622: Duplicate Garbage Generation Process
14 Jan 2025New Mac-monitor possibilities, Tim Cook’s political moves, and updates on John’s app… which now has a name!
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- AirPod noises
- Gui Rambo & AirBuddy
- One of the noises is “the case battery is low” (via Zach)
- Also, more on status lights (via Tom French)
- Another noise is a calibration noise (via Ian Williamson)
- How to turn off charging sounds
- Look, ma! We’re famous!
- AirPod Noises (via Patch)
- TVs at CES 2025
- Hisense’s 116UX with RGB mini-backlight
- DLSS
- History (via Hampus Jensen)
- Explanation (via flunkedflank)
- Digital Foundry explanation video
- Mac monitors
- Some foreign options (via Henry Chen)
- Another option (via Tim Ngwena)
- Dynamic Island Live Alert (via Dan Engler)
- AirPod noises
- 🤮 Tim Cook donates $1 million to Trump inaguration 🤮
- TestFlight subscriptions on macOS
- TestFlight for ATP members
- Marco and Casey price John’s app
- Post-show Neutral:
- Winter report card for Tina’s Civic
- Casey has connected Erin’s car to Home Assistant
- Marco’s new[-ish] car update
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Honda EVs at CES
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Chapters
- 👴🏻
- Decoding AirPods noises
- More CES TVs
- How DLSS works
- Mac-monitor possibilities
- OnePlus’s dynamic island
- Tim Cook and Trump
- Storacusa is now…
- Ending theme
- Neutral: Winter report
👴🏻
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it turns out I am tired and it is entirely my fault this time. What’d you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided this would be a good day to get like all of my medical to-do items done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so not only does that include a trip to the dentist, which is never fun, but I also now have four new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holes poked in me, I think. Oh, lovely. Three different vaccines and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m in line for my shingles vaccine now that I’m 50.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, congratulations. So
⏹️ ▶️ John exciting! More vaccines open up to me. I think I have to get that one twice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, do you have a party for that?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you haven’t had chickenpox, what you get instead is the chickenpox vaccine that prevents you from ever getting chickenpox.
⏹️ ▶️ John But too late for old people. Didn’t exist when we were kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problems of being born in the 1900s.
Decoding AirPods noises
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a bunch of follow-up to go through we have a lot of air pod related follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this This is so funny to me in a good way I almost didn’t talk about this because I thought maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m an idiot maybe I didn’t maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t understand these noises and so on and so forth and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This actually got quite a bit of traction both in terms of feedback and some other stuff which we’ll talk about in a minute but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have thanks to the magic of friend of the show Guy Rambeau and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You might know Guy because of air buddy which does a lot of really fancy and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun Bluetooth stuff with your Mac and other devices. Also, what was the name of the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey silencer thing that we’ve been talking about on and off for the last few weeks, which I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John drawing up. Is it Keyboard Buddy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s right. I think it is Keyboard Buddy or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a very friendly category of software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is very friendly and so is Gee. Anyway, thanks to Gee, we have actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sample audio that we can play for you and thanks to Marco, it should play not only for John and I, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more importantly for those of you listening, even those of you listening live. So we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go through a bunch of feedback. And the funny thing about this feedback is I am pretty darn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confident that we have discovered the genesis of one of the, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually two of the noises, one of which I was talking about, one of which I wasn’t, but there’s yet another noise that I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not sure what the genesis, what the purpose is for this noise. Let me get to the feedback. Zack says,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have the same model of AirPods Pro as Casey, and I feel like there was a firmware update the last few months that introduced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new noise because I never heard it before, which tracks what I was experiencing as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It sounds a lot like what Casey described. Turns out that noise is to let you know that the case has 40% or less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery left. You can turn off case charging sounds, but then you don’t get the chime when it starts charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, I am not saying this with confidence, but I believe that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Marco will play for you now, which is… So that like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trailing off noise is, I think, the case saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, I need to be charged now, please. And there’s actually a little bit of knowledge-based articles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we can talk or that we’ll talk about in a moment that indicates that there is a noise that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does this, but doesn’t indicate which noise does this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you, I’ve heard this noise for, you know, years now, occasionally. I never assumed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what it meant. It might be be what it means. But I have just, I just, Oh, I put my AirPods in the case sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually, before you go on, let me just address something that Zach pointed out that a lot of other people pointed out as well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can turn off case charging sounds, right? This annoys me so much, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John about AirPods, and I think I complained about it before and I will do it again. Whenever I read anything
⏹️ ▶️ John like this, like, Oh, there’s some setting in AirPods, I should go change that because I was like, you know what, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t really benefit from the case charging noises. I should probably just turn them off. But guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t, unless the AirPods are connected to your phone. And that drives me
⏹️ ▶️ John give me the UI. And then the next time they connect, set the settings in. So I have to go
⏹️ ▶️ John get the AirPods, put them in my ear, open up the phone. Oh, there’s my AirPods. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John I can turn off case charging. So anyway, if you don’t feel like you benefit from hearing noises from your case, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I do, because I’m pretty good about keeping things charged. You can turn it off, but you do have to connect
⏹️ ▶️ John your AirPods and then the AirPods show up at the top of all of your settings and you dig into them and you can find this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is very true. And there actually will be a link in the show notes about where you can do this if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Marco, if you wouldn’t mind playing that same one, one more time, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s one of them, which we believe to be the case is mostly discharged sound. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s another one. And this one, I’m still not entirely clear what this is. Marco, if you please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that might mean that there’s some sort of I’m not charging situation
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like one of the earbuds has poor contact or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounds like an error.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We all agree. And I think that’s what it is. But I’ve heard and read no specific
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confirmation that that’s the case. That’s just a theory. But that being said, Tom French writes, hey, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the sad sound your case makes is telling you that the case charges below some level and needs to be charged. I find this helpful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to not end up with uncharged AirPods because I forgot to charge the case. It may be the same sad sound the AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make when their batteries are low, but I’m not sure. It’s not. It’s not. The orange light when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing is in the case tells you it is not fully charged. Green indicates fully charged.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Orange with AirPods in the case tells you the AirPods are still charging. Green tells you the AirPods are fully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charged. I was aware of the orange and green for when the AirPods were in the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t realize that if you do the same motion, if you open the case while the AirPods are in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your ears or just out of the case, I suppose, that the light now serves double duty as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case status, which was a bit of news to me. Continuing on, Ian Williamson writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you reminded me of a noise that I’ve been meaning to investigate with my AirPods Pro 2, recorded here when I put one AirPod back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the case with the other. You can hear the sad charging noise overlaid with the case closing snap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but about 15 seconds later, you can also hear what appears to be a diagnostic sound coming from the AirPods inside the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was driving me mad for a while as I kept hearing the sound, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. So I’m gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco play this in just a moment. I will tell you that by no fault of Marco’s, this is a little bit shrill.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you have the ability to turn your volume down just for a moment, I might recommend it. So Marco, why don’t you play it like twice please,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you don’t mind. This is apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sound that’s played only when the case is closed, only when the AirPods are in the case. And this is quoting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a knowledge-based article that we’ll put in the show notes, to help ensure that your AirPods, microphones, and speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are operating at their best, for example, to help provide high-quality hearing test results, your AirPods may periodically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play a quiet chime when they’re in their charging case. I have heard this from time to time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had not a damned idea what the hell it was. And so I am very thankful for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ian Williamson and others who have written in with this. This was not one of the noises I was talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week, but I am genuinely happy to know what exactly this is. So again, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link to Ian’s little video recording on Mastodon in the show notes, as well as the knowledge-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article that mentions this. Then as John had mentioned earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can turn off the charging sounds and there’s also some information about the light. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different knowledge-based article, which we also put in the show notes, quoting from that, when your AirPods aren’t in your case, the light shows the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey status of your case. Green means fully charged, which is what we thought earlier, and amber, or what I called orange, means
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than one full charge remains, which I did not know until I read this. That was very useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This ended up getting picked up by MacRumors, and so we actually inspired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an entire article on MacRumors. And it’s so wild for me personally, because again, this was a thing I was barely even gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bother talking about. And then Julie Clover made an article out of it on MacRumors. And so among other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, Julie writes, information on the mysterious chime was highlighted on Mastodon after Apple’s unclear AirPod sounds were discussed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on what’s now last week’s ATP podcast. Then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody who listens to the show, who goes by Patch, said, after listening to your most recent episode, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put together airpodnoises.net, a super simple site that has the various AirPod noises you can go through and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play to work out what they are. The only one I believe I’m missing at the moment is the new shake head and nod head sounds from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4, but I will hopefully add those soon. And actually Patch, at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or last I looked, it doesn’t have a couple of these noises that we talked about earlier today, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, maybe Patch will, you know, slice and dice them out of the recorded version of this episode. I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the day-to-day noises, this is what I was hoping to see on Apple’s website, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t. So, Patch, thanks for rescuing Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple hasn’t figured out how to play audio on the web yet, but they’ll get to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve reinvented scrolling in many different ways, but never audio. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. But anyway, thank you to everyone. Thank you to Guy. Thank you to Marco for being DJ
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. And thank you to everyone for writing in. This had a lot more traction, like I said, I realized, which makes me feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good that I’m not the only dope in the world. So go team.
More CES TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John more TV at CES news slash follow-up what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John this one snuck in After we recorded I saw this news. So I think we just missed it at recording
⏹️ ▶️ John time I don’t know why these guys don’t get all their announcements done all at once but they don’t they tend to trickle out over the Course of CES.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think this is probably the last one. This is from Hisense Chinese television manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ John Usually known for making not so expensive displays with very impressive specs. They’re kind of an upstart
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, they have a television which I believe is called the 116UX. That was the name
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuck on the plate underneath it on its display, but a lot of the videos that we will link in the show notes don’t actually say the
⏹️ ▶️ John name of the TV. But anyway, it’s as the name might imply, a 116 inch television. It is very large. Its
⏹️ ▶️ John innovation is what they are calling, what they are branding, a trichroma
⏹️ ▶️ John LED backlight, which is, as the name sounds, a backlight that
⏹️ ▶️ John uses three different colors. Now, with a regular mini-LED TV or mini-LED screen in
⏹️ ▶️ John your MacBook Pro or whatever, what they mean is that the backlight, instead of being just one big giant light, is a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of smaller lights. And usually the more the better, because you want those backlight regions to be small, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it works is it turns on the backlight regions behind the areas of the screen that are lit up and turns them off, or
⏹️ ▶️ John turns them down below the areas that are darker. The screen has millions of tiny little pixels on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John the backlight, maybe there’s hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, but you know the screen has millions
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So the backlights are maybe you know one inch by one inch or one centimeter by one centimeter on a large television a few inches
⏹️ ▶️ John by a few inches right? And obviously the pixels are very very tiny. This is one of the disadvantages of
⏹️ ▶️ John mini LED screens because you can’t just light up an individual pixel you can if you want one white pixel on a field
⏹️ ▶️ John of black you’ve got to light up the entire giant backlight behind that one pixel and then it bleeds through
⏹️ ▶️ John and yada yada right? Well the innovation on this screen is instead Instead of the backlights being
⏹️ ▶️ John white or blue LEDs, which is the two things they predominantly use, they use white because it’s convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John and they use blue because they can turn the blue into the other colors in a
⏹️ ▶️ John quantum dot front layer and they let the blue straight through for the blue subpixel and then they turn it into red and green with
⏹️ ▶️ John quantum dots. Anyway, instead of the backlight being all one color, every backlight
⏹️ ▶️ John region, every like square in the back, in the dynamic backlight, has an RG and a B,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, RGB LED lights that combine. If you turn them on, they make a white backlight, but you can also
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously make it a colored backlight. So one thing that television manufacturers have been doing in demos,
⏹️ ▶️ John either for real or faking it, is they will, I think Sony did this for real last,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometime during 2024, where they basically show you a television screen where
⏹️ ▶️ John one half of the screen is the whole screen, has the liquid crystal display layer
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the backlight behind that and you know, the whole stack, right? But the other part of the screen does not have
⏹️ ▶️ John the LCD. So there is no liquid crystal display over it. It is just the backlight regions,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And whatever like filters and polarizers and stuff they have to show off how
⏹️ ▶️ John good their backlight is, right? What they wanna show you is like, okay, well, here’s what the screen looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, even just looking at the backlight, you can kind of make out what the picture is because our backlight
⏹️ ▶️ John regions are so small and there are so many of them and we do such a good job of blending them so they don’t look like
⏹️ ▶️ John little lit up squares or whatever. See, isn’t that impressive? Well, Hisense did the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I don’t know if it was for real, like they peeled away the physical layers of their screen or if they faked it by just showing
⏹️ ▶️ John video, but either way, you can follow the links that will be in the show notes and see it. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can see on the left, the actual color image of the screen and on the right, what is supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John just the backlight. And what just the backlight looks like is a really blurry color version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen because the backlight itself has colors in it. And that obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John makes the backlight look closer to what is on the screen and also helps the color purity
⏹️ ▶️ John of the individual pixels. What they claim for this is that it covers 97% of the BT.220 color space, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is a very large color space that no television has come close to covering all of.
⏹️ ▶️ John Closest any television has ever gotten was QD OLED, which is around 75, 80% of BT 2020. And this is 97%. So this has the best
⏹️ ▶️ John color volume of, I was gonna say before I finished
⏹️ ▶️ John filling in these shots, the best color volume of any consumer television. And this television goes up to 10,000 nits,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they don’t say what size, what the window size is for that, like how much of the screen is lit up. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is very impressive, right? OLEDs still have the advantage in terms of they can light up every individual pixel.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t need to deal with this backlight stuff. But the color purity they’re achieving here has surpassed OLED, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John very impressive. Then I got to the video, which came out, I think just earlier today,
⏹️ ▶️ John the first one to say a price for the television, and it’s $30,000. Oh, so.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool. My excitement has been severely tempered,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I thought, like, look, it’s a mini LED television, it’s 116 inches, there have been 115, 100 inch, 98 inch, like, it’s not unreasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John size, and the tech that it was using, it’s like, Oh, it’s mini LED, but they have RGB backlights. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, $30,000. So that’s not great,
⏹️ ▶️ John but still impressive showing. Samsung and TCL also have similar tech
⏹️ ▶️ John in the works. I also remember back before I bought my first flat screen
⏹️ ▶️ John television, like I was going from my, I had bought a used 34 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony Vegas CRT that weighed a whole jillion pounds and I was gonna buy my first flat panel TV. And I was looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at like what’s on the market for flat panel TVs. And at one point I was really enamored with
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony’s LED backlit LCD televisions of the day. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe they also used RGB backlights, like incredibly primitive. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they look like actual big, like Christmas tree light, you know, RG and a B, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I ended up getting a Panasonic Plasma as my first flat screen television. But I remember this tech being
⏹️ ▶️ John existing back then as well. And like I said, Samsung and TCL are also investigating it. I don’t know why it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. It seems like if it has a similar number of backlight regions as a regular mini LED TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John making them RGB shouldn’t increase the cost that much, but whatever. Anyway, as an aside,
⏹️ ▶️ John as part of watching the videos that we will link about this, one of the videos mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John that this new television, this Hisense 116 UX, comes with
⏹️ ▶️ John a MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset, which finally supports four full bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI 2.1 ports just in time for HDMI 2.2 to be announced. They’ve done it. MediaTek
⏹️ ▶️ John now sells a part that can handle four full bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports. So
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, companies other than LG and Samsung could have televisions with
⏹️ ▶️ John four full bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports in 2025. I guess that’s so-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry, to fill in a little background here, I’m gonna go with what my understanding is and just interrupt me whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re ready. So there is a parts manufacturer that does kind of the IO for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many, many different TV manufacturers. And their most common version of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IO board only supports one or two HDMI ports at 2.1, is that right? And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every other HDMI port is neutered by comparison. Is that fair?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just the most common, their best one. That you couldn’t buy one from them that supported for
⏹️ ▶️ John years. You get two of the good ports and then two not so great ports. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, LG does their own chips and I think Samsung does as well. and they’ve supported four HDMI 2.1 ports
⏹️ ▶️ John for years and every other company that just buys this MediaTek chip, there wasn’t anything for them to buy to
⏹️ ▶️ John support it, but this year there is. Now, will TV makers buy the new MediaTek chip or will they keep using the old ones? We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see. I’m hoping the flagship TVs use them, in particular, the Sony TVs, which have not yet been announced for 2025.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope they use the new QD OLED screen. I hope they use the new MediaTek chip and that
⏹️ ▶️ John will be great. But anyway, good job for Hisense for pushing the envelope, bad job for
⏹️ ▶️ John it being $30,000. I mean, if
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna look at $30,000 TVs, like I said, there were micro LED televisions where every
⏹️ ▶️ John little sub pixel is a tiny individual LED, like that amazing screen technology that is the best
⏹️ ▶️ John technology you can get. But those have always cost like more than a car, right? Well, if I’m gonna spend $30,000, I’m gonna start
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at those. I’m not gonna be looking at like a mini LED backlit thing. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John and supposedly they had ones of those that were, the one company showing them being less expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John because those tend to be modular, Like literally one of the demos they have is you can take a piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen and pull it off like a television we made of like six or 12 of these panels. And you can literally like remove
⏹️ ▶️ John one while the television is running and then snap it back into place. Which made me think, which would make everybody think,
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t you see the seams between the panels? And the answer is, yeah, you kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of do see the seams, but if you pay enough money, they can essentially precisely
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacture the parts so that like the rectangles really touch each other, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that you can’t see the seams because like they’re so precision engineered and like the
⏹️ ▶️ John light overglow like hides the seams. So even in that technical, you can kind of understand why
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re expensive because A, it has to be precisely manufactured and B, placing however
⏹️ ▶️ John many millions of tiny R, G, and B LEDs is very expensive. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do have $30,000 burning a hole in your pocket, maybe look at micro LED before looking at the Sisense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Noted, for when I inevitably have $30,000 with no other purpose than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a absurdly expensive TV. Aye aye aye.
