My Computer Supports Math
Casey:
Alright, we should start by pointing out we have done another members special.
Casey:
Because I'm an idiot, and I like getting my feelings hurt, I decided I would roll the dice and see what John and Marco thought about Johns of Bleecker Street, which is my beloved...
Casey:
preferred pizza institution in Manhattan.
Casey:
And so what we did was we spent a truly absurd amount of money to get Gold Belly to send us two not particularly large pizzas per family and do that overnight from Manhattan to our respective households.
Casey:
And then we cooked them up much like we did with the, I almost said frozen meals, but don't call them frozen meals, call them TV dinners.
Casey:
And so they all arrived at our desks at about the same moment.
Casey:
We talked about it on air.
Casey:
I will not tell you if my feelings were hurt or not, but I will tell you that it was an adventure to say the least.
Casey:
And so if you are not a member, you can go to atp.fm slash join.
Casey:
You can join for as little as one month, although we'd love for you to stick around.
Casey:
If you join, you get access to all the member stuff that's ever happened.
Casey:
And we're up to like, I don't know, six-ish episodes, I think, something like that now.
Casey:
And so you get access to all that.
Casey:
You could grab them all and then cancel your membership.
Casey:
We're not slimy.
Casey:
We let you do that.
Casey:
You'll hurt our hearts and our feelings.
Casey:
But you can do that.
Casey:
That is allowed.
Casey:
But I think once you check out all the perks, you will love it.
Casey:
So please check out atp.fm slash join.
Casey:
Marco, John, anything to add.
Marco:
If you could imagine what it would be like for Casey to try to convince two New Yorkers with strong opinions on pizza to try his pizza, you can see why this was a good episode.
Marco:
I suggest if you've been on the fence before about membership for whatever reason, you aren't a member yet, but you like when we...
Marco:
you know argue about non-technical things or even discuss plenty of that yeah even just discuss non-technical things um there these kind of member specials and and this one in particular it's a good venue for that indeed uh come for the pizza talk stay for the bagel talk um and also i i do i would like to point out just one more time i probably made this point on the special although i might have forgotten
Casey:
My birth certificate says stayed in New York, my friend.
Casey:
Two-thirds of your hosts, their birth certificate stayed in New York, and Marco is not one of them.
Casey:
I'm just going to put that out there.
Marco:
Yeah, but which one of us lives here?
Casey:
Oh, that's fair.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
Yeah, so we're all imposters one way or another.
Casey:
When's the last time you lived in New York, Casey?
Casey:
I lived in New York, late 80s, I think.
Casey:
Right, John?
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
John:
I go there every year at least.
John:
I'm like Casey.
John:
Did your parents live in New York when you were born or did they just drive there to give birth to you?
Casey:
is that a thing that people do i'm not sure i i'm pretty sure i'm supposed to be offended and to be honest i started it by throwing you under the bus earlier but i'm not sure how offended i should be uh no they were living i believe they were living in fort montgomery at the time which is nearish newberg um and i was born in newberg um which is probably i'm now probably giving away some sort of top secret yeah you're not supposed to tell people the answers to your security yeah so there you go whoopsies
Casey:
But anyways, they live in New York.
John:
There's nothing in Newburgh for any security question to ask about.
John:
I didn't know where any of those places were, so I assume they're all upstate, so never mind.
Casey:
They're not upstate by most standards, but by both of your standards.
John:
Hold on.
John:
Newburgh is definitely upstate.
Oh, come on.
John:
It's not that far.
John:
Marco lived in Brooklyn long enough to adopt the Long Island definition of upstate.
Casey:
It's like a two-hour drive north.
Casey:
No, it is.
Casey:
Is it really?
Casey:
No way.
Casey:
A two-hour drive from Fire Island?
John:
Everything is a two-hour drive when you go upstate.
Casey:
Yeah, well, we established that frickin' Manhattan is two hours from Fire Island.
Casey:
That's what I'm saying, yeah.
Casey:
No, no, that doesn't, no.
Casey:
So, like, how about this?
Casey:
John's a bleaker.
Casey:
Let's just take that as a landmark.
Casey:
Let's see how far we are from Newburgh.
Casey:
Give me a second.
John:
Go ahead, yeah.
John:
Is this as the helicopter flies or if you actually have to take roads?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
I'm doing this on Google Maps.
Casey:
It's under an hour and a half, 70 miles.
Marco:
wait hold on in what at what time of day right now right now at 8 p.m so eight o'clock at night right yeah on a monday yeah try it anytime while the sun's up i don't know man so you consider like the lake that we used to go to you consider that like deeply upstate i assume
Marco:
I wouldn't use the word deeply, but it's unquestionably upstate.
Casey:
I guess to me, I'm not trying to say I'm right.
Casey:
I am not trying to say I'm right.
Casey:
But to me, I feel like anything within a couple of hours of the city is barely upstate.
Casey:
So where's the dividing line?
Marco:
Harlem?
Marco:
Philadelphia is within a couple hours of the city.
Casey:
I mean, this makes no sense.
Casey:
Okay, that's fair.
Casey:
So where's the dividing line?
Casey:
Is it 125th Street, for Christ's sakes?
Marco:
I mean, it depends on the definition.
Marco:
And different people have different definitions.
Marco:
The one definition every New Yorker can agree upon is upstate begins north of them.
Marco:
No one thinks they live upstate.
Marco:
However, if you kind of plot the bell curve of where does upstate really begin to most people's opinions, it certainly begins at least above Westchester or Rockland counties and possibly even lower than that depending on who you ask.
Casey:
So you would – this is going to sound argumentative.
Casey:
I really don't mean it that way.
Casey:
So you would say Westchester County is – you personally, Marco, would say is or is not upstate?
Marco:
I personally would say no, but it's like – but it's not the city.
Marco:
Like I would never say it's the city.
Marco:
It's definitely not.
Marco:
And it's not quite upstate, but it's like – it's certainly like a boundary.
Marco:
It's kind of like the way the atmosphere of the earth transitions to space.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's not like a clear line.
Casey:
I think that's reasonable, actually.
John:
That's where I'm fuzzy because I don't get it.
John:
When I was a kid growing up on Long Island, if we visited Marco or Marco's house is in Westchester, I would say that Marco lives upstate.
John:
literally everything is upstate like i know i'm just telling you what the what the and i i recognize that that's a very limited perspective like that classic new yorker cover that shows the map of the united states with the the new yorker's view of it and it doesn't make sense and today i would probably say anything uh that's above westchester but i still feel in my bones the idea of like going to visit marco would mean driving upstate
Marco:
And like, and certainly like by the time you get like, once you're more than, you know, 20 or 30 miles from the city, I think the argument is, yeah, you're pretty much upstate.
Casey:
So 20 or 30 miles, you said miles or minutes?
Marco:
It's just a ballpark, but I'm going to say, yeah, like something, you know, something on the order of like 20 or 30 miles, I'd say you're upstate.
Casey:
Well, so now that we got that argument out of the way, I feel like we've accomplished something.
Casey:
So yeah, if you want to hear more of that, if you want to hear more of that, atp.fm slash join.
Casey:
It was an adventure.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Apparently, this is the follow-up that will not die.
Casey:
I mean, the follow-up that keeps continuing.
Casey:
Tell me about the latest developments with your Kobo and your e-readers.
Marco:
I think this is it.
Marco:
I know I say this every time.
Marco:
You said that the last two weeks.
Marco:
I know I did.
Marco:
I think this is it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I mentioned last episode I had switched from the Kobo Sage to the slightly smaller Kobo Libra 2 device.
Marco:
And a couple of people pointed out that Libra 2 doesn't support Dropbox, which I didn't know at the time.
Marco:
I'd only use it for like a day.
Marco:
And I hadn't noticed, oh, this feature that I like, this Dropbox feature that the Sage has, the Libra 2 doesn't actually have it.
Marco:
And I was a little disappointed by that.
Marco:
Okay, so pause.
Casey:
Pause.
Casey:
Remind me, what was the draw for Dropbox integration?
Casey:
Because that is not something I feel like I have ever wanted on the Kindle, but I have a feeling you're using it for a purpose that I either am not expecting or just not something that I do.
Casey:
So remind me, what's the purpose there?
Marco:
Well, the main purpose and the reason it's on the Sage, the Sage supports a stylus where you can draw or take notes on pages.
Marco:
The main reason I think it's there is so you can export your notes that you make into something that's easily accessed elsewhere.
Marco:
But what I use it for is I have e-books from various sources that sometimes if you buy an O'Reilly one or something like that, sometimes you'll buy an EPUB file.
Marco:
And, like, you'll buy something that is downloadable as an EPUB file without DRM.
Marco:
Like, you know, a lot of, like, you know, the tech instructional stuff a lot of times comes this way.
Marco:
I bought a couple of e-books recently that came that way.
Marco:
And so you'll have an EPUB file.
Marco:
Like, all right, how do I read this easily?
Marco:
And you can, you know, drag it into Apple or Apple Books or whatever.
Marco:
Or I can drop it in this Dropbox folder that I just have a Dropbox folder now for the Kobo.
Marco:
And any EPUB files or PDFs I can stick there.
Marco:
And then I can get them on the Kobo and read them that way.
Marco:
So that's my main use.
Casey:
Is there no, and I'm viewing everything through the lens of Kindle because it's the only thing I'm familiar with.
Casey:
With the Kindle, you get like a bespoke email address, I think at like Kindle.com or something like that.
Casey:
And you can email a PDF or an EPUB or what have you to there.
Casey:
And then it will send you an email back and be like, are you sure you want to do this?
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
You can give it permitted email address sources to say, if I send it from this... And that's how Instapaper's Kindle integration works.
Marco:
A long time ago, I reverse-engineered the Kindle Mobi format the way they were doing newspaper and magazine periodical support.
Marco:
Because they would devise this table of content structure out of it.
Marco:
And so I reverse-engineered that, figured out what they were doing, and then did it with Instapaper.
Marco:
So Instapaper would...
Marco:
Basically generate... And it still works this way.
Marco:
It would generate a Kindle format periodical file and send it to that email address that you would enter in the newspaper control panel.
Marco:
Right, right, right.
Marco:
Anyway, it's a little bit tricky with Kindles because at least back then... I don't know if this is still the case.
Marco:
I think it might be.
Marco:
But back then...
Marco:
Kindles didn't support EPUB.
Marco:
They had their own custom format that was based on the ancient Mobi or Moba Pocket format.
Marco:
And you could email documents at their service and it would actually convert them to Kindle format on Amazon's end and then send them over to Kindle.
Marco:
And Kobo, as far as I know, doesn't need to do that.
Marco:
It seems like the device just natively opens EPUBs without any other effort involved.
Casey:
But my point in interrupting earlier was that there exists such a thing with Kobo as well.
Casey:
There's some email you can send things to.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
So the way Kobo normally, as far as I can tell, I looked for that.
Marco:
As far as I can tell, to send stuff to it electronically, the only way to do it is this Dropbox integration on the Sage.
Marco:
And apparently the only other way to get stuff on it is to connect it to your computer with a USB cable and it shows up as a USB storage device and you can drag files over that way.
Marco:
Which is fine, but not great, you know.
Marco:
So anyway, so I posted about this on Mastodon and a few people, including Stefano Costantini, wrote in that there's actually a hack that I mean, and I use the term hack very loosely.
Marco:
It's very easy.
Marco:
There's this third party like hack app called Nickel Menu for Kobos.
Marco:
And the way you hack this is you connect it to your computer as a drive, and you just put this file on the drive.
Marco:
And when you eject it, the Kobo sees this file, reboots, and so it must have some kind of checking for plugins kind of system.
Marco:
It feels like an OS plugin that's kind of unofficial, but the Kobo just loads it.
Marco:
And then once you load this plugin, then you have an extra menu on the bottom of your Kobo.
Marco:
And there's a few little incantations you could put in this config file, one of which will enable Dropbox support on the Libre 2.
Marco:
And there's also the Libre 2 version is super easy.
Marco:
There's apparently a couple other methods you can use for other like older Kobos.
Marco:
Anyway, all this is to say, in, like, five seconds, I had Dropbox support hacked onto my Libra 2 by basically sticking this file on the USB drive version of it, and that was it.
Marco:
Like, that's all I had to do.
Marco:
So I'll put the links in the show notes.
Marco:
Obviously, you know, when you're installing, like, random hacks from the internet onto a device...
Marco:
It is worth considering, like, what is the security service area that I'm exposing here?
Marco:
Like, you know, and so, you know, so what I did for the Dropbox support was I have a secondary Dropbox account that that only has access to like one folder.
Marco:
And then I share it with my primary account.
Marco:
So that way, because I figure like if this if this third party thing ends up being untrustworthy in the future or presently or whatever, you know, what do they have access to?
Marco:
Well, they have access to a handful of eBooks and that's it.
Marco:
Like, you know, a Dropbox account that has access to none of my other stuff.
Marco:
So the surface area I decided was small.
Marco:
Obviously, you know, you can make your own decisions on that.
Marco:
It's still like a device on your network and stuff like that.
Marco:
So that's up to you.
Marco:
But I decided this hack was worth it.
Marco:
And now I have Dropbox and it's great.
Marco:
There's a couple other things that it enables that I don't really need.
Marco:
So I'm just really using it for that.
Casey:
That's cool.
Casey:
So we'll have some links that Marco provided in the show notes.
Casey:
John, we have all sorts of genuinely interesting news and feedback and whatnot with regard to multiple displays on M1 and M2 Macs.
Casey:
We were talking about... I don't remember when in the episode we were talking about it.
Casey:
We were talking about how the MacBook Air doesn't support more than one external display and we were...
Casey:
You know, trying to theorize whether or not that was Apple being jerks and doing that in software, or is it really a hardware problem or something?
Casey:
So what is the verdict on this, John?
John:
In the context of the 15-inch MacBook Air, people were saying, writing and saying, 15-inch MacBook Air is great, except in corporate environments, people really want two displays, and the M1 and M2 only support one.
John:
Right.
John:
Mathis Woolworth says the M1 and M2 chips only have two display controllers, one for the built-in display and one that can run the external display.
John:
The display controllers are not part of the GPU.
John:
They are separate bits on the SoC.
John:
On the Mac Mini, the internal display controller signals piped out to a chip that converts it to HDMI.
John:
So that's why the Mac Mini has got an HDMI port on the back.
John:
The controller that drives the internal display seems not to be able to output display port signals.
John:
It seems from die shots that Apple is using a lot of die area for the display controllers.
John:
Richard Stevens continues that Hector Martin, who does Acai Linux, how do you pronounce that?
Casey:
Asashi?
John:
I think it's actually Hector Marcan, I believe.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Richard Stevens says Hector Martin, but I think you're right.
John:
Anyway, A-S-A...
John:
H.I.
John:
Linux.
John:
It's the Linux that runs on your M1 and M2 Macs, right?
John:
And they've been figuring out how to tap into all of the hardware features of M1 and M2 SoCs, including, you know, the GPUs and display drivers and everything, so they know a lot about these internals.
John:
Anyway, Hector had a bunch of tweets that were since deleted, but Richard found them in the Internet Archive.
John:
Here's what Hector had to say.
John:
Why does the M1 slash M2 only support one external display?
John:
Because Apple's display controllers are so fancy pants that the M1 Max has more silicon dedicated to display controllers than CPU cores.
John:
They can't fit any more of these on the cheap chips.
John:
Compare the display area and the die shop below to the power CPU cores, excluding the L2 cache.
John:
one display controller is larger than two power cpu cores combined with enough spare left over to cover the efficiency cpus as well m1 max has four of them plus the internal one which is on top of the cpus not annotated in the die shot so i actually additionally annotated the die shot that's in our little show notes here we'll try to put a link to the
John:
old Twitter thread and the show notes for you to look at.
John:
You can see that the display controllers are pretty large, especially when, again, when you compare them to the power CPU core.
Casey:
Isn't that performance?
John:
Performance, power, whatever.
John:
Like the good ones, the fast ones, the big ones, right?
John:
The efficiency CPU cores are really small.
John:
I'm not reading that from the text because in the text it's PCPU and ECPU as abbreviations.
John:
It's kind of cheating because like, oh, just exclude the cache.
John:
Well, you can't really exclude the cache because...
John:
You're including what looks to be very regular memory region, the display controllers.
John:
But anyway, all this is to say is this is a hardware limitations of the SoC, and Apple decided to make it this way.
John:
And one reasonable theory about why they decided to make this way is that the display controllers are surprisingly large.
John:
When you're budgeting out how much space and therefore how much power and how much cost you have to allocate to all different functionality on an SoC,
John:
Maybe for your low-end chip, you decide, eh, two display controllers should be enough.
John:
And so you burn almost as much area as half of the power CPU cores.
John:
I did it again.
John:
Performance CPU cores.
John:
As you did in the other things.
John:
Now, it doesn't mean that Apple can't change their mind about that.
John:
It could be that having the M1 and M2 both be like this, only support two external displays with two display controllers,
John:
has garnered enough complaints that the m3 may make a different choice we'll see so stay tuned for that but anyway on the m1 and m2 uh the the display support is not apple artificially limiting you to something it is a decision apple made when they designed the m1 and m2 soc
John:
in terms of allocating space for drivers but that doesn't mean as we've talked about in many past shows and we will now talk about again that you can't actually have two displays attached to your m1 and m2 how can that be so edward munn writes and says it is possible to get the m1 m2 macbook air to support multiple external monitors by using a dock that supports display length with the correct drivers installed display link does have its drawbacks however
John:
You can only watch DRM content in a browser by disabling hardware rendering.
John:
You cannot watch content within the TV app.
John:
And a message displays when logging in saying that the screen is being monitored.
John:
Besides that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I don't know.
John:
A lot of people are in this setup, and I don't know if these are universal.
John:
I think you can use display link stuff and not see some of these.
