382: Static Ad Removal
12 Jun 2020Reactions to last week’s show, the latest ARM rumblings, and the technical road to our new membership program.
Episode Description:
- Reactions to last week’s show
- Follow-up:
- Race/racism book list
- On writing into web forms
- On Casey’s SMB issues
- Home.app scenes rather than automations, via Hugo Jobling
- Daniel Jalkut corrects us about powerbox
- Android Live Captions 1 2 (via David D’Arcy)
- Donate to Black causes
- ATP MEMBERSHIP IS LIVE!!
Please consider joining, but we’re still cool if you don’t. 💙 - ARM Macs are coming! For real this time!
- Post-show: Membership Pricing Tiers that Never Were
Sponsored by:
- Notion: Stay on task, find what you need, and collaborate efficiently, all in one place. Get 10% off a team plan.
Chapters
- Intro
- Follow-up: Black Lives Matter
- School testing software
- Justin Frankel’s portfolio
- Follow-up: SMB
- Follow-up: Open/Save dialogs
- Follow-up: Live Caption
- Equal Justice Initiative
- Black Lives Matter
- Black Girls Code
- ATP Membership
- Membership tech
- Sponsor: Notion
- ARM Macs finally happening?
- Ending theme
- After-show
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, let’s do this thing. Nothing like fixing a critical bug,
⏹️ ▶️ John not 60 seconds before we go on the air. I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that five seconds ago. I just saw that. That was great diagnostics from the both of you. I’m very impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, I’m very annoyed right now because the headphones I’m using, the left driver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started rattling today. It’s only resonating with certain low frequencies. So, like, when Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talks, I hear a little rattle in my left ear. But when I talk or when John talks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually don’t. But when Casey gets nice and deep, really close up, then I’m like, oh, God. Hey, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How’s it going? So try to avoid your sexy radio voice this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll just be sure to do it like this for the whole show. How’s that sound?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What could possibly go wrong? That’d be perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What could go wrong?
Follow-up: Black Lives Matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am incredibly pleasantly surprised with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it’s the quality of our audience. So last week we began the show with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty big segment about Black Lives Matter and racism and police
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and privilege and all the issues that are going on right now and have been going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while. I thought we were taking a risk. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got hundreds of responses. I mean, we must’ve heard from 500 people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of that number, I think three were even slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argumentative. Like, I wouldn’t even necessarily classify them as negative. Like, they were just like slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argumentative and all the rest were universally positive. And so I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both shows that our audience is awesome but also this gives me hope for just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the public in general that I think it shouldn’t be risky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say Black Lives Matter, and to say that we have a racism problem in this country, and to say that we have a police
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brutality problem. Like that shouldn’t be a risky thing to say, but it is, and it has been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think now it’s not. Now I think it has reached a critical mass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of public realization and public acceptance, that like, oh yeah, this is actually a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really big problem. And it’s not risky to talk about it. It’s not risky to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh yeah, we really have this problem. Like, no, it’s a real thing. And that, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a weird way, gives me hope that we’re making some progress on these issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know we have a long way to go, and it’s not gonna be fast progress, but it’s not risky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to talk about this anymore, and that’s a really good first step.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I was braced for impact, because whenever you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put anything on the internet and you have more than 10 people that look at it, you’re going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obnoxious feedback. It’s part of the contract. There’s also a contract of the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give you some idea, like this might, like saying Black Lives Matter so emphatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around all that discussion of privilege and everything last week, I thought, again, I thought this was gonna generate some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controversy among the audience. Things that have generated more controversy than this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be things like if we said like the sky is blue, or if we said, you know, Apple’s doing pretty well these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, like anything we could possibly say generates way more argument
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and way more negativity than that did. And so, again, like, I think that’s amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m really pleased with that ratio of positivity that we got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Connelly Yeah, I’m very excited about it, and I wanted to just one quick moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank the both of you guys, especially for speaking so eloquently about it, and for our listeners for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking the time to listen to it as well. And actually, our first bit of follow-up relates to that. John, can you tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why we need to recount this other than that it’s a good idea to revisit this periodically?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m inlining for performance purposes. We had a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bunch of links
⏹️ ▶️ John in the last episode about the resources so you could go to learn more and do more and stuff like that. And people
⏹️ ▶️ John were very nice in recommending things to add to the list. In particular, a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John were recommending books. What we had linked was a page that itself linked like 16
⏹️ ▶️ John different books. So most of the recommendations for books that we got were actually books that were already on that page. So I just wanted to surface
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And so we’re not going to have a million notes this week. I just wanted to pick out like the three or four
⏹️ ▶️ John handful of books that were most recommended. They will be in line in the show notes this week and not buried, won’t link away
⏹️ ▶️ John under a page. So check it out if reading is your thing and you want to learn more about these issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I plan on reading at least one, maybe two of these. There’s another book I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to read this summer, but I have a couple of these on my reading list now. If I have time, I hopefully we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to add many, many more and I’m really looking forward to that.
