Hey Billionaire
John:
how's vacation sorry the green tea i o wrong pipe exception the vacation when he goes back to the no i get it okay easter all right it's confusing what is what even is vacation when your life is a vacation john you can't even tell anymore
Marco:
I mean, honestly, it does feel more like vacation to be here.
John:
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
John:
It's all messed up now.
John:
Everything is backwards.
Marco:
What a hardship it is to have too much vacation.
Marco:
I have my regular life feeling vacation.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm really doing something wrong over here.
Marco:
I am half vaccinated.
Casey:
Two thirds of this podcast, Marco, are half vaccinated.
Casey:
And if I was better at math, I could make some sort of math joke about what the sum total of our vaccination status is.
Casey:
But I'm terrible at mental math.
Casey:
John, what the hell's the hold up, man?
John:
It's killing me.
John:
It's killing me.
John:
Everybody I know is vaccinated.
John:
Everywhere I look, vaccinated, vaccinated.
John:
I want to get vaccinated so bad.
John:
You have no idea.
Casey:
Would you drive three hours each way to do it like I did?
John:
I would go anywhere.
John:
All of my searches are like, what distance from your house do you want us to look like?
John:
Whole state, anywhere.
John:
Infinity.
John:
Doesn't matter.
John:
Exactly.
John:
My problem is I'm not eligible to be vaccinated until the 19th.
John:
But we have this technology where you can, say, buy tickets to a concert that happens next month.
John:
I don't know how we can do that.
John:
But it's impossible to make a reservation to get vaccinated, you know, after April 19th, which is when I become eligible, right?
John:
Just let me make the appointment now.
John:
Anyway, I'm dying to get vaccinated.
Marco:
For all of you out there who are maybe on the fence, I don't honestly, I don't expect a lot of our audience is on the fence, but there are a lot of people out there who are.
Marco:
And I really want to encourage everyone.
Marco:
I know it isn't available everywhere yet, not even close.
Marco:
And I know it isn't available to all people in the places where it is available, not even close.
Marco:
I became eligible because in New York, they started allowing anybody over age 30.
Marco:
And I'm, as you know...
Marco:
Not 50, but well over age 30.
Marco:
And so I just wanted to make a plea to our listeners.
Marco:
If and when you get the opportunity to get vaccinated, please do.
Marco:
Many of you out there are probably on the same page and think, of course, I'm going to get it as soon as I possibly can.
Marco:
Many people aren't, though.
Marco:
And we don't get a lot of chances as a society to really...
Marco:
step up and like serve the world in some big way you know most of us my age or your age you know most of us in the audience and and certainly all three of our hosts have not been alive during a military draft um certainly not you know the big world wars and this is something that like we as a society i i think we are we are really given a huge opportunity and duty here to like
Marco:
help the world out, help us get out of this pandemic, help literally save people's lives by stopping this virus.
Marco:
And the way we do that is widespread vaccination.
Marco:
And so for you to go get it as soon as you're able and eligible to, for those of you who are able to, because that's an important thing here, not everyone's able to.
Marco:
So for those of you who are able to get vaccinated safely with whatever health criteria you have,
Marco:
It's kind of up to us to all get vaccinated so that the people who can't get vaccinated for whatever reason, whether it's health conditions or eligibility or whatever else, or if they're children, which is a big thing right now, those of us who can get vaccinated, I think, have a duty to everyone else who can't.
Marco:
to build up the herd immunity to finally stop this terrible thing and and and we know we were lucky we we were able to schedule it on the way we were coming back back home and from from a trip and uh so therefore we had adam with us we had our kid with us and and so tiff and i both got appointments back to back and we we brought him in uh with us and we were able to like show him like look this like we're making history here and he understood he understood very well like you know we explained what was going on and why this was important and we're
Marco:
They're all doing this to help out the world and doing our duty for society.
Marco:
And it was amazingly run.
Marco:
It was super well done.
Marco:
Very big kudos to the government and the state and whoever else was involved in making this happen because it was very well run.
Marco:
It was very easy.
Marco:
We were in and out in...
Marco:
under 45 minutes, and most of that time was walking through mostly empty lines.
Marco:
You go through the little zigzag things that they set up, but there's nobody in it.
Marco:
You just have to walk through it.
Marco:
You walk through, you reach somebody at a booth, you enter their questions, you show them your paper or whatever, and then they go down the hall, go to the next booth.
Marco:
You go through two or three of those, you get shot.
Marco:
It doesn't hurt much.
Marco:
I got the Pfizer vaccine, so did Tiff, and I would say it hurt less than an allergy shot.
Marco:
Uh, I've had many, many allergy shots in my life.
Marco:
So I, I'm, I've been stabbed a lot.
Marco:
This hurt less than an allergy.
Marco:
It was very, very fast and, uh, had a sore arm today, but that's it.
Marco:
You know, I know, I know the second one frequently gives people like fevers and stuff, but that's, you know, I'm willing to do that because we need this.
Marco:
The world needs this.
Marco:
We all need this.
Marco:
And the sooner you get vaccinated, if you're able to,
Marco:
the sooner this comes to an end.
Marco:
Please, everyone out there, as soon as you're able to, please get the vaccine.
Marco:
If you are in any position to help other people get it who might need help or convincing, please do that as well.
Marco:
Parents, grandparents, anybody who might need help getting an appointment, locking one in with the technology side of things, please get this done.
Marco:
Please, everyone.
Marco:
This is so important.
Marco:
This is one of the most important things that anybody in my generation has ever been called to do.
Marco:
Please, everyone, go out there and do it.
John:
yeah and you're right about the tech nerd angle like i'm i'm doing what i'm so used to doing for so much stupider reasons like trying to get a playstation 5 or trying to get back in the day having a million web browser windows open with a million tabs and furiously reloading and using all my web developer skills to find out when a website is broken and how i can you know edit the dom to get through something that's preventing me from putting today's date in the date picker because they don't understand that you may you know like it's just anyway um
John:
Use your technology skills to help other people, because just because someone wants to get vaccinated doesn't mean they're going to be successful, especially if your state is a giant cluster like Massachusetts, where everyone I mean, they're all like this in the US where it's like, oh, everyone just do your own thing.
John:
Community center.
John:
Make your own website for letting people sign up for vaccines.
John:
You know how to make a website, don't you?
John:
No, never mind.
John:
You got to do anyway.
John:
And CVS has their own website and Walmart has their own website.
John:
Massachusetts State has its own websites for the mass vaccination sites.
John:
And it's all a free for all.
John:
And every one of these websites is terrible.
John:
So please use your technology skills to help the members of your family navigate this.
John:
Make appointments for them if you can.
John:
Right.
John:
Like if you know people who are eligible before you, just make the appointment for them and tell them I made your appointment and I'm going to drive you to it and you're going.
Marco:
They don't check ID to make the appointment on the website and you can always cancel it.
Marco:
If they really can't make it, you can always cancel it.
Marco:
That's a good idea.
Marco:
Get yourself in there and get everyone else that you might be able to help or influence who is able to do this.
Marco:
There's a lot of people out there who are not able to get this.
Marco:
We owe it to them, those of us who can, to build the herd immunity so that they aren't in danger.
Marco:
We aren't in danger either.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter which one you get.
Marco:
They're all effective enough that the right answer, unless you have some health reason, like I know some people's doctors are telling them for their particular needs to wait for the Johnson & Johnson one because it works.
Marco:
It's not the mRNA-based one.
Marco:
It's a little bit gentler on some systems.
Marco:
If your doctor says get a particular one, fine.
Marco:
If you don't have such direction from anybody and you don't have any particular reason, get the first one you can get.
Marco:
That's because the more people getting the vaccine, it doesn't matter which one.
Marco:
Just get the first one you can get.
Casey:
You know, I probably don't even accept or realize how American the three of us are, but I recognize that this conversation probably is in a way uniquely American because everything I've understood from those who are not in America is that vaccinations are extremely hard to come by.
Casey:
They're hard to come by here.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
talk to John, but they're extremely hard to come by outside of America.
Casey:
Um, and obviously there are other mechanisms by which one could defeat this virus.
Casey:
Look at New Zealand, but for Americans in particular, I cannot echo what John and particularly Marco have said enough.
Casey:
If you have the opportunity, which supposedly in the next week or two, every adult American will have the opportunity, please do everything in your power to get whatever vaccine you're offered.
Casey:
Just like Marco said, um,
Casey:
As it so happens, I got my first Moderna shot like a week and a half ago, two weeks ago.
Casey:
I had a sore arm for a day or two, and then that was it.
Casey:
I'm expecting to be positively run over the day after I get my next one.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
If that's the price I have to pay in order to help my family stay safe and others stay safe, then so be it.
Casey:
And you can bet your bottom before we get too many emails.
Casey:
That I'm going to still mask up.
Casey:
I'm going to still be afraid of the indoors.
Casey:
I'm still going to be afraid of other people.
Casey:
Because I, like Marco said, I have children that can't get vaccinated yet.
Casey:
And so for me, even though it makes me feel immeasurably better that I can...
Casey:
go into a building if necessary, even like a doctor's office and not stress for two weeks following about what I just did.
Casey:
It's still, you know, this doesn't end for those of us with small children.
Casey:
And so please do your part wherever you are, be that masking and distancing, be that vaccinating, whatever it is, please do your part.
Casey:
And, you know, I don't view myself as a anti-science kind of person, but especially in the prior administration, I was very nervous about
Casey:
Them just ramming approvals for all this through, you know, and not really taking a step or taking a minute to think about, like, is this safe?
Casey:
Does this work?
Casey:
Et cetera.
Casey:
And there's been a couple of jokey videos about how the vaccine works, particularly the mRNA-based ones, which I think is not Johnson & Johnson.
Casey:
No, correct.
Casey:
But the two mRNA-based ones, there's a very popular TikTok video about four cans that we'll put in the show notes that's literally a minute long, and it's great.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
But for our audience, if you have not read Reverse Engineering, the BioNTech slash Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, which we'll put in the show notes, it is a deep dive in the actual... Oh, God.
Casey:
Aaron's going to be so mad at me as a former bio teacher.
Casey:
What are ACT and G called?
Marco:
It's the things that DNA are made of and MR. Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
I'm so sorry, Aaron.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
She doesn't listen.
Marco:
It's so good.
Marco:
This article is so good.
Casey:
It is very long, but I cannot speak highly enough.
Casey:
Like once I read this, I felt like, okay, no, no, no.
Casey:
This makes sense.
Casey:
I'm in.
Casey:
Sign me up.
Casey:
I'm ready.
Casey:
Just tell me where I'm ready.
Marco:
And if you listen to this podcast, I think you can get through that.
Marco:
Oh, absolutely.
Casey:
Absolutely.
Marco:
I think if this podcast is not too long or nerdy for you, I'm pretty sure you can read a blog post.
Casey:
Strongly agree there.
Casey:
Strongly agree there.
Casey:
But I apologize for rubbing this in John's face, but I know your day is coming soon.
Casey:
The amount of relief I felt, even after the first shot, like...
Casey:
I don't know how to verbalize how incredibly relieving and how genuinely my stress level... And I mean, I'm extremely privileged.
Casey:
I was born white and endued.
Casey:
I haven't had a particularly hard life by any reasonable measure.
Casey:
And so perhaps I'm just a big whiner because I'm not used to having latent stress in my life 24-7.
Casey:
But I tell you what, for the last year, I've been pretty stressed.
Casey:
And so to have...
Casey:
To have even just the first dose in my arm just gave me immense amount of relief.
Casey:
And John, I say with no reservations that I'm incredibly excited for you to get yours.
Casey:
I am incredibly excited that certainly the next time the three of us see each other, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't be able to hug it out, which will be very disappointing for John and mildly disappointing for Marco, but I will be extremely happy for it.
Casey:
I'm not against hugs.
John:
What is he trying to say?
John:
I'm anti-hug.
John:
This is...
Casey:
libelous what is it libelous libel is written slanderous there you go yeah yeah that's right anyway it's wrong is what it is yeah but uh please please do what you can to help everyone out especially uh those close to you john how are you going to replace your router with a switch i don't even remember you saying this i must i would have called you on this had i realized that's what you said so can you explain the foible here
John:
Yeah, I always talk about my network stuff.
John:
I mean, it was implicit.
John:
There was circumstantial evidence to surmise this, but a lot of people were confused because I said, I'm getting rid of my Airport Extreme, which I was using as my router.
John:
And then I talked about how I need to buy an unmanaged Switch.
John:
because the router had like four plugs in the back of it, and where do I plug all that stuff in?
John:
I don't have any Ethernet ports.
John:
And people were like, well, how can you replace a router with an unmanaged switch?
John:
The little bit that you needed to catch was that I do have an Eero that I'm using.
John:
And the Eero can act as a router, of course, right?
John:
I wasn't using it as a router.
John:
I was just using it in bridge mode where it was just doing all the Wi-Fi and then my Airport Extreme was the router.
John:
But of course, the Eero can do all of that and does do all of that by default out of the box.
John:
So when I got rid of my Airport Extreme and replaced it with an unmanaged switch, I let my router, my Eero be the router.
John:
And to that end, there's a whole big thing that I go, I complain about a little mini tech podcast portion of, uh, I think it's in the member, the members only version of rec diffs, uh, where everything went great in my network upgrade, except my one smart outlet, uh, HomeKit smart outlet just is now invisible.
John:
to my network it was like your thing is offline i removed the device and now i can't add it i thought the hardware was dead so i bought another one marco style um and oh it's my style to replace dead hardware really like that's
John:
That's on me.
John:
Well, I didn't know it was dead.
John:
All I knew is I couldn't get it to work.
John:
I'm like, you know what?
John:
I'm not a HomeKit expert.
John:
Maybe the hardware is dead.
John:
I have no way to know if the hardware is dead because I literally can't see it or connect it in any way.
John:
I can plug it into the wall and see if the lights turn on and no smoke is coming out.
John:
But beyond that, maybe it's just dead.
John:
So I bought another identical one.
John:
exactly the same problem so i'm like okay so now i start now i'm actually engaged in support emails with the various companies and i leave that one as a kicker for the end because i say here's what i did i list the 800 things that i did for troubleshooting and at the very end i go oh yeah and i bought a brand new one and it does the same thing because you just know they're gonna say oh maybe your hardware is broken it's not our fault you're gonna say it's not awful i think your smart outlet is dead it's like no
John:
that's not what the problem is anyway i will give updates not if i ever figure it out but i also want to give updates on what did i get from my unmanaged switch again context clues in the last episode i had already ordered i think i mentioned that i had already ordered the unmanaged switch to replace it last episode so everyone who was sending me suggestions thank you for the suggestions but it was kind of too late because i had already ordered the replacement
John:
And so that came and I'm using it and it's working out pretty good.
John:
The one I ordered, we'll put a link in the show notes, is from TrendNet, which is a brand I had not used before.
Marco:
I love how you pronounce that as if it's the first time you've ever seen this word.
Marco:
Meanwhile, they've been making inexpensive networking gear for a very long time, like over a decade, I think.
John:
I was trying to pronounce the all caps trend part.
John:
It's like trend net.
John:
Have you heard of this company called net gear?
John:
Yeah.
John:
TP link.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, I think it's weird that the trend is in all caps and net is lowercase.
John:
So anyway, it's an eight port switch.
John:
It's got eight ports in the back of it.
John:
It's got the power connector on the back of it.
John:
It's got lights in the front of it.
John:
The case is made of metal, which I mean, in the grand scheme of things probably doesn't matter.
John:
But like, you know, maybe it helps with heat dissipation.
John:
Who knows?
John:
And it's black and it's rectangular, you know, and it has little rubber feet that go on the bottom of it.
John:
So there you go.
John:
That worked fine for me.
John:
The only thing I the only mistake I made is this is this is sitting in the same place as my Airport Extreme was.
John:
And the Airport Extreme, in typical Apple fashion, is this white monolith.
John:
It has one tiny pinprick light that is green when it's working and orange when it's trying to connect and it blinks during the connection.
John:
But otherwise, it's basically a constant pinprick of green light.
John:
I wanted lights in the front of this thing so you can look at it and see which link is having problems or is traffic flowing or whatever.
John:
But I didn't really think through the idea that there would be eight lights in front of this blinking very quickly almost all the time.
Yeah.
John:
and that was a bit much to me but it's nothing that a black piece of gaff tape couldn't solve so i bought this thing with lights in the front of it and i put a piece of black tape over the front it's just fine um but anyway i'm happy with it that part worked out my entire network converted with only minimal downtime i was actually pretty impressed with the euro router software stuff because i was i had everything all customized in the airport extreme and
John:
And I basically exported that configuration and then manually re-entered it in the ERA one.
John:
And it took me a little while to find them, but all the options were there.