How DLSS works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me about DLSS, if you please. This was the, what does this acronym
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stand for? I forget now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Deep Learning Super Sampling, I believe, from memory. DLSS 4 was announced at CES. We
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about it last episode. A few people had some feedback about it. Hampus Jensen says, frame
⏹️ ▶️ John generation was added as part of DLSS 3. That was what I was trying to remember last time. I’m like, this is not the first version of DLSS
⏹️ ▶️ John to do frame generation, but the big innovation with DLSS 4 is it can add like three manufactured frames instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John just one. anyway continuing. DLSS3
⏹️ ▶️ John actually included this originally with just one frame and while the comparison, this is going back to Hampus, and while the comparison to motion
⏹️ ▶️ John smoothing on TV is apt, it’s not just a dumb average between two frames that uses motion and depth information
⏹️ ▶️ John from the game engine. And then Flunked Flank’s explanation of this is that DLSS frame generation
⏹️ ▶️ John introduced in DLSS3 is not just extrapolating the next frame based on previous frames, but rather interpolating
⏹️ ▶️ John between rendered frames. But wait, how is is it possible to add a frame before the one
⏹️ ▶️ John being shown? Did they invent a time machine? Well, no. About half a frame of latency is added to the display
⏹️ ▶️ John pipeline. After a frame has completed rendering, the display pipeline delays it a half a cycle
⏹️ ▶️ John until the next frame is about halfway through rendering. Another half cycle later, the next frame is done. DLSS
⏹️ ▶️ John runs the relatively quick interpolation step and then immediately displays the generated frame. Another half cycle later, the frame
⏹️ ▶️ John that was previously finished can now be displayed, rinse and repeat. So what it’s doing is basically it wants to interpolate
⏹️ ▶️ John between two frames, so it’s got one frame ready, and then it waits a little bit until the other frame is
⏹️ ▶️ John almost ready. And then it does an interpolation between the frame that’s ready and the frame that’s half-baked
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the in-between frame. And if you just repeat that pipeline, you get ahead of the game and you end up
⏹️ ▶️ John increasing the frame rate. There’s a Digital Foundry explanation video that tries to show this in action in like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Spider-Man game, if you wanna see what this looks like. And then something I meant to add last time
⏹️ ▶️ John is this whole DLSS, XDSS, I can’t remember all the things. There’s a bunch of different alphabet
⏹️ ▶️ John soups from every company. This family of technologies was originally focused on letting people
⏹️ ▶️ John run games at lower resolution, because obviously if you render fewer pixels, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John have a higher frame rate. Render the game at lower resolution and then upscale it to fill like a
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K screen. So you run it at 1080p, upscale it to 4K. That’s what most of these
⏹️ ▶️ John technologies were originally aimed at, because upscaling is obviously fast and easy to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John The upscaling has gotten better and better. I believe they added machine learning upscaling many years
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ago, and now it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be called AI upscaling. Like, can we upscale with a little bit more smarts than just like
⏹️ ▶️ John Photoshop, you know, where you just expand? Well, Photoshop probably does AI upscaling too, but instead of just like bicubic
⏹️ ▶️ John interpolation or whatever. Anyway, all these technologies, DLSS included, started
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of doing that and still do that, still can do that. But now DLSS, you know, starting
⏹️ ▶️ John with version three was getting to the frame generation game. So yeah, there’s lots of ways for you to
⏹️ ▶️ John make, get better frame rates in your games without relying
⏹️ ▶️ John on, what was it? Traditionally rendered frames or brute
⏹️ ▶️ John rendered frames. They use those same terms in the video. So these really are terms of art in the industry of
⏹️ ▶️ John rendered frames, having all these adjectives stuck on them to make them seem old fashioned.
Mac-monitor possibilities
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, yeah. All right. And then with regard to Mac monitors, Henry Chen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote in, have you all spent any time looking into the monitor options from lesser known Chinese manufacturers? Remind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me reminds me of about 10 years ago when you could get Korean branded 27 inch monitors for a fraction of the price
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the American ones. That said, the Korean one I had died a few years ago and I’m still using my 27 inch Dell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultra sharp, ultra sharp purchased around the same time. I found a thread on Mac rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey covering a lot of these and we’ll link to that. And then Henry says, here’s the one I would likely get, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kuikon, K-U-Y-C-O-N G27X. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aesthetically a clone of the XDR, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s 27 inches in 5K instead of 32 in 6K. But I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just looking at it, it looks good. I mean, visually, I’m not offended by it at
⏹️ ▶️ John So please load the web page. I didn’t put the images in the notes, so please load this web page now and take a look at this monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m guessing that you’re gonna make me feel dumb because I’m not seeing what you see.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, like you’re right. Like they’re trying to, the whole idea is presumably it’s using the same panels, a 27 inch 5K panel, 600 nits,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like it’s probably the same panel that’s like in 5K IMAX,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like that much I believe. And they’re trying to style it to look like the XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John But how do they do that and offer this panel in an XDR
⏹️ ▶️ John looking case for $1,000? because that’s the price, $1,000, which is, you know, incredibly inexpensive compared to
⏹️ ▶️ John like the studio display. Well, let’s look a little bit closer at this case, which is hard because they’re WebP
⏹️ ▶️ John images, and if you try to open the image in a new tab, it will download it because of some misconfiguration of their website. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John take a look at the back of the monitor with like the XDR Mac Pro looking holes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pattern is wrong. It’s like two layers sandwiched together that are offset.
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of, what’s actually on the front of the Mac Pro is like if you machined out these partial spheres.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just two sheets of metal with holes in them that are offset from each other. Yeah. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a like a 2D shadow puppet version of the much much more expensive machining that is
⏹️ ▶️ John completely unnecessarily done on the back of the monitor that I never see because it’s facing a wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got it. Okay. Look, I gotta say so the way I mentioned in the past that my desk is floating in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my office so I can I’m sometimes behind my desk like I have a a chair back there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take phone calls that are boring on. So I can sit there during a boring phone call and look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back of my Pro Display XDR, and even though it’s ridiculous, and even though this monitor needed no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco additional reasons to be expensive, it’s really cool. Like, it does
⏹️ ▶️ John look really awesome. It’s on the front of my Mac Pro. I look at it all the time. It’s a beautiful work of art,
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely unnecessary just for aesthetics,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but it’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly expensive because you have to have this thick piece of aluminum that you machine out into this incredibly complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John shapes. Like, it’s just so expensive. So this is trying to look like that, but it’s literally two flat
⏹️ ▶️ John pieces of metal with holes punched in it that are just slid past each other. So clever there. Second thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John take a look at the side view at the bottom there, because this comes with a stand, right? Looks a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John like the XDR stand, but look a little closer. I think it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, there’s no articulation. Like that thing coming out of it is just a
⏹️ ▶️ John flat piece of metal. There’s no hinges anywhere on the thing. It is not height adjustable. It’s not tilt adjustable.
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, oh, good. This is the position does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move. I’m giving an option for a how to show it comes with no stand because they copied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple that closely. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John regular stand 50 bucks, right? A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John expensive than apples, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the height adjustable stand is 100 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? But like the one you’re looking at the regular stand, like it looks like the XDR stand, but it does not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s gotta be. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So kudos to these people for, and it’s a VESA mount on the back of it, so it’s a standardized thing or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, I, my faith in the quality of the casing around this is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John low, but this is always the gamble with those things. Like the panels are only made by
⏹️ ▶️ John a small number of companies. If you know this is actually the panel that you want, and you think the surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ John case is aesthetically to your liking, and you think it will be reliable, and you think like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, things that are, people tend not to think about until they go wrong, Casey, like the connection of the
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C ports in the back of the monitor to the the printed circuit board that’s inside
⏹️ ▶️ John and how when that starts getting flaky, the whole monitor becomes no good. It’s hard to judge
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. Right. But anyway, yeah, there’s there are many sort of lesser known brands for
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors that use the same panels. It’s just a question of finding one of those that
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to work out for you in the end, because there’s so much more to monitor than just the panel, all that other stuff around it, including
⏹️ ▶️ John the case and the stand, but also the power supply and the way it’s designed and
⏹️ ▶️ John how the connectors connect to the circuit board. That all adds up to the sum total that is the monitor experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you got to be a little bit careful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Tim Wena writes with regard to the ASUS, ASUS, I’d never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get it right. I always say ASUS, but I have no idea if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All I know is that my version of ASUS is definitely wrong. Definitely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely incorrect. The ASUS PA32QCV, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a 32-inch, same resolution CXDR6K monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, at a glance, this looks pretty good, $1,200. Yeah, it’s not many LED,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s just got one big backlight, no dynamic backlight, so the black levels aren’t gonna be great. It’s 98% P3, it’s HDR 600. I
⏹️ ▶️ John finally found a webpage that explains what these display HDR 600 specs, what it means. Like, you just glance
⏹️ ▶️ John at it and say, look, it’s not gonna get brighter than 600 nits, which is fine, whatever, but we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John link to the performance criteria thing on displayhdr.org so you can see what it really means. But this thing has HDMI 2.1,
⏹️ ▶️ John DisplayPort 1.4, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, it’s a USB-C hub, it has
⏹️ ▶️ John a headphone jack, an ambient light sensor, built-in KVM, 96 watts power delivery, $1,200.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming this uses the same LCD panel as the XDR because it’s 32 inch and it’s the exact same resolution?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It does not use the same backlight, obviously, so it’s not HDR, it’s not 1600 nit, It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna have good black levels or whatever, but like it’s the XDR panel with
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of IO on it in a plasticky looking case, but it’s $1,200.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s less than the studio display with no stand and it’s basically, it’s a 6K monitor. And remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John studio display also doesn’t have HDR, also doesn’t have a mini LED backlight, also doesn’t do 120 Hertz, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So, and Asus is not a fly-by-night brand. So this looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like the best deal I have seen for someone who just wants 6K pixels, doesn’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR, and wants it from a brand that they’ve heard of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this looks amazing, because this is literally like you could buy five of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the cost of an XDR with its stand. Like this entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor, which comes with a stand, is only a little bit more than the stand for the Pro Display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XDR. Like, yeah, it’s not gonna be as good in some of the kind of edge,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some edge case specs that a lot of buyers won’t care about. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t do HDR at all, so if you want HDR, just this is not the monitor for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and look, these days, every third-party monitor is going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit of friction with macOS. Like there’s not gonna be as great integration in certain ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s gonna be downsides to using non-Apple monitors, as there always are, and I feel like these days those downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a little bit higher. But $1,200 for the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size panel as the $6,000 XDR. as the $6,000 XDR, like the same size and same resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That like, let me tell you, I haven’t moved to one of these panels a few years back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s amazing. And when I use a 27 inch now, it feels like I’m looking through a porthole. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have this much space, like screen space matters a lot to power users. And especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in certain use cases, but almost everybody who’s a power user can benefit from more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen space within, you know, up to a certain limit of like, how big is your field of view,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like physically from your eyes. And I think 32 inches maxes it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like this, I feel like I can use this monitor fully without turning my head. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is about as big of a monitor as I can use without turning my head. But to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this option, if this is good, I mean, look, we don’t know yet. We don’t have it. We don’t know what the experience is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it with a Mac. But if the experience of this monitor is good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for $1,200, this will be an incredible buy. Yeah, 100%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I was in the market today, given how frugal I am,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, this is probably what I would get. It’s incredible value for money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assuming it isn’t a pile of trash. But who knows? I mean, I hope not, but we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see. But as the character’s name, I can’t remember, says in Planet of the Apes,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s just so damn ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, it’s a shame.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not ugly, like the Dell 6K is ugly. This is just, it looks like a PC
OnePlus’s dynamic island
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so Dan Engler writes, in HP episode 500, you wondered what the industry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at large would call the Dynamic Island. Here’s what the phone maker OnePlus calls it. And this is from NKBHD’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey review of the OnePlus 13. Uh, somebody, maybe John, maybe it was Dan, put together a YouTube clip,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I very much appreciate. And apparently they call it live alert capsules.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, Dynamic Island is not great. I think that’s why we were talking about it. It’s like Dynamic Island. What an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of, you know, poetic name for, you know, making a
⏹️ ▶️ John lemonade out of the lemons that is the giant punch out needed for the face ID sensor. I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John say Dynamic Island is better than Live Alert Capsules. Oh yeah. It’s pretty rough. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially since this is like so clearly just a complete copy of Apple’s feature. You know, Apple did
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing with their cutout. We’re doing the same thing, but we call it Live Alert Capsules. So there you go. That’s what they
⏹️ ▶️ John would call it. Oh yeah. you
Tim Cook and Trump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk topics. And I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what to make of this. And I’m not sure I really want to talk about it, but we need to. So Tim Cook apparently donated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a million dollars to the Trump inauguration. Reading from Axios, Apple CEO,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to the president-elect Trump’s inaugural committee. Sources with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowledge of the donation tell Axios. The Verge writes, Cook’s donation follows similar commitments from OpenAI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CEO Sam Altman, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos through Amazon, And Meta, as big tech companies and executives,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked curry favor with the incoming administration. Unnamed sources tell Axios that, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes that inauguration is a great American tradition and is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m good. I’m good. Unity with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who? Right. The spirit of unity. We’re going to anger everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing, Apple is, quote, not expected, quote, to donate to the inauguration. And then later on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll link to The Verge also, where Google and Microsoft apparently are also doing the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John How much is everybody donating, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I thought everyone was donating exactly a million bucks, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I guess that’s just the price that’s stamped on it. Like, you know, do
⏹️ ▶️ John not pass go. Do not collect $200. Donate $1 million. Everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, interestingly, they all decided they’re going to donate exactly $1 million to the inauguration
⏹️ ▶️ John committee. And you may be wondering, what is donating to the inauguration, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John like the event where the person becomes president? Why
⏹️ ▶️ John would giving money to that event be helpful or useful
⏹️ ▶️ John in any possible way? And I think before we talk about the people doing it, it’s worth considering why that’s the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s basically because it’s a way to get money while looking like you’re helping to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for a party. And really what’s happening is it’s a sort of, not money laundering, but might as well be,
⏹️ ▶️ John like many government things. Some amount of money is going towards this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this thing is somehow going to find a way to spend all of that money by hiring all
⏹️ ▶️ John the companies that are friends with the incoming administration,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they will get all this money. And just look at what happened to all the money that was given to the 2016 Trump
⏹️ ▶️ John Inauguration Committee. It’s just a way to enrich
⏹️ ▶️ John people associated with the incoming administration. And so that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John donating money to the inauguration committee is seen as a thing that is desirable. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, you’re not actually paying for a party. What you’re doing is paying for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John obscene price that my brother-in-law’s DJ company
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to charge us for whatever it is that they’re supposedly doing for the inauguration or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ll just say it’s a bribe. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a lot faster way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say what John just said. It’s just a bribe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s just basic. I mean, a lot of government stuff is like this, where it’s just basic government corruption,
⏹️ ▶️ John which the Trump administration is a corruption machine. Everything is corruption. But
⏹️ ▶️ John every administration has some form of patronage, where you give money and I hire it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s whole sections of the government that are meant to try to stop this, to say, well, we won’t just let
⏹️ ▶️ John you pick your brother-in-law’s company. In fact, we’ll have a whole process for figuring out who wins the bid for this contract
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. And then the companies all involved find out how to subvert that process and make sure their brother-in-law’s company
⏹️ ▶️ John still gets the money and the cycle goes on. But Trump, the Trump administration in 2016 and again
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2020 is like, we don’t dispense with the notion to be even pretend we’re doing anything legitimate. It’s just straight up corruption.
