317: We’re Customers Too
16 Mar 2019A special WWDC segment, our live show, and the Spotify-Apple in-app-purchase dispute.
Episode Description:
- A special extended WWDC segment
- Live ATP "Save the Date": evening of June 3
- Apple and Spotify
#askatp:- Is Perl dead? (via Gustavo Poscidonio)
- Can using AirPods in loud environments cause hearing damage?
- Post-show: Casey's rejiggered priorities
- Analog(ue) #151: Super Simple? Thank You Very Much
- YouTube channels:
Sponsored by:
- Mack Weldon: Reinventing men’s basics with smart design, premium fabrics, and simple shopping. Get 20% off your first order with code ATP.
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Audible: Get a free audiobook with a 30-day trial.
Chapters
- WWDC announced
- Special interview
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
- ATP Live: WWDC Monday
- Apple-Spotify dispute
- Sponsor: Audible
- Apple-Spotify, cont’d.
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: Shell languages
- #askatp: Hearing damage
- Ending theme
- Analog(ue) follow-out
WWDC announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So WWDC has been announced. It is time, ladies and gentlemen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As per usual, I’ve thrown my hat in the ring for the lottery. John, what did you
⏹️ ▶️ John do? Same as usual. I’m glad it was the dates we all thought it was going to be and I entered the lottery.
⏹️ ▶️ John How has your luck been going on the lottery system?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Every year except the last one at Moscone, I have been extraordinarily lucky and I am very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very thankful for it. Here’s hoping that the WWDC gods treat me well again this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think I’m like whatever. I don’t know how long Laurie’s been going like five for five or something I’ve gotten it every single time. I would love that streak
⏹️ ▶️ John to continue but You know like I think about this every year We entered a lottery not that we’re a super special
⏹️ ▶️ John people But I asked myself are we not press which is like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a reference that neither one of you will get but
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like a thing that could possibly happen. Maybe we should just ask hey Phil. Can we get some press passes?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Sure, I mean it’s sold out But getting in is pretty easy. You just use my
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller name and passcode to the door. You’ll get right in.
⏹️ ▶️ John See how easy that was? We should have done this years ago. What’s the passcode?
Special interview
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’d like to introduce Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Schiller. Thank you so much for being here, Phil. Sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Thanks for letting me barge in on the podcast and talk about WWDC. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. So there’s a lot going on around Apple, as usual,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will get to the rest of it later, I promise. Phil has been generous enough with his time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come here today to talk about WWDC, so that will be the focus of our conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I gotta say, WBDC to me, this is like the Super Bowl for Apple fans. To me, it’s the biggest event of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the year. Because it isn’t usually very hardware-focused. It’s usually more about the software. And hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is exciting, especially exciting in the moment. But software ultimately matters more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And WBDC is so fun to me because we get to see what the whole next year of software will bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all of our devices, and for developers, what it lets us bring to our apps. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those of us who are fortunate enough to be there in person or to get press passes, There’s nothing like feeling the energy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that room when 5,000 developers are all cheering for a new Mac Pro or a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new awesome API we’ve been waiting for. So I’m always very excited about WBDC, and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very thankful to have a chance to talk to you about it. So I believe our first question comes from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mr. John S. Is it Syracusa? Close enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Leave it to me for my first question to look back into the mists of time. You mentioned WBDC as the Super Bowl. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only one Super Bowl a year, But long ago, back in a time that Phil will remember, Apple did a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of like annual keynote things. They did Macworld Expo, they did Apple Expo in Paris, and at
⏹️ ▶️ John every one of those, it was like they had to announce something cool, which apparently was a thing they could do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how many years ago, many years ago, they narrowed it down to just one. So now you’ve just got the one WWDC, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John like this self-imposed yearly deadline where all of us out here expect Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to announce something. My first question is, what is that like inside Apple? Like you’re, you’re doing this to yourself. decided we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to get rid of all of the fixed dates. And of course, we expect an iPhone every year or whatever. But WWDC is your show,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you put pressure on yourself to have something cool to show. What is that like?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Yeah, we do have still a lot of shows all throughout the year. But WWDC is
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller unbelievable in its consistency and the run. It’s been, I think, 30 years
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller now that we’ve been doing WWDC once a year, every year, around the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller There was a while it was in May, and now it’s in June. That week worked out better. but generally the same
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller time every year. I was trying to recall, I think I’ve been to 28 of the 30 and
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller run just about 20 of them through
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the years I in the team. So incredibly consistent, a lot of fun to
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller be a part of, and through the years it’s been pretty remarkable.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller If you just think back to all the great innovations that have been launched there, that we could just spend
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller a whole hour just on that, but everything from QuickTime, that was a great one, to Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller X, to the App Store itself was launched there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to your point, literally thousands of engineers worked super hard all year long, and for
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller multiple years at a time, depending on the technology, to bring out what they’ve been working
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller on and announce it at WWDC. And a deadline
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller is a great thing. Yes, it imposes rigor
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and it makes it something you have to artificially
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller set for yourself, but it also is a great thing. And I’d say, net, to your question,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller it’s nothing but a pro. It’s a positive thing to have a goal and
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller a deadline and have everyone working all together towards that same
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller thing. So all good. It’s a wonderful thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about that on the show back when I was 12 I think was out and Apple was messaging like that. They
⏹️ ▶️ John were going to not slow down but like take a another Make a
⏹️ ▶️ John quality a very high priority not to ship anything before its time and there are all these rumors about things that didn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John cut and made me think about like how how deadlines interact with software development because and the Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Reputation has always been we will ship no product before its time. If it’s not ready. It’s not ready It doesn’t ship right and
⏹️ ▶️ John usually we don’t show a product for its time either together. Um, but you’ve got this date. So does it just become
⏹️ ▶️ John an exercise of three months out figuring out like what makes the data, what doesn’t, or does it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s so hard on the outside to see how these giant shows can come together because we don’t see all the things that don’t ship until years
⏹️ ▶️ John and years later. So do you feel like it’s the same now as it’s always been, you know, say 1990s WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John or is the, uh, the internal attitude towards hitting that date different?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Oh, it’s, it’s a lot changed. A lot’s changed. The
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller processes have evolved a lot. It’s moved from one operating system platform
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to multiple platforms, and those platforms intersects with products
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller that they work on that have also different schedules of their own and features that
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller are coming out. As you know, for example, when you’re introducing iOS, you’re introducing iOS for
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller iPhone and future iPhones and for iPad, and it’s also the foundation that
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller works and builds, that we build watchOS with, that we build tvOS with,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller that runs inside HomePod, and of course, as shared technologies that
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller work in macOS, and when you want to create something like continuity that then works across
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller those different products, all the interdependencies really matter. And
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the things we’re announcing at WWDC are a lot of the things we’re working on months and months in advance
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller of when you know you can finish them, but you have to have a good line of sight that you believe you will in high confidence.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller You have to be able to release them at least into a beta form for most of the features, not everything. And then there
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller are features that we can’t talk about yet because they’re tied to hardware things that may come later on down
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the road. So all of those things are going on and with just dozens and
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller dozens of teams that have their own interdependencies and it’s a complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller air traffic control system that has a lot of very smart people and technology
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller involved in trying to land it all as best as possible because ultimately we care about
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller quality and we care about delivering on the things we promise to customers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller we’re not perfect at it, but we care deeply about it. And so just a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller of great work goes into that. And it is different and more advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller than it was five years ago and 10 years ago and 20 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it must have been simpler when all you had to do was come up with a modern OS strategy for the Mac and that was it.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Yeah, and we thought that was really hard and complicated and amazing. And now you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller what goes on and it’s just a different world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So WDC, it’s attended every year by, I don’t know, I don’t think you published the number, but let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say a few thousand people. And you’ve scaled the reach of this because you have millions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of developers. So you’ve scaled the reach of this conference with changes like live streaming, faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video releases, which are great. Occasionally you do traveling tech talks in different cities, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately a huge supply and demand mismatch. It’s still hard to get tickets, and the total cost of attending,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially with hotels being so expensive, makes it simply inaccessible for many people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what else could be done, do you think, to make WWDC and its content more accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Yeah, we think about that a lot. But first, to your question, there’s over 5,000 attendees and
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller another over 1,000 Apple engineers and guests. So more
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller than 6,000 people in that hall where we hold the keynote and wandering around the building all week
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller long. So it’s an amazing audience. And to start
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller with, nothing will ever be better than just being at WWDC. It really is built around
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller this experience that for decades now we’ve said will always be
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Apple engineers presenting and interacting with developers. And there have been
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller plenty of requests through the years to have other kinds of presentations with marketing people and business people
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and I hold the line. Nope, the greatest benefit of this is engineer to engineer.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller That’s the core of it. And so nothing can replace that. That is a unique experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller But on top of that, you’re right, we know that we can’t reach everybody in that way there’s so much great content
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and we want to get that content out to the widest audience possible, help developers take advantage and adopt
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the new features and technologies quickly and give us feedback. And so we’re constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller working on this challenge. We certainly live stream more and more
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller of the WWC week, not just the keynote but other events
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller throughout the week to as many people as possible, making that live stream available on as many platforms as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller We put video on demand up available very quickly and we work really hard every year to
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller accelerate the time that that gets posted from, it used to be months, now down to weeks and then days.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller We try to localize that into other languages with subtitles and content as
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller quickly as we can to get that out to people in different countries. And then we do, on top
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller of that, a number of programs throughout the world. Of course, Tech Talks have
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller been beloved and are a way of sort of bringing the content of WWDC on the road.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Now we’ve got our developer academies that we’ve now built in some countries, like Brazil and
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Italy. We’ve got accelerator labs, like in India. We’ve got our new entrepreneur camps we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller started to bring women and other groups in to start to get more direct
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller access to Apple engineers and developers. And so we’re just continually trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller create new methods to bring this content out to everybody as quickly and broadly as we
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when we’ve talked about the supply to man mismatch on the show, sometimes we think like, why don’t they make WWDC bigger? Cause there are bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John conferences like the Salesforce dream force, whatever the hell it is. It’s like 55,000 people.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John listening to you talk about it when you phrase it, it’s like engineer to engineer. Even if you let 55,000
⏹️ ▶️ John attendees in, I suppose you can’t multiply your employees to match that. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, it doesn’t seem like a scalable solution. So yeah, The videos being live streaming and being available immediately is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Exactly. I mean, sure, you can create a bigger event and have people standing in a street milling around
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and I’ve seen those. For us, it’s about the sessions you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller in and how that experience is. And it’s about the labs that are run constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller all week long and can you get down in there and can you get some face time with somebody to help with solving a UI
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller problem or adopting some new technology quickly. And if you scale
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller it too big too quickly, then those things all break.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m curious, I mean this kind of overlaps a little bit with an adjacent area, like a lot of developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have special relationships and they’ll know certain engineers in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they’ll have connections to developer relations people that maybe aren’t available to other developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in general, there’s like a big versus small developer dynamic in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of areas. How do you balance the needs of large developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus small developers, or well-known versus not well-known? And what do you think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are some other ways that you could enable small developers to succeed?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller I think that’s a great question. And first of all, I just want to say, we
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller think about the small and independent developers all the time, like every day, every
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller week, all year long. It is a passion for many of us in the developer relations team.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller The app store itself, and we had a chance to think about apps on iOS over a decade
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller ago. One of the core principles we started the whole idea with was
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller how do you make it, sort of open up the technology and the access
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to developers of all sizes, from an individual kid at home trying to make his or her
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller very first app to the biggest company. The old model, way back before
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the app store, was much more of a partnership managed individual, big developers
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller get most of the resource kind of model, is that was the old shrink wrap world. With the App Store, by
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller design, we made a core principle that it’s much more open to developers of all sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And so we try really, really hard to make sure that all resources, access
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to people, the services, the systems, the programs, the guidelines apply
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller equally to everybody. And I’ll never say we’re perfect. Nobody is, but we try incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller hard to make sure that everything about the developer program is one to many, one to
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller all developers, not who you know. And so while we all value
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the personal relationships we have and the ability to handhold and help somebody who calls and that,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller you wanna encourage that, you want that to happen, you still have to do everything you can to build the programs and the services
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and the content to make it available to everyone. And so we do that all the time. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller latest example I’ll give is the new App Store design. The new App Store design was to make it an even
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller better, more modern App Store based on how we know customers use it, and to build
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller up editorial resources so that we can feature more and more apps in the developers
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller who make those apps right there on the front on today, on the app tab, on the game
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller tab. And I can tell you the editorial team thinks constantly about making sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller that resource is being used to help small and independent developers throughout.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and a lot of effort goes into that. And probably the, I don’t know if you know, the traffic to the
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller app store is approximately half a billion visitors a week. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller unbelievable the size of that traffic. And we try to reach
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller all these users and put developers in front of them with a sense of
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller how do we support the widest base of developers who are making great apps. I mean, I’ll say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller certainly developers come in saying, hey, how do I make sure that I can be in front of that, are you favoring
