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

211: Hardware Mind Virus

USB-C iPhones, Overcast ads, and bitter-tasting game cartridges.

Episode Description:

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MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. Intro
  2. Follow-up: APFS
  3. Follow-up: Tesla harassment suit
  4. To Uber or not?
  5. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  6. Overcast ad sales launch
  7. Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
  8. USB-C iPhones?
  9. Nintendo Switch cartridges
  10. Sponsor: Betterment
  11. USB-C iPhones? (reprise)
  12. Ending theme
  13. Post-show: Decoding Tim

Intro

⏹️ ▶️ John Zeon gold that’s really the name of this thing Zeon Pro gold yeah extreme

⏹️ ▶️ John Special edition

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I mean if they’re released in sky like a P. I don’t care what they call it But that’s really a stupid name 18 cores

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zeon gold are they gonna make a gold Mac Pro? That would be amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There could even be an addition. That’s solid gold John it if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next Mac Pro is only available in rose gold and like actual rose gold not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like pink aluminum but actual rose gold that would probably raise the price by $15,000

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would you buy that Mac Pro? Nope can’t swing it. What if it had a gaming video card in it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Still no? That’s cold Marco. No $15,000

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers sorry. Well I mean at the rate that you replace them that actually isn’t that ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, how many cars have you had during the time you’ve had this Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ John I get a lot more value out of the cars.

Follow-up: APFS

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we should start with follow-up as we always do. Tyler

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Locke has some APFS boot experiments that he has performed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would you like to tell us about that, Mr. File Systems?

⏹️ ▶️ John He was the person who last week tweeted about

⏹️ ▶️ John booting a Mac off of APFS, and we talked about it in follow-up.

⏹️ ▶️ John And one of the points that I made during that segment was that he had posted a screenshot of the git

⏹️ ▶️ John info window in the finder of the volume that he booted from and it said APFS case insensitive

⏹️ ▶️ John and what I thought that meant was that uh that APFS on his

⏹️ ▶️ John volume that he booted off was case insensitive and therefore all the weird problems that we discussed about trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John run macOS and its applications on case sensitive file systems wouldn’t apply. I should have looked a little

⏹️ ▶️ John bit farther down his tweet timeline because apparently he subsequently tweeted that finder

⏹️ ▶️ John and other utilities are confused about whether the volume is case insensitive or not. rest assured it is case

⏹️ ▶️ John sensitive. So it’s kind of weird that the get info window says case insensitive

⏹️ ▶️ John but he’s telling me no no this APFS volume is case sensitive. So again he’s

⏹️ ▶️ John doing weird stuff on an unreleased you know beta everything so still doesn’t tell

⏹️ ▶️ John us what the final incarnation of this is going to be whether it’s in a point release of Sierra or whether it’s in the next major

⏹️ ▶️ John version of MagOS but that’s super weird that the finder

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thinks

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s case case insensitive, but knows that it’s APFS, but that the actual volume

⏹️ ▶️ John is case sensitive. So oh, well. Ooh, riveting. It is. It’s because

⏹️ ▶️ John this is this will be an important, even though this seems esoteric as the follow

⏹️ ▶️ John up we had a couple of last week or whatever, but your programs won’t work if it’s case sensitive like or they won’t work for

⏹️ ▶️ John some period of time till the developers update them. It will make you sad. So you better hope they start

⏹️ ▶️ John this out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. you

Follow-up: Tesla harassment suit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we have a little bit of talk about the various cesspools in Silicon Valley.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that redundant? Anyway, Tesla apparently is having some problems with harassment. Surprise,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprise. There’s an article in The Guardian, which I haven’t had the chance to read, but I intend to read

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tomorrow. A female engineer sues Tesla, describing a culture of, quote, pervasive harassment,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote. You don’t say. A technology and car company. That’s surprising.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I put that in there just because not so much about the specific story, which this is actually

⏹️ ▶️ John interesting in that it’s a current employee suing the company. So that’s another twist on this. But just to

⏹️ ▶️ John reinforce the idea that we touched on last week about Uber, that although Uber

⏹️ ▶️ John is surely an extremely egregious example, that this problem is not isolated to a single

⏹️ ▶️ John company, to a single person, to a single bad apple. I think it’s not even isolated to a single industry,

⏹️ ▶️ John although in the circles we travel and we tend to see tech things. It is everywhere and when one of these stories comes

⏹️ ▶️ John up, what it does is it makes the other stories come to the surface, you know, because it’s, it’s, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, a media trend or people feel more emboldened to come forward or, or people want to report

⏹️ ▶️ John on it more and they come in cycles. But anyway, it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere, and if you want to see another

⏹️ ▶️ John example, There you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go.

To Uber or not?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and then we have an entry in the show notes to Uber

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not to Uber and I presume that this is because a handful of listeners, very, very astute listeners,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey called out the fact that one of us, it very well may have been me, had talked about, with regard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to WWDC, flying into like San Francisco rather than San Jose

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, you know, maybe we could just catch an Uber to get down to San Jose after flying into San Francisco and,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, A few people had said, hey, that seems kind of disingenuous after you spent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair bit of time complaining and railing against Uber to then immediately

⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, oh yeah, I’ll totally take an Uber after that. So uh… It was actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. I’m pretty sure it

⏹️ ▶️ John was me that said that. Yeah, it was Marco and he used it as a verb. He said like Uber up to, Uber down to San Jose.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And the reason why is because when we recorded last week, we didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have time for the Uber topic during the main show. so we did it in the after show. During the edit,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided it was too important to have as an after show topic, so I moved it forward in the show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and kind of promoted it in the edit to a regular main core show topic, so I thought it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco important enough. Then, I probably wouldn’t have said that after having that discussion, and I just kind of said it without

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even thinking about it, you know, like at the time. As soon as I said it, I regretted saying it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that is exactly the kind of thing that I’m usually conscious of, And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of thing where like, yeah, I kind of don’t want to take Uber anymore after how horrible they are. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, I personally have since deleted Uber off my phone. There were plenty of previous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons to do it, but this is the big one to do it, to do it like now. And I figure, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t actually use it that often because in my home city, I don’t need it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when I’m traveling, I would use it often. But I think I’m gonna install Lyft now and try that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead because yeah, It’s not worth supporting that if we don’t have to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. It’s kind of like some people who tweeted at us about this pointed out the Kleenex situation, where

⏹️ ▶️ John because Uber was first and is so famous and so prominent, that

⏹️ ▶️ John to Uber it is like, even though you were saying the word Uber, which is the name of a company,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just the generic term for a thing that makes a car come and get you because you tap stuff on your phone.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so you could Uber from one place to the other with Lyft or whatever. Either way, the larger

⏹️ ▶️ John question is, given all this stuff, are we going to continue

⏹️ ▶️ John to use Uber? And you know, I think all of us in our places where we actually live never

⏹️ ▶️ John have a need for a service like Uber at all. So it’s not really relevant. It’s only really relevant when we’re traveling.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there have been a lot of people deleting Uber off their phone or otherwise vowing

⏹️ ▶️ John to never use it. One of the interesting things I read about

⏹️ ▶️ John the people who drive for Uber is that very often the drivers are working for multiple ones of these companies

⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time. So if you call for a Lyft or you call for an Uber, it could be the same person

⏹️ ▶️ John answering. They just change what app is up on their phone, which is interesting. So it’s not as if

⏹️ ▶️ John the car or the person you get is actually dependent on the company. And

⏹️ ▶️ John Lyft, like every other company, I’m sure has its own fair share of problems.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, as people putting on the chat room, problems dealing with down to the application itself, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, always putting location on. Oh no, this is the opposite. They’re complaining that Uber always has location

⏹️ ▶️ John on. Anyway, I recall reading lots of scary things about Lyft as well, and that

⏹️ ▶️ John very often they were presented as the better alternative to Uber merely because Uber is so incredibly terrible

⏹️ ▶️ John that the bar is low. In some respects it’s a little bit like airlines

⏹️ ▶️ John that we’ve talked about before where we all know angry travelers, maybe we have been

⏹️ ▶️ John this angry traveler who has a bad experience with an airline and vows to never fly in them again

⏹️ ▶️ John and if you travel at all frequently you will

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually have that same experience with every airline and then you will literally be unable to fly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because all airlines do something that is enough to anger people that say, that’s it!

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m never flying Delta again! And they stick to it and they never fly Delta again. If you do

⏹️ ▶️ John that for five years of constant traveling, you will be out of airlines. And I wonder

⏹️ ▶️ John if ride-sharing services, especially ones subsidized by VC money that are basically trying to put taxi companies

⏹️ ▶️ John out of business so they can, you know, dance on their grave and and then raise their prices.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I wonder if there are any good ride sharing companies. And it’s not as if taxi services are all that great either.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like every one of these things seems to have some kind of problem. So, you know, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John certainly, what I’ve heard somebody say recently was that, I’ll still use Uber, but I’ll hate myself every

⏹️ ▶️ John time I do it. I don’t know if that’s the solution. Is the solution deleting Uber? What if you use Lyft and you find all sorts of horrible

⏹️ ▶️ John things about Lyft? Eventually, can you not use any ride sharing services?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s hard to know what to do in these types of situations. I think it is very similar to an airline type situation, but

⏹️ ▶️ John when there are alternatives, obviously, if you have any kind of choice at all, and you

⏹️ ▶️ John really do think Uber is the worst of the worst, like, don’t pick them. Pick another company, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I guess you just keep doing that until you’re out of ride-sharing company, or, you know, ride-hiring companies.

⏹️ ▶️ John What are they called? It’s not ride-sharing. What do you call a thing like Uber?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, private taxis? But it’s not a car service. I don’t know. Whatever it is. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually this argument of, well, they’re all probably terrible, and we just might not know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how terrible the other ones are because they’re less in the public eye. Or we do know, but it was

⏹️ ▶️ John two news cycles ago.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve talked about this previously with how I buy things from Amazon, even though I know that in many ways

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon as a retail company is kind of horrible. But I’ve worked in other retail companies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before just enough to know that they’re all pretty horrible. And retail is just a horrible business.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, like the smaller ones, like, what am I going to do? Like, oh, I’m not going to buy this thing at Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to buy it at Walmart. No. And like, you know, where else am I going to like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I’ll go to some, you go to Target. Well, they’re probably horrible in some other way, too. Like, because retail is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a horrible business and all the incentives kind of force everyone in it to be pretty horrible or to go out of business.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I decided, like, it’s worth it to me to shop at Amazon because it’s just so much better than everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, and their offenses aren’t bad enough to offend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me enough to overcome the difference between them and anybody else in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco morality versus the incredible convenience that they offer. With Uber, though, I think it’s a little bit of a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different situation because, first of all, Uber, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty young.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s hard for anybody to look at what Uber gives them in their life and say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t be without that. Because, well, you were without that, what, five years ago? It wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that long ago. Chances are, five years ago, you weren’t using anything like that, and you still lived.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You still got around. You still found a way to make that work. How did you do that? Could you just go back to that?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco How bad would it really be? Even if there’s no other ride-hailing companies like Lyft,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you can’t get any of the one’s in your area. If Uber is the only one that serves your area, how bad would it be not to use them?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in some cases, it actually is really bad. In some cases, if your alternative is like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can get an Uber in ten minutes, or because of where I am, like if you’re in nowhere

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Brooklyn and no cab will pick you up out there, believe me, I’ve been there. This was before I used Uber. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to wait, literally, you have to wait an hour and a half from midnight to 130

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a.m. on a pier in Brooklyn because there’s no cabs around and you had to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco call a car service and that’s the soonest they can come get you? In that kind of case,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, if Uber’s really the only thing that will serve you, I can’t really fault you for using it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, most of the time for most people, if Uber serves you at all,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other options probably do too. it’s your regular taxi service or other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco car hailing services or mass transit or other like you know private you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco car services stuff like that like chances are if you use Uber at all you probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have other options and they might be a little bit less convenient you might have to wait one or two extra minutes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a ride or you might have to pay a dollar more but you have to decide for yourself

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s worth you know the the the moral savings or not and for me I think it’s worth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s that was that other one I heard about called fasten like fasten your seatbelts. I think it’s another one

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s at the very least in the the Pacific Northwest. I heard a bunch of people talking about so it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not just uber and lyft There are probably other options maybe not all of them are nationwide So I guess check

⏹️ ▶️ John the App Store and ask around to see what the other options are in your area You too can live an uber free

⏹️ ▶️ John lifestyle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hopefully though and I mean it’s easy for the three of us to say because we’re white dudes But, you know, I’ve understood that in some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways it can be better if you’re, you know, like a minority or if you’re a woman that maybe it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better for some reason to call an Uber or perhaps a

⏹️ ▶️ John Lyft. Well, maybe not an Uber. There’s been a lot of horror stories about women getting picked up by Ubers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Maybe women was a poor example. But, you know, maybe if you’re a person of color or something like that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe a taxi cab would not take your fare where an Uber or perhaps a Lyft