John:
But anyway, I don't speak for much experience.
John:
So Edward continues, despite these drawbacks, it does allow for a one cable solution for multiple monitors and charging.
John:
And then Edward says, lastly, I find it amusing that this M2 MacBook Air can natively support a 4K HDR 144 hertz monitor or even a 6K monitor, but requires workarounds to display two tiny 1080p monitors.
John:
I mean, it just goes to show it's like it's not the resolution or the number of pixels.
John:
It's the fact that, hey, are you a separate display that I have to deal with?
John:
Then I have to have a display controller for you or I have to do something else.
John:
Steve McWee writes, I have two 24-inch HP monitors running off a base model M1 Air using the wavelength USB 3.0 to HDMI adapter.
John:
And finally, Lior Chacade says, yes, DisplayLink is an external driver.
John:
Yes, it uses screen recording to send data out as data packets over Thunderbolts instead of using data display control protocol.
John:
Yes, docs that support it are less common and more expensive than comparable alternatives.
John:
But at the end of the day, it does the job of connecting multiple external displays to M1 slash M2 Max.
John:
And the reason I think this is relevant is because in my experience in the corporate world, terrible docs like this that support multiple displays were ubiquitous.
John:
They were everywhere.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Before Arm on Mac, everyone had one of these third-party docking things that you would connect your laptop to that would let you have multiple displays, whether it's for your Macs or for your Dell laptops or whatever it was.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Did they all use this display link tunneling video over USB, or was it just a common product?
John:
But either way...
John:
I think this is the corporate solution to, hey, I've got an M1 or M2 and I want more than one monitor.
John:
It's like, well, deal with this.
John:
It's a little bit janky.
John:
It's a little bit weird.
John:
I bet the video quality probably has some compromises as well.
John:
I don't know all the technical details, but that's what you have to do.
John:
And it seems like for the 15-inch MacBook Air, I assume those limitations will continue to be the case.
John:
But maybe for the M3, they'll do something better.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then Ryan Maxwell wrote in,
Casey:
was that the PowerBook supported extending your desktop to an external display.
Casey:
The iBook just supported mirroring.
Casey:
The problem was the iBook G4 was totally capable of supporting extending.
Casey:
It was just a firmware lock.
Casey:
There was a very popular utility that many of us used to unlock the feature.
Casey:
It worked great.
Casey:
I can imagine such hacks are much harder these days.
Casey:
We'll put a couple of links to relevant information in the show notes.
John:
A couple of people have this story.
John:
Some people thought it was iBook G3 or G4.
John:
This is back in the days when the pro laptops were called PowerBooks.
John:
It's not that Apple has never done this and it's, you know, they would never do it.
John:
It's just not common practice.
John:
I mean, you know, giving this example from the days of the iBook and the PowerBook shows how old it was.
John:
There's probably a couple more modern examples, but in general,
John:
That's not Apple segments.
John:
They segment by designing the M1 chip display controllers like it's baked into the hardware.
John:
It makes a chip smaller, cheaper, lower power, so on and so forth.
John:
And Apple hopes that they have struck the right balance between costs and power efficiency and features.
John:
maybe they haven't with the m1 and m2 maybe they'll change their mind but like that's that's that's the point at which they're making their decision it's not like they're making a chip capable of driving seven displays and they say oh but seven displays on a macbook air they would never buy our pro products quick we need to cripple it they tend not to do that and if they do do that it's a pretty terrible mistake because that means when they were designing the chip they made the wrong choice right
John:
Like if that's part of their design that we want to segment the line and give people a reason to upgrade, they would bake that into the hardware because then they would give you a smaller and cheaper chip, the two things that Apple cares about.
John:
And yes, also more power efficient, which customers care about.
John:
So, you know, sometimes Apple makes the wrong choice with hardware, but the wrong choice for you might be the right choice for somebody else.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
With regard to Final Cut Pro and the iPad, Chris writes, my 1-terabyte 13-inch M1 iPad Pro has 16 gigs of RAM and virtual memory.
Casey:
So the inability to round-trip projects is definitely not a hardware issue.
Casey:
For what it's worth, not every M1 iPad Pro has 16 gigs of RAM.
Casey:
They can come with as, quote-unquote, little as 8.
Casey:
And then I don't know what the virtual memory story is on iPadOS.
Casey:
I know that that's a relatively new development, but I can't recall the specifics.
Casey:
John, do you happen to remember that?
John:
Yeah, I just want to add that M1, the minimum amount of RAM, I believe, is eight gigs.
John:
I don't think Apple has ever sold it with less than eight gigs.
John:
So if you've got an M1, you've got eight gigs and you may have more.
John:
The reason I put the virtual memory note in here is because I said it on last week's show.
John:
We talked about it again.
John:
It's become the sort of colloquial way to talk about this topic.
John:
But, you know, this is a tech show and I'll hold on to this one as long as I can.
John:
iPads have always had virtual memory forever.
John:
What they haven't had is they didn't use swap.
John:
They wouldn't take things out of RAM and swap them to, you know, flash storage and back.
John:
Those are two different things.
John:
Virtual memory just means that the addresses that your program is using are not addresses in RAM.
John:
They are virtual addresses that are somewhere in a virtual address space.
John:
And every process gets its own gigantic virtual address space of a given size.
John:
And it's like, well, how can every single process in the computer have the same address space?
John:
Aren't they stomping over each other memory?
John:
No, because those aren't the real addresses.
John:
Those are virtual addresses.
John:
And there's a thing, there's a bunch of hardware in there that translates from virtual addresses to hardware addresses.
John:
And at that point,
John:
The hardware and the operating system makes sure that two processes don't stomp on each other by using the same physical address.
John:
So basically all systems that run Darwin, the core of what was macOS 10, have and always have had virtual memory.
John:
But iOS devices and iPadOS for the longest time did not have swap, which meant that when RAM was getting close to being exhausted, they would say, oh, don't worry about it.
John:
This stuff that's in RAM, I'll write it to quote unquote disk.
John:
in a big giant file and if someone needs it again i'll go get it from there and i'll to make room for it i'll take something that is in ram and put it back there and anyway doing that a lot is called swapping that is called the swap file and ipad os did not have that for a long time but now does support it on certain hardware configurations i'm not
John:
familiar with details just like casey uh we talked about when it when it rolled out but i only imagine it'll become more prevalent um but the point is it's not a limitation the big beefy ipads do support swap uh i just want to be a little bit careful about saying they support virtual memory because maybe i'll lose that battle maybe just eventually people will just oh when you say virtual you don't mean virtual yeah you've lost that battle
John:
I don't think so, though, because the problem is they've always had virtual memory, and there's no other word for virtual memory than virtual memory.
Marco:
They've always had it.
Marco:
But I feel like virtual memory has been supported since the 386.
Marco:
So I don't think it's the kind of thing you have to say that modern computers support or don't support.
Marco:
Every computer supports virtual.
Marco:
Most people's fridges probably support virtual memory at this point.
Marco:
But there's no other name for it, though.
Marco:
It's like saying, yeah, my computer supports math.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Most computers support math.
John:
I know, but if you were trying to reuse that term, say my computer can do addition, it's like, well, I don't mean addition.
John:
I mean, it'll take memory and write it out to persistent storage.
John:
I'm like, well, it's totally different.
John:
Why are you using that term?
John:
Anyway, I would say it doesn't have swap, doesn't use swap, virtual memory with swap.
John:
I don't even know how Apple describes the inner thing, but I just want people.
Marco:
I believe they called it virtual memory swap when they had it on like one of those little bubble words on the slide.
Marco:
Some technical person said, you can't just call it virtual memory.
John:
You got to put the word swap.
John:
Virtual memory swap.
John:
I think that three word phrase, use that one.
John:
That one works.
John:
But virtual memory, it's really confusing for me.
John:
People say, does your iPad support virtual memory?
John:
I'm like, yeah, it does.
John:
And so does yours.
Marco:
And so do all of them ever.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so does your watch.
Marco:
Right, right.
John:
And your fridge, probably.
Marco:
Yep.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So bringing you back to Final Cut Pro, I thought this feedback was excellent.
Casey:
And I probably should have known this having had a brief window of time when I sort of kind of knew Final Cut Pro.
Casey:
But because my usage was so rudimentary, I never really put this together.
Casey:
So Brendan writes, as an occasional Final Cut Pro user for over a decade, I'm extremely confident that the lack of round trip has nothing to do with performance whatsoever.
Casey:
And everything with the way Final Cut Pro X handles project files.
Casey:
It's extremely flexible and allows assets, proxies, and cached renders to be segmented out on different volumes and storage types.
Casey:
That is extremely useful and necessary in professional video editing environments.
Casey:
So I don't see a new project format coming along soon on the Mac side to replace that if it needs to adhere to the current limitations of iPadOS.
Casey:
Like one of the things, and maybe one of you can have a better explanation here, but one of the things that we needed a lot more years ago was if you're working with these super high-resolution video files, that's really computationally intensive for the computer to do as you're scanning through them and so on and so forth.
Casey:
So the Final Cut Pro would make these quote-unquote proxy files, which basically means it'll downsample your 4K video to like 720p.
Casey:
that it'll use for the purposes of doing the edits and getting everything lined up.
Casey:
And then when you finally did the one true export, it'll go back to the source material and render it in 4K or what have you.
Casey:
And that was proxy media, or I forget what they call it, proxy something or other.
Casey:
And there's all sorts of other things too.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
yeah final cut pro will often generate this on its own behind the scenes and you can be explicit if you so choose and tell it oh i want the proxy media to go here you know i want the regular stuff to go there and so on and so forth so yeah i think brendan makes a good point that it is extremely flexible which is wonderful particularly if you're working on like a two-hour video or something like that but that might not be so wonderful if you're trying to work within the extreme limitations of ipad os
John:
See, I don't buy this as a format difference, though, because that's true between Macs as well.
John:
If you if you have a project file that references assets that are all over the place and you give that to somebody else on a Mac and they're on their laptop across the country and they try to open that project, it's not going to work.
John:
It's just going to be able to find all the media like that's just the nature of the beast.
John:
I don't think there's anything particular in iPad OS that prevents access to network storage or whatever.
John:
But again, Apple makes the operating system so they could patch these things.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think if there was a new project format on the Mac, it would, of course, continue to support that flexibility, probably.
John:
And then they could also support it on iPadOS, and it would behave exactly the same way as it does on a Mac, where it says, oh, you opened this project?
John:
I don't know where the hell any of this media is.
John:
I tried to connect to the server, but it's not accessible on my network.
John:
I don't know where it is.
John:
Sorry.
John:
That's the nature of complicated formats like this.
John:
So it is another thing to consider that dealing without an iPad OS may be slightly more difficult because of sandboxing and the inability to mount network drives as far as we know.
John:
But, you know, Apple does make the OS and they can make all that possible.
John:
So it's still a little bit of a mystery.
John:
I would love to hear.
John:
a technical explanation from somebody at apple why the project format is different i would hope they wouldn't say well you know the the the ipad is a little less like like sort of just a vague answer doesn't tell us anything because they can't i don't think apple can say with a straight face is kind of the point of this fall i don't think they can say with a straight face anymore that it's a power limitation
John:
especially for the people with like a 16 gig iPad Pro with an M1 in it.
John:
Like, no, there's no excuse for in terms of horsepower or power and swap, right?
John:
Virtual memory swap, as Apple would say.
John:
That's got it all, right?
John:
So what's the problem?
John:
I continue to hope, fingers crossed, that it is just an updated project format that will eventually come to the Mac.
John:
And if and when it does, to Brendan's point, it will have to support all the existing workflows if they are an essential part of people's business, which I think they are.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then finally, I think it was like right in the beginning of the year, I forget exactly when it was, but Dell announced their own kind of knockoff version of the Pro Display XDR.
Casey:
You might remember this because it had a truly enormous webcam that stuck up above the top forehead of the monitor.
Casey:
If memory serves, it had a little drop down like a connectivity port that would come off the bottom of the monitor.
Casey:
which I actually think was kind of cool, but I'm not sure many share that opinion with me.
Casey:
But anyways, this is a 32-inch 6K monitor, the oh-so-eloquently named the U3-224KB.
Casey:
Well, apparently pricing has been released, and it is $3,200, which normally would make me do a spit take.
Casey:
But remind me how much your ridiculously overpriced monitors were, gentlemen?
John:
Well, are you including the stand?
John:
Yes, I am.
John:
Yeah, don't forget, this comes with a stand.
John:
So it's $3,200, comes with a height-adjustable stand, and this thing has, to remind everybody, up to 140 watts of power delivery, a 4K webcam, a huge array of ports, just a ton of ports all over it, has slightly higher resolution than the XDR.
John:
It's 6144 by 3456 instead of the XDR 6016 by 3384.
John:
Sorry about the way I read that number.
John:
Just deal with it.
John:
They're also, because this is Dell, we'll put a link to the product page.
John:
They make a whole line of these monitors, and you can change tons of things about them.
John:
This monitor is available in the following sizes in inches.
John:
24, 27, 30, 32, 34, 38, 43, and 49 inches.
John:
slow down though but that but that doesn't necessarily mean 6k in all right exactly and it goes up to 8k as well so there's those the smaller monitors are different resolutions and the bigger monitors can be different but i'm saying this is the matrix of different features so you can't get all the resolutions at all the sizes obviously but there's a lot of choices here include like i said including up to 8k i think the 8k version is like four four thousand dollars or something now this is not really an xdr quote-unquote replacement because
John:
I don't think any of the combinations of sizes and resolutions support HDR up to 1600 nits.
John:
I don't know if they have mini-LED backlights.
John:
But hey, $3,200 for XDR resolution.
John:
If you don't care about HDR and you don't mind looking at what is a very unattractive monitor, in my opinion...
John:
It's a good deal.
John:
That's what we were wondering about the whole time.
John:
We were talking about this at CES.
John:
We were making fun of the looks.
John:
We were looking at all the ports.
John:
We were like, well, how much is this going to cost?
John:
And the question was, how much will it undercut the XDR by?
John:
And I think $3,200 with adjustable stand is a good price.
John:
That is a way better deal than the XDR.
Marco:
Well, I will.
Marco:
I mean, so, you know, you said you have a lot of options available here, but none of those options make it super nice as, you know, as an Apple replacement.
John:
There is no option for beauty on this monitor.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
But, you know, so I think this is a very good deal relative to what else is in the market, which as far as I know is just the XDR, like in this kind of resolution and size class.
Marco:
I don't think there's anything else, really.
Marco:
I could be wrong, but I'm not aware of any.
John:
I mean, I'm sure there are other makers making monitors with the same panel, but Dell is a reputable brand.
John:
And you know what I mean?
John:
So, yeah.
Marco:
But but I think so for this to be thirty two hundred dollars and the XDR to be with the stand six thousand dollars.
Marco:
Yeah, this is a really good deal.
Marco:
I would at least, though, I would caution people if it's been a while since you've used an Apple computer with a third party monitor.
Marco:
The experience is not always as seamless as you would hope it should be.
Marco:
It's not like the olden days, because the olden days things were simpler.
Marco:
We didn't have things like HDR and all these new DRM schemes for movie protection and stuff like that.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
On some level, I am not tempted by this.
Marco:
Obviously, I already have the XDR, so that's a huge difference.
Marco:
But I'm not tempted by this because my experiences with my UltraFine LG monitor have been pretty paper-cutty, in part because the UltraFine is just such a mediocre monitor, but also in part because Apple does not seem to take much effort at all in making the experience good for third-party monitor users.
Marco:
And oftentimes, as Apple's computers move forward, as the hardware and software move forward, oftentimes it seems like the number of paper cuts that you get by using a third-party monitor is increasing over time.
Marco:
So while you are able to save a good amount of money going with this option...
Marco:
you are giving up a lot of niceness and you're setting up for possible paper cut issues that you might not get with, with a first party monitor.
Marco:
And that's not to say that like Apple is, you know, making the best monitors here.
Marco:
You know, it's just to say the reality of the situation is you're in an integrated environment.
Marco:
If you're using this with a Mac and you're going to miss out on some of those integrations.
Marco:
And it, it might not be, there might be annoyances or limitations by going with this that we don't really know about yet, or that you might not be thinking of that are worth considering when you, when you're making a decision.
John:
I think a lot of the fault is going to lie with the monitor maker.
John:
That's why I was suggesting maybe Dell over somebody else, because I think there is like driver software that you might have to install on your Mac to get all the features of this monitor to work.
John:
And that's kind of the responsibility of the third party monitor maker.
John:
You would hope Apple would work together with them better.
John:
uh but that is you know it's like who's to blame here is it apple because they don't care about making stuff work with third-party monitors or is it the third-party monitor maker because they stopped caring about the drivers for mac os after a few years because they've already made their money in that monitor they don't care already bought it uh to give one i don't i don't know if this is an example that you know puts apple in a good light uh but it is something that happened before apple sold monitors besides the xdr even maybe before the xdr uh the m1 and m2 for example
John:
even though they can only drive one monitor they can drive the lg 5k i believe right yeah i believe so and so the lg lg 5k is a third-party monitor it was the only you know apple retina resolution third-party monitor for a long time while we were asking for apple to make one again other than the xdr well there was the there was the 4k for a while and then they changed it which made it slightly less retina e but
Casey:
It was the LGs, the two LGs, the 4K and the 5K.
John:
Yeah, I guess the 4K 24-inch was close to that.
John:
But anyway, the 5K was the big one, right, until Apple had the XDR, but until Apple came up with a studio display.
John:
And the LG 5K is weird and requires Apple to do some stuff to support Apple.
John:
that that apple did like as far as i'm aware you didn't have to install any lg drivers right for the lg 5k correct correct so uh part of that you could say okay well that's not apple doing it out of the goodness of their heart it's because the lg 5k is basically the same monitor that was in a 5k iMac and they had already done the work for that but
John:
The fact is that the M1, when it first came out, could drive a third-party monitor, and Apple had to do some work to make that happen, because for people who don't know, we talked about it when the 5K iMac first came out, which was ages ago.