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller certain developers? The first motivation is what’s a great app? And if it’s great, we wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller show it to everybody, we wanna help users. In fact, I think the biggest program
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller we do every single year consistently is the Best Of. So at the end of the year, the Best Of gets incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller traffic and attention. And again, the team tries to make sure that we’re giving
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller love and attention to the small and independent developers as part of that program. That’s really important
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to us. So throughout, I think, the team, the system’s been built to better provide
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller access to small and in-depth developers, and we think about that throughout every part of the process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, honestly, the new App Store has been wonderful for me because Overcast has been in a whole bunch of those lists, and I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thankful for that. I’m curious, you know, like the App Store redesign, it was a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change, and I think tremendously for the better. And, you know, I like your goals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it, and I think you’ve achieved that, but, you know, I only have my own perspective on it. Do you have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to have metrics about how many good, small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps you’re servicing and whether that’s better with this design versus the previous design? I don’t even know how you’d measure that.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Yeah, yeah, we do. Some of it’s qualitative, a lot of it is quantitative,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller so you have to track on all sides. We look at
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller everything from traffic to the store, engagement with users,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the number of apps we’re able to put in front of customers for views
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller throughout the week, how successful that is with how long people
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller want to look at stories, read its stories, again entirely anonymous and aggregated
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller data, but we try to understand the traffic and usage and then look
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller at how are we helping the broadest base of developers we can with that and there There are metrics and
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller tools, but in the end, the qualitative side of it matters too. What kind of engagement
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller we have with different developers, what opportunities there are when they have great new things happening for us
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to make sure they get the exposure and maximize the opportunity. And there are a team
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller of people that work specifically on that, on the business of the app store for all developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And some of them would target specifically the small and medium developers to make sure to getting the
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller best of the new opportunities as we build them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You might say that sometimes dealing with small developers is actually easier than dealing with the big developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller You know, yes, there’s certainly times when it could be easier, but not always. Every situation’s
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller unique. But there are just so many great small developers doing
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller beautiful, creative work and just wanting to get their shot, wanting to get their chance,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and often wanting to make it their lifetime career now to maybe have
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller started as a part-time thing and would love the chance to just make this their life’s work. And
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller nothing makes us happier than to be able to do that and help them find that success and make it their business.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller That’s incredibly important to us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’d like to pull the curtain back on WWDC to the best that you’ll allow us. And one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things I’ve been wondering is, you know, the WWDC keynote is interesting to me and to us because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s ostensibly for developers, but it’s really so much more than So how do you guys go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about balancing the developer-focused content with information that’s of interest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to all the non-developers that may not be in the room but are watching at home or at work or whatever the case may
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller We think about the audience for the keynote at WWDC as
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller really three unique audiences. The opening keynote is different than the rest
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller of the week’s events and activities. That opening audience is
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller developers, it’s customers, and of course, that’s the press. So three unique
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller audiences. And we love that more than any other event we do. It has that
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller broad and diverse range of interests in what we’re doing in the keynote. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller it’s WWDC, we still are talking about the platforms and the technology. So it does allow us to
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller kind of geek out more than most shows. And it gives us a chance to let
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller some people really, really run with the content. So for example, Craig does an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller job and really gets to lead a lot of what we talk about there. So we can
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and have to talk to the developers that are in the room. We talk to the developers who are watching around the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller But we can’t get completely deep into every API and every technical change because
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller we do have customers watching. And they’re going to want to learn some things as well and understand
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller those things in context of what it means to them and how it’ll benefit the products for them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the press are watching and they’re trying to figure out what story they want to write and what does this mean and how does it
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller relate to whatever else is going on in the world. So all three audiences matter in the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and we’ve got to kind of balance that and that’s actually kind of the fun of putting on the
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller keynote. But it doesn’t stop there, as you know, like right after lunch we’ve got State of the Union and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller there we can say, okay, all right, Not everyone’s watching now, so we can go much more engineer to engineer
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller here and truly get deep into it. And still we’ll get deeper further as the week
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller goes on, but it’s sort of the transition from the broader audience
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to the developer audience and the setting up of the rest of the week. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller we have that kind of, that outline to it, which is keynote is
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller one level, State of the Union goes another level, and then the rest of the week it’s really deep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So you said developers, customer and press. Well, two out of three ain’t bad. I’m almost there, Phil. I’m almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. So my next question is, how does Apple gauge the reaction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to what’s announced at WWDC? I mean, quite obviously, you can look at the press, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what other sorts of things do you look at to see if people are excited? And longer term,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do you measure how well new APIs are adopted? Like, are you looking through source code or are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there any metrics that you’re capable and willing to share that tell you, you know, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course everyone’s excited the day of, but a month on, two months on, a year on, are people really still excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Darrell Bock Here we care a lot about that. First of all, getting input on
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller what people think about things, anything, is really easy nowadays. So
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Marco as you all well know— Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cynova We provide a whole lot. You’re welcome. Whether you ask for it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Darrell Bock You get a ton of input from so many sources. So that’s never a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And from what’s happening live, as you’re introducing
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller things during the keynote, I mean, when we introduced Swift, you could tell that moment
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller what the reaction was and was going to be. And you can tell. So we can tell live all things are going on,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller both in the show and on social media. And then immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller afterwards, immediately afterwards on everything from the emails we’re writing, the blogs that people
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller were writing, the podcast you guys were creating, the forums, the developer forums and what people were saying
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller on social media, you name it. I don’t know if people realize it, but we all
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller like watch and read and follow that stuff all the time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller I’m always laughing when I’m listening to a podcast from you guys or someone else and people are like, wow, if Apple’s listening,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller here’s three things. Are you kidding? We’re trying to listen to everything. We love the input
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and the feedback. So we hear a lot and we monitor and listen
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to those channels as much as humanly possible. And specifically the technologies
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller as we roll them out in the platforms, oh yeah, we have so
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller much work that goes into everything from the latest version of
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller core media to some new technology like core ML or AR kit.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And we want to help these things be successful. We want them to enable new kinds
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller of apps and experiences because they’re adopted quickly. And so we have
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller targeted programs with our developer team to go out and reach out to
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller a list of developers that we think about ahead of time of who can really use this the second we announce it, how do we help them
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller get started quickly, what resources can we apply, what help can we provide, because it becomes self-fulfilling.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller You put something out there, you help someone use it, it turns into a great success and more developers want
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to use it and it all advances the platform at an even faster rate.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And probably the biggest advantage we have in doing that is the rate of adoption
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller of the OS, right? And as you know, the second we have an
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller event like WWDC, we put out the beta releases. The beta releases get millions of users.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller So very quickly, and we didn’t used to have that program years ago, now we do, the ability
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to sign up for developer beta and then a public beta, and that gets very quick utilization
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller of the technology so as developers can start using things, they can get
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller users trying things out. And then, as it rolls out to the general release, iOS 12
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller are up to over 80%. This quickly into
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the year, that means that the new technology we put out there, the incentive for
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller developers, if they see the benefit to take advantage of it quickly and put it out to the world as
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller new features and new capabilities is massive. So we do, we
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller look at all the new technologies, we target goals for how we think they
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller might be adopted by developers of certain classes of apps, we try to get those things out into
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the market as quickly as we can and help them to do that, and try to build awareness
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller around it so people create more demand for more developers to do it and it all builds on itself
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and it moves the platform forward.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve seen you on stage a lot over the years in various keynotes. Do you still get nervous when you have to present
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller No, I wouldn’t say nervous, but anxious is the word I’ll use. And excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller I get very anxious and excited. I literally stopped counting
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller how many keynotes I’ve worked on when it crossed 100. So I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller on many of them. And still, today, just like the first one, I can’t sit down
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller during them. I am so, so internally amped with
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller adrenaline and energy. I pace the entire keynote backstage. I cannot sit down for a
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller second, back and forth. And like everyone else at Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller I care deeply how it goes. And we all know how important these
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller keynotes are. We look forward to them. it’s because behind
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller everything we’re talking about, there’s hundreds or thousands of engineers who have
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller worked on something for a good part of their life, and they’ve poured their heart and soul into something.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And then we get to stand on stage and try to explain it and tell people why it matters or why it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller great. And that’s an incredible honor, and it’s an important responsibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And so we care, like, how is this going to go? Will people like what we have to show.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Will they understand what we’re saying? Have we done justice to the work that’s gone into the product?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And I mean, the reason I do what I do, like everyone else that I work with,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller is we’re customers too. We love this stuff. We love the products. We love the work that goes into it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller we’re just proud to be sort of the customer on the inside and bring it out the way
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller all of us sitting in the audience watching want it to to be brought out. We want to live up to that expectation.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And so when the keynote’s going on and things are being announced or a video’s being played, I’m on the edge of my seat,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller metaphorically I’m standing, but I’m on the edge of my seat waiting just like, what’s the reaction going to be? Are people excited?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Are they cheering? Are they happy? Are they awed? Are they silent because they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller got to absorb all this? How’s it going to go? And again, no, we’re not perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller but we look at each situation as how can we be better next time? What can we do different?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller What do people want to hear more about? And so that’s kind of the way we’ve,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller I certainly feel about it and everyone I work with feels about it. It’s the feelings and the emotion
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and the energy hasn’t changed one bit in 30 years and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller still just as important and exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I was going to say you haven’t been this wise and experienced your entire career. What is the
⏹️ ▶️ John most anxious, let’s say, that you’ve ever been during a presentation? If you can think back to
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller I don’t know what that means. I haven’t been so wise my whole
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, John career. I don’t know what any of that means. You
⏹️ ▶️ John came in on day one and you’re like, put me in front of millions of people. I can do it. I’ll jump off the stage. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s exactly what I was thinking about, 1999, Macworld, New York. Does that ring any bells?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Oh, boy, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, John I wish we had enough time. I’d tell
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller you the whole – there is a whole long fun story behind that. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller short version of that is, as you know, we were introducing the iBook
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and the world was wondering about this iBook and what was it going to be. And one of its marquee features
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller was the very first implementation of Wi-Fi. And that was, boy, was
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller that an exciting time, right? Wi-Fi did not exist in computing and we were bringing the first wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller communication into it, something we all had dreamt, you know, a real George Jetson thing, like
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to bring that to the world. And Steve had been charging us with, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to demonstrate that wireless networking is really going to work. And we came up with a couple of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller One of them he did on stage, as you remember, was the Hula Hoop. He passed it over the iBook and said, see,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller this is, it’s really wirelessly communicating. And that was at one end of the spectrum
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller of degree of difficulty as a demo. The other end was we came up with this
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller idea of using an accelerometer, and we were gonna throw
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller a doll, a big giant, it was a flick from Bugs Life doll, off of, with some
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller bungee cord on it, off of the ceiling and have it bounce, and then wirelessly you’d see communicated
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller from that iBook to a PowerBook, the G-forces as it
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller bounced in the accelerometer. I thought that was so cool, right? And Steve,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller in his incredible salesmanship, said, this is such a good demo, but it needs to be a person, not a doll.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And he looked at me and said, Phil, you’re gonna do that. You’re gonna jump with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller But if you do it, this will be the greatest demo of all time. You will never have to
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller do another demo again in your life. You’ll go down in the demo
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Marco hall of fame, and this is it.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And in my youthfulness, I went, sure, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller I’ll do it. I said, but, and I kid you not, I said, but here’s one deal. I’m not gonna sign any
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller waiver or any license. If I fall splat on the ground and die, I want my family to
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller be able to sue Apple for everything they’re worth, because why not? He said, okay, that’s a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller So then as we’re working on it, we did it at Jacob Javits in New York. And Jacob Javits, they had
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller union rules we weren’t aware of and different guidelines, and I couldn’t bungee cord off the roof.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller That wasn’t gonna work. And they wanted this big truss all over me and everything. And
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller so we just said, forget it, we’ll just jump off a platform. I’ll just set up a platform and jump and
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller fall and that’ll work too. We’ll create the G-force when I hit the ground. We’ll have a pillow on the ground, a
