?
Poor Chris just wanted to know how to store and organize cables, and we're all just telling him to get rid of his cables, which he just specifically said I didn't want to be told to do.
My life is complicated by the fact that, like, the Marco rule of, like, when you no longer have devices to use a cable, you can get rid of them does not help me because I don't get rid of my devices.
I have devices that need SCSI cables, so of course I'm going to keep the SCSI cables.
Well, then keep the SCSI cable in the box of the thing that actually uses it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But anyway, I have a lot of cables, and having spare cables is handy, too.
But...
uh my my sort of management technique for this and by the way the two things you mentioned interestingly hdmi cables and ethernet tables i am chronically low on and you know it's constantly annoying me like if i need to hook up like a single other device by ethernet i find out i have zero ethernet cables in the house and then i buy one right and every time that happens i'm like i have zero ethernet cables when i got the mac pro i actually did buy some new ethernet cables but i think i'm using all of them so i think i'm back to zero same thing with hdmi
i have i found a hdmi cable that went bad that was driving me batty for a little while uh back before i got my mac pro and i put a big like piece of tape on it that said bad because it wasn't totally bad it would work sometimes oh my god john it was the only but here's the thing it was the only one i had in the house like every other one was connected to a device oh my god you couldn't i think it might have been when i got my playstation monitor this was literally the only one that i had
I couldn't get rid of it because then I could not use it at all.
But it was bad because occasionally it would conk out and have to unplug it and plug it back in.
But it was better than zero.
But as soon as I got my, you know, got back on my cable buying spree, the bad one goes in the garbage.
Right.
So my my advice for storing and organizing cables is to treat your house like a cash hierarchy for cables.
And have the sort of the registers or L1 cache be the cables you actually need to use with your devices, the Marco rule, right?
So when I got my whole big Mac Pro setup, I had a big pile of cables that no longer plugged into anything in this room.
Every single one of those cables went to L2 cache or maybe L3, whatever my attic is, right?
Yeah.
uh hdmi cables i have the connected ones i have an accessible small amount as my l2 and then my l3 is i have a tupperware bin where i keep hdmi cables you know now that i have more of them than i need right so have a caching hierarchy and what you can do with the caching hierarchy is you know just in the ones that you use all the time like constantly reassess those if you literally have no micro usb devices that you use that should not be you should not ever see that cable and as you graduate cables up the hierarchy you
You will eventually sometime come to like one of these Tupperware containers and you'll open it.
And you and at that point, you'll realize either that the cables have become so old and brittle and disgusting.
You need to throw them out because they're gross and they're probably broken.
Or B, you realize, actually, I don't have any devices that use this cable anymore.
And you'll just throw them out.
But you need to get them.
you need to get them out of your life before you get them out of your house that will help you with organizing them and if you think you need you have so many cables that you need literally in your life that you need to organize them into like people like the idea of having a big drawer that you can pull out and see all the cables but that's too much in your life unless you actually run a computer repair store or something you don't need that ready access to these cables they can go into the more distant caches that
You'll know they're there when they need them if you need to write down where they are or whatever.
But then you care less about them being neatly coiled or divided or labeled.
They're out of sight.
And the out-of-sight stuff, when you go on your various purges, that's where you purge from because you'll find that easier.
When you literally haven't seen it for a year and you come upon it again in a Tupperware thing, it's much easier to dump it than if it had been sitting coiled perfectly in a little drawer next to your desk the whole time.
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John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, it was accidental, and you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, 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-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
They didn't move.
so right before we started recording something appeared in the after show section of the show notes and it says john's mac pro woes oh no yeah what's going on i saw this too i right at that moment i'm like oh no this is not good
oh john what's what's up well should we pour you a sprite one of those no it's one of those things where it's like one of those uh not a slow moving disaster but like it's kind of a gradual thing where i'm trying to pinpoint like when did this all begin because it begins innocuously and you don't pinpoint the time right here here's how it began i'm pretty sure this is this is where it began um
uh i was back from my vacation and i was making another photo book as i do after my vacations this is gonna be the first non well it's not the first non-long island photo book it's gonna be the first year without a long island photo book i've made photo books of my trips to other places like walt disney world or whatever but anyway
I was making my photo book, and I made it all up, and after you submit the photo book, it takes a while to upload all the images, not because of my connection, but just because the server on the other end is slow.
So it's like, all right, fine.
Apple Photos is preparing the photos and uploading it and blah, blah, blah.
So I left.
I left.
I was like, fine, you go upload these computers.
And then I just watch a TV show with my family, and then later I'm like, oh, yeah, the computer's probably done doing that book.
And I came back in, and the screen was off,
And I'm like, oh, it must have gone to sleep.
It must have finished the upload and gone to sleep.
But then I couldn't wake it up.
I was like, huh.
I tried space bar, mouse button.
The fans were going, but nothing was happening.
So I went to another computer and checked.
Couldn't ping it.
Couldn't SSH.
And I'm like, well, I don't know.
Maybe the thing crashed something in the photo extension.
Who knows what could have happened?
It was so long, though.
I'm like, surely the book went through.
And so I hard reset my computer, held down the power button, the thing booted back up.
I could see in the email there was a confirmation email, and I think the book is actually being shipped to me now.
So I'm hoping when the book arrives, it hasn't arrived yet, but I'm hoping when it arrives that it will have all the pictures in it.
