23: The X Or The X
25 Jul 2013iSCSI FU, the Developer Center downtime, Logic X and App Store upgrade pricing, iOS developers acting like the RIAA, and the effects of falling prices for apps and games.
Episode Description:
- FU: iSCSI and network Time Machine.
- iFixit teardown of the new AirPort Extreme.
- Apple's extended Developer Center downtime. (Note: we recorded this before we knew why it was down.)
- _DavidSmith on Logic X's pricing and what this might indicate for future App Store upgrades.
- Whether upgrade pricing is best for consumers, and the upgrade-pricing train.
- iOS developers acting like the RIAA in 2002.
- The complexity of modern software business models.
- The Wal-Martization of app pricing and how Marble Madness formed the modern Marco.
- Are Apple's policies really at fault for falling app prices?
Sponsored by:
- Drafts: Where text starts on your iPhone or iPad.
- Squarespace: Everything you need to create an exceptional website. Use promo code ATP7 for 10% off.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s my fault again. Well, it’s a combination of John’s actually no that one’s more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably the most egregious error I made in the last episode Was reporting that the global san
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ice cuz the initiator was free it used to be free But apparently a couple of years ago. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stopped being free Now it’s 90 bucks And so when looking at iSCSI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco initiators, you have GlobalSan at 90 and Addo at 195, so 200 basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still continue to get positive recommendations for the Addo one and mixed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco negative recommendations for the GlobalSan one. A few people sent in a few kernel panic stories
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about GlobalSan. So given that the price difference is now much smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it was before, I would if I was going iSCSI I would I would go with the add-on but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still haven’t One also interesting iSCSI thing that a few people have pointed out to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I didn’t realize but it makes perfect sense Because iSCSI is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like running the direct drive access protocol over the wire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can actually like like let’s say let’s say Mac OS whatever Mavericks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever comes after Mavericks comes out and and your iSCSI initiator of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your favorite iSCSI initiator stops working and just won’t work again you can take the drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the out of the NAS and stick it either directly into the computer or into one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those drive dock things and because iSCSI is just accessing the drive directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you plug it in directly to your computer it works directly because like it’s formatted however you formatted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, it’s because it’s just like a block level protocol So I think that’s pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s like an interesting kind of insurance policy, again, because we were discussing last episode how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was worried, and John, you were worried about, first of all, even needing to run a third-party kernel thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this protocol enabled. But also I was worried about what happens when a new version of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS comes out, and what if your iSCSI initiator breaks? How long does it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take them to fix it? Do they ever fix it? Does this cause problems? So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting, it’s nice to have the option that, you know, we could always just like, cause I have one of those drive dock things, I’m sure every nerd does by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. And if not, you can get one from Amazon for like 30 bucks or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s nice to have that kind of fallback option. And also, well one more little bit of follow up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the NAS topic. One person recommended today, I wasn’t familiar with this cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve, haven’t been paying a lot of attention to PC hardware in probably about five years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s an HP micro server and of course HP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes really really awesome servers and networking products and their website is completely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abysmal and makes all of them impossible to find and impossible to find information about but if you search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon for HP micro server you can see there’s a few of these things and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically it looks like a four bay NAS and it’s it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little cube and it’s like 300 bucks with some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of low-power CPU a little bit of RAM and four hard drive bays and even an optical bay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if you if you’re looking into the build your own area of NASA’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HP micro server might be worth looking at that’s all I really know about it but it looked really interesting and I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would certainly want to play with that if I had a good reason to that’s it what do
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys have on the on the iSCSI thing with like pulling the drives out of your
⏹️ ▶️ John NAS and connecting them directly with an enclosure or in the old Mac Pro days putting them inside your Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got to make sure you don’t use any RAID setup obviously on your NAS if you do that. So if you just have a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John drives in there and you want to be able to flexibly take out drives and stick in new ones of different sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John and have it, you know, re-silver and everything, like if you’re doing that, you lose the advantage of
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to pull that drive out and attach it, you know, not through the NAS to your thing, even if you’re using iSCSI.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s That’s one thing to be aware of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still don’t have enough of a reason to try iSCSI and spend that $200 and get the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and try it, but it’s nice to know that it’s an option. Like in case the time machine thing breaks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with 10.9, because one of the things is 10.9 apparently changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it either removes AppleTalk file or AFP or it disables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it by default. One of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well anyway, it runs network access over SMB2. which I should know more about, so I’ll do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some research on that. But people are speculating that might break or change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Time Machine thing. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John People keep asking me that as well, and I actually don’t know the answer, so I can’t break an NDA and tell you. But my guess is
⏹️ ▶️ John that Time Machine is still AFP only, because they did a bunch of weird enhancements
⏹️ ▶️ John to network Time Machine backups in the years past. In fact, we got some email from somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, who was saying that when Apple made those upgrades. Like, Time Machine over the network used to be terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they did some sort of protocol upgrade to make it not terrible. And if you happen to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a third party NAS device that supported the old terrible way and that company didn’t upgrade it to support the new way, then
⏹️ ▶️ John you were sad because even though your device technically supported Time Machine, it used the old terrible way. And I think both the old
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible way and the new way are both built on top of AFP. So my guess is Time Machine over the network,
⏹️ ▶️ John to a time capsule, continues to use AFP even in Mavericks. And I say that having not tested it
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t even know how I’ll be able to test that. I think actually ours is going to do another article about
⏹️ ▶️ John SMB2 and AFP. And that’s going to be my excuse for not delving into it. Because I just don’t have that stuff available.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have a time capsule of any stripe available. Or an ass for that matter. So there’s not much I can do there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also thought it was interesting. So last episode, we talked very briefly about the new Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 802.11ac Airport Extreme and time capsules. And you mentioned, of course, that it has a fan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was news to me, and I knew that there was an empty drive bay inside of it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t actually look at the teardown. That’s just something that I believe, actually, John, you probably told me at WBC at some point while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were walking somewhere. But, um, so I looked at the iFixit teardown of the new Airport Extreme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base station, and it is pretty comical, because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like a giant 3.5-inch hard drive bay in the middle of this, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that, you know, does not need one otherwise if it isn’t a time capsule.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 3.5 inch drive bay? Yeah. No. Are you sure? That can’t be that. Positive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Put the iFixit URL in the chat. I gotta find it. That thing has to be gigantic. Is it gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a… Well, so what they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they mount it diagonally. So basically, it’s standing up on end, but it’s oriented diagonally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the case. So it’s as if you drew a rectangle, a tall rectangle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around a 45 degree diagonal hard drive. That is the shape of this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really weird. And so, that’s… And so I think it’s interesting, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, it has… that they’re basically making the same unit, whether it’s a time capsule or not, and then just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having a hard drive or a… or even like the little connector cable that goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it. Here, Casey, paste it. You can see. And what’s also interesting is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much it looks like the new Mac Pro construction inside. And then the third interesting thing which kind of was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a disappointment to me I thought that the whole that the point of that tall shape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was to make larger antennas inside to have like you know tall antennas that are spaced out a bit for you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better better reception better range you know different different frequencies whatever the case may be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what I could tell from this from this teardown it looks like all of the antennas are still in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top plate so So, there appears to be no reason for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be tall, other than to fit the hard drive and have a smaller footprint and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have more room for the cooling and everything like that. But there appears to be no good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radio or reception reason for it to be tall, with the exception that maybe it gets it a little bit off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of whatever surface you have the thing on. It gets the antennas a little bit higher than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that surface to get a little bit less interference. But that can’t matter that much. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. disappointed about that. Anyway, this might be the most boring follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s saying something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this router is exciting because it’s terrible. And it’s exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John to have terrible hardware. I don’t want to buy this thing. I’m going to end up buying one of those Asus
⏹️ ▶️ John things with two dorky-looking antennas. I want all the features this thing provides. I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to be able to just plug in a printer and have the USB printer sharing thing because I still have my cheap printers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the management software that Apple provides. Well, the new version is kind of crappy, but it’s not, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John everything is fine except the fact that it’s gigantic and has a fan and
⏹️ ▶️ John has a place for hard drive that I’m not going to use. And they even took away one network port versus the one I have
⏹️ ▶️ John now. So I don’t think I could buy this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have one with four?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, the one I have has like the one, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco port, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I think it has four. I could go run over and check now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because as long as they’ve been the previous shape of this like the white Mac mini shape rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve always had three as far as I know mine mine does I?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, all right. Let me go check was I need to give Marco something to do in editing right back
⏹️ ▶️ John I counted that I counted the ports. Yeah, what do you got? That’s the same as the as the new
⏹️ ▶️ John I was fooled by like the I guess the USB cable sticking out of the back or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever Oh, yeah It’s yeah It’s annoying because like that’s kind of a weird number to have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have if you if you don’t have any wireless devices Or any wired devices, then you’re probably not gonna use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any ports And if you have wired devices, you probably need more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I Have a bunch of switches connected to the thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John quite a quite a rat’s nest as it extends out from there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a little disappointed that you don’t have all your cables like zip-tied, color-coded, etc. etc.