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller little cushion just like in a movie and land on it and that’ll do it. And so that became
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller how we did the jump. And one really
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller funny thing. So that morning we had set up a backstage practice area
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller because it was about three stories tall. And on the video now, gosh, I look back and it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller that wasn’t that high, but trust me, when you’re standing up on the roof of Jacob Javits looking down, it’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller higher from one side of the jump than the other. And so I’m rehearsing backstage
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and we’re getting ready to go, and somebody from the Jacob Javits Center comes over and says,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller hey, we see that you haven’t signed a waiver for the Jacob Javits Center, and we don’t want anything
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to happen if something bad happens to you, so you need to sign a release or we won’t let you jump
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and start the show. And I said, no, you don’t understand the deal. I said, I’m not signing anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller If I hit the ground, my family can sue all of you. I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And they said, well, you can’t start the show. And so the show wasn’t starting. And the whole audience is
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller clapping, Steve, Steve. They thought there was some reason they’re delaying the show and it was just because
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller I wouldn’t sign the release form and they wouldn’t let us start the show. So our chief legal
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller counsel took a business card and wrote on her business card that Apple resolves Jacob
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Javits Center for any legal liability, and that was the contract was on a business card. And
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller so they let us start the show, and did the jump, and that was how that
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller demo all happened. So yeah, it was definitely one, but the only thing that wasn’t true
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller was the very next show, Steve starts talking about demos, and I said, no, no, no, no, no, you promised, this is it. Demo
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Hall of Fame, done, no more. And he’s like, no, not gonna do more. So it never ended.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller still to this
⏹️ ▶️ John day. You should bring us up with Federico all the time when he complains about his demos. Please, you’re not jumping off anything. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Phil Schiller got it easy, kid.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Demos are the greatest thing. I love demos. Demos, because it’s real, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller using the product, you’re trying to explain something and show through how it works
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller rather than just slides and words. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller demos are underrated in the power importance in technology. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, because I think it really shows something, because the stakes are higher, because it could break, it could go wrong. Like, it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say you have something that’s a product or that works, and then do a demo of it, unless it really does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, and unless it’s pretty close to done. Totally
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller agree, totally agree. It shows the state of things, and
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller it’s a high wire act. I mean, if things go wrong, they go wrong in front of the whole world.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller So it’s even one more forcing function to get things done, and that’s a great thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So WBDC is surrounded recently in probably the last five, six years by a lot of other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco events now. This includes things like Alt Conf, Layers, other alternative conferences, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well as live podcasts, like what we do, like what John Gruber does and what Relay does. What role
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you think, if any, Apple should take in promoting or helping or otherwise participating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the adjacent community events around WBDC?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Yeah, this is really important. A number of years back, we realized that
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller WWDC is not just an event. It’s a week with a lot of things happening for the developers
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller who attend. And we think about it from their perspective, shouldn’t everything be part of
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller a great experience? And that experience is not only what happens in the hall that with the activities Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller puts on, but everything else around it. And that was a pretty big realization
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller that changed a little bit about how we run WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller So we decided that the right thing we should do is embrace some of these other activities and help
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller their events be great too. And so now that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller just some things that have been already going on around WWDC and we’re happy to partner and help them. So Layers,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Cocoa Conf, Alt Conf and other activities are part of the week.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And so to the extent that we can help make those things better, we do.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller We help if we can with them with getting the best space possible in the area, scheduling things
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller around what we’re doing so that we don’t have things happening at
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the same time that would be counterproductive for the engineers who wanna go to it and on and on. So
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller sending people if they want us to help a little bit in participation and whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller yeah, we love this. Once we realized it, like, oh, why
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller didn’t we think of this before? This is a whole week of activities. Like, why not WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller take over San Jose and everywhere you go, you feel like there’s just great stuff happening, and
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller doesn’t that make it even better? And it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Paul Matzko, Jr. So, we have—we saved our most important two questions for last. Joel Aschenbrenner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco explaining this, go ahead. Paul Matzko, Jr. So we’ve discussed in the past in this show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our wonderful trials and tribulations with the WWDC box lunches. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you like to see in a box lunch?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Let’s see, a box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lunch. Stan. I mean, have you eaten the box lunches? Like, because some of them are pretty good. Darrell Bock I
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller have, I have, I have. But I’ll get philosophical
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Marco Let’s see. Stan Yeah. Darrell Bock Or think about it like a
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller scientist. So, first of all, it’s waxy cardboard. So, you can’t have, in an ideal
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller box lunch, you can’t have anything that doesn’t work in cardboard. So, nothing probably too greasy.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller It has to handle changing temperature, right, because it sits all day. You don’t know if you can’t really keep 5,000 box lunches
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller warm. So probably something, you probably don’t want fish
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller or French fries because they stink when they get cold, or cooked vegetables
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller probably get pretty tough on you. It’s a square container, so you want something that can
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller utilize the space because I want to maximize the opportunity to have a good meal out of this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller So when I think about that, I guess there’s only one best food,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller mac and cheese.
⏹️ ▶️ John Huh, at room temperature?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller you kidding? Cold mac and cheese can be great. Well, room temperature, not freezing cold, oh, come on, a
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller little chilled mac and cheese, nothing wrong. There are foods, as you know, that get worse when they get cold,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller French fries, as I said, and there’s foods that get sometimes better, pizza, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Marco So, Chinese food.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Mac and cheese can be great. So there’s my vote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m with you on pizza, but man, that’s a tough one. So first of all, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should put this to the test. I think you should somehow work with the venue and the staff and everything and see if you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that added as an option this year. And then we can see which box piles get depleted first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let the people vote.
⏹️ ▶️ John Metrics, we’ll get metrics on this.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There you go, right, metrics.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Phil Schiller Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller but there’s a variable that a lot of people are healthier eaters than I, so I’m not sure if that’s the only judge
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Marco what’s best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I would try it. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever had room temperature mac and cheese. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does this violate your religion? I would skip it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would let you try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just live a little, John, you’ll be all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Well, what are some of your recommendations now, since we’re talking about ideas
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller for future box lunches at WDC, what would you guys recommend with your supreme wisdom?
⏹️ ▶️ John I always like sandwiches, but the problem with sandwiches is moisture. Like, so if the bread gets soggy, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John end. So I don’t know how to solve that, But sometimes there have been sandwiches where the bread is not
⏹️ ▶️ John damp. And that works great because it’s something you can pick up in your hand. Like you don’t have to try to eat it with a fork, like
⏹️ ▶️ John on your lap or whatever. Sandwiches are an important invention for a reason. So I feel like a well-executed sandwich is
⏹️ ▶️ John ideal. Not sure about the container shape. And a dessert, cookies. Cookies is all I have to say about
⏹️ ▶️ John the desserts. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know, like lemon
⏹️ ▶️ John squares, no pieces of cake, no weird things we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco identify. Cookies. I like the lemon squares. Again, because you can pick it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and I think like a wrap, in so many ways, wrap is a really mediocre food.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like a wrap is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the corporate boardroom, like designed by committee of sandwiches, but it actually, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, works really well here because like, you know, the wrap itself has a lot of fat, so moisture doesn’t get through it very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily. And as long as you omit obviously bad ingredients, like tomatoes aren’t so good because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have too much moisture. So in this scenario, tomatoes and probably lettuce are a tough sell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you have a wrap with, I’m going to say chicken salad, my favorite food.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re brave. You want that chicken salad sitting in the sun outside? Well, it’s in a
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably not sealed. The wrap is magic, I see. You’ve got to think
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller about mayo, and I’m not sure about that. But you are right. I mean, a wrap is like an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller meal in its own container, right? So I think there’s something to the wrap idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is actually special speaker food, is there not? I know we’re not supposed to know about the existence of this, but it just stands to reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Oh, I don’t know about special. there’s food. Darren Bock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Special in terms of geography perhaps, but not cuisine.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Darrell Bock Exactly. At least you don’t have to worry about fighting thousands of people
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller to get to it, but other than that, no. A lot of times, personally, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller even get lunch, and I don’t say that for sympathy. It’s just you get done with the keynote, we
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller start meeting with press and analysts, and we dive right into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller I’m usually living for the next six hours on about two pots of coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and a couple power bars and that’s my afternoon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems like it must be a long day. It’s a long day for us, and I can’t imagine what it’s like for you, much less the months leading
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller It’s the best day. Are you kidding me? I love it because here you’ve been keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller things bottled up in secret for months and months and months and now there it is, you can talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller it. And so try shutting me up. I’m going for six, seven hours meeting with everybody as
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller much as we can and we’re talking, talking, talking and always asking, so what did you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller What’s your reaction? You’re seeing this for the first time. We’ve been living with these ideas for a long time and
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller it’s just fascinating. So no, I think I’m still full of energy all through the whole afternoon.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller You sleep well
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Casey on the reactions, yeah. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller fair, that’s fair. No, you know, I often don’t. Usually that night I’m up
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller all night reading every blog and every news report and every.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, John This is not healthy, Phil. I just can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller yeah, I’m just curious.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just listen to our podcast and you can go right to bed, it’s fine, it’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ John, Phil Schiller you right to sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Well. I’m always amazed at podcasts that are longer
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller than the keynotes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it takes longer to talk about it. You just get to say a thing, but then we have to talk about the thing, so the about the thing is always gonna be longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. And we talk about keynote plus State of the Union, so we really have like a four hour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey True. Something like that. All right, so our final question. So I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by virtue of your Twitter header picture, whatever Twitter calls it, if nothing else, your biography there, that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are at least passively interested in cars. And this very show that you’re on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of spurned itself from a short-lived car-related show that the three of us did. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought I’d get your take on this. So imagine, Phil, that you could have a car, any make, any model, any year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Doesn’t matter. It’s in mint condition. and by virtue of magic, it is guaranteed to stay in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good working order for the entirety of your life, what would you choose?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller That is a really hard question,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Casey really hard. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Because, I mean, I love cars, love them, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller not sure I could be happy with one car for the rest of my life. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller all right, I’ll give you a couple, I’m gonna, maybe this violates the
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller request, but I’m gonna list a couple cars, any one of which I would be happy with to
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller answer this question with, but then I’ll pick one at the end of it. But, but, but, but, but, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller but, but I, because I just, they’re all so great. Absolutely, I’d have to have the
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato. I mean, that is stunning,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and I love that car. And I’d be happy with that one. or I’d take a Lamborghini Miura,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller like the first true supercar. Oh God, that would be incredible. A McLaren F1,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller that dream car, dream car. Jaguar XK-SS,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Marco oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller that’s amazing. Bugatti 57SC Atlantic,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller there’s something. And so any one of those, and I could list 25 more that
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller just would also be great answers, But I’m going to settle on, because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller forced to answer, so I will answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Marco Porsche 550
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Spyder. That would be the one. Pure, raw, lightweight.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And if you’ve ever heard one, the engine idle sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Alex Van Halen playing drums on Hot for Teacher. That’s just what it sounds like.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller It is so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to say, a lot of these cars are like before your time, but that reference your time for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just more impressed, like, I think you have more car knowledge than the three of us, and we did a car podcast. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Well, if you ever bring that podcast back, let me know. I’d love to be on it and talk cars for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can happen. We talk
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot about Honda Accords. How do you feel about those? Oh, God, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Well, you know, there’s a model car for everyone, I guess. And
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Casey there’s one. That’s the one
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller But what are some of yours? What are some of your answers on that question?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, for me, so when I was growing up, my dad had a 1977 Corvette, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is by most metrics a terrible car, a truly and utterly terrible car. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am the oldest of three boys, and so that was as close as I had to an older brother or sister or what have you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when I turned 16, my dad effectively bartered that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a new roof on the house we were living in. And I love my parents to death. they’re both still around.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get along great with them. But on the very short list of things I will never forgive my parents for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is getting rid of that Corvette. And because of that, I would love to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not any 77 Corvette, but that 77 Corvette. If I could just will it into existence—well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure it’s still around somewhere—but if I could will it into existence today, I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have that and have my older brother back. TB. What color was it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please say it white.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it started life as beige, and then my dad totaled it. He actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rebuilt the car from the frame up, which when you live in New York, that was very unusual. And so once he redid it all, it was jet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey black. And I actually quite liked that car. And again, it was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad era of Corvettes by almost any reasonable metric, but it has a special place in my heart. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more, I mean, he actually now has a Z06, which is a very different animal, a year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old Z06. unique and different animal but I’d still take that 77. Beige one of
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller the worst car colors and jet black one of the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah oh I couldn’t agree more absolutely no it was it was truly terrible. How do you how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you feel about white?
