173: A Series of Heartbreaking Rejections
10 Jun 2016App Store subscriptions and search ads, WWDC wishes, and a change of opinion.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- No 5K Monitor at WWDC
- iPhone "7" & SE: Third Time's a Charm
- macOS in official documentation?
- App Store changes announced this week
- Apple's official pages:
- Press interviews with Phil Schiller:
- Under the Radar #31: Today's App Store Announcements
- Brent Simmons' request for clarification
- People can't see ads
- Casey's take on DuckDuckGo
- Covariance & contravariance
- WWDC Predictions
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Marco changes an opinion
Sponsored by:
Chapters
- Pre-show: Google Photos
- No 5K at WWDC
- iPhone SE is a “tuck”
- “macOS”
- Sponsor: Hover (K56FLEX)
- Pre-WWDC App Store news
- Subscription pricing for all?
- Sponsor: Ring
- 85/15 split after 1 year
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- App Store search ads
- WWDC predictions
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Marco changes an opinion
Pre-show: Google Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John Boy, I put my photos into Google Photos. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John You know why I finally ended up doing it? Because, like, that thing I just tweeted about my controller, my PlayStation controller
⏹️ ▶️ John with the worn out thing on the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ John was trying to find the old picture, like the original one, because I wanted to do the tweet, like, here’s the new one,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey here’s the old one,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I could not find that picture. I’m scrolling through my photos library, I just, like, I could not find it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t even narrow it down to, like, I was trying to, like, look at the release date of Destiny, but I didn’t get it on the release date, and I’m scrolling, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s, like, one picture, I could not find it. I’m like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait so to find one picture you upload your entire photo collection to Google Photos and that was easier
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes to find because how else are you gonna find the one picture if I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco knew which photo to
⏹️ ▶️ John upload like I have to upload The whole thing I wanted to try it. Anyway, this just pushed me over the edge. That’s amazing So as
⏹️ ▶️ John is uploading literally 70,000 photos I’m typing in searches like as you can search
⏹️ ▶️ John while it’s uploading Trying to think of searches that will find this so I type in controller. No, no
⏹️ ▶️ John matches ps4 No matches black plastic matches, but none of the ones I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John then I was thinking maybe it’s not in my photo library Maybe it’s on some other trapped in some iOS device So I start
⏹️ ▶️ John putting things up that I think was actually trapped in my phone So now I’m uploading from my phone like photos that it is again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tina has the library not me, right? So it’s her photo thing. So uploading from Google
⏹️ ▶️ John photos Google was from her Mac It’s pushing those pictures up, but it’s not pushing any of the pictures up from my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone So now I’m trying to push up from my phone Into the thing and I just type controller into the search and you know it found
⏹️ ▶️ John Two pictures of GameCube controllers and a picture of my brother getting a PlayStation 2 in 2004
⏹️ ▶️ John Seriously, it’s magic it is but it still didn’t find the damn picture I mean I found it myself eventually because I figured
⏹️ ▶️ John out that I had tweeted it and I found the tweet based on searching the Tweet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so all that and it still didn’t you still didn’t actually find the
⏹️ ▶️ John three it found three controllers The problem is I don’t know if that picture has been pushed from the whole time We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been recording my phone has been in theory pushing photos up And I’m guessing that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John it is in these 7,000 photos that are on my phone But anyway, it did find pictures of controllers, so I have some hope now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should do a little bit of John’s favorite thing in the world we should do some follow-up And there’s some very very sad follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s not going to be a 5k monitor at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well. We don’t know but that’s the rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was there was there ever gonna be the 5k monitor was that really a strong
⏹️ ▶️ John We did a whole show last week all about all the hardware that we were excited
⏹️ ▶️ John for and then like immediately after that all The rumor site said you know you’re looking for five game honors with
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs forget it You’re looking for new Mac books those might not even be there. No hardware. It’s gonna be all about software
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t get your hopes up and of course no one even bothered to refute the idea that they’re gonna make a new Mac Pro Cuz no one cares about that enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to even put on the rumor site. Yeah, there’s not gonna be any of those either so yesterday was all hopeful and now
⏹️ ▶️ John the prevalent rumors are all the hardware you hope for may still come but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not a huge surprise. I mean the no MacBook Pros is a little bit surprising but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect the display to come with the next update to the Mac Pro and whether that’s the same time as the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro or not who knows but it does seem like it’s probably going to be a high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly pro product for a while. Like I don’t think a lot of people who are like mid-range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buyers who have like a 13-inch MacBook Pro are going to be buying the very first Apple 5K display.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably going to be expensive. It’s probably going to be, you know, this big special thing that’s gonna require the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand new computers. I wouldn’t expect this to be like just an average consumer release. I would expect this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to wait for the Mac Pro, but I could
⏹️ ▶️ John be wrong. See, I would think the opposite. I would think that the whole purpose of this monitor is so people
⏹️ ▶️ John who buy MacBook Pros can have a really big screen when they sit down at their desks. And that the whole point of this entire
⏹️ ▶️ John product is That’s why it’s got a GPU inside. So even our lowly MacBooks that don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually have a GPU that can drive it, no problem. The GPU that’s inside the screen is enough to drive it. You’re not gonna play games
⏹️ ▶️ John on it or anything, but it’s just, it’s enough to actually drive that many pixels. So now look at all these great laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re great laptops on the go, and sit down at your desk and you have, essentially, a 5K iMac style
⏹️ ▶️ John screen in front of you. And they won’t even mention the Mac Pro because who the hell cares about the Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If this was like a regular update, When they went from 27-inch LED
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 27-inch Thunderbolt display, that was like, okay, we already know how to make screens this size. We’ve been making them for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few years at that point. And before that, we made 30-inch screens for even more years. It was like, this was no big deal. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly existing technology put together in a new way. In this case, this is a 5K screen. This is still a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end product. There still are very few 5K screens in the market. So you got to figure like, this is going to be expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably not going to be $1,000. It’s probably going to be a a little more and even if it was $1,000 that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still compared to other monitors that people would have to put on a desk. That’s still a pretty expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor. So I would expect this to be a high-end thing at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first and then maybe in a few years when they update it next to add whatever new screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco construction technique they’ve developed by then it’ll be more consumery. I wouldn’t expect version 1 to be.
No 5K at WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with that. However, I do think that there is some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very big demand for this. Say for example, you are an iOS developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say just for the sake of discussion, you have an actual job and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to an office and that office issues you a 15-inch MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they issue you two Lenovo displays that are of unremarkable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resolution. And so every time you’re running the iOS simulator, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running it at like half size, even for like an iPhone 6 simulator. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that can cause problems such as you’re doing something with a UI table view and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t want it to look like a UI table view. You don’t want any separators between all the UI table view cells.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when you’re just looking at the simulator stationary, the divider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines, the separator lines between each cell disappear because it’s at half zoom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then suddenly you go and you start playing around with your UI table view and suddenly these magical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines appear from nothingness. And it’s very fricking annoying because you wish you had noticed it in the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place. Not a very big deal, but still annoying. And then you come home to your beautiful 5K display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and think to yourself, wow, wouldn’t it be nice to have something like this at work so I didn’t have to run the simulator at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half height? I mean, just hypothetically anyway. I would kill for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thunderbolt Retina display. I would kill both of you for a Thunderbolt Retina display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John at work. We are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honored. Yeah, I know you are. I don’t think work would pay for it because I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you, it’ll probably be very expensive, but man, would that be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s all right, though. Oh, and before the entire internet writes me, I have the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two displays and I have a standing desk so I run my MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in clamshell mode. Yes, I know you don’t think that’s a good idea. Yes, I’m aware that there’s heat, potential
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heat problems. Yes, I know the simulator would be able to run full height. If I did use the onboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display, I understand all those things. I am I’m my own man and I do what I want to do.
iPhone SE is a “tuck”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, which one of you decided you wanted to talk about the iPhone SE?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s all like me to add follow-up to the show. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was because a lot of people sent us this follow-up. Last week we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about the upcoming iPhone and how it might look very similar to the 6 and 6S,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if that was a big deal. And one of the ending points was like, this is their third shot at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John form factor, and if they do a really good job, like the second iterations of phones usually are really good, and a third
⏹️ ▶️ John one could be even better. we talked about all the reasons that might be and a lot of people said hey the iPhone SE is
⏹️ ▶️ John basically the third shot at the same form factor albeit separated in time by you know by
⏹️ ▶️ John quite a few other models in between but it really is the third shot at that five style form factor
⏹️ ▶️ John now I don’t think the SE changed that much about the case like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like the 6 and 6s of being like less bendy and less slippery to you know trying to do minute
⏹️ ▶️ John changes you might not even notice but still improving on the 6 does the SE
⏹️ ▶️ John improve on the 5S case in any way other than possibly being cheaper to manufacture because they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the shiny chamfered edge around it. Oh gosh, yeah I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John remember. I think that’s the only thing I can think of and I guess different colors. But anyway, everyone loves the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John SE. I don’t know if it’s because it’s the third shot of the same form factor but it is a precedent for
⏹️ ▶️ John doing a phone that they had two models experience with and doing it again and they can do it even
“macOS”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and yet another instance of lowercase m.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Akka Capital OS Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s exactly how you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John pronounce it
⏹️ ▶️ John lowercase m. Akka Akka, yes, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s how you pronounce it kids
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It had been seen in the wild, but apparently has been Killed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and brought back to the farm.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think I’d seen it before before with a capital M in some like Apple thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that just look like they forgot the space or and that doesn’t even make sense. They forgot. So anyway, it has been seen before an Apple stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John with a capital M and I think quickly removed as we’re recording this right now where you click on the URL
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re pasting into the chat room. You would see an official Apple page that lists
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will not it’s already been changed
⏹️ ▶️ John already. I checked it. I took like five minutes before the show started.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, well, is there a spy in our document?
⏹️ ▶️ John it was this was this is a nine-to-five Mac. It was tweeted all over the place This is not a secret URL that we just figured out like
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess yeah They’re on top of I purposely checked just before we we connected the Skype’s call I wonder if they’ve changed
⏹️ ▶️ John it like nope still there and I copied and pasted it right out of that document into the notes mere Moments ago, but
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently the little elves are really fast anyway, that’s probably a
⏹️ ▶️ John Fairly telling slip up because when you have the list of OS is all in order like that that, you know, iOS, Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, TV, OS and watch OS. They all look like the same when you write them like that. And I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if it turns out that they don’t rename it like this. This will be a weird series of slip ups.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think at this point, it’s over. That’s that’s the name, period. If you don’t like it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry. I really hated the name MacBook when like the very first MacBook and MacBook Pro. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hated the name MacBook. I had the power book was such a better name
⏹️ ▶️ John still still is a better name. And MacBook still is a terrible It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still I agree, but I got used to it and now I don’t care, you know So that’s that’s gonna if you if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate lowercase Mac OS, okay, you know It’s gonna suck for a little while and then you’re gonna move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and life will go on.