John:
In fact, Apple bragged about it.
John:
That's why we knew about it.
John:
The 5K iMac had its special Apple custom timing controller because it's basically like two internal logical displays with two parallel display stream things going in there and then a controller that synchronizes them.
John:
That's how you get 5K resolution over one cable internal to the 5K iMac.
Casey:
Well, that was true at the time.
Casey:
It is a little bit different now.
Casey:
But carry on.
Casey:
Yes.
John:
But I think even the LG 5K today, if you connect it to an M1 over a single cable, it's doing the display stream multiplexing.
John:
It's more commonplace now.
John:
But Apple had to support that, my point is, with the M1.
John:
They could have chose not to support it because none of their monitors do stuff like that.
John:
Or maybe just the XDR or whatever.
John:
So...
John:
I don't know, again, I don't know if that is Apple making an effort to say, oh, well, since we don't sell any monitors like this, we should make sure the LG 5K works because it's the only game in town.
John:
Or just saying, well, we already basically did that work for the 5K iMac, so we get it for free, so we might as well do it.
John:
But it is a thing that happened.
John:
The Dell ones, on the other hand, especially the 6K thing with the camera and all the ports, I imagine you're going to be relying on Dell keeping its drivers and software up to date to have all the features of that monitor working.
John:
How good is Dell at doing that?
Marco:
probably better than some random no-name brand that you just found online right but maybe not as good as you want it to be to marco's point especially years down the line yeah it's it's still dell at the end of the day and and dell also you know they're not going to care nearly as much about how it works on a mac than they are how it works on their pcs that they sell so or other pcs i thought i saw the word mac mentioned on the product page so let me search for it again
John:
i mean you know they'll take our money but you know you better believe they're not gonna like you know have amazing driver support if they don't have to yeah i mean like i'm just happy to see the word mentioned this monitor is compatible with multiple operating systems including windows and mac os they'll are in a circle i guess what are the other ones linux uh but anyway uh they are at least mentioning it so they i think they understand who who would want a monitor with this kind of pixel density at this size uh there is some possibility that it might be a mac user
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Casey:
What do we have to talk about tonight?
John:
Well, first we can talk about whether I use this phrase correctly, and I shouldn't be asking you to.
John:
Maybe we can get some young people in the chat to weigh in.
John:
What I wrote as the top topic here is WWDC vibe check.
John:
My use of that term...
John:
is in the sense that we are seeing how we all kind of feel about wwc being two weeks out from it is that the correct use of the term vibe check do we have and we don't have any who are we kidding there are no young people in that room i don't know why i think that's like all that matters is like does our audience is our audience old enough to think that we are using it correctly
Marco:
Whether or not we actually are or not.
John:
Well put, well put.
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
I know young people listen to the podcast.
John:
Hello out there.
John:
We love that you listen to it.
John:
Tell your friends.
John:
Tell your nerdy friends, which is what I always say.
John:
Because if you tell your regular friends, they're going to listen and think it's super weird.
John:
But tell your nerdy friends.
John:
Anyway, people who listen live, like there's a very tiny number of dedicated people who are in our chat room right now who listen to the live stream of this as we record it.
John:
And we love it.
John:
And I have to imagine because the number is so small, the percentage that might be young people...
John:
there is probably very low.
Casey:
That is probably accurate.
Casey:
But I will say, as an official old, I do believe you are using the term correctly.
John:
Again, I don't know how much stock I put in any of our opinions of whether I'm using it correctly.
Casey:
Totally.
Casey:
Totally, totally agree with you.
John:
I mean, I do have teenagers, so I feel like I have a leg up on you two, at least.
John:
But I can just learn through osmosis by hearing them say things.
Marco:
Well, who's less likely to know about cool slang?
Marco:
Like, a random 40-whatever-year-old...
Marco:
Or a 41-year-old with teenage children.
Marco:
I almost think the people without the teenage children are more likely to get it right because the teenagers will try harder to hide it from you when they're your kids.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
No, no.
John:
You can't help.
John:
You'll see when you have a teenager.
John:
You can't help but hear them speak all the time and them talk to their friends.
John:
And they will say things to you using the same language they talk to their friends, whether they mean it or not.
Marco:
I mean, I mean, look, we, we get some of that now, but like, it's funny, like, like, so going around, you know, my, my kid and his friends going around that group is this, I don't know, I'm sure it came from a YouTuber, but some kind of joke where they are like, you know, what's, you know, nine plus 10, 27 or whatever, and everyone laughs.
Marco:
it's like okay and i don't get it at all and i'm like okay well i'm already at the point where you know the kids are doing stuff that i don't understand at all that you know and you know every generation goes through this um and like i'm thinking like you know when we start saying things like vibe check like
Marco:
i'm already so disconnected from what the young kids are saying and how what they think is funny and whatever references they're making from their youtube celebrities they follow there is no way in hell that we're using this term correctly like we're just we're too old they're like we should avoid any anything that even seems like modern slang we should just stick with the the the phrases that are licensed for old people use yeah someone in the chat room says that it's well the idea is that you're uh
John:
Checking to see how somebody's doing.
John:
It's more like checking in with them.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'll ask my kids after.
John:
Anyway, I've defined the term as we're using it here.
John:
If we're using it wrong, at least you know what I mean because the goal is communication.
John:
Although I will say what I remember on a recent episode, I heard Casey say something that I actually talked to my daughter about.
John:
that I'm wondering where Casey heard it.
John:
He probably heard it from the same place my daughter did with some kind of popular media or like a sitcom or something.
John:
I'm getting so scared.
John:
You used the term, you were, I don't know, one of my phrases that I would use for it is so on and so forth, et cetera.
John:
Sort of one of those where you're trying to say, and other things like this, I'm not going to list them all.
John:
You know what I'm talking about, right?
John:
And the phrase you use is whatever, whatever.
John:
You say whatever twice.
John:
Whatever, obviously, was from our generation.
John:
We all know about whatever, my generation anyway.
John:
Whatever, Gen X, it's totally a thing, right?
John:
Whatever, whatever.
John:
Saying it in that particular way, whatever, whatever.
John:
I heard my daughter say it, and I talked to her, and I said, is whatever, whatever, is that a you thing, or is that a common thing among people your age?
John:
And she said, no, it's not a me thing.
John:
It's just a thing that people my age say.
John:
And so I took her word for it.
John:
And then I heard Casey say it a few times.
Casey:
Did I?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Where did Casey pick up whatever whatever?
Casey:
Now I want to know.
John:
I don't think you picked up from your kids.
John:
Do either one of your kids say whatever whatever whenever you're laying a story about something?
John:
I don't think so, no.
John:
So it's probably from like, you know, some television show or something like that.
John:
And people keep comparing it to yada yada and saying yada yada like that Seinfeld that made up that thing yada yada.
John:
Seinfeld did not make up yada yada people.
John:
Seinfeld popularized it for the rest of the world.
John:
It's not the metro New York area, but rest assured yada yada existed long before Seinfeld.
Casey:
Well, this has been Language Corner.
Casey:
But yeah, so let's talk about how we feel about WWDC, however you want to phrase that.
Casey:
How we feeling?
Casey:
Since I'm talking, I guess I'll just start.
Casey:
I am excited.
Casey:
You know, I never get any concrete information about anything in any regard from any of the people I know inside Apple.
Casey:
But I can tell you that...
Casey:
the, the, now I don't want to say vibe, but I was going to say vibe.
Casey:
The, uh, the impression I get from, I think we can use vibe.
John:
I think we all understand and know how to use vibe.
John:
I don't think, I think that's the thing that predates a lot of teenagers who are alive today.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Uh, the vibe from people inside Apple is that they are like vibrating, like they are real excited.
Casey:
At least that's, that's the impression I've gotten.
Casey:
Um, I wish I could tell you that I'm being coy and I know exactly what was, what's happening and when it's happening and so on and so forth.
Casey:
I genuinely know nothing about,
John:
Our sources aren't that good.
John:
The vast majority of the Apple employees are just as surprised as we are because they compartmentalize everything.
John:
If you don't need to know about Project XYZ, you don't know about it.
John:
And so it's not like we're watching and they're like, well, every Apple employee already knows this.
John:
No, every Apple employee does not know this.
John:
apple employees are vibrating it there could be coming off the same thing that we are which is like we feel like there's something big coming and they literally don't know what it is because they're not disclosed as they say on the headset or on the car or on the whatever the hell like they don't they just they literally don't know but because they are employees and work there you can kind of get a feel from because maybe they know someone who does work on that team or they know someone knows someone and those people seem happy all the time or they seem frantic all the time
Casey:
Or, yeah, they've been working nonstop for the last two months.
John:
Exactly.
John:
That's the vibe that they're getting that we're not getting.
John:
And that is being transferred to us.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
My favorite example of this is after the Swift announcement in like 14 or whenever it was, I was talking to a handful of internal Apple people.
Casey:
And of the, I don't know, five or ten people I spoke to, I think maybe one or two of them was aware that Apple was working on a new language to release at some point.
Casey:
But I don't think a single one of them knew that the Swift announcement was happening that day.
Casey:
So they're sitting there, you know, in their office or whatever, watching the keynote and saying, oh...
Casey:
That's cool.
Casey:
You know, same time that I'm looking over at John saying, oh, that's cool.
Casey:
Like, they all found out at the exact same moment for something as big as Swift.
Casey:
So, I mean, not literally all of them, but you know what I'm saying.
Casey:
So, whatever, whatever, John.
John:
For the Swift example specifically, that's another example of how...
John:
how tricky it is to read the tea leaves at Apple.
John:
Way back in the day, you know, I'd written a bunch of blog posts at Ars Technica, which have since been moved to my own website, talking about Apple's needs for a new programming language.
John:
And in response to those posts, lots of people from Apple either reached out to me, back channel, I talked to them at WWDC, and we would have discussions on the topic that I wrote about.
John:
Obviously, almost all of them didn't know anything about what Apple would eventually do in this area, but some of them did.
John:
And we would have discussions about it.
John:
And in hindsight, I can see that a lot of those discussions, you could tell which one of these people that I was talking about this four years before Swift was announced knew Swift existed or whatever, you know, or like two years, one year leading up to it.
John:
That's the way that you can get a vibe from Apple people.
John:
The problem is, though, tons of stuff is happening inside Apple that never sees the light of day.
John:
And so you can have a discussion with somebody that makes you... I totally think from all these discussions I've been having with Apple people, they seem really excited about...
John:
whatever smell-o-vision right and i really think apple's working on a smell-based product and it just never sees the light of day and you're like oh i guess i was wrong about that and then you have to learn 15 years later that there was a big smell-o-vision project and it got canned because of some internal political turf war or they decided they weren't going to do smell-o-vision or it was catching on fire right exactly so this so
John:
The vibe inside Apple reflects a feeling about what might be happening inside Apple, but then there's the question, okay, but what of the things that happens inside Apple comes out of Apple, and in what form and when?
John:
Another example is the TV stuff.
John:
Apple's going to make a television set, and from what we understand from current rumors and people revealing stuff, some of the technology that was originally made for the
John:
for the project where Apple is going to make a television set.
John:
I keep saying television set because I don't know how to explain this to young people, but like a TV, a big screen that you look at that plays.
John:
Anyway, ended up in the HomePod of all places because they were working on audio for the HomePod.
John:
So the HomePod comes out of some work that was done on the television.
John:
There was so much smoke around TV back in the day.
John:
of just like Apple's going to make a television set.
John:
They're going to do it.
John:
It's going to be, and what we ended up getting was the HomePod and the Apple TV and Apple never did make a television set and we'll see where the car stuff goes.
John:
So it's difficult to read, but sometimes like the vibe you're getting, it's a legit vibe, even if Apple never ships any of that stuff in the form you think they're going to.
John:
But in this case, I feel like,
John:
the vibe about the headset is so strong and so lightning focused and so detailed with the rumors that, uh, you know, where there's smoke, there's surely going to be fire eventually.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I mean, again, I, I'm not playing coy.
Casey:
I wish I, I wish I knew when I was playing coy, but I'm not, uh, but I don't know.
Casey:
I, I just feel like based on no facts and just a gut feeling, I feel like there's going to be a lot this year, even if it isn't the headset.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
I still feel like it's going to be a busy keynote.
Casey:
Obviously, the drop of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro just last week, that could, you know, lead, lend credence to the idea that it's going to be busy.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I just I feel like there's going to be a lot here.
John:
And if there's no headset, how can it be busy?
John:
Explain that to me.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm not sure.
Casey:
I really don't know.
Casey:
But I mean, as a couple of examples off the top of my head, it sounds like we're getting an all-new watchOS, or for some loose definition of all-new, which we may or may not talk about this episode.
Casey:
We should be getting widget support on iPadOS.
Casey:
I'm trying to think of other things.
Casey:
Presumably, there'll be a lot of improvements to SwiftUI.
Casey:
I mean, this is a developer conference, strictly speaking.
Casey:
So hopefully, we'll see a lot of SwiftUI improvements.
Casey:
I'm not sure.
Casey:
I feel like they could fill an hour to an hour and a half with just normal software stuff.
Casey:
I mean, hell, as Chris Vanazzo says in the chat, no new features in macOS.
Casey:
That would need an hour and a half just for applause, right?
John:
That would be a crowd pleaser, but I don't know if it would count as a big keynote.
John:
I kind of feel like...
John:
headset is the obvious one that would make this big and honestly if they have if they have the headset nothing else matters essentially like not that they're not of course they're gonna have new versions of all their os's and the new versions will have nice features but if they have the headset that alone makes it this an extremely like these come rarely when does apple introduce new platforms not that often watch os tv os like they you know sometimes they're big sometimes they're small but this is so hyped so long room it is as if they were coming out with the car right and
John:
all you need is that if that exists in the keynote it is a big keynote if that doesn't absolutely it isn't released in this keynote i think to make it a big keynote you need a lot of things that currently seem unlikely i think you would need the 15 inch macbook era to be announced you need all new versions of the os's with more than with some significant features that people care about and i think you'd have to probably throw in the mac pro that's what it would take to match the headset and of course it always comes back to the mac pro i don't honestly no one cares about the mac pro but
John:
But if you're trying to make a big keynote, you need the things people do care about.
John:
15-inch MacBook Air, all new versions of all the operating systems that people love, Swift with the new features, new version of Xcode, and then you throw in the Mac Pro as a fun kicker.
John:
If you remember, the Mac Pro was announced at WWDC.
John:
We were all there, I believe.
John:
The 2019 Mac Pro, that is.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
And I think that was, like, the star of the show in terms of, didn't they, like, leave that to the end?
John:
Like, despite the fact that nobody buys them or whatever, it is a glamour product for Apple to roll out because it's big, it's powerful, it's shiny, it's expensive, it's good looking if you like holes.
John:
LAUGHTER
John:
And so I even I know people think like, oh, nobody cares about the Mac Pro.
John:
That doesn't make a big keynote.
John:
It does.
John:
It would it would add to the bigness of it.
John:
But you need all that stuff that I described.
John:
And on the other side of the scale, just the headset by itself.
Casey:
Yeah, that's fair.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I've been talking a long time.
Casey:
But suffice to say, I get the feeling that whatever it is, it's going to be a big year, which is why I really hope that the three of us get to be there.
Casey:
So Apple, call us.
Casey:
We'd love to hear from you.
Casey:
But no, I think it's going to be big.
Casey:
And I don't... I think that would be excellent because I don't feel like the last couple of years have been bad by any means, but I think just a really firing on all cylinders kind of year would be pretty, pretty awesome.
Marco:
I'm excited.
Marco:
You know, I'm a little bit nervous as a developer that, like, I'm about to have my summer, you know, ruined in the best way.
Marco:
You know, the same way it's like, you know, like the Jonathan Colton song about, you know, you ruined everything in the nicest way.
Marco:
Like when you have a kid, it's like, oh, you ruined everything in the nicest way because...
Marco:
You disrupt my life in a huge way, but you're my kid and I love you.
Marco:
Forgive the horrendous summarizing of this art form.
Marco:
I feel like this might be like that for developers in the sense that whatever plans we had for this year...
Marco:
are probably about to be derailed in a pretty big way by the headset you know it seems by all accounts it seems like the headset is being announced at this event and there's going to be a developer story to it because obviously why else would they announce it if that'd be quite a move at a developer conference to be like here's a brand new brand new platform a sweet solution you can make web apps for it yeah right yeah
Marco:
So anyway, yeah, you can program it only with Siri.
Marco:
Oh, gosh.
Marco:
I would quit the business.
Marco:
Anyway, so I think our plans are going to be disrupted.
Marco:
If our plans weren't, you know, wait for the headset, it's going to be disruptive.
Marco:
And I think it's going to be in a very exciting way.
Marco:
I don't know what the headset will be.
Marco:
I don't know what the headset's chances are on the market, but...
Marco:
When I use the existing VR headset hardware that exists on the market today, the limited amount I have used with it, with the exception of the Oculus whatever 2 that we have upstairs, I'm super uninterested in it.
Marco:
It kind of gives me motion sickness a little bit.
Marco:
It doesn't work optically well with my eyes for whatever reasons.
Marco:
There's a lot of minor paper cuts or major paper cuts with it, and I don't find the games that interesting.
Marco:
Apple is full of really smart nerds, and many of them have apparently decided that what they have is something special and worth shipping for Apple in a pretty high-profile way.
Marco:
So I'm optimistic.
Marco:
I'm tend to be optimistic that whatever they have is probably pretty good.
Marco:
Because I trust them to make that call and they call it right most of the time.
Marco:
So whatever they have, you know, we can look around the market and we can be super unexcited about all the other VR headsets out there.