School testing software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you were making fun of me last week about doing some edits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside of a web form, and Martin Bre has some thoughts about that. Martin writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regarding John’s last remark about never editing in a text field on a web page, I’ve also been in the same camp and trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to spread the message. I did that no later than yesterday with my brother, who’s currently taking his exams, which are occurring online due to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey COVID-19 measures. In this particular case, that was disastrously bad advice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He quickly learned about the school’s anti-cheat features. some of the questions they simply blocked pasting text.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And on others, they apparently check the speed at which text is entered, and if that’s too fast, it gets cleared, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I assume you also might get flagged as a potential cheater. I should have anticipated this, but I didn’t, and it made my brother lose a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of time. See, I was right all along.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I think this is one of the ways, like, schools, when I went through school,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and again, disclaimer, I’m a terrible student, etc., but when I went through school, when I stumbled through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco school. We didn’t have much technology in the school. Like, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graduated from high school in 2000, from college in 2004, and that was, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never even saw anybody use a laptop in a classroom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even college? No. Really? That happened, like, right after I graduated. Like, it was when that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole wave came in. When I got to college, most people came with a desktop computer, a cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC desktop computer. Only a few, usually the rich kids, had laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’d occasionally see them with it like in the library, but they you would never see anybody in the classroom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using a laptop and and that seemed to start literally like right after I graduated like in like to that like I graduated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2004 and it seemed like around 2005 is when everybody had laptops in classrooms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I never saw one and you know I never took a test on a computer I never like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to I would have loved that at the time I was dying to use computers for anything but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know we only had them for like computer science class and that’s about it. And so I missed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this entire wave of classroom technology that is now ubiquitous. I’ve never seen a smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco board. I don’t have a great idea of even what it is. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Oh, they’re so nice. You’ve missed out on so much. And we’re the same age. In fact, actually, that reminds me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy birthday to you because your birthday is tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so we are effectively the same age, you and I. And I didn’t get to use a smart board until my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second real job, but they were amazing at the time. Smart boards were, imagine like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those mobile whiteboards that you would perhaps see in like school or whatever. But instead of being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a traditional whiteboard, if I remember right, it was a, or maybe it was a whiteboard, I don’t remember, it’s been so darn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long. But anyways, it was something like a screen projected on the whiteboard or the whiteboard itself was a screen or something like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so the point is, it was digitizing everything you were doing. So you could draw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using this like fake marker, and then you could select what you’ve drawn and move it around. And as someone who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loves doing whiteboard diagrams and things of that nature, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really convenient because not only could you move the stuff around when you realized, oh, I got to shimmy something in between these two boxes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also you could just easily make a PDF and send it to your coworkers or whatever. Smartboards are super cool. I never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had that opportunity in college, but they were great in the real world. Sorry, I totally interrupted, but happy birthday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, I mean, I interrupted you. That’s my job on the show, I guess. I’ve never even, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think in all of college, and like, I think I had one professor who gave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco presentations as PowerPoints. Like, I’ve never had that either. Like, I, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seemed like the old school way of doing school ended right as I left.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now everyone’s on PowerPoints, using smart boards, or things like that, using digital test taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on computers. That’s all new to me. And so, So if you look at the quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of software on average, up near the top you have most consumer level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff made by good companies like Apple, who are pretty decent at it. That’s nice, usable, thoughtful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software. And geez, even Apple has their problems in that area a lot recently, but believe me, it’s way better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of things. Then a little step down from that, you have the general world of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC hardware. Well, sometimes it’s okay, sometimes it’s all right. It’s not to the best standards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still like generally kind of usable. Then kind of like down a bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have like specialty software for like certain industries, like my dentist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software. And that’s, it’s getting a little bit hard to use, a little bit crappy, a little bit, you know, hostile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you take a huge step down and you have enterprise software. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a disaster. It’s impossible to use. It’s terrible. It’s user hostile. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terribly designed. And then even another giant step below that, you have what is usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco education software. Like the incentives and the factors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the costs and benefits and everything are not set up at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for enterprise software and especially for education software, which is like enterprise software but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with even less money. It’s not set up at all for that to be usable or friendly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or well designed or even remotely well maintained because schools have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very special needs and usually no money. And so it’s like, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar enterprise software where you’re making a deal with a whole district or a whole government where you have to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re dealing with huge committees and budgets and the public and politics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all sorts of other stuff. So I can’t even imagine how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hostile a lot of the software must be in education these days. I mean, we only see, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like scratch the surface with just whatever we have to use, because my kids in school, as the parent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco portals of various things, which are always terrible. And that’s the bare minimum. I can’t even imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it’s like to be a student in this stuff these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember, I’ve told pieces of this story on the show before, so forgive me, but when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was in college, I went to school with a home-built tower monstrosity,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco time was not unusual.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A full tower, too, not even a mid-tower. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Because the full tower had more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive bays. Yep, and I believe I had two CD, like I had a CD-ROM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive that was super fast for reads, then I had a CD-RW drive that was not that fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for reads, but then what you could do is you could duplicate CDs without having to like cache it on the hard drive for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little while, you could do a straight rip from one to the other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you could, but like, you know, that was a risk because you, like, the buff for under-rim protection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the writers was never that great. Like, I mean, you gotta whip out your Nero burning ROM game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like, you know, rip it to an ISO first, and then use Nero, you know, to burn with like all the protection,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to copy all the games with all their stupid protection discs and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, this is a walk right down memory lane. But anyways, but I think I had what was it wasn’t a zip?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was it a jazz drive? That was like a zip drive, but higher capacity? Is that what I’m thinking of?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was one gig instead of 100 megs. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had one of those, which I loved at the time, even though I barely ever used it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after a couple of years, I think it was my junior or maybe senior years, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got myself a ThinkPad, which was in no small part because dad worked for IBM at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I remember I thought I was hot stuff, and this is the part I’ve told on the show before, because this ThinkPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was one of the first that you could add a daughter card internal to the ThinkPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It had a little door that you could unscrew and open, and you could put a Cisco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 802.11b wireless card within the computer. And so I had a wireless connection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the 10 buildings on campus that were set up for wireless. But I had a wireless connection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without one of those PCMCIA dongles hanging out the outside. You remember that, where you had that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey antenna hanging out the outside of the machine? This is around the same era as if you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really cool, you would have one of those, not like slot loaded, like one of those spring-ejected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet or modem jacks, you know what I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those things, I’m shocked those didn’t immediately break on every use. Agreed, completely agreed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it’s called an X-Jack, if I remember correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, you might be right, I don’t even remember. But anyways, I bring all this up because one of my,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, you are right, look at that, very deep, good poll there, Marco, I’m impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I write a lot of computer magazines and a lot of ads for these things. What about? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey never actually owned one.