John:
Every one of the devices that had reserved IPs, I gave them all the exactly the same IPs.
John:
I put in all the Mac addresses and, you know, like it was just completely seamless except for the HomeKit disaster.
John:
And I'm still working on that.
John:
So there is one device that didn't make the conversion.
John:
But as far as the rest of the family is concerned, this is a non-event.
John:
And I had many, many team meetings since then and have had no drops.
John:
But again, they happen like once a month.
John:
So stay tuned.
Marco:
On this same topic, I had briefly breezed by the Ubiquiti Flex Mini Switch that I bought like the four pack of.
Marco:
Because I had said that you had to manage them under a Ubiquiti network environment to have them work.
Marco:
And we've heard from a number of listeners, thank you, that apparently that's wrong.
Marco:
Apparently, if you just plug in the Ubiquiti Flex Mini switch, it will work unmanaged by default.
Marco:
So you don't have to actually be running a Ubiquiti network to use it.
Marco:
So that's nice.
John:
But one one caveat to that.
John:
So, yes, it will work on managed.
John:
But one person said, you know, if you look on your network with like, you know, a network snoop or whatever, you will see the Ubiquity Flex Mini switch mournfully calling out doing a DNS resolution to try to find the Ubiquity management thing.
John:
every once in a while so it's not happy being an unmanaged switch like at the very least it will do a periodic dns query and attempt to connect to a host thing that's not going to end up being there so i i mean i'm sure it works fine as an unmanaged switch like no big deal but i would prefer my unmanaged switches to actually be completely dumb and they're also probably cheaper
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I personally use Hover for, I think, most of my domain names now.
Marco:
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Marco:
They have a great search.
Marco:
Their interface is great.
Marco:
You know, all this stuff, the reasons that make Hover great...
Marco:
It's because when you think, how would I want a business to be run if I was being their customer?
Marco:
A lot of businesses, they make choices that you're like, I would never want this.
Marco:
Hover does everything the way you would want them to do.
Marco:
If you had to ask, would I want support to try to upsell me on stuff?
Marco:
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Marco:
Would I want free privacy protection?
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It isn't always the case with businesses.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Make a name for yourself with Hover.
Marco:
I also wanted to do some quick follow-up on something I was corrected on a couple of weeks ago, but I just kept forgetting to correct it here.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
When I was talking about how good the HomePod actually was when you're in the Apple ecosystem, I had mentioned the integration with Control Center and how nice it is that when you play something on a HomePod, other people in the house with iPhones and iPads can just access that device automatically.
Marco:
from their devices in Control Center and can start controlling it and can, you know, open it up in their music app and can enqueue things or change the controls or see what's playing and all that other stuff.
Marco:
And I had mentioned that this was a feature of AirPlay 2.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
This is actually two different Apple technologies that I'm conflating here.
Marco:
Handoff is what's happening here when you're using a HomePod.
Marco:
So if I, using the Music app, if I go to the AirPlay menu and fire that over to a HomePod,
Marco:
it will actually use handoff, not AirPlay 2, to transfer that session to the HomePod.
Marco:
And what that means is, instead of my phone then streaming the music bit by bit to the HomePod for it to play, it's actually just telling the HomePod, play music, play this track ID starting at this timestamp, go.
Marco:
And then after that point, my phone is not really involved.
Marco:
It can retake over the session.
Marco:
And this is the handoff feature that Apple has whole APIs for this.
Marco:
They even usually tend to work most of the time.
Marco:
They definitely never cause any Bluetooth mouse dropouts or anything like that.
Marco:
And there definitely wasn't a bug in Catalina that made me have to disable it for all of Overcast.
Marco:
But anyway, this is handoff.
Marco:
And this only works with HomePods, not other AirPlay 2 devices.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
This big benefit, I was saying AirPlay 2 is a great ecosystem to get into because of things like this.
Marco:
That actual benefit where the HomePod takes over the playback session completely for itself, and then that phone is no longer involved or necessary for it to continue, that only works when you are using the Apple Music app with a HomePod.
Marco:
If you stream with the music app to any other AirPlay devices, AirPlay 1 or 2, that don't support that, like my Sonos home theater gear and stuff like that, the phone that initiated it is still doing the streaming.
Marco:
Other people can't control it.
Marco:
I think they can play pause, but that's about it.
Marco:
They can't pick new tracks or rearrange things or change the play mode or seek within the track you picked or anything like that.
Marco:
That's your phone doing that stream the whole time.
Marco:
If you use AirPlay 2 from an app that the HomePod does not natively support handoff for, like Overcast, still work that same way as well, where they're doing the constant streaming.
Marco:
If you do the music app to a non-HomePod AirPlay 2 speaker...
Marco:
then it does that same kind of streaming as well.
Marco:
It's not doing handoff.
Marco:
So handoff is its own thing when you're using the music app with HomePods, and that provides that awesome control center integration for everyone in the house.
Marco:
And you only get a very small subset of that power when you're using different apps or non-HomePod AirPlay 2 speakers.
John:
So obvious.
John:
I don't know why we all didn't figure that out.
John:
I find this whole ecosystem very confusing.
John:
And the fact that you also were confused by it makes me feel a little bit better.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, also, one other complicating factor is that handoff is kind of buggy.
Marco:
And this works to varying degrees of success.
Marco:
with different versions of iOS, different versions of the HomePod software, different HomePods, and even just different times in the same network with the same version of everything.
Marco:
If you get into a bad state where... This happens with HomeKit stuff, too.
Marco:
If you get into a bad state where sometimes your...
Marco:
home networking or your home kit stuff or your handoff stuff just won't work until you like unplug your home pod and plug it back in like that happens sometimes with this and so actually if you want things to work the exact same way every single time you actually don't want the music app with home pod to perform handoff because it doesn't work all the time but it works most of the time and when it does work it's very nice
Casey:
80% of the time, it works every time.
Casey:
That's a reference, John.
Casey:
Zach wrote in to tell us about a reason why Apple may have announced WWDC in March for a virtual event in June.
Casey:
And Zach writes, the student challenge.
Casey:
Students have until April 18th to submit a project, and then Apple has until June 1 to review and grade them all.
Casey:
Student winners get dev program memberships and thus access to the labs.
Casey:
I hadn't thought about that.
John:
This message made me think about the fact that my son could enter this now, I think.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
He's actually taking an iOS development.
John:
He's taking a bunch of programming courses and done a little bit of dabbling, but now he's taking a straight-up iOS development class in high school, which is pretty cool.
John:
I'm not sure he's particularly interested in it or whatever, but it just occurred to me that I now have a potential contestant for this.
John:
Come on down.
John:
But he's doing school projects, though.
John:
I guess he can't probably turn in your school project.
John:
He's got enough on his plate to deal with.
John:
I don't think this should be his top priority, but it's cool.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
An anonymous Apple employee writes that Apple uses WebEx for all internal video conferencing.
Casey:
When all the stores were shut down over the summer, all communication was done via WebEx.
Casey:
Even now, internal interviews are conducted this way.
Casey:
And as John said, it is the bottom of the barrel, and myself and other coworkers would have vastly preferred anything else.
John:
The worst part about WebEx is it's like, you know, people complain like Chrome is such a battery hog and you should use Safari because it's nicer on your battery.
John:
WebEx is like Chrome times 10.
John:
It is the most battery draining application you could possibly run on an Apple laptop.
John:
So Apple does all this thing.
John:
They make their OS and their browser and everything and all their apps very sensitive to energy.
John:
And then they make all their employees run WebEx.
John:
It's like, what's the point?
John:
You're just killing all their batteries.
Casey:
Carlos Lopez Ferreira writes that Microsoft Teams killing the network.
Casey:
Many small, perhaps UDP packets can more easily kill the router than fewer large packets.
Casey:
Typical big downloads that John had mentioned.
Casey:
This is because the high volume of packet headers that the router or network equipment has to process.
Casey:
Might this explain the behavior that John is observing on the network?
Casey:
I would buy this.
Casey:
I don't know what your thoughts are, John, but it stands to reason.
John:
Yeah, this is the most plausible theory that I heard because I was saying like, oh, I've got this network and I do all this stuff with, you know, I use the network a lot.
John:
I use my one gigabit, you know, upload and download fiber connection all the time.
John:
And my router only seems to have problems when I do Teams.
John:
And if Teams really is sending many small packets, that could overwhelm things.
Yeah.
John:
This is the working theory that I'm going with as I blindly replace the oldest piece of equipment on my network and then cross my fingers for a month to see if the problem ever happens again.
Casey:
Surely a winning strategy.
Casey:
Simon writes that they had to install Teams, which they had never used before.
Casey:
And since that day that they lose their internet connection only when in a Teams call at least once a day.
Casey:
It doesn't just hang the Teams call, it kills their laptop's Wi-Fi.
Casey:
They see the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar doing its searching for internet dance, and if they ping something, they get nothing back.
Casey:
Usually it sorts itself out within 30 seconds, but sometimes they have to renew their DHCP lease.
Casey:
They've never had this issue when Teams is closed, we're not in a call, and they've never had the issue before installing Teams.
Casey:
Apparently, they've been using the same ISP-provided router for three years, no issues.
Casey:
They have a Ubiquiti wireless AP, which has been rock solid for over a year now.
John:
This is one of many, many pieces of feedback we got from people saying, I too use Teams and my internet goes out.
John:
Now, it's difficult because lots of people are forced to use Teams for obvious reasons in these COVID times, right?
John:
And lots of people have their internet go out.
John:
And if you spend all day on the internet using Teams, it stands to reason that when your internet goes out, there's a high chance that you're using Teams.
John:
That said, the explanation that if Teams actually does send many small packets and people have routers that might get overwhelmed with it, maybe there's something to it.
John:
But I think there is also the possibility that, like I was saying, maybe it just always seems like I'm using Teams because the only time I really care with my internet blips is when I'm in the middle of an important meeting or giving a presentation.
John:
But
John:
Lots and lots of people say, I use Teams, it kills my connection.
John:
And lots of reports like Simon say, when I'm not in Teams, I never lose my internet connection.
John:
It's only when I'm in Teams.
John:
Lots of other people also had complaints of like, well, it does something weird to my laptop or whatever.
John:
But to be clear, when I say I lose my internet connection, I know that because I would see, speaking of that pinprick of green light on the Airport Extreme,
John:
When the airport extreme loses its IP address, essentially, or like, you know, it's the thing that connects to my Fios R&T and it's the thing that gets my IP address.
John:
If that router dies, reboots, does anything bad, can't get an IP, everything in the house is offline because that is the internet connection.
John:
So when Teams starts flaking out, I just turn my head around and look behind me.
John:
And instead of seeing a green pinprick of light, I see either no light or a blinking orange light.
John:
I know that essentially my router is rebooting.
John:
right or has lost its ip address and is trying to gain another one like you know so if it's just that your laptop loses wi-fi but everyone else is still online you're not having the same problem as i was this was like literally knocking the whole house offline briefly and it would come back on was it crashing my router was it rebooting the router did it just lose its ip or was it really just a brief fios outage and nothing in my house could have saved it we'll find out in a month
Casey:
Stay tuned to find out.
Casey:
More from Carlos Lopez Pereira, this time on crypto mining.
Casey:
Thinking about crypto mining recently made me think of how wasteful typical heating systems are.
Casey:
I live in Norway, and I have to heat up my house about seven to eight months of the year, not to mention water heating for showers, etc.
Casey:
That made me think that we could produce heat in more intelligent, productive ways than just heating up resistors.
Casey:
Heating up the house is a necessity.
Casey:
How can we make the electricity to heat conversion more useful to
Casey:
And whether it's mining cryptocurrency, protein folding, or some other useful computation, do you see any merit in this idea?
Casey:
If so, what would you choose to do to make heating smarter?
Casey:
Oh, these are technology connections video that somebody has linked, isn't it?
John:
Yeah, so this is about crypto, which we'll get back to in a little bit to touch on.
John:
But it's kind of the idea of what I was talking about before.
John:
When you're enthusiastic about a new technology, and let's say the technology has a downside, like using lots of energy, you think, well, I'm heating my house anyway.
John:
And if I can produce a bunch of heat by using my computer, at least I'm doing something useful with that electricity.
John:
So I've got to produce it anyway.
John:
I've got I've got to heat my house.
John:
So what if, you know, let's say protein folding may be a better example than cryptocurrency.
John:
But, you know, anyway, two angles in this one.
John:
the electricity that you are using as an individual with a computer doing either protein folding or cryptocurrency is not really the problem we're addressing here like especially in terms of cryptocurrency the real problem is like the giant you know shipping containers filled with gpus that have their own power source burning coal somewhere or whatever anyway like in the grand scheme of things kind of like pollution other things individual action especially by individuals who are just living a normal life is not that big a deal but the second thing and this is where i get to link to some fun videos um
John:
So heating your house with electricity is not really the best way to go.
John:
So it's not, you know, I know it may be the only option you have, but in terms of efficiency, in terms of greenhouse gas emitted per BTU of heat provided to a human inside a house, it's not like, oh, let's just do something useful to the electricity.
John:
The real answer is...
John:
If you possibly can avoid it, do not use electricity to heat your home because it doesn't have a particularly good carbon footprint unless you're getting a lot of electricity from wind or solar, which maybe you are, in which case, you know, fine.
John:
But in the U.S., that is more rare.
John:
So to that end, I want to put some links into some technology connections videos.
John:
This is a channel on YouTube that covers sort of like how everyday things work.
John:
It's very good.
John:
It is very, very good.
John:
Yep, it's really good.
John:
And they did a bunch of episodes on heat pumps.
John:
And heat pumps are, in particular, in the first heat pump video, there's a direct comparison, again, in the US.
John:
So, you know, obviously your mileage may vary based on where you live and what's available to you.
John:
But in the US, electric heat is generally much worse in terms of carbon emission per BTU than heat pumps.
John:
And the videos explain why.
John:
And it's pretty cool.
John:
So I think you should check those out.
Casey:
Yeah, but I've only seen the first of these two videos, but it is very, very good.
Casey:
And, you know, I can only give you one data point, but here in Virginia where we have winter, but certainly compared to my two co-hosts, it's winter light.
Casey:
And the way my particular furnaces work in my house is that they're heat pumps at reasonable temperatures.
Casey:
And then if it gets cold enough, I have natural gas service via my city.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
Uh, if it gets that cold, then it'll start burning natural gas.
Casey:
And let me tell you, when it gets to that level, it heats up real quick in here, which is delightful.
Casey:
So, uh, yeah, it's not just resistors getting warm, like, like was implied.
Casey:
John, tell me about MS running application, please.
John:
This was the API that I was complaining about had all these bugs.
John:
We listed all the radars last time, the quote unquote worst API on the Mac.
John:
And I surmised that it's like it's weird that it would be broken so much because I just assumed it was some really old API that had been around forever.
John:
But apparently not.
John:
Daniel Joukot reminded me that this API was actually added in Snow Leopard, which might seem like ancient history to some people, but I was thinking it was back from the next days in the 90s.
John:
So 10.6 is when NS running application was added to macOS.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then we have good news about this, don't we?
John:
Yeah, this is the bug that I was talking about where I had the one, the bug I filed on this was I needed like a reproducible test case because the bug I described in the show was like, it works pretty much all the time, but not all the time.
John:
And that's the worst kind of bug, as Casey knows, right?
John:
So, but to file a really good bug, you're always looking for that reproducible test case.
John:
So when I was reaching my peak of frustration with these, you know, with the various window activation APIs not working correctly, I
John:
I found a reproducible test case just from my experimentation or whatever.
John:
And my test case was a version of Microsoft Outlook that I was running never responded.
John:
Like you do like activate all windows in Outlook.
John:
Outlook would 100% of the time go, ha, no, I'm bringing one window to the front.
John:
And I was like, yes, like this application.
John:
Because here's the thing.
John:
It's like, oh, well, that must be a bug in Outlook.
John:
Again, I will say, like I said last time, the Windows server is part of the operating system.
John:
if the operating system offers an api that's part of the os whose job it is to say bring all the windows that belong to a particular application to the front i don't feel like the application should have any say in that happening whatsoever because the operating system runs the windows server
John:
And the operating system controls the window layering.
John:
It can pull all those windows to the front.
John:
Even those windows don't have any contents or the application is stuck in an infinite loop and hasn't updated them, it doesn't matter.
John:
The whole point of a double-buffered window manager is the window manager has buffers for all those windows at whatever state they were in before.
John:
The content is available.
John:
So if that API fails to bring windows to the front, that's a problem in the OS's API.
John:
Never mind what brokenness in Outlook is causing this.
John:
So I'm like, here's a reproducible bug, Apple.
John:
I made a sample project with a little window that explains you need to be running Outlook.
John:
You need to be doing this.
John:
Follow these steps.
John:
Click this button.