⏹️ ▶️ John Give us the money and it will go to all the people we want to give it to. And we’re not even going to pretend we’re actually spending
⏹️ ▶️ John it on anything for real. So yeah, it’s a payoff. here’s some money in exchange
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and let me just also put another explanation point on what John just said here, because I’ll say it even more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly. To say that this is just the nature of the game is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do a disservice to most of the players in this game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to the people listening, because that kind of equivocates it with, like, oh, this is just all politicians are this corrupt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what we saw during the first Trump administration, and there’s absolutely no end in sight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Now the second one is that they take corruption to another level. This it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a difference in degree so great that it is not comparable to what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost any other US president has ever done. Like it is a very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of corruption. It is first of all right out for everyone to see like there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no it’s shameless.
⏹️ ▶️ John no they have no shame. There’s no they don’t try to hide anything about they hire their
⏹️ ▶️ John idiot son-in-law to be like an important government position if a thing has no experiences in it. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even going to pretend there’s a reason for this. It’s straight up corruption. What are you going to do about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, he was elected by this time a pretty good margin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco despite being a convicted felon, a rapist, a traitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our country. I mean, there’s the list of crimes is pretty severe here. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, you know, people like him. So obviously he knows he can do whatever he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants. He did last time, nothing happened. And so he’s going through the same thing again. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we have getting back to the topic at hand here. Uh, now we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the, well, most of the big tech people basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just right out in the open, giving him protection money, like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going right in and saying, you know what, we’re just going to give him a huge amount of money here just speak just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can curry favor with him and and what we see you know look I’ve seen a lot of people you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say online oh well this is just shrewd business from from Tim Cook so you know because they’re he’s gonna because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Trump’s gonna put tariffs from things I’m from things from China so Tim Cook has to protect the troops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know make sure that all these thousands of people whose jobs he’s responsible for these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sir surely they can’t be hit by terrorists and from things from China. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my reaction to this is, first of all, the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Tim Cook put everything in China, despite the political environment of the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of decades, that is his fault, largely. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, there are certain volumes and certain entries, but Apple could have moved slowly out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco China. They could have done that sooner and more than they have been doing that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re stuck there. And that’s, that’s on them. That’s the Tim Cook era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right there. Like that’s on them. So that’s number one huge strategic problem that they have. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s right on Tim Cook. Now, number two, does he have to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ball here and literally bribe the incoming president? First of all, will that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even matter? Trump turns around and fires his gun at whoever he wants to all the time, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people close to him. It’s a waste of a million bucks in my opinion because it’s not good It’s that’s if Trump wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get that money from apples products He will like if he wants with the tariffs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. This won’t matter number three Suppose these tariffs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually do go into effect, which that’s I mean, that’s a big F. Let’s be honest It’s kind of a severe thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you never know with Trump. So suppose these tariffs actually happen Shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s products be hit with them? Like, if you’re gonna have a tariff from products made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in China, isn’t that what most Apple products are?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see any moral high ground for Apple to not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be tariffed the same way everybody else would be. To me, that is also morally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indefensible. So, no part of this move by Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strikes me as either good for business or at all justifiable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook is a bullsh** artist. He’s always been a bullsh** artist. He’s a big corporation CEO.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of them are. That’s kinda how it goes. He puts on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great show, but how much he cares about certain things, and you know, he’s not a terrible person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He does care about certain important things. You know, his environmental, the company’s environmental efforts under his reign have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been very good, and that continues in certain ways. But when it comes down to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom line, he’s a business CEO like every other business CEO. So when something threatens to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attack his bottom line, he’s gonna do what it takes and he does not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the courage to stand up to this in any other way. This is a complete lack of courage. This is a complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lack of good business. This is the result of kissing ass and bribing a new president to cover up for strategic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco errors he made in the past and to protect his bottom line. Screw everyone else.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have a slightly different take than Marco. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco first, I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John explain why I think Marco is so angry about it, because it’s worth saying explicitly in case
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t get it from the vibe. Why are people mad about Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ John donating a million dollars to the president’s inauguration committee? The reason
⏹️ ▶️ John is that people who dislike everything that
⏹️ ▶️ John Trump stands for don’t want to see him get support
⏹️ ▶️ John from anybody for anything. So if someone, if like the CEO of a company you like
⏹️ ▶️ John does literally anything to try to help or
⏹️ ▶️ John support or seem to endorse in any possible way,
⏹️ ▶️ John anything having to do with anything that Trump wants, that’s why people are mad.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, you can’t, we don’t want you to smile at him, we don’t want you to shake his
⏹️ ▶️ John hand, we don’t want you to like just nothing, Because it’s like everything he stands for is the opposite of everything
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook says he stands for. And so you’d be like, oh, it’s not a lot of money. Who cares? Whatever, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John The whole thing is like the symbolism of the gesture. We don’t think that this million dollars is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John make a big difference in anything in the grand scheme of things. It is Apple, a company that we all care about,
⏹️ ▶️ John a company that stands for, claims to stand for, and I think does stand for, essentially the opposite of everything
⏹️ ▶️ John Donald Trump stands for in terms of issues that people care about,
⏹️ ▶️ John is giving this money. So that’s why people are mad, right? Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m mad about it too, because I also hate everything that Trump stands for and think it is the opposite of everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple and Tim Cook stands for, right? But they have done this, and so have tons of other
⏹️ ▶️ John tech companies. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, now, slow down. Strictly speaking, Apple hasn’t done this. Tim has done this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a distinction that I think does not matter at all. This is just a shield. Like this is Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there is something to that a little bit, but come on, it’s Tim Cook, it’s Apple, we know. Like there’s no getting
⏹️ ▶️ John around the fact that this is Apple. You know, you can just say Apple. It’s Tim Cook, but it’s Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John For all these companies that are doing this, Tim Cook in particular, I think, has
⏹️ ▶️ John a reason to believe that it will be good for Apple’s business,
⏹️ ▶️ John because he did the same stuff last time Trump was president. Wasn’t a million dollars, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John that whole like, oh, come and stand in front of me and I’ll stand next to you and smile and listen to you say the wrong things about
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro factory and like whatever, that whole PR thing where he was with
⏹️ ▶️ John Trump about the company that made the Mac Pros and stuff, that, you know, basically kissing
⏹️ ▶️ John up Trump and trying to make him look good by being, by standing next to him and allowing all that to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John was supporting an administration that lots of people didn’t like and made people angry
⏹️ ▶️ John and it got Apple, in theory, not provably, a carve out in
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of regulations and rules, I forget what they were, that would have hurt Apple a lot financially,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for whatever reason, Apple was excluded from those, interesting. So
⏹️ ▶️ John will, you know, kissing up to Trump get you a business advantage?
⏹️ ▶️ John History has shown that it is possible, perhaps even likely, right? That’s the nature of corruption.
⏹️ ▶️ John He is a corrupt politician. Bribing corrupt politicians gets you something. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re corrupt. Like that’s the whole point. Bribing an honest politician doesn’t get you anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of companies give money to the inaugurations and funds of lots of, you know, that’s the thing that tech companies
⏹️ ▶️ John always do. It’s like, we just give money to all politicians. People are angry about that. Like, you can’t give it to all politicians when half the politicians
⏹️ ▶️ John are doing terrible things. But like, anyway, we just do that because it’s just a thing that we do. But like, in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John if a politician thinks they at least have to pretend to be honest, they’re not just gonna be like, oh, take
⏹️ ▶️ John your money and then write into the law, Everybody gets this law except for Apple. Don’t ask me why.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nah, right? That’s corruption, right? So I think Tim Cook has some reason
⏹️ ▶️ John to believe that giving this money will get Apple an advantage because it did last time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s terrible. It is an indictment of the Trump administration, but I think there is
⏹️ ▶️ John reason to believe that this will be a smart business move for Apple. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John a smart business move for Apple. Marco thinks that they should take their lumps along with
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody else. If Trump does something stupid that makes the price of Apple products go up because they’re made in China,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should take that because guess what? They are made in China, right? And they should just take that the way it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one possible position. The other position, which Marco said in a funny voice before but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is a position that has some merit, is sort of the position that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll put a link in the show notes to, as I actually looked at this quote because I couldn’t remember it exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ John that has some historical connotations that are not positive. This was
⏹️ ▶️ John a Wikipedia article about Charles Irwin Wilson, who was up for the nomination for Secretary
⏹️ ▶️ John of Defense many decades ago. And this was
⏹️ ▶️ John back when people really actually needed to pretend to be somewhat honest. And during his confirmation hearings, they were like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, wait a second, because he was previously the CEO of General Motors. You’re going to be Secretary of Defense,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you were running General Motors. Isn’t that unfair? Aren’t you going to have a conflict of interest
⏹️ ▶️ John like between like what you want? You know, you want things that are good for General Motors, but now you’re supposed to be making decisions for the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John country. But you’re not going to surely not you’re not going to do anything that hurts General Motors.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you imagine being being afraid of a conflict like that, given the insane conflicts that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey everybody has in
⏹️ ▶️ John government, including everybody? Anyway, it was a different time. And it was answered in the confirmation hearings.
⏹️ ▶️ John But his often misquoted answer was essentially to paraphrase that he thinks that
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s good for General Motors is also good for the United States and vice versa. So he’s like, well, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to do things just to benefit General Motors, but General Motors is so big and so important
⏹️ ▶️ John that what’s good for General Motors is also good for the whole country. So I’ll just do what’s good for the country, and it will
⏹️ ▶️ John also be good for General Motors or vice versa. And that was widely condemned as saying like, oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John think, you know, the country and General Motors are equal and just as important to each other. And so you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even draw a distinction. You’re like, I’m just going to do what’s good for John R. Morris, because as we all know, whatever is good for GM is good for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the rest of the country is like, no, that’s not the way it works. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that angle on Apple is perhaps a lot more apt than it was for GM. Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John huge, not just in terms of the people they employ and the money they
⏹️ ▶️ John make, but also in terms of, given the current financial situation,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much of every private person’s retirement who has any kind of retirement account
⏹️ ▶️ John is unknowingly wrapped up in Apple and three other tech companies, right? Because we all, like people who have 401ks
⏹️ ▶️ John have mutual funds and they’re invested in the stock market. And what are the big players in the stock market? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what percentage of people’s portfolios are unknowingly made up of the big tech companies?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they don’t know that because it’s a mutual fund. It’s not like they’re buying individual Apple or Google or Microsoft stock. But like the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John is tech giants are tech giants for a reason. Financially speaking, the footprint
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple across the financial fortunes of the entire country is huge. Kind of like GMOs
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the day. What’s good for Apple is good for the country. What’s bad for Apple is bad
⏹️ ▶️ John for the country because we’re so freaking big. And you may not even think you have any interest in Apple whatsoever, but guess what you
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of do because if we get screwed over and we get destroyed by these tariffs, your 401k is gonna go
⏹️ ▶️ John down and you’re not gonna understand why. And it’s because tech dominates our industry, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That angle does exist. Now, it is extremely charitable
⏹️ ▶️ John to ascribe to Tim Cook the motivation that he wants to essentially protect the fortunes
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the people who are financially dependent on Apple. It may be true, it may not be true. I don’t know what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in Tim Cook’s heart, but practically speaking, it is a fact that if Apple gets
⏹️ ▶️ John massively hurt financially, obviously Apple employees get hurt by that because a lot of their retirement
⏹️ ▶️ John and compensation wrapped up in Apple stock. Tim Cook himself, who cares, he’s a billionaire. He’s not worried
⏹️ ▶️ John about that and no one else is. So he’s not in it for his own personal wealth or whatever. But tons of
⏹️ ▶️ John people rely financially on Apple maintaining at least its current level
⏹️ ▶️ John of health. So, and trying to protect the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who depend on Apple, employees, investors, everyone who’s got stuff on their 401k,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s something to that. Now you could say that’s It’s not worth the price you’re paying. You’re enabling
⏹️ ▶️ John the evil Trump administration or whatever. But the most charitable and noble interpretation
⏹️ ▶️ John of what he’s doing is personally sacrificing his own reputation
⏹️ ▶️ John and perhaps historically his own view in history. Because if Trump turns even
⏹️ ▶️ John worse during this term, everybody who did anything to support him is going to, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to go down in history as like the person who helped out this
⏹️ ▶️ John even more terrible person, right? Personally sacrificing himself because he knows people are going to hate him
⏹️ ▶️ John for this and they do, right? And he donated himself rather than donating
⏹️ ▶️ John it through Apple and that doesn’t deflect the blame from Apple because again, it’s obviously an Apple donation done
⏹️ ▶️ John for the purposes of protecting Apple like it’s clear what it’s for but by doing it himself, he is
⏹️ ▶️ John putting his personal reputation in the trash can, right? For doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this in exchange for protecting the company. And I honestly believe, again I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what’s his heart, but I honestly believe he’s not doing it to protect his riches. He doesn’t care about the money for himself.
