catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

160: Be Careful Out There

Mac ransomware, the future of Mac OS X, and a surprising product review.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Use promo code ATP10 for 10% off your first order.
  • Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
  • Hover: The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code CRAIGSHOUSE for 10% off your first purchase.

MP3 Header

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. MS SQL Server on Linux
  2. TV follow-up
  3. Sponsor: Fracture (code ATP10)
  4. Marco’s surprise
  5. iPad Pro Non-Pro Mini Nano
  6. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  7. Mac ransomware
  8. Future of the Mac
  9. Sponsor: Hover (code CRAIGSHOUSE)
  10. Future of the Mac, continued
  11. Are we just old?
  12. Ending theme
  13. John doesn’t go to Las Vegas

MS SQL Server on Linux

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you sad at all about the m5 leaving

⏹️ ▶️ John you should pull the engine noise mp3s off the computer So you can play them anytime you want when you miss it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s move on to something super exciting let’s talk about sequel server on I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn’t even get it out with a straight face I Tried so hard I couldn’t even do it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of interesting right cuz like you know Microsoft has their database sequel server which forever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has required Windows Server. And I would imagine a lot of Windows Server

⏹️ ▶️ Marco licenses were exclusively to run Microsoft SQL Server. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them making this or announcing that it will be available for Linux is interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, because that means, again, like we brought up last week how them bringing.NET

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Linux officially would be, you know, interesting and might have a negative effect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their Windows Server licenses, this will probably have an even bigger negative effect on their Windows Server

⏹️ ▶️ Marco licenses. So I think what this is showing is that Microsoft would rather that you use.NET

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use SQL Server rather than necessarily be stuck

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Windows Server. And so all the reasons that people have for not using Microsoft Server products,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now they have one big one less.

⏹️ ▶️ John fewer than they bring this up last week I don’t know maybe I’m misremembering but I remember talking about

⏹️ ▶️ John the similar issues of like that Microsoft is becoming more friendly to Linux

⏹️ ▶️ John and how people don’t like to run Linux servers and Windows servers the two kind of separate domains

⏹️ ▶️ John of knowledge and really just run all Linux servers Linux is everywhere in the enterprise and so

⏹️ ▶️ John that Microsoft could sell you I think I might have said exchange server for Linux or something like that but

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway and also like that Microsoft could have its own Linux distro eventually and it wasn’t you know that was like

⏹️ ▶️ John last week and then this announcement came I mean I’m sure this announcement was telegraph for people who pay more attention to Microsoft than I do but I

⏹️ ▶️ John had no awareness they were even close to this but then you know there went right after last week’s show

⏹️ ▶️ John so it and I think Christina Warren was also joking about a Microsoft Linux distro

⏹️ ▶️ John around the same time I don’t see that as implausible although a couple people from Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John tweeted oh you know we partner with Red Hat and so on and so forth and we let them do what they do best which is do a Linux

⏹️ ▶️ John distro we don’t have one or whatever but if Microsoft pursues this strategy to basically

⏹️ ▶️ John we will sell you enterprise software and we’re not going to be super picky about

⏹️ ▶️ John where you run it like if a lot of customers want to run our software on Linux fine we’ll we’ll sell

⏹️ ▶️ John them a version to run on Linux because they’re not not the the everything

⏹️ ▶️ John Windows company anymore I mean they haven’t been for a while now since Palmer left basically

⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe even before

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah Fair enough. It’s an interesting push for sure. And I’m curious to see where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this all ends up. But I like it. I think this is Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing to their strengths, which we’ve talked about several times on and off in the past. So good on Microsoft.

TV follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on we got a lot of people that wrote in to talk

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about TV mounting over a fireplace because unsurprisingly a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people were perturbed at where I mount my TV and we got two Recurring

⏹️ ▶️ Casey links which we’ll put in the show notes and it was Neil Weinstock that I guess was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first one in with these links One of them is dynamic mounting which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very similar to the other which we received far more often which is mantle mount and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two of these things basically allow you to stuff the TV over the fireplace

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it’s not in use but then drop it down kind of in front of the fireplace when you are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using it and these are very clever and things that I would never

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever bother with because I just don’t care that much.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be so nervous about this like I mean again I know that you can make a mount that’s super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong and everything but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey man

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having it having the TV on the walls bad enough having it like suspended

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this arm that reaches like a couple of feet away from the wall that’s like thinking about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the stresses on that mount oh my god I do I could not sleep at night with that above my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV or on

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco my TVs

⏹️ ▶️ John are light it would be fine but it is kind of weird though because your room looks weird with your TV kind of hanging in front

⏹️ ▶️ John of the fireplace like I guess it’s kind of a solution. And the idea is you can push it back up when you want

⏹️ ▶️ John the room to look nicer or whatever, but it still seems weird to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then a final piece of follow up. I had tweeted a challenge to you slash our mutual follows that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s the PDF of my owner’s manual for my TV. Make it work. I got a plethora of suggestions,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of which were actually very helpful, which I do appreciate because oftentimes with Twitter, that’s not the case.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tentatively, I think it may be fixed. It’s been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very not reliable. Sometimes it seems to be working right, sometimes not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I say working right, what I mean is that it doesn’t overscan or anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It appears to be, I changed a million things at once because I’m a terrible debugger apparently when it comes to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these sorts of things anyway. I think it is basically the showroom mode or something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it, some sort of like, ooh, let me do everything automatically mode. When I first changed that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it didn’t seem to make a difference. Then all of a sudden, it seemed to be working. So gosh only knows. But the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey positive sign so far. So thank you to the people on Twitter that sent in some tips.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in theory, I think it might be better now.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I think both you and Marco have had people download PDFs of things that you own and read them for

⏹️ ▶️ John you and tell you how to work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I think the common thread between us here is that we just don’t care enough about this particular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. Like Marco does not care enough about, about, well, because But you should find the battery in his car.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey He can write ish and about knowing how to do shortcuts on the iDrive,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example. Personally, I think that’s a little weird that you didn’t care that much, but, you know, teach their own. And for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I could not have possibly cared less about reading the manual to fix this problem. I had lived

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it for like six years at this point. I can live with it some more. However, now that it is fixed, I am quite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, tentatively. I am quite pleased that that I was going to say I spent the time, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really that the The internet spent the time to read the PDF for me. So thanks, Internet!

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this past weekend, we celebrated my mother-in-law’s birthday, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we had gotten her a Fracture print of a photo that I had taken of Declan at a park nearby

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we really like, that she had commented to me, oh man, that’s a really great picture, I really like it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yada, yada, yada. And that was like a month ago. And so we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had pretty much instantly turned around, went to Fracture, knowing her birthday was coming, and had that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey printed, made, pressed, however you wanna phrase it. And she opened it up and instantly burst into tears

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because she was so overjoyed about how good it looked and how awesome it was. And so, seriously kids,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey give it a shot. It’s really good stuff.

Marco’s surprise

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually have some surprise follow-up. Oh, I thought we were done.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, this is surprise follow-up because on my desk right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have two of the Apple Smart Battery Cases.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, seriously?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Seriously. We’re back to this? We are gonna spend even more time on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Apple Smart Battery Cases. Just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick, just quick. You

⏹️ ▶️ John get one for the Plus and one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for

⏹️ ▶️ John regular?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t make it for the Plus. No, one for me, one for Tiff.

⏹️ ▶️ John They only make it in the one size just for the success? That’s it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the Plus already has enough battery life. Anyway, I have my cheap Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that I got, and I expressed some concern about, you know, being not MFI certified,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a little worried about what it might do to my phone, but otherwise it seems all right. But I decided for this trip, Tiff wanted one too,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I decided, let’s try these, I’ll give it a real shot, a real honest shot. And honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like this is a common theme with you. Oh, this is crap, fast forward. Yeah, you know, that’s not so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you’re right. Nobody else would ever do that, Casey. Like Apple and BMWs and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey iPhone. Oh no, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not innocent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m not innocent.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just bringing you down to my level.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand the appeal of this case now. You know, so first of all, it is really easy to take on and off because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the weird bendy top. It does indeed look really stupid. Holding it is actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not bad because the little ledge from the bottom edge of the bump, you actually can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest that on your pinky and have kind of a nice handhold there. Unless you’re John. Unless you’re John. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you hold your phone normally, you can do that. And the smartness aspect of it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really nice, where you never have to turn it on or off. Like that to me,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is what really sets it apart above all the other ones, is that it is always just automatic,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can see its status in your Today view in the batteries widget. So, and when you first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug it in, it shows both side by side, it shows the case and your battery. So overall, it’s actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty nice. It still looks stupid. It’s still big and clunky.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not as big and clunky as some battery cases I’ve seen and used, but it’s still big and clunky.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only major downside to it besides it’s stupid looks, I think, now having