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Pre-WWDC App Store news
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m happy to report that Apple apparently knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I had not spent the time to figure out my WWDC predictions yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and has decided to drop some very interesting news and thus us take away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of the time that we’re going to be able to talk about dub dub predictions and instead we’ll we’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to talk about some app store changes. So thank you people at Apple for timing it appropriately because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t thought about my dub dub predictions yet and you can hear me fumble about it in probably about an hour and a half.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then Marco had to go and ruin it by having an entire podcast about this earlier today. So he’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John got all his thoughts out of his system already about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, because all my thoughts in this totally fit in 30 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s your own fault for having a short podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saved minutes 31 through 90 for you guys. Oh, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So what we’re talking about is Phil Schiller went to I think was the verge that broke the news.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a whole bunch of sites. Actually, I saw it on the loop first, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John my Twitter feed, which is now the substitute RSS. The loop was the first one that tweeted about it. And then I think I saw the verge next
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe Gruber after that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, loop verge Gruber telegraph had one. I think that was it. That was all the ones I
⏹️ ▶️ John Although it’s interesting, like who got this story and who didn’t? I don’t know how they made those decisions,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you could probably read something into the favorability of various outlets based on who got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so basically the story is that there are some substantial changes to the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are happening now. So the first one I think is a gimme. The first one is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these really suspiciously fast app review times that we’ve seen the last few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not just a fluke. It is not an accident and it is apparently not temporary. Apple has officially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco acknowledged that these things are real. That yes, indeed, app review is much faster. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have made some changes to allow it to be faster and to probably stay faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is really good because before it was like, well, this could be an accident that they, you know, it just happens to be really fast, but it’ll,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if they don’t mention it ever, then it could probably go back at any time. But now that they’ve mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in public, they’ve like bragged about how good this is. It is way more likely, I think, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stay this way or for this to be the new target standard rather than just a fluke.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if I’ll get a WWDC slide now, maybe like they’ve and by the way, before we even continue with these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John the very fact that everything we’re going to talk about in these app store changes is being announced now,
⏹️ ▶️ John like days before WWDC, but presumably, you know, not saving for WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there’s a lot of speculation about why that may be the of course, the party line is we have so much good stuff to tell you about WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John just just wouldn’t fit. So here a couple days early, here’s this news and the more pessimistic take is
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s enough in this announcement to cause discussion, consternation
⏹️ ▶️ John and worry among developers in addition to like excitement or whatever, that if this was in the keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is all people will be talking about afterwards and Apple wants people to come out of the keynote, keynote, not
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about App Store pricing, but instead talking about insert thing that they’re going to announce.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, it’s I think there’s there’s a few different takes on this that are that are plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certainly, yeah, the pessimistic take of like, well, developers are going to hate these changes. I don’t think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was it, honestly, because I think most of these changes are good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, not hate them, but that they will be talking about them, they’ll be a top of mind for developers because
⏹️ ▶️ John not not, you know, it goes towards our WBC being yet to developers conference, but money’s keynote is for
⏹️ ▶️ John the public and they didn’t want they didn’t want developer oriented news dominating
⏹️ ▶️ John their let’s talk to the public one time a year. That’s not a special event thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? Well, so that’s the thing, too. I think we have to realize like, yeah, there are 5000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers who watch that keynote in that room. And then there’s another, you know, another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handful of thousands of developers. Who knows? Probably probably another like 10 to 50,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers who are watching that keynote live stream to various places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then there’s also like thousands and thousands of thousands of people who just watch the keynote because they’re Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fans or they’re Apple customers or they’re press or whatever. And then whatever is announced in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keynote that gets reported on mainstream news, gets reported all over the web, it gets reported on TV, on like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CNN and stuff. This is a mass media event that happens to be the beginning of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a developer conference. So the focus of whatever is in that main keynote is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be more mainstream than just talking to developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why, honestly, it was kind of surprising that Swift was unveiled in the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was so technical, even though it was barely unveiled, but it was. Generally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t see source code in the main keynote. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear about a lot of low-level changes. You’ll hear about some, maybe, or it’ll be like one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word cloud slides where There’s a whole bunch of little words on the slide and everyone rushes to take a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture of it. It’s like, oh wait, there’s a whole bunch of stuff buried in there. And then they just kind of move on. I tell you in more detail later, like after the public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has gone away and they tell you in a session. So that keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is mostly a consumer event. It is barely a developer keynote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it could be that this stuff is really mostly only relevant to developers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stuff that they are leaving in the keynote is just more… This is Apple’s summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco announcements and getting people ready for the big stuff that’s happening in the fall. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like how last year, they spent so much time on Apple Music, and developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do nothing with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John it turns out neither could the public.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But this is mostly a consumer event. And so having some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer stuff that’s of, you know, possibly large importance happen outside that main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keynote is totally understandable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So anyway, the App Store review times may or may not get a slide if they did. I mean, you can do the one brief slide as we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about earlier in the week, review times are down isn’t Phil Schiller great. Everybody loves it. And the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John to the question of we discussed this on a couple of weeks ago, if things are actually faster, how
⏹️ ▶️ John might they do this, we talked about many possibilities that they could change the rules that govern how they do
⏹️ ▶️ John things so they can have better automated tools. And there were some rumors of management changes. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John there was a couple of stories about that on the web earlier. The answer from Phil Schiller when he did his media tour
⏹️ ▶️ John was basically everything we said contributed to the thing. It’s it’s everything tool improvements, internal
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple staffing changes and policy changes, I think, put Gruber listed. So there is no one
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that is making this faster. It’s a series of changes which sum up to the the stats that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John touting now, which is 50% of apps are reviewed within 24 hours and 90% within 48 hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this is awesome. It’s just so so awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ve been stunned by this. And I think it’s a good thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the tool improvements and just trusting their tools to suss out any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like private API violations, any crashes, potentially things like that. I mean, trusting your tools, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good thing. I mean, this is why I write unit tests.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, to me, this kind of just shows the potential of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, before Phil took over the App Store, I don’t want to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throw anybody under the bus or anything, but it sure seemed like it was not progressing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, and that basically nobody was working on progressing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Phil took over not that long ago and a lot of stuff is changing and a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of progress is being made for the better. So I’m kind of excited like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if if all this changed in such a short time while there’s been kind of you know finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody literally running the store what else is gonna change you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know like this is even you know in the big picture even if some of these things don’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out or don’t do you know don’t do as well as they wanted or whatever or you know make things harder for in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways or in easier in other ways whatever happens with these changes there that they’re doing they’re making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes that’s amazing because for like eight years they changed almost nothing so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is this is real progress and this is a a rapid and dramatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change almost all if not all for the better
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the again the pessimistic take is this was a management change
⏹️ ▶️ John like Phil’s just taken over control of what previously didn’t have control over and when you switch a new manager
⏹️ ▶️ John onto a new project and it’s important and they want to make a good showing they want to come out of the gate and say okay
⏹️ ▶️ John you put me in charge of this and in short order i did these things that made it better isn’t that great
⏹️ ▶️ John um that’s a pressing need within a typical uh you know bozo corporation
⏹️ ▶️ John which we assume apple isn’t but anyway that’s one pessimistic take and the other one is we were all excited when they finally
⏹️ ▶️ John turned their attention to the mac pro that had been neglected for a long time and came up with this amazing radical new computer that shows they really do
⏹️ ▶️ John care about the Mac Pro Pro and surely this means that the Mac Pro is off to a new, brighter,
⏹️ ▶️ John healthier future involving lots of updates and lots of future changes. Not that I’m predicting this for the App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store, but if you want to be pessimistic about it, and you know, it is possible that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John enough. There’s enough reasons why this might be a bunch of big dramatic changes that have been a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John coming sort of like pent up demand, and then they’ll let this do for a year not because they don’t care anymore. But even just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like the idea that they’re going to be caught sort of let’s try a bunch of things and
⏹️ ▶️ John fail faster, whatever, like I think their appetite for churn and the app store rules has obviously increased,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t think it’s that great. So I would expect this set of rules to possibly be tweaked and sussed out over
⏹️ ▶️ John the next year. And then maybe, you know, I think we’d all be happy if every year they revisited the rules of
⏹️ ▶️ John the store and saw how they did for a year because you can’t really change it every week. What are you going to change it in response? So you don’t have enough
⏹️ ▶️ John data to know whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea. So unlike perhaps the operating systems, a yearly,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty regularly scheduled update to app store rules is a reasonable idea. And if you tried to update the rules
⏹️ ▶️ John radically more often than that, I think it would be too much churn for developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, even if they change the change something about the store every two years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John more than once every eight years. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would still be like radically more progressive than the way it’s been all this time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they did add bundles, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The other good thing, by the way, about all these changes we’re going to go through is they all apply to all stores, including the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store. The TVOS store. Yeah. All right. So that’s fast review
⏹️ ▶️ John times. Good for Phil. Thanks for watching.
Subscription pricing for all?
⏹️ ▶️ John The next thing is a subscription pricing available for all app types, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John by far the most interesting and the most fraught with doubt
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco announcement across. We’re only like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, one day into this announcement. But the gist of it is that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John previously, if you wanted to sell an app on the App Store that did subscriptions, it had to be a subscription to some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John media thing like television or like a news service or audio or whatever. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John subscription pricing is open to all kinds of apps. And so a quick
⏹️ ▶️ John naive reading of that could be like, great, then basically no more restrictions. Previously I had to follow these special
⏹️ ▶️ John rules to be a subscription app. Now, anybody can just say, I want my app to be a subscription app. And then you start reading the rules and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, is that what they’re saying? That any app can be a subscription app? Or is it just say that any
⏹️ ▶️ John app can potentially be a subscription app? And that is the current source of doubt. Again, granted,
⏹️ ▶️ John one day in, I’m sure Apple will clarify. I’m sure things will get worked out. But right now, there’s still some
⏹️ ▶️ John doubt about it. So it’s hard to know entirely how to feel about this. Because all the debates
⏹️ ▶️ John about does this enable sustainable development is this, you know, all the things that Marco, I’m sure talked about on his
⏹️ ▶️ John developer podcast, whose name I can never remember earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John It, we don’t know if this is going like, should we indulge in in speculation
⏹️ ▶️ John about how this model might work for particular kinds of apps before we even know whether Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will allow it. Yes. We should indulge in that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes. Yeah, because I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, so if you if you just look at this as like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most conservative reading of the rules that they’ve put on that page, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s basically no change from what we already had policy wise. I mean, there are some technical changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have to be a media app. But you already didn’t have to be a media app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like, Instapapers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has that kind of subscription now, Evernote has had it forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instapaper counts as a news thing, Evernote?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, it doesn’t, because it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when, believe me, I looked into this back when, when these first launched in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days of Newsstand, when Newsstand launched in, I think, 2011 or something like that, it was only Newsstand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. And then, shortly afterwards, I think maybe like a year afterwards, it became available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to any app that was delivering periodic content of some kind. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to be like issues or episodes. It had to be like, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It couldn’t be for like, I guess it couldn’t be, we don’t know, but like if you were delivering video, because HBO Go
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything has all this stuff outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could have been, but it had to be like episodic content. You know, it couldn’t just be like, you just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to this thing forever, but it could be like, you have access to this new thing every week or month or whatever. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that then quickly got like semi-relaxed into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of where it stayed between then and now, which is you could kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of do it for any kind of recurring service, but it was, it was risky whether Apple would approve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you or not, because the definitions around it were fairly vague as to what would qualify.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it was clear that you had to have some kind of recurring service, like some kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, backing web service that had like, you know, cloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or content available on the service or something. It was, it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most apps would not qualify for that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but all that language is still there though everything you just said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the problem So I know like I know like Brent Simmons wrote a good post basically asking Clarification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this and because like if you read Phil’s comments in these interviews It sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now any app can do this no matter what but then if you look at that page It looks like that’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case it looks like it’s still the old rules of It depends a lot on the interpretations of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some words on the page. It says all apps are eligible to use this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s appropriate for these types of roles. So does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that mean they would approve it for inappropriate uses? It depends on how these things are, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what’s going to happen is, like most times when a new app review policy gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put into place and the details aren’t quite worked out yet. What’s almost certain to happen is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either in the next few days they’re going to edit the language in that page to be more clear and to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco firmly fall on one side or the other or unfortunately more likely they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna figure it out through rejections later this fall and then we’ll kind of solidify the policy and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would suck. I hope that’s not how they do it but you know I because Phil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like the guy on top of app review you know one in in the grand scheme of things and because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his actual statements really strongly say otherwise than that page I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was probably like a debated thing internally until very recently and they just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t worked out like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the details yet but I don’t know I
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s from marketing they always want to put on give you the bright side of it that’s what his whole role is let
⏹️ ▶️ John me tell you what’s great about this so even if it was exactly as you said where maybe they’ll reject it
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they won’t he’s not gonna come and tell you that it’s going to come and tell you it’s open to everybody. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then sort of allow the chips to fall away. And I think they did update the copy on this page because a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John the language is about Oh, you have to have like, you know, content or services or you know, issues
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But then certain senses explicitly call out exactly what we’re talking about. Like this is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like many freemium app, successful auto renewal subscription apps operate the services that are continuously supported and
⏹️ ▶️ John often require sustained content development, that would be like you get a new, you know, a new level every week or something
⏹️ ▶️ John for a game or feature enhancements to retain users feature enhancements is
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what we’re talking about we’re saying hey I want to add a new feature to my app that you used to take notes
⏹️ ▶️ John with there is no service there’s not even a sync service let’s say there is no there’s just an application that runs
⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone I just want to add feature enhancements can I charge you a subscription for that it’s right there
⏹️ ▶️ John in the language but that every other thing on the page it just leads you back into the oh but of course, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be providing a service or, you know, periodic content or whatever. So it’s, I don’t think feature
⏹️ ▶️ John enhancements was there before. Like, there’s no real equivalent to this page, I think they’re all new pages, right? Yeah. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think that language so someone put that was words there, but then didn’t get them didn’t like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the rest of the page doesn’t agree with it. So you’re right, it kind of looks like it might be conflicted. But again, the pessimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John take and pessimistic, not because we’re just mean people, but founded on past history, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the past has been very much like, the are kind of vague. It will nail it down through
⏹️ ▶️ John a series of heartbreaking rejections to a bunch of small developers. And then when you see their bodies fall
⏹️ ▶️ John below you like, oh, don’t do that, what that guy did. Oh, don’t do that. That’s a waste of time. They got those guys waiting six months and their app
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get on the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. You know, you know, it’s going to be James Thompson again. He gets he gets like the worst luck with app review.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s going to be like James Thompson can have a calculator app and you have a subscription and And each
⏹️ ▶️ John month you get a new number. So you have all the digits plus zero plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So his is like the stop making sense of calculator apps. I see how it is. Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that if I were Apple, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do pretty much exactly what they did, which is I would write the the verbiage verbiage, however
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you pronounce the word verbiage, verbiage, right? I would write the text such that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it leaves plenty of room for Apple to put the kibosh on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything that they don’t think is appropriate. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that doesn’t mean they’ll actually wield that hammer. It just means the hammer is available to them if
⏹️ ▶️ John Would you do that because you because you’re Apple and you’re trying to act like a big jerk because that’s what that’s like. Like let’s write
⏹️ ▶️ John it real vague to leave everyone in doubt. So we retain all the power and can make arbitrary decisions. features? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. Decide what you want now. And if you can’t decide, even just be honest about that. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ John worst. Like, if you like, seriously, it’s their job to come up with a policy. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John you want people to be able to charge money for an app that just adds new features every year and has no back end services? Decide