⏹️ ▶️ John He knows he’s got enough money. He’s gonna give all his money away anyway. He seems like a nice person. He’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John someone like some of the billionaires we know who can never feel like they have enough
⏹️ ▶️ John power and money and always have to have more. I don’t think that’s Tim Cook’s MO. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think he’s doing it to protect Apple. Could be argued that Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John his tunnel vision about protecting Apple is causing him to miss the wider picture, which will say there’s protecting
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, but now you’re enabling this terrible administration. On the other side of that, you can say, is this amount of
⏹️ ▶️ John money going to materially affect how much evil the Trump administration does? Or is it just going to enrich
⏹️ ▶️ John the brother in law DJ? Because in the grand scheme of things, it’s just the inauguration fund, which is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John skimmed off of by a whole fleet of grifters that, yeah, those people probably go off and do bad things, but honestly, they’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ John just blow it on jet skis or whatever. So I hate this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think everybody who is against the Trump administration hates seeing Apple support the administration
⏹️ ▶️ John in any way. But I also feel like I’ve been here before. I hated seeing Tim Cook standing next to Tim Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac Pro factory. I hated the Mac Pro’s good name being sullied by that whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh. Yeah. Cheesy
⏹️ ▶️ John peasy. But like, but he did get a carve out for Apple. Is it fair that Apple has a carve
⏹️ ▶️ John out? No, it’s not. It’s corruption. Is it a more defensible,
⏹️ ▶️ John more moral stance to not give into that corruption and not pay the bribe?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, but morality is not just a one-dimensional thing of like, do you participate in a corrupt
⏹️ ▶️ John system by paying off the corrupt politician or do you not? That’s an easy decision. That decision doesn’t happen
⏹️ ▶️ John in a vacuum. Because there’s also the people who all wanted to retire from Apple this year,
⏹️ ▶️ John but when Apple’s stock price gets dropped in half because Trump puts giant tariffs on it that hit Apple, Apple, all those people can’t retire
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. What is the moral factor in, you know, one person sacrificing his
⏹️ ▶️ John own personal million dollars and personal historical reputation in exchange for protecting the financial fortunes of all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, see that to me, that is a really dangerous argument. Because once you start saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we have to let Apple keep making as much money as possible, because if you don’t let them keep making as much money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as possible, through basically whatever means they deem necessary, then we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harm all these people’s retirement funds. So then doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean you need to grow without bound. It just means if something terrible is going to happen like these China travel tariffs
⏹️ ▶️ John that again might not ever happen. But anyway, if these if these terrible things that were threatened didn’t come to pass, it was not
⏹️ ▶️ John just a matter of growing without bound or even just maintaining. It’s a matter of like massively hurting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s oh god, there’s so much wrong with this. But like, you know, I think number one is like if if Apple does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, so suppose again, if these tariffs do happen and Apple gets a carve out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under the argument that this is good for people’s retirement funds and the employees and everything. I mean it totally would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well okay but like first of all does Apple need any more unfair advantages?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re a monopolist in so many areas already like so for instance like you know should should the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost less than like a high-end Amazon Kindle? Those are made in China.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know that’s that’s the nature of corruption yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re the people with money bribe. Right what about like a like Sonos most of their products are made in China. How about the remarkable tablet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s made in China? Should the remarkable tablet cost $1,500 when the iPad is $700 because they weren’t big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to give a million dollars to Trump? To say that the solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to corruption is more corruption… It’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John solution to corruption, but it is harm reduction. How can I make the least
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of harm come out of this terrible situation we’re all in?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, what should happen is if these tariffs end up ever being real, every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco American who voted in or who chose not to in this past election should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel the pain of what they voted for. Honestly. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John We know how well voters are able to connect the consequences of their vote to things that they don’t like. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reelected Trump. If they vote for a guy who says, let’s raise the prices of everything in China, everything from China, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do it. I dare you. See what happens. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we’ll see how it works. Anyway, I don’t support this. If I were Tim Cook, I wouldn’t have done
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But I’m not Tim Cook. I don’t understand the what’s in, first of
⏹️ ▶️ John all, I don’t understand what’s in his heart. And second of all, I don’t understand the responsibilities he feels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s in his heart is completely irrelevant. You judge him by his actions. Look at what he’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but his actions, net, net, his actions may be reducing the total amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of harm that happens during the Trump administration when you count the number of people times amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of harm. You know what I mean? Like he’s doing the most harm to himself, and in exchange he’s protecting a
⏹️ ▶️ John whole lot of other people from consequences. He’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cheap-ass coward is what he is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hurting competitors, but like no, that’s the difficulty of ethical and moral decisions to deciding, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John this we may discuss this in a future episode, the good of the one versus the good of the many, and how do you balance that? Ha ha ha ha
⏹️ ▶️ John ha ha ha. Right, it’s not so cut and dry. Like, you know, we all hate it,
⏹️ ▶️ John we all don’t like it. I don’t, I’m not gonna come out and say it is a noble move by Tim Cook, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know that it’s a noble move by Tim Cook, but like, I’m not ready to say that the consequences of it
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t actually be better overall when you multiply the amount of harm times the number of
⏹️ ▶️ John people it affects. And no, it’s not fair. It’s corrupt and terrible. Like I’m not saying this like, oh, you fixed the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not fair to Sonos. It’s not fair to any, it’s not fair to the people who vote. It’s not fair to anything. None of this is fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing good is happening here. It’s just trying to figure out how can we minimize the harm. And on that front,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think one of the things that you can argue is like with the slippery slope thing, which I think is true, is like, okay, well, the inauguration, a
⏹️ ▶️ John million dollars, personal donation, like in the end, is that going to enable any harm that wasn’t going to
⏹️ ▶️ John happen already anyway? Probably not. But there are things that you can do later by, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, now I need another few million, another few billion I need to do to support this nominee for this or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can’t just say like, well, whatever bribe I give, it’s fine because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John reducing harm. Maybe you’re not, maybe you shouldn’t support the nomination of the devil
⏹️ ▶️ John incarnate to some government position in exchange for Apple avoiding the tariffs because the devil incarnate is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, do devil things, right? Like, it’s just, you can’t just say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what you do, it’s fine because there’s some good that comes of it, right? I think this is very
⏹️ ▶️ John close to the threshold because you are giving money, but it’s not a lot of money, and it’s just mostly gonna be sucked up by ancillary
⏹️ ▶️ John grifters, right? And it’s not, nothing bad that is going to happen wasn’t already going to happen anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John with or without this million dollars and yada yada, right? But it is actually a slippery
⏹️ ▶️ John slope, and that’s one of the things that people hate about this. It’s like, okay, well, once you’ve decided you’re ready to bribe corrupt politicians, when does that
⏹️ ▶️ John stop? Do you just bribe them all the time now? Once you know the bribes work, like this is how corrupt
⏹️ ▶️ John governments happen, it’s like, oh, well, everyone knows you have to bribe to get anything done. We don’t want that to be the system.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, a corrupt politician has been elected, and a bunch of the largest tech companies
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world are all saying we are going to now pay the bribe in hope of avoiding the things that he’s been threatening us with,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably in exchange for getting bribes. That’s not a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precedent. And then the result of that will be every single smaller company who can’t afford
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bribe the politician is going to have their products squeezed even further out of the market.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and by the way, that’s not just like, forget about corrupt politicians or whatever. That’s true of everything having
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with anything, no matter who’s in the administration. The big companies always get advantages. The whole regulatory
⏹️ ▶️ John capture and open AI being in favor, of constraints on AI,
⏹️ ▶️ John like regulations regarding AI, because they know they’re big enough and rich enough to navigate them and nobody else is.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re squeezing out their competitors by trying to get regulations on the books that only they can navigate.
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft has done the same thing. Like, setting aside Trump, this is just something that big businesses always do. They
⏹️ ▶️ John get advantages over small businesses by donating money to politicians.
⏹️ ▶️ John Citizens United has made sure that that is a thing that can continue to happen in this country, one of the many things that is
⏹️ ▶️ John broken about our system. And every big company does it. And it is unfair to small companies. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John worse than that, because the person they’re bribing wants to do a lot more than
⏹️ ▶️ John tweak regulations to favor big tech companies. But it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John unprecedented. And it has always been happening. And it has always been terrible. And it’s one of the many,
⏹️ ▶️ John many things wrong with our country.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s just I think the problem is something that I’ve been struggling with a fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit, both in a personal level and a professional level. We, well, I shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say we, I fancy Apple as a company that tries to do good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a company that’s trying to do right by people. And Tim Cook is a good man. Who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who, who cares about things that I care about and there it’s, everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. They’re all good. And rank and file Apple by and large are good people. Tim,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you both have said, predominantly John is probably, I think he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly a good person, but as Apple gets bigger and as their monopolies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get stronger and as they operate as a bigger and bigger company with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the bad that comes of that, it’s real hard to be really enthusiastic about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple. And I think this comes in fits and spurts. I think if you were to plot the vibes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ATP over the last 10 years, there have been times it’s been hard to be a fan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Apple and there’s been times it’s been easy. And it’s funny because right now in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey products, by and large, I think it is a pretty good and easy time to be a fan of Apple. And yeah, you can start saying, well, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this? What about that? But I mean, look at how great Macs are these days. iPhones are iPads. I mean, these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are all great products and in that sense, it’s easy to be a fan, but it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me to come to terms with, I don’t really want to support a company that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is a clear to me anyway, a clear monopolist and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t give a shit that that’s the case. Like they just don’t care. It’s like, yeah, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are owed this money. We are owed 30% of everything. You know, we’re owed, we, we put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a lot of hard work. We’re owed it until the end of time. And that’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be enthusiastic about. And it’s hard to find a way to be enthusiastic about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a man who, even though on the whole, I think is a good person who donates to this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just frigging monster, like, I’m sorry if you’re enthusiastic about Trump,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe you’re cackling and excited about what we’re saying, but I am not, I am not, and we are not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and to shoulder up to slash kind of snuggle with him
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just frigging gross. It’s just gross. And I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey squint and I can think of a thousand different reasons why it’s, by some definitions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right thing to do. And this is what John was talking about, but it’s also just gross. And so it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be enthusiastic about this company that I have enjoyed for a long time, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as long as John, but I’ve enjoyed for a long time. And to some degree I’ve hung, like I’ve hitched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my horse professionally or hitched my cart rather, uh, it’s professionally to this horse in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many different ways, not only this very program, but you know, the apps that I I write,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re only on Apple platforms. And yes, I could switch. And yes, I could do a bunch of things, but I don’t want to do those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. So it’s making me kind of feel like, I mean, I’m being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit dramatic now, but it’s making me kind of have that, oh, wait, are we the baddies moment. And I think Apple are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the baddies. And I think Tim, at least in this action, is a baddie. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can justify it. I can make a passionate argument why this was 100% the right thing for him to do. But it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hollow argument, because I don’t think he should have done it. And it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes me feel disgusting. It makes me feel super gross, and I hate every bit of it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t. That’s part of the sacrifice, is that if we imagine ourself in that position, we would never want to do it, because it would feel
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it would be so soul-destroying and denial. Like, especially if it were us in our position, where
⏹️ ▶️ John we know how we feel internally, we were like, how could you ever bring yourself to do that? Because it would feel so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you were convinced, which you may or may not be, that it actually is the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that produces the least long-term harm, you still have to eat that
⏹️ ▶️ John beep sandwich. See, I do it myself. I don’t know. I’m not that smart.
⏹️ ▶️ John have to eat that beep sandwich yourself. Like, why do you have to do that? All right, so now I gave you like the
⏹️ ▶️ John noble Tim Cook self-sacrifice version of it. Here is the less noble, less charitable version, which you can decide if it’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John or less likely. One area where I think it is possible that Tim Cook actually
⏹️ ▶️ John does agree with some of the things that the Trump administration stands for is
⏹️ ▶️ John when it comes to regulating big business. Tim Cook probably
⏹️ ▶️ John wants what’s best for all the people in the world, but he thinks, he may possibly think,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is very feasible, plausible to imagine him thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John that the person or entity best positioned to
⏹️ ▶️ John decide what is good for all people of the world is Apple and not the
⏹️ ▶️ John US government. Therefore, Tim Cook may agree that less
⏹️ ▶️ John regulation on big tech companies is better than more. Tim Cook’s recent experience
⏹️ ▶️ John with the EU and the DMA is some evidence that Tim Cook thinks
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe governments don’t know what’s best when it comes to making decisions that affect large
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers of consumers. And so, even though Tim Cook may be opposed to pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ John everything that the Trump administration stands for, he may, in his billionaire heart of hearts,
⏹️ ▶️ John believe that this kind of regulation of tech companies
⏹️ ▶️ John is harmful and those kind of decisions are best left to benevolent,
⏹️ ▶️ John wise, smart people like Tim Cook who run the companies. And it’s very difficult,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, to become a billionaire captain of industry and not
⏹️ ▶️ John start to believe that the people or entities that know best
⏹️ ▶️ John are the captains of industry, the private companies that have all
⏹️ ▶️ John this money and power. Especially if you are, as I think Tim Cook is, a benevolent captain
⏹️ ▶️ John of industry who does want what’s best for people and isn’t in it to enrich
⏹️ ▶️ John himself past all reason for, you know, like there’s no actual reason
⏹️ ▶️ John any billionaire needs more money, but some people just can’t stop trying to amass money and power as if it’s some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of game and they’d have some kind of terrible sickness. I don’t think that’s his position, but I think he does believe governments
⏹️ ▶️ John should not be telling Apple what to do. And Trump also seems to believe mostly to
⏹️ ▶️ John enrich, mostly because of a hangover from his own life as a quote-unquote business person that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, rich people should be able to do whatever they want and the government should not tell them what to do. So I should be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John discriminate and, you know, do terrible things and cheat on my taxes and
⏹️ ▶️ John there should be no regulations on me and it should be able to put lead in the Cheerios that I feed to the kids and like that’s the world Trump wants.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Tim Cook doesn’t want any of those bad things, but he absolutely does not want the government telling Apple what to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John So he is actually aligned with the Trump administration’s
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed possible, you know, as much as they have any kind of coherent anything, he is aligned
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. And so I think as much as he hates Trump
⏹️ ▶️ John and what he stands for, if there is an opportunity to do something that
⏹️ ▶️ John produces less government interference with Apple, he would do that no matter what, no matter who was
⏹️ ▶️ John in the administration or out, he would be lobbying for, I don’t think you should make more rules that govern Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t do what the EU did. It’s bad what they’re doing. Don’t do that here in the US.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t regulate us. We know what’s best. We’re Apple. We don’t need any more regulations on us at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Regulate our competitors, fine, but not us. So any rule that’s going to affect us, we don’t want.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can see that in every kind of shareholder meeting at Apple, where there’s sort of like shareholder proposals.
⏹️ ▶️ John We think Apple should do X. We think Apple should do Y. And the default answer is always, Apple recommends you as
⏹️ ▶️ John a shareholder vote against this, because we don’t want anyone telling us what to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it. Let’s reframe this a little bit, though. The Department of Justice currently has an open lawsuit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Apple. For now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so why else might Apple and might Tim Cook support Trump?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Huh, maybe the million dollars and all the support, maybe this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just about tariffs. Maybe it’s also because Apple wants the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regulatory pressure and the lawsuits from the Department of Justice to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away. Now under pretty much any other non or less corrupt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco president that would be unheard of. Under this president that will become commonplace.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we are saying, the two of you maybe, are saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things from the point of view of Tim Cook really doesn’t support Trump but he’s gritting and bearing it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the good of whatever. What if Tim Cook does support Trump? Like I think Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually literally does support Trump. He absolutely does not.
⏹️ ▶️ John He does not support Trump. How do you know? He’s a gay man. He’s not going to support
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a president who hates gay people. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think he’s the only gay man who would have voted for Trump? Like, no, of course
⏹️ ▶️ John not. But I’m saying he absolutely does not. He loves the environment. Trump thinks climate change
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t real. He’s, he does not. Tim Cook, every fiber of Tim Cook’s being is counter
⏹️ ▶️ John to everything that Trump stands for, except for the part where the government doesn’t interfere with what Apple does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, to me, people are bending over backwards trying to justify why Tim might be doing this despite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hating Trump. It sure looks like Tim Cook supports Trump, period. Like, that’s it. What else do
⏹️ ▶️ John But he didn’t he didn’t lobby for him to get elected. He didn’t give he didn’t give millions of dollars to help get him elected like Musk
⏹️ ▶️ John did. It’s clear that he did not support Trump.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When every other big business person gives Trump some kind of financial support, we all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say they’re a Trump supporter. Why don’t we say that about Tim Cook?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, he only is giving this after he’s been elected, when he has the power to do something that affects Apple. Tim Cook is a
⏹️ ▶️ John Trump supporter. What do you call it? If he had been giving stump speeches for Trump, then maybe I would believe you. But even that would
⏹️ ▶️ John take a lot of speeches to think it wasn’t some weird strategy because personally, from everything we know of Tim
⏹️ ▶️ John Cook, he’s not, he’s not, I mean, he, he was out there trying to get
⏹️ ▶️ John Hillary Clinton elected in the first time Trump was elected. Like it’s not, it’s not a Tim Cook thing. It’s a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Things change. A lot of people support Trump now who didn’t then.