John:
What should happen?
John:
All the Outlook windows should come to the front.
John:
What will happen?
John:
Just one window will come to the front.
John:
100% reducible every single time.
John:
It literally never, ever, ever works, right?
John:
And so we were talking about that bug in a Slack and I looked at, occasionally I look at him like, yeah, they haven't done anything to it.
John:
It's just totally, you know, no comments, no nothing.
John:
It already had a cyst diagnosis attached so they couldn't ask me for one.
John:
You know, and then, and I figured, you know what, I should check that bug again because someone said they had changed a bunch of stuff in Big Sur.
John:
And lo and behold, in the current version of Big Sur, this bug is 100% fixed.
John:
Like it no longer reproduces.
John:
You run my sample project, you click the button, all the windows in Outlook come to the front every time.
John:
and so i was like yes my bug is fixed or this particular bug is fixed but then i thought wait a second oh no before when it wasn't working right i just got through saying this is something the os is supposed to do like it controls the windows it can bring any window to the front anytime it's the os it runs the windows server right but it wasn't working before only for outlook and
John:
Like Outlook was the only app that would like not do it 100% of the time, right?
John:
Other apps would, you know, like Finder occasionally would freak out and Safari would freak out.
John:
But most of the time, everything worked.
John:
Outlook never worked.
John:
So obviously there was something about Outlook that was...
John:
triggering this bug in the os right and outlook which i unfortunately know because i use every day at work has changed a lot recently in fact there's this new outlook with this new look with a big switch at the top that says would you like try outlook's new look like it's a whole new application it's a new application that i hate but anyway right i like the new version worse than the old one i'm sticking with the old version as long as i can
John:
Anyway, Outlook has changed substantially.
John:
So now I'm like, OK, did Apple actually fix this bug or did Microsoft just so substantially change Outlook that it no longer triggers the bug in the OS?
John:
So now I'm depressed about it.
John:
So I'm excited that Outlook works now.
John:
So no one who's running Outlook will send me complaints that, hey, I tried to use your thing and it didn't bring all the Outlook windows to the front.
John:
Your app is broken.
John:
And then I have to point them to this feedback number.
John:
and i was tempted to close the bug to say well so much for this bug it doesn't reproduce but then i thought you know what i should just leave it there and let apple close it but then they're never going to close it so i just should close it myself anyway i'm of i'm of multiple minds about what i should do about this bug report practically speaking this 100 reproduction that i had for this bug no longer works and we're back to the situation i was in before where it's an intermittent impossible to reliably reproduce but nevertheless infuriating error
Marco:
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Casey:
I have to non-sarcastically congratulate our cryptocurrency enthusiast listeners and our Tesla enthusiast listeners, because I saw a startling lack of feedback about how wrong we were about everything we said, which typically with those two groups doesn't necessarily relate to whether or not we were actually wrong about anything we said.
Casey:
But everyone kept it to themselves, and I'm very proud of you all.
Casey:
By the way, quick aside, I think I put in the neutral channel in the Relay Slack.
Casey:
you did you guys see that there's an entire github repo with a like delivery checklist for model 3 owners so it's this it's this entire list i'll put in the show notes it's this entire humongous list of things you need to look at when you take delivery of your model 3 because more likely than not at least one of these things will be wrong now to be fair a lot of them are like standard you know any new car sort of things but oh my goodness it was hilarious to see this
Casey:
But we also realized that we didn't exactly cover kind of cryptocurrency 101, which I think, John, you would like to do now.
John:
I like how in the intro to this tiny follow up item, you managed to get another dig in at Tesla users.
John:
Like really, at a certain point, you're bringing this on yourself, Casey.
John:
I know, I know.
John:
Let me just say one more mean thing about Tesla's.
John:
um yeah this is not cryptocurrency 101 this is this is cryptocurrency 000 and the reason the reason i wanted to bring it up is a i don't have much deep knowledge of cryptocurrency and i don't think any of us do but and you know and b i don't really want to go into that deeply but i felt like the last time uh we kind of talked about the issue uh
John:
with the assumption that everyone listening knew at least a tiny bit of the basics to have the context and if you don't i feel like it's our duty to explain one or two things about the basics and that's what i wanted to do now marco mentioned thinking the sort of digital underpinnings of it are interesting and that i think is the one the probably the coolest thing about cryptocurrency and blockchain and all that that people should actually read about because it is kind of interesting um
John:
So the quick version of that is cryptocurrency, you know, I don't, I'm probably using the wrong terms.
John:
People say it's not cryptocurrency, it's the blockchain or whatever.
John:
Anyway, the problem they're solving is if you have, I mean, let's just use money because that's what they use in the thing.
John:
If you have two parties and they want to, you know, exchange money or like complete a transaction, right?
John:
You know, in some network, right?
John:
That involves exchanging, you know, money, right?
John:
But no one trusts anyone else.
John:
And there is no party in the middle being the referee.
John:
So there's no bank.
John:
There's no government.
John:
There's just two completely anonymous, totally untrusted people on the internet.
John:
How can you possibly ever get any kind of exchange where someone doesn't end up getting ripped off or like someone doesn't end up like spending the same dollar two times or like how can you reliably do that?
John:
Isn't that why banks and governments exist?
John:
To have a place who's sort of like the referee, the party in the middle that is going to make sure everything happens fairly, or the government with the military that's going to come and...
John:
drop a bomb on you if you don't do what you're supposed to be anyway like with no enforcement zero trust on the internet right and this is the problem they're solving can we get a network of entities on the internet that are able to complete transactions where nobody trusts anyone else and
John:
You know, and it's assumed that people will attempt to do malicious things.
John:
They'll attempt to double spend their money.
John:
They will attempt to receive money, but not send the amount that they promised.
John:
They will attempt to break and corrupt the system.
John:
How can we make a system that works in that environment?
John:
And that is part of what the whole blockchain and distributed ledger thing does, where there's various consensus protocols and ways that everyone is incentivized to make sure that the transactions are valid and they can't become validated until enough of the network agrees that they're legit.
John:
So that one or two or a small number of bad actors can't cause things to go bad.
John:
My understanding is a lot of these schemes...
John:
uh if one particular entity controls more than half the network it kind of breaks down so you want to avoid that but i think there are other systems that that try to help with that so that is pretty cool and technically interesting because if you think about that problem in the abstract it seems like it's impossible well you can't do it if you have just a bunch of people who are liars and cheats and you know again theoretically like actors in the computer science sense
John:
where it behooves them to lie about transactions and to cheat and to try to get more money or whatever how is anything ever going to work right and that's the problem they're solving so i would encourage everybody even if you don't care about bitcoin or cryptocurrency to read up on the tech behind that because that is a cool in the abstract cool kind of information computer science problem and then you can look into the implementations it's like okay theoretically i understand how it works and there are various different schemes to sort of set up the incentives uh to work correctly like what we were getting at with the um
John:
pollution and everything is some of them use proof of work which is you have to solve a complicated problem that's easy for other parties on the network to check your answer but it's hard for you to get the answer in the first place so there's an asymmetry there and the proof of work ones have the unfortunate side effect of okay well you want me to do work well i'll just buy a thousand gpus and do tons of work and use tons of energy to do it whatever there's also proof of stake which is a different system for solving the same problem that doesn't have the exact same downsides right
John:
And then on top of all this, there are things like Ethereum, where if you have this sort of baseline distributed ledger type thing, you can use that to build other systems like a system of contracts that describe what parties agree to and have those contracts be validated on the blockchain and agreed on by all parties and be verifiable and all sorts of stuff like that.
John:
So the tech part of this actually is cool.
John:
It's just that the...
John:
I mean, you'll hear this word a lot in the heat pump technology connections thing.
John:
The externalities are less than ideal, let's say.
John:
Yeah, you get to do all these things, but at what cost to the entire planet and world?
John:
And by the way, you know, what are these things actually good for other than speculating on the value of the things themselves, right?
John:
So...
John:
So technologically and intellectually, I would encourage anyone who has any interest in this to read one or two or three of the Wikipedia articles that we link.
John:
We will link in the show notes to get a feel for it and dig deeper on how they solve the problems.
John:
But practically speaking, I would still encourage people maybe not to invest their life savings into Bitcoin just yet.
Casey:
That I agree with, but I actually slightly disagree with reading up on this.
Casey:
And maybe it's just because I'm a more visual learner or something.
Casey:
But I'm going to call out one more time the video I mentioned last week by, oh shoot, I forget the name of them, but it's 3Blue1Brown or something like that.
Casey:
And it is like a 20-25 minute video, but it was the first time that I had seen something or read something for that matter, because I had tried reading on it plenty, that really helped me understand how you arrive at the blockchain and Bitcoin situation.
Casey:
And it starts with, like you were saying, John, let's say you had two parties that you just wanted to agree on exchanging money or something like that.
Casey:
And it walks you through, OK, how do you land on the blockchain?
Casey:
It's fascinating.
Casey:
And I also want to call out.
Casey:
Since last episode, when I mentioned this before, Twitter user Elijah pointed out to me, apparently these videos are just Python scripts that generate all the animation.
Casey:
And there's a GitHub repo for the video's Python script, which blew my mind.
Casey:
So I will link that in the show notes as well, which I thought was almost as interesting as video in the first place.
Casey:
But I really, really enjoyed that video.
Casey:
I cannot recommend it enough because I had tried on and off for years to understand what the crap this was all about.
Casey:
And it did not click until...
Casey:
I saw that video, and it will be in the show notes yet again.
John:
And the people who made that video were made from just a series of instructions.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
With DNA made up of those things in case you couldn't remember the name of before.
Casey:
Yep, that's right.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
No, I mean, I...
Casey:
I snark on Tesla a lot, and they really do make good cars, usually.
Casey:
I snark on crypto more recently than before, but it is extraordinarily fascinating as an academic exercise, even though I have tremendous concerns about its impact on the planet.
Casey:
So I couldn't agree with you more, John, that as an academic exercise, it's very much worth looking into.
John:
and there's the other angle that i didn't get into is the political angle obviously like if you can if you don't have to have a government or a bank involved governments and banks through their role in basically making the economy work by being the things that enforce the the correctness and validity of various financial transactions and agreeing on how much money you actually have and what even is money and all that other stuff and the whole fiat currency thing right um
John:
Any kind of system that can, in theory, solve the same problem without requiring banks and governments has some advantages because banks and governments historically have done some pretty bad things and have their own terrible externalities, right?
John:
And then the final thing I'll add is setting aside pollution and energy use and setting aside governments and banks.
John:
There is, on top of all of that, the basic economic question of, is this a pyramid scheme?
Yeah.
John:
like what are we even doing here exactly is anyone buying anything with bitcoin or is it just again uh great for people who need to be able to perform transactions with untrusted parties so now hopefully given all this rambling across two episodes the description of imagine if idling your car 24 7 would produce solve sudokus that you could change for heroin i hope that all finally makes some form of sense because again every part of that sentence hits on one of these things
Casey:
Oh, man, that is such a perfect tweet.
Casey:
That is up there in my book as one of the most perfect tweets of all time.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So there's been some news in America recently for coming from the Supreme Court with regard to Google and Oracle and whether or not Google copied the Java API and whether or not that's fair use and so on.
Casey:
I'm not even sure, even as Chief Summarizer-in-Chief, the best way to summarize this.
Casey:
I mean, I could take a stab at it unless one of you would prefer to, but I don't know.
Casey:
There's a lot of moving parts here.
John:
I think I can do a reasonable summary like this is a really old case.
John:
I'd forgotten that it existed in between the time that it went to the Supreme Court and has a decision.
John:
But this is good news, right?
John:
The Supreme Court miraculously came to decision a not along party lines, which is in itself is miraculous because our court is also screwed up in that way.
John:
And B, they came to the right decision.
John:
The court case was essentially around the Java API.
John:
So Oracle bought Sun.
John:
Sun made Java.
John:
Oracle bought Sun.
John:
And then, you know, Oracle being giant evil corporations.
John:
Like, what do we have that we can sue somebody about?
John:
out so google uh google had basically re-implemented the java api itself right and so for and programmers probably understand this but goodness knows that the judges and lawyers in this court case clearly didn't but if you're not a programmer don't know what we're talking about here when we say like the api like the java api um java is a language but there's always like you know standard libraries that come with it you use to do things some of them are complicated some of them are simple but you know
John:
the java api has a bunch of such a bunch of functions you can call oh this function adds two numbers together this function concatenates strings this function opens a file this function reads a file like just there has to be you know method calls it's like a name and a bunch of arguments it says you call this thing with these arguments and you get a result like if you had an add function the function would be called add and it takes two arguments the two numbers you want to add and what does it return the sum of those two numbers like that's obviously silly and simple but it's a type of example the game the thing but java sdk
John:
It has tons of APIs, and that's what makes it the library for Java.
John:
Someone has to pick, hey, when you open a file, what does that API look like?
John:
Is it called Open File?
John:
Is it just called Open?
John:
Is it called Open Buffer Stream Factory?
John:
Like maybe if it's C++.
John:
But there is an API, right?
John:
And there's all these different functions, and they take a certain set of arguments to do the thing, right?
John:
Google wanted to essentially have its own development system for Android phones and so on and so forth.
John:
that used the Java API that had all the same functions with all the same names, with all the same arguments, with all the same return values, but they didn't want to use or license Java.
John:
They just said, well, we'll just look at what your API is.
John:
We can see that from your documentation.
John:
Here's all the different function names.
John:
Here's the argument takes.
John:
Here's what they're supposed to do with the return.
John:
And then we'll just implement them ourselves.
John:
right they call it like a clean room implementation we didn't look at how you made this work we just know there's a function called add that adds two numbers and returns the sum so we will make that function signature and we'll write the part of the body part and obviously it's it's much more difficult for functions that are not just adding two numbers um but they re-implemented it all from scratch and oracle said you can't do that you copied our api
John:
And they're like, well, we didn't, you know, we didn't look at your source code at all.
John:
Like we just, we have an API that has the same functions that yours does, but we wrote it all ourselves.
John:
Like there's not a single line of this that came from what you did.
John:
Like it's not, we're not stealing anything from you.
John:
You just made an API and we implemented the same API to make it convenient for our programmers to use an API they might be familiar with.
John:
And this is the court case, right?
Okay.
John:
And it would have been a terrible, catastrophic decision if they had said, oh, you can't copy that API.
John:
Because all of a sudden, anybody who had any API with any kind of function that did anything, you know, like say someone did the add function, right?
John:
It would be like patents, basically, or an existing terrible system we have.
John:
If you made a function called add add that took two arguments and returned the sum, and then someone else had that function in their code, you could sue them and say, ah, ah, ah, we made the add function.
John:
That's ours.
John:
You can't have a function called add.
John:
You have to give it a different name and make it different.
John:
So yours has to be called add two numbers or something, right?
John:
It can't just be called add.
John:
And it gets absurd from there.
John:
The entire foundation of the way software works, the idea that
John:
yeah i can make a function with the same name as yours that takes the same arguments does the same thing but if i write the whole function myself it's my work i didn't copy anything from you so anyway the supreme court came to the correct decision which is yeah they're allowed to do that get a grip like they didn't they didn't steal anything from you it's just they they use this they copy the same public api as you but they wrote every single line of that code themselves so tough luck
Marco:
I also think you can think that what Google did was slimy, but also agree that this is not a legal thing that they should be barred from doing.
Marco:
And that's where I fall on it.
Marco:
Google, they do slimy stuff all the time.
Marco:
Their corporate ethics are not great.
Marco:
This was a slimy thing to do.
Marco:
But I also think they should be allowed to do it.
John:
Here's the thing.
John:
They needed a development platform for Android, right?
John:
Rather than make their own from scratch, they said, why don't we just do a thing that we know people like already?
John:
People use and know Java.
John:
Why don't we get on board that train?
Casey:
But do they like it?
John:
Well, anyway, I feel like that shows it's kind of a sign of weakness and they didn't feel like they could make their own API from scratch that would be attractive enough to make people come over to a new unfamiliar thing.
John:
And they also didn't think they can, you know, it's like, I can't, we're not going to make something so much better that people are willing to use it even though it's not familiar to them.
John:
So why don't we just copy the familiar thing?
John:
I don't think that's a particularly strong move, but I don't think it's unethical.
John:
And there is something to be said for like, it's a conservative move.
John:
Let's put it that way.
John:
It's a safe move.
John:
Like we know people know Java already.
John:
Why don't we just do that?
John:
And maybe people who, the people who do this, maybe they really like Java, right?
John:
To give an example, I'll put these links in the show notes.
John:
We're all familiar with, well, maybe you're not all, but anyway, Next Step, the operating system that Next made that eventually got purchased by Apple and then, you know, the whole company got purchased by Apple and then turned into Rhapsody and then Mac OS X and yada, yada.