⏹️ ▶️ John that before you write the policy. Don’t write it because how are they going to whatever mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to use to make that decision later when they’re deciding to reject someone’s app? Do that now as a thought experiment.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t wait until it comes. It’s so asinine to not I mean, if they’re in a hurry, and they had to put this out, and they haven’t decided fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying like, that is a general policy to like, retain, reserve the right to like be
⏹️ ▶️ John vague and just let people send things in and then decide then don’t wait for that to happen with real apps, run a thought
⏹️ ▶️ John experiment and decide now they should be able to decide I think, very clearly, is this a valid thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do for just plain old apps that add features that have no back end service and no periodic content? Yes or no,
⏹️ ▶️ John pick something now write it down clearly. I’m not even a developer, but I’m super angered
⏹️ ▶️ John by their inability to communicate clearly on this topic. And if it’s just an error in the text and it’s fixed in three days, then
⏹️ ▶️ John fine, you know, good on Apple. You know, I should give them a break. It’s only been a day, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t buy that whole. This is what I would do too, because it remains maximum power for me. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And the big thing is like this, you know, in addition to, you know, hurting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the existing developers who are going to try this and hurting, you know, new stuff, what this is really going to hurt if they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clarify this, or if they don’t clarify this, or if it stays in the more restrictive interpretation of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, which is only apps with services and content and stuff, then this won’t apply to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like pro-content editing or pro-content creation apps. And that seems like a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco candidate for subscription pricing in the app store. Something like, you know, if you’re gonna have like a pro-image editor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a pro-audio editor, or you know, content, you know, pro-drawing apps, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro apps usually don’t have backing web services. Usually don’t have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a magazine built into them. Like it’s-
⏹️ ▶️ John You could have a backing DRM service, like I was thinking Photoshop.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Photoshop doesn’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ John backing service, but it does just for DRM, but I guess you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need that. Oh, it has all this Behance card reason nobody wants. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro apps are a perfect use for subscription pricing on iOS because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of solves free trials. It completely, in my opinion, solves upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can get people to pay. and the people who are most likely to pay are people who use pro apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get advanced functionality on things like their iPad Pros that they’re like desperate for amazing software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. It seems like this is the most clear need for subscription pricing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, A, video apps on the Apple TV, B, pro stuff on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they don’t clarify this rule, I don’t know, it would be royally stupid for any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro app developers to start developing their pro app or port their pro app over to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad or the iPhone. Suppose you make an amazing music app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for pros or a pro photo app and you bring it to iPad, you want to charge like 40 bucks a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something and then, oh, you can’t do it. Rejected. Sorry, you don’t have a web service. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible and most smart business people won’t even start that development until this is clarified. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like this is a great way to to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a great incentive for pro app development on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or would be or would be if they were clear about it. And like, and to be it’s not as if this rule,
⏹️ ▶️ John this new rule necessarily needs to be the thing that solves the problem. We’ve identified it as a potential problem. It could be
⏹️ ▶️ John that these changes are just not addressing that, which is fine, too. But if they think they’re addressing
⏹️ ▶️ John it for all the reasons Margo said, they’re not really because pro app, the reason pro apps are scared
⏹️ ▶️ John away from, you know, the iPad Pro and to some degree these days, you know, the Mac App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John some degree. Yeah, well, all apps are so you can’t tell it was just because the pro apps but
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t they can’t be sure that there is a business model that will support sustained development of a pro application.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s and because they’re so expensive, because they’re, you know, because the barrier
⏹️ ▶️ John to entry of like what does it take to make a real full featured pro application out of the gate that takes a lot of money initially, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have a plan going forward. You could try like, I think it might be fun to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a silly free to play game or a 99 cent thing. You can try that and it can be a throwaway thing
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have the money to spare. But if you’re going to embark on making a pro app, you have to have a solid
⏹️ ▶️ John go to market strategy where you understand how it’s going to be sold, how you’re going to get money, how you’re going to fund development,
⏹️ ▶️ John how you’re going to make the money back that you spent on it, and how you’re going to continue to pay for it. That same
⏹️ ▶️ John uncertainty still exists if these rules are still vague. Like I said, this rule doesn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John have to make that possible. But when I first heard, oh, subscription pricing opened all that’s the first thing I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought of is finally there’s a way to sustain, you know, basically iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John applications, expensive to develop full featured applications that are important for people to do their jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John that aren’t just put on the App Store and then forgotten about and like you make your money back and then you move on to the next thing. That’s what this
⏹️ ▶️ John seemed like. And again, a lot of the language and almost everything Phil has said, makes that clear,
⏹️ ▶️ John but a lot of the other language makes it not clear. So hopefully this will be clarified. You know, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re we are less than 24 hours after this announcement. So maybe we’re being too harsh. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I just find it frustrating to for the press tour to be leaning so heavily
⏹️ ▶️ John on all our hopes and dreams and then the actual text of all the web pages to be just making everything as clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, maybe it’s freaky Friday or I guess since it’s Wednesday, wacky Wednesday, because Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is super duper enthusiastic and chipper about this. I’m, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, I don’t know how I feel about this. And I think the reason I’m hemming and hawing a little bit is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at this from the perspective of a very cheap consumer who is happy to pay for apps for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure, but I don’t want every app that is even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remotely decent to think of themselves as, oh, I certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am a professional app and I can go subscription And I can charge, you know, five or 10 or 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 20 bucks a year because I’m worth it. Where some apps like TweetBot, I freaking live in TweetBot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Overcast, actually, I spend a lot of time in Overcast. I would pay $20 a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year for those apps, but there’s a lot of apps that I worry their developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will think, oh, we are definitely a pro app. We deserve a subscription pricing, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where I really don’t think that’s the case. I think it should be either a one-time fee or perhaps a one-time in-app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchase or something along those lines. And I don’t know, I just, I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m hopeful that this does solve all of our problems, like, like Marco seems to think that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will, but I really don’t want to end up paying a monthly fee
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a yearly fee or what have you for every damn app on my home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this will sort itself out though. It’ll sort itself out in the market. Like it’s not going to, developers are free to
⏹️ ▶️ John try whatever they want, but if, but I don’t think, I don’t think these rule changes, especially in the
⏹️ ▶️ John short term will change what people are willing to pay for applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John all it will do is make it so that the sort of like the unrealized sort of like a marketer with patron
⏹️ ▶️ John patronage, there’s untapped money, like money that people would be willing to give but have no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to give to stay in the development of the apps they use regularly. Like that’s what basically patron is like, you care enough
⏹️ ▶️ John about overcast that you want to make sure that overcast continues to exist, you know, subscribe, right. And like you just said,
⏹️ ▶️ John you listed two apps that all the time that you would gladly subscribe for without any kind of subscription and without like
⏹️ ▶️ John a patronage thing that Marco is doing. There’s no once someone buys it from you, there’s no more way for them to give you money unless Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John does the thing where he makes an entirely new overcast to and you know, all the things we’ve talked about in the past, right? So this
⏹️ ▶️ John releases that money from the people who are willing to pay it, but it doesn’t make everyone else suddenly willing to pay way
⏹️ ▶️ John more for the software they have. Now it could make developers be all like, Oh, I want to try this. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John hot new thing. But those developers will be sad because they’ll find out what is the the actual appetite to pay a
⏹️ ▶️ John monthly subscription for app, they’ll realize that many people, you know, installed their 99 cents app and never looked at it
⏹️ ▶️ John again, or, you know, or whatever, like, I don’t think you have too much to worry about, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I really don’t think this will change the hearts and minds of users in the short term, especially. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John if developers change their plans, they will be punished by not getting a lot of sales, and people
⏹️ ▶️ John will stop using their app and move to competitors, and then they’ll change back, and it’ll sort of settle down again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And that’s the thing is that I agree with you that users aren’t going to look at this generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking that differently. But what I’m worried about is that even in a run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the mill developer with a good, but not world-class app is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think, oh, well, darn it. My, my app is great. And I think everyone is going to pay a subscription for me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right that this will kind of suss itself out over time, but I really hope that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone in the app store doesn’t immediately run to subscription pricing when really, at least on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone and my iPad anyway, there’s a very small subset of apps that I think really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should consider subscription pricing, that I think really should be worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And granted, my handful, my five apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are different than your five apps, they’re different from Marco’s five apps, so maybe that’ll suss itself out that way as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know, I just really hope that everyone on the App Store doesn’t immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run to subscription pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have heard from a number of people now saying, basically expressing that same sentiment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, I as a user don’t want everything on my phone to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of a sudden be charging me like $2 a month or whatever. To some degree that’s reasonable. To some degree,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jon is right that the market will sort this out. And also to some degree, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this is an improvement over the reality that we have now. So right now, if you consider the example
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, say, TweetBot, like we’ve been mentioning. TweetBot releases a brand new version of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, and TweetBot is a paid up front app, and then about every, what, year or two?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They release a new version that is a brand new standalone app for, what is it, a few bucks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like five bucks or four bucks, whatever. So basically, you’re almost already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying three or four dollars a year for TweetBot. If you move to subscription pricing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not really much of a change, except it’s easier and better for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a psychological change. You know, they don’t want to sign up for another eel in Roderick Online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, I’ll get there. And then the customers, you don’t have to go through the stupid hoops of, like, well, download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new app, hopefully transfer all your accounts over, delete the old app, transfer all your settings, all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid stuff. It avoids all that, all the cumbersome complexity of replacing a paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app with its next paid app version. The developers will make more money this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way because of the new 85-15 split that you get in years two through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infinity, which is a whole other thing that’s really cool and most likely related to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV negotiations, but with video providers and possibly Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, the consumer side of this is everyone saying, I don’t want everything on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my screen to all of a sudden charge me X dollars a month. If you instead think about it as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X dollars a year, which is probably going to be a more common price point, because ideally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want to be like bugging people every like you don’t want to be reminding people every month that they could cancel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your subscription if they wanted to like because every time that email comes in from Apple saying the following subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are about to renew like in a few days or whatever like that’s that’s like a prompt for people to cancel your subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you don’t really want to do that if you can help it like if you can charge a few dollars a year instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a few dollars a month that is probably a better idea as long as you can still make enough money that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so if you think about like you know, from from like a paid app perspective, like if you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re paying five bucks or four bucks or three bucks every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year or 18 months, whatever, whenever there’s like a new standalone paid app version of something that’s upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgraded that way versus if you have like a $4 a year subscription, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that different. And it’s actually way easier for you with the subscription. So I think this is the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing where not every app will do it. In fact, I would guess very few apps will do it for the same reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very few apps are paid up front anymore. Most people won’t pay for most apps. That’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change. Most apps are still going to be free with garbage inside of them to fund it somehow. Most apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still going to be like, you know, you don’t really have to pay for really anything, but you could pay if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to. All the big, you know, in-app purchase freemium mind trick games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still going to make all the money in the app store. All those, like all the market forces around this aren’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to change that much as far as I can guess. What will change is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that are already now earning money through some way that’s a little bit clunkier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now have a smoother, easier way to do it where they will probably also make more in the process. It’s easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for both them and for users. Don’t think about it as everything on your home screen is going to start charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you $2 a month. Think about it as maybe two or three apps that you really use are going to charge you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $4 a year. That’s more likely to be the outcome. If you think about it that way, it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connelly Oh, I agree. I completely agree. I just hope that the people who are writing these apps, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the developers writing these apps have the self-awareness to realize whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s appropriate for them to move to the subscription pricing. And if they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t realize it, that’s why coming back around, I think some of this verbiage is written the way it is on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the website that gives Apple the leverage and ammunition with which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well I guess they already have the leverage, but the ammunition with which to say, no, this is not an appropriate use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a subscription.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, the market will sort this out. Developers will very, very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learn that pricing well above what people are willing to pay for their app is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to work for them. On the other hand, suppose you have an app on your home screen and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they start charging four bucks a month. If they can make enough money doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that way, and you don’t want to pay, good for them. And that’s too bad for you. Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree. Again, the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this out. The developers who overpriced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their apps pass what the market will bear, will adjust it. And you as a consumer might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to pay more, but I would argue that prices for software have been artificially depressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for quite some time, and kind of subsidized by a combination of hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and VC money. I think that it’s really good to have this option. And not every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer will use it. Implementing these subscriptions is not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy. And it’s kind of a pain. And it’s not as easy as putting a paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app up there. You have to code in this in-app purchase and have the back end to verify the receipts and keep track
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of who’s subscribed and everything. So it’s not simple to do this. So not every app will do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if Apple would approve them, which we don’t know. So I think this is going to be a much smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal than you expect to apps on a whole, as a whole, but it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a really big difference to the relatively low percentage of apps that will actually end up using it.
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing that developers who decide to go subscription should factor in, I’m sure they are all thinking about this already, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the psychological barrier to signing up for a recurring payment, even if the recurring payment is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John less than what you’ve actually been paying, for example, say your Twitter client updates every year and every year you buy a new copy for five
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks and then they go to two years two dollars a year you’re like great that’s like half price you’re like but
⏹️ ▶️ John what if at the end of this year I don’t want to upgrade right like it’s always you know the whole like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re signing up for a bill you’re like well how am I gonna keep track of the bills how am I gonna know when it renews like and
⏹️ ▶️ John we know that Apple handles this pretty well like in terms of sending you an email letting you know that your thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is up for renewal that they’re gonna let you know if the price changes like you know Apple is doing a good job in it but
⏹️ ▶️ John just the mere concept of signing up for a recurring payment, even if it is less money now
⏹️ ▶️ John and less money in the long term, bothers people. And then the tech nerdy angle is, and
⏹️ ▶️ John also, what if I just want to keep using the old version?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, as a developer, I say, too bad. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll take these things separately. First of all, the subscription pricing. It’s like, yes. But as I’ve said before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people sure that you want to pay between zero and one times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and and then have functionality it’s updated forever and that’s that’s not sustainable
⏹️ ▶️ John well no but not not even that you want it to be updated forever it’s just that you like the idea that it’s a thing that goes
⏹️ ▶️ John on in the background that you have to be aware that it exists like the perhaps a rational in the case of Apple fear that you will
⏹️ ▶️ John forget this thing exists and that you’ll be in charge you know five dollars a year forever kind of like an AOL
⏹️ ▶️ John dollar subscription that you you just forgot to cancel in 1997. Like that, that that’s what I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about. Mostly not the idea that you just want to pay once and get features. But again, say you’re gladly paying like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, say you’re paying like $5 for a new Twitter client every nine months, and you’re happy to do it because you think it’s awesome every
⏹️ ▶️ John single time. Then they ask you to pay $2 a year. And you’re like, what in perpetuity, like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John signing up for something that you know, like, it doesn’t make sense. But especially again, especially since Apple is so good
⏹️ ▶️ John about like, not letting you forget these things. So there’s not as if you’re going to not know that you’re being billed for this and everything. In fact, I I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t it like, if you don’t do something, it won’t auto-renew? I don’t know how good it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, that’s only if you raise the price. It will continue to bill you until you stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And right now, the interface to stop these subscriptions is awful and buried. Assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this will all be better. But they’ve said, like part of this announcement was that all of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is getting an overhaul. So a lot of this depends on the implementation details. It really does. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we will see that the previous renewing subscription system was really rough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There were a lot of things about it that were really just badly done or inconvenient or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumer hostile or developer hostile. So a lot of this depends on the details. So I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming with my predictions here, I’m assuming that they have made it better enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we can overcome those problems. I see what you’re saying. I agree that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a bigger barrier, but the reality is paying Paying it all is a big barrier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once you’re over the hump of paying it all, yes, people would choose to pay once if given the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option, do I want to pay $4 once or $4 every year? Of course, you’re going to choose the first one, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not sustainable. We’ve seen this over and over and over again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Software these days, people expect continuous updates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The pay-once model, whether it’s pay once forever or whether it’s pay once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every 18 months, then there’s upgrades and separate apps. Both of those are dysfunctional in a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re saying it’s not feasible for developers, right? But I’m thinking it from the perspective of the customer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s perfectly sustainable from the perspective of the customer, because the customer is like, I buy a Twitter client.