Anyway, I think the book actually did go through.
But that was the first instance I can remember of...
I couldn't wake my computer up.
And then a couple days later, a similar thing happened where I wasn't doing anything of note in particular, but then I went up to my computer to wake it up.
And it didn't wake up.
Like, it was asleep, dead asleep, right?
And then I'd hit the space bar and the fans would spin up, like it's coming back to life, right?
And I could hear my hard drive spin up, my few spinning hard drives in there.
But it wouldn't wake up.
Same deal.
Can't SSH in.
Can't, you know, can't ping, can't do anything, right?
And yes, I have SSH enabled in this computer and all that other stuff.
It's a thing I do all the time.
Um...
I don't think I had time to investigate it then, but then like the next day I was thinking about it.
I'm like, wait a second, because I'd been messing with my sleep settings because I've been doing some long running stuff.
And then at various times I have a Mac configured to never go to sleep, but I manually put it to sleep sometimes.
And I also have it scheduled to wake up in the middle of the night and do things.
And for a while I was like, maybe it's waking up in the middle of the night and flipping out about something or whatever.
But eventually, after a couple of days, I was like, all right, maybe there's something wrong here.
So, you know, I do an experiment.
Put my computer to sleep manually, which I hadn't done in a long time because I've been doing those long-running tasks.
Try to wake it up.
Doesn't wake up.
Hard reset.
I do that experiment a couple times, and I start to come to this drowning realization that my computer no longer wakes from sleep.
right that's undesirable and i'm thinking what changed recently and it's hard to pinpoint because you're like when did this really happen was the photo book thing that really the first one or did the photo book didn't really crash like what's what happened recently so i i start going through basic troubleshooting stuff right
Maybe I started down the wrong path, but the first thing I'm always thinking of with sleep-wake is I go into PM set, I'm looking at the sleep-wake log.
When I first got it and tried to stop it from waking itself up from stuff, I had set up a lot of systems for looking at all the sleep and wake reasons and everything like that.
But the problem with this situation was it would go to sleep and the logs would all say, yep, totally, I'm going to sleep just like you told me to.
And the next log message would be booting up.
like there was nothing happening like when i thought i was waking it up it never got to the point where it woke up like there were no other logs so the last log message would be i'm going to sleep and the next log message would be hello i'm booting right
And so my sleep-wake logs and everything else weren't helping.
Then I went in and just said, okay, let me try all the different sleep settings.
Power an app on and off, spin hard drives up on it, like all settings that I had configured and messed with earlier.
But I'm like, maybe there's something wonky about something or others.
Let me see if changing any of these software settings helps.
Nothing helps.
No matter what I had it set to, you put it to sleep, and that was it.
It would not wake back up again.
Right?
Then I'm starting to, well, I think I did a really reasonably sensible thing, which is, like, I have Big Sur on an external disk.
I'm like, well, one of the things that happened recently is upgraded to 1015.6, right?
That was, like, recently, like, last week-ish or something, or I don't know.
Anyway, it's a recent OS update.
It's, like, maybe 1015.6 broke sleep on the Mac Pro, and it's not the type of thing I'm likely to hear about because nobody has these computers.
Let me boot into Big Sur.
So I boot into Big Sur.
It's Beta 5 at that point, right?
Yeah.
i put the computer to sleep doesn't wake up and you know i repeat that put the computer to sleep in big sir doesn't wake up i'm like all right all right now now i'm suspecting hardware because if this is a software thing it's not 10 15 6 and it's not big sir beta 5 because they both do it and it's exactly the same symptom so now i think i have a hardware thing so i'm like okay hardware thing the first thing i look at can you guess the first thing i look at on my desk
Your screen?
Why would it be your screen, though?
No.
USB hub.
Always suspect the USB hub because they're like, well, you know, I've had this USB hub.
This is the one piece of hardware I've still had that I use with my old Mac Pro.
So I'm suspicious of that.
So I'm like, yank that out of the computer, right?
Just disconnect it entirely.
And this is such a pain because due to my wiring thing, I actually have my keyboard and mouse wired and they go through the hub and
So I don't have to have the two cables snaking.
Anyway, I switched to, you know, using my keyboard in Bluetooth mode, which I normally don't know, just because it's inconvenient.
And I switched my mouse to Bluetooth mode.
Disconnect the USB up.
Doesn't help.
And now I'm like, all right, scorched earth.
I am removing...
everything from this computer hardware wise but before they do that i end up going like the apple support page and it's like you should do an smc reset you should do an nvram reset you should do all these other things or whatever like all right i go through the motions i do an smc reset i do an nvram reset you should spin in a circle yeah i do it like i do all those things right because they recommend them right they also recommend that eventually getting the hardware things disconnect everything from your computer that's not an apple keyboard mouse and monitor like
I can do that, right?
I disconnect every single thing, disconnect all the external hard drives, disconnect all the hubs.
Literally, the only thing connected to this computer is an Apple monitor, an Apple keyboard, and an Apple mouse.
Put the thing to sleep, won't wake up.
right so i'm like okay all right all right still think it's hardware because how could it not be hardware like big sur did it and uh you know what the hell is catalina also did it it can't it can't be the software update like two totally different os's you know are different enough have this exact same sentence right so i'm like okay
What other weird ass hardware I've got?
Well, I've got the spinning hard drives in there.
Maybe one of the hard drives is going bad.