John:
Has an API called AppKit, a bunch of other frameworks in there.
John:
And they've been around for years.
John:
They've been around since the 90s, since before Apple bought them, right?
John:
And it's a cool new API, like from scratch, a thing that didn't exist before with its own weird language, Objective-C, that was also made around the same time, right?
John:
And the open source community saw that and they said, wow, these next things are cool, but they cost 10 grand.
John:
What if I want to write a program on my little Linux computer that costs way less than 10 grand?
John:
and i want to use that cool new api i want to use objective c and i think you could do that with the you know supported in gcc or whatever open source compilers but i also want to use app kit like i want to make i want to make an ns window and do you know i'll do all the things that you can do with the app kit api but of course they couldn't get app kit because it came as part of next which is a proprietary thing and they didn't have the source code to all that so they made gnu step which is a play on next step which is an open source re-implementation of
John:
app kit and a bunch of the other next step apis exactly the same thing that uh that uh oracle was suing google about they saw the next api they didn't have the source code for it but they said that's a cool api can we make something that has all the same functions with all the same arguments but then we'll just write all the code ourselves and they did uh luckily next wasn't
John:
foolish or litigious enough to try to sue the people the the volunteers that made the open source gnu step implementation they rightly surmised this was not particularly a particularly big threat to the success of next and even when next was bought by apple apple didn't sue gnu step out of existence as far as i know tune in next week for people to send me all the court cases where apple uh crushed gnu step under its heel um
John:
But anyway, I think it was just another example that came to mind.
John:
If you know what AppKit and Cocoa are and can imagine someone basically looking at Apple's documentation and saying, that's pretty cool, I would like to do that.
John:
And they just copy all those APIs but write all the code themselves?
John:
That's a good new step.
Casey:
I don't know, though.
Casey:
To go back to what Marco was saying, I tend to agree with him.
Casey:
I feel like
Casey:
The not slimy thing for Google to do would be to pay Oracle whatever they needed to pay in order to license the API.
John:
Paying Oracle is always a little slimy.
Casey:
Also true.
Casey:
And it's tough because I think I'm – as I'm listening to myself say this, I think I'm being slightly hypocritical because I think the most honest thing for Google to do would be to arrange some sort of agreement with Oracle, even if it's that they're just going to use the API.
Casey:
I think –
Casey:
if you really look at the spirit of everything, Google arguably owed them something.
Casey:
Maybe not the absurd amount of money that Oracle would want, but they owed them something.
Casey:
And I think the kind of screw you, I want to have my cake and eat it too approach is to do what they did, which isn't necessarily wrong, but it's slimy, like Marco said.
Casey:
But all that being said, let me disagree with myself slightly and say I do think that the Supreme Court ruling was correct.
Casey:
I don't think an API really should be copyrightable or certainly they shouldn't be able to be sued for copying the API because the API is –
Casey:
To my eyes, and I say I want to use so many words that have double meaning, but it's kind of like a framework in a sense.
Casey:
Like, if you want to be something that looks and smells like Java, then you need to be able to do these things.
Casey:
Or if you want to be something that looks and smells like AppKit, you need to be able to do these other things.
Casey:
And I think the more honest thing for Google to do would be to enter some sort of an agreement with Oracle, but I don't think it's necessarily wrong what they did.
Casey:
It's just not the rightest thing they could do.
Casey:
And certainly, I think the rightest and least evil, remember that?
Casey:
Don't be evil.
Casey:
The least evil thing they could have done was either to create something like Kotlin from the get-go, which is
Casey:
a very swifty, or I think it predates Swift, strictly speaking, but it's a very swifty version of their APIs and language and whatnot, to start with Kotlin from the get-go or make their own thing in its entirety.
Casey:
And I understand how they landed, well, to some degree, I understand how they landed on, let's just use Java APIs.
Casey:
I've never been a fan of Java, and I find Java to be a very clunky language to work with, but I understand how they got there.
Casey:
Take another example.
Casey:
C Sharp, by most metrics, especially early on, C Sharp was just Microsoft's version 2 of Java.
Casey:
They looked at Java and said, hey, there's a bunch of good ideas here, but let's do this in a less crummy way, a less crummy and more proprietary way, and we'll make C Sharp.
Casey:
And even though it's spiritually very similar in execution and application, it's very, very different.
Casey:
And that, to me, is a far less slimy approach.
Casey:
But it's exactly what you said earlier, John, that they wanted anyone who knows Java to be able to just swoop in and continue where they left off for all intents and purposes.
Casey:
And I understand how they landed on this course of action, but I still find it to be slimy.
John:
Yeah, I don't think it's slimy.
John:
I just think I just think it's weak.
John:
I think it shows that they didn't they didn't believe they didn't believe they can make something better.
John:
So they did this.
John:
And I think it should always be valid for people to do this.
John:
Like if someone sees like Swift UI, I mean, I think there already is a Linux implementation of Swift UI.
John:
Like and you think Swift UI is a great API.
John:
I wish I had that API in Linux.
John:
I think by all means write it, especially if it's like open source type stuff, because no one expects a band of volunteers to come up with a new thing as good as Swift UI, maybe like on their own.
John:
But if you want to re-implement SwiftUI, go for it.
John:
And Apple, I think, wisely would say that is not a threat to us.
John:
It's not on our platform.
John:
They're writing for Linux.
John:
It is not going to take anything away from us.
John:
And in fact, the more people that know SwiftUI, the better it is for the thing that we wrote and control the evolution of, which is SwiftUI.
John:
So if Oracle was smart, if Oracle, if it was still Sun, I think they would say the more people who know the Java SDK, the better.
John:
And if they're copying us and we're leading...
John:
you know, that's great, right?
John:
But anyway, I don't attach any ethical consideration to it.
John:
It's merely like a potential strategy misstep or a smart strategy if you know for a fact that nothing your company is going to come up with is going to be any good.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think it's wise to remove ethics as the particular line you're trying to draw.
Marco:
Is this ethical or not?
Marco:
To me, it's not a question of ethics.
Marco:
It's a question of doing this is kind of distasteful, which is different.
Marco:
Lots of things are not exactly unethical, but many people would find distasteful.
Marco:
A really good example, I think, on a different kind of scale, but for a similar problem, is...
Marco:
Microsoft famously does not want to license any kind of proprietary technologies for Windows.
Marco:
And so they almost always, when something is popular out there in the world that they might have to license to build support in, they will almost always make their own version of something very similar that they can then offer for free.
Marco:
A great example of this is when MP3 was all patent encumbered,
Marco:
They didn't want to build an MP3 encoder, so they built WMA, their own similar format that they could do their own thing.
Marco:
A more common case, that is still the case today, is certain fonts like Helvetica that they decided, you know what, Helvetica costs money to license.
Marco:
So instead of licensing this font that's very popular and useful, we're going to make our own clone of it called Arial.
Marco:
That's almost the same, but just different enough not to get sued.
Marco:
By the way, I believe Google also did that.
Yeah.
Marco:
But anyway, it's a distasteful thing to do, but they did it and it mostly was OK if you don't care about taste.
Marco:
And Microsoft doesn't and Google doesn't.
Marco:
So, you know, it's OK in the sense that, like, you know, it is legally acceptable for them to have done this.
Marco:
and we don't think it should be made illegal, but it is distasteful, and these companies should be, you know, in John parlance, given a thumbs down, maybe, for having done this this way.
John:
No, I don't give them a thumbs down, though.
John:
I don't.
John:
Oh, wow.
John:
I mean, I don't even think it's distasteful.
John:
I think it's, I mean, although your font example is interesting, so Apple obviously licensed Helvetica, right?
John:
But Apple also, with the original Mac,
John:
made a bunch of fonts because they couldn't or didn't want to license the real ones and they gave them names that are similar like instead of times new roman they made a font called new york and instead of helvetica they made a font called geneva like you can you can do the mapping it's there right but then they licensed helvetica right but then the modern apple what modern apple did is they decided you know what
John:
We think in-house we can make a font that's better than Helvetica for our purposes.
John:
And they did, as far as they're concerned, San Francisco.
John:
They made their own font with many different variants suited to exactly what they need the font to do, which is work on watches, work on their Mac, work on the phone or whatever.
John:
And they did San Francisco.
John:
And I think that shows kind of like depending on what position you're in, are you in the position to license the thing?
John:
uh does licensing it help your competitor in a way that you want can you do your own thing that's similar can you do your own thing that is 100 compatible with the thing you don't own by just reampling in the api or do you feel like you're in a position to actually do an original thing that's better right apple bought next so i believe it arguably they didn't do the original thing that's better although steve jobs did next right but uh you know apple's apis are not like even though apple used java
John:
back in the day because java looked like it was going to be super popular it was java so you could call you know next step apis from java right it wasn't you know swing or whatever um and when the time comes for them to do something better they think actually we can make a new original thing that we think is even better they come out with swift ui right they don't say we're going to copy win fx or whatever the hell the the you know the
John:
the windows new apis are they don't copy the java apis right they come up with something on their own but you're not always in a position to do that so i feel like if something is out there like the implementation obviously you can't steal their code right but if something is out there as a public api with publicly available documentation and you think you can just simply re-implement that from scratch just looking at the api
John:
go for it because that's not easy right like just think of any operating system and unix with all the system calls i can give you a list of all the unix system calls no go write your own operating system say you can't do that that's cheating don't shouldn't you make your own operating system everyone accepts everyone's going to make a posix compatible operating system and just because posix is this open thing that no company owns is exactly the same thing oh you have a call called f open and you have printf and you have s printf you're just such a copier that's distasteful it's like no it's it's fine because you still have to write the implementations yourself
John:
Or, you know, use Linux or whatever and have a bunch of other people write it for you.
John:
But anyway, I think it's perfectly fine.
John:
But the best way to think about this, legally speaking, is imagine if the opposite was true.
John:
Like I said, if the opposite was true and it was illegal, absurd situations arrive immediately.
John:
That basically you could squad on all these sensible APIs for doing any kind of reasonable thing and no one can ever use them, right?
John:
And then you could have court cases over, you know, I have an ad API and they have one called add two numbers, but the arguments are exactly the same as mine.
John:
So they're basically copying me.
John:
It's like, oh God, look...
John:
Sometimes, when it comes time to make an API for opening a file, there's only so many ways you can do that, and we don't want to have to avoid the 8 million other implementations made previously.
John:
I mean, again, it's like patents, which is the stupidest system we have in this entire country, see previous hypercritical episodes about, right?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
And as some people said in the chat, sometimes we have more sane law about this.
John:
You can't copyright a chord progression, but you can copyright a performance of a song.
John:
It gets sketchy after that in music because I don't want to bring up music too much.
John:
Fonts are similar.
John:
And then I think you can't copyright the shape of a font, but you can copyright the font itself.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Laws should be made so that we don't end up in absurd scenarios that discourage innovation and make it harder to do stuff.
John:
And if this court decision had gone the other way, it would make everything harder for everybody.
John:
So I'm glad it went this way.
Marco:
Yeah, in general...
Marco:
I have similar views on patents.
Marco:
I don't think any patents should exist on anything.
Marco:
Yes, including the vaccines.
Marco:
I was just talking about everything.
Marco:
I don't think any patents should exist.
Marco:
I think the system causes more harm than it prevents.
Marco:
But
Marco:
Generally, when looking at technology, one of the biggest reasons the technology industry has been able to develop so quickly and do such huge things in such a short amount of time in relative history and keep moving and advance is that –
Marco:
And most developers are violating them
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And it just kind of goes unaddressed and unenforced most of the time, thank God.
Marco:
And everything is fine.
Marco:
And you have people copying each other all the time.
Marco:
You have applications that compete in the same market space.
Marco:
They're copying each other's features back and forth all the time.
Marco:
And it's fine.
Marco:
You have platforms copying each other's stuff all the time.
Marco:
You have iOS and Android copying each other.
Marco:
Windows and Mac copying each other.
Marco:
Everyone's copying everyone all the time, and it's fine.
Marco:
And that is a fundamental reason why the tech industry has been able to get as big and great as it is.
Marco:
And whatever problems you might have with how big it is now, with political stuff, with certain big companies, whatever, the reality is the entire business, all of us,
Marco:
rely on that relative unrestrictedness of most intellectual property in technology with the exception of like trademark, which I think of all the intellectual property categories, I think trademark is probably the most defensible category.
Marco:
and the one that brings the fewest problems compared to copyright and patent as they are currently enforced.
Marco:
The reality is the industry is better off for everyone, including themselves and all of us using this stuff, when there are fewer intellectual property restrictions, basically as few as possible, besides really obvious stuff like direct copyright infringement or direct trademark infringement.
Marco:
Otherwise,
Marco:
Almost nothing else being protected is a good idea in technology.
John:
Yeah, and the proof is the lack of protections for this stuff has not caused the technology industry to fail to thrive, let's say.
John:
I think the technology industry is doing pretty well with everybody free to copy everybody else's APIs.
John:
Because again...
John:
It's like having an idea for a startup.
John:
It's the execution that matters.
John:
Feel free.
John:
Anyone out there, if you would like to copy all of Apple's APIs and make your own implementation of Mac OS X, go for it.
John:
It's harder than you think.
John:
The APIs, even though they'll say, it's really hard to design a good API.
John:
There is.
John:
The implementation is also really hard.
John:
So Apple does not need legal protection to prevent you from copying SwiftUI in their entire operating system.
John:
Right.
John:
Their moat is the fact that doing that is incredibly hard and they already did it and you haven't.
John:
So go ahead.
John:
Copy.
John:
Apple does not need that legal protection.
John:
And if that legal protection existed, it would make everybody's life miserable because we would very quickly run out of names or functions that add two numbers together.
John:
it'd be like domain name squad like someone would just you know create and copyright every conceivable function that does a thing you know all possible print functions right just and they would just it would be like patent trolls like they'd be just a holding company it's like we own the copyright of every conceivable api any human will ever think of to perform these basic tasks and they just wait for someone to use an api like that so you can't use that api we own that one license it from us just like patents oh god patents are terrible i don't want to go off on that anyway we need to get the next stop sorry everybody
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Marco:
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Casey:
Tim Cook did an interview with Kara Swisher sometime over the last day or two.
Casey:
I don't know when this landed, but it is very interesting.
Casey:
I have thoughts.
Casey:
I'd like to point you to our show notes where someone, probably John, put in the Overcast link to the podcast.
Casey:
There's also a transcript, which we will put in the show notes.
Casey:
I'd also like to call out Dithering if you happen to be a subscriber.
Casey:
I believe it was today's or yesterday's episode of the show.
Casey:
They kind of go through it a little bit.
Casey:
And also Upgrade this week was really good.
Casey:
And Upgrade touched on a lot of the things that I heard in this interview.
Casey:
I should probably summarize it.
Casey:
So there was, it's a lot of talk about a lot of different things, including Apple's gatekeeping and their, you know, Apple tax, if you will, on the app store, you know, the 30 or 15%.
Casey:
They talk about AR and future products-ish.
Casey:
They talk about Tim's future, which we'll get to in a little bit.
Casey:
And there were several other things that were discussed.
Casey:
I...
Casey:
This was probably the best interview of Tim Cook that I've heard.
Casey:
And I didn't come away from it feeling great.
Casey:
And I'm curious what you guys thought.
Casey:
Marco, since I heard you snicker a second ago, why don't we start with you?
Casey:
Have you heard this and what did you think if you did?
Marco:
yeah i listened earlier tonight and and i do think um the only other tim cook interview that i've really been able to get through um was the one he did for i think it was outdoors magazine or outdoor magazine uh that was also a podcast i think podcasts are a good format for tim because first of all smart speed he he really needs it um so i'm able to pay attention a
Marco:
And you also are able to pick up little bits of his personality here and there that he very carefully drips out.
Marco:
But if you see Tim giving a TV interview, usually – I don't even watch those because they're so usually relatively low in value.
Marco:
Certainly, whatever he says during the keynotes and presentations they do, that's all so incredibly tightly scripted that he – again, there's not a lot of value to what he says there.
Marco:
It's hard to –
Marco:
See through the cracks and actually see the personality and the interesting parts that don't seem like PR statements.
Marco:
And so podcasting, I think it's nice to be able to get that sense from him a little bit.
Marco:
He's still extremely guarded and extremely careful with every word he's saying, but you do get a little bit more of that personality.
Marco:
And yes, Smart Speed helps.
Marco:
So in general, I was pleased with the interview.
Marco:
I liked Kara Swisher's style.
Marco:
I don't know if this was done in editing or if this is actually how it went, but she was very just kind of like, you know, rapid fire questions.
Marco:
Maybe that was just the smart speed, but it was very much like, you know, she asked a lot of hard questions and,
Marco:
And Tim would answer some of them, many of them maybe.