⏹️ ▶️ John A year later, that developer goes out of business because no one ever could find a way to give him more money. And then I pick a new Twitter client.
⏹️ ▶️ John A year goes by and then that new Twitter developer releases a new version of his application. I can use
⏹️ ▶️ John it or not. You know, like, like buying a new application every year is the model that they’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John going on. If that new application is from the same developer, fine. And suddenly that’s sustainable from the developers
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective. If that new application is a different one, it’s still the same money from the users perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We’re just looking at from the developers perspective saying it’s not sustainable. Therefore, I’m going to go to subscriptions. Subscriptions are not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to help you if if your application is not attractive enough to get people over the eel barrier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure. However, the other model has a whole bunch of problems. So, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instance, why are you not considering buying a Mac Pro today, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pros cost way more than apps. I don’t think this is applicable. I’m short-circuiting this analogy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Believe me, it works exactly the same way. Why are you not buying a Mac Pro right now? Because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy, I don’t want that one. Because you know a new one’s coming out soon. No, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know that at all. Nobody knows that. Well, the current one’s three years old, and
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m saying, that’s why I don’t want to buy, because it’s not a good product to buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You expect there’s probably going to be an update to it coming soon, and if you buy it now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you won’t get the updated one for free.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I know all the anti-patterns. I’m not saying this is not bad, I’m just saying this started with me giving advice
⏹️ ▶️ John to developers. Hey developer, you’re thinking of changing your applications to suit pricing. If you only think about how this will
⏹️ ▶️ John affect your revenue, you’re not factoring everything You also have to factor in how
⏹️ ▶️ John unattractive the idea of a pay this amount on this interval forever
⏹️ ▶️ John and ever until you cancel is to people. That is very unattractive to a lot of people,
⏹️ ▶️ John more so than every year after my favorite app developer goes out of business, find the next client
⏹️ ▶️ John that I want to buy for two bucks, even though or five bucks, even though it may be costing the user more to do it the other
⏹️ ▶️ John way. People are more comfortable that and not just because they’re what it’s used to, because people have
⏹️ ▶️ John a real fear of recurring bills of all kinds, like even if it’s $1 a year, like
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think the older you get, the more like younger people may eventually get okay with it because you just get used to whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John like the status quo is like. So if you’re coming of age during this time won’t be a big deal. But the older you get, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I have trouble convincing my parents to buy $2 application, I could never convince them to buy a $1 your application
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they use that application every single day. My parents have $1 a year to spend. But if I try
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, wait, I have to pay that every year for how long forever? If I stop paying, do
⏹️ ▶️ John I stop being able to use the app? Doesn’t make any sense. People do not like recurring payments.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re right. There are a lot of people who don’t. It’s not everybody. A lot of people don’t care, but there are a lot of people who don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly. But like, I think so many of those people wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay for these things anyway, that it’s not is I don’t think it’s as big of a problem as you think.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking I’m thinking of applications, they’re changing their thing. Like the upside, the upside of
⏹️ ▶️ John this and it is very large is for applications that, like the ones that Casey said, we all have applications that our phones that
⏹️ ▶️ John we hope continue to be updated and improve that we will gladly pay a yearly fee for
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody has stuff like that on their phone. Those developers now have a way to unlock
⏹️ ▶️ John that money that we were ready to give them, but usually didn’t have a way to do so. Like so that is the big upside
⏹️ ▶️ John to this. The only potential downside is developers miscalculating if their application
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of those ones that has that on tap market like or if that on top market is big enough or whatever and
⏹️ ▶️ John so I guess you have to know as a developer who are my customers who are my potential customers
⏹️ ▶️ John if I change the scripting pricing is my does my app have that much potential value to that many potential
⏹️ ▶️ John people that it is one of those apps that can get away with subscriptions or does it not and the
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that Casey was worried about is that a hundred a bunch of developers will miscalculate
⏹️ ▶️ John will think that they can do it. And it will be like, maybe not company
⏹️ ▶️ John killing, but like, there’ll be a short term loss of application as a bunch of them try out the
⏹️ ▶️ John subscription model, lose all the customers who aren’t willing to do that people seek out alternatives. And then when they change their
⏹️ ▶️ John mind and realize that they’re not the one of those people who can sustain subscription pricing, then switch back in is too late, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John lost everything. And that would be like a net loss of like, it would be it would perturb users who lose a bunch of applications. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, the market will sort it out eventually. But there could be some short term churn and pain from
⏹️ ▶️ John user perspective as developers try things out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but ultimately I think this is going to be a very short-lived experimentation period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, people are going to realize very quickly whether this is working for them or not. And honestly, most developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco underpriced their work anyway, so I think the opposite of the problem. I think we’re not enough people will
⏹️ ▶️ John Although, speaking of the short-term thing, that is another phenomenon is that if you are the
⏹️ ▶️ John first application in a set of users applications that they have on their home screen or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John to go subscription, they might be like, you know what, I really don’t like subscriptions, but I’ve been hearing a lot of those new subscription
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and maybe I’ll try it. If you are the 10th one to do that, subscription fatigue may set in. So like like
⏹️ ▶️ John so many changes in the App Store and like the App Store itself, there is probably a gold rush period where
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can, you know, decide now like if you want to run this experiment, probably better to start soon
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than you know, three weeks in after everyone has been prompted three times on their home screen
⏹️ ▶️ John if they want to, you know, change the subscription or whatever. Because if you’re the first one, that is definitely an advantage and there is
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely a first mover advantage. And then I guess you’ll find out if your model is sustainable before anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think most people don’t really use that many apps on a regular basis that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would even pay for, let alone that would be subscription based. Like, I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the average number of apps on somebody’s phone that are going to attempt this at all is probably something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like three at most. I mean, like, it’s probably not that many, you know, and that’s why I think I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the fatigue issue or the like too many eels issue, I don’t think these will be prevalent
⏹️ ▶️ John three, three is fatigue. The third one, people are going to be like, that’s it. No more of these applications asking me for subscriptions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Three is definitely over the fatigue barrier. One is the honeymoon period. Two is you’re getting grumpy. Three is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, nope, I’m out, for regular people. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree. I really think these are going to be mostly single digit number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dollars per year. Most people won’t have a whole lot of those in their phone, except like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most power of the power users. You know, then it’s going to be very small amounts per year, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to be fine. And it’s just going to be easier for everybody once it’s all established. But we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, to sum up this thing, I think any kind of change subscription to broadening it
⏹️ ▶️ John in any way, even if it’s vague or whatever, is a good thing. Because, I mean, I’m talking about all the
⏹️ ▶️ John potential bad sides, but net, this is going to be an improvement. Like, this is a positive
⏹️ ▶️ John change. All we’re arguing about is exactly how positive, because it could potentially be really, really positive, or
⏹️ ▶️ John just a little bit positive. But it’s going to be positive. Like, make no mistake about that, even though it sounds like I’m just complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about all the potential downsides, and how things can go wrong. Like, anytime there’s any change, people can go wrong, and developers can
⏹️ ▶️ John make bad choices about how to change their pricing structure or their application, or which applications to make,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I can’t see any way that this could make things worse. This is going to make things better. It’s going to make us have better applications
⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone. It’s going to make it so that our favorite applications don’t go out of businesses often
⏹️ ▶️ John after whatever the initial shakeout period is. And people figure this out right. And it could potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John finally solve the problem of how do you get pro level feature full applications
⏹️ ▶️ John on all of Apple’s platforms in a way that can be ongoing, just like it was with box software where year after
⏹️ ▶️ John year they would make new versions and charge you for them and everything so and and we didn’t even talk about the 85 15 split except
⏹️ ▶️ John for mentioning it briefly also obviously a positive change for
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody except for apple you know
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were talking earlier about the 85 15 split. So Apple has said if you keep if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a subscription with a user and that user keeps a subscription for at least a year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subsequent to that first year being completed, Apple will only take 15% and they will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give 85% of the revenue back to the developer. And John had made a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of offhanded comment that, oh, that’s bad for Apple. And I presume, John, you don’t mean that in a
⏹️ ▶️ John good for everybody except Apple. I was mostly joking. Obviously, it’s good for Apple if more people develop for the App Store and all,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, more sustainable applications, more people develop for longer. They’re motivated to make their customers happy and keep
⏹️ ▶️ John them for a year. Like, obviously, there is upside for Apple. But but what I’m saying is there
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t, You know, it’s all upside for developers getting more money, and for users, it’s upside
⏹️ ▶️ John because the price for the user doesn’t change at all. They don’t really care how the money’s split up, except for the fact that they probably like
⏹️ ▶️ John it that the developers are getting more money because they’re not really worried about Apple being cash-strapped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point. This is great because, first of all, it shows that Apple can lower their cut,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that they’re willing to selectively lower their cut now for the right reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John We always knew they could, it just didn’t say whether they would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. So this is interesting. So now they can lower their cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to incent behavior that they need or want. So I mentioned on Under the Radar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this would be a great thing to do. So for instance, if they really wanted to juice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or subsidize more growth of certain kinds of apps or certain platforms, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to say, all right, anything bought on an iPad Pro would be this, or any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV apps would have this split. This is a way for them to turn some levers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to juice development of certain kinds of apps that they want or need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’ve seen things like the watch and the Apple TV and the iPad Pro. Having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their app stores take off probably more slowly than Apple wanted them to, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s good for them to develop incentive systems that they can use to help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco juice app development in the right and sustainable ways. So that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also interesting that this is probably part of the negotiation of things like getting Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and HBO Go to allow sign-ups on the Apple TV. There was actually a report back on Recode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in April that this was the case, that they were actually getting 15% from the beginning on those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the longest time, for the entire history of the App Store, until possibly this or until possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this Apple TV deal, all developers were given the exact same terms and had to follow the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rules. from Facebook down to the 123 Notetaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Connected. Every app was given the same terms. It was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair and democratic in that way. From what I understand, that was a big part of the culture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Eddy Cue App Store team, so good on them for that. This is interesting in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously there have been market pressures for Apple to lower that rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for certain big companies. a big one is Amazon, right? I’m sure part of the negotiation with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon are that Amazon does not want to give Apple 30% of things that are bought in their apps or you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco memberships that are started in their apps. Apple doesn’t budge on that and Amazon doesn’t budge on that and that’s why we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have Amazon video on the Apple TV. This is interesting in that it looks like Apple is now budging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that for the right reasons, which include things like getting important partners on the Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that as they’re doing that for them, they’re also then bringing in any developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under certain terms with that too. So yeah, it’d be nice if all Apple TV apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were $85.15 for everything. That’s probably not going to happen, at least not yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is nice that everybody gets the same deal thing. Seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still either continuing or mostly continuing. And also this is great because that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut being so high, you know, 30% is a lot. That cut being so high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes certain business models either impossible or at least not very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compelling to even try to do on Apple’s platforms. The more they can lower that, or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more places in which they can lower that, the more it makes completely new business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models possible or more practical on Apple’s platforms. And that’s good for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s good for the developers and the users and Apple. Everything won’t suddenly be possible because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of business models, 15% is still too much for somebody else to be taking. Still
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t sell ebooks. 15% is too high for that, to give one example.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, probably. But Amazon is not going to be happy with that either. Amazon is only going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy when they can have their own checkout with their own stuff and not pay Apple anything. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t expect Amazon and Apple to resolve that anytime soon, because Apple is certainly not going to budge on that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Amazon is not going to accept anything else from Apple. Especially, at least not for the Apple TV, where Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can afford to lose the Apple TV. Can’t they just do…
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re talking about just for people who subscribe to the app, but don’t a lot of the video apps say like, oh, if you subscribe to the
⏹️ ▶️ John web, then Apple doesn’t get any of that money. And then you just sign it. Why doesn’t Amazon just do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They already do that on all of Apple’s other platforms. That’s exactly what they do. The only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason they don’t do it on the Apple TV is because there are so few Apple TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there of the new generation that Amazon is gambling that they can just afford to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be there and that they have the upper hand in that negotiation. Whether that’s true or not… I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to sell that fire TV boxes so that you can ship them to people for free. It’s packing material.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the whole thing with Amazon. I have no pity for either side there. You have two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two stubborn monopolists fighting over who gets to be the stubborn monopolist. Like, okay, that’s good luck with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Yeah, anyway, so I think this is great. This 8515 thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great. I would love to see this in more places. I wouldn’t hold my breath on that yet but I’m glad to see it anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to have this make things possible that weren’t impossible before and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to reward developers who have that kind of like longstanding customer base to reward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them with basically a raise is really cool. And it’s the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downside to it is that I think for the foreseeable future, it’s probably going to benefit very few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people like it’s like there’s going to be very few developers who have subscription priced apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and who have users sticking around that long. It’s I think it’s going to be a small group, but for those people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s the second, the second change that we’ve gone through so far, that no matter how you look at it
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely seems focused on what we always talk about sustainable development. How do I make it
⏹️ ▶️ John more feasible for a developer to make something for the platform and then keep
⏹️ ▶️ John improving it year after year rather than doing the hit-and-run or the one-hit wonder or the game or other throwaway
⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing. How do we make that possible? Subscriptions, no matter how we slice them, either make that
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit better or a lot better. In 8015, after the first year couldn’t be more clear. We want you to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John your customers for an entire year. If you can do that, there will be a reward at the end of it. You are now incentivized,
⏹️ ▶️ John motivated to do this. Not incented, because I don’t like that. It’s a weird word.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And so, yeah, so that’s two for two and trying to make a more sustainable
⏹️ ▶️ John zone. The only question I have about it, I haven’t looked into it deeply, is like the loophole of like, all right, so it’s per
⏹️ ▶️ John customer. So it’s like you, Joe Schmoe, have been a customer for a year. Joe Schmoe’s
⏹️ ▶️ John subscription money after the first year changes over to but the guy who
⏹️ ▶️ John signed up six months later doesn’t change to 8015 to the same. So it’s not calendar year, it’s like customer year. But so if you’re a customer,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a customer who has been subscribing every month for 12 months and then in the 13th month they go,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what, I’m not subscribing anymore and cancels their subscription. And then five minutes later, resubscribes
⏹️ ▶️ John or a month later, resubscribes. Like if there’s a gap in the year long thing that you lose out on the 8015,
⏹️ ▶️ John does the clock start over again or is it the cumulative 11 months that they were a subscriber and then after their 12th month,
⏹️ ▶️ John like details like that about it doesn’t have to be a continuous streak if they bail
⏹️ ▶️ John on the last month but change their mind five minutes later five minutes later or a day later or a month later what are all the rules
⏹️ ▶️ John surrounding that because it would seem kind of cruel to like say you’re a really good customer
⏹️ ▶️ John for an application and you want to be sustainable and you were really excited about being able to fund
⏹️ ▶️ John it for an entire year because you knew it in your second year that the developer would be getting more of your money,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for whatever reason, you either accidentally or you changed your mind briefly or something, you
⏹️ ▶️ John cancel it and then you resubscribe and like, oh, and I got to use that for another year before this developer gets not that people care
⏹️ ▶️ John about so much about developers that they’re worried about it, but I’m just trying to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope there are rules in there that have reasonable buffers to make it so that you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t because you have to keep the customer for a year. You wouldn’t want to lose out on that money due
⏹️ ▶️ John to a technicality or a silly mistake. Real time follow up from Pat Murray, there is a 60
⏹️ ▶️ John day grace period on the 80-15 split. So that’s pretty generous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is pretty cool, I didn’t know that.