Marco:
And also trust Apple to say, you know what, if they're this excited about something like this and they're releasing it now, there's probably something there.
Marco:
It's probably really good in at least some ways for at least some uses and possibly more.
Marco:
So, you know, because otherwise they wouldn't be releasing it.
Marco:
You know, Apple holds back on a lot of stuff.
Marco:
So we can be fairly sure that what does get out there, especially a new platform in a high profile release like this is bound to be.
Marco:
They've done their homework.
Marco:
They've probably built something really cool.
Marco:
And it's probably going to be really exciting when we see it.
Marco:
So that's why I'm very interested, not in the VR or AR or XR space in general.
Marco:
I'm very interested in what the heck did Apple do here?
Marco:
Because I trust them to, if they've gotten to this point, it's probably something really exciting and really good.
Marco:
Now, how many other people will think so and will be willing to spend $3,000 and deal with the whole butt-mounted battery situation?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
We'll see when we get there.
Marco:
But again, I trust them to have gotten this right.
John:
If they do that, I don't think that'll be a thing to deal with, by the way.
John:
I think that'll be a feature that everyone will say, oh, of course they did it.
John:
I mean, we've all discussed all the reasons.
John:
It's just that once the product comes out, all the reasons we've discussed suddenly become concrete and people say, I always thought it was a good idea because the headset weighs less and you can swap batteries and so on and so forth.
John:
But
John:
right now everyone thinks it's dumb right and then the whole rest of the industry will change to butt batteries and they'll be like well of course this is the obvious design we didn't copy apple exactly right yeah it was obvious we didn't copy apple at all i mean apple's not going to be the first one to use a battery pack external battery pack a bunch of other people not anyway yeah i do feel like for this for the headset again i get the vibe that it's coming this year if it's not i think a lot of people will be disappointed i think it's you know whatever like it would quote unquote justifiable it's like well apple never announced anything that was all on you it's just rumors but anyway um
John:
The good thing that I hope the headset will do is provide cover for every other product.
John:
And I know this is not the way it works inside Apple, but it's plausible that there could be enough internal communication to...
John:
Let the other products that are announced every day, every WDC, all the new versions of the new OS, the new version of Swift updates and frameworks, the new version of Xcode gives them some cover to not feel like they have to press, press, press to get their exciting feature out the door ASAP, even if it's buggy.
John:
Because the headset is just going to block out the sun at WWDC, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so a lot of times at WWDC, I feel some groups are pressing.
John:
They're like, we really need to wow them in the keynote.
John:
And they show something, and we are wowed.
John:
But then we realize like, oh, this isn't even in the beta build at WWDC.
John:
It'll be coming in a later build.
John:
And when it does come, it's buggy and unfinished.
John:
And it just ends up being frustrating and disappointing.
John:
And it's like...
John:
You don't need to try that hard.
John:
Ship what you're actually ready to ship.
John:
Like, I don't want to see anything in any of the other sort of platform stuff that isn't in the WWDC beta because I feel like the headset provides them cover to be more relaxed with their...
John:
with their choice of what to include and what to save for a future release.
John:
In the ideal world, I would have liked Apple to have the forethought to say, hey, back in 2022, hey, WWDC 2023, we're going to ship the headset.
John:
So everybody else, when you're planning your new releases for the new versions of all the different OSs,
John:
everybody take a snow leopard right that didn't happen like that's you know that they don't have that kind of coordination they can't tell the future that far in advance it's foolhardy to try to make plans like that i do think it would be wise for them to give each platform a snow leopard once in a while we've talked a lot about mac os not being annual if they could get the bugs out of it
John:
But it's just too big of a company to be that coordinated and making plans that far in advance about software releases and releases and headset.
John:
Part of the reason you can't make that plan is that all the other groups aren't even probably disclosed on the headset if they don't have to be, or subsets of them are, because only some people who work on tvOS don't have to know about the headset, not all the people.
John:
And certainly the people who work on tvOS hardware probably don't need to know about it.
John:
It's very compartmentalized to the detriment of Apple internally, I feel like sometimes.
John:
And this is kind of one of those cases that we just assume that despite the fact that if the headset does launch at WWDC, it will provide cover for lots of other OSs.
John:
The only thing that helps them with is what I just described, which is...
John:
okay now maybe they don't have to press maybe the higher levels of the org chart can cannot press to have the xcode team you know push out some feature of xcode that is buggy and going to cause the the app to crash all the time they'll say we'll just save that to next year it's fine that you don't have it and they won't know that's because the headset is coming but only like the people seven levels off the org chart who are disclosed in the headset do know that and they let those things travel downhill this i know this sounds
John:
byzantine and complicated but honestly this is the way it works in big companies especially ones like apple that have everything compartmentalized this is whole that's why reading the tea leaves is a thing that's whole kind of game of telephone of like what gets prioritized what gets given money and why uh by people who at various points in the chain don't know have all the information available they just know what the people above them tell them and what the people below them send back and feedback but they don't nobody has the whole picture until you get pretty high in the org chart and it makes it very difficult to
John:
act in a coherent manner it's apple has an amazing job of it to be clear as a company they speak with one voice their their marketing their pr makes it seem like they are a coherent mass but internally it's lots of little kingdoms moving in all sorts of different directions pushed and pulled by forces they can't see and don't understand for the most part yeah apple can put that slogan in their in their recruiting material
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Marco:
So in terms of like the overall, like what I expect from the other platforms, you know, it's hard when in a new platform year, like what we have most likely here with the headset launching, this is a year as John mentioned, like this doesn't happen often.
Marco:
This is a year of a new platform.
Marco:
What tends to happen with Apple when a new platform is being developed is a bunch of talent is pulled from other teams to work on that new thing.
Marco:
And obviously that doesn't all just happen in one year.
Marco:
But what has probably happened here is probably a bunch of people from other OSs and other projects in the company have probably been spending a lot of time recently working on the headset.
Marco:
And so I would expect, based on that, for not only this year, but also last year to have been somewhat slow.
Marco:
And I would say that's kind of the case.
Marco:
That being said, Apple's a bigger company now than they used to be, and they are able to maintain things on multiple fronts better than they used to be.
Marco:
They're still not great at it, but they're way better than they used to be.
Marco:
But anyway, so I would expect this to be a somewhat slow year for the other platforms.
Marco:
But that being said...
Marco:
In terms of what is actionable for developers to do with the headset right now, I think we're going to see version 1.0 of this OS.
Marco:
We're going to see version 1.0 of the SDK and version 1.0 of all the frameworks and the UI and everything else.
Marco:
On some level, it's very exciting and very disruptive to our summers, as I was saying earlier.
Marco:
But also, there might just not be that much for us to do yet on it.
Marco:
First of all, I don't know when they plan to actually ship this thing to us, but that's going to itself be a pretty big limitation.
Marco:
There's going to be a lot of things where we want to develop something for this, but we kind of can't until we have one.
Marco:
Or we can only do preliminary work, maybe in some kind of simulator or something, until we get one.
Marco:
Or maybe...
Marco:
Maybe Apple will use the new developer center that they built.
Marco:
They opened up last year to invite developers out by invitation only.
Marco:
Come out to the developer center in July and August, and you can sign up for a one-day slot to use the hardware and test your app on it.
Marco:
They did that with the watch, and they had the whole dev kit situation with the transition to Apple Silicon.
Marco:
They've done stuff in this ballpark before.
Marco:
So I'm guessing that kind of thing will happen.
Marco:
Whether it will be open to many developers is a different question.
Marco:
I'm sure some developers will get invited.
Marco:
I don't know if it will be like anybody can sign up kind of thing.
Marco:
I think it will be more likely, you know, don't call us, we'll call you.
Marco:
That's much more likely just for scale.
Marco:
But anyway.
Marco:
So I don't expect there to be a ton for developers to do on the headset yet this summer, because presumably we won't have them yet.
Marco:
We won't have access to them yet.
Marco:
And we probably will have a very early SDK.
Marco:
And so it's going to depend a lot on what you do.
Marco:
If you make an app or choose to make an app that is really a great thing in AR, VR, then you're going to have maybe a busier time.
Marco:
If you make, say, a podcast player, it might not be that important.
Marco:
It might just be, all right, find a way to show a UI, but otherwise everything else is the same.
Marco:
And if the stories are accurate about them being able to run iPad apps in little windows, it might not be that much work at all for developers to get their apps to at least run on the thing.
Marco:
And then once we have physical access to them, then we can maybe worry about making it good on the thing.
Marco:
Secondly, if we don't have physical access to them, neither do our customers.
Marco:
And so, again, it's like there's only going to be so much we can really do until this thing is out in the market or at least widely available to developers.
Marco:
So that's going to hold back some of that.
Marco:
So I would I would also hope that there is some nice to haves on the other platforms.
Marco:
This is what we're going to get to in a second.
Marco:
And I think based on the rumors and everything so far, that seems fairly plausible.
Marco:
And also just based on what Apple has done, even when their teams have been busy doing other stuff on new platforms or whatever, they do tend to have decent iOS releases.
Marco:
macOS oftentimes is last priority and doesn't get much and frankly that's often a good thing because when they touch macOS without a ton of effort behind it they tend to break things and make them worse so it's good for macOS to not have a lot of updates when they're busy but
Marco:
But iOS, I think, is likely to have some decent quality of life stuff there.
Marco:
Even if there isn't some kind of massive SDK overhaul, some kind of massive new language or framework or anything else, even in the absence of those really big updates, there tends to be a bunch of nice small stuff with new iOS upgrades, both as customer-facing features and on the developer SDK end.
Marco:
a lot of little like quality life improvements little new apis little you know single little modifiers for swift ui or hey here's a new view container that makes things easier for you you know stuff like that that tends to get there and ever really so i'm expecting that for ios and then i think what we're about to get to is i'm actually very excited and interested to hear that there's pretty strong rumors that watch os is getting substantial updates so do we want to talk about that now
Casey:
So yeah, this is reported in Bloomberg, what was this, last month, I believe, in late April.
Casey:
I believe it was a Mark Gurman piece that talked about how Apple is to upgrade its watch operating system with a new focus on widgets.
Casey:
And so Mark writes, as part of watchOS 10, Apple is planning to bring back widgets and make them a central part of the interface.
Casey:
The new widget system on the Apple Watch will be a combination of the old WatchOS Glances system and the style of widgets that were introduced in iOS 14 on the iPhone.
Casey:
The plan is to let users scroll through a series of different widgets for activity tracking, weather, stock, tickers, counter appointments, and more, rather than having them launch apps.
Casey:
The new interface will be reminiscent of the Siri Watch Face, which was introduced in WatchOS 4, but it will be available as an overlay for any Watch Face.
Casey:
It's also similar to Widget Stacks, a feature in iOS and iPadOS that lets users pile many widgets into one and scroll through them.
Casey:
As part of the overhaul, Apple is testing the idea of changing the functions of some of the watch's buttons.
Casey:
Currently, a press of the digital crown watches the home screen.
Casey:
For the next version of watchOS, Apple may have that open up widgets instead.
Casey:
And it is worth noting that apparently the watch app store has fewer than a million monthly users in whatever region they were going through some court proceedings.
Casey:
Apple disclosed versus 101 million on the iPhone.
Casey:
So literally 100 times more people using the iOS app store than the watchOS app store.
Casey:
I can't say I'm surprised.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I think the idea of which it's on the watch is appealing.
Casey:
I don't know if I'm quite as enthusiastic as you are, Marco, but I will say that even as someone who has only dabbled in watch development...
Casey:
One of the things that makes watch development very tough, particularly for things like complications, is that you have extraordinarily little time as a developer to run code that will update information on a complication and other things like that.
Casey:
And so if widgets were given more flexibility and more time to update themselves, such that they're getting updated more than what feels like three times a day.
Casey:
I know that's not literally the case, but that's what it feels like sometimes.
Casey:
So that I would be more enthusiastic about.
Casey:
Like when I look down at my carrot weather widget and it's not, excuse me, complication, and it's not carrot's fault.
Casey:
Oftentimes it is clearly behind, you know, especially on, you know, spring or fall days where, you know, the temperature can vary pretty dramatically from morning to afternoon.
Casey:
A lot of times I'll look and my watch will say, oh, it's, you know, like 40 degrees outside, but I can tell it's easily, you know, 20 degrees more than that.
Casey:
And so I think what I'm most potentially interested in is if there is either...
Casey:
You know, a better API, which presumably there would be, and I'm going to give you a chance here, Marco, in a second, but a better API to make this work a little better or be easier to do on the developer side.
Casey:
But more, I guess, more importantly, just to have a little bit more ability to make the watch feel alive rather than something that occasionally wakes up and then goes immediately back to sleep again.
Casey:
I don't know, Marco, does any of that make sense?
Marco:
Yes, and I think you've identified a couple of the key parts of both why I'm excited for this and also some of the issues I've had with watchOS in the past and present.
Marco:
So Apple has a long history going back to, I believe, the first major version of this that we saw in modern day was dashboard for macOS.
Marco:
A long history of...
Marco:
These views that you can get where you have to like go to the view or you look at a view of something and at that point when you're looking at it, the app is asked, hey, update this data.
Marco:
And in the meantime, maybe it shows a placeholder or stale data and then the new data pops in like a second or two later.
Marco:
And from a user point of view, that sucks.
Marco:
It's terrible when you look at something on your watch or in the old dashboard interface on the Mac or different places like that or the old Today screen or the Today widgets on iOS.
Marco:
You would...
Marco:
seek out this information you would go to it or you would look at it and then at that point the system would ask the app oh hey update this and the reason why it was built that way was that these the systems for for various reasons over time there weren't the system resources or they were chosen not to be spent this way to have those apps constantly running in the background being able to update their data whenever they wanted you know in the case on the watch
Marco:
The watch has always been extremely power constrained, and that dictates everything about it.
Marco:
It's a very small battery and a very small device, and they really can't make the battery any bigger.
Marco:
It's already most of the device.
Marco:
So it's like you've got to deal with what you've got here, and that dictates everything.
Marco:
That dictates the slow processor the watch has relative to the phone.
Marco:
Everything is about space and power and minimizing drain on that battery.
John:
Speaking of that, there are rumors that they're going to actually change the SoC, not just change the number on it, but actually change.
John:
And I don't see the rumors around 3 nanometer are really confusing because I know TSMC is ramping up on 3 nanometer, but the lead times are such that I can't figure out when Apple will ship a product fabbed on TSMC's 3 nanometer process.
John:
But I also can't imagine the watch SoC being substantially better without going to a new process.
John:
I don't know what the current process is.
John:
Is it actually the same process size as the good 5 nanometer that the phones are?
Marco:
It might still be 7.
Marco:
The watch SoC, the CPU in the watch, I don't know about the whole SoC, the CPU cores in the watch have not changed in three years.
John:
I think the whole SoC hasn't changed.
John:
I think people who have looked at the die shots, not much has changed for a long time.
Marco:
Yeah, so it's using a three-year-old processor.
Marco:
And so that's not fun.
Marco:
Yeah, I think the Series 6, 7, and 8, they're all the same chip.
John:
So the rumor is this might be a new chip.
John:
And I think if it uses a smaller process size than the previous one, that could give Apple a little bit of headroom to change some of the things you just described.
Marco:
Yes, because that's the thing.
Marco:
With watchOS, since its beginning, it was all about conserving, extremely aggressively conserving the resources on the watch because there's not much to go around.
Marco:
So that impacts the way apps have been built from the beginning in various ways.
Marco:
But the gist of it is what Casey said, that your app, you don't always run.
Marco:
If you're not being actively used on screen, with very few exceptions, you're not running.
Marco:
And so if you have, if you rely on a third party app that has, say, a complication that you're looking at, say, you know, carrot weather, you know, a good weather app, you know, you're looking at, you know, whatever the complication is on the screen, like that app is only being woken up in the background every so often to, you know, fetch new data from the internet, update the data in the app and, you
Marco:
the complication data, and it tells the watch, hey, over these next six hours, here's the hourly forecasted display.
Marco:
From this time to this time, show this.
Marco:
From this time to this time, show this, et cetera.
Marco:
It gives us this timeline of updates.
Marco:
And during that entire time, the watch may not and probably won't ever ask the app, hey, refresh, give me new data here.
Marco:
So what you're looking at when you, when you look at watch complications, you are looking at a Siri, a timeline of pre-rendered data.
Marco:
That is that the app has provided during some like three second long window.
Marco:
It was allowed to run in the background a few hours ago, possibly.
Marco:
And, and there's a certain limit on how many times per day can do that.
Marco:
The app servers can send push notifications to request an update, but those aren't always obeyed.
Marco:
It's more, it's like, it's a request, not a guarantee.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
please give me some time.
Marco:
I have some new stuff.
Marco:
I would like to show it.
Marco:
And the watch can say, okay, or the watch can say, I don't know what you're talking about, and just walk away.
Marco:
And so there's all these limitations.
Marco:
And the widget system on the iPhone was built the same way.
Marco:
If you were making watch complications, you know, a couple of years ago, then when WidgetKit came out, it was like, oh, this is ClockKit, just, you know, slightly different and with SwiftUI, which made it a lot better.
Marco:
But that idea of...
Marco:
When you swipe over... When you view a widget on the iPhone, that app is not running.
Marco:
And this is why, again, there's also some rumors with iOS 17 of possible interactive widgets.
Marco:
And this kind of flies in the face of this because it's kind of questioning, like, well, what would that mean?
Marco:
And I think it would be very limited if that is a thing.
Marco:
But anyway, because...
Marco:
again widgets on ios work that same way and then they actually they later then brought that widget system back to the watch and replaced clock kit which was based on widget kit was based on the ideas of clock kit but did it better with swift ui then they redid the new complication system using widget kit because it was better
Marco:
Anyway, so they brought it back full circle.
Marco:
Anyway, so on iOS, you have widgets.