You know, if a hard drive ever goes bad, you get weird errors, right?
And one of the things that happens when you wake up from sleep is the hard drive spin up.
So maybe one of the hard drives is like is pulling too much power and like undervolting the whole, you know, motherboard or it's tripping some safety measure or there's a bad bearing in it and it can't spin up or like God knows what's going on.
Let me just for a very brief time register my continued disappointment that you have the 2019 Mac Pro and you also put spinning hard drives in it.
That's the greatest.
One of the reasons I like it is because I can put them in there because it's way cheaper to get, you know, 16 terabytes of storage inside my computer if I had to do that in SSDs.
You know, I already spent a lot.
Anyway.
So I go in there, and by the way, this is the beginning of the opening the computer phase of this operation, which lasted a long time, right?
This computer, as I've said before, is way harder to get to the inside of than the old cheese grater, because that door you could get off in a second.
I used to take that door on and off with the cheese grater, the old Mac Pro, under my desk.
I would just go under there, flip, poop, thing comes off in two seconds.
This thing...
it's an ordeal to get off i have to take the procedure i ended up with is like if you try to take it off when you've seen it in a little picture and did you see the picture where it is in the relay uh thing where i showed a picture of my desk become a relay member everybody and go look at the you can see a picture of my desk at home i think i tweeted it too eventually anyway
It's on a little table.
And if I try to pull vertically the Mac Pro case off, it's actually hard to continue to pull perfectly vertically straight, starting from a position that's like a desk height, because it's a tall case and you end up like, I mean, I'm a tall person, but you end up, it's hard to, you have to really pull it off exactly straight.
If you do it a little bit of an angle, it's bad, right?
So my procedure was...
disconnect all the cables of course because remember you can't get the case off without the cable so disconnect all the cables find some place to put the cable so they won't slide down behind my desk because my desk is has is against a wall and has a wall to its left and a thing to its right so my cables like if they slip down to the floor i have to i'm on my belly crawling under there to find them again so i like had a big piece of masking tape and i'm like taping them so take the cables out
tape them to wherever they're going to be lift the mac pro off of the little mini table put it on the floor pick the thing twist it up lift perfectly straight up very very carefully put that thing away pick the mac pro which is very heavy by the way up again put it back on your desk and now you can work on it so i did that i disconnected both of my spinning hard drives
I plugged it and the power to them, by the way.
So it's three connectors.
It's two little SATA connectors and like a power thing.
Disconnect all three of those cables, put the case back on, put it in, put it to sleep, wake it up, it wakes.
Like, all right, well, at least I found the problem.
And this is many hours into this because I said it really quickly here.
I'm trying to say it really quickly.
But remember, every time I do this, it's a hard reboot of my computer and
and you know and i'm taking off these cables i'm crawling around and like it's just this is absorbing all of like a saturday right i'm like finally found what it was so i'm like i was relieved to get that you know that thing out of your head of like at least i know what the problem is now i don't know why the problem is these spinning discs but whatever i found the problem i'm so hoping the problem is your u-shaped piece of metal god i mean like the piece of metal does nothing right but but obviously the hard drives are hard drives are in that
I know, but, like, you focus so much on, like, you know, how ridiculous it was that this, like, you know, basic piece of metal was whatever hundreds of dollars that it was, and how could you, you know, how hard could it be to make a piece of metal?
They came with the 8-terabyte hard drive, which was, like, I suspected that one immediately, too.
I'm like, I didn't pick this 8-terabyte hard drive.
I hate when I don't pick the hard drive mechanism.
I picked the other one, which is a Western Digital Red, but I didn't pick whatever the hell this Toshiba thing is in here, so I immediately suspected that.
So I was so relieved that I'd found the problem, but annoyed because I'm like, oh, what am I going to do now?
Because...
Again, it's like 12 terabytes of storage.
I can't replace that with an SSD.
I really need to have the spinning disk.
So I'm like, okay, well, just set this aside.
I went off and I did some other things.
I did a driving lesson with my son or whatever and then had dinner and then I resumed it.
I'm like, okay, well, now I'm going to resume messing with this.
What I really want to know now is...
Which hard drive is the culprit, right?
So again, we begin the procedure, and there are multiple combinations here.
You would think the only combination is plug in one hard drive, test it, and if it doesn't work, you know it's the other hard drive, right?
But there are more combinations than that, because remember, there are three connectors.
Maybe it's just having the power connector connected that does it, right?
And I made some mistakes where I disconnected one drive, but I didn't disconnect the cable at both ends, so technically that drive was still connected to power, even though the data wasn't connected.
So...
multiply by another like three or four or five or six opening and closing and attempting to sleep things and every time i did it connect drive one connect drive two oh i forgot i that first drive one test was invalid because drive two is still connected to power disconnect both drives but still have the power connected i'm doing all these different combinations and every single one of them i put it to sleep it doesn't wake up
right and i'm like well i guess you know i i like maybe it's just if either of the drives connected it's bad maybe my motherboard is bad maybe the sata thing is bad and by the way yes i ran apple's hardware test which seems much wimpier than it used to be like it didn't take a long time to run i'm like please check all my ram do all my stuff like this hardware test should take forever it was disturbingly quick to run apple's hardware test anyway
I did all that testing.
I'm like, no.
In every single one of these scenarios, if I have that thing connected in any way, the thing doesn't wake from sleep.