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App Store search ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at backblazer.com slash ATP. Thanks a lot. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So another big change to the way the App Store works. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay to get placement in search results, sort of, kind of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not entirely clear on how this is all held together. And I’m guessing, Marco, you probably have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best overall understanding of it. So can Can you take the Summarizer and Chief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mantle from me and give us the quick and dirty version?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re interested in these search ads, go to the link that we’re going to put in the show notes. Apple’s paid on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this because they have screenshots, and it explains better than we can in the text or in the audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically the gist of this is they are now offering search ads for developers so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you search, you can pay for your app to show up for certain relevant search keywords
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people search certain words in the app store, you can pay for it to take. There’s a single spot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top. It’s highlighted in blue. So you’re not fooling people and thinking this is a real result. It looks like an ad. It’s labeled
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you are fooling people, but we’ll get to that after you finish summarizing. Go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s basically very similar to what we’ve seen from search engines like Google, from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search ads for over a decade. It’s the very similar kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think Apple has put in place certain limits and controls that are there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to limit potential abuse and annoyance and possible fraud issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sounds like they’ve actually done a really good job. It looks pretty good to me. The restrictions they’ve put in place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound pretty good. If they work as well as they sound, I think it’ll actually be a really good system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of bad—and by the way, just briefly, some of those restrictions are things like there’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one ad being shown at a time, so you don’t have to worry about a giant stack of ads above the real search results.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the ads only take up at most half of the viewport,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re still seeing… Whatever the top couple results are, you’re still going to see those pretty easily on screen. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really going to bury the organic search results. One worry that I saw a lot of people cite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was basically keyword squatting of bidders, big budget games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bidding on your keywords, like image editor or podcast player, just
⏹️ ▶️ John to get their big budget game. Or squatting on your trademarks. They would actually register your product’s exact name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a keyword. Right. Exactly. And Apple says on this page that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only going to show up on searches for which your result would be relevant, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter how much you’re willing to pay. And so we’ll see what that means in practice. That sounds a lot like a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data search problem that Apple’s usually not very good at, but we’ll see. I’m willing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give them the benefit of that. At least let’s see what this is because if they do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well and you know it looks good so far in their press shots we’ll see how it is again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they do this well I think this is great you know other developers are I have not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard from any other developers who are as excited about this as I am and maybe that’s a bad sign I don’t know but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a big budget and you want more growth you now have a way to get more growth you can bid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some search keywords or there’s even what I thought was interesting there’s an option in the screenshot they show there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an option option to not specify the keywords and to just let Apple put you into things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it thinks are relevant. Not just the option. I think that’s the default. I think you’re right. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I think, is more interesting because, honestly, trying to keep track of what keywords you should be bidding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on is a lot of work. And there’s a lot of voodoo and some data, some guessing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it makes it more work. So if Apple can do a decent enough job and get you a decent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco return or a decently low cost per tap for automatic searches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll actually get in more places. You’ll be on keywords you wouldn’t have thought of. If they work, then great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That I think is interesting. But if the system works, it’s a way for both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people with a budget to spend to get more people to download their app, so that’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, people keep saying, like, oh, what’s going to happen to the small developers who can’t afford
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this? If you’re a small developer trying to break into a market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is almost impossible to get meaningful exposure unless you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco woo the press and get them to write about you somehow. This is easier and more reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yes, it costs some money, but it’s a crowded market. Sometimes you got to pay some money to get noticed because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to buy promotional spots. If you are going to try to break into a category
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where no one’s really gonna write about your app or you haven’t gotten the kind of press you want or it’s too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco narrow of a category for the press to care, this is great. This is a way for you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get to your customers and to be visible. If you’re launching a new photo editor, there is no way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are going to show up in that number one spot before this. You could not show up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. If people search for image editor and they got this one camera, whatever, as number one spot, that’s it. That’s what they’re seeing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your app doesn’t stand a chance. Now you have a way to get there. And maybe you don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it forever. Maybe you do it only to build your initial audience, then you depend on organic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spreading of your app after that. But this gives you an option where there was no option before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see how you can look at this and say this is a bad thing. The only major valid criticism of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, yeah, they really should make the actual search better before worrying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about things like this. But ultimately, okay, this is reality. That’s not going to happen. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco original search will get better or not separately from this, that is independent of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in the reality that we live in, it makes this happen independently, I would much rather have an app store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I as a developer can buy keywords for to promote my apps, and we’ll see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe the pricing will make this impossible, but I would at least rather have the option to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than to have something where if I want to break into a new market, I have to either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already be famous or get the press to write about me. Because that is not nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as open and democratic as this is.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re trying to be helpful, it seems like, to people who have less experience in these things by giving you the tools to do
⏹️ ▶️ John the fairly simple multiplication and division to say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to lose money if you bid, because it’s an auction system. If you bid too high, if this is a very popular
⏹️ ▶️ John keyword, and a lot of people are bidding on and they’re being it up and up and you get caught up in that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t make that money back because it costs so much money and it’s per tap by the way, like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John per purchase, it’s not a for a time period, it’s how many people tap on your your results, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to kind of guess what do I think my conversion rates going to be of all the people who tap on my ad, how many of them are actually
⏹️ ▶️ John going to buy it for each one who buys it? How much do I how much money am I going to make? And therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John how much money does it cost me in aggregate during this ad campaign to acquire each customer who will give me a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of money and Apple will actually have a little tool where you can say look if you don’t want to do this very complicated multiplication and division
⏹️ ▶️ John in your own head just put your cost per acquisition your CPA goal in there and then they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how to maximize your app downloads like you just give them your target number where you feel like this ad
⏹️ ▶️ John campaign will be worthwhile for you whether it’s you put in a number that makes you feel like you won’t lose any money or that you’re willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to lose a certain amount of money like how much how much do you want it to cost you to get a new customer if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to cost you 50 cents to get a new customer, each new customer gives you $1, you’re going to come out ahead. Maybe it costs you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get $1 from every customer, but you’re willing to pay $2 to acquire your first set of customers like Marco was saying on your
⏹️ ▶️ John launch day or whatever, you can do that, just put that number in and they’ll do it for you. Like everything they say about this sounds good. Down
⏹️ ▶️ John to I’ve heard, I don’t know if this is text from the ads or Phil Schiller talking to people, the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John like, say your application is Twitterific, and someone types Twitterific into the search thing. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John heard that there would be no ad there, that Twitterific will be the number one hit and there’ll be no ad displayed because it is an
⏹️ ▶️ John exact match for the name of an existing application. In other words, nobody can buy the Twitterific
⏹️ ▶️ John keyword to make their thing show up as the number one hit when someone searches for Twitterific. Again, I don’t know if this is
⏹️ ▶️ John official or it’s just something that was like floating around, but that is exactly the type of thing that I would expect from
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to try to have try to be classy and not sleazy. And for the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason that I posted about this earlier on Twitter today and mentioned it earlier when Marco, we said that the ads are clearly marked.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t quite work on Twitter. What I said was that I had heard a couple stories
⏹️ ▶️ John about how ads will be in search results and all of them had the same screenshot, I assume provided by
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, that shows a search and shows an ad at the top. And I saw that picture
⏹️ ▶️ John four separate times on four separate websites. Each time I looked at it, it was in the mix
⏹️ ▶️ John with an article that I don’t like skimming and reading or whatever. I looked at the screenshot and I’m like, oh, I guess this is showing an ad
⏹️ ▶️ John result. And I looked at it and go, oh no, it’s not showing an ad result. this is just regular search results because at that point I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to come from Apple. I thought people were just showing what the App Store search looks like. Four times I looked at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Only on the fourth time did I realize they’re trying to show this as one of those ad search
⏹️ ▶️ John results. And I looked at it a little closer and then I saw the tiny letters AD in a little tiny blue
⏹️ ▶️ John light blue box in a light blue thing. And so I posted it to Twitter. Of course, everyone said it. Once you say
⏹️ ▶️ John this isn’t clearly marked as an ad or you know, I basically I posted the story. I saw this image four times before I realized
⏹️ ▶️ John that it was an ad. But once you say that, everyone’s like, look, this little thing says ad right there. You see this clear as day. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re looking with that mindset, yes. And other people were like, how can you not tell it’s blue? Blue doesn’t mean ad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was like the top hit a selected hit. I have no idea why it was blue.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is this is a real phenomenon. Someone posted a tweet with a study showing
⏹️ ▶️ John that something like 57% of people don’t identify
⏹️ ▶️ John ads in like Google search results as ads, even though they’re also clearly marked again with a little tiny yellow
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that says add in them or whatever. If you’re not going into it with the mindset that some of these things are going to be ads
⏹️ ▶️ John and that you should look to see how they’re identified, you won’t recognize this as an ad. It will look like the
⏹️ ▶️ John most prominent and the most important, especially if it’s colored differently and it’s on the top, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a difference between recognizing, you know, people say like, what do you care? A good analogy someone
⏹️ ▶️ John gave on Twitter was like, when you go into the store to buy DVDs, which I guess this is an old person who said this, and you see
⏹️ ▶️ John a DVD on the end cap of the display, right? Someone paid for that end
⏹️ ▶️ John cap placement, like the whole retail thing where you pay the retailer more money to have your thing more prominently placed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you care that they paid for that placement? Or do you just care that? Oh, that’s the application that I want. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that analogy does not work at all. Because what you want people to know is,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, in theory, this breakdowns because Apple search is so bad. You want them to think, when I do a search,
⏹️ ▶️ John the things near the top of the search are the most relevant to the thing I searched ads don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about your relevance. Again, modulo Apple’s rules. The thing at the top when it’s an ad is not there because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple search algorithm thinks this is the most relevant application for your search. It’s there because someone paid for
⏹️ ▶️ John it to be there for your search. And that is different is different. You know, from the user’s perspective, you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John know, oh, this must be the thing, you know, I searched for, you know, Twitter, and this is the top one,
⏹️ ▶️ John this must be the best Twitter application, the most popular Twitter application,
⏹️ ▶️ John the most downloaded Twitter application, the application that most matches the keyword Twitter or if it’s a more complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or whatever, none of those things are true if it’s an ad. If it’s an ad, the answer is it’s because someone paid Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John money to put it there, which is totally different and totally a misaligned incentive with what the user was expecting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now because the Apple search results are so terrible, maybe a paid ad is just as relevant as the number
⏹️ ▶️ John in many cases. But in theory, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be ads. Having
⏹️ ▶️ John only one ad is good. it, you know, having you not be able to fill it with with garbage lies and
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I know, again, we fall back on the app store not being that great. I was gonna say that because
⏹️ ▶️ John the ads themselves can only contain text from your actual application, like you don’t get to write an ad, you don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John to write like your own ad copy. It just pulls from your actual application on the store, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John have an application on the store. And all this does is pull your icon, your name, your description, everything from
⏹️ ▶️ John your actual entry, that should go towards making sure that you can’t make a misleading
⏹️ ▶️ John ad or a fake ad, unfortunately, as we’ve seen many times over, you can make a misleading application icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make a misleading application name, and you can make your description misleading, and those can all be in the store, so this doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really save us. But again, in theory, the rule system is correct. You don’t get to write your own custom ad, so it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John classy, there’s only one of them, it’s limited, if everything goes well, this should all work out really well, and still I
⏹️ ▶️ John say that it’s not even Apple’s fault. No matter how prominently Apple says that this is an ad,
⏹️ ▶️ John most people I feel will not realize it’s an ad. They could put AD in gigantic black letters and people would
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, huh, what are these weird AD letters? They could put, this is an advertisement, Surgeon General’s warning,
⏹️ ▶️ John smoking causes cancer in a giant box, people would still not see it. This is a real phenomenon,
⏹️ ▶️ John it happens all the time, and Apple’s being so super subtle about it, there’s no chance that regular people are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to realize this is an ad unless someone points it out to them. Even if they notice the AD, they’d be like, what does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this an advanced copy? Or does this application contain ads?