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used it, really the only major downside is that the amount of extra capacity that you get really isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that great. It’s something, I mean, I don’t know, something like two thirds of a charge or half a charge. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is enough if you need just a little boost. But I feel like on the flight on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way out there, we both drained our cases down to nothing and drained our phones down partially.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just like in the airports here and there, you know, going in and out of planes and everything. And yes, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can plug in on the plane, but then you have this cable running across your lap and it’s kind of inconvenient and you gotta reach in the bag

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s like, ideally you don’t have to. So, you know, ultimately it was, they did provide enough power,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it would be nice if they provided more. Like if you’re going to have this big battery backpack on your phone at all,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like a little more power than what this offers. Other than that, pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t say it’s a great value for the money, but there are a hundred bucks and you can get other battery cases

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like fifty. So you know, not a great value, but the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you never have to turn it on or off and it just automatically charges your phone as necessary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it depletes itself first and charges you first. All those things actually pretty nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s my abbreviated review of the Apple Smart Battery Case after

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having mercilessly made fun of it for like three episodes. Did you get a white one? I got, we got one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco each color. Tiff insisted on the white, I insisted on the gray. Both colors are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy colors. The white hasn’t discolored itself yet, but I’m sure it will soon.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They both pick up tons of pocket lint because they are the rubbery silicone material. Physical form-wise,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are exactly as mediocre as you expect. But they do work pretty well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would just only wish for a little bit more power. Overall though, you know, it is not terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I expected it to be terrible and it’s not terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. Well, that’s surprising, but I guess exciting. Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean the one I have, I have this battery case. I think it’s by Lenmar. And yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean it’s okay. It’s a little bit clunky, but I think they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a newer one actually now that’s thinner. one I got with my 6. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it, it works fine, but it’s definitely big and large

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t know if I’d say heavy, but certainly not light.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s alright. And I don’t know, maybe if I were to do it again, maybe I’d get one of these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you have. To be honest, I did get one of those battery packs that you had recommended. What did, who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes that again? Volt Ready. Volt Ready, that’s right. It’s got to be reliable. How

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could it not be?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco $25 from a company you’ve never heard of that has all these little flimsy cables on it. It works most of the time. Why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not? It works exactly what you’d expect for a $25 battery. That’s fair.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I got one of those on your recommendation, which I guess was on someone else’s recommendation first.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The one I got is a truly hideous gold color because that was the only one that was available

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the time. I don’t even see it on Amazon anymore, so maybe it’s been updated since then. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s too tacky even for Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Seriously.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, yeah, so I haven’t traveled with it yet, but I am going on a trip soon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a plethora of other people, and I presume it will be a mixed crowd of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhones and Android phones. And it was appealing to me that this would have a connection for each,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m a nice guy like that. So we’ll see how it goes. If my phone melts, then you can laugh at me and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey say I should have gotten the smart battery case.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure I would ever tell somebody they should have gotten the smart battery case. It’s not that good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is fairly expensive. It’s expensive for the capacity that you get.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, it is really nice not to have to manage it, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco flip it on and flip it off. That part is really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, that makes sense.

iPad Pro Non-Pro Mini Nano

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, ultimately, this might be just convincing me that I should probably just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go with the 7 Plus when the 7 comes out, but we’ll see what happens.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t do it, man.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mike might have been right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Duh, don’t do it, man.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you know, what’s pushing me more and more towards that as time goes on, not only my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery preferences, but also I really don’t use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads. I at least didn’t get myself a Pro, and I’m probably not gonna get myself

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new Pro Mini, whatever the heck they’re gonna call

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new iPad Air with pencil support and Pro speakers and Pro-like style, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The rumors from German is that they’re gonna call it iPad Pro also, which my theory

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that actually, now that we’re talking about it, my theory on that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it makes sense for Apple’s current marketing goals to name

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the big iPads pro because they want people to be thinking of the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a machine that you can do professional work on to help differentiate it not only from you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big phones and everything but also to help differentiate it from Amazon’s like six-pack of cheap tablets. You know like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want the iPad to be a premium product that you can do pro work on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you need or want to. So I think that their goal here, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do indeed call it a Pro of some form, I think their goal here is for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to just think of the iPads as the Pro tablets. And you’ll still have the Mini that probably won’t be called Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the only non-Pro iPad left will be the Mini? Do they still call that one Mini? There’s no more just plain

⏹️ ▶️ John old iPad?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe. I mean, for much of the, well not much, for some of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years that MacBook has existed, was no just plain old MacBook. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the laptop lineup, which I think is a fair comparison here, this was covered pretty well on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Upgrade and Connected the last couple of weeks, but if you look at the Mac lineup, you have some on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the low end, and then you have the entire middle and high end is all called Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s partially because these are higher end things, partially because I think Apple realizes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that gives the whole line like an air of professionalism, of premiumness, you know, superiority.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it kind of makes MacBook, you know, you just follow it with Pro. It kind of makes the whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco line seem prestigious to have so many of them called Pro, especially so many of them people actually buy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, to have most of the iPads that end up being sold have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro in their name, I think helps contribute to the perception Apple wants to create that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad can be used for pro use. Whether or not it can is a different story. That’s, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people can and people can’t. Not going to get that on this episode, but I feel like that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a plausible reason why they would want to do this.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was on one of those episodes of Upgrade and what I said on that episode was I think that

⏹️ ▶️ John the middle, the middle size, like the plain iPad size, the original iPad size, I guess

⏹️ ▶️ John you would call it. I think there’s room to have a model that’s that big with pro in the name

⏹️ ▶️ John and a model that’s also that big without pro in the name because at this point there are enough pro features

⏹️ ▶️ John the smart connector the pen the high refresh rate screen the speakers that

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s enough to differentiate it to say the pro one has all that stuff and is more expensive and the non pro

⏹️ ▶️ John one that is the same size is thinner lighter smaller cheaper and worse in all those other ways

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have a smart connector doesn’t support the pen at all maybe the camera’s crappier maybe it has even the

⏹️ ▶️ John last year’s CPU or whatever but it just seems silly to me to require

⏹️ ▶️ John what I consider the regular iPad size to be encumbered by all of the pro features.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean if I just think about what kind of iPads do rich people want to buy for their toddlers they don’t want to buy

⏹️ ▶️ John them the pro but mini is not you know it’s it’s more fun for a toddler to have the big screen

⏹️ ▶️ John to like finger paint on and and play little games and just do stuff like that so I really help eventually maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe for this first one they won’t do but I really hope eventually there is a pro 9.7 inch

⏹️ ▶️ John one that’s the regular size right

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yes 9.7

⏹️ ▶️ John inch yeah there’s a there’s a pro 9.7 and a non-pro 9.7 because already I mean there aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ John even that many pro features but I think there are already enough features to clearly differentiate the two lines that there wouldn’t be any

⏹️ ▶️ John confusion about it and they can hit more price points they could push the pro one up in price and they could push

⏹️ ▶️ John the non-pro one down by using cheaper stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. We’ll see. Knowing Tim Cook’s Apple, there’s probably going to be like 17 different iPads.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goodness. All right. So, do we want to actually get to what we were planning on talking about today?

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Mac ransomware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right So there was a bit of a brouhaha over the last week or two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about an OS 10 ransomware Attack, this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the one that was in the transmit transmission Which was a is a bit torrent client

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no it’s a it’s a client for acquiring new home home videos at home movies But what does the Apple TV call

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them home videos or home? Yeah home home

⏹️ ▶️ John videos. I think they’re called

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so transmission is a bitcoin bit torn client slash home movie acquirer and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently if I understood what happened correctly the website

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had been Screwed with hijacked etc. And somebody re-signed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Transmission with a valid Apple cert, although not the original transmission cert I believe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that also had ransomware stuffed within it and so a bunch of people downloaded from the website and got

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an infected version of Transmission now sparkle, which is the auto updater that many many many apps

⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside of the App Store use That I believe was written by Andy Matushak originally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, that I guess was not affected but downloads from the website were and there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a ransomware virus thing in there that basically said hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have just read we’ve encrypted your entire hard drive pay us money or You can never get any of your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey files back

⏹️ ▶️ John I thought I encrypted like individual files not the whole drive like it didn’t it’s not whole disk encryption it would just like find your

⏹️ ▶️ John files and encrypt them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you’re correct. So, so this was a bit of an issue. And the biggest issue is it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was signed. I mean, it w it was a valid. Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, not for the app store, of course, but it was a valid Mac app. As far as your, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your installation of OS 10 was concerned because it was signed with a valid development certificate shady, perhaps

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it was coming from a very different place than the normal transmission cert, um, geographically speaking,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it It was still a valid cert, so it was a bit of a cluster

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say the least. What do we think about this?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the big angle that a lot of people started going for was, hey, if this was on

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac App Store, this would never have happened. And that maybe is true, because

⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re relying on on the App Store is, I guess, app review, to realize that