Marco:
Those apps aren't running.
Marco:
It's the same thing where they are periodically asked for updates, and the app gives iOS a timeline to say, all right, show this from this time to this time, et cetera.
Marco:
And again, same thing applies.
Marco:
That app's servers can send a push notification requesting an update.
Marco:
It may or may not be obeyed.
Marco:
There's limits, there's throttling, etc.
Marco:
On iOS, there's one set of limits.
Marco:
On the watch, it's way more aggressively throttled.
Marco:
And there's way less opportunity for apps to update their complications on the watch.
Marco:
So anything they do, first of all, it makes perfect sense to bring that system more to the watch because it does what the watch needs.
Marco:
It gives a timeline of updates without having to have all these apps running in the background draining the very, very tiny battery in the Apple Watch.
Marco:
So it makes sense to have this be more built into the system.
Marco:
That being said...
Marco:
If there's no other major advances like more frequent background updates, a more robust system to request updates, higher limits on how much CPU time or memory those processes or extensions can use when they're updating, without other changes like that, it's going to be a fairly limited system.
Marco:
And it's not going to enable a lot of what people would expect or want.
Marco:
So I hope when they bring this over, assuming they have done, I mean, I'm sure it's too late now.
Marco:
Whatever they've decided to do, that's it.
Marco:
But I hope they have when they have presumably brought this over.
Marco:
I hope it has come with some increases in those limits or some less aggressive throttling.
Marco:
some more frequent updates being permitted, or something.
Marco:
And all of that, I think, will be a great thing once they establish it.
Marco:
Because when you look at the way the watch works now, apps on the watch still suck.
Marco:
They just suck less than they used to.
Marco:
Way less.
Marco:
I mean, they used to be horrendous.
Marco:
With WatchKit 1, that was rough.
Marco:
But they're still very limited.
Marco:
They're still way more limited than iOS apps.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
It makes it very hard as a developer to make a great watch app experience that will match what our users expect.
Marco:
As a result, it's kind of unfair.
Marco:
I don't use a third-party weather widget as a complication on my watch.
Marco:
because third-party apps, even the best-written ones, like Carrot, Carrot's a great app.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
Even the best-written weather apps on the Apple Watch cannot update their complications as often or as reliably as Apple lets theirs update.
Marco:
So I use Apple weather complications on my watch, even though they're less good, because they work better and more consistently.
Marco:
And that's not to say anything against the developer of other apps.
Marco:
They can't do anything about it.
Marco:
It's out of their hands.
Marco:
And I know this because I have my own custom little complications that don't do anything useful.
Marco:
But I just kind of use them for cosmetic things on my own face.
Marco:
And I know that occasionally they just stop getting asked to update.
Marco:
And I can't do anything about it.
Marco:
So the whole system is pretty limiting for third-party developers.
Marco:
So what I'm hoping, if they're moving this to the system from a developer point of view...
Marco:
I hope those limits get raised in a big way.
Marco:
And maybe that'll need the new processor.
Marco:
Maybe not.
Marco:
I hope not because I would like them to be available on all the existing install base.
Marco:
But hey, we'll see what happens.
Marco:
And then as a user of watchOS...
Marco:
the honeycomb screen has always been a huge failure i anytime you have to go to that screen you've lost and it's going to that screen it's like trying to plug in a micro usb cable it's like i know i'm going to be i'm going to spend way too long staring at these tiny icons trying to find the app that i want and whatever i tap on whatever i guess is this alarm or timer whatever i guess is going to be wrong the first time and maybe the second
Marco:
And so that screen is terrible.
Marco:
You can change it to a list if you want by a long pressing.
Marco:
But the list is terrible in different ways.
Marco:
It's first of all, it's just too long.
Marco:
There's all these different built in features, many of which you can't turn off that, you know, you need some way to access.
Marco:
So that whole system could use a rethink.
Marco:
It's a hard problem.
Marco:
I get, you know, they're trying to cram 40 apps onto a two inch screen.
Marco:
Like, yeah, it's that's that's a tough problem.
Marco:
But there is room for improvement in the way they've done it now.
Marco:
So if the rumor is correct that they are actually re-implement or rethinking large parts of how users interact with apps on the watch at all, that's a very good thing too.
Marco:
And then finally, I would say...
Marco:
The rate of adoption of third-party apps among non-nerd people on the watch is really low.
Marco:
This is just anecdotal, but look around people in your life who have Apple Watches.
Marco:
We've talked about that on the show before.
Marco:
How many of them even know that you can change the complications?
Marco:
Ask around.
Marco:
Look around.
Marco:
See how many people in your life use an Apple Watch face that even has complications.
Marco:
And then see how many of those are on the defaults.
Marco:
And it's a lot.
Marco:
It's most of them.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
The watch has a lot of functionality that people just don't know about.
Marco:
And you can't blame them because the way to access this functionality is often really hidden or convoluted.
Marco:
Or on the phone.
Marco:
Yeah, or on the phone.
Marco:
Fortunately, they have been moving a lot of that off.
Marco:
Recently, I tried to edit what metrics were shown in different workout modes.
Marco:
And that used to be phone only.
Marco:
and now it's watch only like now you have to like hit the little like dot menu on the workout and go in there and edit stuff there it took me a while to figure out like first i was looking all over the phone app for it couldn't find it anywhere there i'm like well crap did they just remove customization of workout faces and then eventually i found it in the in the watch app but it took me a while and i and i and that was like i know this feature is probably still here somewhere and i know roughly where to look at it and i'm a computer professional
Marco:
And it took me a long time to figure it out.
Marco:
So there's a lot of stuff like that on the watch.
Marco:
There's a lot of functionality on the watch, much of which people would really enjoy if they knew it was there or if they knew how to do it.
Marco:
And it has a massive discoverability problem.
Marco:
And a lot of stuff is super clunky about it once you do figure it out.
Marco:
So there's a lot of room for improvement there.
Marco:
I'm really excited that they're tackling this because...
Marco:
For most of the last three to five years, it has seemed like the watch is not well-staffed.
Marco:
When WBDC comes and goes every year for the watch, it has seemed a lot like, man, do they have more than four people working on this entire OS?
Marco:
Because they do good work, but it's just really...
Marco:
bits and pieces come out every year like it's not not a lot comes out from the watch from watch os every year it's a very it's kind of like tv os like you know you get a couple of things here and there but it's it's a very very small set of new features every year and so it has seemed under invested in in the last you know x years
Marco:
This suggests that they have actually put a lot of effort into it this year.
Marco:
So that's exciting to me as well.
Marco:
I'm really looking forward to hopefully the watch having major updates in usability or in app capabilities or app structure or whatever it is.
Marco:
I hope they actually deliver on that.
Marco:
I hope it's really good.
Marco:
And I would also hope still, maybe, the more you put a widget-like architecture into the watch...
Marco:
I think the easier that makes it for them to offer third-party watch faces as an option.
John:
It's going to happen eventually.
Marco:
Whether they are doing it, whether they will choose to do it, whether they will permit it, these are all very different questions.
Marco:
But from a technical point of view, using widget kit or a widget kit-like system with some pre-built parts...
Marco:
makes a lot of sense for enabling for the structure to enable third party watch faces because then you don't have to have a third party process running constantly on the on the watch you can again just wake it up periodically you can you have you can define certain pieces that you have to use like all right well you have to use this digital face of this size and it has to be in this location
Marco:
Or you can choose to use these specific analog watch hands and they have to be in this location.
Marco:
Whatever it is, if they wanted to dictate certain parts of it and certain requirements, say all watch faces must be able to do XYZ or must use pieces XYZ in this way, they could do that really well with WidgetKit, technically speaking and practically speaking.
Marco:
So
Marco:
It seems like the most apparent and obvious way to enable third-party watch faces based on the tech stack we know of today is with WidgetKit.
Marco:
So bringing WidgetKit to watchOS in a bigger way, yeah, that makes a lot of sense for maybe enabling this either now or in the future.
Marco:
I hope it's now.
Marco:
If it isn't now, and I know it probably isn't, I hope it's in the near future because I still want third-party watch faces.
Marco:
And this is just such a clear, I wouldn't necessarily call anything easy, but this is actually a straightforward and, dare I say, obvious way to offer them using this kind of architecture.
Marco:
So anyway, I'm looking forward to this, and I hope this is an exciting year for watchOS.
Casey:
So imagine this.
Casey:
It's WWDC.
Casey:
We're watching the video.
Casey:
Since it's a fantasy, we're all sitting next to each other for the first time since 2019.
Casey:
We're watching the video together, and Kevin Lynch comes on the video and says, I only have one thing to tell you about the watch.
Casey:
communication between the watch and the phone is reliable now and then walks away that's not gonna happen is that enough is it'll never happen but marco is that enough to make this a classic like just favorite wwdc of all time oh no because i would first of all i don't think it's possible second of all i wouldn't i wouldn't believe them um and i think the the way the way to fix phone to watch communication is to get rid of it
Marco:
The way to fix it is to give me the same controls that I have on URL background download sessions and URL communication, which you have most of it already.
Marco:
Give me the same background download abilities and APIs on the watch that I have on the phone.
Marco:
Let background downloads start immediately and let them run over Wi-Fi and not over Bluetooth to the phone.
Marco:
That's what like there's a there's a number of points in that communication stack that are either unreliable or ungodly slow.
Marco:
And again, this is all in the name of saving power.
Marco:
You can see why they did it.
Marco:
But I think a lot of those decisions, they might have made sense seven years ago.
Marco:
Maybe they make less sense now or maybe they're not as necessary now as they used to be.
Marco:
And those decisions really hold back apps.
Marco:
And so, again, I hope they... Just let my app initiate a backgroundable download that will run over Wi-Fi and start immediately.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
I can do it on iOS.
Marco:
I can do it on all other Apple OSes.
Marco:
Well, I don't think Mac OS supports background downloads.
Marco:
Anyway, I can do it on most other Apple OSes.
Marco:
I can't do it on the watch, and that really holds stuff back to the point where I had to make a breakout game in my app so that you would keep the screen on.
Marco:
like that the whole reason i had to make a game in my watch app in my podcast app while you download a file is so that you have something to do that will keep the screen on so i don't have to rely on the background downloads when you want to download something right now before you go out for a run or something and you don't want it to be canceled for no reason or to never start for no reason so please apple make make that stuff better but anyway um i will complain a lot less about that if i have custom third-party watch faces
Casey:
No, that's fair.
Casey:
So John pulling on this thread a moment, what is your, I don't care about anything else that happened.
Casey:
This was a great WWDC.
Casey:
I assume new Mac pro.
John:
Uh, I mean, yeah, well, I'm not really expecting that because of the rumors, although I do have a brief aside about, uh, something that Marco talked about, how people don't know, uh,
John:
don't customize their complications on their watch because they don't know they can do it, and the interface of doing it is clunky, and lots of things on the watch are non-discoverable.
John:
And when you were describing that, I thought this is another place where it seems like Apple is, I mean, we don't know because we don't know what they're doing, but it seems like they're behind where everyone else is zooming forward with their large language models.
John:
One of the things that current large language models that are out there right now are really good at doing is exactly this task, which is
John:
a voice interface to describing what you want your the complications in your phone screen to be like you can go to one of these large language models right now and say make me a web page in the lower left corner put a picture of a sun in the lower right corner put a counter that counts up every second and like you could actually describe the functionality of the widgets and it will do it like how easy would it be for a well-trained large language model to say
John:
I want the weather in the upper left, the date in the lower left, and then to continue a conversation.
John:
I said, no, I want the date to be the day of the week plus the month in the year, or I don't want the year.
John:
Those type of conversations, you can have them with large design models right now.
John:
And the canvas that they're painting on is like anything you can ask for, more or less.
John:
It'll try to do it with varying degrees.
John:
The problem space of...
John:
picking which widgets you want to picking out from a fixed set of widgets to appear in a fixed set of location with a fixed set of options large language models would eat that for breakfast the problems are one apple seems not to be on that train with everyone else as far as we know because they haven't announced anything in that area two their existing thing that you can talk to siri sucks balls and we know that um and then you know three i don't think this is the type of thing that apple can uh
John:
uh you know say oh well they're popular we're rolling out this year you know like it's again it's hard to know because we don't know what's going on but like it seems like apple is behind everyone else on this so you can't expect them to surprise watch os 10 is out and it's got a large language model that you can talk to oh and i guess this ties into what marco was saying towards even if you could like you don't run the large language model on the watch right
John:
So now it has to do network communication.
John:
Oh, no, the sky is falling.
John:
Battery is being destroyed.
John:
And I get that.
John:
Like, it's true of what Marco was asking for.
John:
I want my download to start now and on Wi-Fi.
John:
It'll kill people's watch batteries.
John:
But it's like, but they want that to happen when they're down.
John:
You know, it's the balance between which would you rather have, your podcast literally never downloads and it frustrates you to no end, or we burn part of your battery downloading your podcast.
John:
Like, you have to pick one.
John:
You can't, like, there's no way to get the podcast on your watch without burning battery.
John:
So either you want it and you're willing to sacrifice the battery for it and you don't.
John:
And the same deal, I think, with talking to your watch and setting up with a large language model and setting up your complications.
John:
Maybe as a one-time tutorial that you guide people through when they're setting up their watch and they have a conversation with it, and during the course of the conversation, the watch face forms in front of their eyes, is a great way to A, show people that that's possible, and B, let them know that they can do it in a way that doesn't involve them poking their fingers at the screen trying to find the interface.
John:
Because I have the same frustration.
John:
I'm not familiar with watchOS because I don't wear an Apple Watch, and anytime I want to do anything in watchOS,
John:
I don't know where it is.
John:
I don't know how it works.
John:
I can't figure out what things I'm supposed to be touching or even what the vocabulary of gestures is to do stuff.
John:
Large language models would destroy this test.
John:
They're so good at it.
John:
It's such a narrow problem space and you can talk in a freeform manner.
John:
And Apple's speech to text actually works pretty well.
John:
So once you get over that hurdle and you can throw that text to a large language model running somewhere on an Apple server that it can communicate with,
John:
That is, I think, a really good use of current technology for, you know, talking to things and the problem space of dealing with any kind of UI on a two-inch screen that's on your wrist.
Yeah.
Marco:
And on the point of large language models, by the way, this is obviously a huge question.
Marco:
We're in this boom time of this new generation of AI capabilities.
Marco:
What's Apple going to do at WBDC with them?
Marco:
And I think, unfortunately, the answer is probably nothing.
John:
The answer is nothing.
Yeah.
John:
uh because like that's not what apple does like apple does stuff you know more slowly than that in a lot of areas and i mean they could if they were on the ball on this and were were sort of ahead of the curve or even you know even with everyone else they could have stuff to announce the wdc but that whole part of the org seems dysfunctional now again because we don't know what's going on for all we know they've been working on large language stuff for seven years and they're about to roll it out and wow us but it certainly seems like that's not the case
Marco:
No, I think what's more likely is, look, Apple knows that, again, these are smart people.
Marco:
They know that the eyes of the world are going to be upon them expecting AI announcements.
Marco:
And so I think what they're going to most likely do is brand some things as AI that are not actually using this new generation of technique.
Marco:
And it's just using the previous generation, what we used to call machine learning.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I know these terms are oftentimes vague and shifting around over time, but I think they might just show off stuff that is using that kind of technique and say, this is AI-powered, just because those are the buzzwords that people expect of the day.
John:
The rumor surrounding Siri and the headset, I seem to recall reading something somewhere that was supposedly inside dirt on the headset team didn't really want to use Siri.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But like that's what's available to them.
John:
They're kind of like wanted to go their own direction because Siri sucks so bad.
John:
They just like, well, we, you know, I don't know if they want to use large language models.
John:
Maybe that predates that.
John:
But like they know they have a problem here because the headset is similar.
John:
Like the interface to it is more limited than it is on a phone, iPad or Mac.
John:
So you have to figure out how do I manipulate things?
John:
I know the whole camera's looking at your fingertips and so on and so forth, but it's a harder problem, right?
John:
It's harder than just using a pointer or a cursor, you know, or touching the screen with your fingers.
John:
You can't do that with a headset.
John:
So let's use the voice assistant that our company already has.
John:
Oh, but that voice assistant is bad.
John:
So bad.
John:
Well, you don't want the headset to be bad.
John:
People working on the headset is that we want the headset to be good and we do need something that's going to listen to us.
John:
And so I kind of agree that they're like, as they promote Siri and the headset, maybe they'll have a new suffix, Siri AI.
John:
I mean, I don't know how they'll go that far, but like,
John:
Maybe they'll just say, hey, Siri's in your headset, too, and everybody loves Siri, and look how amazing it is.
John:
You can talk to it and make little VR apps, as the rumor was or whatever.
John:
But this is another one of the benefits of the headset.
John:
The fact that it blots out the sun, I think it can blot out the fact that Apple doesn't really have anything to show for it regarding large language models, WWDC.
John:
which is fine.
John:
They got a whole headset and a new platform.
John:
Isn't that exciting?
John:
I think they can get away with it this year.
John:
Next year, when we come to WWC next year, regardless of how the headset turns out, maybe next year it's finally just shipping to people or something.
John:
Next year, Apple needs to start having some kind of answers with large language models because I think they've proven they're useful in enough context.
John:
And the reason I gave the setting up the complications on your watch screen problem space is
John:
That is a limited domain where large language models can excel in ways that Siri absolutely has not because you have to know how to talk to Siri in the special way that Siri understands.
John:
And even when you know, sometimes it does ridiculous things that don't make any sense, whereas large language models don't work that way.
John:
Again, if you've never tried one, go to one right now and ask it to do something with a limited problem domain or even with a not particularly limited one, like I said, asking it to make a web page for you or something.
John:
It's really good about having a conversation with you and understanding what it is you want, as long as you're talking to it about something that was able to train itself on that's out there in the world.