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Marco know
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller it depends first of all there were like a thousand different whites
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller so you can’t just say white like I mean a classic Porsche 911 in a Carrera
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller white incredible Aston Martin has a range of whites
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller that are just sublime so it depends but on other cars it’s just nothing but
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller looking like somebody just didn’t have time to pick a paint color
⏹️ ▶️ John popular paint color of cars in the US like our theory from neutral or my theory from neutral is that if the car has a
⏹️ ▶️ John nice shape you can put it in white but if it’s like it’s like when you are black clothing to conceal your
⏹️ ▶️ John figure right if a card has some awkward curves and you put it in white, the awkward cars just jump out. So you have to have a beautifully
⏹️ ▶️ John shaped car. Then you can get away with white. If not, go with a darker color.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Well, what’s interesting about white cars is that white cars look great
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller in the flesh, but they photograph horribly. So you have this nice
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller white car, and then it blows out in the photo, right, because it has a white balance. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller show friends pictures of your car, and they’re like, oh, wow, look at that thing. It’s got no lines and no curves or nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller No, it’s just the picture. And so sometimes you pick a color for how it looks in real
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller life, and sometimes you wanna share it and show your friends, and you want it to look good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you have auto HDR on the iPhone camera
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco app. It’ll take care of that for you. Yeah, yeah. They need some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system to map those highlights to a wider dynamic range, and that way it’ll look better. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I know you were very generous to give us this much time, so I really, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna thank you, first as a developer, Just, you know, even though we’re not talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store much today, I want to thank you for the significant App Store improvements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last couple years since you’ve taken it over. Because, you know, I know nothing’s ever perfect and lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people still have access to Grind, including us probably. But I think every developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know would agree that the App Store is in a much better place now and it’s improving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a very healthy rate. And so, since we never really, as a community, have a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly tell you this otherwise, I wanted to, I don’t know, speak for all developers to say, thank you very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much for the App Store improvements. We see them, we recognize them, and we appreciate them.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Well, thank you. That’s super nice of you. And I’ll accept that on behalf of the whole team that works
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller so hard on it. It’s not me. There’s a team that just cares deeply about
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller making things better. And I just help to be sort of like a magnifying lens and try to help
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller point them on the things that I hear that people most want that we can do in
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller a year and try to help focus them on the changes that people will feel and
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller sort of increase momentum of improvement and the team’s doing all the hard work. So
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller on behalf of them, thank you for saying that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And finally, I wanted to thank you for just the work you’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and continue to do more broadly at Apple. You know, we as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both, you know, the audience in general, as well as the three of us, We give you a lot of sh**
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you get things wrong, or when we think you’ve gotten something wrong. But we care so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of how often you get things right. That’s why we’re all here. That’s why this show exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why we care so much about these products and the company. We give you sh** because we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care, and because you get so many things right. And I know that your role at the company involves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far more than developer relations, and that you personally have played a key role
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in making so many world-class products, including many of our favorite things. And without the work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you do and the things you’ve helped make, all of our lives would be very different and probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not for the better. So for all of that, we sincerely thank you and please
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep up the good work.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Wow, thanks, that’s really nice. I just hope everyone knows that we
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller strive to do everything to be the best. not the most, not the cheapest,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller not the fastest, those all matter, but the best. And that’s a never-ending
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller task, because it’s always something you can do better.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And I hope people realize that, while we’re not perfect, the motivations
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller are great. Everyone I’ve ever worked with at Apple cares deeply. We all have different
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller opinions about what is best and what we can do next and what’s the smart choices.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller but it’s not for lack of wanting to do better. And I’m just like all of
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller you. I mean, I love technology, I love this company, and the people who work at it,
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller and wanna live up to the huge expectations everybody has on what
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Apple can do and what Apple can mean in the world. And that’s what gets you up in the morning and has
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller you go to work day after day, year after year, decade after decade, is because so many people care and feel
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller like you guys do, And it’s pretty remarkable to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller represent that inside the company and be just another fan, another
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller customer who wants everything to be great for as long as the eye can see.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And that’s what you get to go in and keep that spirit alive. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller a fun and important thing. And so I just feel like all of you do.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller And I, like all of you, we all see the things that drive
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller us crazy and wish we’re better and see all the things that we love and are better and we just
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller keep plugging away to live up to the high expectations. And so it’s critical
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller that you and everyone else keeps expectations high and keeps respectfully
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller saying, hey, I get it, you guys are trying your best, but boy, here’s 10 more things we would love and here’s our next
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller, Marco hierarchy
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller of what we want. And everyone will do the best we can, but
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller thank you for, we’re all part of the same system of making Apple and Apple products
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller meaningful to us. So the feeling’s mutual.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, we are happy to oblige on our duty on that. And so given the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we usually see you on stage, I really hope we see you soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Thank you. We’ll see you at the next show.
Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Mack Weldon. Better than whatever you’re wearing right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. I gotta say, I love Mack Weldon stuff. So Mack Weldon is a premium men’s essentials brand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They believe in smart design, premium fabrics, and simple shopping. And I gotta say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they live up to all of that. Like I wear Mack Weldon stuff every day. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always at least one thing. It’s always at least their underwear because they make fantastic underwear. And then most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days I’m also wearing at least one of the things. So at least their t-shirts are excellent. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often wearing their socks. I sometimes am wearing their winter knit hat or their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warm knit long sleeve shirt. It’s kind of like a lightweight sweater. Love that. They have long sleeve t-shirts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short sleeve t-shirts. They’re all just excellent. They are really nice fabrics. They are very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made. Like they’re fit well, they’re constructed well. They don’t cheap out anywhere. Like it’s all really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good stuff. In the summertime, I switch to their silver line because silver is naturally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco antimicrobial. And so by wearing their silver underwear and their silver t-shirts, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the summertime you don’t stink. It’s really, really great. And that’s all I wear all summer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s wonderful. So they are just amazing fabrics, amazing clothing, amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products over there at Mack Weld. And I love them. I really suggest you try them out. They want you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be comfortable. So here’s the deal. You can get a pair of underwear from them. If you don’t like it, you can keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and they will still refund you with no questions asked. So you can see for yourself how great their stuff is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I gotta say, I just love it. So for 20% off your first order, visit macweldon.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and enter ATP at checkout.
ATP Live: WWDC Monday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, that’s 20% off your first order at macweldon.com by using code ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at checkout. Thank you so much to Mac Weldon for making almost everything I wear these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so speaking of WWDC, we have an announcement to share with everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP will be doing a live show during WWDC, as is our tradition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. We will be doing it on Monday evening, as is our tradition now. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have any specifics about where or when other than to say Monday evening,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it will be somewhere in the San Jose area Monday evening, and we will get details out as soon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we can get them hammered down and nailed down and so on. But I just wanted to put it in your calendars if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re like me and a super type A planner, Monday evening of WWDC, somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somehow, the three of us will be there doing a live show if all goes according to plan. So keep your calendars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open if you please. And yes, if we can, we will live stream that and by we, I mean Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will live stream that if possible, but no guarantees are made nor implied. We’re just going to do the best we can.
Apple-Spotify dispute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How the heck do we follow that up, man? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I guess we’re done, right? I don’t know. I guess we’re done, right? Talk about all the stuff that we didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about with Phil.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what we do. So let’s talk Spotify. Oh, gosh. Okay. Let me loosen the collar a little bit here. All right. So this has been making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rounds. And if for some reason you are not familiar with what’s going on, a couple of days ago as we record this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spotify came up with a website called timetoplayfair.com. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the top of that website, there’s a video which is on YouTube. We will link both of these in the show notes. And Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is making a case that Apple is not being fair with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way they run the App Store. And this basically comes down to three key points
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Spotify has enumerated themselves. And so I’d like to very quickly just talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the three key points are, and then we can go through the kind of ins and outs of each of these. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three points they make are, number one, Apple denies customers true choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and their claim, again, we’ll get to it in a minute, Spotify can’t promote deals that they may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have, like sales and things, and Spotify claims that Apple has deliberately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rejected their app at quote, business critical moments, quote. Their second issue, Spotify’s second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue, is the 30% tax, as they call it. So this is the 30% that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, I shouldn’t say skims, but takes off the top when you’re in the app store for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything that’s digital. So if you have a paid app, they take 30%. For the first year of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subscriptions, they take 30%. And for digital goods, they take 30%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But they don’t take that 30% for things like Uber or Lyft or DoorDash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or stuff like that. And then their third point, Spotify’s third point, and this is where it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real kind of interesting and ugly, is that Apple’s actions violate the law. And I’d like to read a very small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excerpt that Spotify has written. Quote, Apple has intentionally made it worse and worse for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spotify and other app developers, and it’s unnecessary. There’s enough market potential for numerous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey companies to thrive in this space. It’s not Apple’s role to decide who the winners and losers will be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They must stop interfering and let competition work. So again, real quick, Apple denies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey customers true choice, the 30% quote unquote tax, and Apple’s actions violate the law. And so the summation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all this, other than a PR blitz, is that Spotify, which is based out of – oh, gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to get this wrong. Sweden? I should have looked this up in advance. Somewhere Nordic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in Europe. Oh, we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco to hear about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco God. I’m so sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re making it worse with the Europe stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re all very cold and very angry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. But anyway, they’re somewhere wherein the EU cares. And so they have filed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a formal complaint with the EU or European Commission perhaps saying, hey, this is messed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. You should look into this. So that’s the kind of state of the world. Are there any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other things that you guys would like to add before we go through this point by point?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think we can save ourselves some time and see if you two agree. The legality thing, none of us
⏹️ ▶️ John know enough about EU law to know about legality. And honestly, I mean, I know it has big repercussions for Apple, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m the least interested in whether they’re in violation of some law, because the
⏹️ ▶️ John law has very little to do with what is actually right and best for consumers or companies or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m just happy to dispense with the law thing and say, good luck with your case, yada, yada, yada,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not, I don’t think there’s anything you can dig out there to figure out. We’re not going to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out whether they’re in violation of law. A bunch of lawyers will.
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out what country
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exactly. We don’t even know US laws on this stuff. I mean, I think we’ll talk about it for the other points because
⏹️ ▶️ John at least I have some visceral experience with antitrust in the US with the Microsoft stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea how their court case is going to go to the EU. So it’s probably a problem for Apple, but it’s not a thing I think like it’s It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John for real for us to discuss.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I’d also like to point out that there’s been a lot of kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of complaining and pointing out that, hey, Spotify isn’t this, you know, innocent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey angel because Spotify doesn’t pay artists as much as they probably should. And depending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on who you ask has been taking legal recourse in order to try to pay artists
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than, than maybe they are being told to pay. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not interested in having that debate. I think that that’s probably true, that they probably don’t pay artists enough. But it is possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to think that Spotify doesn’t pay artists enough while also thinking that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it pays Apple too much. Like these to me are very separate issues. I am not interested in debating whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not Spotify is a good company, whether or not they’re doing what’s doing right by artists. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m interested in is how is their relationship with Apple and what should it look like?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I understand that a lot of people, particularly musicians, are very upset about what the way they treat musicians.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m not trying to take away from that. I just don’t think that’s germane to this conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s part of this whole sort of, you know, so there’s the legal part of it, which probably constrains what they can do in public, but Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has a press release response to it. And we’ll get to the responses in a little bit. This is all just like talking in the press and looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John the two press releases, they’re totally talking past each other, which is fine because your goal is not to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John rebut their arguments or something. Your goal is to win in the form of public opinion. And if you want to win in public opinion, you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John actually address people’s points. You can just say, look over there, like they’re talking past each other. Like, it’s very unfruitful as someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s watching the two sides, because they don’t address each other’s points, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John for good reason, because you shouldn’t address them in public if there’s some pending lawsuit about it. So what I’m most
⏹️ ▶️ John interested to talk about is, so Spotify is just one of many companies that may or
⏹️ ▶️ John may not have various complaints about the App Store, and just sort of the state of the App Store, and the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who put their stuff in it, and the balance of power. Have we talked about this before? Like, Apple has a certain amount of power as the
⏹️ ▶️ John platform owner, and big companies like Spotify have a certain amount of power as well. And what does that balance of power look like?
