639: Crimp the World
15 May 2025Even John finally flipped.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco’s [kinda] brief review of the M4 MacBook Pro
- Follow-up:
- Letterboxd SF Symbol
- Procured via volunteer Alyce D! 💙
- Custom Symbols App (App Store link)
- AI App Store summaries != spam email filtering (via Kevin Markham)
- “A fine is a price” (via Kieran Healy)
- Apple 🤝🏻 Anthropic
- Apple appeals App Store rule changes
- Riley Testut details changes to Delta’s IAP options
- More (Ed: 🤣🤣🤣)
- Meanwhile, in the App Store…
- Home networking corner
- Ubiquiti’s consumer line is Amplifi
- Try CubiCasa for floor plans (via Colin Robertson)
- What Unifi Stuff Should I Buy? (via Thunder God Cid)
- Casey’s sitrep
- 2× U6-LR installed
- 10GbE card installed in Synology
- Switches just arrived
- Camera time?
- Letterboxd SF Symbol
- Apple Turnover
- Some fun Apple media
- Backblaze drama
Backblaze is a former ATP sponsor - Post-show: More restaurant-tech MVPs
- Members-only ATP Overtime: SSD data doesn’t last forever
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Chapters
- M4 MBP mini-review
- Custom SF Symbols
- Follow-up: App Store review summaries
- “A fine is a price”
- Xclaude?
- Sponsor: BetterHelp
- Apple would rather not comply
- Delta’s scare sheet 🖼️
- Kicking and screaming 🖼️
- Home-networking corner
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
- Apple Turnover
- Apple’s Diet of Worms
- Jony & Dave & Buster’s
- Backblaze finance drama
- Ending theme
- Restaurant MVPs: Network cabling
M4 MBP mini-review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Before we start, I have a very, very tiny mini review of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M4 MacBook Pro. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dotto0Did we know you got one of those?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jared Polin0I mentioned it and we never followed up. That was my emergency pre-tariff purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve Dotto0Right-o. Jared Polin0I had to send my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M2 MacBook Air down the hand-me-down line in the family, and so I got it to replace that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit earlier than planned due to tariff concerns. But it is now my new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco travel, lightweight, mostly train and ferry computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m sorry, you went from an M2 MacBook Air to an M4 MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. Correct. And remind me why go from Air to Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I mainly wanted the nanotexture brighter screen. That was the big thing. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I secondarily would have liked the extra USB-C port on the other side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for charging on either side, which I often run into, or the SD card reader, which I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often miss with the Air. But anyway, so I did it. I’ve been living with that computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now for, what, about a month, almost? And it’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I’m sorry, I keep interrupting you, and I apologize, but what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the- You’re making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this mini review a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey mid-review. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can blame me. The desktop laptop remains an M3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco MacBook Pro? Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the big one is the 16-inch M3 Max. Oh, 16-inch, okay. Yeah, this is the 14-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M4 non-pro, non-max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like the base M4 with some, you know, slightly elevated RAM and disk space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nanotexture. And the nanotexture. So this is my first nanotexture device. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good. Like the screen is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the rest of the computer is also very good, but it’s very good in ways that we all knew already,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, which is not like I don’t mean to gloss over the fact that it’s like an incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast, incredibly capable laptop that produces no noise and has infinite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life. Like those are not small things. But now, like almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything Apple produces, you can say that about, which is, you know, look, for all we can say about the company and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its BS, the hardware is in a really good spot right now. So this is an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer for pretty much anything and being for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my upgraded purposes of having the screen be more readable in bright transit vehicles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is very very good for that so it is so good in fact I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I will be buying any more products that don’t have nanotexture screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that is available as an option because it is it is that good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think it’s the nanotexture or the brightness?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well it’s a little bit of both it is brighter than the air screen I believe the air screen is still a 500 nit max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and this one, I believe the, the, the base rate before HDR can go higher than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. It is brighter, but it’s not so much brighter that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like makes just a world difference. It makes a small difference. It’s, it’s a welcome difference, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a massive, like earth shattering. Oh my God, that’s bright. It’s not like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is nice. But what makes it extra nice is the nanotexture. That really helps a lot when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re in a vehicle like a train or something like it helps a lot. And it’s just it’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall package still. It’s not as thin and light as the Air, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty darn thin and light. So I’m very happy with it. And again, the battery life is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, granted, it’s a brand new battery compared to the Air, which was, you know, a two year old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, but it’s a very noticeable increase in battery life over the Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s because I got the low specced one, but it still has a bigger battery. So anyway, great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer overall. And if you don’t need like the super pro processing for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that computer, I would strongly recommend you look at it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it sounds really nice. I really would love a nanotexture display on my MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. And otherwise, I have no qualms with my current M3 Max Blackbook Pro, as I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to call it. However, I am really looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward to, because of things that have been happening, which we’ll talk about during the show, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would love to get a CalDigit TS5, and which isn’t out yet. And I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that requires Thunderbolt 5, I think. And that means there may be a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade in my future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Wait, we’re up to five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already? We’re up to, it isn’t Thunderbolt 4? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John that case, Marco hasn’t been listening to the show
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey either. Yeah, exactly. See, it’s not just me this time.
⏹️ ▶️ John We did a whole segment on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Wait, do I have it? You believe you do have
⏹️ ▶️ John it on your M4 MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t have the M4 Max. Does it need that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s a good question. I don’t recall one way or the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it might just limit your ports. Anyway, you can look it up in the specs, but the point is if you were to buy a high-end Mac now,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would have Thunderbolt 5.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Update, real-time follow-up, I don’t have it. It does require the M4 Pro or Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there you go. Good feedback. Thank you. Marco for providing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exceedingly quick feedback. Anyways, suffice to say, I would really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a 10 gigabit connection. And the TS5, if I’m not mistaken, has a 10 gigabit ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port. But again, it requires Thunderbolt 5, which means.
⏹️ ▶️ John are you connecting through 10 gigabit to?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Your home networking
⏹️ ▶️ John setup is going to be at most 2.5 between devices, right? And your internet connection is 1. So where
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey does this 10 become in your life?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll get there. We’ll get there. All right. All right. you
Custom SF Symbols
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, let’s do some follow-up. First of all, I talked, I believe it was last episode, about wanting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an SF symbol for Letterboxd or Letterboxd, if you will. A few people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were very kind and reached out with submissions, which was also very brave because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I gave the briefest of design briefs in what I was looking for. I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to particularly call out Alice D, who sent me the winning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contender, even though it wasn’t ever designed to be a contest, but it was very kind of all of you that sent them in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And theirs was the one that I think best fit what I was doing with it in call sheets. So that’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a forthcoming version of call sheet which I hope to push the app store in the next week or so, no promises.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I also wanted to call attention to the custom symbols app. I haven’t tried this myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because honestly I haven’t had a need to, thanks to Alice and Ben McCarthy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who has done some stuff for me in the past. But anyways, Underscore was the first of many people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to recommend the Custom Symbols app, which is for the Mac, where allegedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can drag in any reasonable SVG and it will fart out or toot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, if you will. See what I did there?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a SF symbol. Again, I haven’t personally tried this, but Underscore gave it two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thumbs up or at least I believe he did. And a few other people have reached out and said the same thing, that it’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you might want to check that out if you’re in a similar boat as me, and I will be looking into that whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is I need another SF Thank you.
Follow-up: App Store review summaries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kevin Markham writes, summarizing App Store reviews using AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would not suffer from the same challenges filtering spam emails. As long as the threshold for what counts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as spam is set incredibly low, then any review that is even a tiny bit spam-like will be ignored by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the summarization model. As a result, the only reviews that will get used for summarization are the ones that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the model is very confident are ham, which I thought was a typo for a second, then I played that back in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head and realized, no, no, no, that’s deliberate. Continuing from Kevin, building an email spam filter is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a much tougher problem because the end user sees every ham versus spam decision that you make. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app store summarization model does not need to divulge which reviews were used to generate the summary.
⏹️ ▶️ John That does make it a little bit easier, but the thing with spam filtering, especially Apple spam filtering, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so bad, you can’t assume that I’ll just crank the threshold up. And so only the
⏹️ ▶️ John really good ones will get through it because first of all, that’s gonna eliminate a lot of the actual good
⏹️ ▶️ John reviews because you’re getting false positives. And second of all, it does not mean that the spammiest of spam
⏹️ ▶️ John things you’ve ever seen in your entire life won’t get through because we’ve all seen that happen, even Gmail occasionally.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’ll be literally all caps word spam in the subject line and somehow it will get through. So I don’t think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John any threshold that these very bad spam filters can be set to that won’t let spam through. So now what you’ve done is you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John eliminated almost your entire pool of data, but still occasionally a bad one leaks through. So now it is like
⏹️ ▶️ John a big fish in a small pond. Anyway, I think it does make the job easier. So this is a good point. but
⏹️ ▶️ John I have so little faith in the ability to filter spam consistently
⏹️ ▶️ John from anyone, and especially Apple, because every time I visit my iCloud email and
⏹️ ▶️ John sort through it, the spam situation there is dire. And yes, I know they’re trying not to filter out my spam, but let me tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you, my spam folder is filled with legitimate emails, and my inbox is filled with spam.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t even know where, speaking of setting the dial, I don’t know where to set the dial on Apple’s ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to filter spam, but it’s not good.
“A fine is a price”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kieran Healy writes with regard to a fine as a price. Kieran writes, there is a debate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the literature about the degree to which this idea is true, but there is a quite famous paper literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey titled A Fine as a Price. And we’ll put a link in the show notes, thanks to Kieran. The Journal of Legal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Studies, volume 29, number 1, from January 2000 by Uri Gneissi and Aldo Rasticini.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess the summary is, the deterrence hypothesis predicts that the introduction of a penalty that leaves everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else unchanged will reduce the occurrence of the behavior you’re subject to the fine. We present the result of a field study
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a group of daycare centers that contradicts this prediction. Parents used to arrive late to collect their children, forcing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a teacher to stay after closing time. We introduced a monetary fine for late-coming parents. As a result, the number of late-coming parents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increased significantly. Whoopsie-dipsies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And now, you know, what famous, I’m sure whoever Marker heard it from was someone who heard it from
⏹️ ▶️ John this paper because this was going down in the sort of like pop culture news at the time. I think the debate is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John around any kind of like famous paper or famous saying that like becomes known in the popular media, there’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a backlash against it to say, well, how representative was that? How many people have reproduced it? And
⏹️ ▶️ John people are motivated to try to do studies to disprove it or whatever. But anyway, this, uh, that’s where the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the phrase comes from and it is still a good thought technology, as they say, to keep in mind when considering,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you fines and deterrence and how they work.
Xclaude?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is going to be teaming up with Anthropic, apparently, for a new AI-powered vibe coding platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is reading from Bloomberg. Apple is teaming up with the startup Anthropic on a new vibe coding software platform that will use artificial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intelligence to write, edit, and test code on behalf of programmers. The system is a new version of Xcode that will integrate Anthropic’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Clawed SONNET model. Apple will roll out the software internally and hasn’t yet decided whether to launch it publicly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last year, Apple announced its own AI-powered coding tool for Swift, for excuse me, for Xcode called Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Assist. The company had intended to roll it out in 2024, but never actually shipped it to developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Internally engineers have complained that the company’s own system could hallucinate and even slow down app development.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t quite understand this story. This is another German thing. It’s like, all right, so there, is this just like an internal
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to Apple? They’re not sure if they’re going to ship it. What about Swift assist? They’re they didn’t ship that. Are
⏹️ ▶️ John they not planning on shipping it? It’s very, it’s a very confusing other than like the potential partnership is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, maybe Apple is having trouble, uh, creating its own LLM powered
⏹️ ▶️ John code assistant thing integrated with Xcode. So they’re just going to field test a bunch of different partnerships
⏹️ ▶️ John inside the company until one is good enough to escape. But anyway, I mean, this I would throw this in
⏹️ ▶️ John the pile of policy decisions that Apple has made after the whole Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John intelligence debacle last year, basically saying we will we’ll work with third parties much more openly
⏹️ ▶️ John than we used to. We will consider using third party LLMs. We’re trying to partner with Google for Gemini. Maybe they’ll they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John announce that at WWDC. We’re gonna partner with Anthropics to try to make Xcode better. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I endorse these efforts, but I would like to see something come of them eventually.