Justin Frankel’s portfolio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of my favorite memories of school, which is probably indicative of how poorly I did in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey school, was when we were in a class, it was myself and a couple of friends, and we all had laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we were using Waste. And nobody remembers this, but this is Justin Frankel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who did Winamp. When he was at AOL, he put together a peer-to-peer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chat app that was all super encrypted at the time. Maybe it was easy to break, who knows? But at the time, it was super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encrypted and you could make a chat room and then have person-to-person chats. And this is when AOL instant messenger was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very much a thing. But we were like, no way, man, the school might find out that we’re chatting during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey class if we use AOL. So we got to use like this super encrypted waste thing. And it was so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupid, but I was a stupid kid. So what are you gonna do? But I remember doing that with a couple of friends during class
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was extremely enjoyable having like a back channel as we were supposed to be listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though we really weren’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love Justin Frank. I was like, yeah, he was like, I made Winamp AOL bought Winamp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the late 90s or early 2000s because they wanted relevance and they didn’t know what to do and they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old people and they had more money than sense and had no idea what they were doing and MP3s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemed like a new thing that they could take hold of and maybe do something with so they bought Winamp. And meanwhile, Justin Frankel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the developer, or at least one of the developers, was one of the most radical activist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anti-establishment developers of the era and he just kept making and releasing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just totally undermined AOL. I don’t know what his deal was, like how he didn’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get fired. I don’t know. Whatever the contract he had with them was, was amazing because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he was able to just release stuff that just constantly poked them so hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and somehow get away with it. And he just, he seemed to not care at all, which I just, I love so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I completely agree. Whatever happened to him recently, what has he been up to? I don’t know. I hope you’re not some horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person. Oh, who knows. Doesn’t ATP’s livestream eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boil down to Shoutcast, or is that not correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sort of. Yeah, so we hosted this livestream on an open source app called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Icecast, which is basically the successor to Shoutcast. Shoutcast was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streaming server protocol for MP3s, basically, that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty sure Justin Frankel, or at least the Winamp team initially developed, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then Icecast kind of evolved out of that. I think it has replaced it and it’s better in a few ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the basic idea is the same. Like, it’s one of the many things that I love about MP3 is that, like, the broadcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protocol is amazingly low tech. You just like, I run an app on my computer, Audio Hijack,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that streams the MP3 bytes that we’re recording here to the server, and the server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just repeats it back to anybody who listens. And the protocol is super simple. It’s like, it’s basic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, text to connect, and then it shoves binary at you. That’s just the MP3. And MP3 decoders are super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple. They just look ahead until the C11 ones in a row and start decoding there. And it just works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s amazing. Like it’s really, like it’s so, this is one of the reasons I love working with MP3 so much. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, in many ways, it’s so low tech that it makes it very easy and powerful to work with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s right. Somebody in the chat put a link to Kakos. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s his current company. And I’d forgotten that my favorite software to make animated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GIFs of screen recordings. What is it called now? I can’t remember, shoot. Oh gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s gonna drive me nuts. Click it, that’s what I use. Licecap, there you go. It’s like the simplest,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ugliest, like clearly cross-platform, but does the job well screen recording software. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, that was done by Justin Frankel and Kakos, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know how you pronounce it, but anyways, it was done sometime after he left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is what I was forgetting. I knew he made something that really put AOL on the side. He made the Nutella file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharing network. That’s what he, as he was working for AOL, I’m pretty sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was a major media conglomerate that owned a lot of like, you know, music and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man. Yeah, so, oh man, he’s the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, what were we talking about? I don’t even know. Oh, writing into web forms. The moral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of the story is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Don’t write on web forms, kids, unless you’re in school, in which case your software probably sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t try to paste into web forms because they’ll think you’re cheating. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my son had to take an online,