⏹️ ▶️ John As you noted, it doesn’t really matter what’s in Tim Cook’s heart. It only matters what he does. But I would bet such
⏹️ ▶️ John a huge amount of money that Tim Cook hates Trump and everything he stands for, except for the part where he doesn’t regulate Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Tim Cook likes making a lot of money from Apple and I think if you compare… You think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, not well, no, I think he’s motivated by his company’s fortune which is related very heavily to his personal fortune but listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you compare the behavior of Tim Cook in all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various App Store regulation lawsuit kind of stuff, right? Compare that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think Tim Cook really would like to be a little friendlier and less horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the app store in-app purchase policies, but he’s, for the good of his company, he’s making the difficult decision to be
⏹️ ▶️ John No, he’s doing that because he thinks Apple knows best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and he thinks Apple shouldn’t be sued by the Department of Justice probably too, and Apple shouldn’t have tariffs too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see why these are different things. That’s just Tim Cook. That’s him. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think he should be more aware of how many LGBTQ people he has in his own company who have a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with this and are literally have their lives threatened by this administration. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about supporting the troops. He doesn’t support them at all. It’s all about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and money. That’s that’s what I was saying. How much additional harm is happening from donating a million to the inauguration
⏹️ ▶️ John versus how much additional harm for doing something more substantial like there is a line right here and he Tim Cook is walking
⏹️ ▶️ John right up to that line. You maybe think he’s already over that line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. Tim Cook flew over that line in his private jet. But now listen now go back for a minute.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do want to, what Casey said a few minutes ago, I think is worth discussing. You know, it is hard, at this time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you are as fired up as I am, or as Casey is, and maybe John’s down there, I don’t know where,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John’s on a different planet right now, a planet of compassion and understanding. Casey and I are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m mad about it too, I’m just able to see more sides of it. I mean, as
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I said in other conversations about this, the way Tim Cook has dealt with China is also enraging in
⏹️ ▶️ John similar ways. Yes, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like, like, he’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the way and he has and Tim Cook has actually articulated, like, whether it’s the truth of his motivation
⏹️ ▶️ John or not. He has articulated he said, This is why I’m doing this with China, because he thinks it is better to engage
⏹️ ▶️ John with them and do the best we can then to do what Facebook did, which is like saying, No, we’re not dealing with them at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. And you can argue about that. Is it better to deal with them and engage with them and let China into
⏹️ ▶️ John your data centers and do all the stuff that you would never do sacrificing Apple’s Apple’s customers. I think that it’s easier to argue
⏹️ ▶️ John against that because Apple’s moves in China open up millions of Apple customer to
⏹️ ▶️ John invasive stuff that Apple supposedly doesn’t want and stands against. But Tim Cook says, no, it’s better to engage with China.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that gets back to Marco’s thing of like, well, maybe it’s better to engage with China because they manufacture all your stuff. And if they didn’t, you’d be screwed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that convenient? Yeah. No. So I think it’s important to kind of bring this down a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back down to the John’s planet of compassion. But you know, we’re cases on on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earth, John, I don’t know what part of this whole system you’re in, but anyway, to bring this back a little bit, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Casey said a minute ago is like, how do we process this as Apple customers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple fans? And I think that’s a worthy discussion to have because it’s hard. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not an easy thing to do. And I, you know, I brought this up a couple times in the past, I think it’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analogy. A while ago, our friend CGP Grey said somewhere on a podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whenever he complained about Apple stuff, would suggest, why don’t you move to Android? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he compared changing your major computing platform to be like moving to a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco country in terms of disruption to your day-to-day life. Which also comes up having to do with Trump.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, well exactly. And so I think it’s a very apt analogy of like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do we do if we disagree with the political moves of the person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the top of Apple? What do we do about that? Do we stop buying Apple products? Do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get rid of the ones we have? Do we move to different platforms? And I think you can, it’s a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a direct parallel to like, if your country gets, you know, bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leadership, if you have a bad election, you get bad leadership, do you move to a different country?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, obviously, like there are certain aspects of moving to a different country that are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people are like, well, that’s a ridiculous analogy to changing operating systems. It’s much easier to change operating systems, but in some ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s easier, in some ways it’s harder. Like, as Casey was saying, our entire businesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are related to Apple, and in many ways, intricately tied to Apple. Like, it would be difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for us to continue doing this show and continue making our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps if we all stopped buying Apple products and tried to move off of all of them. Like, that would be difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we could maybe make apps for other platforms, and you know, and you can, again, look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco country analogy of like, well, are the other platforms much better in these regards?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do the other platforms have much better leadership? Because if they only have sometimes better leadership or slightly better leadership,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that move’s not gonna be worth it. Do they have much better leadership? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John worse, we just listed, you know, Google donated, Microsoft donated, like where are you gonna go?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there some big tech company that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game? That’s the problem. Like I think Microsoft didn’t or did they? Yeah, they did. Google and Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. Yeah, and that’s the problem. When you look at what other platforms, Like, you know, there’s the whole,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can move through the woods and use Linux thing, but like, even that’s probably, you don’t know who’s running all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the companies that maintain Linux, that’s probably. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use Linux because that murderer made a file system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like, there’s so many gotchas when if you try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look around for a country that has no bad political problems, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an operating system, or a major tech platform that has no bad people funding or running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, you’re not gonna find one. It’s like when you get mad at an airline, like I’m never gonna fly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco United again or whatever. And then like. Hey, that’s me. Yeah, I mean United is terrible. But like you say that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then like, well there’s only like four airlines that fly into your airport. So you’re gonna probably fly them again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because these are systemic problems. They’re not problems due to like one bad person or the CEOs are all evil.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just the system. The system is bad. And it gets to the question of, do you fight to fix the system or
⏹️ ▶️ John do you flee to Canada where nothing is wrong and their system is great and they would never elect somebody who’s on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wing. Right. And that’s the thing. I think it’s useful to think of it that way, of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are we going to move to a different country because we don’t like Trump? No. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not to say that we never would. That’s not to say that our tolerance for that is infinite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But things have to be pretty bad for that. And the alternatives have to be substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. And I think in this case, we don’t have that dynamic. Things in Apple land
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t that bad. and the alternatives aren’t better meaningfully. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, exactly. In every aspect, every aspect we’re talking about in terms of like, you know, donating,
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook donated personally, the other companies donated directly from the company. If you care about the environment, if you care
⏹️ ▶️ John about diversity and inclusion, like show me the companies that are all better than Apple on all these
⏹️ ▶️ John fronts. Like it’s either a wash or Apple is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead. Right, and that’s why I think like, you know, the same reason when people complain to us, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t like, you know, XYZ, but everything we’re complaining about that month. If you don’t like this thing Apple’s doing, why don’t you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave? And it’s like, why don’t we move to a different country? Because that’s ridiculous and the options aren’t better and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would destroy our lives in so many ways. And by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, on talking about what we do, maybe this is just for my background, but I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John my non-programming, like my regular jobby job career, fine I was a full stack
⏹️ ▶️ John web developer for 25 years and worked for a bunch of different companies, did a bunch of different things. But my other career, my Apple related career,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mostly view as being an Apple critic. Like I wrote reviews of Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey universally flattering for 15 years, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I feel like being critical of Apple does not
⏹️ ▶️ John impair my career, in fact, mostly is my career. And I think that applies to both of you as well, with the exception of developing
⏹️ ▶️ John apps for the platform, which is slightly different, right? Which is not as big a part of my business. My income is
⏹️ ▶️ John it is both of yours. So that is that, but like on the podcast, Criticizing
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple just like a political podcast political pockets don’t go away when the the party that they support
⏹️ ▶️ John wins or loses an election like Criticism is just as valid commentary
⏹️ ▶️ John as praise and I feel like you know We could still make a good podcast when we praise what is praiseworthy
⏹️ ▶️ John and criticize what is worthy of criticism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, but and and I think the The right way to address this as an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan is to be vocal about it You don’t need to move to Jupiter like you can you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just just, you know, obviously maybe support Apple less. Write a letter to Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook. Yeah, like make your position known that this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay and why this is not okay. Like what you think of this and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that supporting Apple is optional, maybe don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, if I was like, you know, about to develop a Vision Pro app for some reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like maybe this would stop me. I don’t know. Who knows? There’s lots of other reasons why I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco apps. That’s obviously killed your motivation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I know. But that’s probably a bad example. But like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, it’s a good one. Because that’s like, it’s not the Tim Cook donation thing that’s stopping people from Vision Pro. But there’s tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of other things that people don’t like about Apple that may be influencing people’s decisions to perhaps not develop for the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we’ve discussed in the past. And this kind of, just like all the app store, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in-app purchase BS, like this kind of sentiment accumulates and can kind of affect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mood. and that overall mood can cause problems for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company when they try to do something like Vision Pro and no one wants to support their new platform. Like there are lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of knock-on effects that are hard to evaluate, like the numbers behind them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s hard to put a cost on alienating a whole bunch of your own employees and your customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to support a corrupt dictator wannabe. It’s hard to put a number on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So maybe Tim Cook can understand it, But it absolutely has massive value destruction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the right answer here is fight it from the inside. Because you can’t really, like, I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go buy a PC to fight this. Like, that’s not going to do anything, except ruin parts of my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So instead, I’m going to try to fight it from the inside, because that’s all I have. In the same way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m fighting this terrible corrupt government that we’re about to get from the inside of my own country.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think part of the understanding of the damage that is done by Tim Cook doing this
⏹️ ▶️ John is reflected in Tim Cook doing it personally, because what that means is when he retires,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the badness goes with him because you can put the blame, some of the blame on him personally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, Apple did this bad thing when Tim Cook was in charge. You remember when he donated to the Trump thing, but now he’s gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he does recognize that, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s one of the positive effects of him personally donating instead of making Apple do it, is
⏹️ ▶️ John that it transfers a tiny bit more of the badness to him. And so when he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gone, that tiny bit goes with him, as opposed to like trying to reshape Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John as a company that supports Trump, which he’s not attempting to do. Someone in the chatroom asked if Nvidia had donated. I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John they have not, but there’s a story in the Verge that we will link in the show notes about Nvidia
⏹️ ▶️ John flattering the Trump administration to, to what? To get fewer regulations on selling
⏹️ ▶️ John AI chips that Nvidia makes. So, lest you think that Nvidia is the
⏹️ ▶️ John one morally upstanding company that would never engage in this kind of corruption when it comes time to stop Trump from
⏹️ ▶️ John making, or stop the Biden administration, for that matter, from making rules that say Nvidia can’t sell as many
⏹️ ▶️ John chips as it wants to whoever it wants. Nvidia says, Trump, you’re not going to do that, right? You’re our pal, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s all just so gross. And we’re not going to forget. When Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retires, this sticks with Apple, because this is entirely on them. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stain he put there and this will stick there and we will not forget. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even forget the Mac Pro factory thing. People
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco forgetting about that, not me. Easy peasy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this is even worse. This is just straight up corruption.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s about the same. It’s a lot worse. I mean, it’s worse because it’s the second administration,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like honestly, by the time he did that, we all knew better. It was bad then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is literally giving him a million dollars. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s not giving him, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving his brother-in-law DJ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dollars. This is giving him a million dollars. It’s hard to be worse, except giving him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even more, which I’m sure will happen over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But his personal wealth has very little effect on anything, and he’s not getting this money directly. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to his cronies, and it gives him a tiny bit more power. But anyway, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s just- No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it goes to him. He’s not a good businessman. Where do you think his money comes from? It comes from grift.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It comes from grift and corruption. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John all of it is. He’s going to be dead in a few years anyway from old age. Him accumulating more money
⏹️ ▶️ John is so pointless now. He’s just one of those like, just blind, he’s got the blinders on where he just thinks like, this is what
⏹️ ▶️ John you do, you amass money, and it’s just like, for what, to what end? Like, there’s no, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no helping him there. We just need to contain the badness
⏹️ ▶️ John that he can cause for four years or until he dies of old age.
Storacusa is now…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, what’s the latest update with the app that shall not be named?
⏹️ ▶️ John Good transition. Boy, we’ll just come off of that totally light, fluffy topic.
⏹️ ▶️ John You got to follow that. I’m sorry. Anyway, as you may have heard, I’m developing
⏹️ ▶️ John app for an Apple platform. But it’s the good Apple platform
⏹️ ▶️ John that like lets you do stuff, except I’m putting it on the Mac App Store. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you have a launch party fund?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Please donate the money
⏹️ ▶️ John to my launch party fund. Uh, brother-in-law needs that money. Um, all
⏹️ ▶️ John right. So, uh, as I said, the last episode, uh, I am indeed going
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the test flight, uh, for my new app available to
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP members, so it’s not there now. So people in the chat room don’t run off to ATP.fm and look at your member
⏹️ ▶️ John page. But after we finished recording this episode, I will press a bunch of buttons and I
⏹️ ▶️ John will get the link up on the member page. That means you go to ATP that FM, you log
⏹️ ▶️ John in and on your member page, if you click on membership in the nav bar or whatever, you will see near the top
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that says, Hey, do you want to go on the test flight for this thing? Here you go. And it will give you a link. You’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John need to install the test flight app on your Mac if you don’t have it already. I link to that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’ll be able to install the test flight and try it out and totally destroy your disk and then not blame me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, yeah, so, uh, obviously once you,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were interested in the test flight and you do install it, you will know the name of my app. So I have to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to reveal the name of the app on the show now, uh, cause I’ve just been holding
⏹️ ▶️ John off and now everyone needs to know. So, um, we talked,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, about possible names for, uh, many episodes ago. I read many of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t want to say whether, I said at that time that I had already chosen a name, but I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to say whether I had chosen a name that was recommended by somebody or whether I had come up with something
⏹️ ▶️ John of my own. And I have to say, and I said it in a later episode
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think people aren’t going to like the name that I chose based on- Oh, I’ve been there. Based
⏹️ ▶️ John on all the people who were sending feedback about that huge list, they’re like, I like this one, I like that one. Like people eventually voted with
⏹️ ▶️ John like giving their opinions on the many names that we listed and nobody was interested in
⏹️ ▶️ John any name that was anywhere close to the name that I chose. So it is what it is. As
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I described before, I wanted the name to have some chance in being discernible
⏹️ ▶️ John as an app that finds duplicate files and replaces them with clones. Like I didn’t want it to just be like Lavender
⏹️ ▶️ John or like just some fanciful name that is not connected in any way. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly hold that rule as well as I had hoped, but it’s because one name grabbed
⏹️ ▶️ John my attention And I initially didn’t think it was that great, but it just hung on and eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John ate away. And it was like, all right, fine, fine. You’re the name. Uh, this name was suggested
⏹️ ▶️ John by a listener. Ooh, it was suggested by Jared Hofferth
⏹️ ▶️ John on December 13th, 2024. Uh, in a mastodon toot. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that name is hyperspace.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm. That is good. I do like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can see how it ate away at me. Okay. So let’s start here. Hyper,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, my website, uh, my old podcast, hypercritical, right? Anything with hyper,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a connection there. Space, disk space, storage space.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not great. It’s kind of something about getting space back. It’s got space in the name
⏹️ ▶️ John and the one that kills it. Star Wars, Star Wars, hypercritical storage space.
⏹️ ▶️ John The three of them together ganged up on me and made me pick this name.
⏹️ ▶️ John am I going to be sued by Lucasfilm? Maybe. And I’ll have to change the name of the app, but for now, shh, don’t tell them
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m using Hyperspace as the name of my app. And then they won’t notice me because I’m too small
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll be fine. But yeah, that’s what the app is called. It’s called Hyperspace.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to intercap it, switch classes intercapped intentionally because I love I love intercapping. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John the tradition from the classic Mac OS days where Macintosh application names Had a beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John capital letter and then in the middle of the word another capital letter like MacWrite Capital M capital
⏹️ ▶️ John W. MacPaint capital M capital P It wasn’t always just with Mac something but there was a lot of that. MacWrite, MacPaint,
⏹️ ▶️ John MacDraw, all that stuff, right? SuperPaint capital S capital P. I think. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John intercapping was big back in the day Switch Glass is capital S capital G
⏹️ ▶️ John And I almost did hyperspace capital H capital S, but Star Wars doesn’t do that. So I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t tell them anyway, hyperspace capital H. No other capital letters.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the name of the app. If you want to try it, you can for the test
⏹️ ▶️ John flight people. I have some instructions. This is difficult because I didn’t want to junk up my app with a giant dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ John that pops up in your face that tells you about the test flight, but I almost did. There are instructions
⏹️ ▶️ John linked with a three siren emoji on either side of it in honor of Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John on the member page that tell you, please read this first. And it tells you things about the test flight that you
⏹️ ▶️ John might need to know, including the one thing I put in the test flight release notes in all caps, which says,
⏹️ ▶️ John this build will not actually reclaim disk space. It will not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John do the thing that my app is going to do. It will do everything but that
⏹️ ▶️ John final last little thing. So it’s important that you pretend that it’s working. It
⏹️ ▶️ John will tell you that it works. It’ll be like, I reclaimed, you know, five megabytes of disk space. It didn’t, but it did
⏹️ ▶️ John everything up to that point. So please use the app as if it will do
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing, but know that it will not. Why am I doing this? I know this for multiple reasons. First
⏹️ ▶️ John of all, I don’t want to destroy the other disks in the first beta. So this one will not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John modify any of your precious files. It will just do stuff off to the side, but it will do all the work
⏹️ ▶️ John except for that final part where it just swaps it in for your file, right? So please do test that. The second thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use this app and get rid of all your duplicate files, you can kinda only do that once
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey all your duplicate
⏹️ ▶️ John files are gone until you generate more somehow. And so I wanna kinda save that to the end because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not useful if everyone uses the very first beta, it rids their entire drives of duplicates
⏹️ ▶️ John and then says, okay, well, how am I supposed to test the next beta? There’s no work left for me to do. Should I artificially
⏹️ ▶️ John make some duplicate files? So keep in mind that this beta and many of the betas, many of the test flight builds
⏹️ ▶️ John that come will not actually reclaim disk space. Even though it will say it’s doing it, it’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ John not. Which lets you repeat the process over and over again, which is good for my testing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Second thing to know, if you haven’t been on a test flight before, test flight builds will not actually charge you money.
⏹️ ▶️ John The purchase stuff is in the test flight build. You can do scanning for free, but as
⏹️ ▶️ John soon as you try to reclaim space, it’ll be like, oh, you gotta pay. Feel free to click those buttons. they will not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John charge you money. I believe the UI will tell you, oh, by the way, this is not gonna really charge you. It does, but it’s easy to miss.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but it will not. Like just I’ll link to in the documentation that you’re all going to read, links from the member
⏹️ ▶️ John page. I linked to the Apple page that says, I swear, it will not charge you money. Like it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like it does, but it doesn’t. Only the test flight build, the real builds that you get from the app store will charge you money, but this one will not.
⏹️ ▶️ John But please do test the purchase part. This is probably the part of the app that I have my least, the least confidence
⏹️ ▶️ John in because I’ve never done it before and it’s not easy to test, please test the purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John part. Like buy it, pick like there’s a bunch of things and prices in there that we may or may not talk about,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like they just ignore the prices. Don’t like, obviously it’s not charging you real money. Prices may change.