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would. You know, I guess what I’m driving at is it’s all nuanced, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just a balancing act and you do what works best for you. But I plan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, before I go to San Jose, which I think I’m going to be doing, I plan to look into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lyft and understand if there’s any differences in procedure or like tipping paradigms or anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I plan to try to understand what that is before I go. So this way I can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use Lyft rather than Uber. And I should mention that a friend of the show, Jean McDonald,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who in the past has run or been deeply involved with, I guess she is still deeply

⏹️ ▶️ Casey involved with App Camp for Girls, which is an organization that’s near and dear to all of our hearts. Anyway, she

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just for fun decided to drive, I thought, and I’m pretty sure I have this right, for both Uber and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lyft, and then ended up not doing it for Uber anymore because she had some really bad experiences. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have her tweets handy where she talked about this, unfortunately. But you can look

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at her timeline or just ask her about it, and she’ll tell you that she

⏹️ ▶️ Casey drives for Lyft from time to time because she’s just felt better about it. I wish I could remember

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was better, but she seemed to think that Lyft was a better experience for drivers and probably for riders,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey too. The pink mustaches, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, here’s the thing, too. It’s kind of hard to be worse than Uber.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Literally everything they do is horrible, with the exception that they are kind of everywhere now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, the company is horrible. The people at the top leading the company are horrible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The app is horrible. The app itself is its own incredible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco case study of horrendous, abusive, fraudulent app design. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does so many creepy, immoral things that honestly should be or might even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, might be, prohibited on iOS. It’s just a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible app in front a terrible service run by some really horrible people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, like in most cases, most of the time if you’re deciding between big crappy companies like airlines or retail

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stores, I think the differences are usually smaller between them. But in this case, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God is Uber horrible. It would be really impressive for any other company

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this business to be as horrible as they are.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s what the competition is for. So here’s one article from Jalopnik saying, saying Uber is quietly

⏹️ ▶️ John terrible for women and black people study says so there’s an article on that so so much for being

⏹️ ▶️ John better for minorities or women and then another article saying new

⏹️ ▶️ John business model same racist cab drivers that just talks about both Uber and Lyft making it

⏹️ ▶️ John harder for people with black sounding names to get rides so like as with so many

⏹️ ▶️ John of these things we’re trying to emphasize it’s not it’s not a problem with a particular company or particular domain is a problem with

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a cultural societal problem because all these companies are made up of people who

⏹️ ▶️ John come from this culture and this society. Granted, very often they are the worst people, but you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, like the CEO of Uber who was caught on video arguing with one of his drivers, which

⏹️ ▶️ John just boggles my mind. I mean, maybe he was drunk. You don’t have the self-awareness to understand

⏹️ ▶️ John that. I don’t even know. If you can’t, if you can’t be, if you are the CEO of a company and

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t manage to be respectful and magnanimous for five minutes to one of your employees

⏹️ ▶️ John who’s angry. It boggles my mind that you could be this bad at everything having to do

⏹️ ▶️ John with you. Anyway, yeah, so if you, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you want peace, fight for justice, as they say,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if

⏹️ ▶️ John you want to solve the problem, you really have to solve it at the root. You’re not going to solve it by

⏹️ ▶️ John scolding spoiled tech CEOs. But if you can,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you can at all avoid giving money to what really seems to

⏹️ ▶️ John be the worst of the very worst of a business that is already in a slightly precarious

⏹️ ▶️ John situation in terms of all the articles going around about the fact that Uber is not profitable and is

⏹️ ▶️ John basically being funded by a venture capital to put tax companies out of business. And if they ever succeeded in that,

⏹️ ▶️ John they would just raise their prices. And by the way, they exploit their workers. And that’s that’s half of what these

⏹️ ▶️ John the argument with the CEO was about. I used to get paid X amount now I get paid so much less and the uber CEO

⏹️ ▶️ John saying he’s just waiting to replace all These drivers with self-driving cars anyway, and they’re self-driving cars running through red

⏹️ ▶️ John lights and then over lying about it Oh, it’s a mess. So bottom line is stay in your house and never go anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is definitely the John Siracusa answer to this problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John you wish that was the answer solves a lot of problems, doesn’t it? It solves your problems Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I’ve ever actually taken an uber on my on my account My wife has an account that we used when I was in San

⏹️ ▶️ John Francisco and I got to tell you, it was convenient.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, my experience, my personal experience with Uber has really been very good,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey truth be told. I’ve never had a bad experience and it’s always gone pretty well for me. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I said earlier, I’m not comfortable with the way the company

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a whole and certainly the CEO seems to do business. And that doesn’t mean that there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing but mean, terrible people at Uber. But certainly the people that are running the show seem

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be pretty consistently mean and terrible. And so because of that, I intend to, like I said, try out left next time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John there. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s the that’s the way it’s like every time I’ve ever been in an Uber

⏹️ ▶️ John or even a taxi for that matter, like the people who are actually driving like the leaf nodes of the org chart,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve had good experiences. Now, obviously, that’s not universal. And again, all the articles just listed about them refusing

⏹️ ▶️ John to pick up people black sounding names and picking up women and driving them around longer than they should be driving them and hitting on them and

⏹️ ▶️ John doing all sorts of terrible things. Like, obviously that happens, but it’s kind of like when

⏹️ ▶️ John you get mad at Delta and vow that you’ll never fly with them again. Does that mean every employee of Delta is an evil person? Certainly not.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s a complicated thing where you’re like you’re trying to punish the company and by withholding your

⏹️ ▶️ John business. But what about the people who work for the company? Oh, they can just quit and work for

⏹️ ▶️ John a better airline. Can they? What if they work in Atlanta and it’s Delta’s hub? I don’t know. Now, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the whole, the effectiveness and the sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John ethics of boycotts have always been complicated when it’s not like a

⏹️ ▶️ John black and white kind of, you know, pervasive

⏹️ ▶️ John issue like segregation or the bus boycott and stuff like that. This

⏹️ ▶️ John is slightly more nuanced, but I think if there’s something you can do

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s straightforward, like Margaret said, just call a cab, use a different company. It’s so easy to do. You should just do it.

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a project to do, it probably needs a website. But I bet the website itself probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t the project. You probably have something else. Whether the website is for a blog,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a gallery, or a new hobby, or a new storefront. Those things all need websites.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the thing is, if you spend all your time working on your website itself, if you have to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco installing a CMS, managing the configuration of it, custom designing the whole thing for days

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and weeks on end, or hiring someone to help you with all that stuff, you’re not going to have any time to actually work on what you

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco making a beautiful website and makes it incredibly easy, and they support it really

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the muck of trying to run your own website. There’s so much complexity that you don’t have to

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that, that you’re going to just finish it up in probably another 15-20 minutes. It’s really fast, I’m telling you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you’re done. And if the site’s for you, you can move on to do whatever it is you made the site for.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the site’s for somebody else, if they have any problems with it, Squarespace supports it so you don’t have to. So you’re out of the loop.

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, you had a big day today. As we record on Wednesday as per usual, Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ads are available for purchase from anyone that has an Overcast account and that’s exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in what surprised me, but really shouldn’t have surprised me, you have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really neat little table here that’s presumably all integrated with your ad backend that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco shows

⏹️ ▶️ Casey availability and prices and some analytics, sort of, kind of, some estimated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey analytics, and it’s all much more mature than I would have expected. The way you painted it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we’ve talked, both on the show and privately, I don’t know, I just got this impression that this was a little bit, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, grab ass, but as it turns out, this is legit, this is the real deal, and you’ve clearly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a whole lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco work in it. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is grab ass plus CSS. Yeah. Ha ha ha ha ha

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ha ha. Touche, sir. But anyway, but this is super exciting, and you’ve already had a few categories

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sell out. So how’s things going? I mean, it certainly looks from the outside like it’s going really well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, so far it’s going great. Like, and you know, this is not an indication of how it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be going long term because no one, including me and the people buying the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads, has any idea like what is a podcast ad worth? Because, you know, there are some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these ads are for websites or apps, but most of them, by far,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them are for podcasts. And so I really… And by the way, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco love that ratio. I do want the ability to advertise for both types of things,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I also would prefer if most of the ads were podcast ads. And I actually considered

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having it actually be two separate inventory types, so it would actually sell separate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slots, possibly at different prices. Like maybe podcast ads would be cheaper than website ads.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was too much complexity, so I just didn’t build that out. And I might do it later, but probably not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of cool that in a podcast app I can now have ads for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other podcasts because it makes it kind of not feel like an ad anymore and I’ve like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is one of the reasons why I added the option for paying subscribers who normally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just automatically wouldn’t see any ads I added a setting in in settings for them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a checkbox for them to turn the ads on you know if for everyone else it just is on and they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t turn it off but for paying people one of the benefits normally that you’re paying for is not to see ads, but these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads are kind of nice. It turned out really well and so far there are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like podcasts and a good number of them and good quality ones buying the ads. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean I’m literally only about four hours or so into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ad sales, so it’s very hard for me to really know what this is gonna be like long-term,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in the short term it’s really easy. It’s really nice. It’s really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I built the system. It’s a pretty straightforward, basic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco database thing with basic tracking in the app of views, taps, and subscriptions.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The payment is all through Stripe, because Stripe is amazing. I love Stripe so much.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What did we do before Stripe? Actually, I’ll tell you what we did before Stripe. PayPal. And it was a dark

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh my, was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a

⏹️ ▶️ John dark time. I’m going to tell you about dark times. Before PayPal, we had banks of modems that

⏹️ ▶️ John would dial the credit card companies and transfer information using archaic protocols from our Linux servers.

⏹️ ▶️ John Phone lines, actual phone lines. That’s how we did credit card processing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stan. Was that actually worse than PayPal? I don’t know. Paul

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yes, it was worse. Stan. Have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you ever tried to do

⏹️ ▶️ John subscriptions in PayPal? Paul Phone lines and modems are among the least friendly things

⏹️ ▶️ John you ever want to be wrangling at a data center that is not in the same building as you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stan. Have you ever used PayPal?

⏹️ ▶️ John Paul I have. I mean, PayPal will eventually freeze your account and take all your money. But

⏹️ ▶️ John the phone line situation made it so hard to even get money in the first place.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Well, anyway, so this is all built using some nice, easy stuff with Stripe as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the payment gateway. I even accept Apple Pay, which is kind of cool because they make it really easy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I literally… You put in a few HTML divs and you enable this thing on your site, and then you have Apple Pay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can go to my site and buy an ad with your fingerprint in like three seconds. It’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of awesome. It’s incredibly satisfying. And so yeah, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’ve been working on the last week or so is just building the system out. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s still a lot I have to do. Like basically tomorrow, I have to build a system to notify people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when categories become available, they’re sold out. That’s something I kind of added last minute tonight because a bunch of things sold out. And I immediately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco got a bunch of emails from people saying, Hey, I got here too late. My category sold out. Can you put me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up for the next one. And I don’t really want to get in the business of having to maintain a thousand different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco relationships with people and emailing them. And then what if it sells beforehand? Then they’re out of luck and I email them. So I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to very simple like notify me thing. I already built the system to record your intention

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be notified. I just haven’t actually made the notifications yet, because now I have 30 days to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, because all these ads have 30 day annuals.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is the most Marco thing. The most Marco comment I’ve ever heard. Oh, I don’t have to worry about that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a month.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And similarly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want the ad to email the person who bought it when it expires

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tell them, your ad has expired. Click here if you want to buy another one. And I haven’t built that yet either,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have 30 days to build that too. But yeah, so for the most part, though, the system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty much… It’s three quarters of the way done. All the core stuff is there, except

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the payments, my admin interface to approve or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reject and refund them, all sorts of payment handling things that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were actually surprisingly easy because Stripe is so good. I mean, geez,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stripe kind of embarrasses everything else I do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every other part of this was more complicated and took more work and more fiddling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the entire payment processing, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is kind of amazing. You would think that would have been the worst because that’s arguably the most important since it involves

⏹️ ▶️ Casey money, but no, apparently not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey still have some questions. So you had made mention that you had, this took you like a week. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey last I had heard, you had demo ads in the app. You know, obviously I’m on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the beta, so I’m seeing these like, you know, canned ads that, well, I guess they weren’t entirely demo. They were kind of like first

⏹️ ▶️ Casey run ads.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were real ads. I had just inputted them manually into the database because there was no interface for people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so that was running for a little bit. And then how long did it take you do this whole back end? You said about a week?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, about a week. Well, because I already had the system in between the app and the sync service,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already had the system to serve the ads to the app, have the app show them, record

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their stats, and then transmit the stats back on the next sync. And so I had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically the whole back end of serving and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking the ads. So all I had to do was the creation, editing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and buying of the ads. And that’s not a small amount of work, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about half of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when one goes to buy an ad, you select a price, and the first

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing you’re presented with is choose an ad type, and you can either search for a podcast or you can provide a URL.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What happens after that? Would I be providing art or blurb?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is customizable here? Try it. You don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pay until the very end. I’m not going to send you an invoice. Fair enough. You will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know when you’re paying. That’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Works for me. I got a little scared. I don’t want to mess with it. All right. So I have a title,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John description.