John:
And Apple can absolutely find a large language model and train it on enough data to understand something.
John:
watchOS complications.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
One thing, by the way, in terms of WWDC hopes and dreams here, one thing I would love to see, I don't know if it'll be this year, it'll more likely be next year, but I would love to see Apple...
Marco:
make available to developers through APIs on the phone some large language model capabilities that they have optimized like crazy to run on their hardware.
Marco:
So for instance, the stable diffusion algorithm for image generation, Apple actually, I believe it was that one, Apple actually contributed to the open source project or whatever to optimize it for running on Apple Silicon Macs.
Marco:
or apple silicon in general and so and that and then that that kind of enabled people to make iphone apps with it um i would love them to do more of that that kind of thing of like and and build it into the os so that we don't have to download like each each app you know because right a good example of this right now is um if you want if you want to transcribe sound into speech into text
Marco:
Apple has actually shipped an API to do this for a number of years now.
Marco:
It's called something like SFSpeakSynthesizer or SpeechRecognizer or whatever.
Marco:
There were a number of problems with it.
Marco:
Number one, because I've been trying to do features like this in Overcast for years, you know,
Marco:
One of the biggest, clearest examples of where I could use this is like when you do clip sharing in Overcast to be able to show as part of the video clip the text.
Marco:
You know, many apps like TikTok, you know, they do this.
Marco:
They have this built in now.
Marco:
This is a common thing, and I need to do it at some point.
Marco:
And in the past, this was limited by a number of factors.
Marco:
Number one was in the past.
Marco:
I don't know if this is still the case.
Marco:
That API, to use Apple's built-in speech-to-text API, your app had to request and get access to the microphone, even if you were feeding it audio that was not from the microphone.
Marco:
So I could not, as a podcast app, feed the pre-recorded audio that I downloaded to my podcast app through their speech-to-text system until I prompted the user for microphone access.
Marco:
And that alone was enough for me to say, I'm not using this feature.
Marco:
Because I'm not going to ask my users who are all educated nerds for permission to access their microphone in a podcast app.
Marco:
Because there's no reason I would need that except to be creepy and spy on them with ads and stuff.
Marco:
So I don't even want the appearance that I might be doing that.
Marco:
I don't even want the ability to access their microphone.
Marco:
I don't even want that to be possible in my app.
Marco:
So that alone ruled it out.
Marco:
But also, you know, it was using older style, you know, models and things to do the speech-to-text conversion.
Marco:
And it wasn't very good in my testing.
Marco:
Like, I made a couple of test prototypes, granting myself microphone access, just to see, like, you know, how good is this?
Marco:
And it was bad.
Marco:
And it was too bad to ship, so I didn't ship it.
Marco:
Well...
Marco:
However many months ago, OpenAI released their Whisper model.
Marco:
And Whisper is really massively better.
Marco:
It's not a small difference.
Marco:
It is way more accurate.
Marco:
And there is a project called Whisper.cpp where some guy has done amazing work in transforming this thing that you would otherwise need a whole bunch of Python to run into a very simple C++ wrapper that you could make iOS and other apps with.
Marco:
And it runs fine on Apple stuff.
Marco:
And I tried that, and I built a prototype with that.
Marco:
And it was super easy to use.
Marco:
And the downside of using Whisper, there's two main downsides.
Marco:
Number one, if you use the large models that have larger vocabularies and more accuracy, it's just too slow to run on an iPhone.
Marco:
um number two these models are huge to download like the the base model that provides like okay accuracy decent speed is something i think it's something like 70 megs and then if you want something more accurate it goes into like multiple gigs very quickly
Marco:
um and this is just it's untenable to run that in the way i would want to run that would be you know stuff like transcription of what you're listening to uh you know there's lots of things i could do with that if it was fast and and you know inexpensive computationally to run that but if i had to download like a two gig model you know as part of the app to do those features or whatever that's that that's not going to fly and if it's going to be super slow it's not going to fly well
Marco:
They could build in some medium-sized model into the OS if they wanted to, and they could use it themselves for their own speech attack stuff and then make that available to developers.
Marco:
They could also, for instance, optimize that model.
Marco:
You know, the reason why the whisper.cpp doesn't run very quickly on iPhones, one of the reasons is because Apple has not done their work to optimize that one the way they did with the stable diffusion.
Marco:
Also, the way these models usually work, if you're running in the background,
Marco:
you don't have access to the GPU or the neural engine as far as I know.
Marco:
But you definitely can't run ML models on the GPU if your app is in the background.
Marco:
It makes your app only use CPU-based computation, and that makes them way slower to run in many cases.
Marco:
And this is the case for Whisper.
Marco:
And Whisper.cpp only ever uses the CPU.
Marco:
It doesn't have any access to the hardware acceleration besides CPU raw stuff.
Marco:
And so this makes it slower than it could be.
Marco:
So if Apple actually wanted to offer a really great dictation to speech API, they could massively improve the API they've already offered for years by using this new kind of technique, a new kind of model like this, optimize it, let it run in the acceleration hardware, ship a base model with the OS, and all of a sudden, every app could have really easy access to speech-to-text.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing that I think is more likely for Apple to offer with these new AI techniques sooner than having them offer some kind of like full blown customer facing, you know, quote, AI powered feature.
Marco:
I think it's too soon for that.
Marco:
And that's that's kind of less Apple to do that kind of thing.
John:
The customizing watch face is a great example of how Apple would do it.
John:
It's not like you can have arbitrary conversations with a thing like they would be very narrowly constrained.
John:
And I know the large numbers out there now are supposedly constrained, but it's more like everything except for these five or six things they try to keep them away from.
John:
Whereas this would be you can discuss nothing except for watch faces.
John:
And I feel like that is easier, especially if they train the model themselves.
John:
Right.
John:
Which, again, costs money.
John:
And regarding the speech text thing and the size of them and everything, there's a reason large language models are called large language models.
John:
They use tremendous amounts of storage and tremendous amounts of memory and tremendous amounts of compute.
John:
Not just for the training, which is itself huge, because obviously you're grinding through tons and tons of data, but even just for the part of it where it runs, the inference part of it where it does its thing, even that takes a substantial amount of power and resources.
John:
Which is why I was saying the watch would have to be communicating with the server, obviously.
John:
And then even just communicating with the server would be taxing for the watch and drain the battery and so on.
John:
Not to mention the servers.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, I mean, the servers, yeah.
John:
But again, to be that incredibly constrained to just be doing watch faces, it's what we talked about a while ago and that people have actually implemented.
John:
Large language models sitting in front of essentially the functionality exposed by Siri.
John:
Functionality that's already on the watch.
John:
The watch can already pick complications and configure them and put them in places on the faces.
John:
It's just a question of translating from speech to text and from text to what is this text telling me to do?
John:
And then, oh, actually, I, the watch, have APIs for doing all the things you're asking for.
John:
It's a very constrained problem space, which is miles from like what Microsoft did was like, here's Bing.
John:
You can talk to it about stuff.
John:
Good luck.
Marco:
Yeah, but like ultimately, what I want to see from Apple in the AI age really is
Marco:
make a lot of this cool tech available on device.
Marco:
For on-device use by apps that are not communicating with their own servers, that can just run everything locally.
Marco:
And Apple has, with the exception of having what seems like
Marco:
organizational or cultural trouble with AI machine learning techniques and people in general that's a large issue they need to figure out if they haven't yet and so far it seems like they haven't but what they have resource wise is they have all these supercomputers in everybody's pockets that have amazing hardware and software capabilities
Marco:
And they care a lot about privacy and things running on device whenever possible and everything.
Marco:
And that's a level of sophistication and an amount of resources that their competitors don't have.
Marco:
So I hope Apple leans into that.
Marco:
And I think this is how they're going to ultimately tackle, quote, AI, leaning into on-device stuff as much as possible.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And if they do that themselves, they will most likely do it in a way where there is an API for developers to hook into or use those same capabilities in our apps.
Marco:
That's what I'm hoping to see from Apple in this new age of these new styles of AI is, you know...
Marco:
Cool on-device capabilities that run quickly and locally that don't need us to, as a developer of one app, we don't need to go train our own models.
Marco:
We don't need to go run a huge server farm or have our own OpenAI tokens that we have to use and figure out how the heck to pay for.
Marco:
I want to see what Apple can deliver us on device that they will maintain, they will train, they will update it over time, they will make it faster over time, and let us build on top of it.
Marco:
And they have a very strong history of doing that in other areas.
Marco:
So I think this is what they will ultimately do.
Marco:
whenever they get their act together on AI.
Marco:
And we don't know when that will be, and it probably won't be all at once.
Marco:
I'm hoping to see little hints of it this year.
Marco:
Even that, I think, is optimistic, but we'll see.
Marco:
And then maybe next year or the year after, maybe we'll see big stuff.
Marco:
And that'll be exciting.
John:
they're already doing all of that it's just a question of what letters they put on it they used to put the letters m and l and now and now we're saying the letters a and i what we mean is exactly what apple has been doing which is they they do provide you a bunch of models that you can use like that text-to-speech one that you were saying you know and they do improve it over years they do make it run fast and hard but they've done all of that we're like yeah but but no but the stuff that you have now there's better stuff apple that uses not the m and the l but it uses the a and the i and it's all this you know
John:
Obviously, there are different techniques to doing this, and the current technique that lots of other companies are experimenting with is better than what Apple is doing.
John:
So what we want is, Apple, do what you've been doing with all the things you used to call ML.
John:
Keep doing that.
John:
We love frameworks.
John:
We love you making it fast on your hardware.
John:
It's just that there's a new thing that does everything that you've been trying to do but better right now.
John:
not everything, but certain things it does better.
John:
So please give us access to that in a way that makes us not have to worry about it.
John:
And I do think that they will do that.
John:
And I just got done saying the larger models are too big.
John:
You know, they're just way too big to even run at all.
John:
And even like phones are even big Mac sometimes.
John:
That's why you have to communicate over the network.
John:
But that's today.
John:
Like those things change.
John:
Like part of what makes that tractable is just the march of progress.
John:
But part of it is also companies like Apple deciding that it is important for their SOCs to be good at doing this.
John:
And that can really knock down these things.
John:
It's the reason the SOCs we have today are so good at doing the things they do, so good at image processing, so good at, you know, doing the kinds of computations that has to be done on a phone, on a Mac or whatever.
John:
Those special processes for video encoding and decoding and, you know, the neural engine.
John:
All that stuff was developed because Apple said these these types of functions are useful to do on a phone or on a Mac or whatever.
John:
And we want to do them in low power.
John:
I think that will come for large language models as well.
John:
I don't think we're going to, you know, models that currently run that require hundreds of gigs of RAM to do inference are going to run on your phone anytime soon.
John:
but i think there will be a meeting in the middle of like you were saying marco cut down versions of these things limited problem space and and to be clear with the limited problem space you're like oh there's no way they can ever limit a large language model enough it'll always be scary i'm thinking of the scenario when you were talking about configuring the complications it never answers back the only thing it does in response to you talking to it is show you what it thinks you're asking for as you're screening your complications and basically says
John:
you know is this okay you know press okay or say okay or like it never talks back to you it just does what you and there's no way for you to accidentally have your watch insult you or something or there's very few ways perhaps watch insult you by arranging complications i guess each of each complication was a letter it could spell out a naughty word or something and some would figure out how to do it but like it's really limited problem space we just
John:
But basically what we're just asking for is, you know, the promise of Siri.
John:
Well, large language models are currently delivering on a lot of that promise.
John:
I can have a conversation in text with a large language model and get it to do useful things that reflect what I'm asking.
John:
No, it doesn't know anything about facts.
John:
No, it has no understanding of anything.
John:
No, I can't ask it questions and trust its answers, but I can ask it to arrange a bunch of complications on a watch screen.
John:
And the good thing about that is I'm the one who gets to say you did it correctly or you didn't.
John:
And if you didn't, I could say, no, the upper left should be carrot weather and not Apple's weather widget.
John:
And maybe it still fails to understand me or whatever.
John:
But the result is, OK, well, fine, I'll do that one manually or whatever.
John:
But the point is, like, trying to do that through Siri now is laughable.
John:
Like, you can't, you know, people would never try to do that.
John:
They're lucky when they can talk to their watch to reply to a text or something.
John:
And that's only, like, nerds who have practiced.
John:
practice that whole thing, whereas large-lying models seem so much more flexible about understanding the foibles of our language and eventually doing what we want.
John:
And so I really do hope that, again, not this year probably, but that eventually becomes one of the things they start rolling out, if not as a way to interface with tiny screens or headsets, then at least as something that we can expect our powerful Macs to be able to do, right?
John:
Because I would love to be able to say things to my Mac to do drudgery without having to open up a web browser and
Marco:
go to one of these large language models type a bunch of stuff in and all that thanks to our sponsors this week collide squarespace and trade coffee thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join you get that awesome new pizza special and everything we've ever done before that plus all the membership perks you'll see atp.fm slash join thank you everybody we will talk to you next week
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
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-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I wanted to talk to the two of you.
Casey:
I want to kind of invoke the brain trust, perhaps call the diamond dogs together and see what you two thought about pricing for call sheet.
Casey:
We talked about this.
Casey:
I don't know when it was.
Casey:
I think it was a little bit last week.
Casey:
I think it was a few weeks before that.
Casey:
But I'm getting, knock on wood, getting really close to sending this to the App Store, which means I really need to lock down my pricing schedule, for lack of a better word.
Marco:
Well, you need to lock down your initial pricing.
Casey:
Sure, yes.
Marco:
You can always change it.
Casey:
That is true.
Casey:
And so I think what I've landed on as a general scheme, and then we'll talk about the different options therein.
Casey:
I think what I'm going to do is you get to use the main screen, which shows you like popular stuff in your country or really your language, popular stuff in your language, new stuff in your language.
Casey:
So that would generally be new stuff in English for me and popular things in English.
Casey:
And it's sort of kind of American-based when it's English, but not always.
Casey:
It's complicated.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
But anyways, you can do all that.
Casey:
That you can do.
Casey:
You can tap through that whenever you want.
Casey:
And there's no real limit there.
Casey:
So hypothetically, if you can six degrees of Kevin Bacon yourself to the information you want...
Casey:
That'll take a while, but you can do that for free always.
Casey:
But to search, I think I'm going to have a daily limit of something to the order of five, maybe 10 searches at most.
Casey:
That's so many.
John:
What do you do?
John:
That's too many.
Casey:
Is it?
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Have one or two.
Casey:
Okay, well, hold on.
Casey:
Let's shelve that for a second.
Casey:
Put it in the parking lot.
Casey:
We'll come back to that.
Casey:
Because, no, that is something I want to discuss.
Casey:
I didn't realize that that was too many.
Casey:
So I want to discuss that.
Casey:
But hold on a second.
Casey:
So some number of searches per day.
Casey:
And then after that, it's tough noogies.
Casey:
You know, subscribe or get out of here.
Casey:
Wait until tomorrow.
Casey:
And I feel like, in general, that is the right approach.
Casey:
And that's what I think I want to go with.
Casey:
But if you disagree, either of you, we can talk about that in a second.
Casey:
Then the second question becomes, you know, assuming we have this some amount of free searches per day and then you have to subscribe.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, what does subscribing mean?
Casey:
And I think when we first talked about this, we had concluded kind of as a threesome that somewhere to the order of $8 a year seems like a reasonable price for this sort of thing.
Casey:
And I think I feel pretty good about that.
Casey:
But there's two other options on the table that I think would be additive, not a replacement.
Casey:
One of them is, do I offer a monthly option?
Casey:
And if so, how expensive is that?
Casey:
And currently I'm leaning toward offering a monthly option for either $1 or $1.50.
Casey:
I'm not really sure what feels right there.
Casey:
Now that would be...
Casey:
kind of considerably more than the yearly option so i want to know your thoughts when we get there when i stop talking in just a second um but i think for sure i want a yearly option the question is do i do a monthly option and if so how much and then the other question is do i do a something like a lifetime unlock i think using the word lifetime is a is a dire mistake and i wouldn't phrase it that way but maybe a one-time unlock if i go this route at all and i'm
Casey:
Currently, I think I'm against it because I just think that it sets me up for failure.
Casey:
And even if I'm leaving a little money on the table, it makes me nervous promising anything that far out.
Casey:
That just makes me feel a little uncomfortable.
Casey:
So that's kind of where things sit right now.
Casey:
And I am curious what your thoughts are.
Casey:
Now, Marco, you jumped all over me justifiably.
Casey:
I'm not upset.
Casey:
You jumped all over me a second ago, well, both of you really, about...
Casey:
Five free searches per day.
Casey:
So talk me down from five.
Casey:
What should the number be, Marco?
Marco:
I'd say one or two.
Marco:
I mean, that's tricky, though.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
Look, again, it's tricky.
Marco:
And there's a question of, like, what defines a search?
Marco:
That's a big question.
Marco:
If you search and you mistype it and get no results, does that count as a search?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So the way it's currently implemented, it's not in the test plate yet, but the way it's currently implemented in a branch that I have going right now,
Casey:
is that you can, strictly speaking, type however many searches you want during the day, but the moment you tap on a result, then that counts as a search, and now you've lost one of your searches.
Marco:
Yes, that sounds good.
Marco:
The branding of this, I would say you call it something like free searches.
Marco:
You have one free search left today, and then when you hit the end, you've used all your free searches today.
Marco:
you can buy the subscription and get unlimited searches.
Marco:
That's how I would phrase this.
Marco:
You have free searches, and then you have this paywall that gets you more searches.
John:
Speaking of free, you're doing a free trial, right?
Casey:
Well, that was my initial thought, but now that I have this whole free search thing, I feel like it's kind of redundant.
John:
Yeah, I don't know that you necessarily need a free, if you have this.
John:
Here's what you need.