⏹️ ▶️ John fact… I would if I could, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My dad and I rewired my home theater, which I say that with enormous air quotes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we rewired the home theater in order to change from component… component, not composite,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably got that wrong, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you got it right. Okay. those to HDMI cables and even I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decided to color code the HDMI cables so the ones going from the source into the wall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the colors match the ones coming out of the wall into the TV because I’m that nerdy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I thought you’d like that. All right so what are we talking about tonight?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well it might be worth talking about the developer portal being down for so long because at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time we record this it still is but because this is coming out out to most of the public in about a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how useful that discussion would be, assuming it’s probably going to be up in a week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope. A lot of the iOS development world is probably grinding to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco halt right now during a major work period of getting ready for iOS 7. So it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John But they’re still selling software. There are degrees of magnitude. For example, the iTunes store, where nobody can
⏹️ ▶️ John buy anything that iTunes sells going down, would be more of a fire drill than this, which is why I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple would be more willing to say, look, it’s not like the iTunes store went down, guys. I know developers
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be annoyed, but let’s take the extra six hours or whatever to make sure that we have our stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John together. Because as terrible as it is for the developer portal to be down, it’s not the type of thing where there’s a big giant
⏹️ ▶️ John clock on the wall with a dollar sign in front of it and numbers ticking out for every second the thing is down.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two jobs ago, I was at a company like that. It’s like, look, every minute our server is down, we lose this amount of money, and it’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ John number. So it makes a difference. Whereas, yeah, now it’s a bummer that people can’t put stuff up in the store and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. But customers can still buy apps. So the engine of revenue running into Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is still running. And I think they can afford downtime here and just apologize
⏹️ ▶️ John profusely and be nice and extend people’s and do all that stuff. Versus what
⏹️ ▶️ John we would see from Apple, what kind of motion and communication we would see from Apple if the iTunes store itself was down. That
⏹️ ▶️ John would be like New York Times headline calamitous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this might be a result, and you kind of get the feeling from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you see an event like WBDC, and you think, wow, they really love developers, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re really a high priority for them. But then you see what they do for the rest of the year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for developers, and it’s kind of a mixed bag. Sometimes it looks like they really care, and I’m putting a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of resources into it, and sometimes it looks like they couldn’t possibly care less, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get a lot of everything in between. the entire developer program, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VP who’s responsible for that is Phil Schiller. And Phil Schiller does a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot. And it’s kind of hard for people like us on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really get that great of an idea of what exactly Phil Schiller does and how much he does, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what we can tell, it seems like he does quite a bit. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like whether developers can do X, Y, or Z or getting the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of attention they want, he might not have time to care about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that throughout the entire rest of the year that’s not WWDC week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t think it’s his
⏹️ ▶️ John skill set either. He’s not a tech guy. Not that he has to be there and there fixing the servers,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you would expect that an organization responsible for some really important
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of server-side software that’s important to the business would have come from the technical side and
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t be the guy, wouldn’t be a marketing guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I mean, what he does, marketing, I think, is in giant quotes there because he does so many other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he’s involved with a lot of different things in the company, it seems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, product design, marketing, much more so than a regular marketing. But he’s not a Craig Federighi
⏹️ ▶️ John or Bertrand Soleil or anything. He didn’t come up with that area. And even
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I mean, Eddie Q is technically charge of the iTunes store. So maybe, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John did Eddie come from an engineering background? But I feel like that team knows that they’re responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for online services, whereas Developer Relations probably within Apple is seen
⏹️ ▶️ John as a wing of the company that relates to people versus we run web services. But Developer
⏹️ ▶️ John Relations does run web services, and they’re important web services. So it’s kind of a schizophrenic thing, where it’s like, oh, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John relating to people. We need to make the people happy. It’s like a customer relationship management type role. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s this other part of it that’s web services, and it’s really important. So you have to have part of the team that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in that area versus people who run iTunes. It’s like, look, we’re running a gigantic web store. And there may be some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John relating to customers involved in that, but really, we’re an online services thing. So Eddie Cue is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if he’s in charge of that whole thing. We should have the org chart up. But I think he’s the iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John head honcho in charge of all that, isn’t he?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s worth considering whether I hate to use the phrasing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s time for Apple to do a lot of that’s like a crappy headline thing. But do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple needs somebody at that SVP level, representing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer developers and the dev and the App Store, almost exclusively or primarily, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what they do. Because right now, you know, Phil Schiller, I think probably has too much on his plate to be that guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, do you think I mean, I mean, I guess you could argue they’re doing pretty well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without you know it’s it’s hard to argue that Apple should really change anything about what they do because they’re doing pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well with the way they have things set up now but you know you look at things like like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store and the App Store has always looked like it has way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fewer people working for it than it really does it has and there are certain things about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that have lasted way longer than they should or have never changed. For instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the category list, the app category list is really weird. And most of those categories
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were there when the App Store launched. Most of the App Store’s mechanics, most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the layout, most of the things we think of, we know as the App Store today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all of that was there on day one, what was five or six years ago? However many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago 2008 was and so you know it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you obviously like you look at at pages you and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at what Google has done to the Play Store in the same amount of time or less time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually I think and and you can see I mean obviously they have a whole bunch of issues themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s certainly not perfect over there by any means but they’ve they’ve added a lot of features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are really nice to have. Some that aren’t, but a lot that are really nice to have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple has done very little of that sort of thing. You know, like, and there’s things like developers are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always posting blog posts, myself included, or always posting blog posts about, you know, if you just change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one little thing or add this one feature it would make such a big difference. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those kind of changes almost never happen in the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we might want to talk about something that’s awesome, but that you talking about bloggers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are saying, if only this one thing happened, it would be so much better. It made me think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Underscore’s article about upgrade pricing, which I think is worth talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco about. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely. So we will get to that in a minute. First, let me tell you about something we like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is an app that you’ve probably heard of, but amazingly, as far as I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the developer has not sold like 300 million copies of it. How many iOS devices are there? 300 million?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot. Probably more than that now. A lot. As far as I know, he hasn’t sold 300
⏹️ ▶️ Marco million copies yet. So, our job is not done yet. This app is called Drafts, and it’s by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Agile Tortoise. And Drafts, it’s kind of hard to describe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is in a way that makes you realize how good it is. But I’ll give it a shot. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, Drafts is a quick capture app that launches, and it’s – it launches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a text view – a text field, and it’s just ready for you to start typing. It launches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really quickly and the whole point of it is quick, quick capture. So whenever you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking about anything with text, you launch drafts and you are immediately presented with a text field on the keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter what else you were doing. So it’s where text starts on your iPhone or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. It can capture notes, ideas, status updates, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has all these sharing and communication options built in. So you capture the text first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you type it in, as soon as you’re ready to go, you know, then as soon as you’re done typing in whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you had in mind before you forget, then you have an almost a limitless array of options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So let me see what here he gave me a list here, you can send it as an email or text message, you can create a calendar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco event, you can post Twitter, Facebook app.net, you can say to Dropbox, Evernote, you can forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the text of your draft to a whole bunch of apps, including OmniFocus, things Fantastical,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tweetbot. This is one of those apps that it… Oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it syncs. It uses lightning-fast sync to go through between your iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iPad or multiple iPhones if you’re one of those people. Day and night maybe, who knows? There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are some of those people, but they’re misunderstood. So, drafts for iPhone is $3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Drafts for iPhone is $4. They’re both in App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store and you know this is one of those things where if you’ve ever talked about or thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about your workflow this is the kind of app that you need because anybody who thinks about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workflows this is like they love this app because it is like it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things one things developers suggest is try it for a week in your dock you know little four icons at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bottom try it for a week there you’ll see because if you start using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this as like your starting point of I have something some kind of text to enter and then do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with later or right now even just for faster access. This is really what this app is good at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the last time Merlin did a sponsor read for draft I think it took him like 15 minutes. I’m gonna try not to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that but it’s really hard to describe just how cool this app is and how much time it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can really save you and and how you know if you have one of those ideas that you need to quickly capture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The best thing you can do is just get it out as soon as possible because then you might forget or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you launch some other app maybe some other thing pops up and it’s some kind of problem you have to deal with or some kind of distraction like, oh look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a list of tweets that I want to read instead of tweeting this thing. There’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible distractions and slowdowns when you go directly into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end game of what you were typing for. With With Drafts, you just launch the app and you can start typing. It’s that simple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, Drafts for iPhone, again, $3. Drafts for iPad, $4. They have lightning fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync between them. Go to Agil Tortoise. Is it Agil or Agile?