⏹️ ▶️ John And how, setting aside what they say in public and what the court cases do, how are these,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, how are the superpowers going to come to an agreement? Has the balance of power shifted, or could
⏹️ ▶️ John it shift? That’s the most interesting angle for me. So I just as soon also skip what Apple’s responses are, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like they don’t address anything that Spotify said. And I feel like all the stuff Spotify said is irrelevant. And it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John ugh, I find it very frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Marco, any other thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I should disclaim that I have conflicts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of interest on both sides of this here. I just made a lot of money from Spotify buying Gimlet, and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I make my entire living on the App Store. And we just, five seconds ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had on the show my favorite Apple executive. So it’s hard to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unbiased here. But I think, I’ll do my best. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both Apple and Spotify, as John said, like they’re trying to bring up in these posts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco points that I think are separate arguments. And I am willing to totally ignore those. To me, this boils
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down to exactly one argument. That Spotify is being required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use in-app purchase for subscriptions that are purchased in the app. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else I think is secondary. You know, everything else about, you know, like Spotify made a bunch of weird arguments about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they weren’t allowed on the HomePod. Well, the HomePod barely works. It’s brand new. It’s like.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should make a complaint about Overcast not being allowed on the watch for so long. Can’t believe they did that to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast. Right, exactly, yeah. It’s like, I know better than most people the limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of watchOS APIs for audio apps over time. And I can tell you 100% it was not targeted at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spotify. Like, Apple wanted very badly for people like us to make watch apps, and the APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just weren’t there for a few years. Now they are. It wasn’t targeted at Spotify. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just like the APIs were young, and the HomePod is the same thing. The HomePod’s a young product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The APIs are still young, and Siri and SiriKit and everything, to have Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to music library stuff requires a way more sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type of SiriKit access than any of the APIs exposed today. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while enabling Spotify probably makes that sort of API development low of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a priority for Apple, The fact is that API doesn’t exist for anybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would be very complex to build. You can’t just take what SiriKit is today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and add two lines to an entitlements file and say, okay, now we allow audio and just have it all work. There’s way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more to it, because you have to have some kind of catalog indexing. There’s all sorts of stuff you’d have to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make that work that is way beyond what current SiriKit offers for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. So I think it’s probably not Apple saying, ooh, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be mean to Spotify and target them specifically. It’s more like this is a very big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature that we haven’t gotten to yet. And maybe the reason we haven’t gotten to yet is because we don’t need it, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the fact is, the Siri integration, the HomeKit integration, and until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year, the watch capabilities, I think, are all totally separate things that had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little to nothing to do with Spotify.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s actually two things here. You said just the one is about the in-app purchases
⏹️ ▶️ John and the percentage, but like, The biggest issue is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is, they run the platform and they also have apps on it. Right, so that’s the fundamental, that’s like the original
⏹️ ▶️ John sin. Like, they run the app store. See,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s it. It’s not about, like, the Microsoft way, like you mentioned Microsoft,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure you’re mentioning them again, like in the Microsoft way, they got in trouble for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that was a big deal back then. I think that’s less of a big deal these days. Like that seems to go on all the time in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech and we kind of accept it as just a thing people can do now. So I don’t think that’s really the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. To me, I think this whole thing boils down to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strict requirement and the rules around that you have to use an app purchase and therefore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take Apple’s 30% for anything purchased within the app itself. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else I think is not the argument here. It all comes down to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s a sub-item of my larger item. Like the fact that they run the store and they also have apps in it has tons of consequences,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s, that’s what it’s, it’s not saying that it’s a bad thing and I don’t, Spotify complains about it or
⏹️ ▶️ John Elizabeth Warren complains about it as if it’s ipso facto a bad thing. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John that has consequences. Obviously Apple is not paying itself 30% doesn’t make any sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And you could say right away, if Apple decides to make a music service and we make a
⏹️ ▶️ John music service, it’s unfair that they don’t have to pay somebody else 30%. But why would they run the platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is inherently quote unquote unfair. There’s no getting around that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always wonder what people say, so the solution should be like split up the company from the app store and then the Apple thing or Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ John pay somebody else 30%. It’s like, no, when you make the store, it is an inherent tension there,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what’s the alternative? You don’t charge anyone any percentage or that you charge
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself or whatever, but that’s baked in and that has to do with all the APIs and everything like that. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not done yet, but internally, we might be able to use them to test them out. Oh, hey, that’s unfair. But don’t you want
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to like they can’t make the API external until they try it themselves. Like they do that all the time. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms where they want to make an API, they use it themselves for a few years and deal with all the bugs and change
⏹️ ▶️ John the APIs in breaking ways. And they break their own apps and they fix them and then they publish them as public APIs. Like that’s just the way
⏹️ ▶️ John development works. But this this inherent setup where they are on the store and they run the store
⏹️ ▶️ John just seems fundamentally unfair to people. And I don’t I think you just have to get okay with that. Now bringing in the Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, Microsoft’s deal, this is my perspective, I don’t know what the legal perspective is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft’s deal has always been, with the antitrust stuff, is like, from my perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only thing that matters is how dominant Microsoft was. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it stops being a choice to ship something on Windows if everybody has Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John for a reasonable price valuation of everybody. So that’s what I’m always looking for with the Apple stuff. Apple does all this stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t be on their platform, there’s no side loading, you have to use their payment system, you know, there’s all these rules
⏹️ ▶️ John about, you know, that derive from their decisions of how to run their platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m only interested in those ideas if and when we cross some threshold where it’s like, well, as you know, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is impossible to run a business selling applications if you don’t sell on iOS. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s true, but I’m always watching to make sure that someday when that does become true, a new set of rules apply.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does not have dominant market share in smartphones. They probably never will. It’s possible to
⏹️ ▶️ John argue that they have dominant money share in smartphones in terms of how much money flows through the system, and maybe some lawyers
⏹️ ▶️ John can argue that. But when I think about people complaining about the rules of the App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course you would like the rules to be different. But it’s Apple’s store, and they can make whatever rules they want. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it works is if you don’t like those rules, you don’t go in the store, and that’s the tension. Oh, well, Spotify, why don’t you just pull
⏹️ ▶️ John out? And Spotify says, well, we can’t pull out because we have millions of users. It’s like, well, then you deal with the rules. But I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John Spotify goes out of business if they’re not in the app store. I don’t think Apple goes out of business if Spotify is not on the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, but it hurts both of them. So we’re in that situation that we talked about in past shows where there’s a tension
⏹️ ▶️ John in the rules. And I don’t, like, this arguing about the rules in public or in private or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John should go on and it should be healthy, but the balance is, here’s the deal we want, here’s the deal you want. You can be in or you can
⏹️ ▶️ John be in not. And the only place, as far as I’m concerned, where this becomes an issue that we have to all think about and fret about
⏹️ ▶️ John is when there’s no longer any choice. When it’s like, Apple has all the power because you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on the iPhone. Otherwise it is impossible to run a business. And I think that’s just not true. Like Android
⏹️ ▶️ John has 80% market share. Arguably you have to be on Android depending on what your service is
⏹️ ▶️ John to be successful. But Android is fragmented and so there’s no one party controlling everything. That’s where my
⏹️ ▶️ John eye is on all this stuff. And so all the arguments about the percentage they take from things and subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on, I just think of it all as like, yeah, Apple makes the rules that you don’t like and your choice is accept the rules or
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t accept them. and there are negative consequences to all the choices on all sides,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s just the way things go. And so I can’t get caught up in the idea of them arguing about things. Like, just work
⏹️ ▶️ John it out. Decide whether you’re gonna be in the store or whether you’re not gonna be in the store. Try to shame them into changing their rules and see if that
⏹️ ▶️ John works for you. I probably think it won’t, but I don’t know. I just get frustrated. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people have different opinions about this, especially the Elizabeth Warren breaking up Apple stuff, and Ben Thompson talks a lot about that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I keep just keeping my eye on Apple and saying, are they the one and only massively dominant, cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John be avoided source of anything? And the answer that I think right now is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. See, I think the argument of, like, well, Android has more market share,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that really holds water in determining whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a bad enough thing to matter or whether Apple has a monopoly. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS is still, even though it doesn’t have the most market share, it’s still really important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also still has disproportionate usage. It has like much higher usage than you would think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for its market share of certain types of services, certain types of usage. It tends to be, you know, higher end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage, more money involved. So like it’s almost like, oh God, I’m gonna offend the entire world. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost like if you like, you know, the US doesn’t have the most, doesn’t have the majority of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world. But if you try to operate a company that can’t sell to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody in the US and your competitors all can, that’s gonna hurt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a pretty big problem for a lot of types of companies, right? So that it’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, like, yeah, the, you know, iOS does not have dominant market share by numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still really big and really important market share. So I don’t think that argument really holds
⏹️ ▶️ John it is important, but it’s not dominant. Like what I’m getting at is if you all these rules, like the rules like you did, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like these rules or whatever, it only matters that you don’t like them if you have no choice but to accept them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you do have a choice. It may not be a choice that you like, but it hurts Apple and it also hurts you.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Windows deal was, you don’t have a choice. Nobody freaking uses Mac. Windows runs the world. They argued in short,
⏹️ ▶️ John the court, they were like, hey, everyone here who uses a Windows computer at work, raise your hand, and everybody in the room raised their hand.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t do that with Android or Apple right now. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Phil Schiller approaching
⏹️ ▶️ John, Phil Schiller And we could,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there’s the money share thing. Depends on the room. Yeah, well, there’s, don’t do it at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John In a generic courtroom, you know? So like I’m keeping an eye on that because I think the money share argument is real. It’s like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Android has 80% market share. But if you look at how much money flows through app stores, what does Apple share? And that’s that’s for the lawyers
⏹️ ▶️ John to argue. But as far as I’m concerned, the the rules that Apple makes the developers don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John only start to matter when it’s obvious that there is absolutely no choice where they
⏹️ ▶️ John have windows style domination. I don’t think they’re quite there yet. We need to keep looking at it, not just assume they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John never have it because they might. Right. And it could be argued that they have it today in terms of money. I don’t know the exact numbers, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the only point where it starts to matter. Until then, it is just a negotiation between powerful parties
⏹️ ▶️ John about who’s going to be hurt more by me pulling my thing out of the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know though, because I feel like even amongst normal people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I know, most Android users that I know are fairly ambivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Android. You know, I have a Galaxy this time, which is still Android, and then I got a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever next time. And you know, I actually just had an iPhone before this and I might have an iPhone next.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But most iPhone users I know are extraordinarily loyal. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can you really make a legal argument based on the fact that one group is more loyal than another? I don’t think so. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would argue that since iPhone users tend to be extremely loyal, and now I’ll just pick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on myself, the likelihood of me switching to Android is almost zero because so much of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my life, both professionally and personally, is caked into the Apple ecosystem. So I don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I have a choice. And And I actually am a Spotify user.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a silly argument. Yeah, you like the phone better, but you always have a choice. Like, to give an example, my sister will never buy
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple phone because they’re too damn expensive for her. And so she’s just the flip side of you. You will never buy an Android one,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You have to look at the aggregate. The aggregate is what matters. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John we should keep looking at that aggregate. And for the legal crap that I said I didn’t want to get into, there are other rules, like the EU
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to foster competition. They don’t have this. This rule that I’m making up in my head is like, I only care when it’s dominant,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the EU doesn’t work like that. laws like we want to foster competition. So you don’t have to be 100% dominant or 95% dominant
⏹️ ▶️ John to get smacked down by their laws. But I’ll let the lawyer slide that out. But my personal opinion is
⏹️ ▶️ John that these people should deal with each other and have concessions and negotiations
⏹️ ▶️ John like they did with the Netflix with the 15% subscription thing and going from 30 to 15. Like the rules change over
⏹️ ▶️ John time in response to these negotiations. But I don’t think we’re quite yet at the point where Spotify’s
⏹️ ▶️ John argument, their argument is essentially, we have no choice to be on the the iPhone. I don’t think that’s true. They have
⏹️ ▶️ John a choice. They just don’t like the alternative. So that argues I mean, when I think about this, I know Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ John would not like to hear this, but I think Spotify, Apple could probably charge you more money
⏹️ ▶️ John or not just Spotify because they don’t even pay it anymore. But like anybody, the 30% 30% seems like a lot for what we get. But
⏹️ ▶️ John how many people would leave the app store if they changed to 31% like you’re getting into like, you know, finding
⏹️ ▶️ John the ceiling like we
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco did on God’s sake,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t tell them this. But that’s but that’s the negotiation. The idea is that you think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John The rules are bad now, but what is the power dynamic? If Apple had 99% market share, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John could make it 50%, like they’re trying to do with news reportedly. That’s how we can tell when the power dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ John has gone bad, when there is no negotiating power on either side. And right now, I think there is negotiating power on both
⏹️ ▶️ John sides, and we see adjustments. We don’t see Apple saying, I’m going to change it to 31, 35, 45. They haven’t been doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Not out of the goodness of the heart, but because I think they’re calculating that that That would be
⏹️ ▶️ John bad overall for their business.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone keyboard. Really important, really cool stuff. Really great stories. That’s all in Ken Cachenda’s Creative Selection.