⏹️ ▶️ John this supposed BitTorrent client, if you wait a couple of days and it

⏹️ ▶️ John starts encrypting your files maybe they wouldn’t have noticed that because again it does wait a couple days maybe they’re trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John wait out app review like the app reviewer launched this app and tried

⏹️ ▶️ John using it it would work as expected does app review like leave it on the system running

⏹️ ▶️ John for a couple days or leave it around like maybe it would have got past app review as well

⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s that’s one angle on it the other one is that the developer ID signing thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that that Apple has created with Gatekeeper means that you

⏹️ ▶️ John download applications and they come in three forms totally unsigned

⏹️ ▶️ John you know pre Gatekeeper applications which is how every single Mac app was and all the years before Gatekeeper was

⏹️ ▶️ John created the applications that are signed with a developer ID but don’t come to the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John App Store and then Mac App Store applications and that’s sort of like three levels of I guess trust

⏹️ ▶️ John the totally untrusted one doesn’t require If you download a binary and you run it, it runs. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the way Mac apps were for most of the life of the Mac. The developer ID ones, all that does is

⏹️ ▶️ John tie it back to an Apple developer account, which presumably ties

⏹️ ▶️ John back to a person or institution or somebody that you can hold responsible or whatever. That’s kind of relying

⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple’s signup process to correctly identify

⏹️ ▶️ John somebody. So like, can you go through, can you get an Apple developer certificate putting in totally fake information?

⏹️ ▶️ John Probably. But that’s the only thing that developer ID is giving you. Well, two

⏹️ ▶️ John things. One, that your application hasn’t been modified in any way, which is kind of weird. It’s like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t transmission modified? Well, they didn’t just modify it. They re-signed

⏹️ ▶️ John it. So after they modified it, they signed it with their developer certificate and that certificate authenticated

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that, yes, this thing, if someone modifies this this thing after you download it, you’ll know about it

⏹️ ▶️ John because the signature won’t match. But what you’re worried about is someone modified it and then signed it and

⏹️ ▶️ John it is, you know, a valid container for their malware. So if anyone tried

⏹️ ▶️ John to mess with their malware, signing would have caught it. And then the Mac App Store, like it’s the next

⏹️ ▶️ John leg up where there’s actual human beings looking at your application and making sure it’s okay. So why wasn’t this application on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John App Store? My understanding is the Mac App Store does not allow BitTorrent clients at all. Do you guys know if that’s the case? That’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that to be true. And a quick real-time follow-up, this encryption would never have worked in sandboxing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So even if it made it through AppReview, it wouldn’t have been able to touch the rest of the…

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John because it can’t get through the other files.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in reality, this is a BitTorrent client. So it needs to be able to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco write Torrent downloads to a directory. And so what would probably happen is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, you could use sandboxing to have it pop up the dialog and have you choose a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco directory where it can write. more likely would be that even if it was sandboxed outside

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Mac App Store, even if it was sandboxed, there would probably just be some option where they’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, well, just, you know, we need to write your whole drive to make some feature easier or to make this flow better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And most people would say,

⏹️ ▶️ John okay, you can’t even get that. You can’t even get that. What do you call it entitlement anymore? I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re right. Well, so then it just wouldn’t be sandboxed. And nobody would care. You know, like, so yeah, I mean, what, what would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it useful in the App Store is the sandboxing requirement of the App Store,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is problematic in so many other ways. But in this particular case,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would have helped. However, the reality is, as long as there is a way to download

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that aren’t in the App Store on the Mac, something like a BitTorrent client is almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly going to be downloaded outside of the App Store by almost all of its users, just because dealing with the App Store kind of sucks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even as a user these days. And you can make a better BitTorrent app without sandboxing.

⏹️ ▶️ John where the developer ID thing really came in here is like this transmission could have been the

⏹️ ▶️ John third kind of application that I said not not signed with any stuff is just a binary that you download a sort of an old-style

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac app and if that had been the case and tons of people had downloaded it and it started encrypting their drives

⏹️ ▶️ John there there would be no real way to help them other than education saying hey if you accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ John downloaded this from this website during this time you probably got an infected version you should delete it and do this and do that

⏹️ ▶️ John and here’s how to disinfect your system and so on and so forth. But because it was signed with a developer ID,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could revoke the certificate of that developer ID through the little sneaky update thing that we just described,

⏹️ ▶️ John the checkbox that we didn’t think was there. The reason regular users should keep that checkbox checked

⏹️ ▶️ John is that the Apple has central control to make it so this thing doesn’t launch anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We actually are getting real time follow up from tipster in the chat saying that Apple can blacklist any binary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through that system, including unsigned ones.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, well, then developer ID wasn’t helping at all. That’s a shame. So what was, what were

⏹️ ▶️ John the, um, the makers of transmission getting out of using developer ID? I suppose

⏹️ ▶️ John they make people not have to go to their gatekeeper settings and put it in the most insecure mode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, you can also, um, what is it? Right? Click and go and select open.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then it’ll say, Oh my God, are you really sure? And then you can say, yes, yes, I’m really sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I know, that’s what I’m saying. What do you get out of the developer ID thing? As a developer, I guess you get less scary

⏹️ ▶️ John experience for users because you don’t require them to go to a setting that they don’t understand and change

⏹️ ▶️ John it in a way that pops up a warning dialog boxes or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I mean, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t require them to right click and select open the first time they run the app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then go through the extra scary. They still have the scary, this is an application you download from the internet dialog,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if they just double click on an app under default settings that is unsigned,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t let them run it. It says, oh, sorry, this is unsigned, and then you have to right-click and say open, then, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it lets them bypass all of that, which, you know, if you’re distributing Mac apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this day and age, you should almost always have at least developer ID, if not the app store.

⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, in theory, you can track it back to whoever, whatever Apple developer

⏹️ ▶️ John account signed the bad piece of, you know, and again, that’s, let’s just get back to detective work. Can you find

⏹️ ▶️ John someone who you want to hold responsible? Do they put valid information? Are they in a country

⏹️ ▶️ John that has a legal system that lets you find them or hold them accountable in some way?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming not. I mean, the other alternative suggested in the chat room is that maybe it was just a legitimate developer. They got a

⏹️ ▶️ John developer account hacked. Someone got into their developer account, either were getting their password, doing some other way

⏹️ ▶️ John to get into their developer account. There’s also been a couple of bugs around that make it seem like

⏹️ ▶️ John you could exploit Gatekeeper to execute arbitrary software as if it’s trusted. Those

⏹️ ▶️ John have been surmised in years past. But there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so many ways you can hide from the consequences of doing this bad thing. That’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John the maker of this ransomware, like they’re a bad actor here. Are they going to be caught and punished? Do

⏹️ ▶️ John we have the tools to do that? Maybe, maybe not, probably not. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John not everyone is somewhere where you can get at them. So anyway, Xprotect, the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John downloads little updates in the background and disables things. Like your ethernet driver. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco may have.

⏹️ ▶️ John It may have disabled your ethernet driver one week, but the next week it may have saved you from getting your files

⏹️ ▶️ John encrypted by ransomware.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, this is one of those cases where most of the time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the angles that big business tries to scare people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, to scare them away from piracy is, well you know if you pirate stuff you never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what you’re getting. It could be dangerous, you could get hacked, you could get malware, you know. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time that doesn’t happen with piracy. Like most of the time it’s fine and that’s one of the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many people do it. But this is like the one time where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were actually right. Like this, where you know, that’s we really need protections from Gatekeeper

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and from sandboxing and you shouldn’t pirate things because you’re putting yourself at risk downloading random software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from random places like this is the one time where that was actually true but that being said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this made for interesting news and it could prompt some interesting discussions for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these few days but I don’t think this is going to meaningfully change anything for anybody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s estimated that I think somebody said that the total number of of downloads with the malware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco included was only something like 6,000, which for something like this, that’s not that giant of a number.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, you know, Apple fairly quickly blacklisted the binary, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it probably didn’t even trigger the malware, like the encryption step of the malware, for most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those people. So I don’t… this doesn’t seem like it’s that big of an event.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s more about, you know, what it… how we’re all talking about, like, you know, does this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change our opinions of what the Mac should be, where it should go, security on the Mac, and that I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a conversation worth having. But this particular malware I think is mostly a non-event.