⏹️ ▶️ John It is not clear at all. Now, maybe it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things whether it’s clear because
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the top Google search results are also ads and nobody knows and people click on them and the world turns on and everything is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think that is the final barrier to like a completely clean, totally classy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I sound like Donald Trump now. You know, like, believe me, you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And Apple style. How does Apple do advertising in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that avoids all the pitfalls of advertising?
⏹️ ▶️ John think they’ve avoided pretty much every single one of them in theory except for the part where people just absolutely cannot tell That this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, I think the reason that well one of the reasons it’s so hard to tell it’s an ad is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the Really great decisions they’ve made which is what you were just talking about that. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really write an ad For your app. It just shows your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps search results at the top and labels it as an ad And I think that’s really smart because then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re not gonna have a bunch of like really obnoxious like, you know punch the monkey sort of things going on. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the other side of the coin, it makes it nearly indistinguishable from all the genuine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey search results below it. So it’s kind of a double-edged sword, but I will absolutely take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this approach over allowing any sort of image there and, or, you know, God
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awful punch the monkey sort of things. This is a much classier, much better approach,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even despite the fact that by forcing it to look like the search results below it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does kind of blend in a bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing is, it’s not so much that it blends in because it does look distinct. It’s not like, oh, this is just like all the, but it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John the best result. Like that was the, I got to find the survey for the show notes, but the survey result was like, they showed people
⏹️ ▶️ John search results. I don’t know if it was Google, but like from a search engine and they asked them, what do you think these top results are? And people would
⏹️ ▶️ John say, these are the most popular results. These are the most relevant results. These are the results that most
⏹️ ▶️ John other, the most other people clicked on. Like, this is what people thought those results were. Well, they actually where it was ads. People
⏹️ ▶️ John could tell they were different, that they were highlighted, that they were prominent, but what they would read that as
⏹️ ▶️ John is, these are the best. Like, it is, it does look different. You can tell there’s the white results and then there’s the one
⏹️ ▶️ John blue one on top, but how you interpret that blueness is not built into the blueness. Like, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell that’s blue, are you colorblind? No, you can see that it’s different. Everyone sees it as different, but if you ask them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, again, you don’t prime them by giving them the answer and say, can you tell this is an ad? You say, what do you think the blue results
⏹️ ▶️ John were? I bet people are going to say, that’s the best result. That’s the one that’s the most downloaded. That’s, you know, like, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John highest rated. That’s what people are gonna say. Even though it says right in their face, capital A lowercase d in a tiny little blue box
⏹️ ▶️ John that I guarantee my parents cannot see, by the way. Even if you made it bigger, people won’t read it, or
⏹️ ▶️ John people will think that that meant the application contains ads. Which, by the way, is a thing they should probably tell you, and they do tell you if it contains in-app
⏹️ ▶️ John purchases, but… anyway. Not clear, not really Apple’s fault entirely, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John almost nothing they can do about it, but it’s one of the reasons that someone’s asking me if I was for or against this change.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’m slightly against it because I would rather just have a really good search. I see all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that Marco is saying about it from a user perspective. How applications
⏹️ ▶️ John gain traction in the market is not my problem, and I just want really relevant search results without any ads that I have to skip over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly though, as a user, maybe I’m biased because I’m a developer and I kind of understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the back workings of this, but as a user, I think it also might be helpful to know, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the search is usually pretty poor, if you’re looking for something decent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if an app is advertising, there’s a better, I think there’s a better chance it’s a decent app because it’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this app is being cared for, it has a budget. Or it has a
⏹️ ▶️ John really good free-to-play hooks and it’s gonna bankrupt me when my kid spends lots of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, obviously, games are a different story here. And games, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t usually, when we’re talking about app pricing and issues and stuff, I think we aren’t usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about games, which is worth clarifying because games are obviously not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they a massive part of the App Store, and we should be talking about them. The majority of the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. But they also work very differently in a lot of different ways. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you’re just talking apps, like, you know, non-game apps, if you’re searching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for something to do something, a certain type of app or whatever, the one that advertises there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that shows up there and that Apple has deemed relevant to your search query enough to show you that ad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that honestly to me is one signal of many that you should take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with whether this is the one you look at or not. It’s like having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a high quality icon or high quality screenshots or whether you garbage up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your name with a whole bunch of crap or whether you leave it fairly clean. It’s one signal of many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can use to try to figure out when you’re searching for something what should I what should I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look further into than the search result screen like you know what do I tap into to glance at to evaluate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and decide whether to download or not an app that has decided to pay for an ad and that can pay for an ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that is running an active ad campaign and that Apple has deemed relevant those are all useful signals
⏹️ ▶️ John do you use that same logic when you do Google searches do you click on the first five things which are all ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t do Google searches anymore but but oftentimes for duck duck go I do do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Searches, I know I’m that guy. I am too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, you use DuckDuckGo? You got all your photos in Google Photos. They have every picture of your family, but you won’t give them your searches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, because I actually think that DuckDuckGo has been better for me. Those bang
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shortcuts, whatever they call them, are the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are great. Those ducks, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those ducks are really getting to you. They’re really going. No, so like, but in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general, search result ads, I do occasionally click on, because they are occasionally what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking for. know, not every time, certainly, but sometimes. Sometimes when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search Amazon, Amazon has sponsored listings and sponsored alternatives to products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes I click on those, too. Not all the time, but sometimes. I know what that means.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just… So I use that as, again, one input of many to decide what to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with these results.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we’ll see how it works out. I can see many scenarios in which the people with the most money to spend on ads are going to be the
⏹️ ▶️ John worst developers with the worst apps. But it’s only one and realistically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the time I’m searching for an app because of the tech nerd that I am. I already know exactly what I’m looking for and I don’t spend a lot of time
⏹️ ▶️ John browsing. So maybe this is not particularly relevant to my life, but in general, I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John like the idea of advertisements moving themselves into the store in this way.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, if I can see the potential upside for developers on many fronts,
⏹️ ▶️ John so if it helps more good developers, then it helps bad developers. I guess it’s a net win for users as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and honestly if you think about like big big picture, you know long-term stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here I think not only does this make it easier for Less known developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get better known and it makes it way easier to launch a new app in a crowded category
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also long term I think this helps kind of support higher prices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like if we if we’re trying to move towards an app store where where developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have good reasons to charge higher prices and can sustain those prices. One of the ways you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get higher prices is by getting your app in front of a better targeted audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people to potentially buy it. And so the ads will help on that front. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers will now consider the cost of the ads when considering how to price their apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how high they can price them, how low they can afford to price them or not afford to price them. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all gonna be kind of added into all this calculus and all this marketing. So this will, in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, help slightly raise app prices and better reward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers who can find their target markets this way. I mean, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a really big move towards higher quality, more sustainable software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and making it easier, not harder, for new developers to break into the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so a couple of the quick points and then we really need to get in some WWDC talk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Beta will be over the summer and they’re not going to charge people during the beta. They are not showing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ads to anyone 13 or younger, which I think is excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they’re not going to do any terribly crazy tracking outside of location
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tracking, which you can pretty easily turn off in settings. So this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, as advertising goes, it’s a pretty Apple, pretty classy approach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to but it is still advertising in a place that we may or may not want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So we’ll see. But I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is like Apple’s second move into a second or third, depending how you
⏹️ ▶️ John can move into Google style businesses. It tried to do I add
⏹️ ▶️ John a serious kind of Google style thing. And I mean, this is what, you know, Google and Facebook, like
⏹️ ▶️ John their whole businesses are based on this type of thing and so it’s about time because certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John Google has done tons of Apple style things including making their own hardware and making a phone and you know doing all this stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to have a desktop operating system and Facebook I mean it’s got Oculus with on the hardware front
⏹️ ▶️ John try to make a phone once too anyway you know what’s good for the goose is good for the gander
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nice to see Apple like
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know it’s nice to see because I’m not that into the advertising thing but like for so long it seemed that every other company
⏹️ ▶️ John was willing to try to do the things that Apple was good at. And there were certain things that those other companies did to make lots of money
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple decided were not worth really looking into. Selling
⏹️ ▶️ John ads against search is not a speculative business model at this point. It is.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a known quantity. And the fact that Apple just didn’t do it for so long,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, other than selling the Safari search bar to Google, but that’s kind of more of a corporate thing than an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John bidding on keywords. If Apple wants to make more money from services,
⏹️ ▶️ John this could definitely work out. I saw someone joking again on the pessimistic angle that
⏹️ ▶️ John the 80-15 split, all the extra money that developers make will get funneled right back into Apple in the form of paying for keyword
⏹️ ▶️ John search ads. But hey, if that is a virtuous cycle that produces more and more revenue and
⏹️ ▶️ John more and more customers, I think everyone will still be happy.
WWDC predictions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the thing that you two are going to that I’m not. Thanks for that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is Wednesday that we’re recording the 8th of June. This coming Monday, the 13th of June
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the big keynote and then following the keynote is the developer state of the union. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are we expecting Apple will announce? We are hearing no hardware. We’re hearing a lot of rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Siri on OS X and Mac OS. What are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we thinking? Let’s start with Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, you know, it’s software updates. I think it’s gonna be the big thing. You know, what’s new in iOS?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s new on Mac OS? What is new? You know, TV, watch. I mean, look, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now has four platforms that they are hopefully evolving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a steady pace. You know, I would imagine iOS is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to slow down at some point. It’s going to mature at some point, but Apple always pushes that one really hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPad probably has separate enhancements for multitasking and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially because Apple is still pushing the iPad hard, trying to save its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sales decline. I expect to see major time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco energy devoted to iPad software improvements for pro use in all likelihood, things like multitasking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, what’s new on the iPhone, that’s gonna get some big stuff. What’s new on Mac OS 12,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that’s obviously gonna be a part of it. Anything that’s new, you know, if there’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, any new major underlying technologies, any new methods of storing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files on the local disk, John. You know, if there’s anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, shared technologies, that’s gonna get some time. And then you gotta figure, this is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first WWDC since the Apple TV was launched. It’s probably gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something Apple TV related, you know, major new stuff in Apple TV OS, whatever, TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS. And then I honestly hope there’s significant changes to watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS too, because- Sorry, you’re out
⏹️ ▶️ John of time in the keynote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. So like, you know, they unveiled all this, all this like developer app store changes today. You know, if you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like all the software platforms need to go into that keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially the ones that are still fairly young, like iPad Pro, and tvOS, and watchOS, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still have lots of room for major improvements. I think it’s going to be a pretty full keynote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not to mention, if they actually shove in the Apple Music update again, which was rumored. I hope they don’t, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they probably will. If they actually shove that in there too, that takes even more time. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know they try to keep the keynotes to under two hours. So I think it’s going to be software updates, That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole thing, basically. Software updates almost the whole time, and then maybe a little bit for Apple Music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s two hours, easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The thing I’m most interested in is there’s been a humongous push towards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cloud data and big data and processing huge quantities of data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and doing it server-side, like Google Photos as a great example. I’m really curious to see,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and actually Alexa from Amazon, I’m really curious to see what is Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer to this, or maybe even not answer, but what is their approach to solving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar problems? And then not even necessarily with photos, but just in general, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who has an Alexa seems to fall in love with her. So what is Apple doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Siri or an equivalent technology to keep our attention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on products that they create? And I don’t know what that’s going to be. But I’m very curious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see what they do in that department, because I suspect they’re going to do something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a little bit different than everyone else, a little bit more Apple than everyone else, which is obvious,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but something that we didn’t really expect. And I’m looking forward to seeing what that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here Marco make his snarky file system comment about new ways of storing
⏹️ ▶️ John bits to disk or whatever. We realize that we’re all entering
⏹️ ▶️ John the age where we say things like, did you tape that on TV? I think we all say tape. Do you guys say
⏹️ ▶️ John tape that? You should tape that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know what you’re saying, but I think I usually say record.
⏹️ ▶️ John You may be past that, but I’m borderline. In my generation, we all tape things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t make any sense because for such a long time, we haven’t been using VCRs or anything that has actual tape.
⏹️ ▶️ John We still, on phones, and even you’ll watch the WWDC presentations unless it’s being done by
⏹️ ▶️ John a very young person, we’ll talk about, you know, disk I.O. or writing things to disk. There’s no disk.
⏹️ ▶️ John There never has been a disk in a phone, right? As in a round thing that spins. But we still say disk.