But then I get the little itch and I'm like, wait a second.
And so I take the thing and I unplug all the cables from it and I try it, put it to sleep, try to wake it up.
It doesn't wake up.
i was like but that was the thing that worked disconnecting everything is the thing that worked and then i realized because i had you know i i knew this was the case because i had a procedure for putting it to sleep which was put it to sleep and then wait a full minute after putting it to sleep before attempting to wake it because sometimes when you put it to sleep it takes a little while to actually go into sleep depending on what's going on you used to be able to gauge that by you know you can gauge it by the fans turning off
This made me appreciate slash not appreciate how quiet these fans are because I'd have to put my ear up to the thing to make sure I heard when the fans spun down.
And what I think is that time I had the thing in where it woke from sleep, I had not waited for it to fully go to sleep.
And so what I was doing is not actually testing the problem because if you hit the space bar or the mouse button before it really goes to sleep, the screen turns back on and it's fine because it never got to the sleep phase, right?
Yeah.
and i guess i just didn't give it the full minute or maybe the air conditioning was on and i thought the fans had spun down but they hadn't but anyway now now i'm back to zero after an entire day of this i'm back to zero because i'm like no totally disconnecting the hard drives also doesn't let it wake from sleep so i you know at this point i took the entire hard drive chassis thing with the hard drives and the bend piece metal just out of the machine i put it over there right now
Now I'm looking at other hardware.
I'm like, all right, hardware, what's the problem here?
You know, hardware test says it's nothing.
I have two GPUs in this thing.
I have my big fancy 5700, whatever it is, W5700 XT.
And then I have the crappy 580X that came with it.
I'm like, I don't use that 580X.
It's just in there on the off chance that some program can use more than one GPU, like it's in there for computer purposes, but otherwise nothing is connected to it.
Let me get that out.
So I take out the GPU that I'm not using, right?
So I'm slowly stripping this machine down to basically closer and closer to stock configuration, where it's just an Apple monitor, an Apple mouse, an Apple keyboard, Apple RAM that came with it, the internal Apple SSD, and an Apple video card, which is not the one that it came with, but it is one of the built-order options now.
and everything's all apple but the computer sleep try to wake it up doesn't wake from sleep and again every test comes back normal i repeated smc resets and did you know nvram and just did everything that i could think of like this this has to be hardware right then i'm starting to get desperate now and i'm like all right i need some more data let me boot into windows and see if windows can sleep and wake oh god you're getting desperate
Yeah.
Did Windows ever sleep and wake up properly?
On my Mac, yes.
Windows would properly sleep and wake up.
And I spend time on Windows.
I play Destiny in Windows.
Like, you know, that's the whole reason I have it.
Like, you know, I've explored the world of Windows treatment of HDR, which is extremely confusing, right?
But, you know, for the most part, it works.
But I know sleep and wake works because, like, the default Windows settings are to go to sleep.
So, you know, it works, right?
So I boot into Windows.
I reconnect to my one external drive that has Windows on it.
I boot into Windows.
I put the thing to sleep.
I wait for the fans to spin down and for it to go to fully to sleep.
Hit the space bar.
It doesn't wake up.
Again, each time, by the way, I say that I'm doing this like, oh, what if it's just your screen?
What if your screen is just not waking up?
Every time I was also testing SSH in ping and it totally was unresponsive.
Harder to do with Windows because I don't know what the networking situation is.
But bottom line, it does not wake up in Windows.
at all so i'm like all right it doesn't wake up in windows it doesn't wake up in catalina big sur windows i've removed every single piece of hardware all my hardware tests tell me everything is fine what the hell is wrong with this computer and the reason i'm pursuing this like a madman is like waking from sleep is an important part of my computing life like i never shut down my computer the only time i reboot it is for os updates what i do is when i'm done using it i put it to sleep and
And then in the night while I'm sleeping, it wakes up and does a bunch of backup stuff.
And then it goes back to sleep.
And so the next morning when I wake up, my computer is asleep.
And when I want to go use it, I sit down in front of it.
I hit the space bar or click the mouse button and it wakes up.
That's how I use my computer.
If my computer does not wake from sleep, it's not like it's useless to me, but it's pretty close.
I need a computer to wake from sleep.
That's why I'm pursuing this because there is no workaround.
There's no viable workaround.
This computer needs to wake from sleep.
And like and I would love to make fun of you for having, you know, using a desktop computer this way.
But the reality is like waking from sleep is an advertised and supported feature of this platform.
And so regardless of whether you should want to do this or not, which I won't argue with you today.
What do you think people do?
Shut down when they're done using a computer?
What is this, the 80s?
No, just walk away.
Yeah, maybe turn the monitor off and that's it.
The Mac Pro is, you don't understand how much heat this thing generates and it's not winter.
Like I cannot have this thing generate.
I do not have central air conditioning.
It's a very small room.
This thing needs to be asleep in.
And even in the winter, like in the winter, it could serve as a space heater and then it could be on all the time.
But I don't want to just wear the fans all day long, just spinning all the time.
How do you think I use the computer for 10 years?
Like it's when I'm not using it should be asleep.
But anyway, it has to work.
Right.
And I'm getting really close right now because what I'm trying to avoid is like I'm already thinking about.
how would I bring this to an Apple store?
Right.
I, you know, I've brought many large things to the Apple store.