⏹️ ▶️ John And interestingly, it wasn’t like pirated software that was infected. It was the software you

⏹️ ▶️ John used to get the pirated software. Right, exactly. Which is slightly different, but…

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And home movies, don’t forget.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and this is kind of a shame because developers like this, whose applications

⏹️ ▶️ John basically can’t be on the Mac App Store for a policy reason, setting aside all the things that you talked about, Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ John about like, well, the good ones would want to full access to your drive and it’s less annoying to use. But even just like if they’re categorically

⏹️ ▶️ John denied because we think BitTorrent clients are are just as a category, a thing that we don’t want on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John App Store for whatever reason. If you’re a developer who makes a BitTorrent client, and

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re trying to like do as good a job as you can do not being in the Mac App Store, you would get a developer

⏹️ ▶️ John ID and you would sign your application and And you would do all these things, but you know, everybody,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, everyone gets boarded sometimes. They could, you could end up getting hacked. They could

⏹️ ▶️ John hack your website. They could shove a little thing inside your downloadable application

⏹️ ▶️ John bundle and your reputation is smeared because everyone, you know, thinks

⏹️ ▶️ John that whether you knew about it or not, it’s like, oh, transmission, isn’t it? That thing that encrypts your drive

⏹️ ▶️ John and, and, you know, like, I feel like they’re doing everything they could

⏹️ ▶️ John within the bounds of the technology and the, you know, the sort of the rules of the system they’re operating

⏹️ ▶️ John in. And I feel bad that they had a bad result from that because I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t blame the developers. And I do give credit to Apple for

⏹️ ▶️ John having the, you know, for putting in the system that they put in so many years ago to give them the ability

⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with this. But it does make me feel a little bit less

⏹️ ▶️ John safe about downloading applications on the Mac because I’ve, you know, I downloaded plenty of applications not from the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac App Store or from the Mac App Store for that matter. And every single one of those is exploitable

⏹️ ▶️ John through a non-technological means like for example Mac App Store application. I don’t have any

⏹️ ▶️ John faith that AppReview would correctly detect some sort of clever sleeping, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, it waits a week and then it wakes up and does something bad to your thing. And all that it takes for that to happen

⏹️ ▶️ John is for someone to get some poor legitimate developers, developer account password,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, muck up one of their builds or submit a build while they’re away on

⏹️ ▶️ John vacation or do something else like that’s just like a social engineering hack has nothing to do with technology. As far as the entire

⏹️ ▶️ John tech stack is concerned, this would be a completely validated approved Mac application.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there’ll be sandbox and everything like that. And I have, you know, is there a way to get out of the sandbox

⏹️ ▶️ John within the bounds of the sandbox, can you do all sorts of damage? Probably like you could turn on the camera,

⏹️ ▶️ John you could capture keystrokes typed into that application, who knows what you could do. So like there

⏹️ ▶️ John is there is no truly safe scenario and I

⏹️ ▶️ John wonder exactly how much safer users are overall

⏹️ ▶️ John if applications, if we assume that the Mac App Store is a superior level of security to just

⏹️ ▶️ John the developer ID, it seems to me that every category of application that is just not allowed on Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John App Store for some reason is potentially decreasing the security of users over

⏹️ ▶️ John what they could be if the Mac App Store was more permissive in terms of, sure, you can have

⏹️ ▶️ John a BitTorrent client. We don’t say those things are,

⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what, we don’t say those things are just evil. We don’t care how you use them, because there are legitimate users for them. There’s plenty of

⏹️ ▶️ John Linux distros and stuff that are distributed via BitTorrent because it’s a fast way to download stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, software is dangerous. Be careful out there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No man, this is like, that’s the argument, one of the strongest arguments for Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually improve the Mac App Store and sandboxing. Because right now they have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation where the Mac App Store is just beyond disrepair.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s seemingly totally unstaffed. There’s the app itself

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, you know, the store app that runs is horrible. It’s It’s buggy, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco messy, it’s inconsistent, it’s outdated. I’d say it’s one of the worst

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps Apple ships right now, is the Mac App Store app. The service behind it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco spotty at best. Review times for developers are lengthy and inconsistent,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way worse than iOS. You have this technical requirement of sandboxing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, while great in theory, is a huge pain for developers because it has also been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of half-baked in its implementation and also effectively unmaintained.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know and I want to maybe get to Steve Troughton Smith’s post

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about his WDC predictions that came up a couple weeks ago and and his statement that Mac OS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco X is a dead platform. I want to maybe get to that but and maybe this might lead us into that a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit but it just seems like you know Apple started down this path with the App Store sandboxing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They kind of, they said, all right, here’s the future, here’s how we’re gonna do this, this is gonna be great. They started

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it seems like nothing has changed since the Mac App Store launched,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco except the introduction of sandboxing, which came shortly after that, and then it seems like nothing has changed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with sandboxing since then either. So we have the situation now where we have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is in theory a great system that could in theory protect people’s Macs better and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have more secure software and have easier distribution. But in practice the implementation of that system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been fairly mediocre and it’s been almost untouched for years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if Apple really wants to improve the security of the Mac, what they have to do is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make these things better. Make the App Store and Sandboxing able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to support more apps so that more apps can do it and make them good enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the developers are incentivized that they actually want to be in the App Store and they actually want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to adopt sandboxing but it just seems like there’s like nobody you know driving the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ship or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John if you had been looking the show notes you would have seen we push that down for next week and if you had not been on vacation you would have heard me talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about the exact question on upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I did that one but I did all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spoiler alert I haven’t listened yet I was saving it for my car ride coming up

⏹️ ▶️ John tomorrow all right but I did reject one of the topics that Jason suggested because I wanted to save it for this show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, thanks buddy.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it was not that one.

Future of the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think there’s some ground to cover here that you guys didn’t cover on Upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because you made a good case for what the Mac is and what it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be, which I can summarize if you’ll permit, is basically like the Mac should be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the rock. Like the stable, reliable platform that’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco boring, doesn’t get a lot of updates, but is stable and reliable. And I agree. That was

⏹️ ▶️ John one option. The other option was you do another OS X type transition.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, sure. Honestly though, I don’t really see Apple doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I could be wrong, I hope I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem like they devote enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources to the Mac anymore to really do any more big transitions. I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco era of big Mac transitions is over. And that might be good, it’s probably not,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but ultimately it seems like modern day Apple seems to have this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco severe problem of basically just like as I mentioned before, the kind of the drive-by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates because they don’t really have enough people that are permanently staffed on major

⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of their engineering stuff anymore. It seems like so much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple’s engineering resources are being devoted to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other things. iOS, TV, watch, a car most likely,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like that it seems like they keep moving the talent around so much that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s just nobody left working on boring old things like the Mac and we haven’t even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen how they can how they can do their current platforms yet like we haven’t even seen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happens with watch OS and TV OS this year they’re each you know less than a year old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you know does Apple have the engineering capacity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep Mac OS, iOS on the iPhone and the iPad, which are actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite different these days, TV OS, watch OS, and the future car OS,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do they have the capacity to maintain all of those to a healthy level? From what we’ve seen so far,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the answer is probably not. So the question is, what gets back-burdered? What gets put in Casey’s parking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot full of white cars? What gets ignored? And I think usually it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac and the iPad. That’s usually what gets ignored. This year, you know, the iPad got some attention.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see what happens as time goes on, but they probably are not in the position

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they’re going to devote tons of engineering talent to the Mac. And that’s unfortunate.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is a mature platform that doesn’t need a lot of attention. But I, again, I’m concerned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether they’ll be able to do any kind of big changes in the future. So I think it’s more likely that we will keep it on its

⏹️ ▶️ Marco current path of basically being the nice boring thing that most of us

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use and depend on very heavily for our work, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t really get a lot of attention from Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s so much about their capacity to do it as like that they’re going to put resources

⏹️ ▶️ John towards things with growth potential and regardless of the size of the Mac and how it may be growing, I

⏹️ ▶️ John think the company feels that the potential growth that is does

⏹️ ▶️ John not warrant putting lots of resources behind it versus say the watch where

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s conceivable that they could believe that the watch is like the start of a whole wearables thing

⏹️ ▶️ John and that the potential upside is huge. So we’re going to put a lots of time and effort into the watch and then we’ll see if the

⏹️ ▶️ John growth potential is there. But the Mac I think the company feels like in most customers and observers of the

⏹️ ▶️ John industry feel like there is not a tremendous growth potential in personal computer

⏹️ ▶️ John traditional personal computers anymore so when it comes time to

⏹️ ▶️ John allocate Apple’s billions of dollars it’s easier to make the argument for the car or

⏹️ ▶️ John the watch or even the TV because they’re all so small or so new or so non-existent

⏹️ ▶️ John that is very easy to spin out a tale of potential huge growth that we will start

⏹️ ▶️ John down here and the graph will go way up there whereas the Mac if it has to argue for its resources

⏹️ ▶️ John it can show what its revenue is and how it’s growing faster than the industry and how it’s taking share from Windows PCs.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if they say, okay, is the Mac going to be four times the size it is

⏹️ ▶️ John in a couple years? They have to say, well, no, probably not. And so maybe they just don’t get the

⏹️ ▶️ John resources.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hold on before we go too far deeper on this, because I think this might take a while. Let’s do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Let’s cover our

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Future of the Mac, continued