Sponsor: BetterHelp
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Apple would rather not comply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have been talking about last week the App Store rule changes that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was compelled to make by a very cranky and justifiably judge. And hey, guess what? Reading from The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Verge, Apple asked a judge to halt an order forcing it to give up control over App Store payments while it appeals the decision. In a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey filing on Wednesday, Apple says the order contains, quote, extraordinary intrusions, quote, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could result in grave irreparable harm to the company. Quote, deriving Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey depriving, excuse me, Apple of control over core features of the app store is standing alone, sufficient to warrant a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stay. Apple says in its motion, halt the order. The new rules profoundly undercut the integrated iOS ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this court sustains is lawful. And that, and that is the foundation of user trust and confidence in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. There’s a lot of a ringing of hands over the weather, the angry judges a decision
⏹️ ▶️ John about what Apple has to do is going to stay on appeal. And Apple of course is pursuing every
⏹️ ▶️ John possible avenue, including saying, hey, while we’re waiting for the appeal, can we just like undo that? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve been doing it for like a week now and we hate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I just, oh, I hate every bit of this, but you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, look, what did they expect to happen when you pretty blatantly and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maliciously avoid complying with a federal judge’s order?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stuff happens. This, this kind of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Usually bad. Yeah. Their case is kind of like, okay, so we We defied the judge’s order, but the thing they made us do after that is way
⏹️ ▶️ John beyond the original order, and we think that’s mean. You can read their appeal about it. They have many
⏹️ ▶️ John complaints about everything. They’re like, oh, the judge never said anything about not charging money. Anyway, well, this will all be
⏹️ ▶️ John hashed out in the legal system. Part of the process of all these cases
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything is like, when do we decide to even check in with them? Usually, we only check in when something significant happens,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the very aggressive follow-up from Apple on not just appealing, but also saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John while we’re appealing, we don’t want this to apply to us is noteworthy.
Delta’s scare sheet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And with that in mind, um, we have some news from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Riley to friends and show Riley tested and, uh, Delta, uh, Riley’s, uh, emulator app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Riley writes Delta’s latest update with our revised Patreon signup flow has been approved. We can now freely mention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our Patreon without giving Apple 27% of donations. Of course, Apple still requires we offer in-app purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we shoved them away at the bottom of Delta settings under alternative payment methods. Trudy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Love it. Love it. Very good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Literally, an item says alternate payment methods and it’s like a submenu in the support section of settings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. And then Riley continued, I think it was like a day or two later, maybe it was later that same day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adding a new screen to Delta to inform users about the differences when using in-app purchase instead of donating directly to our Patreon. What do y’all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think? This is so good. I’m going to, it’s a lot of words, but it’s worth it. So this is a full screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sheet and it says in a very large font, you’re about to use Apple’s in-app purchase system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Patreon is not responsible for the privacy or security purchases made with an app purchase. And then in a body
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size, body sized font, any accounts or purchases made outside of Patreon will be managed by the company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, Apple Inc. Quote, your Patreon account stored payment method and related features such as subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Casey management, refund requests will not be available. Patreon can’t verify any pricing or promotions offered by the company. Learn more,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey continue or cancel. Bravo.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m pretty sure that’s word for word, the Apple scare sheet, but with the words, you know, substituted, but
⏹️ ▶️ John right down to putting Apple Inc. in quote, like we mentioned last time about the Apple employees being excited. Oh, put the company name there
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’ll be scarier. Well, Apple’s a well-known company name, so it’s not that scary. But putting it in scare quotes just adds
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of extra scare. And and again, these are all truthful statements. Patreon will not be
⏹️ ▶️ John responsible for the privacy and security of the purchase made through an ad purchase, but it makes it sound so scary.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who will be responsible? Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is so petty and I love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is flawless. It is exactly matching the design of Apple’s scare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sheet. Oh, I love this so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so incredibly petty, and I am so incredibly here for it. Just so good. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think it also, like, it highlights just how over the top Apple’s design and language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were. Like, of course, they were going to, you know, be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slapped down by anybody who can read, like the judgment or the regulation like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course this was apple you know putting a finger in everyone’s eye, which they are increasingly
Kicking and screaming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of being exceedingly aggressive with scare tactics,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the App Store, I think in the EU only, there was a MJ
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Psy blog post and we’ll link to that. And there was a screenshot, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a screenshot of Instacar, which is apparently some app that you can get in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey EU. And above what you would normally expect to see in an App Store listing, the icon, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name of the app and so on, and the get button. Above that, there’s a big red warning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey triangle. This app does not support the App Store’s private and secure payment system. It uses external purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So bad. It’s so ridiculous. And this is like, this really shows like, you know, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, they’re not over it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that’s no, they are not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s very clear. They’re not over it and they haven’t stopped fighting and they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more fighting they can do. So what’s it? So this is this app, Instacar, as far as I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell, it seems to be exclusive to the App Store in Hungary. So most of us can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view it without some like workarounds, but I did verify with some people before the show like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, it is indeed really it’s so outrageous like this the thing they’re doing it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outrageous that I thought for sure like that’s got to be that’s got to be fake right like so we but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no it’s real and it links to the learn more links to this giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wall of text that’s all you know scares about you know basically the scare sheet type of language.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it just shows like, if Apple, they’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go down quietly on this. They have a lot more pettiness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hostility and just sheer cruelty they can do to apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they will keep going. So this is a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco block that pushes down the app the app on its own product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco page on the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the very top thing on the page, besides like the navigation where you can go back, like right underneath the navigation
⏹️ ▶️ John where the content begins, giant warning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is Apple showing, demonstrating, like if you don’t play a ball with us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will penalize you in the App Store in substantial ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll try to, because like their sort of blindness on this is like, look, if they do this and they keep
⏹️ ▶️ John doing these banners, it’s not going to be too long before people figure out when you see that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John on the top, the prices are cheaper. Like, because that’s because people don’t need to care about the words
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And yes, that will initially scare them. But word will get around. Someone will make a tick tock and say, Hey, you may have seen this little
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and you might be scared by it. But like, don’t worry, because these are the apps that charge you 30% less or 15% less that
⏹️ ▶️ John will that word will get around very quickly. And now Apple supposed we’re going to scare you away with big
⏹️ ▶️ John dialogue. They’ve just put like a little flag on top of the apps where the prices are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheaper. I think it’s very optimistic that your take on that. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one good tick tock and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean to maybe to some people, but I think this is again. This is showing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has a lot more tricks that can pull out of their hat and they are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to go gracefully. They are going to go kicking and screaming, and we haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen anything yet on what they are capable of because this is a company that is is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely petty and thin-skinned and vindictive around this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’re going to see a lot more stuff like this. They will not go down quietly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it just goes to show how incredibly desperate they are to protect this revenue stream.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s intense. My other favorite thing is the scare sheet that the aforementioned Learn More link goes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to. It’s got a giant graphic at the top from the App Store about alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey payment options in the App Store. dot, dot, dot. We clearly did not spend an overabundance
⏹️ ▶️ John To be fair, I grabbed that screenshot from a video somebody posted, so I might have grabbed it before the layout had completed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, fair, okay. Either way, I do find it mildly amusing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just think, we’re gonna be talking more about Apple in a little bit, but wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it be nicer if we could be talking about Apple products in these news cycles?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of all the wars they’re fighting, This one, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth it. The cost to them of fighting this battle is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much opportunity cost, it’s so much reputational damage, it’s so much damage around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole ecosystem. I don’t understand the strategy they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco following unless it is truly being done by incredibly short-sighted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who don’t understand software, Which maybe it is.
Home-networking corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s enter home networking corner. First of all, Peter Binks writes, Ubiquiti’s other line,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amplify, A-M-P-L-I-F-I, is probably a better fit for people that just want to replace their Google,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TP-Link, et cetera, mesh network. It’s more in the prosumer consumer space. And because of that, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have all the fancy networking software. The one caveat is that it seems like Ubiquiti is much less invested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in it. So we’ll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard about Amplify, but like in the context of what we were discussing with Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John and his plans and Marco and his stuff, Like if your goal is to go to Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can play with all the fancy software that Casey’s raving about, and this doesn’t have that, then this is kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, well, but then now it’s just competing with like Eero and Google without
⏹️ ▶️ John all the Amplify fanciness. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Ubiquiti fanciness. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have all the fancy software. It doesn’t like every device you put in gets added to this big thing. Like it’s not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have any experience with this thing, but it looks like it is. It definitely is more of a consumer oriented one,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like Ubiquiti’s sort of brand
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage is, you know, we make expensive feeling, expensive looking, and probably
⏹️ ▶️ John actually also expensive stuff that will be reliable and that has lots
⏹️ ▶️ John and lots of features and configurability. And to the extent that we can make that easy to set up, that’s great. But if you’re gonna say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we take away most of the expensive feeling and lookingness and some of the expense and also
⏹️ ▶️ John take away most of the cool features, it’s like, well, you know, Like it’s not it’s not their bread and butter like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s now you’re into like Eros bread and butter. So, uh, you know, I, I don’t know about the amplify brand.