⏹️ ▶️ John You got to support arrow keys and return in your autocompletes. Come on.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, my big SERP, the podcast SERPs box? Yeah, that’s a big custom thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. If I hit down arrow to select and hit return, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nope. I haven’t looked at that code since 2014. It might support it easily. I’m not sure. I’m using this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pure framework, which probably doesn’t even exist anymore. I don’t know. It was the smallest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco CSS-type framework I could find in 2014. So I put it in. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, it doesn’t really matter. It does not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this is very slick. Okay, so I’ve put in… This is the difference between John and I. John is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey advertising for a podcast, presumably one that has other people on it. Me, I put in my own URL.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah. Martha.org was his frequent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey test

⏹️ ▶️ Marco URL.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t worry. So I have a title, a description, a URL,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an optional image, and then what I really like is you have a little preview right then and there that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shows you approximately what it’ll look like. And then like you said, when you’re ready, either Apple Pay or Pay with Card.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Super cool. I really like this. And so basically the idea is you’re either advertising

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a podcast or anything that can relate to the web, anything that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a URL.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So apps, websites, any website.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. And so the initial take rate seems pretty good from what I can tell.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, you’re sold out in a few different things. There’s nothing that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has no purchases. Nope. That slot’s available.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I’m sorry. I misread. So health has no purchases. But there are other categories that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have… All the other categories have at least

⏹️ ▶️ John one. Ah, fair enough. Well, so you obviously massively underpriced this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually raised the prices about an hour ago because they sold too fast. I noticed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I know but

⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s too late but anyway live and learn there’ll be another another 30

⏹️ ▶️ Marco days I did kind of want this to be a quick sale because one of the big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenges that I went into this with is all those categories that say not enough data yet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I just haven’t had test ads in those categories and so I really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to know like what categories even get good traffic and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pricing is kind of a guess like you know business sold out really quickly and I had it in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco low price category because I didn’t think it was as high traffic as the other ones in Overcast.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But now I’ll find out if that’s true or not and if it is true I’m going to move it up to the dark gray section between all and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco others. That’s like the mid-price tier. That’s why

⏹️ ▶️ John you should have an auction system because the market will decide what’s valuable because it’s not just the traffic, it’s like how valuable are the people who

⏹️ ▶️ John listen to business podcasts. Maybe they all have lots of money and buy expensive stuff all the time so they’re more valuable to advertise to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I can adjust the prices, obviously, individually if I need to, but ultimately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would rather have the inventory sell out more often than to extract every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible last dollar out of the highest bidder, because I want there to be a lot of ads in the system, because that way people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see a nice variety in their apps and it kind of gives more people a chance to advertise

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app. So I would prefer sold-out inventory to necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the absolute highest price. Again, I have no idea how hard it’s going to be to sell these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads in six months, a year. I have no idea. It could be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really easy. This could require very little effort on my part. Or I might have to actually start keeping

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this email list and, quote, reaching out to people and reaching all over them to get them to buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an ad. I don’t know. It’s… By then,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be onto the next business model anyway, so it’ll be fine. That’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s going to be hard to beat this. If this keeps going, anywhere near what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is now, First of all, I’ve made today enough for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like eight months of the Google Ads.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Wow, that’s awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if I’m gonna make this every month, but it certainly shows like this was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the right move. And if I even get, you know, a quarter of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, I’m happy with that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like it’s gonna go up. I feel like next month is gonna be higher because you have to raise these prices.

⏹️ ▶️ John You just have to. And then even if it slowly tapers off over course of a few years, the only thing that will make you stop it, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is a thing that may happen, but the only thing that will make you stop is if you find it too annoying. That

⏹️ ▶️ John is the thing that’s going to gate this, I feel like.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s certainly the main limiting factor is how much of my time I’ll take. But the good thing is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a really easy thing to have someone else help with. Yeah, that’s very true. But right now, I’m doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it myself right now because I don’t want to immediately outsource something like this because I want to know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, how it’s doing. And the only to do that is to really kind of run it myself. So I want to know how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works for everybody right up front. I want to know what all the needs are, what the pain points are,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I can fix them. And then I need to know, is this even the kind of thing I need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to outsource to someone else? Or is it so little work that I can just do it myself? If it’s sending 50

⏹️ ▶️ Marco emails on one day a month, that’s a decent amount of work, but I could probably do that myself.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’ll see what it actually ends up being. Again, it’s way too early to tell,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the very early indication suggests that it’s pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is super awesome. Now, so you’re doing all the approving by hand using your little admin

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interface?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you had to deny anyone as yet that wasn’t clearly just spamming you for the sake of being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a jerk?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. I mean, one of the things is you have to pay to even submit it. Like in…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, right. Yeah, sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app terms, it literally doesn’t even save the database record until it has a payment.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey payment is all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the temporary session post variables until it’s paid. So that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically makes it unspamable from a pure spam perspective. It puts up a pretty big barrier.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am humanly reviewing the model to just make sure they’re not obscene or hate content or anything else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there was one person who submitted one that had a word that some people might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider a bad word. It’s not like one of the big ones, but it’s like a kind of ancillary one. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went back to that person. I’m like, Hey, do you mind if I edit this? And we worked out a different copy and then that was it. And I approved it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that was the only one that even required any review at all. Nice. And you know what’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing about this? When Google sells ads on my behalf,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get something like 60% of it. When Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sells anything on my behalf, I get 70% of it. Or maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year later for subscriptions, if I’m lucky, 85% of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When Google pays me money, it’s money that I earned six weeks ago that I finally get paid for.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When Apple pays me my money, it’s again similarly about money I earned about six weeks ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco With these Stripe ads, I’m earning, I think, about 97% of what they sell for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it gets deposited in my bank account in two days. It’s really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of amazing to be out of the walled garden ecosystem for once.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s super cool. So initial reaction, things are going great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you think you’re going to play with the pricing for now? Are you going to… I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess, let’s suppose you sell out in the next 48 hours. There’s really no impetus to mess with pricing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey until the end of the month unless you want to cut down on the people that ask to be notified, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess. I mean, it’s probably not a good business plan to cut down on the number of interested parties.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess what I’m saying is there’s no reason for you to raise your prices now once you sell out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unless you want to prevent people from saying, notify me. Let’s say the all goes from, as we record,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s less than $1,000 and let’s say it becomes $3,000 tomorrow. All you’re really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accomplishing since it’s sold out is you’re preventing me from being interested because maybe I would have spent less

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than a thousand, but I’m not going to spend three thousand. You know what I mean? So you don’t really need to mess around with pricing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for like 30 days, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, for the most part, unless things are not selling, and then I might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey lower the price on things that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not selling, like that health category. But for the most part, I think I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to treat this the same way I’ve treated any other kind of thing where I set the price for an ad. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our podcast ads, my website ads, when I sold RSS sponsorships, things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And the way I’ve done this, basically, is if they sell out way too fast when I go to sell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, I raise the price a little bit until things start selling still at a reasonable pace. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it to be like pulling teeth to get things sold, but slowly enough that it’s not like a stampede.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I get 50 angry emails from people saying, Oh, I missed my chance to buy. That’s because that’s no good either. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also is not great for business, necessarily. So I think I’m just going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco control the prices slowly. And maybe when next month rolls around, I will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see how it sells at the new higher price from an hour ago, instead of the initial prices, which are about 30%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower. I’ll see how it sells at these new, kind of higher prices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if it sells out just as fast, then maybe for the month after that, then maybe I’ll raise it a little bit more.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if it’s selling out at a reasonably healthy rate, then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll just leave it the way it is, really. You really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nailed it. This looks great. Thanks. So let’s assume this is super successful for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year, just for the sake of discussion. Are you at all interested in expanding—I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think we talked about this a little bit—but are you at all interested in expanding into being like iAd for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other people, so to speak? And either white labeling your ad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey platform or just extending your ad platform to anyone else’s apps?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Robert Leonard Probably not. Because once you become an ad network for other people,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a very different business. And it’s a much higher needs business for just dealing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with people, dealing with everyone else’s money, dealing with staffing, and dealing with people’s issues.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s a much bigger business. It’s a much higher touch business. And this system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I built kind of in response to other types of advertising I’ve done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it’s like you know for like blog ads and podcast ads where a lot of times you know you have to like reach out to sponsors,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to you know coordinate with them via four or five different emails, you eventually like put

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ad in your you book the ad in your system, you do the ad and then you have to invoice them and then they might take six

⏹️ ▶️ Marco months to pay the invoice. Like we’ve seen we’ve seen the whole the whole spectrum. Some people pay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next day, some people pay a year later or not at all. And it’s a very just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco intensive process. And there are tools like FreshBooks that make it easier, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still a lot of just human work and just dealing with administration

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just do the basics of selling and getting paid. And so with this I really created this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be as simple as possible. And this is actually one of the things gonna keep the prices kind of low because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most big companies who would sponsor things like this, who would buy these ads. If it’s below a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain price, oftentimes that’s $1,000, it requires less of a process for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to approve the payment. So a lot of times big companies, if it’s more than that, you’ll have to go through

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an official requisition process or some other garbage full of paperwork and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco overhead. But if it’s lower, if it’s a sub $1,000 price for something, a lot of times

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just put that on a credit card

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be done with it and not have to worry too much about it. So I wanna keep these prices in that range

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that way I can have the system I have now, which is, look, if you want one of these, it’s self-serve.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You go to my site, you set it up, you pay right there. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even see it until you pay because I don’t wanna have to be chasing you down in a year because you didn’t pay your invoice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate that so much. And so this system is very much like keeping it as simple as I possibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can keep it. And part of that requires that the prices be kind of low. That definitely requires

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everything remains self-serve, and it requires that not a lot that I’m doing involves human interaction from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Because if that’s what it ends up needing to be, I’ll have to hire someone else to help me because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have the time to be dealing with a lot of effort into the system. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to keep it that size and that scale, I basically have to keep it my app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only. can’t become an ad network for any other apps because that will,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by nature, make it a bigger, more complicated thing. The prices would probably go up. I’d have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start dealing with people’s stupid invoice systems. I just don’t want to deal with that. That’s not the business I want to be in.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This makes a lot of sense. The thing that impresses me about you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that—maybe I’m just a big wimp—but the audacity of doing something like this, like, oh, screw

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I’ll on my own hands, why not? There’s no way in a million years, maybe I would have had the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought if I were in your shoes, but I’d look at this and be like, yeah, I’m not going to do that. There’s no way that’ll work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And good on you for not only having the, I don’t know, fortitude

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do it, but to make it happen. It so far seems successful. Like John has said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the ticking time bomb is about a year away until you do another business model change. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m expecting this will fail miserably. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I don’t I was mostly doing that as a joke because if it like like Margo said if it continues like this or better

⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s no reason to do unless like I said unless somehow It becomes too much of a burden for Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with that I don’t see how it would because everything he just outlined about how he doesn’t have to do anything and doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John to chase people for money and doesn’t have to get money on behalf of other people like I You know

⏹️ ▶️ John again, maybe he’s leaving money on the table by saying I’m gonna try to keep it in the in the petty cash range But

⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s enough money, then it’s fine and it should be sustainable Um, same could have

⏹️ ▶️ John probably been set up at all the past plans. So again, we have to wait to see how it’s going to be. But if it actually continues like this

⏹️ ▶️ John sustainably, I don’t really see any reason for him to change models.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I mean, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the sales would have to go down a lot for it to make sense for me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look another model again, because right now I have pretty much everything I want. I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way to get sustainable income. I have my paying subscriber still, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is its own nice, sustainable income that can almost support the whole business by itself.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is kind of just bonus money, and this is monetizing all the free users, finally, in a way that actually works,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the ads really didn’t do that well enough, the previous ads. So this is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a great system, as long as it continues to sell the inventory at any reasonable rate.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, day one, again, it’s impossible to say. I mean, you know, once you have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of audience that my app has, I could sell out day one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty easily. But the question is, what happens on day 365 when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have had a year worth of buying these ads to see what they’re actually worth? And what if they’re worth a lot less

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what I’m charging? Obviously, I have to lower my prices, but like, what are they worth? We don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There I don’t think there’s ever been a system where you could advertise for a podcast in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a podcast player So this is really a complete unknown for both me and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco advertisers We have no idea what what a subscriber is worth You know or how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much how much these subscribers stick around or you know if you get a subscriber through an ad are they? You know how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of them are still subscribed in a year. We don’t know and So it’s it’s the great unknown right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but day one suggests that it’s that there’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very wide buffer here for things to need to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scaled down if necessary. If it ends up the economics don’t work very well, I can scale this way down

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s still worth doing. So that to me shows that this is probably a good idea.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, there’s also other controls I have. Like I can increase the number of slots that sell.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like in certain categories, If they demand that the price be below

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain level to sell them very often, I can just put more slots there. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a known thing to do. People have been dealing with ad-based businesses for quite a long time now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We know how to do it. As long as the ads are valuable at all,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can usually make it work. I think what we’re seeing so far is that I think these are valuable. The only question is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just how valuable. But that’s really just minor tweaks over time. It’s not like having to rethink the whole system.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s super cool. I’m really impressed, really proud of you. This is good work. Thanks.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A couple of very quick questions. Would you consider open sourcing this ad back end

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that other people can copy all your hard work for free?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably not, but it’s not out of a guarding my hard work kind of attitude.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s more just like a lot of it is pretty intertwined with Overcast. So it wouldn’t make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of sense for this to be used for anybody else. This is really an ad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco network for podcasts on Overcast that happens to also work for websites. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty custom to Overcast. And most of the hard stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is payment processing, which I don’t even know which of those… Anybody can integrate Stripe and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. So there’s not a lot of value to that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. And finally, where’s my swipe to delete?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was doing this. So I haven’t done that yet. I’m going to tackle that probably next week.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got 30 days to do swipe to delete. Is that how this works? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I have 29 days to do it and then one day to make all these notifications.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. I take back all the nice things you said, unless you give me my swipe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to delete. One star.