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Apple-Spotify, cont’d.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen. Get started with a 30-day trial when you go to audible.com slash ATP
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to audible for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d like to get back to the Spotify thing if possible like because to me like this is starting a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of discussions everywhere not just here in all these different directions and that’s ultimately I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what they want with these two different like you know, press battles. But I still think this really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one issue, which is that 30%. And so to me, like I see, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the issue is twofold. It’s that Apple requires in-app purchasing to go through their thing that charges 30%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then they have a thing where, if it’s the new kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco auto-renewing subscription, the first year of a subscription, it’s charged at 30%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then if the same customer stays on and stays subscribed, from year two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco onward, it gets charged at 15% instead. So the commission gets cut in half after the first year of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a subscriber. And so they’re kind of doing 85-15 for some people. And we’ve heard rumblings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there that 85-15 was always the deal for people like Netflix. And Netflix recently left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store as well in this way, and we’ll talk about that. But they have this thing where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to use their system. And then they also are very strict about If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choose not to use their system, like for instance, like what Netflix does now, you can no longer sign up for Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iOS app. If you are brand new and you don’t have a Netflix membership yet, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can open the Netflix app and it basically has a login form. And there’s no way to sign up for a new Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account. To do that, you have to go to Netflix’s website. And there’s rules that basically say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Netflix is not allowed to link to their website from their app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tell people, go to a website to sign up, or to have any kind of call to action in that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To allude to the website’s existence in any way. Right, like they aren’t allowed to have there be a path
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the app and a website where you can sign up externally if the app doesn’t offer an app purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, to me, that is the real key problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. I see three real solutions here. Solution one is you keep the status quo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is honestly probably the most likely solution for now, unless there’s a legal decision. But keep the status
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quo and you have people like Spotify weighing whether they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stay in the store and keep getting rejected for them trying to get around this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in-app purchase thing but still offer it like what they’re doing now or whether they want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave like remove that ability remove in-app purchase and just deal with the fact that there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no call to action anywhere in the app to sign up and you just have to kind of know and this is what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon and Netflix do now. Amazon was first to the Amazon started this party years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like this is what they do and it’s not great for anybody really it sucks for Apple because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they get nothing it sucks for you know Amazon and and Netflix and anybody else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who might do this because Their apps are worse and they probably get fewer new customers than they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would otherwise because it’s hard to become a new customer because you Have to go to the app see login form and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow know oh, I have to go somewhere else to sign up. And it sucks for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the customers, because they have to go through that terrible experience. It’s inconvenient for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that choice is just kind of mediocre. It kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks for everybody. And that’s the status quo, though, for a lot of these big companies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you get to a size like Netflix, that becomes worth
⏹️ ▶️ John it. The ones you mentioned, in these cases, Amazon was with the eBooks
⏹️ ▶️ John originally, and Spotify with music, and Netflix, I’m not sure what their business is exactly like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I can tell you for both musics and eBooks, part of the reason those companies resisted giving Apple 30% is
⏹️ ▶️ John not because they’re like, oh, we don’t wanna pay Apple 30%. Those businesses don’t have 30% to spare.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like everyone is getting paid, they have to pay the publishers and the authors and the artists
⏹️ ▶️ John and the labels. There’s not an extra 30% hanging around. That’s like a make or break type of thing in a lot of these businesses,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on whether they’re in VC mode where they’re running out of loss anyway, and no one cares, and they’re just trying to build market share. but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only points before about I only care about the rules until Apple’s dominant, that doesn’t mean I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s rules are dumb. A whole bunch of them are dumb, right? And I can argue, Apple, this is one of your dumb rules. Like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna have businesses like this on your system and you know there’s not an extra 30% hanging
⏹️ ▶️ John around for you, it’s just not there. You can’t get blood from a stone, right? It’s not like Spotify is
⏹️ ▶️ John hoarding that 30% and could give it to you and still make a profit. Like, they’re probably taking losses everywhere. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want businesses like that on the App Store, you should change this rule because it’s dumb. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t mean you need to be legally forced to unless again, you are massively dominant, but that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of the argument I would make from Spotify. Not just like, it’s so unfair that you don’t let us use another
⏹️ ▶️ John payment method. It’s like, let’s find a way, let’s find a way to yes here. Like, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have 30% in our business, but we wanna be on your store. And it’s so dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John that we can’t tell people, go sign up for us. Because honestly, like, that’s where Apple seems petty. Like, what are you afraid
⏹️ ▶️ John of? that now you lose a tiny percentage of your massive advantage of having Apple Music ship on
⏹️ ▶️ John every damn iPhone, because people can go to Spotify and sign up right in the app. What happens there? Yes, it’s worse than it
⏹️ ▶️ John is now, but is it going to destroy Apple Music? I really hope not, right? So there are plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John of good arguments to be made, presumably that are being made behind closed doors. But I think there’s lots of these situations
⏹️ ▶️ John that are just intractable, where there’s never going to be a meeting of the minds because there’s not 30%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like if I were to pick just one issue that’s at the heart of this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the thing that Marco brought up about not being able to punt people to the web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do the sign up. And as Marco said earlier, our understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is if you even obliquely hint at the fact that you can go to the web to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sign up, then your app will be rejected because they don’t want you to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that seems, that just seems kind of wrong to me. And like you said, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what does Apple fear? Why is this such an issue?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I can think of a few things. So for instance, you have to figure, with App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store policy, anything they allow somebody like Spotify to do or somebody like me who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has good intentions is also gonna be abused by a lot of other people who don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good intentions. And are trying to scam people or anything else. So I can see why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t do this because you would have like, you know, games that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want you to put your credit card into their system to buy your gems. And that of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leads to all sorts of potential problems and liabilities and everything that Apple probably doesn’t want. So I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally why they do this. Also, obviously, you know, they are trying to grow their services revenue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, so they have both a financial incentive to be very strict about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also they’ve had always, they’ve had this user experience and safety and security
⏹️ ▶️ John So. Yeah, but they always say that. But it’s not, they make it seem as if the choices are safe and secure
⏹️ ▶️ John at 30% and Wild West. And that’s not true. They could give people payment
⏹️ ▶️ John processing, essentially, at cost for way lower percentage. They don’t want to do that, though.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those aren’t the only two choices in the world. If we give you a safe payment method, it’s got to be 30%. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not true at all. Especially if all you’re doing is processing the payment. I mean, we’re not even talking about processing the payment. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just saying like, send them somewhere else to a website. And that was one of the funny parts of Apple’s reaction of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how they’re dedicated to making the app store safe and secure. They totally are, but practically speaking, scam
⏹️ ▶️ John apps fill the app store. It’s a hard problem to solve. I always wonder like, if you made it worse in
⏹️ ▶️ John some way, how would we tell? Like, is the scam apps are just like amazing? Like, what, did you
⏹️ ▶️ John see that thing? Speaking of scam apps, it was that thing where like, you could go to this website and they were abusing their enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John certificate to give you all these casino gambling and porn games. And it was just like, had been there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That whole world, I had no idea existed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I didn’t know either. I bet Apple didn’t know either, but it’s like, yeah, that’s why I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John they need to have a meeting of the minds and not just be like it’s 30% or the highway. Because if you said, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna take 1% and in exchange you get an awesome safe credit card method that people can do by
⏹️ ▶️ John staring at their phone, people would take it in a second, right? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depends. I bet people like Amazon still wouldn’t, because Amazon is like, you know, razor thin margins, like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t. There might be 1% disparity books. Maybe, but like, like I do think like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just lowering the commission in general, like, so, you know, one option is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just use 8515 for all subscriptions. Now this won’t cover things like Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eBooks because that’s not subscription priced. But if you just use 8515 for all subscriptions, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, I think, open the door a lot wider to have a lot more people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in companies say, okay, we’ll play ball with that because that worked better with our economics or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s more reasonable or whatever else. 15% is still a lot compared to other payment processors, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a heck of a lot more appetizer, or rather, it’s a heck of a lot more friendly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a price than 30%. You know, it’s so, like, and honestly, like, you know, some of us are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of, you know, we, like, I have, for Overcast subscriptions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had the same thing for, I have the same in-app purchase now for over two years, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’ve had time to get those renewals at 85%. And I went earlier into the research
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my current actual effective price I’m paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is 20%. Because there’s so many renewals that go multiple years for overcast premium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m actually, on average, only paying a 20% commission. And that still feels like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of money to me, but I feel a lot better about that
⏹️ ▶️ John than 30. Apple pointed that out, by the way, in their thing of like, you know, here are the things you got, and you said
⏹️ ▶️ John it too, here are the things you have to pay 30% for and here are the things you don’t have to pay 30% for. And one of the things you don’t is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you sell advertising in your application, you don’t need to give Apple any of that, which is an interesting decision and has consequences
⏹️ ▶️ John for the various business models of the apps. But as Matt and Reese pointed out in his blog post about this, like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John basically what I was getting at before is these decisions, okay, digital goods, 30%. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John sell ads in your app, we get 0% of that. If you sell physical goods, we get 0%. Those are all just arbitrary
⏹️ ▶️ John lines that Apple has come up with. And it’s a good idea for Apple. Apple could choose a different line and it
⏹️ ▶️ John should revisit those lines and say, do these lines still make sense? You know, can we adjust these? And I
⏹️ ▶️ John know this is counter to what Phil just said when he was like, we want to treat all developers the same. But as I’ve said before,
⏹️ ▶️ John treating all developers the same, like there is an aspect of that that is a noble, important goal. But there’s another aspect of that
⏹️ ▶️ John that just frustrates both consumers and Apple. Like in the end, Netflix, Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google, Spotify are not the same as indie developers, which is why Apple negotiated that secret 15% deal with Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that did not bring the store crashing down. And honestly, I think small developers are like, OK, well, it’s Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there should be, and even small developers have argued for this. Like small developers, I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John Icon Factory talking about this with Twitter and everything. Some kind of reputation system
⏹️ ▶️ John where I’m not treated the same as random scam app developer
⏹️ ▶️ John because you know me, you know my company, and we have a track record together. I know it’s like bringing back the bad old world of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the haves and the have-nots, but it’s the way the store is working effectively anyway. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John made it an actual path, like the 8515, which is like an actual defined path, where it says, if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to get in our good graces, keep your people subscribed for a year, and you get this benefit. That’s another avenue that they could pursue.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple decides what all these rules are. None of them should be set in stone,
⏹️ ▶️ John and all of them should be revisited. And it seems like a lot of the rules, like, Oh, you can’t send anyone into a website like may have outlived
⏹️ ▶️ John their usefulness or may have outlived their usefulness for the big players. Like, put a roadmap down
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, Hey, if you don’t want to be limited by that, here are the steps you have to take. And anybody can take them. You don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be Amazon. You can be in a developer and take those same steps and be super successful. But put a roadmap
⏹️ ▶️ John out for people to, to better their business because that’s, that’s a virtuous relationship where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, I want to do those things because I want to get the 15% because I want to be able to send people to my website.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do I have to do to make that happen? How can and we make it so that it’s a win-win.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I should negotiate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, you’ll lose them all their money. Yeah, so like, and because, you know, the fact is like any change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you make to this has potentially massive costs to Apple in like reduced App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store revenue. You know, like that’s why like anybody who says, oh, well they should just lower it to, you know, the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 3% that Stripe charges, like no, that’s not gonna happen. Or even me just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, maybe they should do 85-15 for all subscriptions period, that could have massive consequences.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for instance, not only is that just a lot of money off that year one charge of all those subscriptions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also that creates a strong financial incentive for things like games to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just turn everything into subscription pricing, which yes, AppReview could have a policy about, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those aren’t necessarily that consistently enforced or enforceable, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, is that really the world we want? Like where all games all of a sudden have a huge advantage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pricing things, subscription price instead of in-app purchase, single purchase. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything they do here is gonna have massive ramifications that you have to consider when talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about these rules. That’s why I think, you know, so to me there’s three options. Keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the status quo, do 85-15 for everything, subscription-based at least,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I think the most sensible rule is to just relax the rule
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about mentioning your website to pay for things. And you don’t even need to go that far. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one question is, can you just have a link? So, this rule could take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of different severities. You could say, you could link, but it has to be Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view controller. Or you can say, you can link, but it must not be an app. You have to kick people out to Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app. Or you can say, you can’t be a link, but you can mention the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or mention the website in text. Say, go to netflix.com in text and have them manually do it. Or you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have it all the way to the other end, which is you can’t even mention it at all. And that’s where we are today. Right now, you can’t mention it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. And I think that is the part that is most customer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hostile, that is causing most of the drama, and that probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna be what antitrust people have a problem with. Like that, again, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not legal experts, but I think that is gonna come down to being the biggest problem, is that they can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mention other areas of pay. And if they relaxed that, even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just went one step back to say, you can mention the website in text and just not link
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. Even that, I think, would make most of this problem go away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. And I think that that makes the most sense, is to make that a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more relaxed. And I’m glad you brought up punting out to Safari proper, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is surprising how much control an app developer can have over what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes on in a Safari View Controller. So I don’t think that’s unreasonable to say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to go to full bore Safari in order to do all this stuff on device. I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, also, back forever ago, that was the policy. Back in the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early, early, early days of the App Store, that’s what Amazon did. Because that was allowed. You could kick people out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was no Safari view controller at the time. But you could kick people out to Safari and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do your thing there and kick people back to the app. That was allowed for a while. And over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this rule has gotten more and more strict to lock that down further and further. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I think, whenever that was, 10, 11 years ago, back then, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a little bit of controversy over this, but it was mostly not that big of a deal. It was mostly like, all right, well, I guess we’ll just have people use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website and that’ll be it. It’s only been in recent years that it’s causing a really increasing amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of friction between Apple and the big companies. And it also hurts small developers, too. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that I would love to enable for Overcast. There are business models that I have thought about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and abilities that I would have launched. Things like tipping podcasters or paying podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some kind of premium plan that pays out. And there are things like that that I have thought about doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but have decided against doing because the requirements of that 30 percent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just make it economically not work very well. website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just make it not work very well. And so this affects not only the giants like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, but it also affects almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody who uses subscriptions and also has a website or business models that could maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist if not for these rules being the way they are or these commissions being what they are. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think this is a very important issue and I think ultimately Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably going to be forced by some kind of regulatory agency somewhere to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change something about this at some point soon. I know that’s very vague. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think ultimately, if they just allowed people to mention their websites, to direct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people there, even if it’s just via text, that gets you a lot of the way there and I think doesn’t bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the downsides to Apple that the more lenient solutions would.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s actually worse for small developers, because the odds of you downloading the Kindle app and knowing that you have to go to Amazon.com
⏹️ ▶️ John are pretty high, Kindle and Amazon are pretty big brands. You might know that. But if you’re a small developer, no one has any freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John idea where your website is. It’s actually way worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, like if I launched a feature on Overcast that was only available on the website and never mentioned in the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much nobody would ever use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still feel like there’s a virtuous cycle that is being missed out on. Even if you, like, it’s a nice compromise in a negotiating
⏹️ ▶️ John position to say, you can put the text there, you can link out to Safari View Control. But we all know the better user experience is
⏹️ ▶️ John to let people buy stuff in the app. And that, you know, like from a customer’s perspective, that’s what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then you have the whole, like you mentioned all the scam stuff or whatever, but I feel like we need to, that’s where we should be trying to get to.