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked at their products too. They didn’t seem particularly compelling to me because I’m not in the market for ubiquity
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, but I am in the market for, you know, easy to set up home stuff. And so far Eros has been doing it for
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Although not that I’m looking to replace my networking stuff anytime soon, but one of the main criteria
⏹️ ▶️ John that I look at when I look at products other than like brand reputation and feature set and everything is what size
⏹️ ▶️ John and shape are the access points because from even within a brand,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not a lot of consistency and people keep changing the size and shape of them and it makes a difference because
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes it’s easier or harder to fit these things into your decor and into your home depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on is it a tall skinny thing, a low flat thing, where are the plugs, how does it connect
⏹️ ▶️ John to something, does it have to be hung on a wall or a ceiling, maybe Haysa will get to that. If it is on a piece of furniture,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it ugly, do I wanna hide it or is it okay to be seen? And on that front, Amplify
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t doing much better than its competitors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I would say too, like I’ve said in the past, you know, when talking about like, you know, HomePods versus Sonos, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I generally have found better luck, better experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and higher happiness when I’m using a product that is the company’s main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focus, who makes it. And, you know, I love Ubiquiti stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t talk enough about how much I love Ubiquiti stuff. But the reality is Ubiquiti is an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enterprise networking gear company and their Amplify home line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a higher priority for them it seems. So it’s great that they have it for people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it but it does like I would generally recommend like when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible get things from a company that does a really good job of that thing and ideally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is their main focus within the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Colin Robertson writes, I’m a photographer that often shoots real estate where I regularly provide a floor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan as one of my services. The app, Cubicasa, C-U-B-I-C-A-S-A, lets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you walk around your house with your phone recording a video, it uses LiDAR if you have it, and then upload to the company and in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about 24 hours they send you an accurate enough floor plan one can use for furniture planning. It works surprisingly well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I looked into this, I have not tried this, but I looked into it a smidge. The Barebones 2D floor plan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is allegedly free if I understand it right, check my math. But it’s $15 for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what most people would probably consider like the, I shouldn’t say floor, but like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most basic version. At a glance, it looked good to me, but again, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t stress enough, just like the SF Symbols app from before, I haven’t personally tried it. So your mileage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may vary, but you might wanna just check that out if you’re interested in making a floor plan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and didn’t wanna try the magic plan whatever it was I talked about last week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve tried apps like that, but no, maybe not the specific one that use like LiDAR on the camera to try to do like
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D models of your house. Not so much to aim for a floor plan, but again, just like to have a rough idea for like positioning
⏹️ ▶️ John furniture and stuff. And they make it look like you live in kind of like a place with melting walls.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you have lots
⏹️ ▶️ John furniture or lots of clutter, it has a hard time finding your walls and windows, but you know, the tech will only get better. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good to have these options available. Certainly easier than taking out the tape measure and trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John measure all this yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, ThunderGodSid, which is a funny username, has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decided to do the world a service and has created whatunifystuffshouldibuy.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I briefly, briefly looked at. And I can’t say one way or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other if these recommendations are good. At a glance, it seemed fine to me, but I’m mostly ignorant myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if you wanted at least a starting point with which to try to figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to buy, at least that gives you a pretty easy flow by which you can figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this out. So I thought that was a community service for all of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you can check that out. All right. So let me give you my status updates. How much time do we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have? After I talked about the Ubiquity stuff last week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people, a surprising amount of people were kind enough to reach out and offer either to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sell me their leftovers, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, stuff that they had recently upgraded away from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever the case may be. They’d offer to sell me them very, very cheap or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in some cases, just straight up send me stuff, oftentimes because they weren’t using it anymore and just wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it out of the house, which I totally hear. So I think it was over the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weekend, I received two U6 long range
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access points. I wasn’t going and seeking long range access points, but they were offered at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very steep discount, and I couldn’t say no. So I got two of those. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall, the Eero setup that I had, and I know you aren’t looking at my house or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a floor plan or anything like that, but if you just imagine a standard two-story rectangle, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In one corner of the house, in the front right corner, if you’re inside the house, in the front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right corner of the house, on the second story, on the top story, is the office. And that’s where the main Eero was. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s now where the Cloud Gateway Fiber is. Below that and behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is the living room on the back right corner of the house, if you will, that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one Eero was. And then back upstairs, literally in the opposite corner of the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the office is the primary bedroom where I had another Eero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wireless access point. So what I’ve done is I put one of the U6 long ranges in the bedroom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it’s in the bottom left corner there, I guess I should say top left corner of the house, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then one of them in the downstairs living room, which is kind of the bottom right corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the house. And that seems fine, although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installing it was a little bit of an adventure because none of my networking equipment at this point is Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except the Cloud Gateway Fiber. And so because of that, I needed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out a way to power the U6 long range because Marco, how do pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of Ubiquiti stuff gets powered?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Power of Reethanet, PoE. Yes, it does, PoE. With various numbers of plus signs after it, which indicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power level. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. So I didn’t have any PoE, anything in the house, except the Cloud Gateway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fiber, which is all the way up in the office. So I had to buy two, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point anyway, I had to buy two exceedingly ugly and surprisingly large, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only $18, Power of Reethanet injectors. So you plug this into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wall, you plug data in, and then coming out as a combination of data and power. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did that and they worked great. They’re hideous to look at, but they work great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I was able to get them installed. It was a little bit fraught because they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to periodically decide to not realize that there is a wired backhaul
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Cloud Gateway Fiber. Like at first it seemed to work and then one of them fell off and then the other one fell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off and I had to like do a bunch of rebooting, but eventually they both got convinced that, Okay, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, we’re good to go. There’s a wired backhaul. That was a little bit tough. Um, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other question I have, which John alluded to earlier, um, what’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal with ceiling mounting? Like I’m aware that that’s the default method, but do people really ceiling mount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this in their homes? Like, I don’t know if I can get away with that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s to be determined. Uh, but like Marco, do you have your, you know, you don’t because you have it like just mounted on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screws on the wall, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I, depending on, you know, where I’ve put them, I’ve, I’ve done every kind of mounting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option, including not mounting them and just kind of resting them against things. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the antennas in this line are designed for it to be mounted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some form of horizontally. So whether it’s like, you know, sitting on a table facing up or more likely from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ceiling facing down, that is probably better for antenna performance and to maximize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the range and performance and everything like that. That being said, so I have them installed on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ceiling in the restaurant. In my house, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing like that. In my house, none of them are visible because that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really pass the aesthetic requirements that we go for. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re like in closets or like at the beach, I have a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are like in wall areas. like in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the roof of the porch like it’s kind of like it’s like they’re all kind of hidden in or around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or under things or in closets. In my experience you can kind of have them oriented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however you want as long as you’re willing to tolerate like this is my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home not like a competitive gaming like you know high bandwidth everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be like the top-of-the-line throughput like you know if you can if you can just have it work as a house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have found it really doesn’t matter how you mount them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good deal. All right, so with that said, once I got those installed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my beloved topology was looking way better. If you recall, you can go into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Unify management interface and actually see what is connected to what and where. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, with the Eero, it was basically one gigantic flat list. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was just everything connected to the Cloud Gateway Fiber, because as far as it was concerned, that was true. It didn’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of the switches or access points anything in between because they weren’t ubiquity. At this point, it was everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wired was peer to the two wireless access points, and then they had stuff hanging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off it. So improvements are being made. But I’m wondering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, I’m mostly very happy, but I’m wondering if maybe this was a mistake because now I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a lot more data about the state of my world, and it’s telling me that my AP deployment density might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need improvement, and now I’m stressing about things that I never used to stress about. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as happy as I am broadly, I’m wondering if maybe this was too much data for someone as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neurotic as me You know, this is why I don’t have my my my battery level or my battery amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indicator In the in the status bar because I don’t need a percentage. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just need to know vaguely But anyway in the for the most part so far so good. I actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a non long-range I believe it’s a u6 Pro incoming from another very kind listener, and I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna put that in the office and And hopefully that will get me sorted. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not to say that anything isn’t working now, but I can tell that there’s a little bit less coverage than I want. And I use their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi Man app, which you can, I think it requires at least one ubiquity access point, but I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that. But you can go around and scan and it’ll show you exactly, you know, how robust your Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey signal is. And it was sufficient for me, but I could get a little bit better out of it. So hopefully a third
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access point, getting back to the place I was with a Eero, that hopefully it’ll clear me up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then John was alluding earlier, well, why do you need a 10 gig connection for your laptop?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are you connecting to? Well, my Synology now has a 10 gig ethernet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 10 gigabit ethernet daughter cardboard thing in it. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am getting a solid 250 megabytes, megabytes, bytes, megabytes per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second between my MacBook Pro and the Synology because the MacBook Pro- How are you connecting those two things?
⏹️ ▶️ John The Cloud Gateway Fiber, baby. So the Cloud Gateway Fiber has a 10 gig, has one 10
⏹️ ▶️ John gig port, but then the rest are 2.5s, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so the Synology is on the one and only 10 gig port. And then because the TS4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have is two and a half gig, that’s connected to the, I believe it’s only one at two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a half gig port. And at some point I will need to get a couple of SFP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connectors so I can connect the MacBook and the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simultaneously, but I can’t at 10 gigs right now. Or perhaps I’ll just get a switch that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 10 gig capable switch. I’m still not sure how I’m going to handle the office and it depends on whether I relocate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything somewhere else. I’ve been considering, I don’t think I’ve talked about this on the show, but I’ve been considering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moving the Synology and main switch and Cloud Gateway Fiber and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all that. I’ve been considering moving that into either the garage, which I think is probably temperature not going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to work, or potentially the laundry room, which is, I think, a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decent place to put all of it. But that’s to be determined. You love bringing things near water. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be above the water, not below it. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. You can put it outside and combine both of our forces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, put it in
⏹️ ▶️ John the roof of Marco’s porch.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, right. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go. So then, breaking news. Moments before we started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recording, another kind listener had sent me two Light 8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PoE switches, which is I think four PoE ports, four non-PoE ports, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Flex Mini, which is a USB-C or PoE powered, a little baby hub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or switch, I should say. I installed one of them downstairs, the Lite 8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downstairs, I installed the Flex Mini on my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mostly, I’m happy with all this. However, I had heard horror
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stories about getting Sonos to work with Ubiquiti. And let me tell you my brief experience in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey span of 20 minutes before I’d run upstairs and record was that most of those horror stories were mostly accurate because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as soon as I replaced dumb unmanaged switches with ubiquity switches, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was upset. Now I think the it appears to be that the going advice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to go wireless and wireless only on your Sonos devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was the case that my two Aero 100s on my desk in my office were connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a little baby switch on my desk. The Sonos Arc, which is the main soundbar, was connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the switch in the living room. And the Sonos Port, which is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powers the porch and as well as takes input from the turntable, that was also connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via Ethernet. And I knew that I was probably in for a little bit of an adventure,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it appears the moment I switched from unmanaged to the ubiquity manage switches, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took a turn for the worse. Now, I reset up the main living room situation and that seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be fine. I haven’t reset up the port yet. I, in the office just fell right back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey onto Wi-Fi. I think I had explicitly disabled it on the arc way back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when. So far so good, he says with not a ton of confidence,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if I recall correctly, part of the reason, a lot of the reason why it started wiring all this stuff was because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting it to play Spotify or Apple Music or what have you off of Wi-Fi back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I had the Eros was very, very finicky and spotty. And then with the desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones, the two Air 100s on my desk, one of them would like fall out from time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to time. Now, given that my office is now about as far away from an access point as I can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I sit here right now, we’ll see how tomorrow goes. But I’m sitting here now, I think I’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through it, But it was definitely like the Sonos app was pissed. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ubiquiti app was pissed. Like everything was up, sorry, British people. But anyways, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was upset. And so we’ll see what happens. And if I can get all this squared away,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then the next mission is I really, really wanna start getting some cameras in and around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly around the house. I don’t think I need them in the house, unless I wanna stalk Penny when we’re out. But I wanna get some cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around the house. So I gotta figure out, you know, what my plan is for that. how am I going to get data to them, how am I going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get power to them? Because of course, any of the places I want data and power, neither of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those things exist at the moment. And yes, I’m aware of PoE, that’s what makes PoE great, but I still got to get that ethernet, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the E, I got to get that ethernet to where these Phantom cameras would be. So I got to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think on that and work that out. But if people have recommendations for cameras, ubiquity cameras that they really like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and or doorbells or what have you, do let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you, we have all ubiquity cameras at the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what should I get as a person and not as a business though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have a large number of G5 turrets, which are, have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just since been replaced by the G6 turret. It looks like they still might sell it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as G5 turret ultra for 149 bucks. Yeah. So we have a large number of the G5 turret ultras,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which are pretty much universal. Like they’re kind of like the everything cameras. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can put them in many different locations, many different mounting situations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of them we have directly mounted to the wall. You can route the cable through the wall behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, or you can route it out the side. The only weird thing about them is that they have this little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blob that converts the cable. It’s like a breakout cable. It converts the cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from their little proprietary thing that goes into the camera to ethernet. And you can wrap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things around it to seal it up and everything. But that means that six inches away from the camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have like what looks like a large like ferrite core thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s that’s like converting your cable type. If you get one of their mounting boxes, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can shove all that into the mounting box but then it makes the whole thing a lot bigger and uglier. So it depends on, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you’re putting them, how you’re running the cables and everything but it gives you a lot of flexibility. The image quality of their turret
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line is, well of all their cameras is very good. The G6 turret
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes up to 4K. So it’s like a step up in resolution and image quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for most cases for like a standard home camera, you won’t really need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of resolution. And the only other ones, we don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the domes or anything. We do have a couple of the 360 cameras for like covering big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas. I will say a 360 camera is not amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you actually want to like, look and see in detail what’s going on. It’s more of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 360 camera is like a just-in-case camera. Like, if you wanna cover a very large area,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just in case like, you know, there’s some kind of incident that you wanna look up footage for later that you don’t care that much about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the precision of it. It’s not great for detail, especially around its edges. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really hard to view the feed very large because the feed is a circle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you put it up in a window or on a monitor, it takes up a huge amount of space display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively little of the useful information. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI360s, again we have a couple of those for big areas of the restaurant. I kind of regret those, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the turrets, the G5 turrets, and I got a couple of G6s when they came out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those have all been great. They’re rock solid. I have no regrets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At the Beach House, when I did those, the turrets didn’t exist yet I don’t think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So at the Beach House, I mostly have the bullet style of camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, when you look at the specs and everything, for the most part, they’re all basically the same guts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the same small number of guts. It’s just a question of like what physical form do you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera to take? You can get fancy with like the super zoom ones, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think it’s necessary for almost anybody. So again, it depends on what you’re doing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the Beach, I have mostly the bullets. I think I have all the bullets actually. Most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them are the cheap little G5 bullets. I do have a couple of G5 Pros where I needed like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more resolution and lighting, but for the most part, that’s pretty, like stick with like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the turret and the bullet and you’re fine. I have also tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a couple of contexts, the little compact instant ones. I believe they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco G4 Instants or G6 Instants, I forget. No, they’re G4s. The instance are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really inexpensive, really basic, not very good, you kind of get what you pay for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re good if that’s all you can fit in a spot, but usually if you can fit the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turret kind, it’s better. So there you go.
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Apple Turnover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, it turns out that one John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracuse has written a blog post and let me tell you, it started with an upside down flag and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, that is setting the tone as they say. So John, what’s going on, man?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve done like four this year, haven’t I?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know. Let’s see. It’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot for you. For sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve, I’ve blogged in three, in three totally different months so far
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It is a miracle.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve done a total of four posts. So yeah, I’m doing pretty well this year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so what I posted, this is something I’ve been thinking about probably since we started
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about the DMA stuff ages ago, I don’t even know how long ago, like last
⏹️ ▶️ John year sometime. And I just figured I need to just get it out and write it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s usually
⏹️ ▶️ John how things go on my blog. I have a, usually it starts its life as a blog idea and my blog idea note,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it sits there for months, usually, sometimes years. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if I feel like it’s kind of like burning a hole in my pocket that I just need to just, don’t worry about how you’re gonna write it or what you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John say, just get something out. And I kind of reached that point with this topic about a week
⏹️ ▶️ John ago. And if you listen to the show, there’s not really anything in the blog post that’s gonna be surprising,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the kind of the role I see of posts on my blog is like a succinct summary
⏹️ ▶️ John of the stuff I ramble for hours about on a podcast. And also it’s more accessible, like it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be crawled by search engines. It takes two seconds to read instead of having to listen to hours and hours of podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John and find the part where we talk about this or whatever. So that’s, that’s kind of the role I feel like for, for blogs and
⏹️ ▶️ John in my life or, you know, and see our recent episode about our websites, but why it’s important
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to have a website and a domain and a place where I can put this stuff. So there you have it. Um, and so what is the topic?