⏹️ ▶️ John The ways you can buy it may change. Lots of things may change, but like please do test that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John About subscriptions, because some of the options are subscriptions. In test flight subscriptions, renew at an accelerated
⏹️ ▶️ John pace. Again, I will link to the Apple page that talks about this. They say that they renew
⏹️ ▶️ John daily up to six times within a one week period regardless of the duration. So even if you get a one year subscription, it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John renew every single day. And I think they expire after like seven days. It’s not real time, that’s what I’m saying.
⏹️ ▶️ John So don’t be freaked out of like, hey, I bought this supposed free fake subscription, and then the
⏹️ ▶️ John next day the app said I needed to charge money again. Is that a bug? That may, I’m not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John sure, but it may be the nature of the accelerated renewal thing again. I haven’t done this before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Finally, feedback. You can send feedback on the beta through
⏹️ ▶️ John the TestFlight app itself, through the app on your Mac called TestFlight. Not in Hyperspace,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s an app called TestFlight that you will use to install the TestFlight beta. It’s like a blue icon with a propeller
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy blueprint on or whatever. You can send feedback in that app. If you launch
⏹️ ▶️ John the TestFlight app on macOS, find Hyperspace in the sidebar, and then click on the send feedback button.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can use that to send feedback, attach screenshots, so on and so forth. You could also just email me. There’ll be an email address
⏹️ ▶️ John in the documentation that you’re all going to read links from your member page that says you can send email to hyperspace at hypercritical.co.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s fine. The icon is a placeholder. It does not have feet, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey all right. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right. It is not the final icon. Don’t worry about that. Now, as for what I want you to send feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John about, literally anything. I can’t figure out the app. I don’t understand this. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what this button did. I didn’t find any duplicate files. It did find a bunch of duplicate files like
⏹️ ▶️ John just I, I don’t know how people are going to perceive this out. Obviously, ATP members are not
⏹️ ▶️ John the general public, but they are perhaps the type of people who might buy an app like this. So please just any feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to give any feedback, you can just look at it and throw in the garbage. You don’t have to do that. But if you decide to give feedback, don’t feel like Oh, he probably doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to hear this. Just it doesn’t have to be a bug report doesn’t have to be a feature request, it could be just
⏹️ ▶️ John your opinion, your experience, what you thought, where you were confused, things you didn’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Depending on how much feedback is, I might not be able to respond to you individually, but it’s good to hear people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John experience using it, if they can make heads or tails of it. When you work on an app for a long time, it starts to become
⏹️ ▶️ John like obvious to you where everything is and how it works. And it’s not that complicated of an app. But if you don’t have that background
⏹️ ▶️ John knowledge, and you’re just faced with this UI, it may not make sense to you. So I’m open to
⏹️ ▶️ John any and all feedback about every aspect that you see before you, including the pricing, which again,
⏹️ ▶️ John we may get to in a moment here, but like the pricing is not final or real in the app and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is free. So it doesn’t matter. But like, if you have opinions about that, throw your feedback over the wall. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John glad to hear it. I do value ADB listener feedback a lot because
⏹️ ▶️ John you all, if you have been listening for a long time, know a lot about me and a lot about
⏹️ ▶️ John app development stuff from listening to us. So please give your opinions. Show the app to someone
⏹️ ▶️ John else who doesn’t listen to the show to get a more outsider opinion if you want and then tell me what they thought, like
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. So anyway, there it is, Hyperspace, beta for ATP members,
⏹️ ▶️ John coming as soon as you listen to this episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A couple of quick addendums. I’m speaking for you, so tell me I’m wrong if I’m wrong, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once the app is released on the proper app store, the test flight will go away the same way it did with CallSheet. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John That is true, although I don’t think you can make it go away immediately, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it like go for 90 days
⏹️ ▶️ John So like I said before, when we talked about this, this is, you know, you’re on the test flight, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a specific test flight for ATP members. This test flight will end
⏹️ ▶️ John when the app is ready to be released.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, you might be able to expire all the builds, but if you have more than a handful of builds, that’ll take a freaking year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go through and expire them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all. I didn’t even know how
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that in App Store Connect. Oh yeah, one final thing. This is a fun note on how little I know
⏹️ ▶️ John about testing in-app purchase stuff or whatever. I installed the TestFlight version of my app on my own
⏹️ ▶️ John computer, and I was testing the purchase flow in the TestFlight build of my app, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John subscribed to my own app with one of the subscription options to see how it worked. I was like, great, you subscribed,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it didn’t charge me money, okay, fine. And then I was like, all right, well, I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John look like, I wanted to take like screenshots of what the sunscreen looks like when you haven’t paid for the app, but I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John already paid for it, so I’m like, I just gotta find a way to cancel that subscription that I just made.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do have a manage subscription button in my app that uses the Apple approved API to bring up the managed subscription interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John But my subscription to my own test flight build of my app was not in my subscription list.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I couldn’t unsubscribe to it. I Googled for it and I asked people who
⏹️ ▶️ John knew, they’re like, well, it should be in your subscription list. You know, like I swear to you, it’s not there. Like I just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see it. Is it an app store connect somewhere? I didn’t use a sandbox Apple ID, which I do have a separate account with
⏹️ ▶️ John a sandbox Apple ID. I know how to deal with that one, but that’s not this. I use my real Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John that is on the test flight to purchase from the test flight version of my app. And I just
⏹️ ▶️ John could not for the life of me figure out how to cancel that subscription. And yeah, it’s renewing like once every
⏹️ ▶️ John day or whatever. And some people said they thought it would expire after seven days, but it hasn’t been seven days since I did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Could not figure it out. You know how I eventually solved this problem?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please tell me, because I haven’t solved this problem myself with testing subscriptions. Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John has. Have I? You have. You know how I solved this problem? I solved it with
⏹️ ▶️ John confused. So thanks to Craig Hockenberry, who pointed me in this direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John So on Mac OS, you can make a button that says, go to manage subscription. And what it does is it launches
⏹️ ▶️ John the App Store app on Mac OS, and it shows you your list of subscriptions. But test flight things are not there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there is the same API in iOS. And guess what? on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does show your test flight subscriptions. Oh, call sheet, the test
⏹️ ▶️ John flight version of call sheet has a thing in settings where you can go to manage subscription and it calls
⏹️ ▶️ John that API that brings up a sheet that shows you all your test flight subscriptions. And lo and behold,
⏹️ ▶️ John hyperspace test flight subscription was right there inside Casey’s app and I just canceled it from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are welcome. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John take 5% of your proceeds. Why does
⏹️ ▶️ John that not exist on Mac OS? Because Apple doesn’t care about Mac OS. Like I guess, what
⏹️ ▶️ John you do is make a stub application, like a stub iOS application, run it in the simulator, pull
⏹️ ▶️ John up that like subscription management sheet, and lo and behold, in iOS, it has that little square bracket
⏹️ ▶️ John sandbox section that shows, you know, call sheet and all the other betas. Ridiculous. I cannot believe,
⏹️ ▶️ John thank you to Craig Hockenberry for pointing that out to me. I would never have guessed that either making a stub iOS application
⏹️ ▶️ John or launching call sheet would be the solution for me to unsubscribe to my own app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m glad I could be there for you, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the solution, Marco, if you want to figure out how to do it. Maybe you don’t know about the API, but yeah, I’ll see if
⏹️ ▶️ John I can find a link to that to put in the show notes. But Casey just had the link because he literally has the code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it in his app. Well, I was just talking to Craig about this a couple of weeks ago, so I should be able to dig it up from when we were talking because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he had asked me, how do you get the managed subscriptions thing? Yeah, here it is. Managed subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sheet is presented. I will put a link in the show notes and in the chat room and so on and so forth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this is how you do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I see. Margot is putting in our Slack all the people who own Hyperspace stuff. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s just so much hyperspace stuff. There is, speaking of, one of my old competitors, Epic
⏹️ ▶️ John Healthcare, like I worked for a competitor to them back when I had my jobby job. They have a thing called like
⏹️ ▶️ John hyperspace something or other like chart or whatever. Yeah, if someone comes and sues me, I’ll have to change
⏹️ ▶️ John the name of the app. So we’ll be back to the naming thing. But for now, I’m going with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think from a cursory look through things, I think you are reasonably safe. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trademarks are on certain types of goods and services, you have to narrow it and say, well, this is what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m claiming. And if you look through, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a little close, but it looks like it’s a dead app, actually. So everything else looks pretty far away. I think you’re OK.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the actual truth is, if literally anybody comes after me for any legal reason, I’m just going to fold immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, what am I going to do? I’m going to fight them in court over, like, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, you’d never get there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the law of people with money win. I’m not going to invest any money in battling the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing. So just don’t tell anybody. and we’ll just have this little hyperspace app off in our corner and Lucasfilm
⏹️ ▶️ John will never come knocking on my door.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the best defense for disputes like this is obscurity.
⏹️ ▶️ John and if not, I’ll just change the name of the app. Like Steve Jobs would say, just change the name, no big deal. Not that big of a deal,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe it was. Speaking of pricing, how should I price
⏹️ ▶️ John my app? I will give only one constraint to my co-hosts after which I will hear their advice. And my constraint
⏹️ ▶️ John is this app is going to be free to download and the idea is it’s free to download and it’s free
⏹️ ▶️ John to scan to find duplicates because the whole idea is, hey, if you don’t find any duplicates, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John buy the app. It’s not gonna do anything for you. I don’t wanna like take people’s money when they literally don’t, it’s not gonna save them any space, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the flip side of that, if they scan some folder and it’s like, oh, you could save eight gigabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now suddenly they have a concrete motivation to give some amount of money to get that eight gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John back. And so that’s the constraint, free to download, free to scan, free to do everything except that final
⏹️ ▶️ John step that gets you that space back. So I’m open to any and all pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John structures. And in fact, if you, for the people who have the test flight you will see that I have implemented every possible
⏹️ ▶️ John pricing structure. Does not mean that they will all be there in the release version. I was just trying to make sure that I knew
⏹️ ▶️ John how to code all of them. And so they were all in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the obvious pricing structure is 100% consumables. And so you get,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you know, 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cents, 10 cents per gig saved and that’s how you do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey. I mean, first of all, that’s not that crazy of an idea. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing I think that you need to know is how much space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people stand to save on average. And I have no idea right now. Do you have any kind of analytics for the test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flight that will report that back to you? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I ask people to give me reports. Like, so I have zero analytics, zero, my privacy
⏹️ ▶️ John policy is this app collects no data. Like, I collect nothing. I probably will never, I have no
⏹️ ▶️ John telemetry, I have no data, I have nothing. I only know what people will tell me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know what I see on my disks, and like, this is my family, but I have no telemetry.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I understand, from a business perspective, that’s stupid, you should have some. But I just, at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just don’t wanna deal with the privacy implications of collecting literally any
⏹️ ▶️ John data from anybody, and so I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, honestly, that’s fair. I mean, that’s, like, I make a forecast, and the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data I have from that is if the app checks the Sparkle RSS feed for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco auto updates. But I don’t even look at that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I have crash reports from Apple. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John of my, and I don’t even know if you can opt out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those. Yeah, I don’t think you can. But yeah, so I think it’s hard to know what the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value will be of it without knowing how much space people stand to save on average.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think if you look at other disk space saving apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Mac App Store, Prices are kind of all over the place, but it generally ranges from like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 20 bucks for this kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are free ones. That one I talked about that does basically the same thing as my app, but not as fancy, is
⏹️ ▶️ John like six bucks upfront one time pay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. On the other hand, you are John fricking Syracuse, so you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge a premium based solely on not only your fame here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also the reputation that you have of being a good developer, especially regarding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowledge of the file system and how it works. So this is like, people trust you, rightfully so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know how to do this safely. Well, they should not
⏹️ ▶️ John trust me. People have said this. My enthusiasm for the file system does not translate into an app that has fewer bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I will say is that I think my app is more full featured and
⏹️ ▶️ John nicer and more careful than a lot of the other apps, simply because I’ve spent a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of time. But I mean, you can judge for yourself. Like, I know what my source code looks like. I know what their feature set looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I have put a lot of work into this and I’ve worked hard to make it safe. That may be why,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, why can you charge more money? So we talk about this like Mac apps can charge more money for like phone than phone apps
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re bigger on the screen. Like there’s something to that. The idea that like physically it is larger, therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John it is worth more money. Like the things that translate into people being willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay more money are wild. So anyway, I think seeing the feature set
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe or the interface or I don’t know, the performance,
⏹️ ▶️ John like does it look like it was more carefully constructed than this other app? It doesn’t mean that it was, but does it look
⏹️ ▶️ John like it was? Does it look like a more like a native Mac app? Does it look, you know, anyway, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is influencing my thinking about pricing. I’m not going to undercut my competitors. I’m going to probably end up charging more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I think if you were doing like a more full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco featured like cleanup, unnecessary files, like that kind of app, there’s lots of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I think you could be up around 20 bucks. But those are a little
⏹️ ▶️ John janky if you’ve ever used those that I have. That’s true. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look shady sometimes. Oh, those look shady most of the time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact is, those are gonna recover more space and have more utility than most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Especially- But those are gonna remove
⏹️ ▶️ John files and mine will not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, right, but that’s a distinction that many people will not draw. This is a space-saving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, of how that happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, my app is trying very hard to draw that distinction, and my marketing will try to draw that distinction.
⏹️ ▶️ John But really, my app will only appeal to the people who understand that distinction. Otherwise, why would they get it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, fair. But anyway, so I think you should free up front to find out how much you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, and then to delete the files, I think $10.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t delete any files, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To recover your space hyper-early, $10.
⏹️ ▶️ John removing thighs. Traveling without moving, Marco. Another movie you haven’t seen. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. All right, yeah, so I think I would, and I think 10 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the premium price for what you’re doing. 10 bucks for what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the deletion. Or excuse me, for the traveling with that, yeah. For the
⏹️ ▶️ John But no, like, you pay that once and then it’s like a one-time purchase and unlock forever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so, because, you know, you’re not offering people a lot of reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run this frequently. You know, it’s the kind of thing that you’re gonna run once, you’re gonna recover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hunk of space, and then maybe you’ll forget about it for a year or more. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you run it again, and you get like, you’ll recover a smaller hunk of space, but most of the value that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna deliver to most people is gonna be up front on that first run. So, cause that’s when the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space will be saved in all likelihood over the lifetime of them using the app. So that’s why I think you should have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it be a one-time purchase, 10 bucks, you can delete as much as you want after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Actually, non-delete as much as you want after that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Reclaim, I call it. You’re reclaiming space. There you go. Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Marco’s answer, although I think you could charge more than $10, I think you might be able to swing $20.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I think broadly, Marco’s answer is probably the right answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This doesn’t necessarily strike me as a subscription app. I think you could do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but I think it would be a tough sell. I think I well, first of all, I love the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re doing the paywall. I think that’s brilliant. I mean, it’s it’s somewhat obvious, but it’s still brilliant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you know, you’re you’re getting right up to the point of reclaiming not not deleting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Marco gosh, reclaiming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space after the lead files, right? I could delete all your files for free. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting right up to the point where you know, this is what you would have saved. And I think by the way, as a quick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tangent, you should make it very clear, particularly at that step that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, like reiterate at that very last step. This isn’t a deletion, it’s a reclamation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you’re not losing anything. You’re getting this effectively for free. Somebody in the chat,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I lost who it was, and I apologize, but somebody in the chat, oh, Philco said, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should refer to the Apple SSD upgrade pricing. We just saved you $5,000 worth of files, which is eight gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever, which I think is very funny. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rightest answer is probably to do to do a one-time unlock everything in that purchase at that point. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, like you and Marco have both said, or well, Marco definitely said, and you’ve kind of hinted at. Um, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think something that could be fun to play with is doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I said it jokingly at first, but the more I think about it, the more I think there may be something to it is to do some sort of consumable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as an example, you can run this one time or use it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a day or whatever, but probably run it for one time and that’s 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks. You can get a three pack for 20 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or you can get a lifetime unlock, run it as often as you want. And maybe if you wanted to, you could even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have it like install a cron job or something like that. And that’s like 80 bucks or something like that. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if I’m standing by this crackpot theory, but it’s an interesting theory. And this is one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very few apps I can think of where that might actually make sense Because you are, like one of you just said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are only gonna run this once a year, maybe, and for most people, and then other people will go bananas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and run it once an hour, but generally speaking, you’re gonna run it like once a year. You could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do consumables, assuming they’re supported on macOS, you could do consumables here, and I actually think it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is that when you first run it, you’re gonna recover way more space than subsequent runs for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people’s usage patterns. That is a very good point. You also create an incentive then where you’re like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m only going to save a gig, I’m going to save up my ticket to use until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later. Like I’ll come back to this in a year and then you make zero on that person or whatever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you I think it’s a one it’s an unlock one time and that’s it because the utility will vary so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much per person, but it will almost certainly be mostly up front.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so consumables do exist. And I said before that I implemented every possible thing, but I didn’t implement consumables.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how much I hate them. So I’m never doing that. All right, fair enough. is just too like I understand the logic
⏹️ ▶️ John behind it, but it just feels so gross to me and it doesn’t feel like Mac like for whatever that’s worth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the ones I didn’t like, setting aside the pricing, which is who knows if I got anything
⏹️ ▶️ John close to that, like, I have all these options in here at this point, mostly because I think all the options make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense in a certain scenario. And I haven’t priced the options against each other to try to motivate
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the other there’s no price advantage to choosing any of the options that I have available. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of running the app multiple times, here’s the thing to factor in here.