So I'm like, Oh, that Mac pro box is so beautiful.
And my luck, my luggage carrier dolly that I usually use to like transport, like my, remember my old, uh, 27 inch Apple, whatever led display thing that went to the Apple store.
Like I,
I transported that, but it did beat up the box, and I don't want to have to get the box down and put it back in, and I don't want to let people in an Apple store touch my Mac Pro.
They're not even going to know what it is.
We don't even have one in our local Apple stores, and they're just going to scratch it up, and I'm like, oh, but...
Maybe they can figure out what it is because they have way better hardware diagnostics and it's like some controller chip is not working right.
I'm already thinking about that and I'm dreading it because I'm running out of things to change or remove or do.
The only thing I have left is...
my new video card versus the crappy one that it came with right and that was going to be my next move to my completely cored out computer was to you know do the final revert to stock take out my upgraded video card and put in the one that it shipped with even though they're both apple video cards and see if that makes any difference because like maybe the video card i got it's gone bad or something i don't know i'm just looking for something hard but before i did that move i
I had somewhat of a revelation.
Do you have two of you figured out based on all my weird hints and everything what this might be?
I've got nothing.
One thing I'm considering is bridge OS being a potential culprit.
This is like the thing that runs the T2 basically because this is a subsystem that would be operational on some level whether it's running Windows or Mac OS because it operates so many of the critical subsystems of the computer.
So the only thing I think of is like something going weird with bridge OS.
That's exactly what I was thinking, because I have a T2 in this computer, right?
Which is hardware, but also it runs software.
And I don't actually know this for a fact, but I'll just tell you what I experimentally determined, right?
So it's my understanding that when you do an operating system update to macOS, one of the things that can happen during an OS update is that BridgeOS can be updated, that the software that runs on the T2 can be updated.
And that makes sense to me because, you know...
bridge os is software and it needs to be updated as well and i can imagine those updates coinciding with mac os updates getting back to my earlier thing of thinking about what have i changed recently right to suddenly make my mac not awake from sleep i what immediately sprang to mind was 10 15 6 but like i said like that's not it because i've rooted into big sur and still have the problem what else have i changed recently big sur beta 5 came out recently
And I upgraded from Big Sur Beta 4 to Big Sur Beta 5 on the external drive on this Mac.
And a lot of the reason I wasn't thinking about it was like, well, I disconnected it, though.
And I don't actually know if 10.15.6 or Big Sur Beta 5 are responsible or if either one of them did a Bridge OS update.
But I'm like, okay...
Before I try to take out that big video car, but it's kind of a pain to get it now because it's really tall and unwieldy.
Anyway, let me try essentially reinstalling the OS on the T2.
So I had to look up how to do this because I haven't had a Mac with a T2 before, and it's actually slightly different for all of them.
But Apple has really good instructions on doing this.
use the apple configurator 2 thing you connect another mac to it with uh i used the thunderbolt cable because i never know what the hell cables to use in these usbc shaped holes but let me use the cable that supports all the things like the highest speed thunderbolt cable it might have just been usbc i don't even freaking know you put it into one specific thunderbolt part you put your mac pro into dfu mode which is really weird but that's what you do you put your mac pro into dfu mode
And you have two choices.
You can do what Apple calls a revive and a restore.
A restore, you do that and you're just going to need to wipe everything on your computer.
And yes, I have a thousand backups, but I really don't want to restore from any of them, partly because I have lots of good backups.
But...
you know like it's it takes a long time to restore four terabytes like and i and you know i had podcasts to do right i didn't i'm like i can't you know in fact the day i was doing this i had a podcast it was the the special we did for relay that was the day this was going on i'm like i can't even if this succeeds i don't have time to do a four terabyte restore for one of my backups right so i didn't want to do that so what i did was revive and what revive does is in theory uh
you know it does something to the t2 to get it back to a working state based on who knows what but the point the point is that it doesn't require you to delete everything on your computer because you could imagine if you just erased everything in the t2 then it wouldn't you wouldn't be able to decrypt your drives anymore or whatever that's what i imagine the limitation is but like the restore is complete wipe so i did revive right i did revive and the thing rebooted and it came to like the login screen
And that's what I've been doing, by the way, to eliminate like, is it some user account?
Is it something like that?
This is before I tried different OSs, right?
But like on the login screen on your Mac, there's a sleep button.
So you don't even need to log in to test sleep.
You can just boot right to the login screen and then hit that sleep button and it will go to sleep and then you can try to wake it up, right?
You don't even have to log in to test the problem, right?
So it rebooted after the revive, got to the login screen, hit the sleep button, waited for the fans to spin down, waited for my one minute timer, woke it up, it woke right back up.
Like, yes, I figured it out.
it's the t2 god knows what happened to the t2 i don't know if it was the big sur beta 5 that's my main culprit just because it's a beta os i don't know if it was 10 15 6 i don't know if it was something unrelated to either one of those and just something went bad in my t2 who knows but it worked from sleep and i was like sleep wait a minute wake sleep wait a minute wake i'm like yes confirmed it works everything's good here right
And then I went to log in to my account.
I'm like, good.
I'm just going to get back to normal.
And I go to log into my account.
I click on my face, and I type in my password, and it does a little head shake thing.
It's like, no, no, that's not your password.
I'm like, no, that's totally my password.
Oh, no.