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, it’s about, uh, the sort of the, the, the place
⏹️ ▶️ John where Apple finds itself these days and in particular was spawned by when I was thinking about discussing the DMA
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, I always thought about, as I always am, what kind of things should Apple do differently?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Apple should do X, Apple should do Y, Apple should do Z. Like it’s, you know, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John large part of my career is, has basically been that, thinking about what Apple should do differently. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that changed for me is, so many things that I would think about that Apple should do differently, I would end
⏹️ ▶️ John up running into this dead end and saying, well, but they’re not gonna do that thing until
⏹️ ▶️ John different people are running the company. And the more and more I ran into that, the more I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought like, this is, it seems different than all the past times when I was saying Apple should do X, Y, or
⏹️ ▶️ John Z. I gave a couple of examples in this post here, but like, I mean, which example did
⏹️ ▶️ John I use? I think I talked about the bad keyboards, right? They made computers with bad keyboards, right? But even just like
⏹️ ▶️ John way back in the day, they need to have a new file system, they need a new memory safe language,
⏹️ ▶️ John they need a new operating system even farther back than that that has memory protection and preemptive multitasking. It’s always been
⏹️ ▶️ John these things like Apple needs to do this because they are not doing as well as they should. And if they do
⏹️ ▶️ John these things, they’ll be doing better and they need to do this. And usually eventually Apple does. They need to make a way to share
⏹️ ▶️ John photos between multiple people in the same family and a decade later, they do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in all those cases, it was like, I always had in mind, this is the thing that Apple should be doing, but I never thought to myself, but
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, Apple is not going to do that unless different people are in charge.
⏹️ ▶️ John That thought never entered my mind. I was frustrated that it would take them a long time to do it. Even back in the day
⏹️ ▶️ John when we were complaining about, oh, Johnny Ive made these laptops that don’t have any ports on them. I didn’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John like the only way they can fix this is to fire everybody who made these laptops and make different ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, or certainly I didn’t think like, you know, the CEO of Apple needs to go and be replaced to fix the
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops. Like they make mistakes all the time and they’re slow to fix them, but eventually they do. But there’s this
⏹️ ▶️ John one class of problems that they’ve been running into in the past decade or so, that
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I think about it, I’m like, oh, I don’t think that’s ever gonna change until
⏹️ ▶️ John new people are in charge. And the more I would think about it, I would say, well, what do you mean by new people? Like if Phil Schoeller retires, does
⏹️ ▶️ John that fix it? Well, no, probably not. Well, like if those lieutenants you see
⏹️ ▶️ John in the leadership page who have been there for decades, if they leave and new people come in, will that fix it? Well, maybe, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure. It’s always been a, you know, how much does Tim Cook delegate or whatever. But in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John several months, or six months or a year, it’s become increasingly clear that even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you changed the ranks of everybody in the C-suite at Apple, but still left the
⏹️ ▶️ John CEO there, you’d still have the same problem because so many of the worst decisions, when you run them up the
⏹️ ▶️ John flagpole, you find out, no, Tim Cook, as you would imagine, as CEO, the buck really did stop with him. And when
⏹️ ▶️ John it came time to choose between competing theories about which things to do, Tim Cook would
⏹️ ▶️ John be the ultimate arbiter of what goes. And with the laptops and the keyboards and stuff, like you know there’s people
⏹️ ▶️ John under him, like Johnny Ives says, this is our new laptop. Tim Cook says, yeah, sure, fine. You’re the product guy. I’m sure it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John When the keyboards are breaking and they’re having customer complaints, he’d say, what’s the deal with the
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards? And if engineering says, no, we can fix it. We’re gonna put a membrane on it. Tim Cook goes, all right, well, fix
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And then they put the membrane on it. It doesn’t fix anything. Tim Cook says, what’s the deal? You told me you were gonna fix it. No, we’re gonna fix it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that dynamic makes sense. at no time during any of those things, like they need to make a new Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John successor that, you know, the file system, the operating system, the ports on laptops, all these
⏹️ ▶️ John big crises that can make people say, Oh, that’s it. I’m fed up with Apple. They’re not doing what I want. At no point
⏹️ ▶️ John did I feel this helplessness that somehow you needed like leadership change at the very top to
⏹️ ▶️ John fix this, because I always assume that, you know, well, Timco is going to make mistakes. He’s going to, you know, people
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to tell him what he wants to hear sometimes, you know, going to go off and do the car project,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Like in the end, you make mistakes, but you move on. But this
⏹️ ▶️ John class of things that Tim Cook in particular seems extremely married to, and so do many people
⏹️ ▶️ John under him, just really seems like it’s not going to change unless leadership changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so here’s the post saying, like, look, I’m not mad that they’re making decisions I don’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not mad that they’re making products I don’t like. I’m not mad that they haven’t updated the Mac Pro. Well, I am kind of. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying you didn’t make a good Mac Pro. therefore, you need to Tim Cook needs to leave the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying that there are things that Apple has been getting into lately that they just seem
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely hopeless, that like this is never going to change as long as Tim Cook is
⏹️ ▶️ John still there, because he has proven that no matter what the people beneath him say and debate
⏹️ ▶️ John and offer or whatever, in the end, he’s going to make, as the judge said, he’s going to choose poorly, he’s going to make the wrong choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as I said in the post here, people can change their minds. Steve Jobs did all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you make a terrible mistake, you change your mind. And that’s what kind of what I’ve been hoping for for years is like, OK, well, it seems like this is
⏹️ ▶️ John never going to change unless leadership changes at Apple. But, you know, maybe just something sufficiently
⏹️ ▶️ John dramatic has to happen. And I kind of that’s where this came from, the DMA thing. I kind of thought when the DMA
⏹️ ▶️ John thing comes to a head, like finally, they’ve been pushing this as far as they can go. They think they’re they think
⏹️ ▶️ John they can avoid this regulation. And here come the regulations and we see what they are and then they fight. And it’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is going to be it. This is gonna be the crisis that finally drives them to say, all right We we we fought this as long and as hard
⏹️ ▶️ John as we could but in the end we we need to change direction And no, they didn’t change direction
⏹️ ▶️ John They they saw the DMA and they just dug their heels in harder and harder and harder It’s like wow That
⏹️ ▶️ John was that was kind of the crisis point that I always expect them to turn on like they ship those stupid butterfly keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John For so long they pressed it as far as they could but they get to the crisis point and eventually they change their mind
⏹️ ▶️ John They voiced those laptops on us with no ports on them for so long for so many years the touch bar
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole name but they come to a crisis point and they turn and I feel like the DMA was the crisis
⏹️ ▶️ John point for all of the App store stuff and the the rent seeking and services and all that other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and they didn’t turn and sound like well, that’s it That’s that’s the ballgame now, you know, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it just reinforced by the more recent US things or whatever But it’s like there is no crisis that’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John happen It’s gonna change the minds at the top of this company about what they should be doing I thought what they were
⏹️ ▶️ John doing is wrong for a long time. But eventually, I essentially lost faith that anything
⏹️ ▶️ John could happen that will change their minds and they just continue to be wrong. And, you know, we touched on it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John in the follow up section, like they’re just digging in their heels. So they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John welcome to prove me wrong better late than never. If they finally, you know, think about what they want to change.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I mentioned last week about potentially doing a member special or something on this, because I think it would be fun to say, if you could change
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff at Apple without regard for like if you could change leadership and get someone in there as like a turnaround artist and
⏹️ ▶️ John it just sounds dumb when you’re saying you’re going to turn around the most successful company in the world. You know what I mean? Like if you
⏹️ ▶️ John could fix the things, the longstanding problems that Apple had, get in there and fix them. What would you fix? What
⏹️ ▶️ John would you do? How would you change it? But it is kind of like that scenario where you need new people to come
⏹️ ▶️ John in, uh, and say, okay, whatever the old administration
⏹️ ▶️ John slash regime did. Forget about that. A new day has dawned, kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Satya Nadella at Microsoft. It’s not like Microsoft was bad before,
⏹️ ▶️ John but he had a new plan for the company and he executed it. And you kind of need a new person to do that. What does that
⏹️ ▶️ John plan look like for Apple? So maybe we will talk about that. Maybe it won’t be a member special. Maybe it’ll just be on the show. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that’s my thought with this post. I tried to really just boil it down and be as precise
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible and just hit the specific points, not get too bogged down into
⏹️ ▶️ John argument, reasoning and examples and all the stuff that I just got bogged down in when discussing the post.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s, it’s pretty tight. Every paragraph, every line is there for a purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes a point and makes, I’m trying to make the specific point that I’m actually making with the words that I chose, not
⏹️ ▶️ John tangential points that would use different words, which is always the challenge with things like this. And I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I, and I knew I would be able to expound on it in the podcast or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think this is capturing a popular sentiment. Sometimes people
⏹️ ▶️ John complain about when we talk about, you know, complain about Apple on the show, which I still argue is one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John main purposes of the show. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey oh, you know, isn’t there
⏹️ ▶️ John anything nice to say about Apple? And as we said over the many years we’ve gone through this
⏹️ ▶️ John cycle multiple times, when things are going great for Apple, it’s all fun and roses
⏹️ ▶️ John on the show. When things are going poorly, it doesn’t sound as great. It’s that the, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s we can’t impose a reality on on Apple. The things they
⏹️ ▶️ John do influence the discussion of them. And I made this post, which is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the the most pessimistic and damning post I’ve ever written about Apple and got
⏹️ ▶️ John basically zero pushback. I don’t even say basically I got zero pushback. No one read this and say, you’re off your
⏹️ ▶️ John rocker. Apple’s great. Everything’s fine. What are you talking about? Nobody. Zero people. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that usually doesn’t happen because usually there’s just someone out there who says, you know, it was just really
⏹️ ▶️ John committed to the cause. But obviously, the circles I travel in are most inclined to and the people who would even know my site
⏹️ ▶️ John exists, let alone read it and are most inclined to agree with me because there are lots of developers and stuff. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just seems like Apple is not getting the message on the whole,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, anti competitive, rent seeking app store
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And I linked again for the billionth time for the last time I took a run at this topic, which was the
⏹️ ▶️ John art of the possible post, which was like, look, Apple seems to think if they just hold the line on this, that the world will
⏹️ ▶️ John bend around them. And I don’t think that’s going to happen. And they need to change. I forget how long ago that was a year or two ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, as it’s all come to a head, like they’ve Apple continues to believe we’re just going to fight
⏹️ ▶️ John as hard as we can. And in the end, it will be fine and no evidence supports that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, you know, the on the outside, the people who oppose them are not having their
⏹️ ▶️ John minds changed, nor are they being strong armed into compliance. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John governments are stepping in and strong army apple into compliance and still apple is fighting them. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you know, like, uh, I don’t want to steal Marco Stunder for being like fire Tim Cook or whatever. And in, in
⏹️ ▶️ John like in the end, he’s going to retire in a few years anyway. So this is a problem that will solve itself. But it’s just, I
⏹️ ▶️ John really feel like we’ve reached that point where there are so many things, so many important things that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John should do differently that I now feel they will not do differently until there is new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think for me, and I’d like to hear Marco’s take, uh, but for me, the thing that was most surprising, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having been a part of much less, listen to this show, although as we all know, I do, I really listen to the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but anyways, as it was surprising for me to hear you or see you plainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say it’s time for Cook to go. Because to my recollection, you’ve come up and toed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the line on that on ATP, but I don’t recall you ever saying, no, really, he’s gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go. Last show, Casey. All right, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But no, in case of defense, this is a very recent thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not though, like it’s the thing, like it’s, the problem with posts like this is they
⏹️ ▶️ John very often read like, that’s it, Apple has gone too far, They remove the SD card slot from the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air. That’s it, I’m off, I’m no longer an Apple customer. That’s what all these things read like. Like it just seems like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a series of things, a whole bunch of little annoyances, and there’s just one annoyance too many, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John brings me over the limit, and just in a rage, I’m now anti-Apple. And what I tried so hard to say on this
⏹️ ▶️ John is, that’s not what this is. All of those things are a different class
⏹️ ▶️ John of things where you say like, they should change this, and they’re not doing it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but probably eventually they’ll figure it out and change it. This is just like a class of things where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, no, they’ve lost sight of, you know, I called it their North Star, like what
⏹️ ▶️ John makes Apple, Apple? And they didn’t lose sight of it just once or for a year or with the Mac Pro or
⏹️ ▶️ John on a particular topic or even just with the App Store. They’ve lost sight of it like big picture
⏹️ ▶️ John wise. And that’s why, you know, it’s not like, I don’t want to, that’s why I didn’t say like, Tim Cook needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to be fired. It’s not a punitive thing. What I’m saying is I’m now convinced this will not change until leadership
⏹️ ▶️ John changes because they’ve proven it to me over so much time that there’s no crisis
⏹️ ▶️ John that will motivate them to change. And I can go a real long time, like how long, like I still believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that they could fix the laptops. How many years, how many years were their laptops messed up, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John How long did it take them to get a new operating system that was any good? I still believe them, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I had complaints about it. I wrote all those reviews for years and years. I’m like, you need a new operating system, but you’re not doing it right.