⏹️ ▶️ John an AP test online and it had similar measures. That was the same test where there was that story where people were,
⏹️ ▶️ John at some point in the test, apparently students are instructed to do something on a piece of paper and then take a picture of it with their phone or
⏹️ ▶️ John something or upload a picture of it. I don’t know. Anyway, that’s what they were doing. And a bunch of kids took pictures of
⏹️ ▶️ John their iPhone and then tried to upload it, but the iPhone was taking Heek pictures instead of JPEGs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they tried to upload the Heek to the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey website, it crashed because
⏹️ ▶️ John it couldn’t process them and then everyone was flipping out and it’s under a time limit or whatever. My son avoided
⏹️ ▶️ John that by dumb luck because the way I had him doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the pictures because he doesn’t know how to use computers. So I said, look, just take the picture on your phone and then just keep photos open in the background
⏹️ ▶️ John and just wait a couple seconds and you should see the photo you just took on your phone appear in your
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos app because you’ve got the photo stream thing going and then drag it out of the Photos app onto the desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the only place that he knows exists like most people. And when you drag it out of Photos onto the desktop but turns
⏹️ ▶️ John it into a JPEG. And so he was uploading JPEGs and not heaks, even though his phone was taking pictures. Anyway, hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John with all of the COVID stuff, everybody’s online test stuff will get better. And the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to prevent you from pasting into the form, like some password fields do that too, which is horrendous because defeats
⏹️ ▶️ John password managers many times, but I know what they’re trying to do, but it’s punishing people
⏹️ ▶️ John for essentially bad, for good habits, because if you are under time pressure to
⏹️ ▶️ John write something substantial into a text field as part of a test, it does make sense
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it someplace else where you know it’s secure and then only put it into the webpage when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John ready. But of course, the software interprets that as, oh, you must be cheating because you’re copying and pasting it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose if you just edit the node in the DOM and stick the text in, it probably
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey won’t know. But again, they
⏹️ ▶️ John might accuse you of cheating and it’s all just very fraught. So I feel like this is a cultural issue more
⏹️ ▶️ John than a technological one that eventually, once kids become accustomed to taking these kinds tests online
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll learn all the things that you’re supposed to do and not supposed to do and I guess the the backup
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanism is every once in a while copy and paste it out of the web text field into a text file so that if the web
⏹️ ▶️ John page does crash you’ll still have the text.
⏹️ ▶️ John online test, think. Boom.
Follow-up: SMB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when I got angry last week about my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Samba SMB woes, I was expecting to be the only one. And if you recall, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is when I haven’t used my computer in a little while. I go to Reach, like my Synology, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I see a message in Finder. The operation can’t be completed because the original item for whatever can’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found. And the only way I knew how to fix it was to do a kill all Finder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then try the same thing again. and it would always work pretty much immediately. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a lot of varied feedback about this, including from John actually after the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the two most important things I think I can share confidently right now is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that first of all, you can go to the Go menu in Finder and then connect to server,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is also done by Command K. Should I mess with John and say K Command, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to really tick John off? Anyway, you can use Command K to go to this menu and then you can reconnect that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And supposedly, I haven’t actually had to try this and I’ll explain why in a moment, but supposedly that’ll let you reconnect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without having to kill Finder, which is excellent. And then John, amongst others, had suggested, well, how are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you getting to the Synology? And to answer that question, what I was doing is I was looking at locations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the sidebar of Finder and I see disk station, which is the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology calls itself. I see that in the sidebar and I would just click that and drill into the particular folder I wanted and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was that. But John, you had recommended one of several different ways to get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Synology has like its own dynamic DNS system where you can get yourself like a internet visible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey host name, even if you’re, you know, NATed and so on and so forth and I could choose that. But it also occurred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that since I’m running the Pi-Hole, I have set up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco and it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy. It’s the best, isn’t it? Since I have set up Pi-Hole version 5,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then one of the things that allows you to do is very easily using the web interface, set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up DNS responses for your local network, really, but just basically custom DNS responses. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, iMac Pro, I have effectively hardwired, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will, to refer to my 192.168 address for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my iMac Pro, which is statically assigned via the ERO. And so what I’ve done One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, instead of connecting using the sidebar in the Finder, I’ve connected to SYN,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what I have as a shortcut to the Synology’s static IP address within my network. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far, after nearly a week, I have not had a problem with doing that. So it appears that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something, I guess, with Bonjour, or something about using the locations thing in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sidebar is what’s hosing this all up. And so if you have any other mechanism by getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your device, do it by IP address, it by a fully qualified domain name, whatever the case may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be, you might find that that will fix your problem like it did for me. Also, there’s a very interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hacker News post, which is not something I say often about all this, which I’ll link in the show notes. Even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that didn’t actually get me to my solution, it was more what John said to me, amongst others, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you might want to check it out because apparently this is a longstanding bug and not actually a Catalina thing after all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the suggestion that a couple of people had was to do something related IPv6
⏹️ ▶️ John now I forget what it was they’re telling you to like disable IPv6.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember I didn’t have to fiddle with it though
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the the hacker news thing it talks about DNS lookup and like at the MDNS
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff It’s not like regular DNS and that it gets broadcast periodically But and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a TTL on the value, but if the TTL expires say because your computer was asleep Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t go request it again You just have to wait for the next broadcast and during that time your computer has no idea how to connect to it
⏹️ ▶️ John all all make some amount of sense. But yeah, my suggestion was just to do what I did and cut
⏹️ ▶️ John all of that zero conf bonjour rendezvous stuff out of the loop and just use
⏹️ ▶️ John IP addresses or names that you statically mapped to IP addresses. So there you go, problem solved.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think so. Actually, I was really surprised because I didn’t think I was going to get any useful feedback, not because our listeners aren’t awesome, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I thought it was some really weird esoteric thing. Turns out not so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of feedback from From me to me, or to me from me, I don’t know, anyway. Last week I had also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of off the cuff lamented about my TV turning itself off and I wasn’t 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accurate on what I had said the problem was. And Hugo Jobling had pointed out to me via Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m glad that you did, that the issue isn’t, I think I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said it was automations and that wasn’t strictly true. The issue is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the TV was added to my good night scene. I believe I had called it an automation last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Hugo had pointed out that when he was adding his OLED TV to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his home, one of the screens that I guess I just plowed right through and didn’t look at, when if so, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on me, one of the screens he has is suggested scenes. And it says,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey select scenes to include this accessory in. You can customize these scenes later in the Home app. And sure enough, there’s good night
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it says turn off. And I don’t recall having seen this, but I bet you anything that I just plowed right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through it and you know, next, next, next, next, next, next, whatever, whatever, whatever, and wasn’t paying close attention, so it’s all my fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll put a link that Hugo, a link to a picture that Hugo had provided to give you a better view of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m talking about. But I thought that was useful feedback to clarify what I was talking about earlier. And actually somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of people reached out via Twitter and said, oh yeah, that happened to me, and I never understood why, and now I do. So I’m glad I brought
Follow-up: Open/Save dialogs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s see, Daniel Jalkut is telling us about PowerBox. John, what’s going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Minor corrections from last week. PowerBox is the thing that for security reasons presents the open and save
⏹️ ▶️ John panel rather than your application doing it. A couple of notes from Daniel.
⏹️ ▶️ John One is that PowerBox is now always used for open and save panels. Gus Mueller says it
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be that it was only used for sandbox apps, but in Catalina or maybe Mojave, it was changed to be used
⏹️ ▶️ John for all apps. So that could actually explain some of the slowness, because before maybe an app wasn’t using
⏹️ ▶️ John PowerBox, but now it was. And the second is, Daniel says, he thinks that the app actually owns
⏹️ ▶️ John the window, but not the content. So your app may actually control that window, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you only get a small region where you’re allowed to draw into it, and through XPC, the PowerBox draws into the
⏹️ ▶️ John main content of it. And apps are allowed to add their own sort of accessory views, so it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you own the window, and your app gets to draw on some small portion, but PowerBox draws in the other portion, and PowerBox
⏹️ ▶️ John is the thing that actually gives you access to the file and tells you what the result of the thing was. So it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated and it’s not surprising that something like that could potentially go over and go wrong or have
⏹️ ▶️ John some performance difficulties again related to security checks and other things that may be slow
⏹️ ▶️ John especially the first time you try them. So security is complicated. It’s a lot easier back in the day when everything
⏹️ ▶️ John was all in one giant memory space and you just open put up an open save dialog box and you could literally not do anything else in the
⏹️ ▶️ John computer until you dismissed it.