⏹️ ▶️ John So first of all, this is the discussed a little bit in the
⏹️ ▶️ John documentation fact thing that I’ll link to but like the especially the Tesla version,
⏹️ ▶️ John but probably the 1.0 version of this app are extremely conservative. I’m trying not to break
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. So there are a whole swaths of people’s disks that I will just not touch, I will
⏹️ ▶️ John just ignore 100%. Including large areas that people want me to look at for
⏹️ ▶️ John duplicates, I would just will not do it until I can have some confidence that I can do it
⏹️ ▶️ John safely. Example is iCloud Drive, or anything that is like any file that is
⏹️ ▶️ John owned by, like backed by one of those things that makes the file magically appear when you click on it, like the ones with the use the
⏹️ ▶️ John file provider API, like OneDrive, or the new version of Dropbox, or obviously iCloud Drive, I will not
⏹️ ▶️ John touch those files at all, because I have no freaking idea what will happen if I try I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do my magic to them. So it’s just like, I’m gonna reclaim duplicates of my iCloud drive. My
⏹️ ▶️ John file will complete, my program will complete instantly and say, nope, can’t save you anything because it will refuse to touch them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will not touch anything in your library directory, even though my library directory has 12 gigs of stuff that I could
⏹️ ▶️ John reclaim. Why? Because I’m terrified of touching anything there. It’s too much stuff that can be screwed with. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t touch it. I won’t touch anything in your photo library.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did my photo library with the Perl script. not ready to do it to yours. So if you think you’re gonna recover space
⏹️ ▶️ John from your photo library, you’re not. My thing will totally ignore it. I have so many limitations on this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe too many. Maybe people will do a test flight and say it found nothing. And maybe I have to dial them back. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John can dial them back. And I almost added a UI for dialing them back, but like, you know what, 1.0, let me just
⏹️ ▶️ John see. Which means that subsequent versions of this app will surely have some
⏹️ ▶️ John of the guardrails either removed or optional. Which means that over time, as
⏹️ ▶️ John I develop this app, if you purchase it, you will be able to find more space to recover,
⏹️ ▶️ John not because you’ve created more duplicates, but because my app is becoming more brave, or you’re becoming more
⏹️ ▶️ John brave with your settings in my app, of what you’re willing to examine for space. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s that. Second thing is, an app like this, there is an ongoing
⏹️ ▶️ John development burden of making sure that it continues not to host your drive, especially with little picky
⏹️ ▶️ John file system stuff like this. So if I wanted that to continue to work and continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on the market, I will have to continue to develop it, which makes me not wanna do a one-time
⏹️ ▶️ John purchase like my other two apps. Someone paid $5 for my app five years ago and I’m never getting any money from them again.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they run it 24 hours a day. Like I run Switch Class 24 hours a day and I’m never giving myself any more money for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Which is fine if you think the app like Switch Class is gonna be like feature complete and you never really have to do anything to it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this app, I feel like is gonna have an ongoing burden and I feel like I’m over time going to make the app braver and
⏹️ ▶️ John braver. So I was looking for some way to potentially fund what I see as the
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-year development lifecycle of this app. Opt to and including things like a privilege helper
⏹️ ▶️ John tool that can do stuff outside the sandbox that you could secretly install like I did with Switchglass, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They can do stuff across accounts or things that run in the background, scanning for duplicates. Like there
⏹️ ▶️ John are many other sort of more ambitious goals that will never be achieved unless there’s some form of
⏹️ ▶️ John funding that is more than just someone paid for this once, one time five years ago and you’re never gonna get any more money from
⏹️ ▶️ John them. So I did wanna add some kind of option for ways to get money on
⏹️ ▶️ John an ongoing basis. But I do recognize that most people will either run it once and then just never run it again or run it
⏹️ ▶️ John once and then run it five years from now. So the options that you’ll see in the test flight are, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a buy it all upfront thing for so much money that no one will ever pay it, right? But it’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like we always talk about like, what’s the right amount? Should I ever have an unlock forever option? What’s the right amount I should put there?
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I gave myself like a five year runway with the buy it while it wants option. For people
⏹️ ▶️ John want it, it’s there, it’ll unlock everything forever and ever and ever. Marco did this one for the Overcast and is still supporting
⏹️ ▶️ John it and people regret it, but like how should that be priced? Whatever, it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John a deterrent, like don’t buy this. The other things you can buy are time-spanned
⏹️ ▶️ John one-time purchases because people hate subscriptions. So I’ve divided up my purchases into subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ John and one-time purchases. And yeah, there’s the unlock for every one-time purchase, but there’s also the unlock for one month,
⏹️ ▶️ John one time purchase. And then there’s the unlock for one year, one time purchase. Non-renewing,
⏹️ ▶️ John do people know that? Can I communicate that successfully in the UI? Who knows? We’ll see what people think.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, if you want it for a month, a month is enough time to like make sure, yeah, I found all the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that I care about that at one point I was gonna find. And that’s it, it never recurs, it doesn’t rebill you or whatever. Don’t touch the app for three
⏹️ ▶️ John years. Come back to it in three years, scan, oh, but found some more stuff. Should I buy another month? Sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like the consumables, but not really, because during that month, you can run it as many times as you want, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John During that year, you can run it as many times as you want. And then the subscriptions are exactly the same price.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just renew for people who want something that’s renewing. I don’t know why anybody would, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no price advantage to not doing it. I’m not competing. I’m not saying, oh, the subscriptions are cheaper, so you should do them so you forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about it and auto renews. No, there’s no advantage. If you don’t want something that renews, you have multiple options.
⏹️ ▶️ John One month, one year. that didn’t do one week or one day, it seemed like too short or whatever, or forever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then subscriptions, which are exactly the same price as their one-time thing. That’s probably too many options.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should probably get rid of some of these. That’s part of what the test flight’s gonna do. I’ll let people tell me, oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think your prices are insane. I would never pick this option. I would pick that one. This didn’t find any files. It found 20 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John of files. Like, I’m hoping I get some actionable information on this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, what it might come down to is, I don’t friggin’ know. I’ll just, I’ll release something,
⏹️ ▶️ John And if no one buys it, I’ll change it, right? Like Marco has changed the business model and pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John in his apps many, many times. That’s just seems to me to be part of the process. And I’m willing to,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, maybe there’s only, the only way for me to learn that is to like learn it myself despite all these people giving me advice
⏹️ ▶️ John based on their experience. There’s all sorts of things I can tell myself like, well, their experience is on iOS or their app’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like mine, or I wanna do it this way. But it may be one of those things that I just have to learn the hard lessons myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of that could be launching a 1.0 that no one wants to buy. And then I change it and
⏹️ ▶️ John launch a 1.1 and change it. And you know, like, as frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John as that sounds, I actually kind of relish that process of learning because for me, for an app like this, it’s like low stakes.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a big deal. This app is not gonna be a big app or whatever. But in the same way that I kind of perversely enjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John fighting with the in-app purchase system, like doing a part of my app that had nothing to do with my app and had everything
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with dealing with the app store, one of the reasons I wanted to do this app was to play with that code
⏹️ ▶️ John to hope that I got it right. and also playing with pricing strategies. That’s another thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually kind of look forward to. Granted, it will be based on no information because I’m not collecting any information,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s all part of the game for me. So I don’t know, we’ll see. I haven’t finalized anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in the meantime, I want Tesla people to try all the options and give me your opinions on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John If, you know, say if this was a real app, I would pick X option. I would pick Y option if it was half
⏹️ ▶️ John the price. I wish there was a Z option. Let me know what you think, honestly, like, the
⏹️ ▶️ John main customer base for this app right now are people who listen to the podcast, because they’re the only ones who know it exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re the only ones who might even think about seeking it out in the App Store because the name
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t really self. Oh, by the way, the name is not just that it’s, you know, what’s the name of your app, Casey? My
⏹️ ▶️ John app call sheet? No, that’s not what it’s called. What is it called?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, face blaster. No, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the lookup. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John call sheet. What is it? What is actually called though, on the app store?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I don’t remember like lookup, cast and crew or something like that. call
⏹️ ▶️ John sheet colon lookup cast secure. What is your app called Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it’s overcast colon podcast player, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think. Yeah. And my app is hyperspace colon reclaim disk space. Yeah, there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is part of this is because that’s how the app store game is played. Even though Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John refers to his app as call sheet in the app store is called call sheet colon lookup cast or whatever like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of how it’s played. And the other reason is hyperspace I think was already taken by the Epic app. So I had to put colon
⏹️ ▶️ John something. I probably would have anyway, but yeah That’s the only chance anyone finds me in the App Store is they search
⏹️ ▶️ John for like disk space or something and mine comes up because of the subtitle and my keywords
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to put store QSI as a keyword, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think they would have worse SEO than hyperspace if that’s possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, so I mean, for your subscription ongoing stuff, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can work when you add more ways to recover space. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s gonna be a challenge when you’re quote only doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco particular method of recovering space. I think you’re gonna be compared in people’s minds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all the other disk saving tools that like delete temp files
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Yeah, the ones that delete files though, I don’t feel like are my competition. Maybe they are, maybe that’s what people really want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they already have had people say, oh, I don’t wanna actually recover space, I just wanna find files that are duplicates
⏹️ ▶️ John and delete them. I mean, I can always add that feature. Obviously I know where all the duplicate files are and it’s really easy to delete
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, but yeah, we’ll see. Maybe that’s a thing that I’ll learn is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John function my app performs is not desired. All right, it’s desired by me. That’s why I made the app, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s desired, but I think it’s a, if you want it to be an ongoing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue app, I think that needs to be one function of multiple functions that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all responsible for keeping your disk space minimal or recovering more disk space than what that
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we’ll see. Like, I mean, it’s not like ongoing, It’s more like punctuated, like
⏹️ ▶️ John use it once, wait two years, use it a second time. But when I use it the second time, I want you to pay again.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, you know what I mean? Unless you’ve unlocked it forever. But like, that’s what, like, if I get the pricing right, you’ll be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a one month unlock is plenty. I’m not gonna use this thing for a whole month. I’m gonna be done with this in two days. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John pay what you hopefully you think is a low price. You use it for a month, forget about it for two years. Two
⏹️ ▶️ John years later you come, oh, I should do more space. And you download the app and you do the exact same thing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like a consumable in the form of like, I don’t use this app that often, but it does
⏹️ ▶️ John make the second use potentially, you know, a transaction, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, if it was 99 cents to do it, everyone would do it. They’d be like, oh, just pay 99 cents and do it for a month or whatever. It’s like the question
⏹️ ▶️ John is how high can you make that month thing? And really that depends on, to your point, Margo, that first big
⏹️ ▶️ John number when you do, when you find all the duplicates the first time. But like, what I was saying earlier is that it could be that your
⏹️ ▶️ John second run actually finds more space than your first, because two years pass and now my app is
⏹️ ▶️ John brave enough to delve into darker recesses of your Mac where the real space can be recovered? Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John my library directory has been the largest source of duplication that I’ve found, but I’m just not ready to go there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think subscription is gonna be a tough sell, I really do. I get what you’re saying, it makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John why anyone would do it either, but if it’s the same price and if that’s what people want? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You gotta reach for more disk space. I think, again, you gotta go for the library,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gotta go for the photo. Like, that’s, if you want, because the thing is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously the more space you can save, the more value you will have to people. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you have to go for those.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it would also be nice if I knew at what rate duplication is generated, because that’s one of the questions people had. They were
⏹️ ▶️ John like, why would there be any duplicates? I’m not sure I know the answer. All I know is that there are duplicates.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t think I was creating duplicates, but I’ve got just so many of them. How did they get
⏹️ ▶️ John there? Like, I can explain some of them, but not all of them. Like, they’re finding duplicates, I’m like, how in the world
⏹️ ▶️ John do I have two of those that are not clones of each other, but somehow I do. So I don’t know at what rate
⏹️ ▶️ John does new garbage get generated. If new garbage gets generated real slowly, then yeah, no one’s ever gonna wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John run this app again. But if there’s something, some part of some process, especially in the directory that I’m not looking in now,
⏹️ ▶️ John like library or photo libraries or something, if there’s some like duplicate garbage generation
⏹️ ▶️ John process that is just constantly eating people’s disks, then maybe running this once a year is not a ridiculous thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do, or even continuously monitoring or something. So there’s just so many unknowns here. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m not willing to add any telemetry, I’m not sure how those unknowns are going to become knowns, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco presumably slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll see. Thank you to our members who supported this episode for us. You can join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about Honda’s announced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EVs at CES in partnership with Sony, which I didn’t even know was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing until this moment. So this is kind of cool. So anyway, we’re gonna talk about Honda’s EV announcement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to CES in overtime. You can join us at atv.fm slash join to hear that and every other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overtime we’ve done and all the member specials as well. It’s a pretty cool, pretty cool membership. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco atv.fm slash join. Thank you everybody. to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check the podcast
Neutral: Winter report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, it’s wintertime and you have a new car in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think we’ve got a little bit of after show car stuff to match up well with the overtime car stuff. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ John first winter for my wife’s new 2024 Civic. And I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really think about winter car performance until the snow started coming. And I was like, huh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got a new car in the snow. And I’m not talking about how the car drives in the snow
⏹️ ▶️ John because you know, it’s front wheel drive Honda with all season tires, it’s pretty much a known quantity. I don’t think there’s anything
⏹️ ▶️ John remarkable about this car. I’m talking about the other stuff about
⏹️ ▶️ John having a car in the snow, which is basically when you wake up in the morning and it’s time to
⏹️ ▶️ John get in the car and go to work. What does that process look like? Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a place where all your cars fit in your
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s not a big part of your life, but all our cars do not fit in our tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John garage made for horse-drawn carriages. Cars, with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ John of one, are all on the driveway. That means they’re getting snowed on. That means in the morning, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got to go out there and defrost your car and scrape it all off. And depending on the weather you had, you could be
⏹️ ▶️ John brushing away snow. You could be scraping off ice. This is just part of life
⏹️ ▶️ John in a place with winter with a car. And I guess I hadn’t thought too much
⏹️ ▶️ John about it for so many years because so many of our cars have been the same. We have two of the same generation of Honda
⏹️ ▶️ John Accord. We had a bunch of Honda Accords and Honda Civics before that. But this 2024 Civic
⏹️ ▶️ John throws in a few new wrinkles. And I don’t know if it’s just like, because my
⏹️ ▶️ John car is 10 years old. My wife’s car is like seven years old. My wife’s other car. And her new one is the shiny new car.
⏹️ ▶️ John And along with the first car having carplay, there are other firsts in this car as well. I’m not sure all of them
⏹️ ▶️ John are good, but some of them are just a fact of life. So this is our first hatchback.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey has a rear wiper.
⏹️ ▶️ John Has a big hatch, and yeah, there’s a wiper on the hatchback. What the hell is that doing there?
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a thing that I have to be aware of and avoid when removing snow
⏹️ ▶️ John from the back of the car, lest I scrape the wiper off of
⏹️ ▶️ John my car and onto my driveway.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Now, hold on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you not doing the time honored tradition of moving your windshield wipers to the upright
⏹️ ▶️ Casey position when it’s snow is
⏹️ ▶️ John pending? Well, I’ll get to that. So first of all, the wiper on the hatch does not do that
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, as far as I can tell. Well, that’s a shitty design. Yep, I agree. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that, right? And yeah, when the snow is on it, you may not be aware of exactly where it is. But the second thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is, the hatchback also has a little
⏹️ ▶️ John sprayer thingy for spritzing water for the wiper to wipe away.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is in the middle of the glass. That is another thing you do not want to hit with
⏹️ ▶️ John your giant ice scraper as you’re scraping the ice off the windshield with big,
⏹️ ▶️ John long, powerful strokes. Pachink! Yeah, that’s another thing you don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the purpose of argument here, have you not considered just like turning the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and turning the rear defroster on and just coming back in five minutes?