Marco:
Uh, and then she would just move right onto the next thing.
Marco:
Like he, it would be like question one sentence answer, occasionally a followup question, and then right into the next thing.
Marco:
And it covered a very wide range of topics in a relatively short time.
Marco:
Uh, so that was actually, you know, as just like a, a thing to listen to.
Marco:
And as, as an interview, I thought it was pretty good.
Marco:
Kara Swisher is a good interviewer.
Marco:
She has interviewed a lot of CEOs, including Steve jobs, multiple occasions, Tim cook before, uh,
Marco:
And I think she knows what you can get out of somebody like Tim Cook and what you can't.
Marco:
So it was very – the ratio of meat on this bone versus PR filler or fluff I think was pretty good.
Marco:
As for the actual content of what Tim said, obviously there's a number of areas that we'll talk about.
Marco:
One of them was the whole app checking transparency thing.
Marco:
I think that was mostly fine.
Marco:
It's actually – it's worth listening to Dithering and Stratechery because I like Ben's approach to the tracking debate.
Marco:
Ben is mostly on the side of – that Apple is not super clear and often accurate about the terminology they use and how they describe data brokering and tracking businesses and stuff like that.
Marco:
A lot of times Apple will say something like, these companies sell your data, which is like –
Marco:
technically untrue or at least not the whole story or misleading or something like that so it's good to hear that point of view I lean a little closer to the Apple point of view but that's in part because I'm not one of these companies that does all this tracking I don't have like
Marco:
an app install network where I'm trying to attribute which means track purchases to you know between ads and stuff like that like I'm not doing any of that stuff my businesses don't depend on any of that stuff and I'm generally on Apple's side of like how things should be in theory you know with this kind of stuff so
Marco:
even with all that said, I found the app tracking transparency discussions mostly okay.
Marco:
They were very high level, but when it, when it got to the app store stuff, man, this is, and, and this, this applied to Steve jobs as well, but it certainly has not gone away with Tim cook.
Marco:
Apple usually when they, when they give statements or when they're, when their executives give statements or interviews, whatever,
Marco:
And usually they are straightforward and honest and it usually seems like they are arguing with good faith and that they believe they're doing the right thing.
Marco:
And usually you can take them at their word and they're not trying to BS you, etc.
Marco:
And occasionally you get something like this where they're doing something a little bit greedy or a little bit wrong or a little bit too something where the truth of the matter is not super PR friendly.
Marco:
And so they start doing distortions and spin, and they hammer on certain talking points that are kind of misleading or kind of dodgy or whatever.
Marco:
Modern Apple, that's the App Store.
Marco:
That's the problem they have with this.
Marco:
When they talk about stuff like other recent debates they've had with governments or the public, things like, as mentioned in the podcast, the San Bernardino shooting a phone unlocking thing.
Marco:
I think Apple was on the right side of that, of not building in the back door for law enforcement.
Marco:
I think that was the right move in retrospect.
Marco:
I thought it back then.
Marco:
I think that has held up as being the right move.
Marco:
And that was a big fight that Apple had in public, but they were right.
Marco:
The App Store stuff is mostly about money.
Marco:
They make a ton of money from being the App Store gatekeepers, and that's not great for PR, that that's the reason for their App Store over-controlling behavior.
Marco:
I think one of the best questions that Kara asked during the interview was like, they were on the topic of the App Store and Apple's cut, and she said something on the lines of like,
Marco:
Because Tim was saying, oh, well, our app store protects users and from privacy, which was, again, that's complicated and kind of misleading.
Marco:
And she had asked, well, why not allow people to basically accept in-app purchases directly in their apps through their own in-app purchase systems or make alternative app stores?
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
and tim's answer was along the lines of uh well then people people need our app store to trust it and if it wasn't if it wasn't for our app store people wouldn't trust it to they wouldn't input their payment information they wouldn't they wouldn't make purchases and that's just complete bs because like literally the entire internet is filled with independent websites that take credit card payments and have for many decades now and it's been fine like it's people do it all the time and tim is not an idiot
Marco:
He knows the internet exists.
Marco:
He knows this is a BS argument, and he's giving it anyway.
Marco:
And this isn't just like, you know, solely a Tim Cook thing.
Marco:
I guarantee you if Steve Jobs was still here, he would have made the exact same argument for the exact same reason.
Marco:
That's the story they tell themselves, which is partially but mostly not true, but they make a ton of money from it.
Marco:
And it's so hard – that famous quote about it's hard to get somebody to believe something if their job depends on them not believing it.
Marco:
It's so hard for people in the position of an Apple executive who have told themselves this justification over and over and over again for years.
Marco:
We have to be the gatekeepers here because it keeps people safe and nobody would trust giving their credit cards to apps, so therefore we have to do this.
Marco:
Well, that's really not true and hasn't been true for a long time if it was ever true.
Marco:
But they are – they've told themselves that story so much for so long.
Marco:
And they – it's like when you keep telling a lie over and over again, eventually you kind of start to believe that it's the truth or at least you suppress the fact that it's a lie in your mind so much even subconsciously that this is just – you just say it over and over again and it just becomes true to you.
Marco:
but this argument is so flimsy, and when you hear it out in the world, when you're not an Apple executive, and you hear these arguments, they sound completely ridiculous, and almost offensively so.
Marco:
And so most of the rest of the interview, I'm sure it's the other stuff, but to me, it's just every time you get an Apple person talking about
Marco:
the app store cut and their, their in-app purchase policies and all that stuff, it's just such a bad look for them.
Marco:
It's so uncomfortable and it's so cringeworthy and it's, and it is offensive because it's almost like they're insulting our intelligence by continuing to advance arguments that really don't hold a lot of water.
Marco:
And Tim even said, it's so funny, Tim even said at the beginning when asked about app tracking transparency and, you know, Kara said something on the lines like, you know, what do you think of Facebook counter arguments that this is hurting small businesses and everything?
Marco:
And Tim said, I think those arguments are flimsy.
Marco:
and you can say the exact same thing about everything tim said about app store control the all of apple's arguments are really flimsy it sounds good on you know if you don't think too much or if you don't know too much about it it sounds logical but i'm so mad you said that because that's exactly what i was gonna say because it you know the thing of it is is that it's it's
Casey:
When you look at it on the surface, you're like, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Casey:
And then you think about it for a half second, you realize, no, Apple's just pulling this like, oh, we're so magnanimous card.
Casey:
Like, look at us.
Casey:
Look at all this innovation we created.
Casey:
There was some absolutely disgusting phrase used for that, like this economic miracle or something like that.
Casey:
I might have that wrong, but it was something along those lines.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And, oh, look at all this that we've done.
Casey:
Like, oh, be thankful, plebs, that we have given you all these opportunities.
Casey:
And it's like so obnoxious the way they seem to think.
Marco:
Well, and the thing is, like, some of that is true.
Marco:
They have given a lot.
Marco:
They have created a lot of opportunities.
Marco:
They have created an amazing ecosystem and lots of people make money from it.
Marco:
Like, that's true.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But that doesn't answer the argument of why they have to be the only game in town for payment processing.
Marco:
That's a totally different argument.
Marco:
It's so funny that even in the App Store, there are tons of apps that take credit cards directly in the app.
Marco:
They just aren't selling digital goods.
Marco:
But I can type my credit card into the Amazon app to buy stuff that gets delivered to my house.
Marco:
I can type in a credit card into the Uber or Lyft apps to get a car to come somewhere and pick me up and bring me somewhere.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
I can type a credit card into the parking meter app when I park somewhere and I have to go to the stupid Park Mobile app and enter in the numbers and then PayPal fails and Apple Pay fails and you gotta type in a credit card.
Marco:
I can do that.
Marco:
And there's no trust issue there.
Marco:
And people buy stuff online all the time from every other website.
Marco:
So it's a complete...
Marco:
farce of an argument like it makes no sense whatsoever that apple has to has to be the only game in town for payment processing for digital goods in apps on their phone that makes no sense whatsoever
John:
I feel like another reason Apple should hire me is when listening to these interviews, when he does these things, I feel like, Tim, I can make the argument you're trying to make, I think, in a more convincing way.
John:
Now, I think I know why he doesn't make it in this way, because the way I would make it would be
John:
More revealing of Apple strategy than Tim Cook's Apple has ever particularly wanted to do.
John:
And also, I think bringing up Steve Jobs again, I think I agree that he would be making similar arguments and I agree that he would also totally be thinking about the control and money behind the scenes.
John:
But I think also he would agree with this other angle that I was just a take.
John:
And that's this.
John:
And you can disagree with it.
John:
It's open for debate whether you find this convincing.
John:
But I think it's a better argument, which is
John:
By having one method to do digital purchases, and you can get into a side argument about why our physical distinct or whatever, but in general, like digital purposes, purchases are the new thing that didn't exist before the app store in this particular fashion, like in-app purchases and all sorts of like digital goods, right?
John:
In our store, people were always paying things with credit cards, right?
John:
But, you know,
John:
For these digital goods in our store, which are very easy to basically rip people off with or whatever because there's no actual physical product moving around.
John:
It's just bits and taking people's money.
John:
Witness the scam apps signing up for weekly subscriptions.
John:
Having a single way to deal with that type of thing
John:
right the bulk of the purchases all those in-app purchases whatever having it always go through apple no exceptions no ifs ands or buts for that type of thing provides a simple to understand unified experience for customers that apple thinks provides differentiates its platform and makes it more valuable to customers than it would be otherwise if they just did what other people do which is allow multiple payment methods and
John:
And that has more value to Apple as a company.
John:
Like, in other words, why do we keep doing this?
John:
It's because we think Apple is a more valuable, better company that is more differentiated from its rivals by this particular simplification, right?
John:
And that is true of so many things that Apple does, that it has...
John:
Fewer options and it is less flexible, but the simplicity is what provides the level of comfort to the customers.
John:
And overall, net net, that makes Apple a more valuable company, a more desirable company for customers to interact with.
John:
It's the thing that makes Apple, Apple, right?
John:
But I think that reveals too much, and Apple is basically describing, here's why we're beating you at your own game, because all these things that you think are detriments are computers that don't have a lot of features, and we seal in the batteries and all this other stuff that you think, and you get rid of the floppy drive.
John:
I mean, by now, all their competitors should know, and they're just choosing not to do it, but that is the Apple MO.
John:
And...
John:
it would be honest i think there is a section of apple like part of part of the reason they're doing this is exactly what i'm describing and even though it's we feel like it has limits the options for customers and it's certainly worse for developers and all these other things there is an argument to be made that even though it is worse for all those parties and even though it's actually kind of worse for customers in certain ways
John:
Overall, it is still a win because it's what differentiates Apple.
John:
Because if we didn't do that, we'd be down in the mud fighting with Google and Microsoft at their own level.
John:
By making these different choices, this is what makes Apple Apple.
John:
Behind all that is also, let's look at the server's revenue graph, right?
John:
That is unavoidable.
John:
They're not going to say that, but everybody knows it's true, including Kara Swisher, right?
John:
And I thought in this interview, she was actually good with...
John:
It wasn't a follow-up question.
John:
It was like a follow-up assertion.
John:
To give an example, not particularly from the App Store section, but he was talking about the tracking stuff.
John:
And they're like, oh, these companies are tracking you and doing all these things and invading your privacy and stealing all your stuff or whatever.
John:
And Kara would say, yeah, and they do that with the devices that you make running the OS that you use.
John:
you know like with the app they got from your app store right she would always just stick that in and statement of fact like oh they're you know and apple could have come back tim could have come back and said yeah that's why we're doing this thing because it is on our platform but she's trying to say like you are partially culpable for this because you have been vending these apps that do all these bad things and yes you're trying to make up for it now by hurting your competitors who you won't admit are really your competitors right there's that whole other angle there right but
John:
I thought she was good at about sort of just reminding people just FYI, this is all happening on iPhones and you are the iPhone person.
John:
So it's not like you can just say this is all just a thing happening at arm's length from you.
John:
You are, you know, you are part of this ecosystem.
John:
In fact, you run this whole ecosystem.
John:
And then later in the interview, we'll talk about how you run this ecosystem with an iron fist and don't allow certain things to happen.
John:
So you surely share some of the blame for any bad effects that we're experiencing now, even though you are also the one who's trying to fix them.
Um,
John:
But anyway, I think I wasn't bothered by the interview.
John:
I enjoyed it.
John:
I'm used to Tim Cook saying these things.
John:
I wasn't particularly frustrated by the App Store section just because this is what I expected him to say.
John:
But I think there are actually stronger arguments than he was making.
John:
And I think mostly the reason he didn't make them is because they are more revealing than he wanted to be.
John:
And I think he thinks and Apple thinks as a collective corporate entity that they continue they can continue to
John:
to make the case they've been making and essentially get away with it because it is may not be convincing to us in particular but we are not the mass of the public we are not the government we are not congress uh maybe the arguments they're making are sufficiently convincing that they don't have to go into the whole here's how here's what makes apple apple and here's why it's a
John:
i totally buy and think is a huge factor and maybe they never have to really examine the fact that like okay but what is this really about like we know you make a ton of money from this right someone someone in the chat mentioned like how uh steve jobs said in the beginning like they're running the app store at break even i'm pretty sure that was never true i mean maybe i'm wrong but like i said
John:
Oh, so much has changed since then.
John:
The App Store is a huge source of money.
John:
Yes, obviously the App Store and digital purchases have become way bigger than they were.
John:
But when Steve Jobs said we're running the App Store at breakeven, I was given that side eye from day zero.
John:
It's like, okay, all right, we get it, Steve.
John:
Like, you're not trying to make a ton of money.
John:
I get what you're saying.
John:
But the way he said it, it was like...
John:
all right we yeah what you're trying it's like nobody who believed that who believed they were running you know maybe the app store was losing money but he's just saying that as a way to try to say you know look at we're doing that like you just said we're out here killing ourselves for you developers oh i can't believe the developers are yelling at us we're making this great platform you we're running this this app store for you like basically as a charity i'm not buying it right
John:
I mean, maybe they ran the app store at a loss for a while, but we understand projections.
John:
Like, we understand that there is motivation to get people into the app stores and get them to start selling things so you can start going on this upward slope.
John:
Or maybe it was profitable from day one.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Either way, claiming poverty or asking to be better appreciated for what they've given everybody are probably not...
John:
viable strategies but the safety argument i think has legs even without getting into the nuances they just described because most people hear it like like casey just said and go all right that makes some sense and they're not listening to this podcast and they don't care about the nuances so you know problem solved so it could be that the tim cook strategy is actually the winning one
Casey:
thinking back to our earlier conversation about how marco and i seem to think that what google did was a little slimy and i feel like apple's perspective on the app store is slimy like yes i suppose as the gatekeeper they could charge 30 or 15 percent to you know to be on the app store and yes they should earn some amount of money for innovating and creating the app store in the first place and so on and so forth but like
Casey:
Ah, it's just the way in which it came across is, it just, it was so gross to me.
Casey:
Like, it was so looking down from on high and saying, be thankful for what we give you.
Casey:
You are welcome.
Casey:
What can I say except you're welcome and also 30%?
Casey:
And it's just, it was so gross.
Casey:
And I get that feeling, like even...
Casey:
Even when I speak to friends at Apple about this, I get this feeling that it's inherent within Apple as a corporation that they are owed for doing this.
Casey:
They are owed for bringing this into the world.
Casey:
And again, to a degree...
Casey:
I think that is reasonable, but I don't know.
Casey:
At some point I feel like, okay, like, yes, you did innovate 10 years ago.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
13 years ago.
Casey:
How long has the app store been out?
Casey:
It's like 2008 or something like that.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So it's 13 years ago you innovated and I'm, I'm very happy for you.
Casey:
I am, but things have changed since then.
Casey:
And like, Oh, Tim says, Oh, you know, the, the app store rules aren't set in concrete or something like that.
Casey:
And I'm like, well, let's change them then.
Casey:
Like, let's move on.
Casey:
Like you, you have extracted the rent you deserve.
John:
I think he was good in that section because he did make the point that the rules have changed, and he emphasized the point that they have essentially changed over time more or less to be more favorable to people other than Apple, which I think is true.
John:
I mean, obviously, the 30 to 15 really supports that argument.
John:
That's why I thought he did, for the most part, a pretty good job in this interview.
John:
At various times, and I think this is what you're finding distasteful, and me too to some degree, is...
John:
That he sounded like he was he always sounds like he's on a witness stand.
John:
Right.
John:
He always sounds like a lawyer had coached him on exactly what to say, even when he's being persuasive or either that he's on a witness stand or that he's talking in front of Congress.
John:
You know, he's coming with the talking points and his talking points are, well, we do change the app store rules.
John:
And in fact, we pretty much only changed them in one direction.