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco far as I’m concerned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are the expert on this, Casey, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you are in the consulting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business. It is agiltortoise.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash drafts. Go there to learn more and get the app, or just search for Drafts on the App Store because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is actually so popular you will find it. It is so good. So agiletortoise.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash drafts and thanks a lot to Agile Tortoise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show. And a little tidbit here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the creator of Agile Tortoise pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invented X callback URL. He emailed me for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. He also makes an app called Terminology. It’s an awesome dictionary and kind of word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exploration app. And forever ago we were trying to figure out a way that Instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could look up words in terminology and then have it bounce back to Instapaper after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your lookup was done. And so he and I kind of coordinated on this standard and then I’m like, look, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have time to do anything more with this standard in public, but I would love it if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody took this and ran with it. And so he took it and ran with it and and made Xcallback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco URL really what it is today. And made it, you know, made a site, made a directory, evangelized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people using it. And then now it’s this huge thing. You know, pretty much every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on Federico Vaticci’s iPhone uses Xcallback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John URL in some way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a great way for apps to work together. And you know, since iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still doesn’t, even with 7, still doesn’t give us a whole lot of good inter-app sharing options,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or data sharing option between apps or anything like that. It’s a really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of stand-in here until we get anything cool like that. And even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco afterwards, it’s still going to be useful. So anyway, thanks a lot to Duras for sponsoring. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Greg, the developer, is a really cool guy. And if you like xcallback URL and you haven’t bought all of his apps, you should.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s it. All right, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey moving along.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so thanks to them for sponsoring. The thing I wanted to talk about in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cued in my mind after you said bloggers talking about what Apple should do is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore David Smith’s post from a couple days ago, and I’ll put it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the chat, about Logic, is it Logic X or Logic 10?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel ignorant. Logic Pro something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is John gone? Did we lose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco John? I’m here. I’m here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Robert. He’s trying to figure out the X or the 10.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there a question? Are you being serious?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assuming it’s 10, but I don’t know. I don’t do this stuff. That’s what Marco does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What? Because you do all the editing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you’re making me doubt myself. I’ve always just, of course it’s 10. Why would it be? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I was looking at two products. One of them’s got an X at the end, but it’s the Roman numeral 10. And the other one has an X at the end, and you say the X?
⏹️ ▶️ John be the case. Maybe I’m crazy. Now I feel like I have to go back and watch that Final Cut Pro 10, whatever it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the intro video where They demoed it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, I wish so hard that I was trolling you, but I’m not. I’m really not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Awesome. Ignorance is its own special kind of trolling, Casey. Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going to cut all this out, right? So anyway, so David Smith said, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a collective app developers, we’re looking at Apple to have an instance to need upgrade pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see what they would do with regard to upgrade pricing. Because everyone’s sort of seen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, let me quote him. It seems like most discussions of this ultimately ended up with a conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple would only add upgrade pricing if they themselves needed slash wanted it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for their own apps. This morning’s launch of Logic Pro blank seems to settle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the matter on that front. So Logic Pro whatever was a pretty major
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade and they ended up saying tough noogies, you’re gonna have to pay the whole $200 all over again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that I think is a pretty, I think underscores right, that’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious cue that we’re not going to get upgrade pricing. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that’s terribly surprising, but I do think it’s a little bit of a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t have a profitable app in the app store. It just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to me like it would be very useful in certain circumstances to offer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either, uh, I guess just a discounted upgrade for paid users.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you came out with another Insta pay, Oh, you sold in paper if you came out with another no you sold the magazine if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you came out with another bug shot that was a massive rewrite then maybe you could charge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess you can’t because it’s 99 cents yeah I don’t know what you would use this for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was actually thinking about doubling the price to $2 you know
⏹️ ▶️ John like what what is it that made underscore decide that this was the turning point was it because
⏹️ ▶️ John the price didn’t change well I think the previous version is that because like you know Apple’s done the same
⏹️ ▶️ John deal many times before like they would come up with a new version of app and you know way back when they were like oh the app store is out now
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple selling its software through the Mac App Store. What are they going to do? Well surely as soon as Apple needs
⏹️ ▶️ John a new version of program X then that’s when we’ll get upgrade pricing because then Apple will be stuck behind and every time that has come
⏹️ ▶️ John up they’ve released a new version of the program. It has not been upgrade priced and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know they just keep going down the road but it used to be that the prices were lower than like oh okay well they didn’t offer upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John pricing but they lowered the price so it’s almost kind of like upgrade pricing and they can afford to do that because they’re Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ John have a whole jillion dollars of revenue but now I guess logic
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t decrease in price and and maybe is that what cemented it I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I know this is the first pro app from Apple that has had a major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version released after the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh cut final cut right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um was was the original final cut ever in the App store?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, you know, the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John deal was like you people who own the existing version of Final Cut when the App Store version comes out,
⏹️ ▶️ John how are you going to give them upgrade pricing? The answer is you’re not. Apple didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right. So there was no if you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at like Aperture, for instance, Aperture, as far as I know, has not had a major version since the App Store. But when the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launched, Aperture was launched at $80, where before I believe it was 200. And so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they launched the App Store and all the all the pro apps that went into the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all had substantially reduced prices compared to what they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before. I think with Logic Pro X and 10, this might be the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first time that Apple has done a major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update to one of those Pro Apps besides just when they first added it to the store with that reduced price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The theory is that if they were going to add upgrade pricing for themselves, they probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have done it for this. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John David’s post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a pretty big assumption that, like, the assumption here is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they just didn’t do it in time for this, but they’ll do it later, or they’ll do it for some other app.
⏹️ ▶️ John going to say, speaking of the dev center downtime, that the assumption,
⏹️ ▶️ John the real underlying assumption is that the only thing stopping Apple from
⏹️ ▶️ John having upgrade pricing in the store is the willingness to do it. And what could actually be stopping
⏹️ ▶️ John them is the ability to do it. You know what I mean? That’s true. Not like it’s, oh, it’s impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ John The ability to do it in a timely manner, given the resources and priorities of the companies and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Perhaps the people, even all the way up the chain, the people who are on the teams with these power apps are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why won’t you give us upgrade pricing? And they can’t get the other part of the organization to give them the upgrade pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t know what’s going on inside. All we know is that they haven’t. But I think it’s conceivable that they
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t, in terms of like, they can’t make the people who are responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for these products wish they had upgrade pricing, but either can’t convince the rest of the company it’s a good idea, or can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get the resources into doing that with upgrade pricing. But as we’re sitting here not knowing what’s going on
⏹️ ▶️ John in that black hole that is Apple and coming up with these crazy theories, I’ve been thinking of reasons that
⏹️ ▶️ John lack of upgrade pricing is actually good for consumers and Apple. and I’ve got one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you can think of a better one. The reason I thought of is that
⏹️ ▶️ John when you don’t have upgrade pricing, you don’t have the things that developers
⏹️ ▶️ John love, which is basically once someone gets on the train of my product, they are encouraged
⏹️ ▶️ John to stay on that train. Because like, well, I already paid all this money for the original version of Photoshop or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can get the next version of Photoshop for what looks to me compared to my original purchase price to be a bargain.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I can buy an entirely different program that’s presumably priced kind of like the original version of Photoshop was.