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot to Hover for sponsoring our show. So I think with the Mac, what’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco important about it is that they just maintain what they’ve started here. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac is the pinnacle of personal computing. It really is the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco best personal computer out there. And whether or not personal computing has a huge

⏹️ ▶️ Marco growth potential in front of it, I think you’re right, it probably doesn’t. that doesn’t mean it’s going away

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that doesn’t mean it isn’t already big and important. You know and yeah it isn’t as important as the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is still really important to a lot of people and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is also the area in which I would say Apple has the worst and least threatening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco competition. You know that Apple has tons of competition you know very strong competition

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in phones and tablets and watches and TV boxes and they will have tons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of competition in cars if they’re doing that, which it sure sounds like they are. In the Mac, for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco personal computing, I don’t know a lot of Mac users who were like, you know what, I’m tempted to go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco try Windows. That never happens. Yeah, they don’t have, Windows is still the majority

⏹️ ▶️ Marco market share holder, but first of all that says something about growth I think. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows is still the majority holder here, but the Mac is so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good and so many of us rely on it and I feel like it’s Apple’s responsibility

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep it decent to keep it good. You know Apple needs the Mac also. I mean what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they writing on these iOS apps on? I mean I guess we can get to Xcode on the iPad as a potential future thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but… Matthew 16

⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode for iOS it’s coming. Steven Is it? Matthew 16 Someday. Remember the remember

⏹️ ▶️ John the Swift announcement? I totally thought that was going to be I tried to I did tweet about it a while back I pinpointed the exact

⏹️ ▶️ John second in the video when they were leading up to the Swift announcement they said a bunch a couple sentences

⏹️ ▶️ John and I thought the sentences were like this is it sex code for iOS it wasn’t uh but

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that I was the fact that I was so willing to believe that that’s what they were announcing based on like their vague introductory

⏹️ ▶️ John statements uh it just seems inevitable to me someday um

⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah like the mac the mac is not you talk about the weak competitors to the mac like you know no one wants a dell

⏹️ ▶️ John running windows or whatever you know as we all know the real competitor to the mac is things that are

⏹️ ▶️ John not personal computers apple knows that everybody knows that the maintenance argument is like, right, well, so until

⏹️ ▶️ John something until and unless something comes along, they can do everything the Mac does better, right until the iPad Pro grows

⏹️ ▶️ John into that role or whatever that grows into that role, like maybe you’re on the VR by then, who knows, until that happens,

⏹️ ▶️ John we still got max, it’s still a big business, you have to put a certain amount of effort into it just to keep that business going.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that argues for that, like the suggestion you mentioned from upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ John one of my one or two paths for the Mac, which is the stability path, which is not just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John do what it takes to keep the Mac sort of humming along the way it is. But

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, I basically have two strengths of the Mac. One strength of the Mac is

⏹️ ▶️ John that it is the platform that you expect not to change and grow that much like it’s not in the

⏹️ ▶️ John market that’s taking off like a rocket ship or whatever. So how can you turn that into a strength, you can turn that into a strength by

⏹️ ▶️ John saying, Okay, what we’re going to do with the Mac year after year after year, it’s all we’re going to do is find every single thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work on it and make it work. Like that’s all we’re going to do. We’re not going to care how many bullet points or features that we have, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not going to add features. But every single release, all you want to do is brag about

⏹️ ▶️ John how much better the thing you know, how much more it does what it was always supposed to do in

⏹️ ▶️ John the first place, how much more stable it is, you know, how many bugs you squashed.

⏹️ ▶️ John Any part of it, you know, security would be a great area to go into on the Mac, because that’s kind of a stability thing. It’s not like a feature

⏹️ ▶️ John like we’re really nailing down security, even more and more closing more security holes being you know, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John one way to go. And so that would make an experience as a Mac user is like, well, every year, there’s not a

⏹️ ▶️ John million new features, but every year, the Mac gets better and better, like it gets better for the purpose that we’re using it. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that would be you would sell it based on that you would say, like, you can start saying the world’s

⏹️ ▶️ John most reliable operating system or bulletproof or you know, whatever, however you want to spin

⏹️ ▶️ John it, like you can sell stability because if you told any Mac user right now

⏹️ ▶️ John that we have a new version of the Mac operating system that you know, Snow Leopard style has no new features and not only

⏹️ ▶️ John that, but also like we didn’t rip out any subsystems and change them or anything. We just like we said what

⏹️ ▶️ John it does now, we’re going to make it do that better. People were like, Yeah, sure. Sign me up. If you heard from friends

⏹️ ▶️ John that hey, I installed the new Mac operating system and everything was exactly the same except for whatever problem

⏹️ ▶️ John I used to have is gone now. They would, they would love that, right? And the other option

⏹️ ▶️ John to go on the Mac is what could, what is the other strength of the Mac? Uh, it’s not, you have

⏹️ ▶️ John a, I’m going to say it’s not battery powered because laptops are the majority of the Mac sold, but you have a higher power

⏹️ ▶️ John envelope than you do on, on iPads and phones and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You can,

⏹️ ▶️ John right now you could put more powerful stuff inside a Mac, even a laptop than you can inside a phone or tablet

⏹️ ▶️ John because iPads or because of Macs and you

⏹️ ▶️ John know even this the thinnest laptop Macs and everything they have a higher overhead you can fit more stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John in there you can put a bigger battery and you put a higher CPU maybe not that much hotter in the case of the MacBook one

⏹️ ▶️ John but certainly much hotter in the case of the iMac which is plugged into the wall or the Mac Pro or

⏹️ ▶️ John the 15-inch or whatever take advantage of that pursue the

⏹️ ▶️ John high-end there try to try to install the fastest of the fast stuff cater to the

⏹️ ▶️ John idea that if you have minimal computer needs, get the MacBook one or an iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John device, but if you really want a big strong Mac will make you the biggest strongest Mac that you can have. And then what you would do with

⏹️ ▶️ John the software is say, every year is going to get faster and more powerful. And we’re going to have, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the the fanciest features and the best GPUs and the best CPUs and the fastest SSDs and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John like that really make it like a pro product that takes advantage of the And so far

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple seems to be doing neither one of those things instead. They’re kind of like limping along every year

⏹️ ▶️ John They feel like they need to do a release where they have some features to tout and they’re kind of monkeying around inside there and

⏹️ ▶️ John They do fix the bugs. They don’t make it super duper fast and you know, but they don’t on

⏹️ ▶️ John the other hand they don’t do nothing year after year and make it boring and that

⏹️ ▶️ John strategy of sort of maintenance level Investment with an

⏹️ ▶️ John outward appearance of every year. There’s an amazing new OS just doesn’t seem to be striking a

⏹️ ▶️ John good balance for for customers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing I would say too is like and and Steve Trenton Smith cover this in his blog post also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really think that Development of apps for the Mac is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really seemingly at a standstill You know even Apple can barely keep their own apps developed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Mac and and certainly third-party developing development for the Mac seems to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost non-existent. I mean there’s just very little action happening there. All the actions on iOS. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously a big part of that is that developing apps on iOS has a bigger market. You know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can you can sell to more people. There’s more people shopping in the App Store. So like the chances of you making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of money by being on a top chart is higher on iOS probably.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there is a big part of this to on the Mac where the Mac does not run

⏹️ ▶️ Marco UIKit. The Mac runs AppKit, its own, you know, older framework that is kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like UIKit, but when you write apps for iOS you’re writing against this this newer, kind of cleaner,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more modern framework, and when you write apps for the Mac you’re writing against this crusty or older framework that has a lot more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco baggage and legacy in it. UIKit was kind of, for iOS, was kind of like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new version of the UI framework with all the lessons they’ve learned from AppKit over the years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And And the Mac has gotten some of those lessons ported back to it from iOS for developers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make their lives easier. But I think still not most of them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think as a developer who came here kind of through iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I currently don’t have any Mac apps that I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco released or that I’m working on really. Don’t get crazy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh sorry. So you know I would be so much more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely to put effort into Mac apps if they used a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of UIKit. And I’ve tried AppKit. I’ve tried making Mac apps before

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m sure if I was you know entirely motivated to do it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d plow through and I’d learn and it would be fine. I’d learn AppKit. I’d tolerate the inconsistencies and it would be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the fact is right now, the fact that I have to learn this similar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but still fairly different UI framework on the Mac to make Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, that is a big barrier that is discouraging me from doing it. So you have a combination

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of no UI kit on the Mac plus the crappy App Store situation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus the fact that it’s a smaller market begin with, I feel like something there has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change for developers to be interested in making Mac apps. And right now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like nothing is on the horizon for any of those two things to change. You know, AppKit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco proponents or experts can make all the same arguments that shouldn’t matter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people like me make about Swift not being necessary. Like you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can look at that and you can say, well, you know, I could learn an Objective-C but it has all these ugly brackets.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to.” And Swift comes along eventually and Swift is getting a lot of people into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into iOS and Mac development who weren’t there before because they just didn’t want to learn Objective-C.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco A similar kind of effect could happen on the Mac with UIKit. If they brought UIKit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some form, obviously it couldn’t be identical, but if they brought it in some form to the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that would would really bring in a lot of developer interest and really help reignite