⏹️ ▶️ John We should be trying to get to a situation where financially it works out for everybody involved because for the good of the children, for
⏹️ ▶️ John the good of the customers, the best customer experience is to be able to buy freaking Kindle books on your phone without being kicked
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Like everyone knows that’s the best experience. And it’s like, what is stopping us from getting there? How can we
⏹️ ▶️ John find a deal that is tolerable to everybody involved? Because I think there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty significant win to getting to that point. Like we know the fantasy of Apple saying Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John is just going to pay us 30% is never going to happen. There’s not 30% there. If we have to start with a compromise
⏹️ ▶️ John solution to convince Apple the world doesn’t end if you let them put on unclickable text, good. That’s a good starting
⏹️ ▶️ John position. But I feel like we need to get to the best user experience. Like that’s what Apple is ostensibly
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do. And it’s very frustrating when I see things that Apple is doing that
⏹️ ▶️ John make sense financially, but don’t make sense from the perspective of let’s make the best product. Like Phil said, nobody’s perfect.
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#askatp: Shell languages
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show. Make your next move with a beautiful website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Squarespace. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so we’ll start tonight with Gustavo Posadonio, who writes, I’m starting to do a bunch more stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a Unix command line at work, which involves a lot of text processing. So far, I’ve been able to hack together little bash scripts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that just barely do what I want, and they’re pretty much completely unmaintainable and difficult to modify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I need to adjust my task. And this got me thinking that I should probably pick up a quote-unquote utility programming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey language that will serve general purpose needs on the command line. After listening to John for years, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’d take a look at what Perl looks like these days, but there are many on the internet who say that nobody should be learning Perl
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2019 or 2000 or 1980. And instead, I should look to Ruby or Python.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are your guys thoughts on this? Is Perl dead or will I get mileage out of learning it? Go ahead, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like we’ve answered this question before, but the answer is you will absolutely get mileage out of learning it. In particular, because you’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John your alternative is I’m going to write bash scripts. And let me tell you, it is harder to write
⏹️ ▶️ John a adequately correct bash script than an adequately correct
⏹️ ▶️ John Perl script. Like the reason Perl exists is because all the individual Unix tools, both shell scripting and all the command line tools,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are so many sharp edges on there. And it wouldn’t be nice if there was just one glue language that incorporated all their
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality but was internally somewhat more consistent and, you know, just easier and nicer
⏹️ ▶️ John to use. If you’re doing any kind of non-trivial thing with bash scripts,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be better written in Perl. Now, comparing it to Python and Ruby, those will also,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part, work for the situation. So you can pick one of those to learn instead. I’m saying stop writing
⏹️ ▶️ John shell scripts because no, I’m going to say that almost nobody alive and still
⏹️ ▶️ John working today knows how to write shell scripts in a way that is remotely safe. Like people just write stuff and then it works and then they have a
⏹️ ▶️ John file with a space in the file name and they erase their disk and it’s just like this is a reason these other languages exist. So
⏹️ ▶️ John use them and learn them. If you’re, if you’re making like a server side application, then maybe Perl isn’t your best choice. But if you are just
⏹️ ▶️ John doing automated scripting, Perl, I feel like has earned its spot now alongside like grep, ox,
⏹️ ▶️ John said bash, all these things that you just expect to be there in Unix, VI, whatever, Perl should be one of those things, and
⏹️ ▶️ John often is one of those things, even if it’s an old version of Perl. Pick that any day over trying to write a Bash
⏹️ ▶️ John script. And also Perl is fun, way more fun than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bash. This is the first time it’s ever been stated, Perl is fun. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, totally, you don’t know Perl’s reputation. Perl is totally fun. Its initial reputation was that it’s fun, and I think even today
⏹️ ▶️ John people would say Perl is fun, maybe in a bad way, but still, it’s fun because it’s got character and style
⏹️ ▶️ John and is interesting. You know, like Python would be the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco opposite. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much fun you’re having with this. This is great. No, I would honestly, I mean, granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should say that I don’t know Pearl or Ruby or Python.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do write bash scripts extensively and when it doesn’t do what I want, I go out to PHP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that giant disclaimer aside, I would say learn Python. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know Python, but it seems like it is the more modern thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learn that is good at these tasks that also has a lot of value elsewhere. You know, if you were gonna learn one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these languages today, like I think Python is a great example of like, you can learn it for this, but then you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also use it in all sorts of other ways. There’s tons of people using Python for all sorts of things, including web backends,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that seems to be the place to go for this kind of need today.
⏹️ ▶️ John Python is boring and not fun. And Python is not as well suited to replacing a Bash
⏹️ ▶️ John script as Parler is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, everybody writing Python knows that’s true. And they say that’s a good thing, because they’re like, well, Python forces
⏹️ ▶️ John you to be disciplined and strict and blah, blah, blah. And you can’t just dash off these little one-liner things in Perl,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Perl is way more efficient. I mean, again, we’re talking about the alternative as Bash scripts here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like I come down on Marco’s side on this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think that Perl is a very reasonable solution very reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solution to this problem. And I wouldn’t necessarily advocate against Perl. But if you were interested in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey learning something more modern, I think Python is a reasonable answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Ruby was so popular and no one’s even mentioning it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, to be honest, I think part of the problem is I’ve written a little bit of Perl, not a whole lot. I’ve written a little bit more PHP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but still not a whole lot. And I’ve written a teeny, teeny tiny bit of Python and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve written effectively no Ruby. And I think that’s, maybe it’s my familiarity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s tainting my answer, but I don’t know. I feel like Perl or Python are the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answers here if you’re getting beyond what Bash will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give you. I’m biased against Ruby because every time I do a homebrew update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything, I see it run through a billion Ruby commands and it takes forever. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just had this opinion of Ruby of being insanely heavy and slow for this type of use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and the RVM is really weird. And I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I’ll be the first to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And neither of us is looking to get corrected. Not today, anyway. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ditched CocoaPods in no small part because of the reliance on Ruby. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was just a frickin’ nightmare to keep myself and other developers all on the same version of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ruby, doing the same thing at the same time. It was just awful. And that’s why I use Carthage now because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is so much simpler to not have to rely on anything Ruby related
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do these sorts of things. I understand that once you see the matrix, it’s all easy, quote unquote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t seen The Matrix and honestly, I’m not interested in seeing it right now.
#askatp: Hearing damage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. Anonymous writes, I wonder about the potential long-term degradation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of hearing that I may be causing by using AirPods many times per day. Often I end up cranking up the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to hear a podcast, book, or phone call that I’m listening to, especially in noisy environments. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have any sense of whether AfterShot, which is a prior and I believe future sponsor, would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better long-term hearing impact? That is to say, I think, that they would be better on your ears.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that method of sound conduction safer or essentially the same in terms of how the volume impacts the ears.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I should clarify that I am not an audiologist or an ENT
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we don’t have any spouses of listeners currently with us here on the show to correct me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are ENTs. So this is all my speculation. But you know, hearing damage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like long-term hearing damage from volume, I think would occur regardless of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it was volume that was generated by exterior pressure versus the vibrations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are induced in your cheekbone from bone conduction headphones like Aftershocks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, it’s still volume being picked up by the eardrum and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the inner ear and everything else. So, I don’t think that should change things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What matters is that volume. It’s like how much loud content are you listening to for how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long, how loud is it? That is, I think, what is the more important factor here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re talking about having to crank up the volume to hear things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is still cranking up the volume. So if you think about the extreme here, like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are at a loud concert and you wanna put on headphones and hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something in the headphones, you’re gonna have to crank it up really loud. It’s still really loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re in a dead silent room and you put on headphones and you wanna hear what you’re listening to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can have that volume be very low still hear it. So I think if you’re concerned about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preserving your hearing and you’re not damaging your hearing and listening to things in loud environments,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best thing to do is to get headphones that are very well isolating against outside noise and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly have active noise cancellation because that way you can have the material in the headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be playing at a quieter volume and because you’re well isolated from the outside environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can still hear it at those low volumes. So that to me like if you just have AirPods and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cranking them up, you’re adding loud sound to the already loud sound from your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surroundings in order to distinguish what you’re hearing. That’s still loud. That’s still going to be a problem. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best thing to do is make your ear environment quieter, whatever that takes, whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise cancellation or whatever else. And AirPods and AfterShokz are both not very good at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. You’re better off getting a pair of larger noise-canceling headphones that have good isolation and then play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the content in them more quietly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And most Apple things have a volume limiter. Like most people use it for kids, like oh I don’t want my kid to listen to
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing too loud because it’ll hurt their level of hearing. But it’s the exact same on adults. Adults aren’t impervious to it. Set the limiter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like your example, Margot, of being in a concert and like it’s so loud in this concert but I wanna hear this podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you turn the podcast up and you’re like all right great, I can hear my podcast. The best experiment is to go out to the parking lot where
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no noise and play it at exactly the same volume you’re playing it inside and all of a sudden you’re like oh my god, how was
⏹️ ▶️ John I ever listening to this? Um, hearing loss is so insidious because music sometimes does
⏹️ ▶️ John sound better, more exciting when it’s loud. But as you’re hearing degrades, you just keep
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco turning up louder and louder.