⏹️ ▶️ John They eventually got there. but with this one, I’ve just, I’ve just lost faith. And so that’s why it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a angry, punitive, Tim Cook needs to be punished thing. It’s more of a
⏹️ ▶️ John recognition that I no longer believe things will change without new people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I think you’re right. And it’s also like when I saw this blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco post, I was like, oh my God, John flipped. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yeah, exactly. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, you know, like in the, keep in mind, Like in the last few weeks, we’ve seen some pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important like Apple fans and Apple defenders and people who have really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart views and measured views. Like I heard like on dithering, John Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Ben Thompson are both now wondering aloud, maybe it’s time for new leadership at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s huge for the types of people who are now either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying aloud like maybe it’s time Or her actually saying no it’s time now that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big shift And that’s that’s like a big threshold that has been crossed in only very recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks And that’s that’s really something
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, because it’s like in all those cases It’s it’s not the sort of knee-jerk reaction to particular events
⏹️ ▶️ John because how many events can we all name that are just so objectionable to get? People so angry, but those
⏹️ ▶️ John are just if you’ve been in this game for a couple decades You’re like those things happen. They come and go you get angry about them
⏹️ ▶️ John things change you move on or whatever It’s like, but what does it take for you to like, stop believing
⏹️ ▶️ John that these things are going to get better? Like that it’s not just a matter of time. It’s not just a
⏹️ ▶️ John matter of making your case in public. It’s not just a matter of there being a crisis. And I think that’s where people are getting. And honestly, all the discovery
⏹️ ▶️ John in the court cases has really accelerated this, I think, for everybody, because you no longer, we always say, well, who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows what’s going on inside Apple? Well, we don’t know what’s going on inside Apple, but we have actual, like literal
⏹️ ▶️ John evidence of some of the things that are going on. actual words from actual people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those things did not help make people get more optimistic about the company, quite
⏹️ ▶️ John the opposite. So anything you you were able to believe before, and it’s like, well, here’s the people saying the stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So does this help or hurt your faith? And really, I think I honestly, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John not setting aside whether the the wisdom of the court cases and how they’re going to turn out if you’ve lived through the Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John antitrust trial, you know, these things don’t necessarily go the way you think they will, even if if you’re heavily in favor of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But just the discovery process has revealed stuff that we didn’t know before.
⏹️ ▶️ John And all of it has been in support of the idea of, like, these people are not going to change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. And you can look at the, there’s a number of counterarguments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this. People say, like, well, Tim Cook is making the company a lot of money and has made the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of money. He has grown the company tremendously from when Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco died and Cook really took over fully,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the company has grown tremendously. The whole market has grown. Apple has expanded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its dominance in so many ways and has expanded its scale in so many ways. That’s all true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve made the comparison before, so I won’t dwell too much on it, but so did Steve Ballmer for Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook has done so much better than Steve Ballmer, like just in terms on, as measured by Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John Ballmer metrics, Like he’s like, I don’t know, a hundred times better. So you’re right in this, like if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just looking at those specs, they’re of a similar type, if that’s what you care about. But the scale is so
⏹️ ▶️ John much bigger. Like he’s been tremendously good in that Steve Ballmer way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. He has been a better Steve Ballmer than Steve Ballmer was, but he’s still a Steve Ballmer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t call him a Steve Ballmer, but I would say along those metrics of like financial metrics and expansion of the company, he’s done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He also, for, you know, in all fairness to Steve Ballmer, Tim Cook also inherited a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better ship, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John But he did, like, I don’t know, like you do a post-mortem on him, maybe we will eventually, but I think, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at the size of things, like Ben Thompson was talking about this in Dithering a little bit this week too, like the company
⏹️ ▶️ John he inherited had so much going for it, but it had not as many of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that we currently attribute to Apple. Like the company that he inherited was not in a position
⏹️ ▶️ John to make as many iPhones as they make now, let alone sell them, right? And it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John in so many businesses that they managed to enter. So there was a lot of work that needed to be done to get where
⏹️ ▶️ John we are. Like I don’t have a lot of objections to most of the things that Tim Cook has
⏹️ ▶️ John done with Apple. It is particular stances and policies. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as I said in the post here, losing sight of the fact that what you’re supposed to be, what has made Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John successful is doing what nobody else wants to do, which is just concentrate on making a great products and
⏹️ ▶️ John have faith that money will come from that. that’s what brought them to where they are today, and losing sight of that is a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and I think you can look at Tim Cook’s entire time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as CEO. There are some things he’s done well, the scale, you know. Although,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will also point out, people often say that the scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple today is all because of Tim Cook, like the scale of manufacturing in China, which I’ll get back to in a minute, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they ascribe all that to Tim Cook because before he was a CEO, Tim Cook was the COO and he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was famous for all that scaling stuff. When people say that, they’re usually saying in the context of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, we need Tim Cook now more than ever because he’s the operations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person and with all the possible tariff stuff or instability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with China, that Tim Cook is the one we need right now, the leader we need right now to get us out of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mess. And I would point out like the CEO has a lot more on their plate as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a role than all the operational details. We have Jeff Williams doing that role.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Jeff Williams is probably the one who is most responsible for that kind of operational, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff these days. So I would say we don’t necessarily need Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that reason alone. But getting back, you know, so Tim Cook’s tenure has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great for operations. It has been great for profits. It has been great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for growth of those profits. been great for expansion into new profitable areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has been a mixed bag for products. Right at the beginning Tim Cook had said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in interviews and people said like he’s not a product person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well the outgoing CEO Steve Jobs was like one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world’s greatest product people who left in his in his wake one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world’s greatest product companies. When he passed away,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that left a huge vacuum. Tim Cook was the worst person to try to fill that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the role. So what did he do? Well, he, for a while, it seemed like Johnny Ive was kind of the head of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products. Maybe a, maybe a little bit marketing Phil Schiller, maybe was it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like right now, who is the head of products at Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. Like who I, who is the big product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinker? Who is the product lead? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if you need one person for that. Like he’s always been delegating into his various product leads, which is part of why I’ve got into trouble
⏹️ ▶️ John with like the bad laptops and the not enough ports and the, and the, the, uh, the Mac round
⏹️ ▶️ John table. I get various times he’s allowed the company to go in bad directions on product
⏹️ ▶️ John because he can’t make the Canton didn’t make those calls himself and he delegated them and the people
⏹️ ▶️ John he delegated them to made bad calls and it took a a while for like the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the right compiled debug loop to solve that problem. That’s why you had these big, like we’re going to revise
⏹️ ▶️ John the laptops and we’re going to have the Mac round table and say, we care about the Mac. And we’re going to do a real Mac pro. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there had, they came to crises, but they were able to resolve them. And obviously if you have someone at the very top
⏹️ ▶️ John with better product sense, you don’t let that go to a crisis as much, but I don’t think, no, that you need
⏹️ ▶️ John one person who was in charge of it. You just need somebody with, who’s either more, a little bit more engaged
⏹️ ▶️ John has a little bit more faith in their own taste in that regard to not essentially delegated and
⏹️ ▶️ John delegated as much as he had to delegate it like I to his credit he delegated and also to his credit
⏹️ ▶️ John he was able to write the ship several times after running at a ground after
⏹️ ▶️ John after the people he delegated to ran at a ground you know what I mean like that’s why I don’t get so mad about those things because those
⏹️ ▶️ John go in cycles but like now he’s the one running at the ground on the whole like stubbornness
⏹️ ▶️ John about all the anti competitive stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well Well and I mean look I can point to a lot of things in the Tim Cook era that show that he made poor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decisions. At the end of the day he is a bean counter. He’s a really good bean counter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but he’s a bean counter nonetheless. He does not understand the products that he makes from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a product standpoint. He understands them from a profit standpoint. He understands from a business and operational standpoint.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He does not understand them from a product standpoint. time we’ve seen various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways this has manifested. Simply number one was like putting Johnny Ive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in charge of software design showed a pretty large lack of understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of software design. Having Johnny go a little bit too nuts with some of the product decisions of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like making things like too thin at the cost of reliability, that was again like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poor product sensibility or poor product delegation by Tim Cook. We heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many times that Tim had basically abandoned the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in favor of thinking the iPad was the future of computing for a few years there. And the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reflected that. Because again, he didn’t really understand the Mac, which is a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big part of Apple’s product line. He also, you know, when the butterfly keyboard thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened, what we heard from a few different people over the span of that, which lasted again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way too long, what we heard is basically like that they were too cheap to change the manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line too soon. They wanted to get their value out of the manufacturing line they had built. And that’s again, that’s Tim Cook. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was what we heard from multiple sources was that went right to the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. What I heard about the butterfly keyboard is mostly that the people kept telling
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook that we’re going to fix it this time and he believed them like three too many times. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John less than like we wanted to get our money’s worth out of the line because I feel like he was saying, what do we need to do to fix this? And if they told him
⏹️ ▶️ John we need to make a new keyboard, he would have done it. But if someone told him, actually, we don’t need to make a new one,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can fix this. He just kept believing them. And maybe he’s motivated to believe them because he wants to recoup costs on the manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John line for the keyboards. It’s a mix of them combined. So there’s enough blame to go around. But in the end, it’s on him,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it lasted so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long. Right. And let’s look at some bigger picture things. Bigger picture, iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sales have been great, you know, but it’s not like, you know, growing anymore. So what have they done?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They tried to make a car. They spent a long time, tons of talent, billions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dollars trying to make a car, which seemed like a bad idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right from the start. It seemed like an organizational nightmare. It seemed like it was all over the place with its goals and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of problems that reflected a lack of, I think, reality on Tim Cook’s side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They also spent a huge amount of resources, time, and money making the Vision Pro. They actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipped that, but I kind of think they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t have. You know, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of problems with that product as well. You can point to, you know, a lot of big and small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco releases or decisions Apple has made over time that shows that, on a big scale, Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook was really weird at product decision-making, and at a small scale, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to, very frequently under his leadership, profoundly misread the room or fail to read the room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For a large corporation that’s making a bunch of money, it’s easy to overlook all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those flubs because you can say, well, they’re making a bunch of money. And the scale at which the money matters is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite large. When you look at how much of the world economy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is invested in apple, like if apple shares take a hit, that affects like people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retirement funds all across the world, like the amount of money involved in apple and the effect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have on the global market is not insignificant. So to grow it into that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco financial state is a remarkable thing. But as Tim Cook grew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into that financial state, he did it with two massive strategic risks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number one was an incredible over-reliance on China.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And no one for the last 20 years has said, said, we should definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pour more reliance into China. That’s not a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea. And it’s always been a risk. They knew it from the start and they decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for various reasons, maybe it was necessity for a while, but it probably hasn’t been necessity for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time if they actually made the right investments earlier. Maybe they had to, to some degree,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they didn’t have to to this degree. That’s a huge risk that he took that he has built up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over all this time. And now Apple is very vulnerable in key
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas because Tim Cook took way too much of a risk with over reliance
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve said that years and years ago, we were talking about that. I said, you know, America has the China problem and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has the China problem. I think I phrased it all those years ago. But on that front, this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John case where I would say it’s kind of like the butterfly keyboard, but even more so because I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, yeah, he’s done that. He, he went to China was, it was at the time the only option and he
⏹️ ▶️ John invested heavily in it and it led to Apple’s success that it has today. But if I had to pick a single person
⏹️ ▶️ John to both recognize when, uh, Apple needs to start diversifying away from China
⏹️ ▶️ John and to execute that I’d pick Tim Cook. He’s the best position person to fix his
⏹️ ▶️ John own mistake because this is what he’s the best at. And, you know, to we have some
⏹️ ▶️ John items that may be in future shows, but Apple is trying to fix it in various ways, like trying to say that every
⏹️ ▶️ John every new iPhone they sell next year is going to be not made in China. Every new iPhone they sell in the US
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be not made in China to avoid tariffs and stuff like that. But anyway, like I agree with you that it was
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a risk and they went too far and they took too long. So I’m familiar. It took too long to notice
⏹️ ▶️ John that they needed to change. But I would pick him as the person to fix this problem, Because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the kind of problem that he does see and does recognize and is not digging in
⏹️ ▶️ John his heels and saying, no, we’re never going to manufacture any place except for China. In fact, we’re getting even closer with China. No, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not what they’re doing. Like that. So that’s why as much as that concerns me and bothers me and is a huge problem as it
⏹️ ▶️ John is for Apple, Tim Cook is the best equipped person to fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know that I agree because I think we see that Tim Cook is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great at evaluating long term risks. He tends to prioritize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the short term profits over the long term risks. That’s why he’s in that situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the first place.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said, I think he prioritizes the long term profits because that China investment is decades long