John:
And in fact, we recently changed them to be way better for developers.
John:
So you telling us that we are ruling with an iron fist and making the rules that are bad for everybody, we're not saying the rules are perfect, but we change them all the time and we basically change them to get better.
John:
Those are all true and valid points and reasonable counter-arguments to the extreme arguments against.
Casey:
Well, but it's all just misdirection.
Casey:
Well, okay, don't worry about that, but hey, have I told you about it?
John:
But it's not, but it is true.
John:
Here's the problem.
John:
So I just got through saying where Tim Cook could have made his case better that having a single payment method actually is a benefit to both Apple and the world at large as in terms of differentiation and simplification, the basic Apple argument of why is it better for you to have fewer things, right?
John:
On the flip side of that, I don't understand why everybody, including Kara Swisher, doesn't come back at him with the obvious counter argument to this whole ecosystem thing that you're talking about.
John:
It's like, oh, you know, this economic miracle that we've created in the App Store.
John:
And I think you're right.
John:
There was something like that, right?
John:
the obvious comeback is like everybody knows tim everybody knows how platform works right pick a platform right games right playstation yes they make the console and they sell it but they need the games right it's you can't have one without the other it's a clearly symbiotic relationship oh we made the app store you should be thankful and the game the app developers or the game developers consoles say we made the software you should be thankful you
John:
you need both it's so obvious everybody and maybe they don't say because it's so obvious but i think most people listening be like oh well you know tim's right like they did make the app store the app store is nothing without the apps it's nothing right you need the apps that's how every platform works you make the platform and you attract the developers to it by making it a good deal for them and apple did that but it's it's a it's a partnership i mean not really because apple owns everything but you know what i mean like
John:
Nobody who makes the world's most awesome game console, like it's the best.
John:
It costs a small amount of money and it has a huge amount of power and it's better than everything else.
John:
But if no one makes games for it, it's a brick.
John:
Nobody wants it.
John:
You need people to make games.
John:
And so you need to sell a lot of them or convince somebody that you are going to sell a lot of them in the future, right?
John:
I mean, what did Microsoft have to do with the Xbox?
John:
Hey, we're making a game console.
John:
We're trying to make some games ourselves, which is going to cost a lot of money, but we need other people to make games for it.
John:
And we haven't sold any of them yet.
John:
We've sold zero.
John:
And in fact, we've never sold a game console, but we have to convince you game developer to put your game on this console that we can't tell you how many we're going to sell, but we think we might sell this many.
John:
What do you think?
John:
right and no platform is successful without people that build on it and so every single time you know apple or tim cook or whatever says this it should be the some sort of you know immediate sort of rote cliche comeback was like yes but of course the platform is pointless without the apps that develop for it so you owe them maybe not
John:
equal amount as they owe you but it's not 99 1 percent like that that everybody knows it's useless without the apps right and in fact every time someone makes a cool app for your platform that adds value to your platform and their reward is that they get 70 percent of the money you get 30 or 85 15 or whatever right
John:
And so I'm frustrated when that counter argument is made.
John:
Kara probably didn't make it because she knows and Tim knows and everybody, you know, like they know between themselves that this is all right, all right.
John:
Like in some respects, I felt like when she got a talking point, she was just like, you know, over it and wanted to go to the next one because she knows it's a BS talking point and didn't want to get bogged down in it.
John:
But if and when these people go in front of Congress, I hope some congressional staffers like, you know, get them up to date and say,
John:
If they come in and say it's an economic miracle, whatever, tell them how awesome it would be if they had zero apps, right?
John:
How awesome would your store be if developers didn't write applications for it, right?
John:
They're not just doing you a favor.
John:
You're not just doing them a favor by allowing their apps to be on your store.
John:
Their apps make people buy your phones and the phones you make bazillions of dollars with because they have, you know, great margins or whatever, so...
Casey:
Overall, I thought the interview was very good, though, and I also wanted to briefly call out the kind of prelude discussion on dithering.
Casey:
It was interesting hearing John and Ben talk about, and I feel like they'd done this before, talk about the questions that Kara Swisher chose to ask, because on the rare occasions that we get an audience with someone at Apple, everyone's favorite thing to do is to yell at us about not asking the quote-unquote hard questions, and
Casey:
There was a really good discussion between John and Ben about how much of a waste of time that often is.
Casey:
And then it becomes, I forget which one of them said it, but then it becomes us grandstanding it.
Casey:
Lou, look at us.
Casey:
Look at the three of us and how freaking tough we are.
Casey:
We ask those hard questions.
Marco:
This question is more of a comment.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
No, it really is.
Casey:
It really is like that.
Casey:
And if you're one of those people who thinks, oh, if the three of us or if somebody else has an audience with the king, so to speak, they better ask that question nobody else wants to ask.
Casey:
They better stick it to them.
Casey:
And it's just, that's oftentimes a waste of time, because if there's anything we've learned from Tim Cook particularly, and I actually think Schiller is also extremely good in this regard, you know, neither of them is going to reveal anything unless they absolutely want to.
Casey:
So, yes, like the three of us or Kara Swisher could ask the quote-unquote hard question, but...
Casey:
There's really not a lot of point to that because all you're going to do is waste time that you could be using to ask something that you may actually get interesting content and interesting data out of.
Casey:
So I just wanted to point that out as well.
John:
It's not even the hard questions.
John:
Don't ask a question that you know that they're not going to give a real answer for, right?
John:
You can ask the hard question, and very often they invite the hard question, ask me the difficult thing, and let them give their canned answer for it.
John:
But if you're looking to reveal information, if you want to extract information, information that your audience hasn't heard before, getting them to regurgitate an existing talking point is not...
John:
the route to that, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, we've all heard those talking points, and some of the hardest questions have talking point, you know, canned answers, right?
John:
A lot of the questions Kara asked were hard questions, but then when Tim started the answer, you're like, oh, he's doing that one.
John:
The greatest thing, right?
John:
You know that there's no new information.
John:
Like, what people want is to ask the hard question, and we get, like, a different answer or more insight for them to be more honest about it, but if they're coming in with their, you know, and so in some respects, sometimes the
John:
Not easier, but the less expected question that they don't have a prepared answer for.
John:
Because, you know, every question about like App Store and, you know, whatever, privacy and ad tracking.
John:
Those are hard questions, you know, or like he's coming in with answers to those.
John:
He knows they're going to be asked.
John:
Right.
John:
But maybe if you ask something obscure, they don't have a canned answer for that.
John:
And maybe you get something interesting out of it.
John:
Right.
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, like obviously Kara Swisher's interview is different than our podcast is different than a New York Times article is different than congressional testimony is different than court testimony.
John:
Context matters as well.
John:
So there's, you know, it all depends.
John:
But if if what you're expecting is like a I got to do it again.
John:
But Marco still hasn't seen it.
John:
A few good men style, you know, moment of reckoning.
John:
You are not going to get that on a casual podcast.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
You're just not.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And probably not even in court if any past cases are judged.
John:
We've gone long on this topic, but just want to get in this one last bit.
John:
It was one that got a lot of press because it was –
John:
It was the one, hey, it was a tidbit of new information, information that hadn't been said before.
John:
And this is why it's getting all the press.
John:
And this is why it's actually kind of a fun question that is not maybe something that he came in with.
John:
Although knowing this, he probably knew all the questions ahead of time.
John:
But who knows?
John:
Anyway, I don't think he had a can answer this, but he clearly came in prepared to give this answer.
John:
Right.
John:
Maybe he's been prepared to give this answer for three months now and no one asked it.
John:
And maybe he just, you know, told Carrie, you should ask me about this because I got a cool answer for you.
John:
Like, that would be a nice thing to do.
John:
Anyway, the question was, can you see yourself still at Apple 10 years from now or something similar like that?
John:
Basically saying 10 years from now, you think you'll still be at Apple.
John:
uh and what tim said is 10 years from now probably not but i have no plans to leave now and i'm really enjoying it and so on and so forth he basically did an infinite timeline argument with 10 years being the infinite timeline he said well 10 years from now yeah i'll surely i'll be gone by then but i'm not leaving today and i'm not leaving tomorrow and i'm not leaving next year but 10 years yeah probably in 10 years because 10 years 10 years now tim cook will be 60 or 70 rather
John:
And I think it's, you know, that is not an unexpected answer.
John:
If you ask, hey, hey, billionaire, do you think you'll still be doing this backbreaking job when you're 70?
John:
Or will you spend some time to enjoy your billions?
John:
It's not a shocking answer to say, no, 10 years, no.
John:
I'm out of here by 70.
John:
Perfectly valid, reasonable, not unexpected answer, but something he has never said before.
John:
And it is kind of like the first step in the seven year plan to sort of, you know, lay the groundwork for a transition.
John:
Right.
John:
He's a good CEO, you know, like knows how these things work.
John:
Uh, if you have the time, it's good to set up these transitions well ahead of time.
John:
So here is the first little, first little tiny step, which is to say, just so you know, in case you were thinking I'm going to live forever and be like the God emperor of Apple, I'm not, I'm really rich.
John:
I'm not going to be working here when I'm 95.
John:
Uh, so let's put a cap on it.
John:
So 10 years, surely I'm out of here.
John:
But I'm not going to tell you when it's just the 10 years is so long from now and I'll be so old.
John:
I'm certainly out of here by then.
John:
So just keep that in mind.
John:
Anyway, I'm not leaving today or tomorrow.
Marco:
Don't worry about it.
Marco:
I mean, before we blow past it, I also thought it was kind of interesting that he basically confirmed the AR and car projects.
John:
yeah i mean he's been he's he's been doing that for a long time now every interview he's in he doesn't shy away from the fact that apple is very interested or looking into that or like he never actually says we're gonna make a thing but he comes so close to for so many years now that it's been so like unlike jobs who jobs was better at just flat bald face lying denial right just say you know we think ar is cool but you know
John:
you know is apple doing anything about that it's like ah you know i don't think that's we don't talk about here but tim is like apple is deeply interested in this and we are very interested in this area and we are looking into it deeply and he'll say every phrase that you can say other than we're making a car right even when they said are you making a car are you making driving stuff it's like he didn't say we're making a car he didn't say we're making driving stuff what he said was
John:
boop soundboard can't answer number 12 apple really lives at the intersection of software hardware and services right like but you it's so obvious that it's like wink wink nudge watch software hardware and hardware and services that's all true and that's a canned answer but when you give that to your answer over you're making a car or you're making software it's like hardware
John:
doesn't really answer anything because what does that even mean are you going to build it yourself are you integrating with hardware of a car made by somebody else so tim cook is still following the apple playbook of we're not going to actually tell you anything but he is so not interested in hiding the fact that they've been working on ar honestly how can he hide it there's been so many leaks and on ar apple every wwdc has a new ar thing they just don't have the glasses
John:
Right.
John:
But here's a new AR technology and you can use AR on your phone.
John:
And did you know, like that's a canned answer.
John:
Did you know that you can use AR with our iPads, with the LiDAR detector or LiDAR thing in it?
John:
And they're in our phones.
John:
And look, this is amazing AR.
John:
Are you going to make any goggles?
John:
Well, Apple really works at the intersection of ours.
John:
You know, there it is.
John:
We're all just waiting.
John:
And I think at this point,
John:
Apple could never ship AR things and never ship anything with the car.
John:
And all those answers are still valid because Apple has been shipping things in those areas for a long time.
John:
Will a product ever come of it?
John:
We think so eventually, but we also thought that AirTags would arrive eventually.
John:
And so far, so far, nothing.
John:
But, you know, two weeks from now, check again.
Yeah.
Marco:
If anything, I think his answers regarding AR and the car basically confirm what most rumors have been triangulating on for years, which is like both of these are projects that are being worked on heavily.
Marco:
The car is probably not anywhere near being a product.
Marco:
or even defining what the product might be.
Marco:
It's still very much seemingly in the, like, exploratory or, like, early development or experimental kind of areas.
John:
The third attempt at early development, maybe.
Marco:
Right, yeah, yeah, possibly.
Marco:
And I think the AR project is very close.
Marco:
Like, I think you can look at, like, you know, the way Apple talks, the way Tim talks, this basically confirms the AR product is real and very close.
Marco:
The car project is also real but not very close and not quite well-defined or, you know, maybe not nailed down yet.
Marco:
And both of them are very much definitely products.
Marco:
Although, that being said, did Tim Cook make anybody less excited about AR?
Marco:
Is it possible to be less excited about what he was talking about here?
Marco:
You know, as we're talking right here, we could both be looking at a chart.
Marco:
Just think if everyone in the audience was watching a chart.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
If only there was a way... He just wants to replace WebEx.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Even...
Marco:
Even back, you know, in like a regular, you know, regular room back when we get back to, quote, normal.
Marco:
Imagine if there's a way that we can be in a meeting together and we can both be looking at the same chart.
Marco:
We've never come up with a way to do this before.
Marco:
How amazing would that be?
Marco:
Like, I am so, like, God, is anybody on Earth as excited about AR as Tim Cook?
John:
No.
John:
and the thing with the air with with tim cook is like like you know what he must be shown and maybe that's the way to get tim cook personally excited is to share a chart right because maybe that's an application that he can relate to but so all the rumors of the air stuff is like whatever whatever thing that is potentially in somewhat releasable state is essentially like a vr vr thing that looks a lot like uh oculus or you know what is the other big one um vive vive yeah there we go all these brand names yeah
John:
Anyway, that it's a big honking thing.
John:
It's not a pair of dainty little glasses that are magically in future, right?
John:
No, you know, obviously Apple is internally working on things to that, uh, to that end, but they're nowhere near release.
John:
Whereas Apple has had in-house, according to the rumors, many different prototypes and iteration of things that you would recognize as VR, AR goggles, like HoloLens or like, like the Oculus things.
John:
But if you imagine those that you could actually look through instead of being completely opaque or whatever.
John:
And in that context, uh,
John:
it's still fascinating to me how apple will try to sell that as a product because as we as we known from years of these things existing especially the vr things so far it's not a mass market product i mean sony made one for their playstation which is a mass market product and even that accessory didn't set the world on fire and there wasn't really any killer app that made everyone go out and get one right and then you know hardcore gamers have them and it's it's very sort of narrow interest um
John:
And it'll be fascinating to see how if Apple releases a product like that, which is what the rumors are, how they will try to sell it.
John:
Will they say this is also for hardcore people and early adopters or whatever?
John:
Will they try to make it mass market?
John:
Because to get back to what Tim Cook was saying, if you're going to pitch this as mass market, like everyone else did it.
John:
But they didn't know how to do it right.
John:
So we finally made a good one.
John:
And this will be more widely appealing.
John:
Telling people they can share a document is not the way.
John:
Right.
John:
Like, I mean, even with the Apple Watch, you can make fun of digital touch all you want, but whatever.
John:
But there was clearly a very mass market pitch about personal interaction and, you know, like the power that.
John:
what this watch was going to do to you apple's most personal product and some of it panned out and some of it didn't but you can see if someone showed you that pitch beforehand it's like look if you want to make this a mass market product this is a mass market pitch turns out that promise was not you know fulfilled that's not how we ended up using your watches but the things that they are good for are equally mass market fitness fitness is essentially a mass market thing like it's not it's not a narrow you know and health also mass market and telling time mass market very important right
John:
but sharing documents no so uh i guess maybe they haven't come up with the pitch for the the ar product yet and all tim's got is the thing that makes him excited uh but i guess we'll find out either at wwc this year or next
Marco:
One more quick thing.
Marco:
I know this is ridiculous to cover as a one more quick thing at the end of a podcast that we haven't prepared for at all.
Marco:
But that's your way.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
If Tim Cook does retire or step down for any other reason in the next 10 years,
John:
Who do you think is the next CEO?
John:
Yeah, that's why I put this element in there.
John:
I thought we were going to talk about that, but I didn't think we had time.
John:
But now we will, I guess.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, because I don't actually know that much about the people at Apple and all their inner workings and everything.
Marco:
But I think obviously, it's been very obvious that Jeff Williams is kind of being groomed in the public eye.
Marco:
Not necessarily as the next long-term CEO, but at least as a hot spare.
Marco:
If something happened to Tim Cook and he suddenly couldn't be CEO anymore, I think it's obvious that Jeff Williams would be the stand-in, at least interim CEO.
Marco:
But I don't think Jeff Williams is that much younger than Tim.
Marco:
I think they're of similar age.
Marco:
If Tim is saying by the time he's 70, he probably won't be CEO anymore, by that time, I don't think Jeff Williams would be super young at that point either.
Marco:
And once you go past Jeff Williams in the hierarchy, I don't know that there is an obvious next candidate up.
John:
Well, I mean, the thing I was going to say about this was I think Jeff Williams, well, I think Tim Cook has shown that Apple can function reasonably well with someone as a CEO who is not a visionary and not a product guy.