⏹️ ▶️ John So disk is the new tape. What else is new? Anyway, speaking of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if they want to announce a new file system, that’s fine. Like, whatever. I still say 2017. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to see this thing on people’s computers until 2017, but you want to announce it a year early? for it. Bring
⏹️ ▶️ John it on. Anyway, uh, to more serious predictions, I’m really sad if all these rumors about
⏹️ ▶️ John no hardware are going to be are true because I’m excited about hardware, but you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ John can you do if it’s the obvious ones are, you know, the Mac and iOS updates because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve, you know, the iOS upstate, like whatever, we know that’s happening. The Mac one, we also kind of know what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John happening. We know about a rebrand. We know about Syria on, uh, on the Mac. Uh, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what other features they’re going to mix in there. all well and good based on the
⏹️ ▶️ John the the marketing and the design of the WWDC site and also
⏹️ ▶️ John all the activity on Swift Evolution which has been tentatively out in the open. Surely there will be stuff in there about the new version of
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift. I mean we already know everything about Swift 3. Look at the mailing list. It’s all public. You know what’s going to be in there. I don’t think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be any surprises there like oh there’s a secret feature of Swift 3 that we didn’t even reveal. Maybe one or two minor ones
⏹️ ▶️ John like that but nothing restrattering. But they will emphasize that. You know it’ll get a slide or two in the keynote and then much more
⏹️ ▶️ John in the state of the union. Hey, if you haven’t been paying attention, Swift three is actually pretty different than Swift 2.2 and a bunch of ways they’re going to break your
⏹️ ▶️ John apps. But don’t worry, Xcode will fix them for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and speaking of Xcode, you know, you said that there’s not a lot of surprises they could have with regard to Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s all out in the open. And I agree, but they could certainly have some surprises around Xcode. For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example, much better Swift support, for example, syntax highlighting that doesn’t crash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey constantly, for example, segfault 11 going away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crashes even more. more. Is that a feature or a bug?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Historically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, they’ve done a lot of changes to Xcode to support Swift and not all of them have reduced the number of crashes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So, we’ll see. I would love, God would I ever love, to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some improvements to Xcode with regard to Swift. And actually, I like Xcode. I don’t begrudge it like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so many people seem to, perhaps because I just haven’t been using it long enough. But there are definitely annoyances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I run into pretty much daily, that I would, Typically around Swift that I would love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see improved so fingers crossed
⏹️ ▶️ John you You’re pretty much guaranteed to get that there’s gonna be a new version of Xcode. It’s gonna have better Swift support It’s gonna have fewer bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be faster. It’s gonna support all the news, but like that’s gonna happen that happens every year That’s gonna happen as well. It’s also that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John also a gimme I think the wild cards for me are again
⏹️ ▶️ John still sticking to software watching TV I don’t know first of all, I don’t know how much room there
⏹️ ▶️ John is is the things I just listed you’re already at the point where you have room for maybe one or two more segments
⏹️ ▶️ John how much can you really say about watching TV I also have under the impression that one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John two platforms is not gonna have that much new about it I just don’t know which one it is right I hope it’s TV because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the newer one and the watch could really use some some TLC but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not quite sure what to expect there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV doesn’t really need a whole lot right now. Well, it needs a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot. It needs a new remote, but they’re not going to announce that at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that would be a fall hardware update thing. And honestly, I’m not expecting the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV to be updated every year. I’m guessing we don’t get a new one this fall. I’m guessing maybe it’s on a two-year cycle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we’ll see. We’ll talk about that later. But the tvOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general, it’s fine. It’s not perfect, but it’s fine. The watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really needs a lot of help in a lot of areas. And it’s also, as you said, it’s also the older platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would expect, I hope that if they’re trying to figure out how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to allocate resources here, I hope watchOS gets more attention. In reality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what I’ve heard, watchOS is still like a very separate team from the rest of the organization.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I really hope we see something significant from watchOS. And I think we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will. I think the time is right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if they didn’t have time to do like a whole rethink and revamp, they just do custom watch faces, they get a lot of applause, everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out smiling, right? It doesn’t take much, you know, like, because that’s a significant enough feature
⏹️ ▶️ John where they don’t have time to really delve into all the details of how what is the role of the watch and blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. If you just do custom watch faces that opens up such a market, and people will attend the sessions and
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone will want to make one and people who have watches will be excited about the idea. That’s just a you know, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying that I’m not predicting this is something we’re to do. But all you need is one announcement of that caliber, it will
⏹️ ▶️ John tamp down a lot of the grumbling. And I don’t think they have I don’t think they have time even the presentation, if they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John totally rethought watch OS, like in Marco style rethink, we’re like, you know, we’ve learned a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John from years worth of work. And it turns out we were totally wrong about 100 ways that people use their watches. I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have time to talk about that with everything else. Because my final prediction is like, if this is ready,
⏹️ ▶️ John this will be a cornerstone of the presentation, which is we know series coming to the Mac and everything. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John if there is a radically new better version of Siri, which I really hope there is, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple, that will be a fairly big leg on the stool that is this presentation, just
⏹️ ▶️ John if not just simply because those things are prominent now with the Echo and with
⏹️ ▶️ John Alexa and with Google I O leaning so heavily on that and with the rumors of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John improving Siri, they will spend time in the keynote saying Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John is better than ever. Uh, and I think they have to, to to show that
⏹️ ▶️ John they are still relevant in that market. They were one of the pioneers in that market, and
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone else seemed to be eclipsing them. They have to at least say, hey, we’re still here. And I think what
⏹️ ▶️ John they would like to say is, in fact, the new version of Siri is the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna burn a lot of keynote time showing you demos of people talking into a computer that they hope to God listens
⏹️ ▶️ John to them and does what they want it to do live on stage. So I don’t know anything about whether
⏹️ ▶️ John an amazing new version of Siri is ready, but if it is, I think that’s gonna get a lot of time. So when I envision
⏹️ ▶️ John this keynote, I see lots of software, every single update has something that you like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John tentpole features, the really new version of Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift and the new version of Xcode as the little developer nugget, and then some other wild card for maybe Watch
⏹️ ▶️ John or something else I’m not even thinking of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I forgot about Siri, but that’s obviously, you’re totally right. I mean, they, like, you know, in the current landscape,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they need to say something about Siri. So I’m totally with you. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will present a new version of Siri that appears to be very much improved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether it is actually very much improved, we don’t know yet. And it might not be. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they will definitely present it as if it is regardless. And if there’s an API,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even better. I really, really hope there is a Siri API. I think we are way past
⏹️ ▶️ John But… That’s part of the new improved Siri, not just that it listens to you better, but that it’s like those other ones where they all have APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple doesn’t yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, if there’s really an API to Siri, and it’s done in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps can actually take advantage of, not just like a handful of real tiny use cases, but if it’s done well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if it’s done broadly, so lots of apps can use it for lots of good things, it almost wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter whether the underlying service improved at all otherwise or not. That would be enough. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a big deal to do that. that would certainly be a much better series.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think last year, I think maybe the past, I think my track record for WSC predictions the
⏹️ ▶️ John week before have been awful. Like that I’m just like totally wrong about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco everything. Not as bad as
⏹️ ▶️ John mine. Just take that in account. So it’s much easier for me to do the next thing, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John which announcements would you most be excited about? And the more I think about it, the more I think that I would actually be more
⏹️ ▶️ John excited by a new Mac Pro than a new file system. Not because I think the new Mac Pro is more needed than a new file system,
⏹️ ▶️ John But because like the last Guardian, I’m willing to wait till, you know, I don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John wait to 2017 for the last Guardian. Right guys, 2016? Anyway, I’m willing to wait.
⏹️ ▶️ John 2017 is my file system year. I’m five minute away, it’s over there. 2017, new file system. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna announce it now, fine, but if not, I won’t be broken up. But this is the year of the new Mac Pro. If you’re gonna keep making the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, it’s time. So I will, that is the announcement at WDAC
⏹️ ▶️ John that will get me personally the most excited is new Mac Pro. probably not the most exciting to almost
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone else in the entire audience especially Casey but that’s that’s what I want
⏹️ ▶️ John if they do a new file system and not the Mac Pro I’ll be like you could have saved the file system to next year
⏹️ ▶️ John and give me the Mac Pro this year because honestly a new file system is not gonna help any not gonna help my poor 2008 Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro right now like it’s new fossils not even gonna probably run on it well maybe on the SSD but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway I want a new Mac Pro in this completely hardware freaky note I’m almost certainly not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to get one, but that’s my pie in the sky dream. What if you could pick any feasible announcement for WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John as your number one, what would it be?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a really good question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hmm. I mean, we already got like, you know, substantial app store business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model changes today.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Yeah, you can’t pick that one. I would say it becomes unfeasible because if they were there, they would have been in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this announcement. So it’s no longer feasible. Not that they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do them, but it’s just that you got them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So you’re talking just keynote, not like the whole conference, just keynote announcements basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hmm. Because you know one of the wild cards that people are asking for or the people are predicting possibly is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of developer tools for the iPad whether it’s Xcode or Playgrounds or something else you know some kind of developer story for
⏹️ ▶️ John Last year or the year before I thought they were gonna announce it. Yeah I fully expect that to arrive someday but I haven’t heard enough rumblings
⏹️ ▶️ John to think this is the year but who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I that’s I mean it depends you know what’s the what would be the scope of it like if they wanted to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just Swift Playgrounds you know just you know just that to the iPad without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole developer tool stack. That’s obviously a much smaller problem set to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over, and that is more plausible. You just have playgrounds. To bring over Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the iPad, I think people who are predicting that maybe don’t understand or don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite how complex of a job that would be, because it isn’t just the Xcode interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the entire system of, you know, the massive ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and pile of tools and frameworks and everything that goes under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xcode. Everything that Xcode is, like, calling out to do all the work and all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build tools and integration with other things that are part of people’s build needs and everything. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complex to bring over all of Xcode. I don’t think it’s going to happen in the near future because it just depends.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s pretty near there’s a reason the iPad Pro has four gigs like if I’m not saying it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be this year but I think is totally feasible this year and next year is when you should really be on the lookout if it doesn’t happen
⏹️ ▶️ John this year because I think it’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full-on Xcode or just like a playground equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously it’ll be a different application you can’t have sure windows and everything right but but like all those tools that Margo’s talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about I’d like I said that’s I think that’s why the iPad Pro has four gigs why else does the iPad Pro have four gigs doesn’t make any
⏹️ ▶️ John sense unless unless it is allowing for a class of application that does not yet exist on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And one of those classes of applications would be a ever so slightly cut down version of Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John think it has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much RAM just so it can multitask efficiently and well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why doesn’t mine have four gigs? I like to multitask.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, I think long term Xcode will, or developer tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will come to the iPad. But I don’t think we’re there yet because it is such a big job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Playgrounds, you know, some kind of like very cut down subset of it, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like whatever we would call, like something that we would consider Xcode or
⏹️ ▶️ John equivalent. Can you make an app and put it on the App Store?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe. But there’s so, I mean, there’s so much there that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, that you need for the platform to support that it just doesn’t yet, or that it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very clunkily so far for developer
⏹️ ▶️ John tools. It wouldn’t have to be sandboxed, you know. It would be the one app that’s, you know, no rules would apply to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but it’s so much to bring over and so much change and so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people don’t, if you just think about that idea, if you just throw it out there, you don’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite how much more is involved until you really start thinking about, okay, well, let’s bring over things like version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control and package management and all the compilers and all the linkers and all the libraries and all the tools and like.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ll all run in four gigs. Oh, geez. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mean, it’s… You mean your
⏹️ ▶️ John compile times will not be good?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No. Right. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. And you know, it’s already slow on like an iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I know. To build like a big Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco project, it’s not fast. You know, that’s what I’m saying. Like I think, you know, long term I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we’ll probably get there, but I would not expect this to be imminent, you know, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is only a very cut down version like Playgrounds only.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I agree. I had a vision in the audience when Swift was announced and my vision was Xcode for
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad and now just because I had that vision I feel like it’s closer than other people do but it doesn’t make any sense. Anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John that wouldn’t be your most excited you still haven’t said what you’d be most excited about that’s feasible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess it would probably be Mac Pro plus 5k but I think it’s you know Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PR has been so clearly leaking to everybody that there’s not going to be any new hardware so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John still feasible that you can have that as your pick I had it as
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would even I would even argue it’s not feasible because Apple PR has basically said it’s not happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean like technically feasible like the reason the App Store changes aren’t feasible because they already did that not because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like you know
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway if you don’t want to pick that I would have picked for you watch but you don’t wear the watch anymore never mind you were so
⏹️ ▶️ John excited about watch faces until you stop wearing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well and you know I would certainly be interested in developing watch faces I but I think I would be I’d be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more interested if the watch hardware also changed to have some kind of always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on screen mode. Because that like, now that I’ve gotten accustomed to regular watches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one thing that really irritates me when I go back to the Apple Watch for like a day here or there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the face isn’t always on. So like you glance at it and you have to wait for it to turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and sometimes it doesn’t. You know, like that, adding that level of, adding that amount of friction to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every little interaction that when you’re glancing at your watch when you aren’t used to it is very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of just grinds. It’s just It’s irritating. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to get back into wearing the Apple Watch and using it for any meaningful amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, I would need, I think, two things. I would need, first, I would want custom watch faces,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I wanna make my own, of course. And then second, I would want some kind of always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on screen. And I just don’t think that’s feasible this year. Maybe in a hardware event
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later this year or next year when a new watch is unveiled, maybe then. But honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco given the state of the watch hardware and software today, it doesn’t seem like an always on screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode is even in the plans. But I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, your inability to pick one is, in keeping with your top four performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Exactly. Casey, what is your?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will partially not pick three options here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your feasible announcement that you’d be most excited about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See? It’s hard. It’s hard. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John have answers for both of you. I already gave Marco’s answer. He should have been the watch face one. Casey’s answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is the new MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, because I’m not going to get one.
⏹️ ▶️ John but you would be most excited about it. You want one. You know you shouldn’t get one. You’d feel ashamed, but you’d be like, oh, those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that is true, that I would lust for one and I would be excited about one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I am pretty happy with my Retina 5K life at home. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting here now, in famous Casey last words, I don’t see anything wrong with my current MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John wait until you start unlocking your… Seeing people unlock their new MacBook Pros with Touch ID while
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re typing in your password on the lock screen again and again. Truth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think… You know what? This is a very odd choice, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wouldn’t be during the keynote, I’m quite sure. But I’d love to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a better reflection API in Swift. Because I feel like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reflection allows me to solve a whole class of problems. And I include in that annotations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. So in C Sharp, that would be attributes. Reflection and annotations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Swift, I think, would be really, really awesome. And it would help me solve a bunch of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m struggling to solve today. are ways around these problems or there are ways to solve these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems without reflection, without meta programming, but it would be easier if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had it. Oh, and I always get them backwards but covariance and contravariance in generics,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better support for that because it’s driving me up a wall.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say that those aren’t feasible only because if they were coming, you would have already seen them on Swift evolution because those are
⏹️ ▶️ John the type of stuff they would do. And they talked about them and I think they are coming, but probably not Swift 3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I want most.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, we all want things that are not feasible. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s so many things that are feasible. Like, I think all the unannounced hardware is feasible. Like they could announce it even
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s not shipping for a long time, right? Even a new Apple TV or something like that would be
⏹️ ▶️ John feasible, but oh well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I think something that is truly feasible that I think I would be the most amped up about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actually probably the Thunderbolt display because at first I didn’t really get the draw, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that I’m living this life that we were discussing earlier where I’m really living
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the simulator and doing it on a non-retina screen, it’s pretty frigging miserable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s miserable enough that I would probably use my own personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money to buy myself a Thunderbolt display or whatever they end up calling it, an external
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retina display, and bringing it to the office and having it just live there because it would make my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey professional life that much better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hear that Apple? We all want 5K external displays. Chop chop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes please. You know John, you’d have to buy a new Mac Pro to drive it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I know. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no way your 2008 Mac Pro is driving that thing, GPU inside or not. There’s no way it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving it. You don’t even have Thunderbolt 1 ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You don’t even have USB 3. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ John the current Mac Pro? Yeah it does, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, just barely.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t have USB-C, type C connectors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, thanks to our three sponsors this week, Ring, Hover and Backblaze. And we will see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you next week live from California where we will be on vacation always.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let
⏹️ ▶️ John him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at ATP.FM And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T.