And then I go click on my wife's face and try to log in with her password.
It goes, no, no, that's not your password.
I'm like, no, that's not true.
And then I go back to the login screen.
I'm like, wait a second.
What happened to my daughter?
Like, I normally see all of our faces there, but it was just me, my wife, and my son.
What happened to my daughter?
Where did she go?
Like, what the hell is going on with this computer?
And, like, it really wouldn't let me log in.
and when i tried to log in like i have you know the way you can put a hint for your password like nothing i always put a hint there the hint i always put is go away because that's nothing to do with my password is trying to give a hint to the person trying to get into my account without knowing your password my hint to you is go away right and it showed me go away i'm like all right well this is my account that's my picture those are my names these are people but a where is my daughter's account and b why can't i log in
So I, you know, I, I reboot into recovery mode, which I'd done many times over.
And by the way, I left out some steps where I booted into recovery mode, ran disc first aid in every volume.
Like I did a whole bunch of the, I left out some of the normal stuff that I did.
Um, so, but anyway, I was very familiar with booting into recovery mode.
So I boot into recovery mode.
And what I'm looking at, like, you know, everything else is removed from the computer.
So I've just got, like, my computer and my hard drive's name are link, right?
So I've got link and link space hyphen space data, which is the two volumes that Catalina breaks up your stuff into.
And there are actually more volumes than that.
There's the volume that I'm booting into in recovery mode.
There's a recovery volume.
There's a software update volume.
We talked about this with the APFS volume rolls.
There's actually a whole bunch of volumes there.
That's how I'm able to boot, right?
Right.
But what I saw was that on this boot into recovery mode, it showed the system volume, which is just called link, the read-only system volume, just called link, was grayed out and unmounted.
And then link hyphen data was there, right?
And I tried to mount link.
And it wouldn't mount.
And I tried to run disk first day and it wouldn't run disk first day.
And it gave me an error message that I looked up in Google and saw a bunch of reports of people getting this exact error number, a very long number.
I forget what it was, 429 something.
It was a very long error number and did a lot of Googling.
They're like, look, if a drive ever gives you this, it basically means that
some record somewhere for that volume is missing and it can't be mounted without it because the computer doesn't know where anything is in it and i've never found a way to recover from this you just have to delete that volume right i'm like all right well but that's the read-only system volume like my data is in the other volume and it's confirmed to be good and i can run disk first aid on and it's like yep there's your data volume it's you know however many terabytes all your stuff is there i don't need the read-only system volume i can just delete that volume
i can't mount it i can't do anything with it i spent a long time banging my head against it but i'm like well but i finally figured out this problem my t2 is cured i can sleep and wake from sleep i just delete this volume right and i was i think i was just anxious to get it over with if i had thought a little bit more maybe i would have realized this was not a great idea but anyway i deleted the system volume and really honestly i'm not sure what else i could have done because that system volume was completely useless it was i
unable to be mounted in any mode single user mode anything it could not be mounted couldn't run disk for say couldn't drive fsck it was just system volume was like forget it right so i deleted the volume so now i've just got one volume called link data i create a new abs volume called link
I run the installer.
And when the installer asks, where do you want me to install?
I say, please install a link, which is this new empty volume I made.
And the installer dutifully runs.
And by the way, I left this out too.
I had to reinstall Catalina at one point.
And maybe at two points, I had to reinstall Catalina.
With no effect.
Like, it didn't hurt my computer.
Reinstalling Catalina is fine.
And it just didn't fix the sleep-wake thing, right?
That was another thing that I had tried.
So I'd been very used to the Catalina installer.
So I'm very used to doing this.
I picked the link volume.
I reinstalled Catalina.
It rebooted.
And again, it gave me a list of users, but with one user missing.
I was like, what?
What the hell is... Oh, no, no, it didn't give me a list of users.
This is a different thing.
I can explain that one in a second.
I have to go back and explain that, because I think I figured out what that problem was, too.
But no, what it told me was to create an account on this install.
I'm like, create an account?
Like, there's a bunch of accounts in link data.
Why don't you just use those?
I'm like, I don't know what the hell's going on.
So I created an account, and I intentionally gave it a different name so I wouldn't get confused.
This is a very important thing when you're debugging, like...
I don't give volumes the same name.
Don't give user accounts the same name.
You always have to know where you are and what you're dealing with.
So I created some temporary domain account.
I logged into it.
And I realized what it had done was taken link and made a second volume called link hyphen data with nothing in it and made that new user account in it.
So what I had was now the volumes I had was link with the OS link hyphen data with the user data that I just created for this new account.
And then another volume called link hyphen data with my actual data in it.
Oh, my God.
So the installer had installed onto Link by breaking Link into two volumes, both of which were initially empty, and then weaving them together.
So then I'm like, okay, all right, well, still, the data's all there.
I just need to find a way to install the OS and tell it...
Installer, don't make yourself a new data volume.
Use that data volume.
It's sitting right there.
You just need to make the OS volume and tie it to that data volume.
Just weave them together.
And in my research, and actually a personal email to someone I thought might know the answer to this, the answer I got was, now obviously it's possible to weave together two volumes in that way because the installer does it.
But I was not able to determine a way that a user could do it.
No command line tools, no secret technique, no weird installer invocation.
It may exist, but I couldn't find it, right?