⏹️ ▶️ John And developers love that. That’s how we get upgrade revenue. Because it’s pricing psychology. People
⏹️ ▶️ John want to pay a little bit of money because they never want to start over again. They just want to stay on that train. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bad for consumers and Apple because it’s like a lockout factor for new competitors. Apple and consumers
⏹️ ▶️ John would prefer it if you weren’t locked in. Like say, the reason Photoshop is so entrenched is that no
⏹️ ▶️ John one could come up against and defeat it. Well, if everyone is kind of on a level playing field where you have to sell your new
⏹️ ▶️ John version or whatever you think it’s worth and you can’t give the people who bought the old version an advantage, each time it’s time for you
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy a new version of your graphics program or whatever your program is, you can look at the entire field because
⏹️ ▶️ John no one has any pricing advantage based on your past purchases. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple likes that and I think consumers like that because it makes the developers, you know, it doesn’t lock
⏹️ ▶️ John you in as much. And it’s not like real lock, you’re not being locked in by file formats or any, you know, sort of dongle type
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff or whatever. being locked in by pricing psychology, by your own brain and the way you perceive loss
⏹️ ▶️ John and how you just want to keep buying the same one you did. So that’s all I’ve got for why the lack of upgrade pricing is
⏹️ ▶️ John good for consumers in Apple. I don’t know if you guys can think of anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it makes a lot of things a lot easier for both sides. First of all, it makes it very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear. Well, I guess it doesn’t apply to the App Store. I was going to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the weird things with upgrades is that once you have upgraded, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t really do anything with the previous version. You can’t really sell it to anybody else. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other weird things. But I guess you can’t do that now in the App Store anyway. But it certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes things easier on Apple’s side for accounting and price calculations and everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not have these weird dependencies. Like, well, it’s this price if you bought this. And if you didn’t buy that, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this other price. There’s one less thing there. There’s probably a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco avenues for abuse that this rules out. Because keep in mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything you can do in the App Store, people are finding ways to scam it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and beat the rankings in some weird way, or scam Apple or scam us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything in the App Store is going to be scammed. So Apple’s probably reluctant to do anything to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open up any more ways for that to happen. I’m sure there’s some weird thing you could do with gift codes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and weird pricing scenarios and somehow make your app jump in the ranks. I’m sure there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird stuff you could do. I think the biggest reason why,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is probably a bigger topic. Before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets too late, let me do the second sponsor and then we’ll get back to this. Our second sponsor this week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty much the king of podcast sponsors. It’s Squarespace. Of course it’s Squarespace.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or online portfolio. So for a free trial and 10% off, go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco squarespace.com and use the offer code ATP7 for our show ATP in the month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of 7 for July. We use Squarespace for our site, we use it for our previous podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Neutral, and in fact Squarespace sponsored the entire podcast Neutral. We love it, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it’s it’s fast, it’s easy. So Squarespace is constantly improving their platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with new features, new designs, and even better support. They have beautiful designs for you to start with and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the style options you need to create a unique website for you and your you or your business. It’s incredibly easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use. But if you want some help, they have an amazing support team that works 24 seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace starts just $8 a month. And it includes a free domain name if you sign up for a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every design automatically includes a unique mobile responsive experience that matches the overall style of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website. So it isn’t just like you know, one mobile layout for every theme. No, every theme has its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom mobile layout so it matches the style. Your content will look great on every device, every time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we all know that Squarespace looks beautiful on the outside, but what’s also amazing is that the code is beautiful too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace takes just as much pride in their backend code as they do in their frontend design. This ensures that your site’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content can be crawled by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and all the other search engines. Does Bing have built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco punctuation the way Yahoo does? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I inserted something there, I assumed it did, but maybe it doesn’t. Anyway, Squarespace takes care of all the hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you don’t have to. So start a trial today with no credit card required and start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building your website. So when you decide to sign up, make sure you use the offer code ATP7 to get 10% off and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to show your support for our show. Thanks a lot to Squarespace for their support. Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is everything you need to create an exceptional website.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me just respond to the guy in the chat room that I was reading there. They said my example
⏹️ ▶️ John of Photoshop was a lousy one because all Photoshop’s competitors are like $80. They’re already way cheaper than Photoshop.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s true. And it is only a weaker example, I think. But I think it’s still an actual example of
⏹️ ▶️ John the phenomenon I was describing because if you took away upgrade pricing, pretend Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the Mac App Store. We should actually discuss Photoshop’s real, I think it’s on our topic list, Photoshop’s
⏹️ ▶️ John actual pricing with the whole Creative Cloud thing. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think they just gave the
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store the finger with that. Yeah. Pretend Photoshop was in the App Store. if you know and
⏹️ ▶️ John no upgrade pricing is available when the next version of Photoshop came out Adobe would be forced to
⏹️ ▶️ John price it at whatever like the full price of Photoshop is right and then you have a situation where all right well
⏹️ ▶️ John those competitors are still 80 bucks right you know I could buy a pixel mate or whatever for such a cheap price but
⏹️ ▶️ John when the previous owner of Photoshop said okay I need a new version of Photoshop because I want the new features
⏹️ ▶️ John or good doesn’t run on my old computer anymore whatever whatever problem they have, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John have a decision that used to be pay, you know, upgrade price to get the new version of Photoshop. And
⏹️ ▶️ John now the decision is, I have to pay for the full version of Photoshop again? Oh, well, I’m going to look at some competitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, and they wouldn’t be as motivated to look at competitors if there was upgrade pricing. And even though the
⏹️ ▶️ John competitors were always way cheaper, why were they ever paying the, you know, the upgrade fee for Photoshop is more expensive than the competitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John But being forced to like, like you’re starting over a clean slate, there’s no upgrade price and there is nothing keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John you on Photoshop except for your love of the program, makes you more likely to look at the competitors. And
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you still reject them and keep going with Photoshop. But I think that that lack of lock-in, that lack
⏹️ ▶️ John of pricing psychology, keeping you buying the same program over and over again, kind of unthinkingly
⏹️ ▶️ John or not being able to get yourself to seriously consider the competitors because of the sunk cost fallacy or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not good for consumers or for Apple, because Apple wants that dynamic marketplace where no one
⏹️ ▶️ John locks you in in the old style kind of Microsoft Office you just have to keep buying because everybody uses the file format or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, file formats actually a digression in that whatever. Anyway, I think I think there is something to
⏹️ ▶️ John the lack of upgrades. I do not necessarily think this is why Apple doesn’t have upgrades. I’m just trying to think of any
⏹️ ▶️ John any possible upside that could possibly explain some reason that they have this is this I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John someone would write a tell all book about like the insides of Apple and not about like Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John or like forced all being fired, But like about the boring stuff like what happened that dev center downtime
⏹️ ▶️ John and what was the deal with upgrade pricing like no five People would read this book, but I think it’d be really interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in in the vein of upgrade pricing I was thinking while you guys were talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, firstly, I should real-time follow-up myself. It is absolutely logic pro 10. I don’t know what brain flatulence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going through at that moment. So apologies, but with regard to upgrade pricing I was thinking you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If we look at the three groups of people that are involved with this to my mind users Apple and developers You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, how is not having upgrade pricing good for all three? Well, for users, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey teaches them there’s no free launch and sets some price expectations. Now, they may not like them, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it teaches us. I mean, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Lauren, Victor.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s good for users? Like, kind of like, remember to drink your Ovaltine
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey good for users?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not good for like, we’re telling you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s good for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me finish my thought. I see what you’re saying, but let me finish my thought. So Apple, it’s good for them because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot less complexity involved. And that also arguably may be good for users as well because they don’t need to worry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about whether or not they’ve bought the app before and whether or not they’re going to apply to pricing, discounted pricing. And obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can make that obvious within the iTunes store, the app store or whatever. But it eliminates a lot of complexity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But most importantly, I think it is good for developers in the sense that it’s more money for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who write great apps. I mean, look at Tweety as a great example of that. Everyone at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was running Tweety immediately Insta-bought Tweety 2 because why would you not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the guy that did it. Except, was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey There was some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John celebrity that didn’t and complained about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the $2. It’s $2.99,
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like her whole budget for the year for iOS apps. She just couldn’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know where to go from there. But obviously it keeps the system working. And so, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s an application of keeping the system working. In other words, by users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey continually paying developers for their very hard work, It keeps the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running and it keeps interesting and worthwhile apps in the App Store and that is absolutely good for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users. So maybe it’s a hop away from being directly beneficial to users, but I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make a case and perhaps someone at Apple has, that it is good for users not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have discounted pricing. Now flip that around and if I put on my user hat, yeah, it makes me grumble a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit, but if you’re willing to take one for the greater good, I’d rather give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chalk and Berry a few bucks every time there’s a new Twitterific or whatever the case may be in order to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the icon factor, you know, keep it, keep everyone writing these great apps. And, and I will give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco another dollar when bug shot two comes out, even though it’s never going to happen, but still in principle I would.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it, it, I would argue it’s actually possibly better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for everyone if there is an upgrade pricing. But with that said, I don’t run my my life and my business
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by way of the App Store. So I could be totally missing the boat here. But I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably for the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s such torture that Apple doesn’t say anything, because we’re forced into these scenarios of trying to speculate.