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USB-C iPhones?

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So today, I think it was today, there was a rumor that broke that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey came out of the Wall Street Journal, which is usually pretty well sourced. In fact, usually well sourced

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough that we all kind of believe that Apple goes to the Wall Street Journal and says, hey, would you talk about this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey please? And the Wall Street Journal has said that the iPhone 8, or whatever it may be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey called, will have USB-C. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at first I thought, oh, this means that it’ll have lightning on the phone and USB-C on the other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of the cable instead of USB—what is it? B? A? I always get it confused. Whatever the—A,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you. Whatever today is. B is the Pentagon on printers. Ah, right. Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so I assumed, oh, that just means that the cable will go from Lightning to USB-C.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That makes sense. Pretty much all the laptops are USB-C now, fine. But upon further inspection,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sounds like, no, no, no. The phone itself will actually be USB-C.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have really conflicting opinions about this because my gut

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reaction is no, no, I do not want this. I have a crud load

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Lightning cables. Lightning is really small and I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to mess with that. What good does this do me? And I think that that’s in large part because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the top of my head, I don’t think I own a single device that supports USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I guess you could make the argument I’m living in the past. And if you make the argument, I’m living in the past,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I guess really this is the future. And maybe I should be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using USB-C and I should embrace my future USB-C overlords. So John

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and I were talking a lot earlier. What do you think about all this?

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a weird rumor because like you said it

⏹️ ▶️ John is in the Wall Street Journal which is usually like the the end the end stage of life for rumors

⏹️ ▶️ John if they graduate all the way up to Potentially and end up in the Wall Street Journal

⏹️ ▶️ John But as so many people have pointed out it is so poorly written that we can’t even tell it’s like it was written

⏹️ ▶️ John by someone Who doesn’t understand any of the things involved? They don’t understand how phones work. They don’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ John what these different standards for connectors are. They don’t understand what a port is because they wrote it in such a way they

⏹️ ▶️ John were all reading it going, what are you even trying to say? Just like Casey said, are you just saying

⏹️ ▶️ John that the other end of the connector will be C? Are you saying the phone will have a USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ John port? Are you saying iPads will have USB-C ports in addition to the lightning? Like, what are you even saying? This is the worst leak

⏹️ ▶️ John ever. Like you have to leak in a coherent way so we can at least understand the thing that you’re telling

⏹️ ▶️ John us is supposed to be coming. But so I’ve kind of discounted, or not discounted,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I’ve set aside how this rumor is being communicated. I’ve chosen to believe that

⏹️ ▶️ John what these things are trying to tell us is exactly what Casey said, and that if you pick up an iPhone in the future

⏹️ ▶️ John and look at the bottom of it, instead of a lightning port, you’ll see a USB-C port like every other

⏹️ ▶️ John Android phone and all the other things that are out there, right? That’s what I’m choosing to think this is trying to tell me.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then I’m thinking about that. If it’s trying to tell me something different, Like, oh, the other

⏹️ ▶️ John end of the lightning cable is gonna be USB-C. That is a super boring rumor, and I guess we can kinda

⏹️ ▶️ John get upset about that because as has been pointed out in many places before, that’s cool for Apple’s ecosystem,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it kinda makes sense, and it kinda gets back to the whole iPhone 7 thing. We’re like, oh, you buy an iPhone 7 and a new MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, and you can’t even plug them in because there’s no place to put the USB-A connector. That’s true and all, but USB-A

⏹️ ▶️ John is everywhere as a charging port. It’s on my luggage, for crying out loud. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it is everywhere. So there’s an argument to be had there that apple doing that would

⏹️ ▶️ John be maybe an apple thing to do to be like, oh, you should just, you know, you should be in an apple ecosystem.

⏹️ ▶️ John Our power bricks have usb connectors. That’s the future of blah. Anyway, I’m ignoring that. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John just pretending they’re telling me that there’s going to be usb port on iPhones and

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m of two minds on this. I feel like there is there are strong arguments on both sides,

⏹️ ▶️ John both strong arguments for why this would be good and bad, and also surprisingly

⏹️ ▶️ John strong arguments for why Apple wouldn’t wouldn’t do this. Like usually it’s the it’s the opposite. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John okay, well, there’s arguments for and against on a tech wise. But then when you bring Apple into the picture, you say what Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John do this like, there’s only one strong argument for like, that tech stuff aside, we

⏹️ ▶️ John know Apple would definitely do a thing like this or would never do a thing like this. And with

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple in the state it is, I think you can look to Apple and say

⏹️ ▶️ John very strongly they both would do something like this and wouldn’t do something like this. And for the tech, you can say this is an

⏹️ ▶️ John awesome tech idea and this is a bad tech idea. So for on the tech side, I would say why

⏹️ ▶️ John is this a bad idea? Because lightning is smaller and you know that

⏹️ ▶️ John every connector, every millimeter on a connector is some number of months or years off

⏹️ ▶️ John its life. Apple makes things ever thinner and thinner, you’re going to hit the limit of USB see

⏹️ ▶️ John before you hit the limit of lightning. Not much before it’s like probably like fractions of a millimeter or something, but

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit before lightning is smaller than USB say so there’s that. On the other side of the tech

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and this is a little bit of an unknown here. Lightning, we don’t know how

⏹️ ▶️ John unreliable lightning is like we have anecdotal evidence of weird connector scorching and stuff. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John knows for sure what their warranty repair thing is, you know, And also there’s the Apple cables themselves,

⏹️ ▶️ John which really has nothing to do with connector and everything to do with Apple’s uncomfortable relationship with strain

⏹️ ▶️ John relief on cables, where they apparently make things that don’t hold up that well when

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re under, you know, under rough usage. But there

⏹️ ▶️ John is a tech argument to be made for, you know, the fact that lightning is smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ John but also the fact that USB, USB C and someone will correct me if I’m wrong,

⏹️ ▶️ John inverts the relationship of springy pieces of metal and stationary pieces of metal where the connector

⏹️ ▶️ John is stationary and solid and has these contacts on it which is great and makes that connector sturdy but the inside of the device

⏹️ ▶️ John has the little springy metal fingers that touch the contact points so if those little springy metal fingers

⏹️ ▶️ John get fatigued or bent up or fail to make good contact

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s inside your phone you’ve got a problem whereas on USB C connectors I

⏹️ ▶️ John believe the springy bits are in the cable and inside the connector is the stiff stationary thing. I’m using the

⏹️ ▶️ John tactical terms for all this, I’m sure.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And so

⏹️ ▶️ John if the little springy bits that make contact with the stationary thing fatigue, throw out the cable

⏹️ ▶️ John and get a new cable. So that that is a tech argument on the side of USB-C.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then again I guess on the connectors themselves you’ve got the you know the business side of like well

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple gets money for lightning connectors, people can’t make peripherals without it, and that’s a good and a bad thing because good Apple makes money and can control

⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s bad that that Apple has to approve every peripheral. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s like you can. There are even some outside for the tech thing. And then we

⏹️ ▶️ John move over to Apple. Is this a thing Apple would do? Or is this an Apple thing Apple wouldn’t do? And I think

⏹️ ▶️ John probably as soon as like a couple of years in the past, we all would have said,

⏹️ ▶️ John regardless of all that tech stuff we just talked about, Apple will never do this, because Apple loves things

⏹️ ▶️ John super thin and Apple loves things proprietary and Apple is not so much in love with

⏹️ ▶️ John conforming to industry standards just for the hell of it right that would that would be the only side of this argument we’d all

⏹️ ▶️ John be like yep totally like that’s the Apple but today’s Apple today’s Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John is doing things the old Apple didn’t do both good and bad and has sowed enough

⏹️ ▶️ John doubt in my mind that I I’m now envisioning these boardroom conversations

⏹️ ▶️ John where somebody high up says, tell me again what the advantages are

⏹️ ▶️ John of our proprietary lightning connector versus USB-C. And maybe this comes up because

⏹️ ▶️ John of large numbers of warranty repairs or, you know, who knows what the inciting

⏹️ ▶️ John incident is. But someone says, remind me again why we’ve been doing this lightning thing for five

⏹️ ▶️ John years. Like what advantage do we continue to have over USB-C,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially now that we spread USB-C to all of our, you know, all of our Macs and

⏹️ ▶️ John our power brick connectors and you know, all that stuff. And presumably if they

⏹️ ▶️ John ever release new Macs, they will expand it to even more of them. Why are we still using lighting

⏹️ ▶️ John in and not saying there’s not a reason but just you know, just go over it again for me like, tell me again what the advantages of creating

⏹️ ▶️ John for someone couple like here’s our revenue from our made for iPhone program. And here’s what we’ve been able

⏹️ ▶️ John to do with the connector but changing the pins through software and we’re not beholden to the USB consortium and here

⏹️ ▶️ John this blah, blah, blah. And maybe there’s an argument within

⏹️ ▶️ John the company. It says, that’s those are compelling arguments. Now, here’s what we would get with USB C everywhere would be the same

⏹️ ▶️ John one connector for power data, peripherals,

⏹️ ▶️ John video out at adapters for networking, like across max

⏹️ ▶️ John and all iOS devices, including the future much bigger iPads that we’re surely making with multiple USB connectors

⏹️ ▶️ John on them, right? Right, Apple, making those. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John once you once you standardize on just literally one omni directional connector that’s really small

⏹️ ▶️ John across all your products. That’s, that’s an advantage. And you

⏹️ ▶️ John you get to take advantage of the ecosystem of existing USB C peripherals, which presumably will only

⏹️ ▶️ John grow as other things adopted. So an apple five years ago, I can’t imagine

⏹️ ▶️ John this discussion even taking place in serious ways. Apple today, I can imagine this discussion being had

⏹️ ▶️ John prompted by whatever. And I can imagine the USBC contingent inside Apple winning the argument

⏹️ ▶️ John and saying, we’re going to go with the industry standard, even though it is worse in a few ways tech wise,

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s also better in a few ways tech wise. And there’s an ecosystem advantage, not just for

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and non Apple companies, but for Apple’s own products internally to standardize them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because there’s never been there’s never been a chance to do that before. At no time in the past has there been any

⏹️ ▶️ John viable choice for a standard connector for like iPods and all Macs except for I guess when it was

⏹️ ▶️ John FireWire but that was hardly viable and FireWire was definitely not the standard across all Macs that

⏹️ ▶️ John had Macs that didn’t even have it on it. So here we are and I find myself incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ John believing a rumor that a future iPhone would have a USB-C connector on it because you know it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not a slam dunk and I’m not even saying it’s higher than 50-50 but I would say it is 50-50 in my mind

⏹️ ▶️ John that tech wise, coin flip would apple do it? coin flip.

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where i come down on this. do you want them to? i kind of do

⏹️ ▶️ John because if they’re going to standardize on usbc everywhere,

⏹️ ▶️ John i’m sold on the uniformity win. and i’m also kind of sort of sold on

⏹️ ▶️ John the durability win with the little bendy finger thingies. and i have no data

⏹️ ▶️ John on the reliability thing and of course all my connectors still work and I don’t have these problems

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that people have. Of course they

⏹️ ▶️ John do. Of course you don’t. Although my wife said she had one of hers that had the little scorch mark. I looked

⏹️ ▶️ John at it, it wasn’t like Marco’s was. But just mechanically speaking, I

⏹️ ▶️ John love the lightning connector, the fact that it was solid and didn’t have any little fragile pins in it and everything, but the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ John those little fragile fingers are inside the phones, I can see that being a problem. But anyway, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have data on this. But I’m willing to believe. And so if they did it, I

⏹️ ▶️ John won’t be angry. I’ll be kind of proud of them for being surprisingly pragmatic

⏹️ ▶️ John and courageous. Yeah, kind of, kind of. Not so much courageous in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ John like, we’re willing to take the heat, because I think they wouldn’t actually… That’s the other aspect of this. Some people

⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be angry like, you just changed the connector. You’re changing it again. Well, first of all,

⏹️ ▶️ John just is a relative term. The 30-pin connector was around for almost 10 years. And

⏹️ ▶️ John so, So, you know, I think that’s a good run. This is slightly more than half of that.

⏹️ ▶️ John If they ended up swapping this out and slowly transitioning, it would be like five, six years by the time they were done transitioning everything,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? All the products they sold. That’s a little bit, that’s, you know, it’s shorter than a 30 pin.