So now I've got this computer with all my data intact that sleeps and wakes just fine.
but i can't get like my volume back so you may be thinking at this point and maybe if you're casey you're like well fine just i'll just delete all of it and restore from backup because i just want to get this over with right yep but i'm not casey and so i didn't do that because that would be a mistake instead what i said is like look i need another copy of all this data right now yes i know i have a time machine backup a super duper clone another time machine backup on the synology and a backblaze backup
And also my photos are on a whole second computer, which has its own Backways Backup, Time Machine Backup, and Synology Backup.
So my photos have three other backups.
But that's not enough.
So I had to get another hard drive.
And I looked around my house.
This is where I'm looking for cables.
I must have another spinning hard drive around here that can hold...
my volume right it's i don't fill the four full four terabytes turns out i fill like two and a half terabytes and the biggest hard spinning hard drive i have in the house is two that's not currently used so i had to order a hard drive so i had to order a hard drive and during that time i ordered the hard drive i did that podcast uh that we did the relay special i did a rectif episode and now i'm doing this episode right and the hard drive arrived
And I eventually arrived.
It arrived today.
And I did a backup, a copy of the internal drive.
And it took about nine hours to complete.
Right?
This is just a straight copy from my SSD onto this incredibly slow external spinning disk.
So now, finally, I have my final redundant copy of that other hard drive.
Right?
And what I've been booted into here during this podcast and erectives is I'm booted into the that new system with a new weird user that has nothing in it.
And I just installed Skype audio hijack and, you know, all that other stuff into there.
So that's what I've been podcasting from.
And the reason I haven't attempted to restore, like I could have attempted to restore today after the nine hour thing.
Right.
But it was like, that's going to take a long time.
And if it screws up, I don't want to screw up this computer.
So what I'm waiting for is a gap in my podcasting schedule to try my best guess at what I can do besides restore because I still don't want to do restore.
Like I know I have all this stuff.
I still want to restore.
What I want to do is delete all the volumes except link data and then point the installer at link data.
And say, installer, install the OS on this volume.
And I want it to crack link data in half and make an OS volume.
Because if you point the Catalina installer at any volume, any like just single volume that has a bunch of users and applications and, you know, like just like a pre-Catalina OS.
That's when it does the weaving.
That's when it says, okay, I'll make a new empty volume, install the read-only system, and weave it together with that one using these firm links, right?
That's when it does the connection.
Now, I don't have a complete pre-Catalina volume, but I do have a Catalina volume that has user accounts and all this other stuff, application folder, and it actually has a slash system file.
quote-unquote folder that is the old firm link to the old thing like so i but the reason i didn't want to do that until i held all their backup is because like what if that screws up what if i point the catalina installer at my data volume and it says i'll just empty this volume out and erase it or if it just hoses it entirely or whatever it is a valid option in the installer the installer does give you the choice if you can select a link data to install onto it gave me that choice before right but i'm afraid that's going to destroy everything
Now, finally, after this podcast concludes, probably tomorrow or the next day, I will try to resurrect my computer, resurrect the data on my computer before I have to do the next podcast, which I think is like Sunday or something, right?
So that's my plan.
That is my tale of woe.
It could have gone much worse, but it certainly could have gone better.
I spent a lot of time on this, and it's not particularly satisfying to have this conclusion where it was the T2, basically, but why?
Why was it the T2?
I like the Beta 5, the Big Sur Beta 5 theory.
Unfortunately, it's so vague that I can't even file a feedback on it and say, hey...
I have a vague notion that perhaps upgrading to Big Sur Beta 5 hosed the T2 such that my Mac Pro never woke from sleep.
And by the way, every time I hard rebooted it and woke from sleep, it offered to send a report to Apple.
But the report is just like a boilerplate, like, failure to wake from sleep.
I'm like, yes, that is what happened, but there's no stack trace.
Like, there is a stack trace, but there's a message at the top that says, please disregard this stack trace.
It's meaningless, right?
Because if you don't wake from sleep, there's just nothing, like...
Maybe it dumps something from NVRM, I'm not sure.
But anyway, I sent 1,000 of those reports to Apple during the thing, but I don't have enough to send a feedback or anything like that.
By the way, the missing child in the user thing, apparently at some point it was able to boot from an installed OS but not able to see the data volume.
And when you do that, the installed OS has a memory of the user accounts that have been logged into recently, apparently.
But when you try to log into them, if it can't actually find the data for it, it says wrong password, right?
It's like the OS volume says, yeah, you've logged into these three accounts in the last year or something.
So I'll show these little faces and you can click on them and enter a password.
When I go to validate the password, apparently at that point, it needs to see the user's home directory or something.
And that volume just wasn't mounted at all.
why wasn't it mounted and is it i think my daughter didn't appear just because her account hasn't been logged into on my computer since forever which makes sense to me because she never uses this computer and occasionally i log into my sons to do something right but that was what that was the mystery of the missing account and that was also the mystery of the the uh not accepting my password
was that the data volume was somehow unmounted or unreachable at that point.
Again, I have no idea why, because the data volume is the volume that's fine and has all the data on it, as far as I'm aware.
So more updates on this next week.
I'll tell you whether reinstalling the OS onto the data volume worked.