⏹️ ▶️ John and it gave so many profits. It was so huge and important strategically and they
⏹️ ▶️ John are turning it around now just a little bit too late and it’s going to be a long time and it’s going to be hard to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And how much are they turning around? Is it going to be enough to matter? Is this another butterfly keyboard gasket?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t know. You know, speaking of long-term risk, look at Apple’s financial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance. There was a great segment on upgrade this week. Thanks, thanks, Jason. Jason went through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, ran the numbers of like, basically, what percentage of Apple’s profit, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue, what percentage of Apple’s profit is likely to be tied to the Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search default deal and App Store revenue? And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty high percentage. I believe the ballpark he came up with is possibly like a third
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a quarter of their profit. It’s a large chunk of their profit. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that means is that Tim Cook has over the last 10 years, whatever it’s been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by pushing the services narrative, which as I mentioned last episode, I think is a misnomer. And I think it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco misleading the shareholders in an interesting way. They want to tell you that all this money is from Ted Lasso,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a huge chunk of this money is from fees and commissions they collect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on their market position. And so I think it should be called fees or maybe like, you know, commissions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and services would be a better, you know, a more accurate title for this category of revenue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you look at, you know, fees and commissions like, well, those can be a little precarious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because why are they getting this, you know, big Google default search deal?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the Department of Justice has some things to say about that and that might go that might have to go away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why are they getting all this App Store money? Is it because they’re making amazing products for their customers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. That’s a side effect. They’re making amazing products for their customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and developers tolerate this giant tax that they put that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strangles the market and constrains what we can build and constrains the type of business that can even exist in the modern computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world. Those are all the hallmarks of if you look throughout time you can say like yeah they built their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform well but the railroads built their own tracks and the power companies built their own power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines, many utilities and critical infrastructure companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are either regulated or literally taken over by governments. Because once they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get so large, they start to serve such an important role to all of commerce that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the private companies who own them would abuse them in a regular unregulated system. That’s why you have things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the AT&T breakup. the phone lines that were everywhere? AT&T ran
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those phone lines and so they could say, well, we demand whatever terms we want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone lines across all of America. The government said otherwise because it became too important. You look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at any large infrastructure or platform in history before the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era of the personal computer and that’s how things worked. Monopolies would occasionally develop and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco governments would step in to regulate them because they became so big and society became so dependent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on them in such a large scale that regulation was necessary to prevent the owners from being abusive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and putting too large of a tax on society. Apple clearly has reached that point with the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Apple and Google duopoly has really put this in a position of like, yes, this is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that needs to be regulated by the government for all of those reasons that all those things in history were always regulated. It’s an obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parallel to all of those. So what Tim Cook has done, he’s led his company into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge risky position with China and a huge risky position
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having a huge chunk of his profit and much of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their growth as a company, as a stock, is now relying on these incredibly precarious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue sources that both are likely to be regulated down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or out of existence and also have nothing to do with making the product better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the users. So this gets back to what you were saying, John. The problem is Apple’s incentives now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this has been this way for a while under Cook, the incentives are shifting away from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making the right decision to make great products. And it’s more towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capturing more, harvesting more from the ecosystem around us. What can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we take by force? And I love the comparisons that we’ve been hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the App App Store ruling and the in-app purchase stuff. The comparison we’ve been hearing, I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying things like, you know, well, if Apple like loses all this money from the App Store, and almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the presumption that of course, they’re going to lose, like of course, once people can link out to the web to make purchases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, they’re going to lose 100% of their App Store revenue. The reason people say that is because the idea that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might just compete is so remote and laughable to us now. What does that say?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve put themselves in a position where they’re super dependent on risky conditions that Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook himself built and the company now relies on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all that is not with aligned incentives towards making the products better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the customers because you know what where else they can get growth making better products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a different source that’s a different path they could have taken but Tim Cook chose not to and I think it’s because he’s not capable of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he did exactly what he He knew how to do. He’s a bean counter. He squeezed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything as much as he could. He made the profitable decision every single time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He did exactly what he was an expert at doing. Steve Jobs picked the wrong guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It wasn’t the first time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to steal my thunder with the wrong guy thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John be hearing from my lawyers on that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think between the two of you, I come down closer to John than Marco. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowing what Cook knew when he took over Apple, I think he did exactly what he should have done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the problem is that you either, he didn’t realize the error in his ways, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to China, or he didn’t realize quickly enough so that now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this madman at the helm of the United States again, uh, now he,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needs to figure out how to work around that. And I would have hoped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he would have already had one to two to 10 backup plans, ready
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to rock, you know, such that a switch just needs to be flipped. I know it’s not actually that simple, but it sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like I have only heard in the last couple of years that, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re talking about Indonesia and we’re talking about India and all these other places where we can assemble iPhones. And yeah, they’re not as good as China,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they’re, they’re, they’re sufficient. And I feel like Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey firing on all cylinders would have perhaps fired up these alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approaches years before when the oh crap moment happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we’ll see if he follows through on the supposed rumor that there are, I don’t know if it was rumor or just flat
⏹️ ▶️ John out stated, which is like, Hey, the next iPhone that we sell, like in September, every one of the ones that we sell
⏹️ ▶️ John in the United States will not be built in China. That was a plan that is floating around out there. And if he does pull
⏹️ ▶️ John that off, that shows that there was lots of forethought and planning because that’s not the type of thing you do. That’s not a trivial
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of iPhones. I know the rest of the world is big, but US is a really big market for Apple. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John they can actually pull off, oh, we got a new administration, somewhat surprisingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John and suddenly selling things made in China and the United States is undesirable. So
⏹️ ▶️ John for our next phone, we’re just going to make them all in Brazil and India and Vietnam and Malaysia or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John no phone sold in the US will say made in China on it, that would be amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John and shows that there is actually a plan A, B, and C indeed. Now I agree that it’s gone on too long
⏹️ ▶️ John and he is not hesitant about it enough, but like that is a difficult problem and that like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no obvious alternative and building up alternatives is expensive and time consuming and is probably going
⏹️ ▶️ John to take just as long as the buildup in China did. So I’m willing to give him some leeway there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, like it’s, um, it’s not like he didn’t think about it or didn’t have backup plans and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s, you know, we all agree that like this is a fairly unprecedented, dramatic term of
⏹️ ▶️ John events policy wise in this country because as you noted of the new administration being ridiculous,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, and still, still he’s finding a way to navigate that. Like this is what I think Tim Cook is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John the best at, even if he goes a little bit too long and too hard and do heavily into China and that
⏹️ ▶️ John is his big mistake. I think he is the the best person to get out of it. But that’s not why I’m saying he needs to go. It’s all the
⏹️ ▶️ John other stuff that like, it was like what Marco was saying, like making decisions
⏹️ ▶️ John that aren’t trying to make the product better. Like putting the cart before the horse or whatever the phrase
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Like I put this quote from the Ambrosia software page is the sort of the centerpiece of my post.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know if it’s a real quote because who knows it would probably be in a different language or anyway, but a virtue does not come from
⏹️ ▶️ John money, but rather from virtue comes money and all other good things to man. Um, the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea is you, if you chase money, if you try to do the thing, that’s going to make you money,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll fail. You need to try to do the thing that makes good products
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes your customers happy, that makes people want to buy your stuff. If you try to do that, the money will come. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I know you, I know you want the money. You want to be successful. Like that’s what you’re supposed to be like. I want to, I want it. We want to be a successful
⏹️ ▶️ John company, but you can’t try to be a successful company. You have to try to be a company
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes things people want and have confidence that if you just do that, and to Tim Cook’s
⏹️ ▶️ John credit, he has followed through on that philosophy from Steve Jobs for just years and decades,
⏹️ ▶️ John even stuff like the car program. Do the thing that you think is going to make a great product that people really want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t worry about how much it’s going to cost. Put all the money into the big spaceship thing, building. Do $10 billion in
⏹️ ▶️ John the car because if you, I mean, it could turn out you’re wrong. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that wasn’t a thing that was successful. But if you’re chasing that, you’ll eventually get where you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to go. The second you start saying, but over here, actually, we’re not gonna chase that. Actually, what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna chase here is, we’re gonna chase the money. And every one of those decisions is peeling things off
⏹️ ▶️ John the course. And is investing in China chasing the money? In
⏹️ ▶️ John some ways, yes, but in other ways, it’s a recognition of this is where we can make the best products.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just that they cost the least money, Like literally, they make them better than everybody else still. So that’s maybe a half
⏹️ ▶️ John and half thing. But yeah, like I, I give him a lot of leeway to
⏹️ ▶️ John pursue attempts to, you know, to pursue
⏹️ ▶️ John virtue where he thinks it can be found, even if he’s wrong a lot. I
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t give him as much leeway to pursue money. And we can name like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not hard to name the places where Apple, as led by him is clearly pursuing
⏹️ ▶️ John money at the expense of the virtue from the Socrates quote. It’s just so many instances
⏹️ ▶️ John and that you know the more information we get about them the worse it looks and that’s that’s the the place where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it is an it is not it is not a small thing that the industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has just over the last few years exploded with disruption
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and promise and development and excitement in this huge new area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of AI, and Apple is nowhere in it. He missed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. He blew it. All of these companies are doing such cool stuff, and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is struggling to ship such basics way later than everybody else is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t help but think, in large part, they would have been better off doing what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe Ben Thompson suggested a few months back, of just like, just be a better platform these other companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, be like, have all these things run on the iPhone through extension points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or through, like, you know, official API’s like to replace Siri, if you want to the same way you can replace a web browser,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that would actually have been a better path in the path they took. But all those specifics aside, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact is, Microsoft missed mobile and that really hurt them. And that changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that really limited their future directions as a company. Apple has missed AI like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to try to catch up. I don’t see any evidence that they are able to do it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any reasonable, reasonably competitive level. And that’s, again, that’s on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook. Like he, all this time they spent investing in cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and VR helmets, they could have been building this up and they didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I don’t connect those two things at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, I, like they’re separate. They’re, yeah, but they spent a whole bunch of time and money on larks that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really didn’t have much of a chance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those people wouldn’t have been doing the AI stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I agree that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re behind an AI, they’re late on AI, but I don’t blame the VR helmet or the car for that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s more like Apple was, they were willing, like he was willing to invest in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge R&D projects, but because he has such terrible product sensibilities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just picked the wrong ones. They picked R&D projects that seemed really cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, I guess, Johnny Ive and maybe Mike Rockwell, I don’t know who, I don’t know how,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seemed like Tim had a profoundly bad product sense. They took big swings. They just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took the wrong big swings. And meanwhile, here’s this huge new world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of tons of opportunity and development and potential disruption to their core products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re just not competitive at all in that world because they didn’t take it seriously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early enough and still seem to not be investing enough in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they didn’t take it seriously early enough for sure, but I do think the strategy as articulated last WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the strategy actually is a good one. They just have utterly failed to execute that
⏹️ ▶️ John which is kind of an important part of the strategy is the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco execution of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So like, but like the idea, like, so setting aside, like, oh, do you just want to be a platform where other
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s OMs versus doing it yourself? The idea of, you know, to recap the Apple intelligence strategy is like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has all this information about your phone and it has local processing power. And we have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, ways to talk to all the apps. If we can leverage all of that as the platform owner, we can
⏹️ ▶️ John do a more private, more secure version of LM powered stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve heard people say like, Oh, they’re trying to do it all on device. That’s that. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s a strategy at all. The whole private cloud compute thing is the idea. And also we don’t have to do it all on the device.