⏹️ ▶️ John But unlike the 30 pin to Lightning, they wouldn’t be changing one proprietary

⏹️ ▶️ John connector for another, they would actually be moving to where everybody else already is. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I think actually people wouldn’t be all that mad about it. Yes, you’ll be mad. Oh, I have these lightning cables. What the hell do I do with

⏹️ ▶️ John them, right? But there is a PR and real win there to say, but we moved to

⏹️ ▶️ John the standard. We moved to the industry standard. So now, you know, if you’re in a mixed household with

⏹️ ▶️ John Android and iOS devices, you don’t have to have two separate charging cables. And the thing that you use to charge your Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John can also charge your phone. And just, there’s a, you know, there’s a story to be had there

⏹️ ▶️ John to sell this so that it is less impact, so that it’s basically, even though it hasn’t been around

⏹️ ▶️ John for 10 years, we’re not moving to another proprietary one. We’re not screwing you over, we’re moving to the industry standard. So people will

⏹️ ▶️ John be less angry for a shorter period of time, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco? Yeah, I pretty much agree with John. If you would have asked me a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco year ago, I would have said, oh, why would they kill lightning? That’s dumb. This might even come up a year ago. I might have said exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, who knows. But the way I feel about it now, like now that I’ve had my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C MacBook Pro for a few months and I have a few USB-C cables and now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have this stupid thing where I have like half of my cables are that kind and half are another kind and it’s really annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, on the phone it’s a little bit different than like a laptop because it’s the other end of the cable,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is kind of annoying when I’m packing for a trip and I’m packing my charging cables

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that most of what I use charges via lightning, but not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of what I use. I still have to have some mini USB cables and now I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a USB-C cable for this new laptop and probably anything I get in the future will be USB-C cables.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a lot, you know, like the EU has mandated certain charge cable standards for a while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the reason why is because this actually generates tons of waste. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the different waste cables that people have to buy separately and then wear out separately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco throw away separately and have all these different connectors and everything. It actually does hurt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco progress in a number of big ways have all these proprietary things. I think all you have to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to decide whether this is a good idea or not kind of in like in theory is to think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if they were designing the iPhone 5, the first cable, the first phone not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use the dot connector, if they were designing that today, would they still make lightning

⏹️ ▶️ Marco today in a world where USB-C exists or would they just use USB-C? And it’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you know if you do the mental exercise like what would be like the right thing to do if they were if they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a clean start today if there was no legacy to worry about no established devices out there in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco world what would be like the right choice and I think it’s very clear USB C be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right choice you know assuming it is probably more resilient because of you know having the pins

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the cable instead of the plug things like that but also just because it is clearly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good very soon to be very widespread industry standard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a lot of benefits to that. Like, Apple does love a good proprietary port

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they can make one. They do love that. They’ll take advantage when they can. But not always.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes they just use standard things, like USB, like on the Macs. Like, you know, for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time, they used a standard headphone jack because it wasn’t worth making their own custom

⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphone jack. Like, the world had a standard for this thing and they used it. And most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time, they do that. Most of the time, that’s the choice they make. And right now, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very, very clear that, you know, like when they made the dock connector, that was a special purpose thing they made for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPods, then they later adapted it. When they made Lightning, there was nothing better for them to move to. Like the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry, you know, the USB consortium and their people were designing God knows what with all those crazy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the USB

⏹️ ▶️ John 3B connector. Mini micro USB, the seven connectors I have to my digital cameras

⏹️ ▶️ John in the house. that all looks almost the same.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and pretty much everything the USB people have ever designed from a cable perspective,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or from a connection perspective rather, has been horrendous before USB-C. It’s no coincidence that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco allegedly had a very big role in USB-C, possibly even designing the whole thing themselves and just handing it to the USB people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and saying, here. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another reason, by the way, that this argument could be won inside Apple, because whatever sort of not-invented-here

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple pride things may be preventing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it, like with

⏹️ ▶️ John Lightning, we made, they’d be like, we kinda made USB-C too, So we’re all good in the pride area. Even if

⏹️ ▶️ John the world doesn’t know it, we here at Apple know that we kind of made this too. So

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I can imagine this argument being won inside Apple. Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so today, no question, the right move, if you were starting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fresh, would be USBC. And so the only question is, is it worth it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple to endure the transition costs to get to that point?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, you know, Apple, you know, I made a joke about Courage earlier referring to their wonderful

⏹️ ▶️ Marco justification for removing the headphone jack, but I think ditching Lightning this year

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and going to USB-C in this new fancy phone, that would be real courage. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are going to hear better from the users if they do this. They are definitely going to hear from people. I mean, people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still mad today about Lightning. Like, they’re still mad, almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco five years later, that they can’t use their dot connector that they bought ten years ago to charge their iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ John I do hope, though, like maybe Apple has numbers on this, because Android phones are so perverse, but I think I saw like what their

⏹️ ▶️ John market share is among smartphones, I think it’s like 80% or something, it’s some really, really high number. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John hoping that every house that has a, or some high percentage of the houses that have angry people

⏹️ ▶️ John who are angry about like dropping lightning, there’ll be USB-C charging cables hanging around

⏹️ ▶️ John within a couple years to charge the Android phones now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. And so if you think about what does an all-USB-C world look like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, we’re already going to be halfway there because all Android phones are going to have it. If they don’t already,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to have it probably within the next year. Right? And so you’re going to start seeing now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in places like hotel nightstands and charging cables

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in airports and and like terminals and stuff like that. Like you’re gonna start seeing, you know, where you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to see maybe you’d have a lightning port or a lightning cable and maybe you’d have one of those dual like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightning and micro USB things. You’re gonna start seeing USB-C all over all those things now for all the Android phones.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And wouldn’t it be great if they could just do USB-C and have that cover

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all phones? That would just be the new standard for charging your phone. That would be amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Apple had big plans for lightning for it being this amazing universal port

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could do all these different data things and everything. And I think part of the justification for removing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the headphone jack last year was, you know, it turns out we live in a wireless world. Like, most of what we do is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wireless. Still, I’ll go look at audio stuff, I try to buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decent microphone or sound interface for iOS devices. And a lot of them didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even make the jump from 30-pin to Lightning. I think Lightning largely hasn’t panned out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in being the universal accessory port Apple wanted it to be. And for a number of reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One is, you know, wireless things are so good. Another is that Android is more of a presence than I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple thought it would be or wanted it to be in that market. You know, it’s similar to like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, one of the reasons everyone said why they wouldn’t maybe do this is well, they just had to make lightning headphones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this past year. Well, no, lightning headphones have actually been around for a couple years, but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been like three pairs of them. Like there’s been almost none and almost nobody uses them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only ones that have any reasonable use are the ones that Apple includes in the box for free with the iPhone seven.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if they changed to USB-C, they would probably just include a USB-C version. And just like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was basically no big deal for all the people who got the ones in the box for free with the iPhone seven,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be similarly no big deal for all the people who would get the new USB-C ones in the box with the iPhone eight or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s called. So like that you can rule that argument right out. That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter enough, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you also look at the iPad in particular, the iPad really needs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco help. You know, it needs to become more of a work device

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to boost its sales, because it seems like, you know, they nailed the passive consumption market pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. If you want a- The passive

⏹️ ▶️ John consumption by rich people market.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the high end of the passive consumption market. They have that covered now. where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they need to make a lot more headway is in the productivity market. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are starting to see things like the Surface hurting them, not in a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive way yet, but in a way that they should really be noticing and that they probably are.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for the iPad to grow, they are making it more PC-like. They added the smart

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboards, they added the smart connector, they added the pencil. They’re gonna hopefully keep pushing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this direction. who knows what the software has coming next month or this month or whatever it is we’ll see I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess but I think there is large potential if you would put a USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ Marco port on an iPad because right now you know I mentioned earlier about like sound devices and things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like very few of them are available for lightning everything is available for computers like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every kind of peripheral you can think of is available with a USB interface on the end of it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it may not a USB-C port necessarily but like it could plug into a USB-C port through a very easy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap cable or a very easy adapter that you probably would already have three of in the bag.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If Apple wants the iPad to become more of a computer replacement,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding a USB-C port or two or three is not ridiculous. You know it’s the kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of thing like… I remember when I suggested that. It was on this show I suggested maybe a couple

⏹️ ▶️ John years ago adding a bunch of USB ports to the iPad and I’m pretty sure both of you laughed at me very heartily.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because every Apple commentator would have laughed at the suggestion a year ago or more. We all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did. Ever since the iPad one.

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t laugh at it. I said like, you have so much room on the side of the iPad and they wanted to be more

⏹️ ▶️ John capable. It’s the place to put I was thinking of USB a ports. That’s how long ago it was like I was envisioning USB a ports on the

⏹️ ▶️ John side of like the iPad one because there was actually room for them back then. But you know, the Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John I like I want more than one

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey port

⏹️ ▶️ John on a 12 inch iPad Pro. I don’t want just one centered in the bottom I’m replacing the lightning port, you have

⏹️ ▶️ John the opportunity to put more than one. There’s plenty of room, and if you want it to be the pro iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ John like Surface hardware, it doesn’t have just one port for power and all USB

⏹️ ▶️ John like the MacBook One does. So you gotta compete.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I think the iPad, there’s lots of new uses or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses that would be better if the iPad had USB-C ports, at least one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they’re gonna do that, Why would they keep the lightning port also? It would make very little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense to keep the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John lightning port. That’s for your headphones,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah. Yeah, speaking of that, I just realized the other day when reading these stories about lightning headphones

⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, I realized I actually don’t know where my lightning headphones that came with my iPhone 7 are right

⏹️ ▶️ John now in the house. I don’t think I lost them, but I don’t know where they are in the house because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve been using

⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods. And if they get out ahead of this, if they do the transition now

⏹️ ▶️ John with the anticipation, anticipating two things. one thing Margaret has said that like USB C, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not it’s not pervasive now, but presumably in a few years, it will be pervasive thanks to Android phones and everything, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So they’ll be out ahead of that. So they will be saving their customers from the experience of being like, Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m on vacation. And oh, I can’t use my iPhone with this thingy

⏹️ ▶️ John or this charge cable because it’s not USB. So saving them from that. And then to the thing that Apple kind of knows and controls

⏹️ ▶️ John is what is the time horizon for wireless charging? right? Is that just around the corner? Is it one or two

⏹️ ▶️ John years? I feel like Apple, if they switch now, we’ll be saying, we believe that by the time we get our devices so

⏹️ ▶️ John thin that we can’t USB can’t use USB C anymore, we’ll have the wireless charging thing covered. So

⏹️ ▶️ John again, they’re in a position to know and those all seem like reasonable things that could happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the other thing is like, I mean, this, this doesn’t sound a lot more likely than Apple adding USB to an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. But what if the phone is getting thicker, because they’re getting rid of the bezels,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they need somewhere to put things like the camera. The reason why those bezels are there is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco partly out of like, you know, looks and grip and everything, but mostly because that’s where you have to put a bunch of components that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are too deep to fit behind the screen. And if they’re moving to these larger screen, like more edge to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge phone designs that can be smaller in the hand, like have a smaller, you know, width and height

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the hand, they might have to get thicker in order to just have space for things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decent camera. Get ready for some

⏹️ ▶️ John bigger camera bumps. Well probably. I mean, that seems like a more aptly,

⏹️ ▶️ John as judged by the iPhone 7, they’ll just make a bigger bulge rather than make the whole thing wider, thicker, but we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. Anyway, so my point is basically that like, in a perfect world, if they started from scratch today,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had no legacy, they’d probably go USB-C. That would probably be the best option. If you look at the iPad, the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could really use USB-C and it wouldn’t make a lot of sense. It wouldn’t be very Apple style to still keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightning on there. They could just replace that. We are already not using lightning

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for much else besides charging. Like it’s not being used for a whole lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more by most people than just charging your phone. And they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco already pushing things like Bluetooth for a lot of peripherals for audio output and things like that. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and of course then also you look at the Mac and the Mac, you know, if you have USB-C on both

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, everything shares the same peripherals. Everything shares the same cables. You can charge

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them everywhere, even with the Android device cables. You can use all of the devices

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Android right now that are made by companies like Sony. If Sony has to pick between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco making something for lightning or making something for USB-C for Android phones, they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick Android because they’re more of an Android-focused company. There’s lots of companies like that where you kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to, when you pick teams, you see some of the headphones, there are some USB-C headphones now for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android phones, and there are some lightning headphones for iPhones, and usually the same headphone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t available in both. Like you kind of have to pick, and it sucks having this like this format war really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on between these companies and these different ecosystems where you can’t use the same headphones between two different devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wouldn’t it be great if you could just have one standard and USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is good enough and it’s going to be good enough for quite some time. We’re not going to have to change cables again in like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco three years from now. It’s going to be a while and it would be amazing to have that. Now there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one other part of this that is worth pointing out and that is the other end of the cable the end that plugs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the power brick or the computer if the case may be I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco personally I think it’s more likely that this rumor has been misunderstood and that the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more likely outcome here is that Apple’s not changing the phone to USB-C but they’re just going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ship it in the box with a USB-C cable that plugs into USB-C brick but it’s still going to have lightning

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone and that is way more likely

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s totally that’s totally what I thought and I think that’s so much more boring of a rumor so that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ John I was like I don’t want to talk about that because it’s like all right

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fine

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like all

⏹️ ▶️ John you can do for that one is get angry about the fact that now you have no place to plug in your charging cable but that would make such