⏹️ ▶️ Marco third- party interest in the Mac as an application platform.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I hear us, and we’re not the only ones,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about, well, the Mac App Store is a dumpster fire, which to be frank

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it kind of is. Nobody’s doing much for the iPad these days,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by and large. Obviously Federico amongst others would disagree, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly there’s a lot of people that aren’t paying a lot of attention to the iPad. You’re not paying much attention to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, Marco, for example. And, oh, pay up front

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps are a dumpster fire. Maybe that’s a poor way of phrasing it, but they don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. The only thing that’s even slightly working seems to be free within app purchase.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I feel like the three of us, and again, we’re not the only ones

⏹️ ▶️ Casey say the Mac app store sucks. I’ve had app store sucks. The iPhone app store

⏹️ ▶️ Casey store has a lot of great options, but it sucks to make money in.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we crazy? Like there’s a lot of apps in the app store and there’s a lot of stuff getting made every single

⏹️ ▶️ Casey day. So why like either were a little bit crazy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or it’s just not as dire as we think it is. Does that make sense? Like it just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the situation cannot be as bad as we’re painting it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’re confusing different kinds of badness. All right. So one kind of badness is

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it doesn’t seem to be a lot of people making new Mac applications. Like there’s every

⏹️ ▶️ John week there aren’t thousands of new Mac applications, most of which may be crap, but every once in a while there’s a good one. Like there’s not a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot of activity, not a lot of churn, not a lot of like, there’s not a lot of, there’s not a growing base of customers

⏹️ ▶️ John to sell to that base is small and there’s not tons and tons of developers knocking on the door to make tons of new Mac apps.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s one kind of ailment because if you have a software market and not many people are

⏹️ ▶️ John making new applications for that platform, the platform feels kind of crappy. The iPhone has the opposite problem. Everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John wants to make an app, everybody’s making an app and they’re just all climbing all over each other to get the last scraps and figuring

⏹️ ▶️ John out how to exploit people how to extract money from those so many apps is too many apps in the app store. It’s not because people don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John care about the iPhone. People care about the iPhone a lot. Like there’s tons of developers, there’s tons of apps,

⏹️ ▶️ John and all the things you described about there, but oh, you can’t have paid upfront apps and blah, blah, blah. That’s a symptom

⏹️ ▶️ John of an entirely opposite problem, which is, you know, too much activity, lots of

⏹️ ▶️ John competition, lots of people trying to figure out how to get money and plenty of people are getting

⏹️ ▶️ John rich on the App Store, like enough people that it attracts other people, right? From the outside, it looks like

⏹️ ▶️ John all you hear about the stories of the five developers who are getting rich, and you don’t realize that there were 10,000 app submitted that week,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And none of those people are going to get rich, but there’s enough people getting rich, that it seems like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the place to go. Everyone has phones, it’s a huge market, even if that market isn’t growing, it’s still tremendous.

⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s just two ends of the spectrum, the phone and the Mac, both of which have problems, but they’re totally

⏹️ ▶️ John opposite problems. I mean, you would kill to get a little bit of that iOS app store problem on the Mac where,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, we can’t handle the the overflow. Every time every time I look at the map app store, there’s 10,000 new applications,

⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t handle it. just doesn’t happen, right? So and then in the middle, the iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it has more of the max problem where it’s like, yeah, there’s lots of applications that you can run on the iPad, but not a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot of them really take advantage of what’s different about the iPad. You know, the big complaint now is that

⏹️ ▶️ John people are iOS applications that already run on the iPad, but don’t take advantage of split screen, or

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t support the iPad pros display or both. And why don’t they update them? Well, it

⏹️ ▶️ John turns out that they’re even though the iOS platform has tons of customers, the iPad subset

⏹️ ▶️ John is much smaller. And so it’s more like the Mac where you’re like, if I have to spend some time, I’m going to make sure that my

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS application is updated for the iPhone seven or whatever new features that has. And then maybe when I have time,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll update the if I get around to it, update my the iPad version of my iOS application to take

⏹️ ▶️ John advantage of something that only works on the big iPads, like split screen or whatever. So you’re right

⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s something to complain about everywhere. But I don’t think it’s as if we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John saying that they all have the same problem. They have very different problems with very different causes

⏹️ ▶️ John and very different solutions. So it doesn’t seem to be a contradiction to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ John guess that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair. I don’t know. It just seems weird that all three

⏹️ ▶️ Casey platforms seem to have some really, really systemic issues. And I’m not saying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that those issues aren’t real. I’m not saying that they’re not extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey important, but I don’t know. It just, how does Apple not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey either not care or not fix this or we crazy and it’s not as bad as we think it is. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. It just seems weird to me that, that we feel, and again, when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not just us, so many people feel like this is broken and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there seems to be not a lot of care given to it from Apple. And I presume that there is care,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but as usual, it’s all happening internally and we’re none the wiser. But golly, it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems weird to me that there’s no action on this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you haven’t listed like the pros of, for example, the Mac side where something that we all hear from

⏹️ ▶️ John our developer friends and is probably true is that it’s easier to make money

⏹️ ▶️ John with a really good application on the Mac than it is on iOS. Because if you have a really good application on iOS, guess what?

⏹️ ▶️ John There are thousands of really good applications on iOS. If you have a really good application on the Mac, there are

⏹️ ▶️ John not thousands of really good applications on the Mac, especially not thousands in your category, whatever kind of application that

⏹️ ▶️ John you made. And for whatever reason, again, it may just have to do with physical size or whatever, you can tend to charge

⏹️ ▶️ John more for the Mac version is not tremendously more these days, but still more. So if you are a super talented

⏹️ ▶️ John developer, and you can make a really good application in a category

⏹️ ▶️ John that is not overcrowded, and on any platform, if you make it a Mac application,

⏹️ ▶️ John $9.99 for it, even though you will sell far fewer copies, you will make up for it for the fact

⏹️ ▶️ John that you will, you’ll sell, you’ll make more money on the Mac. And again,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to go apples and oranges there is like, well, you can’t make the same application that you can make an iOS and who knows, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll take you longer to make it on the Mac because like Marco, you don’t know the Mac and you have to learn it or whatever. There are lots of variables in the mix

⏹️ ▶️ John here. But I would imagine sort of the the average price of

⏹️ ▶️ John applications sold on the Mac, the ones that are not free, is higher than an iOS and Mac users are

⏹️ ▶️ John still willing to pay money for good applications and your application really will stand out because you don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ John compete with the thousands and thousands of other really talented developers who may have the same idea for

⏹️ ▶️ John an application in the same category as you. And that’s, again, it’s the opposite type of

⏹️ ▶️ John problem. If you look at someone like Omni, who does both things, they have great

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac applications that they charge real money for not 99 cents. And they also have companion

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS applications. And I think they’re finding a way to

⏹️ ▶️ John play to the strengths of each platform. Like we should make a Mac application because our applications are

⏹️ ▶️ John complicated and sophisticated, and we can charge high prices for them and Mac users will pay it. Whereas if we have

⏹️ ▶️ John sophisticated, complicated applications, they either won’t work on iOS because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just not a platform that supports this complexity. And if it does work, we have to charge less And on the other hand, people

⏹️ ▶️ John want to have access to their data on the go and so on and so forth. So we’ll make a series of iOS applications,

⏹️ ▶️ John which will be high priced for iOS applications, but still lower priced than like a $99 Mac app or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’ll be a virtuous cycle and you’ll be able to use your you know, your Mac and your iOS applications together

⏹️ ▶️ John like it is possible to take advantage of the ecosystems as they exist and make

⏹️ ▶️ John money off of it and do a good job. But Omni I feel like is kind of grandfathered in

⏹️ ▶️ John in that they have the expertise and talent, and experience on the Mac platform and have expanded out into

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS. If I think of like, where is the next Omni coming from? Is there going to be a company that starts

⏹️ ▶️ John up now that has that deep expertise on the Mac, and is able to make amazing Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John applications and charge reasonable prices for them and also make companion iOS applications?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how many of those are popping up. Whereas on iOS, like I said, since there are so

⏹️ ▶️ John many people since the numbers are so big, even if a fraction of a fraction of percent of them end up striking

⏹️ ▶️ John it rich. It’s enough that you just saw a story the other day, like some story about the class of people make clash of clans, how many

⏹️ ▶️ John millions and millions of dollars they’re making off of that stuff. There’s just so much

⏹️ ▶️ John activity and so many customers happening happening on iOS that it is attracting people. Whereas the Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see. I don’t see it attracting people even even I felt even better in the days of like

⏹️ ▶️ John text mate where it’s like, What’s this a text editor coming in? I never heard of this text mate text editor. How dare you try to make a text

⏹️ ▶️ John editor? Everyone knows text that our market is all sewn up by insert name of other competitors here.