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to. Accidental, check the podcast
Post-show: Marco changes an opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you want this this would be a time for me to talk about my Garbage topic at the bottom of the list the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you decide you love the Apple watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah Margo changes an opinion. I love the how that’s a bullet point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I think I like the iPad now
⏹️ ▶️ John You just sold the big pro I thought that was like you got two big pros and you sold or did you sell tips because she’s using the
⏹️ ▶️ John small one now So we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got the Big Pro. Tiff thought she might be interested in it and it was her upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cycle for the iPad, her upgrade year. And she ended up just not really liking it that much. She loved the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pencil support, but it was just so big that she kept her regular size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 10-inch iPad around also. And having two iPads, if you’re not Mike or CGP Grey, It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco burdensome and a little bit wasteful in some ways, for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She decided, she said, I could have the big pro and we got her one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new baby pros when it came out. Because she wanted pencil support, we wanted to consolidate, so Tiff got her new baby
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro and I got the big one. And the big one, I didn’t have much to do with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not for me at all. So since neither of us were using the big one, we sold it. The Baby Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, one thing I noticed during the brief time I spent with the Big One and then I verified with the Baby Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that A, I do like pencil support occasionally. Not all the time, but occasionally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And B, I really like the speakers. And I mean when they first announced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the major upgrade to the speakers for the iPad Pro, I thought, okay, who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cares? I guess they had all this space to give to something, I guess shove better speakers in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I didn’t think it was a big deal. And Amazon had their crap tablets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few years ago, and they were advertising how great their sound was. I thought, not a big deal. Who cares? It’s sound on a tablet. Who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as I mentioned before, I listen to a lot of podcasts through the built-in speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my devices. During the brief time that I had the giant iPad Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used it a lot to listen to Overcast in the kitchen and living room.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a space-inefficient approach, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. So I use it a lot for that, and especially in the kitchen. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so good to be able to maybe have a recipe displayed or something, but just to have that be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so nice and loud and clear with those speakers, it was so great to have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a kitchen and dining room speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ John could use it as a tray to carry food into
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the table. Exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, yeah. I basically fell in love with the speakers, the iPad Pro. Once the speakers were,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I was using it constantly speakers well that also meant that solves another problem I always have but I always have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iPads which is they’re never where I wanted them to be like they would like oh I want I might I might use the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the couch right now but it’s upstairs because I was using it last night or whatever so it was always like not in the same room well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was using it every day in the kitchen so it was always there was always in the same spot it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always either it was right next to a plug it was always either plugged in or had just been plugged in so it was always charged always there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was using it frequently enough that it was always at hand. So I started using it more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started using it like, you know, after we’d cook and maybe go watch some TV before bed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would bring the iPad over to the couch because it was nearby and browse the web and stuff on there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of on my phone. And, you know, it’s obviously more pleasant when you have more screen space. If you have one of these devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at hand, you generally want to use it. It’s usually better. So I started using it more because it was my usage pattern had changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the speakers were so good that I would want to use it constantly for that purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it was always around for other purposes. But the Big Pro is way too big for that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of use. It’s so big that the Big Pro I think is really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re using it literally as an iPad Pro user. If you’re using it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for major productivity use, for major multitasking use, uses where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you really take advantage of all that screen space. Not just browsing Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the web when you’re watching TV or trying to read or something like that. It’s not great for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we decided to sell it and Tiff got a Baby Pro and then I got a Baby
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro too. I sold all my other iPads, all the previous ones. I don’t need any of them anymore because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my app runs on the iPad but hardly anybody uses it there. So I don’t have to worry about, what if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a bug on the iPad 3? No, that hasn’t happened in years, so I don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep all these around. Sold every other one. We both now have Baby Pros. I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it every day. I’ve been using it heavily. And it’s now been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, almost a month. It’s been a while. So it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I now, I’m using it more often, more per day, and it has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer since I bought it, when I’m still using it, than any previous iPad I’ve ever owned. I think it’s actually sticking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. because it is kind of always at hand, because I’m always using it for the sound, I’m always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it for overcast. So because it’s always around, that has fixed the main problem I always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have with it, which is it’s never where I want it to be, so I just don’t use it. And so now I’m getting into things like, oh, I wonder how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more I could do on it. Obviously I’m not gonna be programming on it anytime soon, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could start answering some emails. I’m getting a little bit better at the iPad typing keyboard. I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of wait for the iPad to do certain browsing tasks that are better on it, certain shopping tasks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are better on it. You know, it’s like, I’m using it now. Like, what other iPad people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like about it, I’m starting to see some of these things. And granted, I’m nowhere near the level of, like, real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad Pros like Federico, but just getting a little taste of it, it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. And I don’t think I’m going to stop buying laptops, because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like laptops a lot, and when I need a laptop, I really need a laptop. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the baby pro especially is so good. And I have my pencil loop on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the same one, Mike had a little stick on loop. So I always have the pencil. I don’t use the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have one for plane trips, but I don’t leave it on because it’s too big and heavy. So just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the regular smart cover with the pencil always available. It’s just really nice. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get it. Again, I don’t know if this is gonna totally replace my portable needs forever, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get it now. and I’m using it now on a regular basis.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny you say that, that the keyboard is only there for like plane trips or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because maybe a week or two ago, I went into the Apple store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and very, very briefly played with the Baby Pros keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am a devout iPad mini user. I really love my iPad mini. I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad minis for the last couple of cycles now, and I love the portability of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s the right size for me. But after having tried that keyboard that was close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to my beloved Magic Keyboard that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey felt pretty similar. I walked out of that Apple store thinking to myself, maybe I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go full-size iPad again, which was weird because I have not longed for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 10-inch iPad since I stopped buying them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after the iPad 3. But the keyboard was enough to make me think, Maybe I do want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go back there. I mean, not to say you’re wrong or I’m right or vice versa, just it’s funny that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each of us is having our own little thing to bring us back to the iPad or the 10-inch iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, for me, it was the speakers. And for you, it could be the keyboard. I mean, I found the keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main problem with it is not the feel of the keys. It’s actually surprisingly not as crappy as I expected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not great, but it’s not as bad as I expected. But the big problem for me is just the additional weight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the keyboard. It makes the iPad substantially heavier to just carry around the house and to just have around.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s good to know because I didn’t pick up this iPad and I really don’t need another iPad right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John any reason I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can have not to buy one sounds great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I never left the iPad. I’m glad that you’re using it for all the things that everyone else is using it for. One thing you didn’t mention that you might want to try,
⏹️ ▶️ John although it’s kind of a shame you probably already played all these games, is a lot of games that you played and enjoyed are even better
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad. I remember when I was in my Alto’s adventure phase. I alternated from playing
⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone and on the iPad but eventually settled on and when I was going for a real serious high Score run the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John was the place to be it just gives you much more room To do stuff and to see things without your fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John blocking stuff and you can see the graphics better even like, you know games were you know, but you just
⏹️ ▶️ John there aren’t reaction based games like What do you call it the isometric
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective? thing with IDA Monument
⏹️ ▶️ John Valley yeah there you go that one I played that on the iPad too, but it just looks it looks better So
⏹️ ▶️ John if there are any games you didn’t play that everyone else played and thought was awesome try them on your iPad And any
⏹️ ▶️ John new games you try? Give them a try on your iPad before you try playing them on your phone because it’s a really good
⏹️ ▶️ John game platform for those type Of games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I actually earlier today. I discovered that that new game That the humans are other from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world of goo people where you like program wait what? What? That’s, what is it called? It’s like human
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something, like the human resource or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Yeah, human resource department thing. It’s like a programming game, no under marker like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, is this the one that teaches you like assembly or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, yeah, it’s called human resource, the title’s cut off, so it’s human resource something. Human resource
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine, the chat room says. There you go, yeah, it’s the World of Goo people, so I love World of Goo, so I figured. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I loved World of Goo. I figured I’d give this a shot, even though it’s not the same kind of game at all, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love their style, and I figured, I got so much enjoyment out of World of Goo that giving them another five bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if I never even play this game, is totally worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of, do you own like every Tokuboka game in existence?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if I own every one of them, but we certainly own many of them. That is, you know, Adam’s iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is filled with Tokuboka stuff, among other things. Sega Mini is also a big one. Sega
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini makes excellent children’s games.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there was a profile of them in the latest issue of Edge Magazine talking about Tokuboka,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was always impressed with those in terms of they make so many of them and you think Like how can they
⏹️ ▶️ John have so many apps and each one? Our kids really enjoyed them and got a lot of my daughter
⏹️ ▶️ John still plays them from time to time even though she’s probably outgrown most of them now, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another good example of a a whole class a whole line of games that
⏹️ ▶️ John was totally made for and for touch and couldn’t exist on other platforms and it’s just uh really
⏹️ ▶️ John good and of course better on the ipad than on the phone yeah well i’m glad you’ve joined
⏹️ ▶️ John the ipad uh the ipad age
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep you and mike both john and i never left but you and mike were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John oh the ipad sucks you
⏹️ ▶️ John left when you went down to that little mini thing it’s practically like a phone size thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey i feel like you’re leaving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine i remember i don’t use a mutant uh humongous phone like Mike, speaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, you and Mike were all poo-poo on the iPad and suddenly look who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crawling back. I’m feeling very smug about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the iPad Pro, the big Pro, was interesting for people who were already into it for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most part. And it got some new people in, but I think it was mostly like, mostly appealed to people who were already into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But I think the baby Pro is really like what, there’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no downsides to it at all, unless you need more screen space. Literally everything, what? The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Three gigs of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s literally no, just think of how awesome that machine, if that machine came with four gigs of RAM, it would be unquestionably
⏹️ ▶️ John the best iPad Apple has ever, it would be such a perfect product, like no downsides, all
⏹️ ▶️ John upside amazing. As it stands, the Baby Pro is practically all downsides, no
⏹️ ▶️ John upside, you know, whatever I just said. Anyway, except for that one little thing. So close, so close, Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for whatever it’s worth, maybe I’m just not using it heavily enough. the amount of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not been a noticeable problem for me. And it is so, so good in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every other way. This is like a really solid release, a really solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of the iPad. And it just has the keyboard, it has the pencil, it has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing new screen and the color stuff. And it’s just, and it’s so, you know, of course it’s still, you know, very lightweight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and very easy to carry around and very fast. I mean, it’s just, it’s so good. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really think like if there’s any role for an iPad in your life at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an amazing iPad to have. It’s just, it’s so, so good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve even, the little back case thing has even grown on me. Remember I said I had like the back cover, the silicone,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever they call it, and I didn’t know if I was gonna stick with it. Now I’m pretty firmly in the camp that I like
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I still don’t like the little lip around the edge, but I do still recognize the lip gives me a little bit of extra grip because the
⏹️ ▶️ John board is too small. But the grippiness on the back, giving it more security as I rest it on, like the curved
⏹️ ▶️ John arm of my sofa and stuff, and the protection that it adds. I think it probably helps that I went down
⏹️ ▶️ John from the three to this, but I don’t think I’m taking that case off, I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool, yeah, and I’m very happy with just having the front smart cover, because it’s very small and lightweight, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m concerned about the surface it’s on, I just put it face down on the cover, so it’s not like, you know, scratching the back,
⏹️ ▶️ John easy. Oh, what is that loop thing? You should send me a link to that, because I’ve been looking for a way to, moment go to WDC
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m going to bring my pencil with me how am I going to attach it to something sounds like you have a solution to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is the Lecateur 1917 red
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pen loop hold on I’ll give you a link yeah it’s it’s made to attach pens to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notebooks but it works perfectly well on the iPad too here we go you know you stick it on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can unstick it really easily you know so don’t worry about like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John permanent sticking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what is this we’re God’s out. What are you talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John here? How else are you going to attach anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to your iPad? I thought, what is it? I see three of this. Is this three separate ones? It’s a sticky pad with a little
⏹️ ▶️ John tube that you shove the pen through? I would expect this from Mike with his stickers all over everything, but you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re sticking things to your iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normally I wouldn’t stick anything to any of my things, because I hate being sticky and I hate having things stuck to my things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this provides such a good utility that it is really worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reject this. That’s fine, you can reject it. I will enjoy my always available Apple Pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also did the thing where I replaced the back cap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the pencil with the lightning cable adapter to charge it. Like I just keep that on there all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time, which is great. Like I put the cap in the box.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does that, did that come with it? Does that adapter, I think it’s still in the box. I’d have to go in the attic to fish that out. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco look into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the one that just has a lightning hole on two sides. Now my pencil can always be charged via a nearby
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightning cable. And for the very rare case where I would want to charge it from the lightning port on the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I can take this, you know, quote cap off and put it in there for a minute. But it’s way more common that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge it with a cable. So it makes sense to do that cap swap thing. So then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just always in that mode by default. And you always have that with you. You always have that adapter with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. I wish they would just ship it that way, but I understand why they don’t. Because Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ive is just too perfect the other way. No, it doesn’t work as well.