John:
That was an open question when Jobs died, right?
John:
That could Apple function without someone who does what he does?
John:
And Tim showed more or less, yes, you can.
John:
Like,
John:
Tim doesn't have any of those skills and unlike, let's say, John Scully, sorry, Mr. Scully, doesn't try to have those skills.
John:
He delegates those to varying degrees of success depending on who he's delegating to, right?
John:
So Jeff Williams, I think, could run Apple in a Tim Cook style successfully.
John:
Now, you're right about the age thing, but my instincts for super rich executives is that if you haven't been the CEO of Apple, you at least want to be it for a few years, even if you're the same age as the guy who's leaving, whereas Tim Cook is over it.
John:
Jeff Williams would be honored to be the CEO of Apple, even if he was the same age as the outgoing guy for years.
John:
let's say five years right just because he hasn't been before and tim cook has done it for a while right the danger of replacing tim cook with somebody who is not willing to govern in a tim cook style as in not being the product visionary and delegating that to other people is that you get someone in there who has bad ideas and forces them on the whole company right like that's the danger of the position at the top of the org chart
John:
is your badness becomes everybody's problem whereas if you delegate you if you're a good manager you can deal with your mistakes oh i delegated this to these people and they had bad ideas but i can shuffle those people because i'm results oriented and i know how's the company doing do people like our products are they selling well what is public perception like you know tim cook i think is
John:
a little bit underrated like i mean he's overrated and if you look at the numbers like oh look at what tim cook's done with apple since he came on he's the best ceo ever but i think we underrate him a little bit just because we don't care about that stuff and we only care about the products uh but his style is it has benefits
John:
in that when you do make mistakes, you're not sort of wedded to them in the same way that if, you know, if it was Tim Cook's idea that he was wedded to because he thought he was the visionary for this product, it would be harder to dislodge him if it turns out that was a bad strategy or whatever.
John:
We'll see.
John:
But anyway, I agree with Marco that I don't know what the obvious sort of line of succession is.
John:
You can always hire from the outside.
John:
It's not unheard of.
John:
It seems like a totally un-Apple thing to do, but stranger things have happened.
John:
But I am heartened by the fact that Tim Hoke has shown that you don't necessarily need Steve Jobs to have a successful Apple.
John:
And that really opens up the field to people who can be good at that job.
John:
Because if your demand is you must be Steve Jobs, it's a hard position to fill, right?
John:
And Tim Cook is probably like the best in the world at the few operational things that he does.
John:
But you don't have to be the best best when you have such a successful company.
John:
You know, maybe you won't be as efficient as Tim Cook was, but there's a lot of money raining down on Apple.
John:
And I think, you know, as long as you don't screw it up too badly, you can do pretty well.
John:
what i'm saying is hire me i'll do it i don't think you would i honestly think you wouldn't and i think you'd hate it if you did oh delegate everyone else handle it i'll just do podcasts yeah oh totally that'll be fine that'll that'll that'll work just talk to kara swisher she'll ask me the hard questions and i'll give her better arguments about why we need to control the processing
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I got to give you my wild card because it's going to really make you happy.
Casey:
So officially, my official answer is absolutely, Jeff Williams.
Casey:
No question.
Casey:
That's the next one.
Casey:
But my unofficial answer is, and I can't believe I'm saying this out loud.
Casey:
What about Q?
John:
i was like the guy from star trek what oh that's the thing like almost all the executives that we know their names like that have been in presentation everything they're almost all at least in their 50s they're old and rich but but like i said they're all of course they're old and rich but if they haven't been ceo before and they have any desire to be ceo that you take the job and you stay in it for a while like
John:
And I don't think Eddie Q wants the job.
Casey:
So I don't think I'm not so sure.
Casey:
So Eddie Q is 56 as we are recording right now.
Casey:
And I don't I again, my official answer is Williams.
Casey:
Full stop.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
Yeah, I think that's Williams is clearly like he's he's the person who replaced him tomorrow if necessary.
John:
Right.
John:
Exactly.
John:
And would do and would do it, I think, similar to how Tim does it.
John:
which is not a bad way.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
But I think about this, and I think that Q seems to have that... He seems to have the ambition that I think it would take to do it, I think.
Casey:
And beyond that, what's important to Apple these days?
Casey:
Yes, hardware is important to Apple, but I don't know.
Casey:
I don't really see Ternus just showing up, or Suruji, Johnny Suruji just showing up as CEO now.
Casey:
maybe, maybe, but even then, I feel like that's a stretch.
Casey:
But what else is important to Apple these days?
Casey:
Services is really freaking important to Apple these days.
Casey:
And so I could see the seemingly golden boy of services rising up and being the next CEO.
Casey:
I don't know that it would be a particularly good choice, but I see it.
Casey:
I can see it happening.
Casey:
I'm looking at apple.com slash leadership, and I'm looking at Eddie Q stare me in the face saying, oh yeah, I'm your man.
Casey:
I'm just looking at it.
Casey:
I'm telling you.
John:
I feel like if anybody on this leadership page could hear this segment, I'm of two minds.
John:
One, they'd be like, oh, Casey knows our secrets.
John:
How did he find out?
John:
But more likely, I think they're all laughing hilariously at the idea of this happening.
Casey:
I hope so.
Casey:
I hope so.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, I mean, and I actually, I have, I would say a different, I would say Eddie's not number, you know, if Jeff Williams is number two, I don't think Eddie's number three.
Marco:
I think Deirdre O'Brien is number three.
Casey:
Why do you say that?
Marco:
So she is from operations.
Marco:
She has been recently promoted, you know, up to like SVP level and becoming more visible.
Marco:
You know, we know like Tim's from operations.
Marco:
Jeff Williams, by the way, real time follow up.
Marco:
Jeff Williams is three years younger than Tim.
Marco:
So not a lot.
John:
So he's got he's got five years to be CEO then.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And Deidre O'Brien is six years younger than Tim.
Marco:
So not we're not doing still not doing great here.
Marco:
But, you know, at least and Eddie, by the way, is up there to Eddie is four years younger than Tim.
Marco:
So we're dealing with, you know, everyone's in their 50s or up.
Marco:
But I would say Deirdre O'Brien is the number three, like after Jeff Williams in the line of current succession.
Marco:
People keep saying like, you know, Federighi or Ternus, but like, no, these are these are those are like tech people.
Marco:
I don't think they want to be CEO.
Marco:
And frankly, I don't think ADQ wants to be either.
John:
I think the desire to be CEO is the number one factor because it's a hard job and you have to want it.
John:
So just cross off everybody on this page who doesn't want it.
John:
Eddie, I think, wants to go have fun.
John:
He deserves to go have fun.
John:
He wants to go to sports games again and drive his Ferraris and just generally have fun.
John:
And you don't have fun as CEO.
John:
It's a hard job.
John:
So you really got to want it.
John:
Who on this page really, really wants it?
John:
Jeff Williams, I can believe he wants it.
John:
Deidre O'Brien, I can believe she wants it.
John:
Eddie Q, can't believe it.
John:
CFED, no.
John:
I mean, well, actually, I don't know.
John:
CFED, I can't imagine him because these people see what the job of CEO is like.
John:
And I can imagine them just being like, no.
Marco:
like that's not that's not for me right because like if you look at what the job actually is like it's a lot of politics it's a lot of diplomacy it's a lot of PR stuff like it's because like this is such a big company in such a big world Tim Cook has to deal with like world leaders he's got to go on CNBC
Marco:
yeah that's terrible no nerd wants that job like i guarantee you federigui doesn't want the job probably john turnis he's also a nerd probably given his job like i guarantee you these people do not want that job eddie q i think you're i think eddie q doesn't just want to retire and have fun i think eddie q has fun in his current job everything i've ever heard about him he wants to keep it yeah
Marco:
yeah like it seems like he actually is a pretty fun person and has a lot of fun even with his job of like you know meeting with like people from the fbi and stuff like i think he actually has fun he's joking around with them right now can i give you a can i give you a second wild card since now i'm going to top four on this what about lisa jackson
Casey:
I don't think she wants that.
Casey:
I feel like, and this is a very California thing of me to say, but I feel like she has the right energy for it.
Casey:
I feel like she has that kind of Tim coolness to her, just very chill.
John:
Do you think she wants to run a technology company?
John:
company, though?
John:
I don't get that impression.
Casey:
I don't know that I do.
Casey:
Very much not.
Casey:
I feel that way way more about Q than I do about Lisa Jackson.
Casey:
But I could see Lisa Jackson wanting to do it.
Casey:
I could see Apple wanting her to do it because after all of our, and I mean ours, and the three of us, and ours in the collective community, all of our
Casey:
whining and moaning about, you know, diversity and how there's a complete lack of diversity, especially above the fold here on this webpage I'm looking at.
Casey:
I could see how that would check a few interesting and different checkboxes than any CEO they've had before.
Casey:
And I don't know, I think I could see, she strikes me as the kind that can get difficult things done because certainly the
Casey:
Doing all of this, doing all the things that they do for environmental causes, while I argue is the right thing to do, I can't say it's the easy thing to do or certainly not in many cases the profitable thing to do.
Casey:
And I mean, as much as we laughed about her saying, hey, enjoy the fact that you're getting less crap for the same money when they took the power supplies out of the iPhone boxes.
Casey:
She did a pretty admirable job of it, all told.
Casey:
I thought she sold it reasonably well.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like I can see a world where Q is the next CEO, and I can see a world where Lisa Jackson is the next CEO, although I expect to see the world where Jeff Williams is the next CEO.
John:
You have quite an imagination.
Casey:
Thanks, Dad.
John:
I have to – I just look at – I mean, what you made me think of when I was thinking as the – who was the retail person before – who was the Apple store person who left from Burberry?
John:
What was her name?
Casey:
Oh, Angela Ahrens.
John:
Yeah, Angela Ahrens.
John:
She wanted to be CEO.
John:
And not that she would have been in line for that necessarily, but if you want to see somebody who has ambition to sort of climb the corporate ladder and she was ambitious, right?
John:
would they bring her back I don't I wouldn't want her as Apple CEO I'm just saying like it's all about desire because you see this you see this all the time in companies like at a certain point people don't want to be promoted anymore right they see the jobs that their bosses do and they do not want them right for whatever reason and the CEO is the ultimate version of that
Marco:
I think we can look at like most of the people that we know from like, exactly.
Marco:
I think Eddie Q, I think credit for every, I think, I think Phil Schiller.
Marco:
I think all of those people, as far as I could guess, probably don't and didn't want to be CEO.
John:
Phil, Phil might take CEO.
John:
We should ask him.
John:
Let's give him a call.
John:
You were offered CEO.
John:
I think Phil would take it.
John:
Here's why.
John:
Here's why I think Phil would take it.
John:
Not because he relishes the job of doing the work of CEO, but just because he thinks he would be good at it.
John:
And honestly, I think he would actually kind of be good at it, right, in his way.
John:
Because it's a leadership position, too.
John:
That's the other thing we're talking about.
John:
It's not just going on CNBC.
John:
It's about leadership.
John:
And
John:
Phil, I think, understands the job style of inspirational leadership and can actually execute it fairly well.
John:
It's very different than the Tim Cook style.
John:
But, you know, if you think about Phil and how he operated in all of his roles, he was very much in that mold.
John:
And I thought he did a pretty good job of it.
John:
And that type of role, you say, well, I hate the drudgery of CEO, which, of course, Steve Jobs did it well.
John:
But I like the leadership part.
John:
And Phil would be a good leader.
John:
Right.
John:
In the same way that I think Lisa Jackson would be a good leader.
John:
I just think she would want to lead a company that's not Apple.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, I don't think her ambition is to run Apple.
John:
I think her ambition is to run a very different kind of company.
John:
If she was a CEO of Apple, I feel like she would change it to be a very different kind of company, potentially a better company.
John:
But maybe they're not the board is not going to throw her in there if they know that she's going to, you know, shake things up that much.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
Because I feel like the idea of Schiller being CEO, I think that would have worked great back like during the Steve Jobs era when the company was much smaller, when the world was much smaller around them.
John:
And when he was younger and actually wanted to do it, maybe now he's sort of on his way out and, you know.
Marco:
Oh, sure.
Marco:
That aside, but I think today's Apple, you're basically a world leader.
Marco:
You have to operate on such a political level and such a operational level.
Marco:
I don't think it's an accident that the CEO today is a boring...
Marco:
Operations person who doesn't show a lot of personality ever, but can manage a large scale operation and can give statements to Congress when asked like product people or tech people tend to be not only not very good at that, but also totally uninterested and actually turned off by all of that.
Marco:
So I can imagine, I think Phil is a diehard product person through and through.
Marco:
I think he always has been.
Marco:
I don't think a product person today can take over as CEO of Apple.
Marco:
I don't see it.
Marco:
I would love it if that was the reality because I would love a product person to be CEO again, at least if they made good decisions, as you said earlier.
John:
That's the hard part, isn't it?
Marco:
That's a big if, yeah.
Marco:
But I think at today's scale, I just don't think that's realistic.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The danger, again, looking at all these faces is you see this happening in big companies all the time.
John:
Someone who you just described, like who is actually a tech person and probably is going to hate the job of CEO, nevertheless, really, really wants it because they don't realize what it's going to be like.
John:
Like they just have sort of ambition blinders on and they're just like, I want to be CEO because I think I would be great at it.
John:
And then they get in the job and they're like, oh, my God, this is terrible.
John:
I didn't think it would be like this.
John:
And you wouldn't think that people who work a long time at high levels of companies would have illusions of what it's like to be CEO.
John:
But especially in a company the size of Apple, it's hard to really internalize what it's really going to be like.
John:
And sometimes people end up getting a CEO job.
John:
I mean, even at Apple, there was a long line of CEOs that you probably don't know the names of because you weren't following Apple back then who clearly got the job and then went, oh, no, this is not this is not what I thought it would be.
John:
It's harder than I thought it would be.
John:
And.
John:
I don't enjoy it, but I can't leave now because, like, you can't really, you know, once you get the job, you can't be like, oh, this is too hard and leave after two weeks because it's kind of, you know.
John:
So I don't think anyone on this page falls into that category, but I look and I wonder if some technical person would be like, you know what, I think I could be CEO because I would do a much better job than Tim Cook because he doesn't understand technology.
John:
And then they get in a position like, I didn't understand CEO.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, no.
Marco:
Thanks for listening, everybody.
Marco:
We were sponsored this week by Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Hover.
Marco:
You can join as a member if you want things like ad-free episodes and our bootleg feed and stuff like that at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
There's also going to be a merchandise sale pretty soon where you can get 15% off if you are a member.
Marco:
So go there, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
So I have a quick after show if you want, if you don't have anything else.
Casey:
Yes, please.
Casey:
I see something about your car and your quote-unquote current car.
Casey:
So I am very interested in what's happening.
Marco:
As I mentioned in previous episodes where I had a flat tire and a minor impact on my car because it was parked and it was hit while parked.
Marco:
Current theory is that it might have been hit by a truck with a plow on the front that was not currently plowing at the time because there was no snow on the ground during this two-week interval.
Marco:
But this was a parking lot where a lot of contractor trucks were always parked.
Marco:
And so it's possible one of them had a plow mounted on the front because it does look a lot like it was hit by a plow.
Marco:
The scratches prove deep enough that...
Marco:
For purposes of a leased car that is not actually mine yet or ever, maybe I needed to get them fixed.
Marco:
And it needed to go to an actual body shop and they have to go through insurance and everything.
Marco:
This anecdote, just as a side note, this is the first time as far as I know that I've ever filed an insurance claim.
Casey:
Huh.
Casey:
You've been very lucky.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, and it was actually not that hard yet.
Marco:
I don't know if it's going to get hard.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
Please don't clip that sound out.
John:
Anyway, so the... I can't believe nobody... I was waiting for Casey to come in.
Casey:
I was dumbfounded.
Casey:
This is getting worse.
Casey:
And then I kept flashing back to when I told Marco that he gets me so hard, which was not at all what I meant, but it is what I said.
John:
Okay.
John:
So anyway... Moving right along.
John:
I was expecting that's what she said.
Casey:
I know, I should have.
Casey:
Different show.
Casey:
I was dumbfounded.
John:
There's disappointment all around here.
John:
That's what she said.
John:
Oh, boy.
John:
Anyway.
Casey:
Moving on, children.
Marco:
So, yeah, so I had to go to a body shop.
Yeah.
Casey:
You got to start this over.
Casey:
You're never going to get a clean edit out of this.
Casey:
You've got to start this over.
Marco:
What kind of bodies were they, Marco?
Marco:
Anyway, so they have to have my car for like a couple of weeks to get all the parts in and paint.
Marco:
They're going to be repainting two panels and it's going to be a whole thing.