⏹️ ▶️ John But Texmate was very popular and it could have been a going concern

⏹️ ▶️ John if the Mac market had been enough to, you know, make the maker of Texmate as much

⏹️ ▶️ John money as Clash of Clans got. You can be sure he’d still be making that and

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco wouldn’t be using Texmate 2 or whatever old version he’s using now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He is still making it. 2 is in beta with constant updates.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s the open-source thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco welcome to the end of build and analyze like five years ago whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah I know

⏹️ ▶️ John but like but but you know not the text editors are an exciting field but like text editing is something that people do on the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and it’s not as if there are 17

⏹️ ▶️ John really good high-quality text editors to come out for the Mac every week there’s maybe like one or two a year

⏹️ ▶️ John right and they They usually have to have an iOS counterpart or no one’s interested in them.

Are we just old?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So another thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is, am I an old man?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bear with me here, but I think it is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really silly. The hoops that someone like Federico

⏹️ ▶️ Casey jumped, jumps through, and I have deep respect for Federico, but it seems silly to me, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hoops that Federico jumps through in order to accomplish things that are very quite,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really quite simple on the Mac. And we talked about this a few weeks ago when I was talking about signing a PDF from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my iPad and in dealing with scans and things like that and how for me it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very difficult to do that. And I talked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a handful of people like Mike Hurley about that segment because Mike

⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to be very anti-iPad and then now is like almost as big an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fan as Federico is. And I don’t know, it just seems to me like they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I’m missing the point. And in Federico’s case, it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is deeply important to him to be able to work from anywhere and that’s semi true

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the Mac ish, or, you know, maybe it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey true with a Mac and a tethered phone, but it’s not as true

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an iPad pro. Yeah. You can take an iPad pro anywhere. It has its own internet connection and you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can work anywhere. Um, and I just, it still seems to me to be a bit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey crazy and I can’t help but wonder, are the three of us just too old to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand the purpose of the iPad? And is, and to bring this back to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Steven was saying on his post, is OS 10 really kind of dead?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I don’t know. It just seems like maybe we’re the ones that are missing the boat.

⏹️ ▶️ John What do you mean? What are you delimiting me in with you? I’m the one who wanted an iPad Pro. I’m the actual iPad user. I’m the one sitting

⏹️ ▶️ John next to my bed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I use my iPad daily. So I am also a very, maybe not devout,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but a very frequent iPad user. I love my iPad. I love it. But I would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never in a million years look to my iPad to get something done over

⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at my Mac. Even to some degree, the typical things like consumption.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe if I’m just cruising Twitter, I would probably choose my iPad over my Mac, but damn near anything else, man,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna go to my Mac first because I just feel faster, quicker, better with it. And I guess what I’m saying in a roundabout

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way is that because it’s what I’m used to, and it’s not that the Mac is faster and quicker and better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure, empirically it is, but you know what I mean? Like, is it just because that’s what I’m used to and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have severely OS X colored glasses?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me settle this for you. We are all old men. I am, in this way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the oldest. I am the least

⏹️ ▶️ Marco flexible, most skeptical of new things, most defensive of my old ways

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the three of us. I also like the iPad the least out of the three of us, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, I have no problem with people who can do tons of their work or all their work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I wish

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could, honestly, because there’s a number of advantages to going all iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s the physical advantages that iPads are smaller and and lighter and have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better battery life usually than than but than most Mac laptops but also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that’s kind of where Apple’s attention is now again that being said I wouldn’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume that the iPad version of iOS is going to keep Apple’s attention

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for very long it has it now but it didn’t have much attention for years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as we see Apple getting pulled on these different directions as because they try to tackle everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all at once with limited engineering resources and a few ways that they’re unwilling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to budge that will make it hard for them to attract more engineering talent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get as much as they need. Things like remote workers, salaries,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco terms of employment, stuff like that, that just make it hard for them to attract certain talent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s only a matter of time before the iPad falls out of the spotlight

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple. It’s only a matter of time before the resources that were devoted to making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 9 really great on the iPad and getting the iPad Pro out the door and getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the multitasking and stuff like that, getting the special things for the iPad that are in iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s only a matter of time before those resources are put somewhere else, before that attention is directed somewhere else in Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t necessarily expect the iPad to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s star platform for long, but right this second it is. So right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this second, if you are a person who gets all your work done, or a lot of your work done on an iPad, this is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great time to be one of those people because you’re getting cool new stuff from Apple recently,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and seemingly you might get a little bit more soon. Who knows? We’ll see what iOS 10 does. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of nice to be in Apple’s sweet spot of where they’re putting their attention, where they’re putting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their resources, and what they’re likely to do in the future. So that’s nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But to me, it just doesn’t stick.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPad, to me, it does feel like jumping through tons of hoops. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the work I do. And that’s the kind of use that I do. It’s the kind of user I am. It’s what I’m used to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think personal computers with keyboard, mouse, big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor, at a desk a lot of the time, I think that world is going to stay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time. I don’t think it is as dire as a lot of people have said.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I also, I totally don’t begrudge anybody else for using whatever they think is better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever they’re most comfortable with because for them it’s iPads and phones maybe, for me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s Macs. That’s fine, you know? The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only problem is that it is pulling Apple in all these different directions. It is pulling their resources in all these different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco directions. And I think that could be a bit of a problem. And we’ve seen it become a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of a problem so far with just like things that get ignored and things that get neglected and things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that get these drive-by updates. I hope they can find a way to resolve this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m not hopeful about the chance of that actually happening. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. I really hope I’m wrong about all this and that over the next couple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of years they prove us wrong and we see major significant changes to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app stores and Mac OS gets notable updates and they keep updating

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all their new product lines and not just neglect the ones that aren’t getting them a lot of attention forever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t see any evidence that we’re heading in that kind of direction and that’s my concern.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I don’t mean to begrudge those that prefer to use an iPad. It’s just it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard for me to understand why that’s better. I mean, other than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mobility, which is pretty much unequivocal, I just don’t get why that’s better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think what I really should be saying is that for me, it’s not better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t mean to begrudge that it is better for Mike or Federico or anyone else. I’m just saying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around why that would be better. And I think, Marco, you made a great

⏹️ ▶️ Casey point that a lot of that relates to the fact that now I’m living in Xcode. Previously I was living in VMware Fusion. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my day-to-day job, whereas for a lot of these people that’s not their job.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, also, you know, what I said earlier, all the action in the App Store, like all the action in apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is happening on iOS right now. Like, if you make use of,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, cool, new, modern apps to do pretty much anything, to do different workflows,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe you’re doing like photo editing and you want to use like cool plugins and effects and everything, all that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco action is happening on iOS. iOS, if you wanna play games ever, games on the Mac are kinda miserable most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time. Like, all of the action for cool new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that are being developed, cool new workflows, cool new things you can do with your computer, most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that is happening on iOS. Most of it’s on the iPhone, in particular, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of that’s also getting into the iPad. On the Mac, there’s no action to be had.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac apps are seemingly either in stasis or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dying. You have Aperture gone. Logic and Final Cut are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco barely supported. You have third-party apps that are kind of withering on the vine a lot of the times.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s tough. It’s a little scary to be a Mac user right now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we see kind of a big part of the world moving on. A big part of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s and third-party developers’ efforts moving to other places.

⏹️ ▶️ John What you said before about the iPad, like you do think that eventually their attention will go elsewhere, like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in the sun now with like the iPad pro, but that eventually the, you know, they’ll lose interest again

⏹️ ▶️ John because you know, the early in the iPads life, it was basically like a,

⏹️ ▶️ John a less, less important version of iOS. It didn’t have many iPad specific features,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, for several years. And that may be the case, but I have to think that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple overall as a company, one of its goals that it has to have somewhere on its big

⏹️ ▶️ John list of like multi-year goals is to do what it normally

⏹️ ▶️ John does and be the company that cannibalizes the Mac. So they see the Mac with no big growth potential,

⏹️ ▶️ John they see it as another market that could potentially be cannibalized

⏹️ ▶️ John by other markets. Like it’s small, there’s other markets are growing. Apple’s whole thing is

⏹️ ▶️ John we want to be the ones to cannibalize the Mac, you know, we want to be the ones to cannibalize the iPod by replacing it with the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John we if because if we don’t do it, someone else will eventually because if whatever thing that we’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ John about being cannibalized does not have a very big growth trajectory, eventually, whatever size

⏹️ ▶️ John it is, will be dwarfed by whatever the next big thing is. So Apple is kind of in the business of,

⏹️ ▶️ John okay, well, let’s figure out what that next big thing is. because if we just do nothing,