John:
You need to have, what you need to have, the goal is someone needs to use the app enough to like it.
John:
And that is the tricky part.
John:
So using enough to like it, like just a single use instance, like I was watching one TV show and we had a question on the couch about what was this person in.
John:
That one instance of use that has, I feel like that one instance uses has to be successful and enjoyable without any pay crap in their face.
John:
And you're like, okay, but how many searches is that?
John:
And that's why I think that the picking the searches is tricky.
John:
10 is too many, right?
John:
Because no one's going to burn through 10 a day.
John:
10 is enough for a single couch instance.
John:
And maybe you'd use the app once every few days.
John:
But one is too few because for a single couch instance, like no one will ever get the point to like the app because they'll be like, I used it for two seconds and then it threw a paywall on my face and I hate it.
John:
That's why the free trial is good because the free trial period is unlimited and that allows the free trial period to be this is the time when you get to like the app.
John:
Because it's unlimited.
John:
It's a free trial.
John:
Everything's open, full access to everything.
John:
But that door closes and that allows it takes the pressure off your number of searches per day to allow people to get to like the app.
John:
They're supposed to get to like it during the free trial.
John:
And then the paywall sole purpose is to gently remind people that they can pay to get that experience that they previously had.
John:
If you don't do a free trial, you have to somehow thread the needle of like, how much will let people use it enough so they'll like it?
John:
Because I think some people will never go above one search per couch incident or whatever.
John:
They'll just use the app forever for free to say, I don't do this often.
John:
When I do do it, I look it up.
John:
And again, what you just described, I can do as many searches as I want until I find the result that I want.
John:
And then I tap on it and I get my answer.
John:
I put the phone down and never look at it again.
John:
They might not even know you have a paywall with your limit of one.
John:
And other people in a single couch incident to go through 75 searches.
John:
Cause they're like, what was this person?
John:
And what was that?
John:
Search for this person.
John:
I think the person's name was this.
John:
And they're tapping through results and they're doing all sorts of things.
John:
And they will be incredibly frustrated by a limit.
John:
That's like one or two.
John:
But if you have the free trial, you can be like, look, you had the, you had your salad days.
John:
You got to use the app.
John:
You got to see all the features you got to, you know, and then it's just a question of how long is the free trial?
John:
It would kind of be nice if the free trial only started like when they, you know, when they had their first big, you know,
Casey:
usage scenario um but yeah i think a free trial would hypothetically start upon subscribing so you subscribe you get your one week or whatever and then then you're charged i don't know i i hear what you're saying i don't disagree with it but i feel like especially if i were to crank the limit from five to like two or three then i
Casey:
Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like at that point you have gotten at least a vague enough notion to know, okay, no, no, no, this is all right.
Casey:
And if you want to try again tomorrow, try it again tomorrow.
Casey:
I don't love the idea of both a free trial and the search limit, but that is a weak opinion held loosely.
Marco:
See, this is getting very complicated.
Marco:
I almost think...
Marco:
John's right.
Marco:
Like, you know, you want to give people a chance to like the app.
Marco:
Yeah, of course.
Marco:
So that's making me now revisit, like, what if instead of having anything per unit of time, per day, per month, what if it was a higher limit that was a single use?
Marco:
So, for instance, you get 10 free searches.
Marco:
After that, you got to pay.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Like, because then you could make the number higher...
Marco:
And you can give people more chance to get to know the app.
Marco:
You could display it more easily in the UI.
Marco:
It's much clearer to people what the limit is.
John:
Some people take a while to come around to pay for stuff, though.
John:
Some people need to be convinced that there is actual utility.
John:
They may like the app, and they may say, oh, I found that app useful, but they haven't come around to the idea that I like it enough to pay for it.
John:
And that's where the doling out a small amount periodically is better than the big bucket.
John:
Even if it's a big bucket of 100, once they burn through that 100 and they like the app,
John:
they may not be ready to pay still but if they'll but if there's one doled out each day after that that they'd be like you know what i do keep coming back to this is the same reason so many people including me eventually paid for the new york times because it's like they have a bunch of free ones and i don't think i want to pay for the whole thing but you know what over the course of months weeks years you realize i'm more sick of of uh running out of my free articles of the new yorker or whatever than i am sick of paying for the new yorker and then eventually you
John:
it and obviously the numbers here are way smaller than the new york or the new york times subscription or anything like that but it does take people's time to come around if you slam that door closed you use your 150 free searches and that's it forever and ever and ever they're you're giving out the opportunity for them to eventually come around because they're just going to delete the app
Marco:
It's tricky because you don't want to make this too complicated.
Marco:
You want to keep it so that people know that there is a limit.
Marco:
They know when they're going to hit it.
Marco:
And then when they hit it, they don't say screw you and delete the app.
Marco:
And, you know, so I get what you're saying, John.
Marco:
I mean, I just think once we get into you have X per day, they recharge per day, and then you can start a free trial that lasts X amount of time.
Marco:
Then you're paying me eventually after that.
Marco:
And by the way, you have an annual or a monthly.
Marco:
Like, that's a lot of complexity for this pricing model for a very simple app.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, a lot of the apps I see on the App Store are exactly like that.
John:
I know I've been subjected to prompts and screens describing this exact scenario.
John:
And as a customer, I tend not to get hung up with understanding what it is that's saying.
John:
Customer, all I know is, can I use the app when I want to?
John:
And if I can't, how much money would I have to pay to make it happen?
John:
And then the final thing is, will I be able to use the app in the future or should I just delete it now?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I don't actually understand or know or try to parse the text about what their scheme is and what the limits are and what the whatever.
John:
All I know is I can't do what I want now.
John:
Why is that and how can I make it go away?
John:
And is this a permanent situation?
John:
And I feel like that's how most people interact with this.
John:
Like they don't have to actually understand your business model.
Casey:
Well, but that's even more reason to me to say, look, it's either you pay or you don't.
Casey:
And this is what Marco was saying a moment ago.
Casey:
Like, if you don't want to pay, I'll give you a little sip.
John:
You can just make it a paid up front app like an old person.
John:
Well, yeah.
Casey:
I mean, but if you don't pay, I'll give you a little sip of it each day.
Casey:
And if you pay, then that's that.
Casey:
And then we're good here.
Casey:
As long as you keep paying, you get as much as you want.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I like Marco was saying, I don't disagree with you in principle, but I couldn't put my finger on what felt gross about it.
Casey:
And I think it's what Marco said is that just feels too complicated.
Casey:
Like either you're paying me or you're not.
Casey:
There's no in the middle.
Casey:
You know, there's no free trial.
Casey:
It's either you're paying me or you're not.
Casey:
You really want to use this app?
John:
Free trials are insanely popular for a reason, though.
John:
That's true.
John:
And you can't you can't overlook that.
John:
They're everywhere.
John:
They're everywhere.
John:
I think they do really work.
John:
And I know it does complicate things.
John:
It does, especially for an app.
John:
Your app is different in that it's not like it is very situational.
John:
You're probably not going to use this app while you're, you know, commuting on the subway, right?
John:
It's when you're on the couch.
John:
It's when you're watching the show or when you're discussing a show.
John:
Like it's not a general purpose app.
John:
So you don't have that many opportunities for engagement.
John:
And when you do have the engagement, the value of your app is it's there when people need it.
John:
And if it's like, oh, they go to look it up and your app gives them the Heisman, they're not going to come back.
John:
It needs to, like I said, it needs to prove value.
John:
It needs to say, I wanted an answer.
John:
I got an answer.
John:
And the app was pleasant to use.
John:
And this is the thing I find myself doing frequently.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
Now, here's the other thing that I'm sure people listening are probably thinking and we've discussed as well.
John:
The audience for your app, at least initially, is not the same as the general public.
John:
It's going to be able to listen to your podcast and know about the app.
John:
No one knows about this app except for people who read your blog and listen to your podcast.
John:
or are related to them because it's not out yet.
John:
But that is a ready-made customer base.
John:
And that customer base has totally different values, has a totally different idea of the exchange going on here.
John:
They might be buying it because they're a fan of yours because they've heard us talk about it so much.
John:
The general public is coming from a totally different perspective.
John:
So I feel like, and I think it's reasonable to, like this app has nothing to do with ATP.
John:
It is a general purpose app that anybody who watches television and movies can use.
John:
The question is,
John:
Do you want to design this app to be optimal for the people who listen to ATP or to be optimal for the people who have no idea what ATP is or who you are?
John:
And those are two very different designs, unfortunately.
John:
What makes you say that?
John:
What's the difference?
John:
Because the people who are listening to ATP, they have different desires out of the app.
John:
Their impetus to buy, their motivation to buy is so incredibly different from people who have no idea who you are.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
They're totally different.
John:
But they're limited.
John:
They're small in number.
John:
And so you could just say, I'm just going to set them aside and I'm going to build this app for the general public.
John:
Because practically speaking, the people who just want to buy the app because they're curious about the app that Casey made or because they want to have more context for the next episode of ATP they listen to, that's not a market that's going to sustain the development of this app.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Everyone else is.
John:
And the everyone else...
John:
you know, the design for them often involves the gross stuff that you find unappealing and complicated.
John:
And I base that on all of the apps that I download in the app store that have those types of models that they're, you know, complicated, unappealing and gross feeling.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, I, I, I'm not sure I see a free trial is this make or break thing that you seem to, because, and maybe it's because I'm too myopic in the way I operate, but like,
Casey:
I think a free trial is useful if it's the sort of thing where that's the only way I can try the app.
Casey:
But this kind of homegrown alternate approach, I think, gives me kind of what a free trial... I view them as equivalent, even though they're not literally equivalent.
Casey:
I view them as equivalent, spiritually equivalent, where I either need a free trial to prove its worth...
Casey:
Or I need to distribute little sips of the app to prove its worth.
Casey:
And it seems redundant to have both to me.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe I've got this all right.
John:
If you give them the sip, I think the main thing when you give them the sip is to make sure it's clear to them this is not the end.
John:
That you should not delete this app.
John:
Because even though I'm not letting you do this search now...
John:
at some point in the future that I'm going to tell you about tomorrow, next week, in an hour, whatever, you will be able to use the app again.
John:
And by the way, if you don't want to see this nag screen, here's a subscription or whatever, because that's what you're trying to stop is I've hit a paywall, delete this app.
John:
That is, you know, cause you never get that person back.
John:
They're not going to redownload it or whatever.
John:
They have no, you know what I mean?
John:
So that's, that's what you're trying to avoid in free trial.
John:
Let's the idea of the free trial is they get to try it with full functionality and hopefully fall in love with it.
John:
And then when that door closes, eventually it's,
Casey:
they you know they say i really did like this app or i did find myself using it a lot i mean again i hear you but i i feel like that's the whole point of this i'm going to say five searches a day maybe that number's wrong but i feel like that's the whole point and so i i don't know i i it it feels currently like it's like i said like it's redundant and i don't love it and and
Casey:
For what it's worth, when you tap on a search, I'm just going to put this in Slack.
Casey:
I don't think we're going to put an image in the show notes.
Casey:
But when you tap on the search area,
Casey:
What you're seeing that I'm putting in Slack right now, that's not in the context of search.
Casey:
It's just the one view in and of itself.
Casey:
But this would be where the search results and stuff would be.
Casey:
It's like a kind of mini paywall that says, hey, you've got to keep going or wait another few hours in order to get whatever more searches.
Casey:
Um, and, and that would show.
Casey:
And then what, what, what I haven't mentioned to you guys is the way I currently have it is if you think about the area on the, on the, or if you think about the, the, the main screen and how there's a little magnifying glass that slides in from off screen on the right, as you're drilling into things, um,
Casey:
When you're in free mode, to the left of that magnifying glass, I'm trying to generate an image real quick, so give me a second.
Casey:
I'm stalling for time.
Casey:
But to the left of that magnifying glass, there's a really obnoxious red banner at the bottom that says, you have one search left today.
Casey:
I think Marco made a good point earlier.
Casey:
It should say one free search left today.
Casey:
But anyways, it's written right now.
Casey:
You have one search left today.
Casey:
Subscribe now to remove limits or whatever.
Casey:
I can wordsmith that however I want.
Casey:
But but what I'm driving at is there's this big ass banner right at the bottom saying, hey, this is your situation.
Casey:
You've got, you know, whatever, however many searches left.
Casey:
And then you're going to have to subscribe in order to, you know, get more.
John:
Yeah, I think I mean, this all makes sense.
John:
I think the UI you are conveying all the information you need.
John:
You might you could actually do a fun kind of I don't know if this is an underscore esque thing, but it makes me think of him.
John:
uh kind of like where you know you have uh you know whatever you have uh one free search remaining and then you use it and then someone goes to try to do another search and you're going to show up the paywall on the paywall screen have a button that says can i just have one more search and you press it and then your app says okay and it lets you do it
John:
I don't know.
John:
Again, this is a lot of complexity.
John:
Just a one-time extra.
Casey:
Again, I come down with Marco.
Casey:
I don't want it this complicated.
John:
That's not complicated.
John:
That's fun.
John:
That's surprise and delight.
John:
What I'm basically saying is the thing that I do, don't tell anybody, but the thing I do with the ATP sales that we have when we sell merchandise, I always tell the listeners that the end date is one day before it actually is.
John:
well because then that helps you know resolve things like what time zone does it end in like that's that's the real reason exactly i don't avoid all those issues the reason people don't say oh i thought the sale was supposed to end today but it's not i don't have to deal with time zones the end date is always one day later i and that the having the limit be one you know having one extra in reserve that you give people one time it's not like you can always ask for one more forever and ever but just having the one time extra
John:
That's another enticement to eventually buy because all this app was nice to me.
John:
I was thinking about buying.
John:
Can I just do this one last search?
John:
Oh, yeah, you can.
John:
Then the paywall is really down.
John:
And no, you don't get to ask for one more forever and ever like a like a two year old.
John:
Right.
John:
That's the type of thing that you can do to soften this to make it more to make it less likely they delete the app immediately.
Marco:
I've been thinking about it.
Marco:
I played with the app.
Marco:
I saw your paywall screen in Slack.
Marco:
I think this is where I'm landing.
Marco:
You get five or ten free searches, single time use, and then one per day after that.
Casey:
Well, that's interesting.
Marco:
Then when they hit that one, you show your screen.
Marco:
I will workshop the hell out of the screen for you.
Marco:
Don't ship it the way it is.
Casey:
I know you.
Casey:
I know.
John:
As soon as I send Mark over.
Marco:
Unlimited searches every day.
Marco:
What is the everyday phrase there, bro?
Marco:
Anyway, yeah.
Casey:
We'll workshop the screen, but.
Casey:
Yeah, this is by no means the final screen.
Casey:
This is very.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You get five or ten searches up front for free, then one a day, free searches.
Marco:
Then you hit the screen, subscribe to continue after that one a day.
Marco:
And I like how you said, you know, or wait X hours to get, you know, your next free search.
Marco:
Like, that's great.
Marco:
And then you have your two options.
Marco:
You're kind of killing me even offering two options, monthly and yearly.
Casey:
Well, I'm not sure that's right.
Casey:
We can talk about that, yeah.
Marco:
But yeah, you offer your subscription option, parenthesis, S, and that's it.
Marco:
And there's no free trial.
Marco:
You get your one per day after you've used your five single-use ones.
Marco:
That's it, your one per day.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
You hit this, and you go forward if you want.
Marco:
That, I think, that gives people enough time to get to know the app with their five or ten stock-free ones that aren't timed.
Marco:
And then it gives them that little out to keep them in the door on the way if they want to keep going after that.
Marco:
But I think any more than one per day and you will have the limit that like what John was saying earlier with like how many incidents per couch event are we going to even be using this app every day.
Marco:
So I think that's probably your best balance.
John:
I think that if you went with that model, I think the initial bucket should be more generous.
John:
Just because that's the falling... I think 10 is fine.
John:
I think a little bit more than 10 would be... Because you really... You want to give people more time to fall in love with the app.
John:
And some people hit it after 10.
John:
Some people, it will take them three months to go through 10.
John:
Some people will go through 10 and one couch is in it.
John:
So...
John:
Because it is finite at one time, it's not like you have to worry about it recurring.
John:
No one's going to live forever off of your free bucket of 20 instead of 10.
John:
It's just giving people more time to use the app enough that they are convinced that it's the type of thing they want to pay for.
John:
Or at least not delete.
Casey:
So for the sake of discussion, I'm not sure this is the right answer, but you get 20 searches for free.
Casey:
Then once that bucket is up, be that in an hour or in a year, after that, you get one freebie a day.
Casey:
And if you use that one freebie, tough nuts, either wait another day or pay me.
John:
yeah i actually i kind of like that and i still think you should have a free i still think you should have a free trial but whatever i i think i'm team marco on that one i i disagree john also thinks we need to offer our t-shirts in 17 different options every time and i'm the one who's like can we just do like two or three people love it people love it and it's even it even works with cotton bureau's new model nails we're not even penalized for doing it
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, I'll think about the free trial, although my current thinking is Marco's right.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I actually really – I didn't think about this – well, it's not really hybrid, but I'm going to call it the hybrid approach.
Casey:
I actually think this makes a lot of sense, and I think it's reasonably easy to digest.
Casey:
That's the thing I'm worried about, and that's what I keep coming back to with the free trial is I think it's adding a layer of complexity that just isn't helpful.
Casey:
And so I like this because it seems pretty straightforward.
Casey:
You got your bucket.
Casey:
Once you use it, you get one a day.
Casey:
After that, tough nuts.
Casey:
All right.
John:
So I think it's just as complicated as all the schemes you were describing as complicated.
John:
But again, I say that the people who are using this app do not need a mental model of this system.
John:
They just need to know how do they feel about what the app is putting in front of their face and doesn't make them want to pay money.
John:
Like that's the level people are operating at when they're poking at their phone.