⏹️ ▶️ John perfect sense along with everything we have but but why is that a story that’s not a Wall Street Journal caliber story

⏹️ ▶️ John like because who you know who cares whatever I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really

⏹️ ▶️ John hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not it and and the thing is in many ways having USB C on the charger end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually worse than having USB a and the charger end because as I ran on Twitter earlier, basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire world right now has tons of infrastructure in place that has USB-A

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports everywhere for people to plug their phones into to charge them with.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this isn’t just like the phone owner having to buy a new power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco brick or having to use a different one that comes in the box and throw away all their old ones. This is like, again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like airplanes, cars, hotels, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John all these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different yeah luggage all these different places where you have usb-a ports

⏹️ ▶️ John those travel things that we all have with like 12 usb-a ports on them you take the hotel so you can charge the whole family’s

⏹️ ▶️ John devices with you now there’s nothing to say that all those devices won’t also convert to usb-c at some point it’s just the question of

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re changing the non-phone end of the cable which is what we’re talking about now even though it’s boring if you’re changing the non-phone

⏹️ ▶️ John end of the cable is now the right time to change away from a because you’re not gaining

⏹️ ▶️ John much except for the only thing you’re gaining is uniform sanity within Apple’s line where you no longer have the embarrassing

⏹️ ▶️ John situation where you buy a MacBook Pro and an iPhone and you can’t charge them in each other. But that’s it. That’s all you get out of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And so like, you know, it would be fine to have to have USB

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C to C as the main thing or see the lightning as the main thing. That would be fine. But I think see the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightning as the cable that comes to the phone and as a thing that most people have is actually less convenient

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now and for the foreseeable future than a lightning would be because there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so many A ports everywhere in the world that people already have installed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or bought or everything else and it goes way beyond just buying a new power brick and it goes into things like buying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new car or retrofitting airplanes and like those are things that just don’t happen very often. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to have USB A ports as like the new power outlet for phones for a long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to come. And you can’t adapt a USB-A port

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a USB-C cable plugged into it. You can go the other direction with all these little wonderful $9 adapters

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple sells, but you can’t go the other way. You can’t plug a USB-C device

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a USB-A port. It violates the USB spec because there’s lots of weird things that can go wrong if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it wrong, and lots of weird combinations they didn’t want to allow with, like, what do you do with the massive amount of power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on these pins, and things like that. And so that direction can’t be like legally adapted by the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB spec and for very good reasons that are probably likely to change. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re going to have a cable that you’re going to want to plug into whatever you find as you travel or go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco throughout the world or in and out of your car wherever else you’re probably going to want a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the phone has lightning or USB C to USB a and then maybe have a dongle with your laptop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can plug it in there sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John you want to save yourself some email. Yeah, go you have to tell them that you know that there’s connectors that go from A to C. You have to

⏹️ ▶️ John say that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I know you can go on lots of places and buy one from some kind of no-name brand,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s a reason why there aren’t that many of them and why you don’t see people like Apple selling them because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re bad. Bad things can happen, please don’t use them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So speaking of saving email, I forgot to mention that I do have a modern Apple TV

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the house and that is USB-C. Would either of you care to wage or guess how many times I’ve plugged

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a USB-C cable into that Apple TV.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Is

⏹️ ▶️ John that just a diagnostic port? I don’t think it’s supposed to be a user…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s for diagnostics and it’s for developers. Like when I install Providence, the emulator

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that I use,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s similar to how you plug in a phone to run devices or to run apps that you write from Xcode onto

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone through USB. Same thing with the Apple TV. You plug it into the USB port and it becomes an output device for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xcode that you can run stuff on.

Nintendo Switch cartridges

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of USB-C, the Nintendo Switch has USB-C, which is out soon. And someone

⏹️ ▶️ John tweeted earlier today that if you plug a Nintendo Switch into a MacBook Pro, the Switch charges the laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ John not the other way around. That’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco great.

⏹️ ▶️ John In the world of ubiquitous connectors, it is kind of a weird situation, because we have the… It’s kind of based on size.

⏹️ ▶️ John You expect if you’re using your laptop, and you’re like, oh, my phone’s low, I’m going to plug it into my laptop, that’s a thing we’ve all done,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? You fully expect that when you plug your phone into your laptop, the laptop will charge your phone,

⏹️ ▶️ John the phone won’t charge your laptop. And why do you think that? Well, because the batteries in the laptop is bigger, I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ John But when you do it with the switch, I guess they don’t know how big they are. It’s like a little dog that thinks he’s the big dog. It’s like, I

⏹️ ▶️ John got

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you, MacBook.

⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s some juice. Take this. I don’t even know. Who knows? It could be that just the Mac thinks it’s being charged. And it actually isn’t because

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why the switch would output charge or anything. But in this world of

⏹️ ▶️ John ubiquitous USB-C that our future world where everything has USB C ports it can be confusing

⏹️ ▶️ John as to what the actual relationship between devices with batteries and then will be when you plug them into each

⏹️ ▶️ John other I’m sure there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m sure part of the standard is like for that but they probably just didn’t quite do it right or

⏹️ ▶️ John something yeah or like again why the hell this is switch charging anything I don’t think there are any peripherals that plug into

⏹️ ▶️ John the switch and derive power from it so who knows yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do its various external control like the the pro controller what are those are those all just wireless with their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own chargers or what?

⏹️ ▶️ John I would guess so I mean all existing console controllers I have use one of the terrible micro

⏹️ ▶️ John USB

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey things

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the the switch pro controller has USB-C I wouldn’t know because I don’t have a

⏹️ ▶️ John pre-order for it but I’m working on that by the way so everybody knows I

⏹️ ▶️ John do have orders I do now have pre-orders for the switch and for the Zelda game

⏹️ ▶️ John that I want thanks to some very helpful full fans of the show. So far, still no

⏹️ ▶️ John pro controller.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you’re going to have to tell me at some point how I’m supposed to get a pro controller when I get my Switch. Also, can I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy the games? I heard that Pete, when I mentioned that I had these games in my Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cart ready to pre-order, I got a number of helpful people saying why don’t I just buy a giant SD card and download them? Is that a thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can do?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but like the only reason I want the Zelda is because it’s like the special edition that comes with a bunch of little tchotchkes and stuff, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it comes with a soundtrack CD.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would throw all that away or I’d mail it to you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. So, so if you don’t care about that, I’m pretty sure every single game is, is downloadable

⏹️ ▶️ John and the storage on the Switch itself is not that big. So everyone’s telling you to buy an SD card. But I think if you just get the Switch and

⏹️ ▶️ John just want to play Zelda, you can just get it and then download Zelda and play it. And did you see the other story speaking

⏹️ ▶️ John of Switch about the, uh, the Zelda cards? Have you seen pictures of how big the little, uh, the, uh, the Switch

⏹️ ▶️ John cartridges are?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re really small. Like they’re not as small as like the micro micro SD cards, but they’re smaller than you think they are.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and that poses a problem because like, what if kids find these little games and stick them

⏹️ ▶️ John in their mouth and swallow them or do something else bad for them? Right? So Nintendo’s solution to this was to

⏹️ ▶️ John coat the cartridges they sell with a very, very bad tasting substance. So people are

⏹️ ▶️ John now licking, uh, Nintendo

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey switch cartridges. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the backstory. I had seen people say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do taste like garbage. I didn’t know what the backstory was though.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. That’s, that’s what I’ve heard. It’s a plausible theory because it is, it is like kind kind of a you know a swallowing choking

⏹️ ▶️ John hazard they’re small enough and they’re gonna be around kids like because you know it’s not it’s not like that there you’re not worried

⏹️ ▶️ John about a kid swallowing the SIM card from your phone because kids aren’t playing with the SIM card in your phone but kids will be around these

⏹️ ▶️ John loose cartridges for the switch or they you know bring a bunch of them in the back of the car with them and play them on a car trip and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John and their you know younger sibling gets a hold of them and so apparently they taste terrible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait so I have a question all right so uh a while so I used to buy my nails and one of the ways I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stopped was I got one of those like horrible tasting nail polish things same theory and yeah however

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one of the shortcomings of that is that it would like a rub off on like food I was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco preparing or like anything anything that I touched would taste horrible and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if you like handle a switch cartridge and you can make a sandwich it like is it gonna rub

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off at all are you gonna taste that

⏹️ ▶️ John so I have to say that this is the internet and I’ve just read some tweets so

⏹️ ▶️ John for all I know this is totally false and people just got some weird foul tasting stuff on their switch cartridges.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I will say that now assuming this story is true, I would

⏹️ ▶️ John think that the coating they put in these cartridges would have some of the same problems as the nail biting stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John One, that it would eventually be able to wear off or be sucked off as very determined nail biters know

⏹️ ▶️ John well that if you really if you really want to go to town you can a build up a tolerance to and

⏹️ ▶️ John be eventually remove

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that substance. Not this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I quit with one application.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s how bad it was. You’re not as determined

⏹️ ▶️ John as some little children. Yeah. I can tell you from

⏹️ ▶️ John personal experience with people in my family who I will not name, who are not me, that it

⏹️ ▶️ John is possible if you are stubborn enough to get rid of that stuff. And two, like

⏹️ ▶️ John you said, will it come off on your hands. I think it has to necessarily come off your

⏹️ ▶️ John hands if your hands are wet, because if it doesn’t come off on your hands when they’re wet, it also won’t come off on your tongue when you’re wet.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so I think those are real things, but what I’m hoping is that cartridges don’t get handled much

⏹️ ▶️ John under normal circumstances, and that people’s hands are not wet enough to pull off the stuff again, assuming this entire story

⏹️ ▶️ John is true. But all we know is that when any of us gets or encounters a Nintendo Switch cartridge, it

⏹️ ▶️ John is incumbent upon us, as part of the homework for the show, to lick it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve just given me a really good reason to just download all my games and not ever buy one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John We’re like, now you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to get one to lick. You have to. Tip’s gonna want to lick it. I just have to lick my SD card and see if that has the same coding.

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USB-C iPhones? (reprise)

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I think what the thing that bothers me about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPhone USB-C thing is if the USB-C is on the device itself is on the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what technical thing does that solve? Like yes I understand that there’s a consistency

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the rest of like the laptop line but what does that actually do for an iPhone that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes the iPhone itself better.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t we get the advantage of dedicated analog audio pins so that we don’t need the DAC in the

⏹️ ▶️ John things anymore and we could have cheap headphones to connect to USB-C or am I misremembering this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Both USB-C and lightning have ways to do that. However, we also did find that in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little Apple dongle is a little tiny DAC, because DACs cost nothing. And it’s not a very good one,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t matter for most people for what they’re using. It’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, that’s a potential advantage that you could get if Apple decides to take advantage of it. And if there,

⏹️ ▶️ John it may, I have no idea if there are any existing headphones that take analog audio signals

⏹️ ▶️ John and have, instead of a, you know, a regular headphone jack in the end, they have a USB-C one. But in theory, that’s one,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s also a, you know, tech tech wise, the thing with the bendy pins that we talked about, like who knows how big a problem

⏹️ ▶️ John that is, but, uh, it stands to reason that it is

⏹️ ▶️ John better to have the parts that eventually fatigue bend or wear out on the cable that

⏹️ ▶️ John you can throw away and not inside the device. So that’s another tech advantage. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess I guess I just there’s nothing that you guys have said or that I can think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that makes me think, oh, this is a technical problem that’s being solved with USB.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, it is worth that that juice is worth the squeeze of pissing off the entire world

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for another for another cable change or another port.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you think you guys not agree? You both said that you thought people would be angry, but I totally think people will be less angry

⏹️ ▶️ John than 30-pin to lighting. Even though 30-pin was 10 years old, I think they’ll be less angry about this because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a switch to the standard. Because yes, you’re going to be grumbly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re assuming though that people have USB-C devices. I am cheap and I don’t buy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive things terribly often, but I always keep up to date

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on iPhones and iPads and whatnot. And I don’t have a, like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said, the only USB-C device I have is an Apple TV that I’ve never plugged USB-C into.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’d be a little bit ahead of the curve. Like I agree, people don’t have, but I think every story about this would be

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple concedes or like the most negative story you can have. Apple finally concedes and does

⏹️ ▶️ John what everyone else does. Apple finally gets in line. Ever finally does the industry standard thing. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John that would be the negative Apple spin on these stories. And you know, again, with the European regulations requiring

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it was, many USB and probably going to require USB-C. Like, I think that’s the spin on the story.

⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, it’s like, oh, I don’t care what the health standards. I got a house full of freaking lightning cables that are now worthless to me right like people will be

⏹️ ▶️ John angry. But I think the story will be Apple gets in line with everybody else and that

⏹️ ▶️ John will soften the blow.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, I think if you’re going to do that, though, you wait another year or something like that, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone is still sensitive to this because I still within the last month have heard people whining about lightning ports.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And and so if you’re going to make this jump, you make the jump where it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey preposterous that Apple isn’t on USB-C. Right now, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t think anyone… You want to be a latecomer though? Do you want

⏹️ ▶️ John that to feel like… In

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this case, yeah. Yeah. Because again, the thing that I can’t get past is it’s not solving any technical problem that I’m aware

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of. Maybe on like an iPad, maybe if you wanted to plug in say an external display, which I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess you can do that with the HDMI cable on a phone or iPad anyway. So yeah, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey failing to see what technical problem that makes the iPhone itself better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What technical problem are they solving by doing this? Because otherwise, why bother?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we also don’t know how pervasive the lightning connector problems are. Like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know. How many people do

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we know who

⏹️ ▶️ John have had this problem? I know two people, Marco and Merlin, right? Who have both had problems

⏹️ ▶️ John with the contacts, you know, the bendy little bits coming out of thing and then scorching the little connectors.