⏹️ ▶️ John And whenever that comes about, the tendency that I see is people want to
⏹️ ▶️ John assign to Apple some high-minded ideal or overarching philosophy. Sometimes that’s the case. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that when there is some kind of idea or motivation behind it, Apple articulates it eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes repeatedly, sometimes strongly, sometimes weakly. But eventually, you get their philosophy behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas I don’t think the lack of upgrade pricing has ever been justified or defended,
⏹️ ▶️ John even in a subtle or weak way, by Apple, which makes me go right to the other possibilities that people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like to think about, which is incompetence, foolishness, that it’s a mistake, that there’s mitigating circumstances
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t make any sense outside of Apple’s organization to explain why this doesn’t happen. Maybe they just don’t care enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, exactly, all the reasons that make Apple not look good. Everyone wants to go, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s secret, and Apple won’t say anything. And because Apple makes awesome things, and because I love Apple, therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ John the secret reason must be so incredible. And that makes us all do Apple’s work for it and try to come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John a philosophy that makes sense. And don’t you see? It’s because of like, and we can come up with all those possibilities,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re all possible. But it’s not on us to articulate that. And it’s Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John responsibility to either explain itself or not. And with a lack of an explanation, I’m just as likely to
⏹️ ▶️ John assume incompetence is the reason, or that they really are making a mistake,
⏹️ ▶️ John or that there’s some sort of internal political BS conflict over the issue. And I always go
⏹️ ▶️ John to those possibilities. But whenever I read on the web, everyone starts from the premise that Apple is all-knowing and wonderful. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of like one of the advantages of being secret, is that if you’re making good
⏹️ ▶️ John products and you don’t say anything about them, and you don’t talk about how things work internally, people assume
⏹️ ▶️ John that you are a lab full of super genius monks with high-minded ideals who have the whole world
⏹️ ▶️ John figured out. But in reality, it’s like any other company. They’re all fighting with each other and doing all sorts of stuff in there
⏹️ ▶️ John and being office politics and being incompetent and making mistakes and yelling at each
⏹️ ▶️ John other and having fires in the server room, whatever the hell is going on today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and speaking of incompetence, earlier when you said, and it seemed to me to be jokingly, that maybe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why the Dev Center was down was in order to get the upgrade pricing squared away. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty obvious that Logic Pro X wouldn’t have been released already if they were going to do the
⏹️ ▶️ John have just called it. No, no. I was connecting it in terms of things with the assumption of Apple’s competence and
⏹️ ▶️ John the counter example being this very extended downtime to a service that should not be down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, going back a sec to upgrade pricing, neither of you, I don’t think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have really mentioned I think what the most obvious reason is, is because it keeps software prices down. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Apple, we’ve seen, you know, like David Barnard had recently, at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently brought back that slide from Steve Jobs at like three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or four WDCs ago, where they were introducing iAd. And he said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we want developers to be able to continue offering free and low cost apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and, you know, obviously, Apple benefits substantially.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of basic economic reasons. Apple benefits substantially by software being really cheap for their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms. You know, the whole, you know, ancient Joel on Software strategy thing of commoditizing your compliments.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is when like 12 people email me to say, Joel didn’t invent that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some reason Joel has received more criticism than anybody who writes as friendly as he does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’ve ever seen. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple really benefits a lot from having all the software for the devices be cheap because then people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a really great reason to buy their devices because all the software is available for not that much more money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple takes a ton of profit on those device sales. They don’t make a whole lot from the app store so they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really need to worry about making that substantially bigger. It pales in comparison to what they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make on hardware. And then having people have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of apps on their devices is great for Apple because not only do you sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe bigger hardware, faster hardware, so people can run these apps better or hold more of them, but there’s this massive lock-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effect then. Once you have a bunch of apps, there’s more likelihood, I think, that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to keep buying Apple’s products as new competitors come out with fewer or different apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you aren’t used to or that don’t solve your needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Double-E so if you’ve just dropped $400 on two different versions of Logic Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I had just thrown a crud load of money at the same app two or three times, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to make me even less anxious to bail from iOS or OS X. Does that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco make sense?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Douglas Goldstein Exactly. Apple, I don’t think they intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went out there and built the app stores in such a way to encourage cheap apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that was intentional. I don’t think it was planned in advance. I certainly don’t think it was designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think the app store’s success has been just as much of a surprise to Apple as it has been to everyone else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the scale and the scope of just how big it’s become. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think that by having apps be really, really cheap, and having upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very simple, having everything about buying and installing apps be as simple as possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including that now we see like 90% of them or something are free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then… that’s probably not true from Apple’s point of view, but anyway, regardless, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we’re seeing that Apple is benefiting substantially from this. So even though they didn’t design it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the outset to lower software prices, that has certainly been the effect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s benefiting Apple, and it’s benefiting customers, and developers just have to suck it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s kind of the attitude that Apple has with a lot of stuff towards developers. It’s, look, here’s the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way of doing things this is better for users probably and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna be better for some developers and you can either you know join that train or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know wither and die we don’t really care but here’s how things are going and and you know you can join us if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I get the feeling and this is this is probably gonna anger some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I get the feeling that you can look at developers myself included especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially my past self but even a little bit of my current self you can look at us and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can say about us and our behavior a lot of what we said about the music industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the late 90s and early 2000s of obviously things are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going in a direction here and a lot of developers are taking advantage of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and making a killing or you know really substantially improving their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco businesses and their products. And it’s great for people, and it’s great for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of intermediaries like Apple, but the industry is moving in this direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And developers who sit around and whine about not being able to charge $50 for an app anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are increasingly starting to look like the record labels in 2002. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only so much you can do in that position. can keep whining about it and you can keep wishing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will change but they probably won’t. All odds are against that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s nothing you’re not gonna educate users into paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher prices. That’s not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John The software and services side though are different than the music side in one really important way I think
⏹️ ▶️ John because when the music side was like they’re all pissy they couldn’t sell us CDs for like 20 bucks or whatever anymore because
⏹️ ▶️ John people are you know getting for free and then I just to sell them for $0.99 a track or whatever. That’s the phenomenon, the
⏹️ ▶️ John low pricing phenomenon. But on the app side, it goes beyond that. It’s not just,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, here’s a new way where people can get your thing less expensively. What’s happening on the app and the services
⏹️ ▶️ John side is that that is mutating into a worse product for
⏹️ ▶️ John users so that the developers can get more money. The freemium model or the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s a free service, but they sell you information, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John as if the record labels found out a way to start selling CDs again as a whole for $20
⏹️ ▶️ John online. And they did it by inserting ads every 10 seconds into the song or something. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? The product is worse. And that’s the way that they’re working around.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so part of the resistance at this point is you’re not saying, oh, I need to sell my next application for $50.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re saying, I don’t want to make it a freemium thing where when you press the red button, you’ve got to pay $10 in-app purchase to
⏹️ ▶️ John get this feature, and then $5 to get that one. And you’ve got to get coins. And there’s an energy meter. You can’t use the application more than five
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes a day unless you pay money. Like, that’s the model that everyone is going to. All these apps in the App Store are making money
⏹️ ▶️ John hand over fist by game theorying money out of people’s wallets, not just
⏹️ ▶️ John kids, but also adults as well. And it’s a worse experience for users. But that wasn’t true with music,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was more or less, I mean, you said the sound quality was worse, and that wasn’t that terrible. But it was not the hellscape
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the freemium, free to play type of thing, where just like
⏹️ ▶️ John the application is costing you $50, and the company can make tons of money, but it’s free, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John the sale price of the thing is free. That’s where it’s gone too far. And I think most app developers
⏹️ ▶️ John have made their peace with adjustment in pricing. What they don’t want to do is say, man, I really
⏹️ ▶️ John do not want to make a freemium product. I really do not want to put ads all over my thing or do anything like that, because that just feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And certainly, obviously, there’s a few different aspects of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, the gaming world has way more severe problems with this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the whole free-to-play BS.