Follow-up: Live Caption
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally for follow-up, David Darcy writes and shows us some videos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about something absolutely fascinating that I had no idea was a thing. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand this right, on an Android phone, there’s a accessibility mode called live caption.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so David sent us a video of the Android phone playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our show and doing speech-to-text captioning live as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s playing it in his podcast app. at least that’s how I understood it. And this looks really freaking cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I thought it was cool. Like, I mean, it’s another type of Android thing. You see much more of this in Android. There’s no reason that iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do it, but in general, Apple has shied away from allowing
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of the UI, parts of the system that are not the app you’re currently in from overlaying the app that you’re in. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John notifications can come down from the top and there’s other things that can appear and the status bar can change color. And like, there
⏹️ ▶️ John are obviously ways that the operating system can intrude into the space of an app, but not really to this degree. So this was like
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably the operating system, Android, putting a very large overlay on top of the podcast player,
⏹️ ▶️ John showing the captions, right? And you might be mistaken for thinking like, oh, that’s a feature of the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John app, but my understanding of watching this video is that it’s not. It is a feature of the operating system. At any time audio is playing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can have this translucent overlay with the things being transcribed in it, which is pretty cool if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got a very fast on-device speech-to-text engine, that’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ John use of it. Was this person, did they also give the video showing the voice control of Android
⏹️ ▶️ John or was that somebody else? I wish I could remember that tweet.
⏹️ ▶️ John showing how to speak to your Android phone to make it do stuff. Not like
⏹️ ▶️ John you speak to Siri, like, you know, hey dingus, open
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and whatever or remind me to do this with that or whatever. But like using it as
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a verbal pointer, right? So you could tell it to go to the home screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John to open an application. And when it opened that app, all the controls on the screen would
⏹️ ▶️ John have tiny little numbers in circles next to them. So you would tell it to
⏹️ ▶️ John hit button number one, number five, confirm, OK. It was kind of like speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John very much like the interface that the Mac has. You remember that demo where they showed the screen was cut into regions
⏹️ ▶️ John and controls had numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on them, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you could essentially navigate the screen with speech, only this was on a phone. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure what Apple’s interface to that looks like these days, because this interface does require
⏹️ ▶️ John you to see the screen, so it’s not for people who can’t see the screen well. You mean these numbers are very
⏹️ ▶️ John small. So you have to have good vision, but just not the ability to, or the motor control to
⏹️ ▶️ John use the touch interface. Anyway, I think all this stuff is especially interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ John including in the context of RSI. I don’t know if anyone is getting RSI from their phones, but I can
⏹️ ▶️ John assure you that that is actually a thing. Somewhere out there is somebody who’s been swiping too much with their thumb, and it feels a little
⏹️ ▶️ John stiff, and they’re trying not to think about it, and they should.
Equal Justice Initiative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We did want to take a moment to call out three different organizations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we think are probably worth your investment, interest, time, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And just if you happen to have any money that you can throw their way, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think the three of us all believe that these are worthwhile causes and they’re worth checking out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we wanted to take just a brief moment and highlight three of them. First of all, the Equal Justice Initiative, which is committed to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ending – and I’m these mostly from their websites, but I’ve heard from various people that these are all pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United
⏹️ ▶️ Casey States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in American society.