⏹️ ▶️ John We can transparently do it securely in the cloud. And this is a more privacy focused thing where we’re not scraping up
⏹️ ▶️ John all your information and chucking it over a third party company and yada yada. But that’s just what they announced.
⏹️ ▶️ John They haven’t shipped that. So they have a good idea and a good strategy, and they relate with it, and they haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John executed on it at all. So it’s a bad situation. But on on the front,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I feel like the air front is kind of like all the other things that I said of like they’re they’re in
⏹️ ▶️ John trouble and, you know, aren’t doing well, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not not too many things related to I actually run afoul of the
⏹️ ▶️ John the core rot at the center of Apple that I’m saying is not going to change the leadership changes. With the one exception of the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you mentioned about like, well, once you just become a better platform for AI and let other people plug in, that’s where you start touching
⏹️ ▶️ John the third rail of Apple leadership, which is like, when we integrate with third parties,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we got to get our money. It’s like, no, no, stop, just step away,
⏹️ ▶️ John step away from the money machine and say, you should be doing this because it makes your product better for your customer. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John nope, integration with third parties money, we what percentage should we get? Is this going to replace our Google revenue is like, stop,
⏹️ ▶️ John stop chasing the money. And not that that Apple, that has been Apple strategy at all so far, maybe this year, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John say, and our new strategy is we’re the best hosts for other people’s AI stuff, because ours sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, but as of now, that’s not their strategy, but if it was their strategy, everyone would be looking at it and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, well, who’s going to plug their LLM into your phones if they have to give you X percent of their money
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And ultimately, like, I think. I think AI is going to be important enough. I mean, look, it already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, but I think this is going to prove long term to be important enough and that Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Such an inability to do it well themselves that I think long term What’s going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Apple’s going to acquire one of these larger AI companies at just an extraordinary cost It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got is money it is but they’re like they’re going to end up I think having to spend a lot of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to acquire or merge with a good AI company because I don’t see any any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign that they can do this themselves. Whatever that costs them, you should deduct that from what you think of Tim Cook’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expertise, because that’s 100% on him.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they’d be paying for it with Tim Cook dollars. That’s true.
Apple’s Diet of Worms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to call attention to another similar post. This is Apple’s Diet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Worms by Joan Westenberg, who is a writer that I was not previously familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with. It’s a pretty short piece, but I wanted to read two paragraphs to you. It’s not the mistakes that matter. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made them before, the Newton, MobileMe, the butterfly keyboard. What matters is the posture. A company once defined by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey joyful provocation, by thinking different, is now defined by its defensiveness. Its leadership
⏹️ ▶️ Casey acts not like investors. Leadership acts not like inventors, there we go,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like stewards of a status quo. They protect margins like relics. They fear dilution. They optimize at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the expense of surprise. Apple’s fate isn’t sealed. It has the resources
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to adapt the talent to reinvent the reach to still shape the culture. But none of that matters if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it won’t change its mind. Empires don’t fall because they run out of gold. They fall because they mistake orthodoxy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for durability because they think the pageantry of power is the same as the legitimacy
⏹️ ▶️ John Very well written. If you don’t like my matter-of-fact writing style, then you want a more flowery approach to
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Apple’s diet of worms is for you. Although I can’t believe that you put, uh, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that. So many people were cranky about that. How dare you. How dare… The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Newton was such
⏹️ ▶️ John It was not. It was amazing. It was just a little bit ahead of its time. But, like, such great ideas,
⏹️ ▶️ John such great people who went on to do great things, that eventually it kind of circled back around when Apple did the iPhone. I feel like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the return and triumph of the Newton project is essentially the iPhone. It’s like finally
⏹️ ▶️ John we have the technology to do what we tried to do way too early because the Pepsi guy told us to.
Jony & Dave & Buster’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, before we go, I wanted to turn this round upside down. There’s a couple of fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pieces of Apple-related, Apple-adjacent media that I wanted to call people’s attention to. A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of people have been talking about these over the last week because, hey, guess what? They’re really good. First
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all, the Search Engine Podcast, which I don’t currently make a habit of listening to, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the occasions I listen to it, I always really enjoy it. They did a episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Dave and Buster’s anomaly where it was discovered that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you do a voice message, like an iMessage where you’re just recording your voice, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not doing transcription, mind you, you’re just recording your voice and sending it, sending a wave, so to speak, or wav
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the, over the, uh, over your iMessage. Uh, then if you say the words, Dave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Buster’s, the recipient would never receive that audio file, which is bananas. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they go through and talk about how, what was going on and eventually figured it out or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a pretty good theory about it. And then friend of the show, Guy Rambeau was listening to this, apparently stopped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening to it and did some spelunking in order to figure out what he thought the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey situation was. And that is a much more technical write-up, but also excellent. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to call that to people’s attention. And then additionally, I think Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote about this. I’m pretty sure this is where I got it from. There’s a conversation between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Patrick Collison and Johnny Ive, I guess it’s some Stripe thing recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m only about halfway through it so far, but hey, guess what? It’s really freaking good. And for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the things that I blame on Johnny Ive, of which there are many, including but not limited to the butterfly keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s really smart and really good at what he does in the broad scheme of things. So both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these I think are worth your time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But he’s a slow talker.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh my God, I feel so slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. an editor and smart speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you do. I don’t know. Johnny Ive, obviously, his resume is
⏹️ ▶️ John basically will never be equaled, probably, in terms of how important. Like, he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing work, right? But every time I see him talk, I’m like, yeah, this is why
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t let an unencumbered Johnny Ive anywhere near a product that I wanted to make.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because he’s got amazing talent, and he’s got great ideas, and he’s got good instincts, but he’s also got
⏹️ ▶️ John some really bad instincts and ideas. I feel like, I don’t know if that has changed
⏹️ ▶️ John about him as he’s aged, or that was always like that and he was always constrained, but he
⏹️ ▶️ John is a powerful force. Let’s put it that way. And you got to be careful when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John employing a powerful force to do anything. But yeah, it’s a good interview, and I’m glad he’s not at Apple anymore. Yeah.
Backblaze finance drama
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, maybe I should have saved that for after this next segment, but I don’t have too much to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. We should try to at least plow through it real quick because I promised we would last week. Backblaze drama.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, a couple of weeks ago, there was a post by Morpheus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Research. Backblaze, a loss-making data storage business mired in lawsuits, sham
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accounting, and brazen – brazen? How do I pronounce that? Brazen? Brazen. There we go. Insider dumping.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Morpheus Research, which we’ll talk about who they are in a second. Since it’s November, 2021
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IPO. Oh, I’m sorry. I should interrupt myself. Backblaze is a former sponsor. I think all three of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are paying customers to Backblaze. I did look and they are not currently slated to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sponsor again, or at least I didn’t see them in the docket. But just for what it’s worth, they did sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many times in the past. Anyways, since it’s November, 2021 IPO, Backblaze has reported
⏹️ ▶️ Casey losses every quarter. It’s outstanding share count has grown by 80% and its share price has declined by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 71%. In October 2024, two former senior employees filed suit against backblaze alleging accounting fraud, inflated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey projections, and whistleblower retaliation. One lawsuit was filed by backblaze his former vice president
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of investor relations James Kisner, while the other was filed by former senior director of financial planning and analysis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or FP&A Huey Hall. To keep its stock price afloat, backblaze pressured employees to certify inaccurate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey financial statements according to former director of FP&A Hall. Throughout our investigation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we found backblazes track record reveals a management team lacking transparency and willing to take aggressive and possibly illegal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steps to create an illusion of financial performance to support their own exit liquidity. After extensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey research, we believe the evidence justifies a short position and shares a backblaze. Morpheus research holds short positions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and backblaze ding ding ding. And Morpheus research may profit from short positions held by others ding ding ding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This report represents our opinion. We encourage all readers to their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am way outside my depth, to be completely honest with you. So take everything I’m about to say with copious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amounts of salt, but this smelled kind of fishy to me in the sense that people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who want, people who wish for backblaze to perceive badly say, Hey, backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be perceived badly. Like, uh, I don’t know, this, this didn’t smell good
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But that was how short selling works is essentially you are betting that a stock price will go down. And it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s always the two sides of this. It’s like, okay, well, if you’re, if you are betting that a stock price will go down. And
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, short positions have like an unlimited downside practically. So you better hope it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go up. You really need it to go down. You obviously want it to go
⏹️ ▶️ John down. But also, when you pick which company to short, you’re looking for companies that you think
⏹️ ▶️ John will go down. So it’s not like, oh, you just pick a company out of a hat and say I’m gonna get a short
⏹️ ▶️ John position on them. And then I just trash talk them, right? No, you look for the company that you think
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to go down. And then you explain to people, we got a short position on company x, because we think it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to go down. And here’s why. And so which one of those again, cart and horse, which one of those is
⏹️ ▶️ John driving, you know, there’s always, if you’re running a company, you’re always like these short sellers, they just
⏹️ ▶️ John latch on to us. And then they say terrible things about us, because they just want the stock price to go down. And everything they’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ John is wrong. And it’s not true. Tesla always do that. Oh, it’s all anyone has complaints about the
⏹️ ▶️ John company is just short sellers trying to make the stock price go down. But on the flip side is like, well, what do you think short sellers
⏹️ ▶️ John are doing? They’re they’re out there trying to find a company that they think the price is gonna go down. And they do research on them, they say, look at this company,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have lots of problems, and I think their stock price is gonna go down. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I’m no financial expert, but be aware that both of those forces are in play whenever there is a short position.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the things you just read are very clearly from a company that probably honestly thinks
⏹️ ▶️ John that the stock price is gonna go down, but also really, really needs the stock price to go down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like so it’s it’s probably like it is a huge grain of salt like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even bigger than Casey said like the fact like Yes, like they like not only do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they need this talk to go down the more the stock goes down the more money. They’ll make so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they they directly financially benefit from if everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes a stock go down, too So it is like it is a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a pretty biased position to try to take their advice. However, it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indicate like, yeah, there’s some shenanigans going on in this company. There’s some problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John I 100% believe almost everything that they say there, like these are problems with the company because these are problems that
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of companies have. It’s not unprecedented that, oh, it’s being mismanaged. The people at the top just wanted to get their
⏹️ ▶️ John money and cash out and people fibbing about how well a company is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John and trying to hide how it’s doing badly. Like I say, every company does that. And you know, you have to look at it’s like, okay, is this
⏹️ ▶️ John company in trouble? Do they not have a sustainable business? Have they been hiding some deep, dark secret that’s going to come
⏹️ ▶️ John crashing down? And then these people are the first people to see it. Like you just have to make those, you know, judgments for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Backblaze initially responded to Ars Technica in Patrick Thomas. Backblaze’s VP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of marketing said the report is inaccurate, misleading, based largely on litigation of the same nature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a clear attempt by short sellers to manipulate our stock price for financial gain.