I'll tell you whether I had to restore from backup, and then I'll tell you exactly how many hours it took to restore from backup, because I can imagine it's going to take longer than nine.
holy smokes my my current bet is you're going to end up with a link data data volume and it will still have some kind of weirdness i mean you can this is the thing by the way these names like they don't mean anything like remember i had the link data to link data you can rename it it's the mac you can rename the volumes whatever you want it doesn't get confused the volumes have i have identifiers that are unique that are under the covers that you never see you can rename your volumes to whatever you want
which is why i always recommend like if you're doing some stuff like even if you end up like i ended up with two linked data volumes i immediately renamed like the new one it created to be you know something different like new data or whatever so i could always tell them apart because it's so dangerous when you have volumes that are named the same that you're gonna screw something up but yeah like in this situation like
is it hardware or software and i was i was attacking it on both fronts hardware i'm just going to remove every piece of hardware from the thing and run hardware to software let me try it in windows let me try it in big sir let me try in catalina the thing that got me was it's hardware and software it's the t2 with software that you never think about but totally exists but it's also hardware very frustrating
I don't think it's unreasonable if Beta 5 did a new firmware install on the T2 and that was somehow not entirely backwards compatible with Catalina.
But it didn't wake in Big Sur either.
But yeah, it could have just been a bug.
It could have just been a Big Sur bug.
And that's why it's my biggest culprit.
Because yeah, maybe Big Sur Beta 5 had a bug that caused Mac Pros not to wake from sleep.
But I could not find any report from it anywhere.
um and it doesn't surprise me because how many people have mac pros and how many people have mac pros and installing big survey to five it's got to be a small group and that's why i think maybe it's just something that was hosed in my t2 or like maybe it really was 10 15 6 i just don't know all i have is the experimental results doing a revive and why the hell did doing a revive hose my my os volume
Like, I don't think that was an expected result of doing a revive.
The whole point of doing a revive is it's not supposed to hose all your data.
And it didn't hose my data, but it made my system volume completely unmountable.
Forget about unbootable, unmountable.
So there are many mysteries here.
The only, you know, and right now I have on my desk right out in front of me the guts of my computer.
I have my GPU here.
I have a bunch of those little brackets that hold the thing in that I gave up and putting back ages ago.
I've got my big hard drive sitting over there.
I've got a big piece of tape over there.
I've got my new hard drive.
I've got a bunch of cables.
It's a mess in this place.
I can't wait to reassemble this all.
But first, I will tackle the software part of it.
So that's the problem with having big, large volumes of data.
restoring from backup even a local backup takes forever and just i have to find a time in my life when i can set that off and have enough time for it to finish i did do when we did our member podcast i did that from my uh from a laptop so i successfully podcasted from a laptop and the world didn't end but i certainly didn't like it i mean one could argue the world is kind of ending in lots of different small ways and hopefully they aren't the fault of you podcasting on a laptop
But it did better at recording a podcast than apparently Casey's computer can ever do.
I was going to say that I had inherited Casey's hardware curse, but I don't know.
I feel like this is just – assuming my guess about what it was, this is just a really bad situation of like, hey, beta software has bugs.
And I think I've said that in some past shows back before all this happened.
Big Sur has been the hardest experience I've ever had running software update on beta OSs.
And I've obviously run software update on beta OSs since 10.0, right?
I don't know what it is about Big Sur.
Is it because of the ARM transition?
Is it because of like a code fork merge between the ARM branch and the regular branch or whatever?
Like every single version of Big Sur, like I'd install it on either my DTK or my Mac Pro.
And then someone would say, hey, there's a new beta of Big Sur out.
And I'd go to software update and it would be this incredible battle to get the freaking thing to install.
You wouldn't just click software update and update.
It'd be like, oh, update failed.
Download failed.
Can't install.
I don't see an update.
And it was like, oh, reinstall the beta profile or try this or use the command line tool.
The command line is failing.
Some of it was user error where I had like the boot security different or whatever.
But even on the DTK where none of that applies.
I'd always have to be looking for tweets and Googling and say, how do you get that?
Every single update has been like pulling teeth, including beta five.
I had to take 20 different runs at it to get the thing to download and turn content caching.
So the other thing can get it because it could fail to download it from the, I don't know what the hell Big Sur's problem is.
Big Sur running it has been fine.
Like I don't see lots of huge bugs other than cosmetic stuff.
inside the os but actually getting software update to run has been killing me it's probably because they replace software updating big pro with big sir with the mobile update that they use in ios for obvious reasons uh but yeah that's super buggy so needless to say i will no longer be applying installing betas of big sir on my mac pro after this i'll still do it on the ddk that can get hosed fine but
As far as I'm concerned, my Mac Pro is done with Big Sur until official release.
And even then, I'm going to make like a hojillion backups before I install Big Sur on it, because now I am terrified of a similar thing happening again.
That was an adventure.
Yeah.
I never want to open up this computer again.
It's just so stressful because it's like in those bank high scenes where they're trying to lift the diamonds out of the thing without hitting the lasers or shredding off things.
Every time I lift that lid off, it's not... There's...
you have to do it perfectly straight and smoothly and you don't want to bang these pieces of metal against each other i've heard some horror stories of people who picked a little handle up and twisted and like there's some there's some like padding stuff in there they can get all bunched up and it's just i'm really i really don't you know i'm glad i hopefully will only have to open it up and close it one more time after i get this sorted out but i'm way over my i remember when i first got it i opened to close it two or three times like good i'll never be doing that again and now i've opened and closed like 50 times i'm i'm over my limit