Marco:
Anyway, for coming back here, we took TISCAR, the BMW i3.
Marco:
It's not really made to go super long distances, but...
Marco:
This is the longest I drove it for this trip.
Marco:
This included the vaccination trip and and and, you know, driving to the beach and this whole thing and long term parking.
Marco:
I even stopped at a fast charger on the way to kind of top off because I don't know how it has to sit for like two weeks in the parking lot.
Marco:
I don't know how much charge is going to lose on the way.
Marco:
So so I wanted to get there as much power as possible.
Casey:
Can I just interrupt very briefly?
Casey:
I would like to offer my apologies to Tiff for having to deal with you complaining and moaning, as I'm sure you did, about not having the access to the supercharger network, about all the things that make this a considerably worse electric car than the Tesla is.
Casey:
So, Tiff, on behalf of me, and perhaps only me, I'm sorry for having to deal with all this because I can only imagine how difficult and frustrating Marco has been over the last several days.
Marco:
So actually, it's a bit of a mixed bag.
John:
Oh, I'll take it.
John:
I'll take it.
John:
CarPlay makes up for a lot, I guess.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I'm going to get to that in a second.
Marco:
But the i3, from a Model S driver, it is certainly a step down in a few areas.
Marco:
Obviously, it's way less range.
Marco:
It's way less speed and power.
Marco:
And it has fewer luxury features in most ways.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I was actually really impressed by a few aspects of it.
Marco:
So first of all, I know from being an electric car driver that the range estimate they give in miles, you can't really take that as an absolute because it depends on a lot of factors.
Marco:
And I knew on this day, for instance, that we'd probably be using the air conditioning.
Marco:
I knew that we'd be driving a lot on the highway, which might be going faster than 55 miles an hour and therefore might be a little less efficient.
Marco:
um and and i knew you know i knew it'd be a very heavily loaded car and so i thought you know maybe when it tells me that we have whatever it is like 138 miles whatever it is when it's full you know we were going on a 55 mile journey so i thought maybe it actually would need to be charged in the middle before we could get home with it or whatever else so i planned all the stop i planned the stop at it's actually kind of funny the connector that it uses for fast charging is
Marco:
is not a common connector in the US.
Marco:
And if you search for fast charge stations with that connector, I forget what it's called, but there's almost none except like BMW dealers.
Marco:
And there was one BMW dealer on Long Island that has one of these things in their parking lot.
Marco:
so i thought great i'll show up uh and so that's what we did so we drove there on the way first i allocated like an extra hour so we could sit there and charge if we had to again i had no idea how much battery dream we would see after at that point probably 45 miles of driving ostensibly that could be half the car's range or more depending on you know how how much it actually used
Marco:
So I put the car in Eco Pro mode, which really lops off the acceleration.
Marco:
But not only was the range estimate accurate, it over-promised or under-promised rather and over-delivered.
Marco:
We drove something like 45 miles and had only lost like 35 miles on the range indicator.
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Marco:
So it was great, and we actually needed very little charging.
Marco:
Like, it couldn't even take it at full speed anymore because it was already... We got there, and it was at, like, 70%.
Marco:
So I fast-charged for, like, 15 minutes just because we were there.
Marco:
And it was kind of funny, too.
Marco:
Like, you could tell, like, the people at the BMW dealer, you could tell that they...
Marco:
don't get a lot of people doing this and that they really don't like it we we pulled up and it was you know we spotted it from across the parking lot just you know that's sort of like you know booth thing with the big cable come out of it so oh that must be it and we went over to it it was at a parking spot but they had parked one of their cars like one of their show cars they just parked in that spot because clearly like no one uses this yeah
Marco:
And so I just pulled up next to that spot and just ran the cable like out to the car and just kind of partially blocked a driveway.
Marco:
But it was they could get by.
Marco:
It was fine.
Marco:
And charge for a few minutes.
Marco:
And like the whole time I'm looking around like, OK, you know, maybe, you know, go inside, look at the new cars and walk around the showroom for a few minutes.
Marco:
What else am I going to do for 15 minutes?
Marco:
You know, Adam and Tiff had no interest.
Marco:
So I went in, walked around.
Marco:
I was must have been in the showroom for five or ten minutes.
Marco:
Zero salespeople came up to me or said anything to me or even looked at me.
Marco:
None.
Marco:
I got no acknowledgement that I existed.
Marco:
I actually was curious to ask some questions to the salespeople about like their future electric models.
Marco:
I really haven't been paying much attention.
Marco:
Anyway, eventually I left and charging experience was totally fine.
Marco:
it wasn't as nice as supercharged because it was one of those charge point network things.
Marco:
So you have to like unlock it by first like logging into their app and putting in a payment method.
Marco:
But even that was kind of nice once I figured it out because it supports the Apple wallet like NFC type API.
Marco:
So you just hold your phone up to the thing once you have an account and you just like double tap it as if you're using a wallet card like on an NFC reader and it just starts it up and you do the same thing to stop it and that's it.
Marco:
So that whole thing
Marco:
worked pretty well um i can't remember what i paid but it was not much maybe like a dollar it wasn't wasn't a lot oh wow um so anyway i ended up driving this car for probably about 60 miles that day uh over multiple hours lots of different environments and everything um using car play the entire time oh imagine that of course right
Marco:
And this was, I think, the most real-world experience I've had with CarPlay because I haven't had a car that has it.
Marco:
All the development I do on CarPlay for my app, I do with a little test rig on my desk that's plugged into a 12-volt adapter.
Marco:
But I don't own a car with CarPlay and never have.
Marco:
But Tipscar has it.
Marco:
So in this case, I got to use it a lot, way more than I've ever used it before in any kind of real-world environment.
Marco:
And I have some thoughts.
Marco:
So first of all, the i3 was surprisingly good.
Marco:
It was not as nice as my Tesla, but it was not that much worse in a few big areas.
Marco:
The range proved to be very good.
Marco:
The power was okay.
Marco:
And I was actually kind of impressed how much we were able to fit into it.
Marco:
It is not a big car at all.
Marco:
It's a very compact car, but you can fit a surprising line of cargo into it, which I did not expect because it looks like when you look at the trunk, you're like, that's super tiny.
Marco:
But with smart packing, you can actually fit a lot in.
John:
I just want to point out that this is reinforcing my notion that Marco should definitely look at other electric car brands because in the grand scheme of things, the i3 is not looked upon as a particularly good electric car.
John:
It's a very early effort from BMW that most people don't particularly like.
John:
Isn't even considered a real competitor in the current crop of electric cars.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
And yet you are finding it as...
John:
Not that bad, not as bad as you thought compared to what is basically the best, you know, electric car in its class, right?
John:
And so if you think these things are that close, I can only imagine what you would think of anything that is actually a legit competitor to your Model S, which the i3 is not.
Casey:
Amen, brother.
Casey:
Amen.
John:
I encourage you to look at the weirdo, the Audi Taycan that's coming out.
John:
What is that one called, Casey?
John:
Oh, I don't remember.
John:
I know what you're thinking of.
John:
I don't remember that.
John:
But anyway, if you are surprisingly impressed by the i3, I think you would be blown away by a car that is actually a competitor to yours.
Marco:
So anyway, continue.
Marco:
And I will say, the i3 on paper doesn't compete.
Marco:
in practice it's nicer than the paper suggests like it's like if you look at specs and value and and things like that it is outclassed by almost all the modern competitors but it's actually nicer than you would think based on its specs and class and everything anyway so carplay
Marco:
I actually have very mixed opinions about CarPlay as implemented in the BMW iDrive system.
John:
Circa 2017, like what year?
Marco:
Yeah, well, yeah, I think it's a 2019 model, but it's not a super recent update for this.
Marco:
It is wireless, which is great.
Marco:
It's wireless CarPlay, but...
Marco:
I have two main issues with CarPlay as implemented today in BMWs.
Marco:
One is the like scroll wheel style of interaction rather than a touch screen.
Marco:
That time has passed.
Marco:
I think you now need these to be touch screens.
Marco:
You can operate CarPlay interfaces with wheels and buttons and stuff.
Marco:
You can.
Casey:
Oh, it stinks though.
Casey:
But yeah, it's terrible.
Marco:
It's, it's awful.
Marco:
It's clearly designed as a touchscreen.
Marco:
It's clearly designed to have quick access to the little quick icons on the left for things like quick app switching and Siri access and stuff like that and going back between the map and the music app maybe or whatever.
Marco:
That kind of thing, CarPlay, is clearly touch first and that's clearly the right way to do it.
Marco:
This kind of thing should have a touchscreen.
Marco:
I know we went through a time in the automotive industry where...
Marco:
Nobody wanted to put in touchscreens.
Marco:
They wanted to have, you know, lots, everyone had their things.
Casey:
We had an entire episode of Neutral about this, if I'm not mistaken, where we were complaining and moaning about touchscreens in cars.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And you really, with CarPlay, you really need to be a touchscreen.
Marco:
It's very awkward to use with wheels and stuff like that.
Marco:
The other thing is, the whole time I kept hitting weird little friction points between the BMW system and CarPlay.
Marco:
Like, which one of them is running the show here?
Marco:
BMW thinks they are, and Apple thinks they are.
Marco:
And the result is a really weird mixed bag of interaction and modes and things.
Marco:
Like, for instance, above the aforementioned wheel to navigate stuff, there's like five or six buttons.
Marco:
It says like, you know, media, menu, map, stuff like that, nav.
Marco:
And when you're in CarPlay, if you tap the map button, it jumps you to the active navigation app in CarPlay, which is great.
Marco:
Oh, that's cool.
Marco:
If you tap the nav button right below it, it jumps you to the BMW one and kicks you out of CarPlay.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
I'm not sure what the difference is, honestly.
Marco:
Somehow there's map and nav.
Marco:
Um...
Marco:
also so tapping the map button brings you to the map app in carplay great but tapping the media button does not bring you back to the music app it brings you to the bmw media screen there's these little inconsistencies you know like one of the i think critical ways to interact with carplay is via siri
Marco:
How do you invoke Siri on the system?
Marco:
Well, there's a voice button on the steering wheel.
Marco:
Tap that, and you think Siri answers?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
BMW's voice system answers instead and kicks you out of CarPlay.
Marco:
And there kept being these cases.
Marco:
The car popped up a message about the range extender maintenance thing.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
But it popped up this basically modal dialog box a few times throughout the drive.
Marco:
And one of them caused me to almost miss a turn.
Marco:
Because it popped up this box from the BMW interface that kicked me out of CarPlay.
Marco:
And then getting back into CarPlay, there is no one button to get back into it.
Marco:
You have to hit the media or home button or whatever and then scroll over to the CarPlay item in that list.
Marco:
And then it goes right back into it.
Marco:
And so there were just all these issues that I just kept facing.
Marco:
Like, what I would actually want here...
Marco:
is the option for a car that is navigated only in CarPlay.
John:
Well, you see, that's where Apple excels in the union of software, hardware, and services.
John:
On an Apple car, you won't have these problems is what I'm saying.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I think if I were ever to leave the Tesla family, I would want a car that was dumb enough to let CarPlay just fully take over.
Marco:
Like, if I have a CarPlay head unit, hell...
Marco:
Give me a double din in the dash and I'll put my own in.
Marco:
That's probably unrealistic to expect these days.
Marco:
I think most modern cars don't let you easily swap in like a standard radio in there without wrecking your entire dashboard.
Marco:
But what I actually want is...
Marco:
at least an option to just have carplay literally take over and to have all of the buttons in the car that that are that you know if if there happens to be like a voice command button somewhere or a map button or a radio button whatever i want all of those buttons to map only to carplay and to never kick me out of carplay unless i have to go look at like
Marco:
the tire pressure monitor or some, you know, some kind of like rarely used niche setting of the car.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
But during routine driving, I want if I'm using CarPlay, I want to only use CarPlay.
Marco:
I want to be locked in there.
Marco:
I don't want to have to be kicked out of it every so often because I hit the wrong button and the car is taking over saying, oh, you wanted my crappy navigation system instead of your nice one using Waze.
Marco:
Like, no, I like I just want CarPlay.
Marco:
Whenever the time comes that I have to replace my car, I'm going to actually look at this as a pretty important criterion of like, if I'm going to get a car that supports CarPlay, I want that kind of takeover mode.
Marco:
And it has to be a touchscreen.
Casey:
Well, so I think I understand how you've come to this conclusion, but I think you've been wronged by BMW's implementation, most specifically that it doesn't have a touchscreen.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
With my Volkswagen, there's physical buttons on the outsides of the screen.
Casey:
And I forget exactly what they are, but there's like media, nav, app, which really means CarPlay.
Casey:
I forget what else is there.
Casey:
Shoot.
Casey:
But there's like six or seven of them, maybe six or eight around the screen or on the left and right hand sides of the screen.
Casey:
And if I hit anything other than app, I will be dumped back into the VW stuff.
Casey:
So if I hit media in there, I'm back to Volkswagen's onboard media player.
Casey:
If I hit nav on there, I'm going to Volkswagen's navigation.
Casey:
And on the surface, that sounds terrible.
Casey:
And on the surface, the BMW implementation where you said map brings you to whatever your current map app is sounds like it's better than the Volkswagen way of doing it.
Casey:
But
Casey:
It's actually way more consistent, which I'd argue is better.
Casey:
And it's unlikely I'm going to be hitting any of those buttons because once I'm in CarPlay, like you're saying, I'm just staying in CarPlay and I'm just tapping the damn screen if I want to do something on CarPlay.
Casey:
And I don't have to futz with the iDrive stick, which at the time, you know, when we were recording Neutral...
Casey:
At the time, car touchscreens were really bad, and they weren't in places that were very conducive to hit, and they weren't making touch targets big enough.
Casey:
So I stand by my opinion at the time that they were garbage.
Casey:
But now I think you're exactly right, that you really need to have a touchscreen in the car in order to make a lot of things considerably easier.
Casey:
Um, similarly in Aaron's car, there's not really any physical buttons around the screen, but only the bottom third or so of the screen becomes CarPlay.
Casey:
And there's still Volkswagen, like UI and Chrome above it, or excuse me, Volvo UI and Chrome above it.
Casey:
And if you tap any of that stuff, it'll kind of like almost window shades CarPlay.
Casey:
But to get back to it, you just tap the title bar down at the bottom, and then there you are again.
Casey:
And I find that these implementations, even though they don't lock you in CarPlay in the way you're talking about, because it's consistent and because you're never, ever, ever...
Casey:
really interacting with any physical buttons you're only locked on the touch screen in a manner of speaking I think it's pretty decent that way and I think you would like it that way and I think that's how these typically work yeah I think if I had a touch screen and like that easy one button somewhere to kick me back into CarPlay from anywhere I think that combination would be fine
Casey:
Yep, and that's what we have.
John:
I mean, the variety of implementations I've seen, I haven't used a car like this, but I've looked at reviews of the various interiors and everything.
John:
They're all over the place.
John:
And I think one combination that works really well is a touchscreen for CarPlay, which although I disagree with you about the appropriateness of touch in cars, I agree that CarPlay itself needs touch, right?
John:
So if you're going to use CarPlay, touch is the best way to do that.
John:
If you're going to operate the interior of a car, maybe touch isn't the best way to do certain things.
John:
But anyway, if you like CarPlay, definitely touch.
John:
But a central screen for CarPlay, and then a lot of the newer cars have a surprising amount of functionality in the instrument cluster on that screen, because that screen keeps getting bigger too.
John:
It's no longer just like, oh, we can make two little gauges, but they're graphics, right?
John:
Now they're huge.
John:
If you look at Mercedes, basically the entire dashboard is a giant screen, right?
John:
So CarPlay sort of gets its outpost on the touchscreen,
John:
right and then when you do other things with the car features like turning on the seat heaters or whatever it's not competing with the carplay screen right that that information is elsewhere on one of the umpteen other screens whether it's the instrument cross the cluster or the various other screens that are between there or whatever which lets you essentially do everything at once to not have them fighting with each other because they are both active at once i think that solution works really well because it sort of separates the duties like okay apple you get this square and
John:
and the car makers are doing it knowing that people are mostly going to use android auto or car play or whatever and dedicating a chunk to it it's okay that's that's you you get the touch screen you get this you get to do those things but we the car maker there's a bunch of other crap that we want to have available and on display all the time too so you know it's it's kind of like the next step after what casey was describing which is like minimizing car play and then popping it back up which is great because you don't lose state but it's clear that two things are fighting for the same screen
John:
There's no reason to fight in these things with like acres of screens in them.
John:
So I think that will eventually trickle down and probably become like the sort of most prominent way to do it.
John:
Just carve out a space for Android Auto or CarPlay, right?
John:
And then the Apple way to do it would be everything is all Apple from top to bottom.
John:
So you don't have to worry about it.