⏹️ ▶️ John someone else will do it for us. And the iPad and the emphasis on the iPad Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John is one effort to do that. Hey, if the Mac’s going to be cannibalized, let let us do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve always said that the iPad has the potential to be the thing that replaces the Mac if given enough attention and

⏹️ ▶️ John if its capabilities are extended in the iPad Pro could be like the very, very beginning of that process, but say it doesn’t work out. So

⏹️ ▶️ John they try to make they try to cannibalize the Mac with the iPad Pro and it doesn’t work. If the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John loses Apple’s attention, I think it will be because they have another idea

⏹️ ▶️ John of a thing that’s going to cannibalize the Mac. And they only have a certain number of shots of this idea of what’s going to cannibalize the Mac before someone

⏹️ ▶️ John else does it for them. But I think that Apple as a company does not want some

⏹️ ▶️ John other thing made by some other non-Apple company to be the thing that finally makes the Mac irrelevant. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple wants to make the Mac irrelevant. And right now, the iPad is the thing that’s doing that. So I have to think that

⏹️ ▶️ John attention is going to be paid to the iPad Until either something else makes the Mac irrelevant

⏹️ ▶️ John as in not an Apple product or until Apple gives up on the iPad doing that and decides That it needs another solution.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there is any long-term where 60 years from now the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John soldiers on pretty much exactly as it is. I just don’t see that happening. So My hope

⏹️ ▶️ John is that Apple figures out what to replace the Mac with and I think

⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad line has the potential to do that if enhanced in all the ways that we’ve discussed

⏹️ ▶️ John in past shows in terms of larger screens iPads that aren’t really particularly portable way

⏹️ ▶️ John more capabilities in iOS figuring out the whole file situation so on and so forth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re probably right long term on an infinite time scale thing you’re probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right but I have a hard time seeing how iOS gets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from here to there. I and technically you know like on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a low level like on an API level on a kernel level and everything you’re probably right that like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the next version the next major version of Mac OS is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably an iOS derivative. I don’t know when that’s gonna when that’s coming out and and whether that’ll be good,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think what replaces Mac OS eventually will indeed be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a version of iOS. And we will just have large iOS devices with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboards and mice, I guess, I don’t know. I mean, probably, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that would also solve my UIKit problem, with UIKit versus AppKit kind of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t know. there’s so much distance between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS today and what it would have to be to be even a basic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS replacement that I have a hard time seeing that happening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because the distance is so great. And maybe that’s just short-sighted of me, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it may not have to be an equivalent for you, but like when you’re retired or dead, it just

⏹️ ▶️ John needs to have the capabilities of the people who grew up in the generation that grew up with iOS devices find

⏹️ ▶️ John acceptable to do. like the same kind of things you’re doing now, developing software, like I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know, whatever it is that you’re doing with your Mac that you feel like you can only do on your Mac, all that needs to happen

⏹️ ▶️ John is there needs to be a generation of customers who feel like they can best do that on

⏹️ ▶️ John some tablet type device. Whether or not you can best do that on a tablet type device

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t really matter. You just need, the capabilities need to be there. It’s like Casey was saying about Mike, well

⏹️ ▶️ John then Mike finds the iPad experience superior in ways that Casey doesn’t understand. I can understand

⏹️ ▶️ John some of them in terms of just the simplicity and there’s fewer things that can go wrong on an iOS device

⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s fewer things to worry about or whatever. And also that things feel better sometimes in terms of just like

⏹️ ▶️ John body gesture or touching the screen or using a pen or whatever. And those can go a long way towards covering

⏹️ ▶️ John up the fact that you’re actually it takes more steps or it’s less efficient or

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s you know it’s not as straightforward as it would be on the Mac or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m totally willing to give the iPad Pro and that type of thing a shot because like Apple has just

⏹️ ▶️ John barely scratched the surface They just now divided the screen up into two pieces like that’s that’s the level they’re at

⏹️ ▶️ John right They’ve just now offered you an actual keyboard that you can attach to the thing like this is the babiest

⏹️ ▶️ John of baby steps like they Just now gave you a stylus, which is a thing that has not really

⏹️ ▶️ John taken off on the Mac But it offers you know a new angle, so I’m willing to give

⏹️ ▶️ John that a few years It’s not a slam dunk, but I think there is a fruitful avenue of pursuit

⏹️ ▶️ John there And what they’re pursuing again is not the phone obviously what they’re pursuing is if the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac is gonna go away I’ll be replaced with something we think it might be this and then we would benefit

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like well fine Mac shrinks Ipad Pro grows all that money goes to Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad Gets on a better growth trajectory or whatever If that turns out not to be the

⏹️ ▶️ John case at least have it be from you know that that not because you didn’t put money into it, because

⏹️ ▶️ John for the first several years of the iPad, it was, Apple almost as likely thought, if we make a tablet device,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all we have to do, and then instantly it will become the new future of personal computing. It’s like, no, you gotta actually put

⏹️ ▶️ John more effort into it than that, otherwise people are gonna keep using Macs. So, I feel like the Mac is

⏹️ ▶️ John safe for a long time, just because even if Apple is 100% right, it will take them a long time to figure out

⏹️ ▶️ John all the ins and outs, and probably the Mac will last for all of our active careers or whatever, but when we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John in our dotage and retired, don’t be surprised if we’re looking at grandkids on a big

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Fracture, Squarespace, and Hover. and we will see you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any

⏹️ ▶️ Casey research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at ATP.FM

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ John C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, accidental, tech

⏹️ ▶️ John podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so long.

John doesn’t go to Las Vegas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, let me ask you something. Have you ever been to Las Vegas? And if not, how badly do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want to go?

⏹️ ▶️ John You know the answers to both of those questions.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did that more for my own comedy, for my own laughter.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as I was in Vegas last weekend, and Casey, as you are headed to Vegas in a few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, I hope that you consider while you’re there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I did while I was there, what it would be like to see John Syracuse in Vegas and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the state of mind he would be in to be sitting there. I felt so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad for him even not being there. Like just I felt so bad for theoretical Syracuse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Vegas like that oh my god I would he would be so miserable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to mention the flight on the way there but you know any I mean my god to see him in any part

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Las Vegas would be both sad and incredible

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not my cup of tea, but I’m not a miserable person. Like I would find, like they have food there, right? At

⏹️ ▶️ John the very least, I would find some kind of food that I could eat that I would like.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, how could you not? There’s gotta be a million different restaurants there that make some kind of hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ John good food. I don’t wanna be interested in gambling. Smoking is disgusting. I don’t like lots of people. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there’s not a lot there for me, but if I was stuck there, there are a lot of restaurants,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I could find something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are excellent restaurants, however, many of them require walking through a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco smoky casino to get to. Yeah, that’s pretty gross.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Delightful. Did you end up up or down against the house?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Down by roughly 100 bucks. That’s not bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not only is that not bad, but that was after three nights, and a lot of that was given out as tips to the dealers.

⏹️ ▶️ John You were up 50% the last time I heard, and you were like, maybe I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco should just stop now, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently you didn’t. I was up 40% after the first night. But then the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco second night was way down and then the third night was kind of even.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but you said after the night that you were up, you mused to yourself, I believe in Slack, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John I should just quit while I’m ahead, he said.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then didn’t. Yes, I mean gambling is always, in hindsight, gambling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very easy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, it wasn’t hindsight, it was

⏹️ ▶️ John current right then sight. You had that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey insight immediately at the time, not

⏹️ ▶️ John later. Not the next day you didn’t say, boy, I really should have quit when I was up 40%. When you were up, when

⏹️ ▶️ John you were up, you said, maybe I should quit now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did say that, but then I wouldn’t have had as much fun the next two nights, because I wouldn’t have had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that activity. So it’s like, I paid that money for an activity.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And most of the games that you can gamble on in Vegas, the odds are always in favor of the house,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the percentage that they’re in favor of the house by is usually not that big.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you kind of bet responsibly, you don’t make really huge bets or make like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accelerating bets to try to like win back your money. Like my strategy was very simple. I bet the same amount of money on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every bet I took. I was playing to play, not to win a bunch of money because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that the chances of winning a bunch of money were very, very low. So simple as that, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a fun activity and it served its purpose. And I paid about a hundred bucks for three nights and that includes tips and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that includes all the free drinks I got at the time. So I think that’s actually pretty good for my first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gambling experience. Actually, that was my second gambling experience. My first gambling experience

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was in college when I discovered that online blackjack

⏹️ ▶️ Marco existed. And I put 20 bucks of real money into online blackjack in college,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost it in about 10 minutes, and was like, well, I’m an idiot, that was dumb. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t do it again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Never again. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s like, That’s not really a lot of fun. That’s a very short time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to lose all your money. And it just, yeah, it wasn’t, that one was, it didn’t have the same appeal. It would

⏹️ ▶️ John have been better if someone smoked a cigarette you while you did it.