⏹️ ▶️ John Five minutes, eh? I’m not sure where you live. Five minutes is like a dent when you have like freezing
⏹️ ▶️ John rain that has put a centimeter thick sheet of ice over your car. that rear defroster is not going to like
⏹️ ▶️ John make that stuff magically vaporized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but it’ll at least make it loose. Then you can, it kind of just like falls off,
⏹️ ▶️ John You do what you can. You give it 15, 20 minutes, but sometimes you’re running late. Sometimes you don’t have time to
⏹️ ▶️ John let the car sit in your driveway and defrost. You don’t want it to just be sitting there, just spewing fumes into the
⏹️ ▶️ John atmosphere with your internal combustion engine for all this time. Like, yeah, obviously you put on a defroster.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously you turn on the car and obviously you want it to warm up. Obviously you turn the heat on inside. You do all that stuff and yet
⏹️ ▶️ John still you want to get going. You want to get out of the driveway, you’re late to where you want to go, you’ve got the
⏹️ ▶️ John ice scraper out there you’re scraping, so I have to be aware of where that little nubbin is. So you got the wiper on the back and you got the nubbin
⏹️ ▶️ John on the back. And that’s setting aside the other thing that you have, which my wife does not care about, but I absolutely do,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is all the sealing around all the glass. And you have to be aware of what that is so
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t take your scraper and jam it into the sealing around, you know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fragile, right? It’s made of soft plastic or rubber. Your ice scraper can damage it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am of the opinion that you should not hit that with your scraper Other people in my household are not of that opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m trying to preserve this car It’s easy, but and obviously you’ve got the side windows which have their
⏹️ ▶️ John own seals around them, right? But you also don’t want to hit that You’re also trying to scrape off that you’re also trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to point the vents to so they help to rust it But now let’s move around to the front where are some real issues happening
⏹️ ▶️ John So first of all, this is the thing that I’ve gathered a lot of modern more modern cars do
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t like, which is they want to get the wipers out of the airstream. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the wipers are like nestled more under
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the hood. Yes, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John which means you can’t just take them and pry them upwards because they won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go. They’ll hit the top of the hood. What you have to do is go into the car and depending on whatever your car
⏹️ ▶️ John is, do whatever incantation that tells the car, can you please put the wipers in service position
⏹️ ▶️ John and they move and they belong All right, now you can move them out. And of course you can’t put them
⏹️ ▶️ John back until you, you know, so that dance is stupid on the car because you have to like start the engine
⏹️ ▶️ John and then turn it off or actually turn on the accessories and turn them off, which is harder when you don’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ John key because the key you just turn halfway but then you’ve got to push a button anyway. That’s annoying. I don’t like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John understand why they do it, but I don’t like it. And the second thing is, and I don’t know if this is just a Honda thing
⏹️ ▶️ John or this is a new modern car thing, but I’m, I have two minds about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John All my previous cars that I’ve ever owned have the squirty things where they squirt, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John windshield wiper fluid onto your windshield. Just like I have one in the back, little like squirty nozzle
⏹️ ▶️ John sprays out. And usually there’s like two of them. One sprays the driver’s side, one sprays the passenger side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ford Civic. Oh, are they in the wipers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s what the Volvo is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I understand why they do this. What it has is the wiper squirty things. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John in the blades. I mean, they take regular wiper blades. You can just replace them with any wiper blades. The wiper blades are dumb. Like there’s nothing smart
⏹️ ▶️ John in them, but the little arm that holds the wiper blade has the squirty thing in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this stuff squirts out basically just in front of the wiper blade,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like right there with the wiper blade. So as you swipe the wiper blade, it is squirting stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of the wiper blade as it goes. Now, I would imagine that our motivation is this. First
⏹️ ▶️ John of all, with the old one, when you pull the little stalk or whatever and it goes squirt, squirt, squirt.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are situations where you could effectively be blinding the driver in a quickly moving car
⏹️ ▶️ John because that spray, sprays onto the windshield and instantly freezes into ice or smears some mud
⏹️ ▶️ John or dust that was on there or whatever. And now you’re waiting like, oh my God, I can’t see anything. You’re hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John those wiper blades come and sweep away the mess you just made. And if you’re lucky, they do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re unlucky, it like flash froze onto your thing because your windshield washer fluid was the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John concentration and now you can’t see and you’re going 60 miles an hour on the highway, you don’t want to be in a situation where
⏹️ ▶️ John you spray a bunch of gunk on your windshield and then rely on the correct functioning of the
⏹️ ▶️ John blades to swipe it away. With this technique, where they’re on the blades, the only place you’re putting
⏹️ ▶️ John it is right in front of where the blade is about to move into. And you’re not spraying the entire window all
⏹️ ▶️ John at once, you’re just spraying the region in front of the blade. So maybe there’s a safety issue there,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it is a little bit better, maybe it’s a more efficient use of liquid so you’re not spraying most of it into the air.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s just blowing over the car. How much of it actually contacts the windshield, how much of it stays on the windshield. Here you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John squirting it directly on the windshield. But now you’ve got this problem
⏹️ ▶️ John where the little arms have little hoses on them and little squirty things. And it’s just one more fragile thing to go wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John and not mess with when you’re there fumbling in the ice. Maybe people don’t know, don’t live
⏹️ ▶️ John around snow, think that snow is like, I don’t know, invisible
⏹️ ▶️ John or easy to deal with, but like, you know, wet icy snow that’s frozen onto
⏹️ ▶️ John your car and everything, like, it’s not as simple as, it’s not just like this fluffy white powder that just moves out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John way. Like, it can encase your car in hard stuff that you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to chip it out of, but you don’t wanna chip, it’s like, it’s like chipping out a baby from like a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John stone thing. You wanna get the stone off, but you don’t wanna use a jackhammer because you’ll kill the baby. My car is the
⏹️ ▶️ John baby in this scenario, right? So, there’s ice coating everything. I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even get the blades up into service position because everything is frozen in place, but I don’t want to crack
⏹️ ▶️ John them out of those little tubes going into the arms to go up to do the squirter thingies. And in the old way, at least I could
⏹️ ▶️ John like know where the squirters were and like try to clean them off, clean off the nozzle to have a clear shot. But now
⏹️ ▶️ John the squirters are facing down and they’re inside the ice encrusted blades. It is a much more
⏹️ ▶️ John delicate operation than it was before. And I guess this is the march of technology. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John my wife thinks that the wiper arm squirters are not as good as the old ones, just flat out in performance
⏹️ ▶️ John wise, but again, I kind of see why they do it, but like it is making the process of chiseling
⏹️ ▶️ John my car out of its icy prison or my wife’s car out of its icy prison a lot more complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John than it used to be. And I’m not entirely sure that the trade-offs are worthwhile.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you think of your wiper blade squirty things, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I am a civilized human who parks in the garage and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we get, we very rarely get snow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We did just get snow twice actually. So it does happen, but despite what you think. It’s melted away instantly,
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of snow that falls being having to be there until March. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own fault for living in the wrong section of the country, but nevertheless. No, I think in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like in decent conditions, I like having them in the wiper blade. That being said, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went to replace the wiper blades in her last Volvo once, and I had gotten whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, reasonably not crappy ones I could find on Amazon. And then they arrived,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I went to install them in the car. And whatever the mounting situation was for the wipers I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was in direct physical conflict with the sprayer for the wiper fluid. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I quickly ended up saying, I’m not going to bother with this and trying to research what third-party thing will work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I just pulled a Marco and threw money at the problem and just went to Volvo and got some new wiper blades
⏹️ ▶️ John on that front, oh yeah, wiper blades aren’t usually really any more expensive than good third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. like so much like, you know, OEM things where it costs a bazillion dollars to get the official one from your car manufacturer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wiper blades, not the case. Now, maybe they’re not as good as the third party ones you would get for the same price, but if you’re worried about like any wiper blades
⏹️ ▶️ John that exactly fit my car, the OEM ones are not that expensive. You just go to your dealer and buy them at like 20
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks each or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, okay, but still. They’re a lot more expensive, I think, than crappy things you can get from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amazon, but they’re at least not crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway. But they’re about the same price as the really good third party ones that you can get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s probably true. But one way or another, I like having them, leaving the replacement issue aside, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like having them in the Blade. My car, both of our cars do the hide away,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Blade thing when the car is, you know, in a steady state, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t really mind that, generally speaking. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have to deal with snow on a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you even know the process of getting yours out?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I certainly did on her old car. I think I do on mine. I don’t, I don’t, I’m sure I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figure it out fairly quickly, but I don’t remember off the top of my head. But yeah, I mean, it’s not terribly difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just stuff in the center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John concept. You
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s on a touch screen somewhere?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it is what it is. That’s modern cars for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey baby. And speaking of modern, oh, well, actually, before we move on, how is the on-road performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Civic? Like, does it go reasonably well in
⏹️ ▶️ John I drove my wife’s car for the first time like a week ago. Oh, okay, so what’d you think of it? We were on the streak of
⏹️ ▶️ John me just not driving. First, I was not driving in it because I didn’t want to be the first one to scrape the wheels, but then she scraped the wheels, but still
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t drive it. It was just, you didn’t want to break the streak, but she was away for a while and I had to move cars. So I did
⏹️ ▶️ John actually drive her car to move it out of the driveway. I drove around the block to see what it was like. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s nice. I bought this car because we talked about it before, like I can
⏹️ ▶️ John barely fit in it because it’s got a sunroof. So I would not choose this car for myself, but she likes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. For me, I have a little bit of car follow-up. I am mad with power, gentlemen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have installed Home Assistant, which I think we briefly have touched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a handful of times. Are you putting Yolink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although, man, if I could find a way, I would do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John See if your sunroof is leaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, funny. Well, you have a sunroof now too, big guy. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you have nothing to do with your wife’s car, not a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just drove it the first time. We’ve had it for like six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, there is, maybe this has been here for a while and I just didn’t realize it, but there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a integration between Home Assistant, like a community integration between Home Assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Volvo’s like APIs for controlling the car. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh baby, I don’t even know what I’m going to do with myself because I installed this integration, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was challenging for uninteresting reasons, but I installed the integration like three hours hours ago and within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an hour of it being installed, I’ve already written an automation such that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s a weekday and the car is plugged in at about 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes before she leaves in the morning to drop the kids off at school, it will precondition the car. This is stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Tesla owners have probably been doing for 10 years, but now I can do it. And the other thing is, I bet you I could do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Volvo app, but I don’t care. I can do it through Home Assistant now. I’ve got a hammer, everything’s a nail, baby. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so this is very exciting for me. I can get like a readout in home assistant of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the battery level of you know whether it’s charging or not and I think I can even tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roughly when it’ll be done charging. Can you put it in your menu
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can put your menu bar and see
⏹️ ▶️ John your wife’s car’s battery is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep I don’t know why I would but I could and now now I feel like you’ve nerd sniped me I just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of want to see if I can but uh but anyways this is way too much fun and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like again everything is a nail because now I’ve got the world’s biggest hammer. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my quick bit of car-related follow-up for today. Marco, how’s your car in the snow and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else? And how was it on the long trip?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, it’s been great. I mean, I haven’t had it in many demanding,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco snowy environments. So I don’t know how it compares to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual off-roaders I’ve had before because the iX is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an off-roader. It has it has all wheel drive the same way. You know, most modern BMWs have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all wheel drive and it has the benefits of electric drive of like, you know, very high torque and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is not in any way like a good off road choice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, compared to any other, you know, regular SUV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you lift your wiper blades up with your hands without doing anything else?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll have to check, but they do have the squirters in the blades, Which I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had in the Land Rover and- I guess it’s everywhere now. It’s rea- I- So I actually prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the squirters in the blades. Because- Same. Not only does it, you know, as you mentioned John, like it-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have kind of less blinded time as- As the windsh- is- is sprayed. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it uses way less fluid to get a full sweep. Because you don’t have to like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold it down for a second and then like, You know, the wiper blade goes across and scoots it over. And then you like squirt a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more to get under the blade. Like, you don’t have to do that dance. you can just squirt a little bit of it and it coats the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windshield way better with with less fluid. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s less. Less of it is spraying off into the air and doing nothing. Or, you know, the people who have like their their squirters
⏹️ ▶️ John are not aimed correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John driving behind them and they just send off this spout like a whale and it just splatters onto your windshield.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. So I find it’s nicer in every way and I have not yet found a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downside. So other other than those, the car has been pretty great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had a couple of like minor software things where like sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the iPhone won’t unlock it very quickly and I think honestly that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone’s fault because I usually run beta iOS’s and they change the Bluetooth details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time in iOS betas for some reason so that’s probably the phone’s fault not the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car’s fault. Other than that it’s been pretty great. I love CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact, there was a story that breezed through the news today, real quick, that apparently BMW’s next-gen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iDrive system, everyone’s saying, like, it’s barely going to support CarPlay. And what they mean by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, it’s not going to support dual-screen CarPlay. It’s going to keep having CarPlay just, like, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main screen, and not in the secondary, like, driver cluster. But, as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think my car supports the driver cluster second screen anyway. And I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the iX is supposed to have one of their most cutting-edge iDrive systems and one of their most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cutting-edge carplay integrations I mean, it’s a few years old now like you know that the models for years old now so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it’s not as new as the newest ones, but I already don’t have the second screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think I would want the second screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I like This is probably a bigger discussion for a different day but I think CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it is implemented in most cars, which is just like the window on the main screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that is CarPlay’s best self. They should never have tried to branch out any more than that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that was never going to work and there’s other downsides to it. And I think having it be in that screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both, you know, keeps the automakers happier about keeping it there, achieves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nice balance of functionality with the users and everybody, it gives the car enough room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on its UI to show what the car needs to show. Things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like when you have an assisted driving feature, it will usually have some option to show in the middle, like here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your car and here’s a map of ahead of it. Here’s the car that we think is there. And, you know, kind of show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a visualization of like the cars around you as the car sees them or your following distance or your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cruise control settings or whatever. That all goes in the main cluster. So I like having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay in its little, or in the case of the iX, in its giant rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the main screen, I don’t think it needs to go anywhere else. I think having it try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take over everything was probably the wrong strategy for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, Apple doesn’t put a lot of effort into CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think having it be in its rectangle on the main screen matches the amount of effort Apple puts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it. I don’t think Apple makes CarPlay good enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug free enough or reliable enough or full featured enough to have it take over the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dash. So I think car play in the rectangle is exactly where it needs to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, remember CarPlay 2.0, the next gen CarPlay, remember that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, yeah, wherever the hell that that’s gone. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mean, coming
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, that’s there. They’re walking away whistling like that’s gone. Like we all know that’s gone. That that’s up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s up in Apple heaven with air power.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple is still insisting that this is still coming from some car manufacturers, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they keep revising. I think they announced it in 2022, nowhere to be seen, and Apple’s story for
⏹️ ▶️ John all of 2024 is totally, it’s coming in 2024 from one of these manufacturers. That did not happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not going to happen. That’s fine. Anyway, so I love having CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in what is a good version of regular CarPlay. It’s still the one rectangular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen in the middle of the car. It’s a good version of that on a nice big good screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I like that a lot. And yeah, otherwise, I’m very happy with the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I disagree slightly with regard to the multi-screen car play thing. It is nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have, like in Aaron’s car, it’ll do multi-screen and it is nice to have a map right there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the instrument cluster rather than only in the center screen. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps you’ve been tainted by having many cars where the screen was, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, this giant thing in the center and there’s little to nothing in the instrument cluster. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or another, I do like having it there. It’s not critical, but I like it. And I think a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brouhaha with regard to BMW, from what little I read, is that it is a regression insofar as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were supporting that previously in most of their cars, perhaps not the electric ones,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they soon will not be anymore. And people were pretty grumbly about that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all in all, I mean, I do quite like having CarPlay. I still will not buy a car without it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, people keep saying to me with especially with regard to our conversations a few weeks ago, oh, you should buy the Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey R3 when it comes out because it’ll surely be cheap enough. Sure. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not going to buy a car without CarPlay. I just won’t. And you might think me a moron for that. And that’s fine. I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I will not buy a car without CarPlay because I just don’t want to do it. I don’t want to rely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an automobile manufacturer’s software in order to have the infotainment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I want in my car. I don’t want to have to use Overcast via Bluetooth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want the damn CarPlay app. I will not buy a car without it, at least.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m hopeful that CarPlay is not dead in its entirety even though it does appear that next-gen CarPlay