John:
They are not trying to suss out your monetization model and how you've structured things.
John:
So I don't think that's a concern at all.
John:
But if that was a concern, the thing you just described is just as complicated as everything else we've described.
John:
I mean, maybe.
Marco:
Well, and also, like, some people will suss it out.
Marco:
Some people will complain.
Marco:
Some people will be, you know, will be, you know, bounced off and they won't go through with it because they'll think it's too ridiculous.
John:
Those are only going to be the listeners of our podcast, though.
John:
The regular people just do not know who they would complain to, assume Casey doesn't exist and is just a giant application mill somewhere.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They think Apple made all the apps.
John:
The people who complain are so much more, I was going to say sophisticated, but so much more in tune with how the world actually works than most of the people who are just poking at their phone screen.
Marco:
Yeah, fair enough.
Marco:
But all this is to say, you're not going to please everyone no matter what you do.
Marco:
don't sell yourself short.
Marco:
Like, don't rip yourself off trying to please everyone.
Marco:
Like, if you hear from people who are like, well, 20 free searches is really not enough for my needs.
Marco:
Like, you know, fine.
John:
Like, then they should pay you.
John:
If they say, that's what I'm saying.
John:
If they say, I used that up in one couch incident.
John:
A, you know, they listen to the show because they said couch incident.
John:
And B, it's like,
John:
okay but like fine you are you are outside the bell curve 20 for one couch incident is way higher than you know so i'm sorry but i'm not you can't configure the app for the outliers that's what you're just trying to run no and if anybody uses it that heavily they should be paying for it that that is exactly like that is the kind of user that like okay then that makes sense you have you have heavier needs for this you should be paying for it simple as that
Marco:
You know, because this is not a free app.
Marco:
This is a this is an app that has limited free functionality that is really a subscription priced app.
Marco:
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Marco:
And people will there will be people who will try to make you feel bad about that, but don't because that's life.
Marco:
This is what modern software is.
Marco:
You have, you know, you have to keep it up.
Marco:
It's yeah.
Marco:
Modern software is ongoing revenue in some form because you because people expect ongoing updates.
John:
I'll just use IMDb one star.
John:
All right.
John:
Good luck with that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So tell me if I'm bananas to say that monthly should be an option.
John:
I like it.
John:
I think it's good.
John:
I think it's a lower number on the screen.
John:
I think Marco was saying should yearly be an option.
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
Well, no.
Marco:
I mean, I think if there's only going to be one, it should be yearly.
Marco:
But I think I'm okay with two.
Marco:
But I think what you want – so look, cynically speaking, not everyone who signs up for a year will use it for a year.
Marco:
So you kind of want to push more people towards the yearly if you want to maximize money.
Marco:
So there's that to consider.
Marco:
I would suggest if you're going to offer both monthly and yearly, which I think I'm okay with, price them in such a way that people who do math will go for the yearly.
John:
Yeah, and that argues for not making it $150 because that makes the math harder for people.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So if you made it $1 a month, $8 a year...
Marco:
That's pretty good in terms of that will drive people.
Marco:
People can do that math in their head real fast.
Marco:
That's fair.
Marco:
Or make it $2 a month and make it $10 a year.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
Whatever it is, make it so that people can clearly tell, oh, I should really go for the year.
Marco:
Because that's really what you want.
John:
If I care about that.
John:
But I think the smaller number for monthly is a smoother on-ramp for people who say, I don't know if I want this $8 worth.
John:
Correct.
John:
And then after three months of paying monthly, they'll be like, oh, this is dumb.
John:
I should just pay for annual.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But ultimately, like you want this screen, you want most people who choose to subscribe to go for the longer term one for lots of reasons.
Marco:
Number one, you'll make more money from people who abandon it early.
Marco:
Number two, those people will be reminded only once a year instead of 12 times a year that they are subscribing to your app.
Marco:
And every time someone's reminded they're subscribing to your app by one of those emails from Apple saying these are about to renew, that's a chance for them to cancel it.
Marco:
So you don't want to have to bother people with that every single month if they're willing to pay for a year at whatever price that is.
Marco:
So ideally, you want yearly customers more than monthly customers.
Marco:
Because you'll both make more from them in terms of the abandonment, and then the ones that don't abandon it, you'll keep them longer probably.
Marco:
So a yearly is probably better for you.
Marco:
So yeah, I would price it.
Marco:
I think if your yearly price is going to be $8, I think $1 a month is a good price for the monthly.
Marco:
I would maybe push yearly to be $10, but it's not that big of a difference.
Marco:
I know that you're going to have trouble asking for $10 because it's you, and you keep talking yourself down and giving yourself pay cuts.
Casey:
Well, it's just... I mean, honestly...
Casey:
It is up to me, but if it were up to me and I felt like I could get away with whatever I wanted, then I think $10 a year is reasonable.
Casey:
$10 a year and maybe $2 a month.
Casey:
But I think that a regular person would look at this and be like, no, that's way too much money.
Casey:
And that's what gives me pause.
Marco:
Those people are going to say that no matter what these prices are.
Marco:
It could be $0.10 a month they would say that.
Casey:
Yeah, maybe.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like keeping it under $10 is, it feels like I can just, it can be an impulse buy at under $10, even on a yearly basis, which is bananas.
Casey:
Because if you go out to eat and get a soda, it's like $2.50.
Casey:
And that literally is pissed away in the span of six hours.
Casey:
But I mean, I do this.
Casey:
On the consumer side, I do the same thing.
Casey:
And I'll look at a $10 plus a year nap, and I'll be like, eh.
Casey:
do I really need this?
Casey:
So I feel like the most I can get away with per year is $9.
John:
And when I see those $10 apps, you know what I do?
John:
I usually go for the free trial and see if I like it.
Marco:
Oh, Jesus.
Marco:
If you're going to go with eight or nine bucks, then yeah, I'd say I would say in order to maximize the best ratio of monthly to yearly, I'd say a dollar a month, $8 a year.
Casey:
And you don't think that $1.50 is – because, I mean, the only reason to do more than $1 and less than $2 is just to eke out a little bit more from the monthly people, which maybe that's dumb anyway because I'd be – strictly speaking, if they stay for a year, which is a big if, then I'm making more with $1 a month than I am $8 a year.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It just – does it make sense to make it $1.50 or $2 or something?
John:
i mean you could you could try look and this is the kind you can play with this over time you can actually you can change prices all the time like people don't need to have a comprehensive history of the pricing of your app in their head well i thought for subscriptions though got a little dodgy because then you have to like get the permission or something like that you know better than me mark i don't know if you can change you can actually increase the the subscription of existence but i'm just thinking of like for going forward for new customers for it
John:
Setting aside what existing customers do is just for new customers.
Marco:
You can just retire one and start another subscription and just keep it going but not have it be purchasable in the app.
Marco:
So there's ways to do it.
Marco:
Yeah, you just have multiple subscriptions at different price points.
Marco:
You can change... Recently, the whole Disney Plus mechanic they added, you can increase the price of an existing subscription and bring those users along, but I believe they have to... You have to give them some amount of... The system gives them some kind of notice...
Marco:
And I think they I don't think they have to opt in, but they have a chance to opt out.
Marco:
So, you know, that's that kind of runs a risk of loss there.
Marco:
So, you know, ideally, you don't need to change these prices, but you can change these prices.
Marco:
So but yeah, I mean, look, I mean, $1.50 a month is not bad.
Marco:
I just think a dollar a month is an easier... It's a more obvious sell.
Marco:
It lets the screen look nicer.
Marco:
You have more design options in terms of your biggest markets like the US where it's going to be a nice even number.
Marco:
You can not even show the decimal points.
Marco:
So you have options there.
Marco:
Actually, no, you can't because it's going to say...
Marco:
Do the new tiers have even like $1 exactly or is it still $0.99?
Casey:
I thought so.
Casey:
I thought they do.
Casey:
That's why I have it currently.
Casey:
I got to double check.
Marco:
I think you're right.
Casey:
Yeah, because that's why I have it currently is literally 8.00 and either 1.50 or 1.00.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I was listening to Thoroughly Considered earlier today, and they were talking a lot about the 99 cent thing.
Casey:
And I feel like having the round number, I feel like that just feels nicer.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
And that's partly why I don't want to go all the way to 10.
Casey:
I could be convinced to go 9, but I don't think I want to go all the way to 10 because even 9.99, I mean, that's effectively the same damn thing.
Marco:
9 feels like 10.
Marco:
That's why I keep going back to 8.
Marco:
If you're going to be below 10, 8's a really good number.
Marco:
People perceive that well.
Casey:
But that's kind of where I am too.
Casey:
So, all right.
Casey:
So I think we all then, I'm asking, not telling, we all agree that about $8 a year sounds about right.
Casey:
And Marco, you were pretty perturbed about the monthly idea, but have you come around on that or are we still not loving it?
Marco:
I think, I mean, look, obviously I don't have a lot of data here.
Marco:
I have my app that is yearly only, but that's a little bit different in the sense that my subscription is not getting access to core features of the app.
Marco:
So it's a very different mechanic.
Marco:
In your case, you need to convert as many people as possible because anybody you don't convert with this paywall, as John said, is likely to abandon usage of the app completely.
Marco:
And then you make nothing from them.
Marco:
In my case, if they don't like my premium subscription, they can just keep using the app for free and I make money from the ads from them.
Marco:
So it's a very, very different scenario.
Marco:
In your scenario, I think it does probably make sense to have monthly and yearly, especially because the monthly is a cheaper way in the door.
Marco:
I don't think you need free trials, but I could be wrong.
Marco:
I haven't used them in the App Store as a developer, so I'm not sure how the conversion rate would be different.
Marco:
It does introduce a level of conceptual complexity for the customer.
Marco:
It introduces complexity to the screen.
Marco:
That being said, I don't think it introduces meaningful complexity to your implementation.
Marco:
You know, that's a flag you set on the app purchase.
Marco:
And then and, you know, whatever validation you're doing server side or whatever, like it makes that a little more complicated to account for.
Marco:
But for your purposes, it almost doesn't matter if somebody's in a trial or not.
Marco:
Like you're just trying to make money from them long term.
Marco:
You don't really care if, you know, this search came from a trial user versus this one came from a paying user.
Casey:
Yeah, it's not.
Casey:
I already have support for it in my kind of facade in front of Storkit 2.
Casey:
It's generally fairly straightforward unless you're trying to figure out how much time is left in the trial and or when the trial expired.
Casey:
Then it becomes a little bit interesting.
Casey:
But I think I could support the trial if I wanted to.
Casey:
I just don't think I want to.
Casey:
Because, again, I just feel like it's more complicated.
John:
Yeah, it is.
Casey:
But, John, where do you come down on both monthly and yearly?
Yeah.
John:
I think you should definitely have both.
Casey:
The other thing that's interesting about monthly, which I thought I've, I've been thinking about if I should message this in app at all, but certainly I'll talk about it on the show is that if you're a Casey list, super fan,
Casey:
You could do monthly, and if you stick with it, then you're giving me an extra, you know, what, $4 a year.
Casey:
And now I don't think that that's necessarily going to be what anyone would choose to do except like five of you whom I love dearly.
Casey:
But it is another way to kind of have an implicit tip jar without actually putting in a tip jar, which I kind of like.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, there will be some amount of that for sure.
Marco:
I don't know if it'll be enough to make that have to dictate any choices you make about the pricing of the monthly.
Marco:
Yeah, that's fair.
Marco:
That's probably not a massive factor in determining the price.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
All right, so it sounds like the Brain Trust has concluded a batch of non-renewable tokens up front, or I shouldn't say tokens, of searches up front, somewhere in the order of 20-ish, I think.
Marco:
I'd still go 10, frankly, but go ahead.
Marco:
I'd still go with free trial.
John:
I mean, there's no consensus here.
Casey:
This is not decision-making by committee.
John:
No, there's some consensus.
John:
I have opinions.
John:
Marco has opinions.
John:
But Casey, you get to decide.
John:
You can do whatever you want.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
No, I hear you.
John:
If you're trying to get me and Marco to come to the consensus, it's not going to happen.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Not necessarily.
Casey:
I'm just trying to, for as much my own benefit as the listeners, I'm trying to get kind of the brass tacks.
Casey:
Where did we all individually land?
Casey:
And if there is something that vaguely smells like a consensus, what does that look like?
Casey:
And it sounds to me like, again, something to the order of 10 to 20 free searches and then one a day after that.
Casey:
I think it sounds like we all agree that monthly and yearly is not such a terrible idea.
Casey:
A little bit of disagreement as to whether it should be $1, $1.50 or $2.
Casey:
Do you think I could go all the way to $2 on monthly?
Marco:
You could try it.
Marco:
I mean, I'm not sure.
Marco:
I mean, having something begin with $1 a month...
Marco:
Sounds like nothing to a lot of people.
Marco:
That is a really good sounding and looking thing.
Marco:
$1.50 is a little more complicated.
Marco:
As John said, it makes the math a little bit less likely to end up with the yearly purchase.
Marco:
But ultimately, that still looks really cheap.
Marco:
$2 is really cheap, but it doesn't look as cheap as $1.50.
Marco:
So, you know, I think there is a lot of benefit, like psychologically and visually in getting that that one one point something a month that that is, I think, very attractive.
Casey:
And then yearly eight, maybe nine dollars.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like the delta between 12 monthly installments and one $8 installment, I feel like that's quite a lot of savings for the yearly subscription.
Casey:
Right.
Marco:
That's what you want.
Marco:
You want people to be going to the yearly subscription.
Casey:
yeah i know but i feel like what i want to do is make it like nine dollars a year but i still think that i agree with what you were saying earlier i feel like there's some weird divide between eight and nine that you would expect to see between nine and ten but i feel like it feels cheap in a in a happy way whereas nine does not feel cheap in a happy way it feels like it's getting it doesn't feel cheap at all really it feels like it's getting expensive
Marco:
And the thing, what you have to consider here is, you know, it's easy to look at these numbers and be like, well, geez, I'm setting this up so early.
Marco:
And if I make this nine instead of eight, I'm going to make X percent more money.
Marco:
But if the conversion rate is affected even a little bit by these pricing differences, you can quickly erase that margin.
Marco:
So if you convert a decent number more people at eight than you would at nine, you will make more money total at eight.
Marco:
And it doesn't take that many more people to make up that kind of difference.
Marco:
And the same thing is true of the monthly level.
Marco:
Whatever it is, if you're setting it at $1.50 a month versus $2 a month,
Marco:
I think you'll get way more people in at $1.50 than you would at $2, and therefore I think you'd make up that difference in volume.
Marco:
But this is the kind of stuff that it's one thing to have these kind of gut feelings.
Marco:
This is how we think it is.
Marco:
It's really hard to know in advance, and it's even harder to be able to make this kind of decision without just testing it and then being willing to change the pricing in the cumbersome ways that we have to do that.
Casey:
One final thing we didn't talk about much, but I'm curious both of your opinions.
Casey:
Maybe we'll start with John.
Casey:
Do I do some sort of one-time only, you know, like standard style in-app purchase?
Casey:
I'm going to call it a lifetime unlock during this conversation, but I would not refer to it that way.
Casey:
Like I would refer to it as like a one-time purchase or something.
Casey:
Do I do a lifetime unlock?
Marco:
No.
Casey:
Hey, I agree.
Casey:
That's where I've landed too, but tell me why.
John:
I mean, because you can always roll it out later and you can roll it out to people who have already paid you a bunch of money, but just don't want to deal with it anymore, but really love the app and are willing to pay a lot and have had time to fall in love with it.
John:
But I don't see how anyone is going to see this app, use it enough without doing one of the subscriptions to decide they want to pay a price.
John:
It's going to be worth your while for a one time unlock.
Yeah.
Marco:
keep it in your back pocket save it for three years from now from this app when this app is wildly successful but all the power users are so pissed about paying subscriptions that you can charge them $100 then we can talk about it again but now absolutely not so for many reasons the you know whatever even if you didn't call it lifetime unlock that's how people will perceive it they will perceive this as I buy this and now I quote own it and they're going to a expect that it will work forever and
Marco:
Which, B, involves you updating it over time because when we build modern software, we're building it on quicksand.
Marco:
There is no such thing as software that stays working forever without updates anymore, especially iOS software accessing a web service.
Marco:
There's so many moving factors here.
Marco:
So you're building on quicksand.
Marco:
This is going to require constant updates, not like every day, but at least every couple of years.
Marco:
Suppose you worked on this, decided, you know what, this app's kind of done and abandoned it.
Marco:
And you want people to still be able to use it.
Marco:
You would have to put in a certain amount of time every couple of years just to keep it working on the latest versions of iOS and the latest devices.
Marco:
So there's going to be some degree of maintenance over time.
Marco:
So you need ongoing revenue from people.
Marco:
It's simple as that.
Marco:
You need some way to make money from ongoing use of your app to fund ongoing updates of your app, which is what everybody expects you to have.
Marco:
So your ongoing revenue, simple as that.
Marco:
If you don't have ads, then that's it.
Marco:
Those are two options that we know about.
Marco:
Or, you know, creepy user data, which you don't want to do.
Marco:
And I don't blame you.
Marco:
So that's it.
Marco:
You have to make ongoing revenue from your app somehow to justify continuing to update it.
Marco:
And lifetime, any kind of lifetime or flat rate or however you would brand it, it gives users the impression and the expectation and the entitlement that they will feel that they deserve access to this app for an indefinite period of the future because they paid to unlock it.
Marco:
They paid to own it.
Marco:
But that's not the reality of the modern software environment.
Marco:
They can't own it.
Marco:
They can't have it forever without ongoing work from you.
Marco:
So it's better to not even try to sell that to people.
Marco:
Don't even sell them on the idea of that anymore because that doesn't exist for an iOS app.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Brain Trust has spoken.
Casey:
I appreciate it, fellas.