⏹️ ▶️ John of like paper. Doesn’t paper do that? Or one of those graphics apps where you buy the brushes? Like, it can be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco applied to anything. It does, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s a little bit different in that I don’t think they’re consumable. But either way, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s ways for abuse in both regular apps and games. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming market, I think, deserves a special discussion on its own, but overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly you’re right that to get this overall benefit to consumers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of usually lower prices, we’ve had to add complexity and a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that complexity is bad. The old way of buying music, in your theoretical example there, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old way of buying music was really simple. You paid money and you got the music on some kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could play it, you could do whatever you wanted to, you could sell it, you could throw it out the window, you could whatever, and it was just the music and that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. you start throwing in things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads and privacy-invading creepiness and stuff like that, like other ways to make money besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John just charging people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’re changing the product.
⏹️ ▶️ John just changing the pricing at that point. And you’re like, OK, I’ve done all I can with the pricing. I’m going to change the product now. So the experience
⏹️ ▶️ John of using the product is different. So everything is out of the window. If the song wasn’t the song anymore, if the song was changed
⏹️ ▶️ John in some way, if it stopped midway through, if there was something else inserted into the song, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco if somehow you could pull that often a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that customers are like, oh, I guess, like if you could like
⏹️ ▶️ John get the tip of the wedge in and like, you know, because it was like with freemium, it’s like, all right, I do like getting
⏹️ ▶️ John the game for free. This is kind of annoying. Like, it slowly creeps up on you where you just, you don’t notice it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And eventually, everything you get is free, but it’s just torture to use. And you didn’t notice it because it used to be you just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like they slowly put, oh, it’s just one second of audio into a song. Oh, that’s not that bad. I’ll listen to one second of audio to get my free
⏹️ ▶️ John song. And they just kept increasing and increasing. And eventually, you’re just like, remember when you could buy something, You just get the song,
⏹️ ▶️ John you use it, you know? And I’m not saying free-to-player freemium is a terrible thing, again, especially for gaming,
⏹️ ▶️ John but everyone is going that direction because it’s like a way to get $20 for
⏹️ ▶️ John CDs again. They can get so much more money through a free-to-player
⏹️ ▶️ John or freemium type of thing than they could ever get if they sold you that application. I see it happen with my son
⏹️ ▶️ John with these stupid games. I told him that there’s no way he would have spent $15 of his own
⏹️ ▶️ John money to buy an iOS game, But within like the first day of getting a free-to-play game, he spent $15
⏹️ ▶️ John in the game. It’s just the way it works. And granted, he’s only nine, so he’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John of a victim of this thing. But I see it with adults as well. Like, you know, that Candy Crush game you were just talking about your wife playing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a bad scene. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to some degree, it is, I think I made this announcement last time, it is a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like arcades. But now it’s always in your pocket. Now you don’t have to go to the arcade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are always at the arcade and you’re paying by credit card. But it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it is hard to look at this and say it’s overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse. In some way, you know, you can look at specific examples and say, well, that’s worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But overall, like, we now have devices that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, you can look at smartphones and iPads are a little bit more like game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consoles in this way, but smartphones, like, don’t pay a whole lot up front for relative to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of thing it is and it’s subsidized and it has all these capabilities and like you’re kind of buying it you’re kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying a phone anyway in modern society so like you don’t have to like spend $600
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a ps3 to play these games you know like that that’s the difference here anyway the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger thing is you know now if you want to play a new game on your iPhone it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between at least to start out it’s between $0 and maybe $4 most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time. In the olden days, a game was $50 and more recently $60.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you’re able to play a lot more games and the production value that goes into them is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way lower than many $50 and $60 games. But not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. And there was a whole lot of like, I don’t know, I think I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upset from buying Marble Madness from my Genesis for 40 bucks on an Impulse and it was so so bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I I I’ve never impulse bought a game that turned out to be good like a physical game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a store for like 30 to 40 bucks I’ve never I’ve impulse bought I think three or four of them total
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ve always been horrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John making of Marco people. These formative
⏹️ ▶️ John impulse purchases is why now he researches light bulbs.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s all about Marco. Three weeks before he
⏹️ ▶️ John buys one because he’s you know in his formative years you like never again will I allow
⏹️ ▶️ John myself to buy this thing on an impulse I’m will research it and I’m the same way it’s such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible game no but it’s like I totally get that and and so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that whole world now like the stakes are way lower and that was that was like 40 or 50 or 60 bucks in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 90s which was you know more substantial than then than those same amounts are today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you know everything is cheaper now and you see same problem or the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set of problems and benefits and kind of intertwined issues with like Walmart selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular things to people like you know on in some ways it’s better for people to spend less for things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then there’s all these terrible side effects to that you know I don’t think this is as bad but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s hard to argue that this overall is worse that now that everything is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like either free or cheap to get into and then you know even the things that aren’t totally free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you might spend, yeah, what if the worst case scenario is you put 15 bucks into Candy Crush? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s still like, relative to how expensive games used to be, that’s not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s still actually really cheap relative to how things used to be. And certainly you can go crazy and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get, you can kind of lose track of it and start spending, you know, $70. Well, yeah, games
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s the absolute amounts that’s bad, it’s making it less of a conscious decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would rather consciously spend $50 than not realize that I’d spent $15. In terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John the honesty of the interaction, where you’re basically tricking people into spending money they didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John want to spend. I mean, it’s getting at the whole, I do not want to get into free
⏹️ ▶️ John will. But anyway, personal responsibility was another code word, which I also don’t want to get into. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels like a more honest interaction to ask someone to make a decision based on an amount versus
⏹️ ▶️ John ask someone to speculatively predict their future behavior and
⏹️ ▶️ John decide whether they want to download this free or cheap game based on what they think they’re going to spend on it in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it just doesn’t feel as nice. And I think you’re right that it’s been a net win.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, we’re making progress. This is all good stuff. But it’s kind of like with the good has come
⏹️ ▶️ John like this other bad force that we’re constantly bombarded by and we have to build up new defenses against
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing that didn’t used to exist. Like, we get, you know, there are awesome, awesome software out there
⏹️ ▶️ John for a fair price, even, you know, some really good free to play things where you just buy new levels and they’re reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ John priced. And it’s only like five things you can buy in the game. And it’s just a great way for a great developer to get more money. Like, that’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John good. And then there’s like this giant bizarre of people yammering at us. And like the vast
⏹️ ▶️ John majority of the app store, and the vast majority of anything, was it Sturgeon’s Law or whatever, is crap. And they’re in our
⏹️ ▶️ John face. And they’re trying to scam us. And they’re trying to exploit us. trying to do terrible things to us and some of those companies are big
⏹️ ▶️ John and have, you know, millions of dollars, Zynga. And that’s, you know, we’ve created a monster
⏹️ ▶️ John and a mob outside of this other stuff that we got, which is way better than it used to be. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess you got to take the good with the bad. But like, we really need to build up like defenses against the bad that has come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and like, you know, nobody’s forcing people to buy or use these games. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have Candy Crush installed on my phone, because I heard it was really sleazy with all this stuff and I thought you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not worth it and then I saw Tiff play it and I you know I’m like that actually isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t seem like it’s a very good game like instead I went out and bought I bought mean bean machine for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ps3 instead that’s a different story but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I no one’s forcing people to to do what to buy these games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why these things are so prevalent the reason why games can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this stuff is that people let them and people support it. They do it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works. And so there’s only so much that Apple can really do about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reality is that, let’s say Apple gives us upgrade pricing. What’s that going to do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it going to make prices go up in the App Store? Probably not, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people like cheap software. And the reason why so many games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there and so many apps out there have made their prices so low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not usually because they have to. It’s because they can make more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way. People who are saying that, oh, they put an app in the app store and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they wanted to charge $10 but nobody was buying it so they were forced to lower the price. Well, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know if that app would have sold any better in any other environment. Maybe the app isn’t worth $10. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s 15 other apps in the app store that do the same thing for $1 and it’s just kind of, you know, just kind of sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you competition-wise. Like, there’s no evidence that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s policies are really holding us back here. There is the top list, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think has harmful effects. I wrote about that before. I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple removed the top lists from the App Store, that it would be overall much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better for everybody. For people, for developers, you users. It would be way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everybody, I think. But with the exception of that, I really think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there’s not a lot Apple could really do here to change people’s behavior. Because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact is, people love cheap stuff. They respond way, way more to cheap stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than to expensive stuff. And pricing is very psychological and not absolute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people. So to them, like, in a store where where almost everything is a dollar or two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five dollars does seem expensive. It’s expensive in quotes there. So there’s all these other factors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and the reason why developers make their prices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they are is usually because it works better. And no one’s stopping you. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not set a maximum price by policy. Well, actually, I think that’s like $1,000. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one is stopping you from charging 50 bucks for your app in the App Store. You can try,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if people don’t want to buy it, that’s not really Apple’s fault.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, there’s a couple of little things. And we’ve all heard the little things they could do. And I think they would actually help us. Like, for
⏹️ ▶️ John example, making their search better would help a lot. Because when you search for a well-known application and you get the million scam apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Apple’s constantly fighting them. It’s not like they’re not doing anything about it, but they’re not doing a great job. A lot of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a new game that I’ve heard of and I search for it. And you have to be careful not to accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John go through the app that’s trying to scam you, because it looks like, I mean, even things like Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ John where they have those Minecraft clone type things. Oh, yeah. But scam, they’re always trying to fight
⏹️ ▶️ John fraud. But then it’s like, oh, what’s really fraud? This game actually is a legitimate game, and it legitimately uses that word.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not keyword spamming. But Google does it better because they have a system, PageRank. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John in their store, they don’t. If I search, no, I’m talking about Google on the web. Oh, yeah. Like with
⏹️ ▶️ John PageRank and the incoming links, right? And if they can do that for the entire web, surely Apple can
⏹️ ▶️ John do a little bit better job of when someone types in candy crush, I don’t even know what the search returns. But make sure the number one item
⏹️ ▶️ John is the actual candy or cream that everyone is talking about and buying. And it’s not some other thing. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly fighting that battle. Like, you know, they have some role to play. It used
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to be much worse than this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re doing that much in that
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly. They have some role to play in policing bad behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the problem with the system they set up, is once you put yourself on the line for any kind of quality control, where you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just say, look, upload whatever the hell you want, no limits. Once you do that at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you’re always constantly battling, what’s the line? What do we stop? OK, well, we’ll stop outright fraud. What’s fraud?
⏹️ ▶️ John How do we define fraud? Is this fraud? Is this not fraud? Are we going to police copyright? Well, no, we can’t really do that, because our lawyers say we have to just
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for it to take down. So we can’t police copyright. But then our store is filled with crap that’s like Super
⏹️ ▶️ John Mario Brothers with the O spelled with a zero or something, and that stays up until Nintendo notices
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And I’m sure Apple hates that, but it’s constant battle to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John where you draw the line between intervention and allowing the stuff to sort itself out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in some respects, the pricing thing, like the developers are all kind of in there making their
⏹️ ▶️ John own fate with their own decisions, sometimes good, sometimes bad. But there is again, like that, that mob,
⏹️ ▶️ John that horde of barbarians on the outside who are, who are not well-intentioned, who are in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John who are bad actors. And there’s a lot of them and they’re all over the place. And the good people are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, can you get this mob out of here? And Apple is like, well, we can’t tell the difference between the mob
⏹️ ▶️ John and the regular people until they do something bad. So we can’t be police for the entire world, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys just need to sort it out. And I don’t know. There’s been a lot of talk over the
⏹️ ▶️ John years about building a wall around the good people. All the people who are good actors in the app store are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, can’t we get some kind of thing where you agree that you trust us and we’re not losers, and then our
⏹️ ▶️ John apps get approved more quickly? We’ve all heard things like that, because we all think, oh, we’re the good guys,
⏹️ ▶️ John And we know who the bad guys are, but we get treated exactly the same. And isn’t there some kind of way I could pay more money? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John it becomes, well, no, it was just the rich people would go in. And a lot of the rich people are the bad people. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a tiny microcosm, a tiny like world government inside the App Store and the way
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s being run now. It’s not the feudal system, but it hasn’t advanced probably past like
⏹️ ▶️ John the eighteen hundreds in terms of sophistication of the governing process. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, it’s it’s weird because, you know, you said what could what could be done to make this better? And one of the things I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about is, okay, let me put myself in the shoes of a game developer and I’m about to make this game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe it’s a game that’s kind of hard to digest. And, and Mind Blitz from, from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week is a kind of interesting example of that in that, yeah, on the surface it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a standard memory game, but really it’s a lot more than that. And how do I get someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see that it’s a lot more than that? if I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a free download and then in-app purchase. And it makes me wonder, well, would some sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of trial system work better? So it’s a little bit less sleazy. It’s an all or nothing thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you say, hey, you can try the, you know, Apple, I should say, allows developers to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give users a trial. Maybe it’s for a day, maybe it’s just for an hour, whatever the number may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or maybe a developer could even set that number. one way or another, then I could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the consumer of this game, I could download it and I could see if it was any good, see if I liked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, and then after an hour, or whatever the number may be, I can’t use it anymore unless I pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it, but the premise is if I’m paying for it, I’m buying all of it, and I’m not going to be nickel and dimed
⏹️ ▶️ John The oligarchs will not like that, though, because the oligarchs are the people who are selling a gazillion one-dollar games, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John would not sell a gazillion one-dollar games if someone could free trial it, because they would sell like
⏹️ ▶️ John an eighth of that number, because most people would free trial it, get five minutes out of it and say that’s not worth the one, you know, whatever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they make more money selling one dollar game that you can’t trial than they would. And and yeah, there are a few oligarchs.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s not a lot of the people who are making tons of money. There’s the A’s the world. But I think at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John like now we’ve reached the point where he has enough sway to say, you know what, we would prefer not to have
⏹️ ▶️ John free trials. I don’t know what he is official opinion is on that. But I feel like the games that sell tons and tons of copies at a really
⏹️ ▶️ John low price would actually make less money in absolute dollars if they were able to be
⏹️ ▶️ John free trial, even if they tried to crank the price up in response. Okay, well, it was $1, no free trial. Now it’s $10,
⏹️ ▶️ John but free trial. I don’t think they could make a balance that would give them as much money as the $1 free trial
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s an impulse purchase. You’ve already paid. If you don’t like it, you don’t feel bad. And you just keep doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, and that’s true. And it in this all runs contrary to my point earlier about removing complexity with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade pricing. But I still come back to, does Apple care? And yes, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are very influential people that will care and that will try to make Apple care, not Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care, but Apple care. Anyway, so the point is that if that makes the store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little less abrasive and a little less hostile to users, is that not worth it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t know. It’s hard to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but it seems like it might be.
⏹️ ▶️ John That lobbying effort, if it exists, and I assume that that does between the big players in the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple happens totally behind closed doors. We have no
⏹️ ▶️ John that is. Like, something must be going on there, because we know they’re up on the stage during the keynotes. We know about the amounts of money involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we know about the technical discussions, like what do you want out of our next GPU for your, you know, real racing
⏹️ ▶️ John game or whatever. But I don’t know what the App Store policy
⏹️ ▶️ John issues are there. I feel like even if it’s subconscious, there has to be a role at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for whatever it’s worth, I’ve talked to a lot of developers over the years, big and small,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of which have been involved in keynotes or unveilings and things like that. And the impression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get overall is that nothing like that actually happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, for the keynote, Apple goes to you. You don’t go to Apple. And other than that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your interaction with them is very restricted. They don’t really negotiate with you that much. It’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John tell you what to do and you say, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John But why does Apple go to you? go to you because you’re EA, because you’re selling tons and tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of games, because you’re a big game developer. Sometimes they go to small people, too. Like, there’s two parts to that. One is just like the
⏹️ ▶️ John help us with our marketing effort. But the other one is, who does have influence over App Store policies?