⏹️ ▶️ John You build up a tolerance like that’s there is an endpoint where eventually you can’t hear half the frequencies anymore and you
⏹️ ▶️ John like and you’ll just end up chasing it. So what stops you from chasing it? Don’t rely on your intuition about
⏹️ ▶️ John how loud it seems to do that. Put an actual limiter, which means yes, sometimes you’ll be in the concert, you’ll try to listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to something and you won’t be able to hear it. That’s a sign that your ears are already under a tremendous audio
⏹️ ▶️ John load or whatever the technical term is, the solution is not remove the limiter and crank it up unless
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like an emergency or something. The solution is get out of that environment or, you know, do something to protect your ears from that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you’re, you only get one set of ears and they don’t replace them. As I tell my kids with their adult
⏹️ ▶️ John teeth, they don’t grow back if you knock them out. That’s it. That’s the one set you get. So take care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. I’ve lived that and they do not grow back. You know, I should also point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that aftershocks, Part of the appeal for them is that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are open. And so if you’re like me and you like to listen to podcasts while you run and you run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a road, that is a perfect time for aftershocks on account of them still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giving you the awareness of the environment. I can still hear a car coming much sooner with my aftershocks than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I were wearing my AirPods. And I know that isn’t directly about hearing loss or anything, but there’s a reason that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aftershocks have made a lot of the choices that they’ve made. And they’re not the only bone-conducting people, but they’re the ones that I have the most experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with. And so that’s actually a feature, not a bug, in a lot of scenarios.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Mack Weldon, Squarespace, and Audible. and we will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental. And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ Phil Schiller Accidental, accidental, tech podcasts so
Analog(ue) follow-out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Man, Casey, I have so many questions that we probably don’t have time for today about your analog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode most recently. I want to know about you quitting video because I think I might also be quitting video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to know about your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey app that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey launching. No, I’m not quitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco video. You’re quitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video. It’s a matter of time. And I totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with you, by the way. It’s petering off. Yeah. I think I’m going to do a couple more because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do enjoy it, but the priority that I was giving it has dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just keep making my videos.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That was before
⏹️ ▶️ John after. Yeah, you’ll be here forever. I put up a new one recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. Oh yeah, I missed it. It wasn’t recommended to me in YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why you’re so into Destiny videos. You feel like it would be the top of your recommendations. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube.com slash Syracusa.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please like and subscribe or something. I think you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Oh yeah, mash that bell. All right. Yeah, I, uh, cause I, I, I have recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come to the conclusion that I hate making video like I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ability to do it. Now I can make video. I just hate making video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and there’s never like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I have a free a few free moments. I always video to me has become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an obligation in my head that I feel like I’m I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not a properly giving this project that I wanted to do the time it needs and so it’s like here’s this giant undone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco task that I’m slacking off on, right? Whereas everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love doing. Like I love writing code, I love making podcasts. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like everything else I’m doing I enjoy, and whereas video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s such a slog for me. And part of that’s just because I’m not that familiar with it and I’m not very good at it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when I do it, it doesn’t make me wanna get better at it. It makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me hate doing it. And like, and there’s all this stuff in my house now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all this stuff in my office to make video and to deal with video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to make better video and I still suck at it and I’m going to still suck at it for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I just never want to spend the time doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, it’s tough because I really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love the recording of this stuff and trying to come up with interesting and different ways
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to record, not to say that I’ve achieved this goal, but that’s my goal. And I enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having access to some cars that I wouldn’t have otherwise had access to. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t love editing. I don’t dislike it, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love it either. Um, and I think that part of the reason I don’t love it is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that I should really, if I had another two to three grand to spend on like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit different equipment, particularly microphones, like just get really tremendously great microphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would maybe be more enthusiastic, but I feel like I’m fighting some equipment problem every single time. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco telling you, I have really great microphones. It doesn’t help,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John well, it helps a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still really hard to get good audio. There’s always something, right? It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either there’s an audio problem or there’s a video problem. There’s always something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And that never ends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if you get good at it, you still have things that just that you know that fail or that you didn’t set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up correctly or whatever else, but like it’s just it’s such an ordeal to make that kind of good video like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve I’ve often thought like one like one possible alternative to what I’m trying to do now is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to become okay with making really shitty video and just like fill everything on my iPhone at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like at holding it up to my face like like doing it on Instagram like you know like what people do on Instagram stories who suck at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like just like iPhone to your face and just make really shitty video and have that be okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I just have a hard time doing that. And also like, and this is this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge concern necessarily because I think it’s predicated on me assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting very popular, but I see what happens to people and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how like their their fans start getting to be a problem in their life if they get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really popular in video. That seems to just not happen to podcasters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t want the kind of life where I worry about about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being recognized at the wrong time by somebody or people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting too obsessed with me and harassing me. And yeah, this is all based on this crazy assumption that I would get that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many fans. But it seems like if you succeed in video, you enter a world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t want to go to and I have no interest in being in. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have succeeded in audio and that simply doesn’t happen here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s just tough. And to recap for those who may not listen analog. First
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all, you should. But second of all, what I what I said on analog was basically as as Marco alluded,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I’m kind of pumping the brakes a little bit on the video stuff. My Tesla video I will release it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely going to be released at some point, but I was hurrying to get it done. And then this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app that that I started as a proof of concept and is ever, ever increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey becoming more real, which I think I talked about on this show, but in case I didn’t, basically, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look through your contacts list and based on email addresses and Gravatar, which is a kind of globally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agreed upon avatar repository, could I update those contacts to have new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey images based on what’s in Gravatar? And I’ve since since that proof of concept, I’ve expanded it and made it quite a bit better and quite a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more versatile. But I started working on that app as as a proof of concept,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I said, and then Mike seemed really genuinely enthusiastic about it. And the more I thought about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, the more I feel like they really might have some legs and I’m not going to retire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this app. In fact, it may not be that much money that I’ll ever make on this app, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I have this gut feeling I can make more than just pennies, more than fast text. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I’m going to try to see this through. And because of that, I’ve really put the Tesla video on pause and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey filming anything else on pause. With
⏹️ ▶️ John that- I’ll give you some suggestions for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco your app. Yeah, absolutely. By the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this app is a great idea. The whole episode that you were talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m like, yes, that’s perfect. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then when Mike came up with the business model, I’m like, yes, of course, that’s perfect. Although, that’s way too little money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the business model you were suggesting is like, have the app be free to download, which it has to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Show people what images it will add to their contacts, let them preview it, and then to apply it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have to pay. I think that’s genius, that is the best possible business model for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at that point, you don’t need to be thinking with App Store Economics where a dollar’s expensive. At that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, I think the minimum you should charge is three dollars. and maybe even four or five, but I’d say three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is your baseline there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And before I solicit feedback from John, one of the things that we kicked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around on the as yet unreleased episode of Analog, which will come out this coming Sunday. One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the things I’d said was, you know, I could see doing like consumable in that purchase. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, you get a thousand updates at a batch and Mike made a really great point, which I think is correct, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, that may be not a terrible idea, but explaining that is going to be real hard. And what happens if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are one contact shy of updating everything and yet you’ve run out of your batch of a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or five hundred or whatever the number may be. So Mike, spoiler alert, Mike has said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, you should really make the subscription because this is the sort of thing you might come back and do periodically. And I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that one way or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other. I would say no on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And so we’ll see what happens. I mean, I’m on step five out of step
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five thousand. So I have a long way to go, but I’m making progress
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. I am pleased with how it’s going so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a really terrible alpha on test flight that I haven’t sent to YouTube because it’s so terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I will do that as soon as I finish talking. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rough. It is really rough, but I feel like it’s like a fixer upper house, which I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never do in a million years. But it’s like the bones feel good, you know? The bones are there. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just gotta refurnish the whole thing and refinish the whole thing. But with that said, John laid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on me, what should I do?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is one of those third-party opportunities because Apple does such a bad job of
⏹️ ▶️ John letting you manage your contact photos. Like I remember they used to import stuff from Facebook way back when before they got rid of that integration.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s why there is an opportunity here. It’s because people do appreciate having nice
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures on their contacts, but very few people wanna go through the hassle that Apple puts you through to do that. And there are so
⏹️ ▶️ John many pitfalls, we talked about them before, but the format, the size, I’m sure we’ve all seen situations
⏹️ ▶️ John where we make a contact photo and adjust the crop and then we go look at it on our phone and the crop is totally
⏹️ ▶️ John different than what we adjusted and it’s showing the whole picture or it’s like off center or it’s recentered it. And like, it’s a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there is definitely an opportunity to have an app that helps with that. Pulling from Gravatar obviously is a good way to go.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what I want from an app like this is yes, that, but also I have
⏹️ ▶️ John my own sort of growing collection of contact images that I keep like sort of off to the side
⏹️ ▶️ John of photos that are not people’s Gravatar’s, but like, oh, I got a good picture of that person. That’s gonna be that person’s contact photo.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I like to have it around somewhere because so the next time I need to set their contact photo or if it gets unsaid
⏹️ ▶️ John or some thing doesn’t sync or whatever, like that I have it around. So I think you need to have, don’t need to, but it’d be really cool if
⏹️ ▶️ John you had a way for you to say, yes, pull from Gravatar if you’ve got nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John else, but I also have my own personal collection, probably pulled from my photos or whatever, of contact photos that I
⏹️ ▶️ John can apply and that it remembers my crops and that this application deals with all the inane stuff that will inevitably
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly change about what the hell does it take to get this photo correctly scaled and sized into
⏹️ ▶️ John this contact so that it appears everywhere on Apple devices. Like that’s the value your app is bringing. Your app will
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with this crap. So users are just like, I’ll take Gravatar for that one, I’m gonna leave that one blank, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna take my personal photos for these ones and be able to sort of manage their contact photos in the way
⏹️ ▶️ John that they want. Because I know I wouldn’t take this thing and just run it and let it put gravdars down because I have a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of custom contact images that I’ve like hand selected, right? So that’s where I would like to see
⏹️ ▶️ John the app go. Especially if you can charge a lot more for that type of thing. It’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John value proposition is fix a thing that Apple doesn’t do well. And the people who are most interested in paying money for
⏹️ ▶️ John it are people like me who care a lot about their contact photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I completely agree. And the way that this is handled right now is basically as it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey churning and trying to download from Gravatar, and it also looks at some other sources too, but as it’s churning and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking for all of these pictures, it is basically populating a table view. And when all the churning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is done, it just pre-selects everything and checks everything, but gives you the opportunity to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through and say, oh, I have my special picture for Aaron, you have your special picture for Tina, Marco has a special
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picture for Tiff, don’t update those.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have special pictures for all of you, what are you talking about? I have special pictures for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that case, maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t want this app. Yeah, exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But I do, because you know how hard it is for me to get those pictures and I have to keep a little folder in my Dropbox filled with contact
⏹️ ▶️ John photos and remember what the crops were when the sync fails and stuff. And every time I see one that has no
⏹️ ▶️ John picture or it’s an old picture, just the thought of what the hassle would be to fix that. If I could just launch an app and just
⏹️ ▶️ John see all my photos and my currently set ones and here’s what you have set now, here’s the option from Gravatar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you want to adjust the crop on either one of these? Do you want to mess with it? Do you want, like, I would launch that app, but right now instead
⏹️ ▶️ John I just go, I really should get a new photo for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s old. There are, that one doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a photo, but I don’t know where I’m going to find one, you know, like I, it’s, it’s so daunting that I don’t do it. I only do
⏹️ ▶️ John it for like my top 10 or 15 contacts, but I would do it for all of them if I could.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And what was really funny is as I was developing, well, I am developing this. I realized that I don’t even have a picture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Marco in here. It’s not from lack of caring. I just never bothered because it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying. I’ve got some great Marco pictures. I’ll trade
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. My current avatar is, is a Syracuse picture. Yeah. I think my gravatar is ancient. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like 10, 15 years old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey teenager. I think that’s actually the one. Yeah, I think that’s the one I have for you
⏹️ ▶️ John well. Don’t look like that anymore. I don’t have that hairline anymore. None of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. But anyway, but I do feel like this thing has legs and does it have feet? Would you say it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has feet? Oh God, I hate you two so much. I hate you two so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the point of- Fast Contacts, coming soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John From the Fast franchise. From the Fast franchise. Too fast to contacts. haven’t.