⏹️ ▶️ John But just what companies always say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of the companies always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say. I did not get a chance to read this before recording, so I apologize. I totally missed this in the show notes, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is an actual full on formal blog post from backblaze. John, I presume you put this in here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So did you read this? Is there a TLDR you can offer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, you can just look at it. They bolded things. They basically say, yeah, there were some bad things going on, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, we hired third party people to check out our accounting and we’ve been cleared of all wrongdoing, and we’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John great, and I know there’s problems. It’s just, you know, like, neither one of these things is the whole truth. The short,
⏹️ ▶️ John shallow description is not the whole truth, and backblazes, everything is going great, is also not the whole truth. The whole truth is
⏹️ ▶️ John a combination of those two. But anyway, I just, you know, if you wanted to see the company’s response, they have one.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then MJ Tsai has a roundup of different things with regard to this, as he always does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the quotes that MJ quoted was, However, linked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey financial results do confirm that the company lost about $50 million in 2024 and about $60 million in 2023. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also says that the number of computer backup customers has decreased. B2, which is, isn’t that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco what’s the rest of it? It’s S3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s S3, but way cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, there you go. B2 is now more than half the business and the APRU for B2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey customers is $645 versus $159 for the computer backup customers. Additionally, Cornchip writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Backblaze doesn’t break out profitability by product division anymore, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when they did, computer backups were profitable. B2 wasn’t. The cost of revenue largely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes from the B2 side because S3 compatible object storage intensely competes on price per gigabyte,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whereas computer backup competes on perceived trust, UI, et cetera. They consolidate fixed operating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey costs for now, but the R&D is largely for B2 as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so those are the two halves of their business. One is the one we’re always talking about, which is like get Backblaze, put it on your Mac and
⏹️ ▶️ John have your Mac be backed up over the cloud for
⏹️ ▶️ John unlimited amount for each Mac for a very low price. And the other thing is B2, which is like
⏹️ ▶️ John S3, which is like, do you have some data you want to put in the cloud? We’ll charge you per gigabyte. And those are two different businesses.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as as corn chip notes, the B2 S3 thing is like it’s just a commodity. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John what who has the cheapest price per gigabyte that gives you the performance and durability that I need? S3 Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John has a thousand flavors of S3 storage. you can probably find one that is suitable for your needs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if not, B2 is out there saying, we offer this very simple solution. We undercut S3 on price.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, if our durability and latency and throughput things meet your needs, maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ John should go with that. And that’s a very different business than, here’s some software that you put on your Mac to back it up to the cloud.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the reason this is in here at all, it’s not because we care about Backblaze, like I said, they’re not even a sponsor anymore, although they
⏹️ ▶️ John should be, because I still think they’re good, spoiler. Yeah, I’m still a Backblaze customer. Yeah, people were
⏹️ ▶️ John asking us, Okay, given all this Backblaze drama, what do you think? Should we not be using Backblaze anymore? And
⏹️ ▶️ John my answer is, you should still be using Backblaze. It’s the best product at what it
⏹️ ▶️ John does. And by the way, CrashPlan, one of the competitors to Backblaze is apparently back. It like left the consumer business and it’s back,
⏹️ ▶️ John still with the Java client. But anyway, the thing about backup services, if Backblaze goes up in a ball of
⏹️ ▶️ John flames and the company goes under and the CEO loots the company and just falls to ashes or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh well, I’ll pick a different backup service. Like, I know you say like, but you’re giving them your data.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even though it’s sealed with an encryption key, technically that encryption key, you’re sending it, that could be
⏹️ ▶️ John sent, it’s not staying client side, it’s going to the server. There is the thing of like, look, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John really think this company is like bad news and has been infiltrated by hackers or the CEO is trying to steal all
⏹️ ▶️ John your data and sell it, then yeah, you should stop. But I don’t see that here. What I see, even if I take the short
⏹️ ▶️ John seller’s word 100%, like everything they say is 100% true, it’s just a company with a bunch of people who are trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John make money and not doing well at it and want to get out with their golden parachutes and are lying about how well they’re doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And none of that makes me feel like, oh, they really want to get my data. They really want to crack open
⏹️ ▶️ John all my files and look at it because that’s their path to riches. That’s not their path to riches. My files are not going to give them any
⏹️ ▶️ John path to riches. They’re not even, there’s not even rumors that they’re like trying to train AI and all my files and stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ John my tax returns are going to come up and chat GBT. So like, if that was the rumor, I would say maybe pull your stuff out
⏹️ ▶️ John of Backblaze. But even if you take 100% of the worst things people can say about Backblaze, from what we know now, I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John keep using them until they go out of business, because they are the best at what they do
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of price and performance. I ran CrashPlan for years and years, and that Java app
⏹️ ▶️ John I barely even know it’s running on my computer, it just does its job. So I personally am still using Backblaze.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they should sponsor the program again, because I highly recommend them. Because honestly, if they go
⏹️ ▶️ John away and die, I don’t know what I’ll do. I know people are gonna say you should use Arc, and you have lots of other, there are alternatives,
⏹️ ▶️ John Backblaze is just so low cost, fire and forget, low
⏹️ ▶️ John effort on your computer, and they update it, and the people who wrote their software know what they’re doing on macOS. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I still recommend it. You can read all these links and make your own decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still gonna keep being a Backblaze customer because, I mean, look, the company’s finances,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, honestly, I know this might sound a little bit callous but the company’s finances are not my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if they’ve worked this out, if they are still in business, fine. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need to know their finances.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not my problem. And if it becomes your problem, cause they go out of business, you’ll just, you’ll, you know, try
⏹️ ▶️ John Arc or another service or you’ll try Crash Point. Like you’ll go to a competitor because it’s not like a type, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like I’ve invested all my, what system am I using for my family photos? I’ve invested all this in Apple photos. What
⏹️ ▶️ John if they go down? Oh, now I have a big problem. If a backup service goes away, delete
⏹️ ▶️ John all your data off it, hopefully delete it all. And you start backing up to a new service. Like it’s the type of thing where you can
⏹️ ▶️ John jump to a competitor without too much fuss.
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. And we have fast upload connections, that matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, BetterHelp and Mack Weldon. And thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco membership besides all of our awesome specials. Did we forget to plug the special?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco we did forget to plug the special. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under-presented. Oh noes, oh no. is ATP overtime, our weekly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bonus topic. This week on overtime, the bonus topic for members will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about SSD longevity and long-term data storage and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how we do that and some interesting new developments on SSDs and they’re kind of bad at long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data storage. We’ll talk about that in ATP overtime. Join us at atb.fm slash join. Thanks everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk 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
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into mastodon, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast so long
Restaurant MVPs: Network cabling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was hoping to revisit some restaurant tech MVPs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh yes, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a topic I began a few weeks ago and we basically just got through Ubiquiti and stopped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was so long. So Ubiquiti remains awesome. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an interesting failure on that, but what failed was I had connected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an SFP third party module to get 10 gigs out of one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the switches over Ethernet to a different switch and that third-party SFP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco module flaked out and failed. Everything Ubiquiti made was fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has worked continuously and the one part of my network that they didn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaked out and failed already. Anyway, what connects all of these network things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together is a whole bunch of network cable of course and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this I actually finally evolved my skills in this area So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have long-term listeners might know that I have tried in the past to crimp my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own ends onto network cables and have failed every single time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that got a lot better since I did it in my high school home, you know, in the late 90s. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought there was some pretty easy ways to do it these days, but are there not? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were then too. This is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one-week spot. Yeah, this is my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so what I did was basically go on Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I took a bunch of measurements of like how long does this cable need to be, how long does this cable need to be, and I ran a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of pre-made Cable Matters cables. And I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cat 6A for the important runs, Cat 6 for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of sub runs, and I just ran a whole bunch of very long Cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matters cables. And so one of my restaurant tech MVPs is Cable Matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a company that makes a whole bunch of cables and they matter. I don’t know what else to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re good cables. So that’s, however,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at one point, so there is an ATM in the restaurant because you’re on an island, there’s no banks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So a handful of the restaurants have their own ATMs. At some point, the ATM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stopped working and I realized it was because one of the wires that I thought was no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in use and had cut. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in fact, it was in fact the ATM’s Cat5 wire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, all right, how do I fix this? I have a dangling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cat5 cable. I still had some slack in it. It would have been a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very big pain in the butt to rerun that wire. So I’m like, I really should try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the one I have here. So I got one of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of generic brand cable crimpers to crimp on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cat5 or Cat6 ends onto ethernet cables. And it’s some Amazon kit for like 35 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it has like the crimper and a tester and a whole bunch of boots and cable ends. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a thousand no-name brands that make this kind of stuff. And then they have for a long time. And because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to get it to work, I got it to work. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took me like three tries to get the first one. But I did eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco successfully crimp on a new end to an ethernet cable. I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought that was gonna be your story that you were so bad at crimping, but then when you had to do the restaurant, you had to do it so many times
⏹️ ▶️ John that eventually you got good at it. But no, you bought pre-made cables, which boggles my mind. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad you were forced by your pasty cutting of the ATM to practice
⏹️ ▶️ John it a whole three times before you hit successfully.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, and look, it’s still now, I should say, like, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I fixed the ATM and then I’m like, well, now I have a tool at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now you’re ready to crimp the world. So this was, at this time, I had not yet decided that I was going to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cameras like this year. It was still gonna be like a maybe next year product or project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then like, as I was tearing stuff out, I’m like, you know what? It would be a lot easier if I do the cameras now as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m working with all these wires and as I’m tearing all this stuff out and then I can get rid of those wires and all this other stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided like kind of halfway through the spring, I’m gonna also replace the cameras. There were a number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera mounting points where I had to run wires through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holes that went like from the inside of the building to the outside of the building, or through thick walls in the building
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the hole was drilled by, you know, some previous technician years ago to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only be the diameter of a wire. So an end of a cable would not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit through those holes. No. Now a couple of those holes, I just made wider with a drill.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I just shoved an end through them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your fear of crimping is so much that you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no, let’s make the hole bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but some of them, that would have been so incredibly destructive or impractical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or impossible. I was like, you know what, I really, if I’m going to use this cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to have to like, you know, either use a cable that’s already there, which is, they were all these like ancient Cat5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Cat5e cables, you know, they’re super thin, and I’m like, eh, some of them are flaky, and like, I’d rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run new cable, like run brand new, nice Cat6 or, you know, 6a cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, so I was like, I could run it through these holes, or they were, more commonly, they were coax
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wires in the holes. So I’d like replace a coax wire with a Cat6 wire. So I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do things like, you know, tape that, you know, cut off the coax, tape the wire to it and like kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of pull it through, you know, but I still only had the width of the hole to deal with. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to crimp ends on a few. And so I just started doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. And I learned a couple of things. Number one, I learned with practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not even that much practice, I actually was able to start doing them more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consistently and more reliably to the point where now, most of the ones I do, I get right on the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try. Not always, but most of the ones I do. I have definitely wired some backwards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I had to fix those. But for the most part, I get it right the first time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it works. And the best thing I learned though is, all this time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using my trusty CableMatters cable, it matters a lot when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re using a high quality cable. It makes it a lot easier to crimp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ends on because the wires in it are themselves higher quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they’re a little bit thicker or more rigid. You can, they go through the connector more easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t accidentally get cut when you’re cutting the cable. Like there’s all sorts of, like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bend one, it doesn’t snap off. Like there’s all sorts of little upgrades. So actually, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still am using Cable Matters cables when I’m making custom ends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still use them because most of the time I can still keep one of the stock ends on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would just cut off one end of the cable, run it through wherever I had to run it, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put my own custom end on the other end. And I did all of that with this stupid cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kit from Amazon from no name, and it worked. And I stand by this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a strategy, because I wasn’t, I mean, look, at the end of the day, it was not that much cable. It’s not like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wiring up a whole office building where the cost would be a significant difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was just wiring up a few cameras and a few network switches. And so it actually ended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up being fairly easy to still use stock cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for almost everything and just cut off one end of some of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get them into funny places.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you verify that, remember, John, do you remember when we talked years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago about how there’s like two different internal wiring mechanisms?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I did a prototype t-shirt design based on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you tell us that? I don’t remember that part.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I design a lot of t-shirts that ever see the light of day. It’s just believe me you don’t see them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any welfare anyways Marco. I bring this up to say do are you team one or team
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other hundred you remember what they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco are anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there there t568 a and b and in looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diagram so I am team whatever the big picture in the instruction manual of this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whatever the whatever the piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of paper that came with the crimper said it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from memory. I’m looking at the pinouts now. I think I am. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a no, maybe it’s maybe I’m B. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re probably on the newer one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m B. I think the green because I remember finishing with orange. So yeah, I think I’m B.
⏹️ ▶️ John When we last covered this it was like one of them was meant to be backward compatible with like regular phone lines and the other
⏹️ ▶️ John one cared less about that. And well,
⏹️ ▶️ John can go find that episode of ATP because we linked to the Wikipedia page and the explanation and we talked about a thing, but it was so long
⏹️ ▶️ John ago. I don’t remember which was which.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And basically what it came down to was like, it doesn’t matter that much, just make sure they’re all the same. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure I am looking at this diagram, I’m pretty sure I was B, but it’s like, I was just matching whatever was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the other end of the connector.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, in the end, that’s all that matters. If you get them mixed up, you’re in for a bad time, but you got to have the
⏹️ ▶️ John stripey ones, the solid color ones, which color goes where, whatever. Like there’s no like performance
⏹️ ▶️ John difference or anything between them. It’s just, they’re just, it’s just standards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. So yeah, making your own cables, sort of, or making half of your own cables, Turns out,