⏹️ ▶️ John I believe what it mark did you get your phone replaced because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of that

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I did and Then a Merlin I don’t know if he got anything replaced But he had like we were calling it the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ John virus because once one of the little Bendy pieces of metal doesn’t contact with the shiny

⏹️ ▶️ John gold bits on the lightning connector and starts arcing It can cause a little Bernie spot there And that makes the connection even

⏹️ ▶️ John worse and more working and so on and so forth and now you have a lightning connector That has a little Bernie spot

⏹️ ▶️ John on it And if you put that lightning connector into another device now you have poor contact between the Bernie spot and the

⏹️ ▶️ John little bendy metal thing and it causes that to arc and so it’s like it’s like a hardware virus as you plug this

⏹️ ▶️ John this plug into a bunch of other devices eventually they all get this little Bernie spot on the same place

⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s bad and is this just a problem that is really rare and esoteric and really much

⏹️ ▶️ John more much smaller in the grand scheme of things than Apple’s bad strain relief I don’t know but I do

⏹️ ▶️ John know two people and it did cause a warranty replacement for sure and at least one of them

⏹️ ▶️ John that I think would fall into the category of of potentially a tech problem that

⏹️ ▶️ John USBC is solving.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But without numbers,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to know without numbers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess I just, but here again, that’s solving a problem for Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that your average consumer, even I, don’t really care about.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John but Marco didn’t want to get his phones. Well, maybe he did because of the microphone thing. But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey people don’t want to have to bring in their thing to get it swapped,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Does USBC solve the Lint problem? That’s another sort of anecdotal thing we don’t have numbers for. But

⏹️ ▶️ John how many people have you heard about, my thing wouldn’t charge and I had to get out the dentist gear and start

⏹️ ▶️ John pulling out the little lint balls or cat hair from inside the thing or I brought it to an Apple store and they had

⏹️ ▶️ John to do it for me. My parents have had this problem where they had to have lint pulled out

⏹️ ▶️ John of their thing pulled out of their lighting connector by like an Apple store person, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Does USBC suffer from that as much as lighting? I have no idea. But that is another potential tech

⏹️ ▶️ John problem, not just for Apple for warranty represent people don’t want their crap to break and have to bring it to the store either, especially it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so hard to get an appointment and it’s annoying to be in there and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything. I don’t know. I just I feel like if if I were to wager a guess,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s what we what our initial interpretation was, which is it’s going to the the cable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey included in the box, maybe lightning to USB C. That falls down though, because of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Marco was describing about how the entirety of power charging in the world is all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey done via USB.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple, this is one of the old school things where I would say, would Apple do this? 100% I totally believe Apple would

⏹️ ▶️ John would go lightning to USB C. Despite everything we just said, and we all agree on that you have to use BA

⏹️ ▶️ John is more common. Why would Apple do it? Because they’d be like, this is our connector for our stuff. And our power

⏹️ ▶️ John bricks and our computers. And by the way, we sell the other one for a reasonable price. So buy more peripherals

⏹️ ▶️ John from us. And you know, buy more adapters, and it’s fine. I 100% believe Apple to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just hard to sell tell from this rumor. And speaking of hardware virus, I hope this rumor is a different

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of hardware virus and that even if Apple is either doing the boring thing or not doing

⏹️ ▶️ John anything, and they just come with plain old USB a to lightning connectors like every other thing. The fact that the story is

⏹️ ▶️ John out there and that, you know, every tech site and the Wall Street Journal and podcasts and everybody are talking about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it seems to me, collectively slowly convincing ourselves that this would be a good idea. It would be great

⏹️ ▶️ John if somewhere in Apple like no, Wall Street Journal, that’s not what you were supposed to be leaking at all. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just that we were going to change the other end of the case. And then come the time when when the new iPhone is released, we’re all disappointed

⏹️ ▶️ John that it doesn’t have USB C Apple be like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that was getting away from

⏹️ ▶️ John us. So it’s like a hardware mind virus.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of it. Like it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if the phone itself had a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB C port on it. But I just I keep coming back to and I can’t get past, what is it really doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the device? Like what problem is it solving for the device? I’m not saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there isn’t one. It’s making a lot of things more convenient. And in the very, very likely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco future that we’re gonna have, because you know, Android is doing this, so we’re gonna have all these USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables out there in the world. It’s gonna be very, very convenient if we not only can just have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one cable, but then you can plug in your iPhone to any of these things anywhere. That’s gonna be incredibly convenient.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also going to be convenient for just people who travel with an iPhone and a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you can have one charger that you kind of switch between them as needed or you can swap cables

⏹️ ▶️ Marco between them if if what if you forget one of the cables or one of them goes bad or you only have one long cable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one short cable and you need to flip where they are for a certain arrangement that you have when you’re traveling or something like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of like everyday practical advantages that this could bring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a world where everything else is USB-C and I think it’s very clear we are heading towards that world like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the world where everything else is usbc that’s happening apple is leading the charge with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the max like so that’s obviously happening um it’s here like if you’ve bought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new macbook pro in the last five months uh you already are in this world at least partially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as they update the imax hopefully in a few weeks and everything else like you know over the next couple years like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you buy a new mac it is almost certainly going to be all usbc so again

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this world is here This is happening. This is already a thing. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of great accessories for USB-C now. Like, think of all the, like, standard,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like, just how, like, iOS has had support for standard USB devices, like, standard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco HID things, standard sound devices, things that, without any drivers or anything, for a long time now. But in order to plug

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them in, you had to get one of those, like, lightning to USB camera connection kit adapters, and this would actually allow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone to have, like, a standard port that is always there that can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco support a whole bunch of new devices that can make your phone more useful in certain specialized scenarios.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s the everyday practicality of all these different charge cables that are gonna be everywhere. There’s carrying it with you in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bag full of a USB-C laptop with all the USB-C cables you’re gonna have for that. Not having to have two separate sets of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables with different sets of connectors and everything. It’s just tons of everyday practicality plus all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this edge case power that you could have by having this device be a member of the USB-C ecosystem,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a first class member. have it be a USB-C host device that can have other USB-C things plugged

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it and have that just work, in addition to being charged and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John And eventually have Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 7 on your phones, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, I mean, they wouldn’t probably even need that because USB 3 is already really fast for most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things a phone would be transferring over an external

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John bus.

⏹️ ▶️ John You would do it for a video out on the 27-inch iPad Pro, so you could have two of them next to each other.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That actually is pretty cool, but yeah. Yeah, and again, also think of the iPad, where if they want to bring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad forward in a big way, one of the ways to do that would be to give it a USB port of some kind.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, these days that would be a USB-C port. And if you have that, why would you keep Lightning there?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re getting rid of Lightning there, might as well also get rid of Lightning on the phone and also be a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more comfortable with the European Union in the process. So there’s lots of reasons to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And Casey, so as I think the one of us who’s most cool

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this idea, Would you at least agree that if they were starting clean today with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no legacy baggage, would USB-C be the right choice?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, oh, without question. And, you know, sitting here thinking about it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like the only way that this feels better to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me is if inductive charging really is a thing, right? Because although

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I plug in phones constantly because I’m a developer, Like Erin, for example,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only time she ever plugs her phone into anything, it’s just the wall to charge it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yeah, it would be kind of a pain in the butt if she had to bring her like charging pad everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ Casey she goes in order to charge her phone. But that makes it sting a little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit less, I feel like. I don’t know why. Maybe now that I’m saying that out loud, it seems bananas to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me because it’s really no different because, you know, if it’s USB-C, then we would have to bring that specific

⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C cable because it would be the only one in the house But if it’s an inductive charging pad suddenly that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better because I don’t know why but it just feels better to me Even though I admit that that makes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no sense So maybe maybe that’s the fix is inductive charging is the thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey since it’s wireless and Apple hates wires and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C for like, you know Apple TV style if you need it, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I think that’s what charging is is probably a separate thing It’s the kind of thing where,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it ever makes sense to do it in an iPhone, which so far it seems like the uses

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have been out there in the world so far have not been very compelling for lots of different reasons,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of which seem insurmountable, but we’ll see if that ever changes. Things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the horrible efficiency of it and the incredible close proximity you need to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the charging device, or the pad, or whatever it is. But I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see this as separate things. You know, like, it’s very hard. And even like Apple has said this on multiple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasions, I think Phil has made a few comments to this degree. You know, you have a wire, you can plug things into charge,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s no big deal. Like wireless charging sounds great if you think about like, oh, I could just walk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around everywhere. My whole house, my whole work, the whole world outside maybe, and my phone just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always charged from the air. But that probably isn’t what it would be. It would probably be like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just have these wireless charging pads like on your desk and stuff, but like that isn’t that much better than a cable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s pretty better than a cable, I think. I think if you could just have, think of the area in everybody’s

⏹️ ▶️ John house where they dump all their devices to charge and the rat’s nest of wires that they have there. If there was just a

⏹️ ▶️ John nice pad and they could just pile things on top of it, and that’s assuming they just go with like inductive charging with this type

⏹️ ▶️ John of thing. If they go with the, what was that company called? The, wasn’t it Steve Pearlman, the onLive guy?

⏹️ ▶️ John I forget. Anyway, the beam forming

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Wi-Fi kind of tech

⏹️ ▶️ John that could be used to deliver power. piece something that’s the thing that you’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco about like I’m wandering

⏹️ ▶️ John around my house when my thing is charging and that is way way way slower but even if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just like within the same room like imagine putting your phone on your nightstand to charge at night but

⏹️ ▶️ John not plugging it in and not having to put it on a pad and not having your brain slowly microwaved by the thing that’s in

⏹️ ▶️ John your room

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little concerning to be honest and then my phone you can scratch it by the by my nightstand like I have a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doc it’s That’s great. See,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think the real reason why Apple is going to switch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to USB-C on the phone is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just got these awesome studio neat docks for everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. So whenever I buy new docks, last time when they changed to Lightning, was right after

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bought the Elevation dock. And so now that I bought new docks, finally, I finally replaced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Elevation docks after five years or however long it’s been. Now Apple is going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change away from lightning and maybe buy all new docs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the good news for the Kickstarter for iOS device

⏹️ ▶️ John docs made of like, you know, fancy burled walnut and all sorts of other things like that. The good news is that

⏹️ ▶️ John once wireless charging is here, you can still sell those same docs. It’s even easier because they don’t have to even charge.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just basically like a little stand for your phone, like a little home for it. Just it props it

⏹️ ▶️ John up and makes it look cute. Because in the end, I mean, I know you think that I always a charging

⏹️ ▶️ John doc. very important that it charges in the end it’s a little stand for your phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a nice stand for my phone

⏹️ ▶️ John I know I’m just saying like that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco industry

⏹️ ▶️ John will not be decimated by wireless charging in fact that industry will be freed from having to worry about the silly

⏹️ ▶️ John electronics and they can concentrate where they really care about which is fine materials and craftsmanship

⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can use all the money you’re saving by not buying two sets of cables for everything and just dump it all into docks

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s right you have one made from what is your little heavy cylinder made out of Tungsten? Tungsten.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment, and Squarespace. And we will see you next week!

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental. John

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can find the show notes at ATP.FM

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check my cast so long

Post-show: Decoding Tim

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is going on my mouse every great once in a while this happens my beloved magic mouse is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like lagging to hell And it just wants to be

⏹️ ▶️ John harpooned. Yep. That happens to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, too. You see me tweeting about that a few days ago

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, you’re right. I never I don’t think I ever I think I told you it never happens to me in fact But I lied I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a darn dirty liar that that just happened to me and it’s not the first time it’s happened

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It appears to happen to everybody who has any Apple Bluetooth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pointing device It happens to the trackpads and the mice. It happens to the old mice that use AA batteries

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the new ones that have the rechargeable harpoon thing. It happens whether you’re at a high battery level or a low battery

⏹️ ▶️ Marco level. There seems to be very little correlation to any of these factors. It just seems to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen to all of Apple’s Bluetooth devices. So it’s probably an issue with either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all Bluetooth devices or at least

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s Bluetooth devices. Doesn’t happen to my wired keyboard or my wired Logitech mouse from 1992.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re so old. Never, doesn’t stutter, doesn’t need to be recharged.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, the Mac Pro that you have, I’m pretty sure Bluetooth was optional. Do you have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth on that?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Let’s go find out.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think it was like a $60

⏹️ ▶️ John option. Turn Bluetooth on. There is a button that says that. I think I can

⏹️ ▶️ John click it. It is currently off. So I’m going to assume I have it. Oh yeah, that probably means you have it. I did not get the Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ John option on this, by the way. Maybe that’s what I’m thinking of. my Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not have Wi-Fi. I wonder if the 2006 Mac Pro, maybe Bluetooth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was optional on that one, and maybe it was only Wi-Fi on yours?