⏹️ ▶️ John Individual developers don’t have an influence. Like, mom and pop shops don’t really have much influence,
⏹️ ▶️ John except in the aggregate, right? And I have
⏹️ ▶️ John that big companies have more of an influence, let’s say. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know if it’s formal or just subconscious or whatever. I wonder how much influence things like, why isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft Office in the App Store? Not that that’s a big deal for Apple, and Apple’s going to play all tough and
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, we don’t need Microsoft Office anymore. We’ve moved beyond that. But in some ways, you know, at the very least, Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John has someone they can call on the phone and talk to a human being and talk to them about their issues
⏹️ ▶️ John once or twice a year about, what do you think about this, that, and the other thing. And maybe Apple rebuffs them or whatever. But this communication
⏹️ ▶️ John there that’s happening on an individual corporate entity level that is not happening on an individual developer
⏹️ ▶️ John level in any capacity. I think eventually that has to
⏹️ ▶️ John weigh on them, again, even if it’s just subconscious, even if they don’t have formal meetings about deciding what to do about EA
⏹️ ▶️ John or Microsoft or Adobe or anyone else who could potentially be in the App Store but isn’t or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it weighs on their minds in a way that the aggregated mass of angry people
⏹️ ▶️ John blogging about App Store policies does not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re selling their influence a little too much based on no facts
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought so we’ve got it to go on so we got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just I really don’t think that Apple cares what EA thinks about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their app store policies and who knows I just like you said it’s a it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set of very high walls with closed and locked doors I’m never gonna know what’s going on behind there but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know the impression I’ve gotten is that Apple certainly will listen to what EA says,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t think it materially influences what Apple does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, look at the strong arm in the e-book thing, though. Like the stuff like that goes on
⏹️ ▶️ John in the relatively low stakes world of the iBook store, which is nothing compared to the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like, oh, we refused. We didn’t let their app into the App Store to try to twist their arm on this other
⏹️ ▶️ John negotiation we’re having, like that kind of petty crap going on on an individual corporate entities basis.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s because the corporate entity they’re dealing with is big and important. I don’t think they would ever
⏹️ ▶️ John like any cues not going to call the app store guys and tell them to hold Marcos app because Marco said something mean
⏹️ ▶️ John right that but but if Marco is all of a sudden like a major publisher Then who
⏹️ ▶️ John was in the middle of the negotiation with Apple then that comes into effect Like I don’t put that petty crap
⏹️ ▶️ John beyond them and we have now, you know evidence in a legal trial that they totally do stuff like that Right
⏹️ ▶️ John turns out some of its illegal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s not a terribly fair comparison Is it because in the case of the publishers, they had all the cards, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess you could say all the pages, whereas Marco just has an app and EA just has a couple of games.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And maybe if Madden and a bunch of other really popular EA titles were all in the App
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Store and making a just absolute killing, then OK, at that point, maybe they have some of the cards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t feel like EA, as a silly example, I don’t think they really have that much cloud in
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no. I think Apple and the people who run the App Store are still, perhaps unjustifiably,
⏹️ ▶️ John but still kind of a little bit defensive and paranoid about the success of other app stores.
⏹️ ▶️ John And EA pulling out of the Apple App Store and going into the Google Play Store
⏹️ ▶️ John would make them upset. That’s why Apple is constantly putting up the numbers about how awesome their app store is in terms of number
⏹️ ▶️ John of applications and money given to developers and all that stuff. It’s like a little bit, does protest too much
⏹️ ▶️ John in all of their things. Even though they’re just so incredibly dominant in the app store at
⏹️ ▶️ John this point. They do not want that to change. And I think they’re terrified of when
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon’s starting selling MP3s DRM-free and the music labels wouldn’t give them DRM-free music because
⏹️ ▶️ John the music labels are basically intentionally trying to take power away from Apple by empowering
⏹️ ▶️ John another competitor. Not that the Amazon MP3 store came and swamped the iTunes store, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it was scary there for a minute in terms of they’re DRM-free, they’re growing, we’re not,
⏹️ ▶️ John the music labels are playing hardball with us. I think Apple does not want their store to be at a disadvantage.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the big players and their games and you know, how many, how many companies have the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, uh, you know, development bandwidth to produce the types of games that EA puts in there, like three
⏹️ ▶️ John or four or five person shop can make an amazing iOS game, but at a certain point you can’t compete with however many umpteen
⏹️ ▶️ John people are making these big complicated games that nevertheless run on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and that’s exactly what I was going to say is, you know, if let’s suppose EA pulls out and a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of smaller indie shops step in to kind of replace them, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we had a situation where there was a new, I don’t know, like a flight controller, or what was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jetpack Joyride, or whatever it was that was popular a year or two ago, or even Words with Friends before it got even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really slimy? Then Apple could spin it as, hey, when EA left,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at all you little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John guys that had a
⏹️ ▶️ John to make money. But no one’s who’s doing the next Call of Duty. Like at a certain point, that’s going to happen as the
⏹️ ▶️ John computing power of iOS devices increases. At a certain point, like this is something that the consoles went through
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many years ago. One guy used to be able to make like an Atari 2600 game, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John One guy cannot make a PlayStation 4 game. It’s just almost impossible. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John a AAA title, $60, you’re going to buy this and be happy that you spent $60 on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The better your technology gets, the better the graphics are, the more compute power you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John the more money it costs to produce the game. It’s why game developers were a little bit freaked out when they went HD, because
⏹️ ▶️ John now all of a sudden, the resolution of all your assets increases, and then you need bigger machines to crunch them, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John artists have to do more work, and you can’t fudge the details anymore, and all this other stuff. So if things
⏹️ ▶️ John continue apace, iOS is kind of creeping up that same trail, where at a certain point, yeah, you can make
⏹️ ▶️ John flight control and stuff like that, and those kind of casual games are fine. But someone’s going to make
⏹️ ▶️ John Madden, or Call of Duty, or Destiny from Bungie or something, You can’t make destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John with a five-person shop and if the company that makes that pulls out and goes only on another platform
⏹️ ▶️ John You would have to form a company the size of bungee before you can feel the game like destiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe Apple isn’t interested in those kind of games
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, consumers are though consumers are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, but how many
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of them? We’ll see when destiny comes out We’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Xbox whatever sells
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a good point.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. I mean, like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, they sell them on the PC as well. That’s why everyone goes multiplayer. I’m just saying, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS devices are not at that level yet. They can’t play those games at all, period. Right? So being
⏹️ ▶️ John incapable of playing makes you, oh, we don’t have to decide whether people want to play. Once they become capable of playing them,
⏹️ ▶️ John then we’ll really find out, is that something people want to do? You know? Because at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, the iOS devices aren’t going to become, you know, more expensive relative to people’s incomes. They’re only going to get cheaper,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So at that point if everybody who can afford, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John An iPad mini also can now play You know current
⏹️ ▶️ John quality triple-a type games Maybe they do want to like maybe it’s maybe they’re not just buying
⏹️ ▶️ John candy crush because that’s the only kind of game They’re interested in maybe it’s because they don’t want to spend $500 on a game console or $1,000 on a gaming PC to play
⏹️ ▶️ John that Game, but if they could play it with a device they already have for
⏹️ ▶️ John like their web browsing and you know, whatever Maybe suddenly they’re more interested in it right so I
⏹️ ▶️ John will see how that turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. We will. We should probably wrap up though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah we’re getting getting pretty long here. Alright so thanks a lot to our two sponsors Drafts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Squarespace and we’ll see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at c-a-s-e-y-l. Yes, I’m saying the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m teen. I’m trying to enunciate. What did you say? My nose
⏹️ ▶️ John is like a little bit stuffed up and I’m dying in this incredibly hot room so I think I’m a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit more fog horny than usual today. Look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it this way, at least you didn’t stumble over Logic Pro whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was funny though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I could only have that back.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Marco gave pricing for the iPhone version of drafts and also the iPhone version of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey drafts. You did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you got it right
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Sorry. Speaking is hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nothing happened in the summertime. Yeah, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John for OS X reviews. That’s the only thing that happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, what’s the quick update?
⏹️ ▶️ John Today was the first day that I had to consult the Darwin source so that’s always an important
⏹️ ▶️ John point in my review when I’m reduced to going through the source code. So today was the day. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good. I made it with like, I’m probably about halfway done before I had to
⏹️ ▶️ John resort to that. But every reviewer I write, I’m so glad that exists. Because I’m like, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John The easiest way to get the answer to this question is to look at the damn source. And it always is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those servers were up. Opensource.apple.com. I was like, oh no, I need the source.