⏹️ ▶️ John It might have been optional on mine. I might have checked the Bluetooth boxes, and I’m like, maybe I’ll get Bluetooth peripherals. Here I am,

⏹️ ▶️ John eight years later, still no Bluetooth peripherals.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What else is there to talk about? You can talk more about the Mac Pro if you want. Hard pass,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I got to go. I mean, Tim Cook said nothing again.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s why it’s not even on the topic list.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because there’s nothing to discuss because there was nothing

⏹️ ▶️ John said well, I’ll give my two cents that I already gave in slack to put this one to bed.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s He was asked in the shareholders meeting about like, you know pro hardware and all the stuff We always

⏹️ ▶️ John whine about and he gave the same kind of non-committal like oh, you know We’re we have things coming

⏹️ ▶️ John for pros and we we do care about them despite all our actions to the contrary But he didn’t say I’m being sarcastic

⏹️ ▶️ John now But anyway, he gave the same kind of non answer did last time that we talked about that led us to believe that an iMac pro is coming or

⏹️ ▶️ John something. And there was some discussion about like, all right, what’s so bad about this?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like in the hierarchy of things that Tim Cook could have said or done in relation to that, where does

⏹️ ▶️ John this fall? And I feel like saying nothing would have still been worse. It’s I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, when there’s a problem that a bunch of people see, like some people are cranky about pro Mac hardware, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Saying nothing is the worst choice, because that’s just like, it just makes people angry. It’s like you’re ignoring them or

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re baring the head in the sand. People want some kind of answer. Saying something boring and non-committal and vague

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s basically like Apple saying we think we have something for you is better than

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing because at the very least it says all right well this whether Apple whether it’s true

⏹️ ▶️ John or not Apple thinks they have something that we’re going to like in the future and you know that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of vague but like it it strings us along. And then I feel like the best

⏹️ ▶️ John thing they could have done is give a strong definitive answer that acknowledges

⏹️ ▶️ John the acknowledges the issue, and then comes to a conclusion. And so that could be,

⏹️ ▶️ John we hear your concerns, but we’ve decided we don’t want to be in the hardware business anymore. Perfectly valid, it puts an

⏹️ ▶️ John end to all of our whining, right? Because like, well, what’s done is done, you know, we can yell them about it, but at least we have a definitive

⏹️ ▶️ John answer. Or they could say, we’ve heard your concerns, we realize we dropped the ball, but we are going to

⏹️ ▶️ John to rededicate ourselves to pro hardware. They didn’t say that either. So we get the we get the middle one, the

⏹️ ▶️ John vague answer that tells us nothing, that is still better than nothing, but is still much worse than Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John definitively coming down in one direction or another. They don’t have to announce new products, they don’t have to promise anything, but they could

⏹️ ▶️ John have said, you know, they have to acknowledge the situation, say we realize we’ve dropped the ball,

⏹️ ▶️ John and either, but we’ve decided to get out of this market, or we are going to rededicate

⏹️ ▶️ John ourselves. And they didn’t do either one of those things. So it’s business as usual.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you and I just have different definitions of what nothing means. You think he didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say nothing. I think he did say nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ John But, well, no, because he, by not saying, like, we’re sorry

⏹️ ▶️ John you feel like, you remember the Final Cut Pro 10 thing? What they basically said with that was like, we’re sorry you feel this way,

⏹️ ▶️ John but Final Cut Pro 10 is the future, get used to it. Right? So instead of saying, we’re sorry you’re sad about the

⏹️ ▶️ John pro hardware, but we’re not doing that anymore, get used to it. Like, what he was trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to say, what he tries to say every time in this vague thing is like, I know you’re sad now,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I will not acknowledge that your sadness is founded in anything. I know you’re sad now, but we have some really great stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John coming in the future. And he always says that. It’s a Tim Cook-ism

⏹️ ▶️ John to say, boy, we have a great roadmap, we have great things coming. And he

⏹️ ▶️ John says it frequently in earnings calls. For years and years he’s been saying in earnings calls. And if you look back on those earnings calls

⏹️ ▶️ John and you try to say, three years ago when he said that on the earnings call, what was he talking about? What

⏹️ ▶️ John product was he… He’s always so jazzed. He’s like, we have some great things coming. We have amazing product line.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’re going to be super duper impressed and we get all excited. And then if you go forward three years, you’re like, when he said that,

⏹️ ▶️ John what was he even talking about? Like, was he talking about the watch or was that like the new

⏹️ ▶️ John Retina iPad mini? You can’t even tell what he was talking about even after the fact. And he always

⏹️ ▶️ John says, like, hang in there guys, just because you don’t know that we’re going to do a thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John trust me, in the future we’re going to do a thing and you’re going to like it. And I think that is materially different than literally saying

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing, like, you know, not answering the question. And it is also different than

⏹️ ▶️ John actually definitively saying they are or aren’t going to rededicate themselves to the pro market.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But see, it’s because you can’t associate what he says with anything even after the fact

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it basically means nothing because it can you can apply his words

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to whatever you want them to be and he knows that like it that it’s it’s a non-committal statement

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if he says we have great things down the pipe and it isn’t at all what you want then but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hot but then like you know when later comes and the great things they release aren’t what you want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it doesn’t invalidate what he said it just then then there’s just a new excuse of well they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made something new it just wasn’t for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know that’s the thing. Yeah right, but what if they never made another thing that they even pretended it was for pro people?

⏹️ ▶️ John They never made an iMac Pro like, because then we could call him on it, but by him saying this it’s clear that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple thinks they have something that pro people will like. They may be wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No it’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve been wrong in the past, but at the very least I think what this says is, it’s them saying

⏹️ ▶️ John we are going to release a new Mac that we think will appeal to pros. And all of us can say cynically, well you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John probably wrong, it probably won’t appeal to pros, because your road or your track record here is crap. But at least you think

⏹️ ▶️ John you have something a little appeals to pros, which is more substantive than just saying, vague, we have something

⏹️ ▶️ John coming. I mean, it’ll eventually build up to the point like it did right before the trash can where at that point, they were like,

⏹️ ▶️ John stay tuned for exciting new pro hardware, which

⏹️ ▶️ John we all thought was going to be a new Mac Pro and totally was a new Mac Pro. And so we’ll see if that it builds to that.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like what Tim Cook is saying on this hardware front here is like we’re going to introduce a product that we

⏹️ ▶️ John think people who like the old Mac Pro will like and we probably won’t because it’ll be an iMac Pro but whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I think is coming.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is even what he said it like what he said was like you know things for like pro markets and especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco creative pros you know what Apple pitches for creative pros? The iPad Pro. And the MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. Everything Tim Cook said could be just in reference to the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco updated iMacs and iPad Pros they’re gonna launch in two weeks or whatever it is like that like that’s the thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it doesn’t mean anything

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t I don’t buy that all right so if here that’s not like if if in a year there

⏹️ ▶️ John has been no motion on anything that Apple is even pitching as a Mac made for pros

⏹️ ▶️ John I think people will be angry and they’ll come back at Tim Cook and say you didn’t deliver on those things

⏹️ ▶️ John as opposed to his other we have this great roadmaps the problem is we could say well they did release a lot of cool stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John and any of that stuff could have applied we just can’t tell what the hell he was talking about, but it’s not as if they didn’t deliver because

⏹️ ▶️ John every year Apple releases great new stuff somewhere, it’s just never desktop Macs, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that if no, if it really is just like the new iPads, people will be like, well, that’s not what

⏹️ ▶️ John we thought you were talking about at all, and they’ll be pissed about it and they’ll come back even angrier with the same question. Whereas if Apple releases

⏹️ ▶️ John an iMac Pro, people are like, oh, all right, well, I guess this is what he was talking about, but surprise, we’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John happy because we wanted a better Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My concern with Cook’s remarks in this area and the resulting products

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that come out of Apple is that, especially because he specifically called out,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he said, some of the lines of like, you know, pro users, especially creative pros, and they keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco referring to, oh, creative pros, creative pros. It seems like Apple’s image of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what a creative pro is is somebody drawing with a pencil on an iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s one type of creative pro, but that’s a very, very small percentage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. And that’s also, and like creative pros aren’t all pros.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple used to really own the market for so many kinds of pros.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve really owned those markets so well for such a long time. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like all the market share that they’ve like shaved off in recent years by just neglect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or cutting off support or cutting off product lines or features or whatever else are almost all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pro users that had more complex or higher end needs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than somebody drawing on an iPad. And it doesn’t seem like, it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook’s Apple just either doesn’t care about the other kinds of pro work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and needs that are out there, or they fundamentally don’t understand it. Both

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of which are scary possibilities to me. But I think it’s very clear that at least one of those is true.

⏹️ ▶️ John that mkbhd video where he was uh… complaining about his mac pro

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey uh… and uh… yeah ideas

⏹️ ▶️ John basically saying that you like you get he’s got the old twelve core trash can mackerel hit the old slash current

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco current yes the only thing i have a really good as an idea and he

⏹️ ▶️ John uses file cut pro to edit his videos and what he was this is things like people like why even use my crappy old mac

⏹️ ▶️ John want to get it like a a fancy pc was like well i like final cut for video editing i’m sure it’s what he’s used to and he’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John a plug-in to file cut that are available elsewhere and so on and so forth I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a good canary the whole Final Cut Pro thing. So like Aperture is gone, right? Final Cut Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of the last bastion of pro-ness,

⏹️ ▶️ John like the video market, right? And it is currently being woefully underserved

⏹️ ▶️ John by their current trashcan and anything else. I feel like, I mean, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe people are editing

⏹️ ▶️ John entire movies on their MacBook Ones and I’m just silly for thinking this, but whatever. MKBHD,

⏹️ ▶️ John who does video for a living, wants his Mac Pro. Maybe it’s just because he’s like a computer gearhead like we are.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, he actually needs it. Yeah, but and he says that even despite that 12 core being

⏹️ ▶️ John old and creaky, that he does still get better performance than he would with Adobe Premiere, which is not an apples

⏹️ ▶️ John to apples comparison, obviously, that he does on Adobe Premiere on a fancy PC. But you know, bottom

⏹️ ▶️ John line is he just likes Final Cut, right? If they drop Final Cut, if they stop making it in the same

⏹️ ▶️ John way they stopped making aperture. That will be an extremely strong signal because you’re right,

⏹️ ▶️ John Mark, like what’s left? Is it just people making artisanal sketches on virtual napkins?

⏹️ ▶️ John Is that it? Is that the only creative purpose even like real creative pros need to use frickin Adobe Illustrator? Like let’s get

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey real here. Photoshop and Illustrator

⏹️ ▶️ John is what they need to use to do their jobs. And you know, maybe like a page layout type of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Creative professionals like when they say that I would think of things like aperture oops,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not there anymore, or Lightroom, because that’s a Mac application to write, or things like Final Cut

⏹️ ▶️ John and Premiere. And so many markets like we again, we’ve complained about so we get a lot of emails as a self selecting

⏹️ ▶️ John people saying, I work in this industry, and I’ve watched my entire industry dump Macs as soon as they can switch all

⏹️ ▶️ John to PCs, because they realize that doesn’t care about them. Apple makes Final Cut, it’s their own program,

⏹️ ▶️ John presumably there is a team working on it, right? And they put a lot of effort into the Final Cut Pro 10, being

⏹️ ▶️ John a big leap over the other one and endured all the problems with that program and you know like like they

⏹️ ▶️ John as a company seem dedicated to resourcing and believing in that product in the same way that you super

⏹️ ▶️ John aperture I suppose if they drop that then it will really be like all right Tim

⏹️ ▶️ John stop talking about professionals of any kind creative or otherwise because what the

⏹️ ▶️ John hell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the way on this MKB HD video you know what he says right before new Mac Pro I

⏹️ ▶️ John always have my USB see yeah yep well it’s in the news it’s in the news He’s reading the same stories we are.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, he wants USB see everywhere. He’s so much cooler than us That’s a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Casey low bar.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. He’s pretty nerdy You think he’s cooler cuz he’s young and handsome, but he’s pretty nerdy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think I’m pretty sure he’s cooler than us Yeah, I’m pretty sure he’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey considered.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All right,

⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s a low bar is he’s cooler than Casey. Let’s see Well, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s also a low bar. It’s very it’s very flattering and complimentary of you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to try to put the coolest among us to try to see if we can we can reach up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that lever. I mean the coolest among us is definitely Casey and sorry Casey I think he’s cooler

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you so I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John therefore that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco solves that solves the question right

⏹️ ▶️ John there

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right?

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I guess you’re right maybe if we can if we combine all three of our coolnesses then

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we can maybe maybe all of us combined like Voltron.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would still be I think it would still be a fight.

⏹️ ▶️ John Coolness counts for nothing in this industry. Witness Bill Gates,

⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson. Not cool people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re cool in their own way. Bill Gates is cool in no ways. but

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the is the antimatter of cool curing malaria

⏹️ ▶️ John not curious that curing You know what I mean?