Black Lives Matter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Secondly, the Black Lives Matter organization is a global organization in the U.S., U.K.,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Canada whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on black communities by the state and vigilantes. By combating and counteracting acts of violence, creating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space for black imagination and innovation, and centering black joy, we are winning—well, not we, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are winning—immediate improvements in our lives. We, if you donate, which is excellent.
Black Girls Code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, Black Lives Code is one of the organizations that the, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now defunct App Camp for Girls has decided to sponsor, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey elevate. And I know the App Camp people, and they’re all really great. So Black Girls Code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is devoted to showing the world that black girls can code and do so much more. By reaching out to the community through workshops and after school programs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Black Girls Code introduces computer coding lessons to young girls from underrepresented communities in programming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey languages such as Scratch or Ruby on Rails. If you happen to have a few extra bucks to throw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of the three organizations that we’ve just called out, I think that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be really excellent and certainly the three of us would appreciate it. But we just wanted to call that out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what our agenda is for talking about these sort of social issues and stuff in the future,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but expect that as with last week, we’ll talk about it here and there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then we won’t. And then we will. And then we won’t. And we’ll just do what we think is best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We had some sponsorship openings this week and we figured, you know, what better thing to do with them than to try to promote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of these great causes.
ATP Membership
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco it’s your birthday tomorrow. Are there any birthday presents you would like by chance? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t know my wife’s making me some delicious fruit tarts And I’m gonna have some beer that I like and I think that’ll be a good day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That sounds like a good day Additionally if you want to get me an extra birthday present after you’ve already given to the good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Causes that are way better than this because they need it way more than we do We are going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch a membership program as of right now So if you go to ATP that FM join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can join as a member right now We’ve been doing this show for seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years so far, something like that, a little over seven years. And we are not gonna stop anytime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon. We all love doing this show, and as long as all of you out there keep listening, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna keep making this show. And the format and style of this show were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco established really fast. Within the first few episodes, we pretty much established the format that we’ve really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used almost unchanged for seven years. We have the cold open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pre-show, We have the dial-up sound, follow-up, main topics, Ask ATP if we have it that week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ending theme, and the after show. All right, it’s a very simple formula. We’ve been doing it for a very long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yet you two still can’t follow it, can you? No. No. No. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And part of the formula is not following the formula. It’s OK. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we also, very early on, established the business model of the show. And it hasn’t changed, really, in the entire seven years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The show is free. It’s available everywhere. It’s not exclusive to anybody. And it’s funded, as so many podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, by sponsorships. We read an ad read three times per episode, roughly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Each read is about two minutes long, so you get about six minutes of ads in our show that is usually almost two hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long. And I think that’s one of the best content-to-ads ratios of anything I listen to that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads. And this all has worked very well and continues to work very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for seven years, and will continue well into the future, we hope. And unless the sponsorship changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot, And if people stop buying podcast ads, other than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something dramatic like that, we have no intention of changing any of these basics for the foreseeable future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you all will forgive me for a moment of a total lack of modesty,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we make a great show. We might make the best tech podcast in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world. You will never hear me say this any other time because it’s really hard for me to say this without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freaking out about the lack of modesty here. But we take a lot of pride in what we do here. We put a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of work into it, and I think we’re good at it, and I’m damn proud of it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s get back to the money part for a minute. We already make good money from this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show. None of us are hurting financially. The vast majority of that money,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, only comes from one source. It comes from those ads. Now, we did just finish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a merchandise sale, which we do a couple times a year. Merchandise is kind of a fun side project. It doesn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much money to us that’s so expensive to produce physical items and ship them around the world and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We make a few bucks off of each thing but it’s more for you know kind of fun stuff to give our fans something cool to wear if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to and you know make some side income from the show. But the vast majority of the money comes from those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six minutes of ads that you hear in each episode. Our ads usually sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well because we have a really good audience for selling ads. You know you all out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have a pretty good idea that like you’re probably mostly a bunch of nerds like us and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we you know we can sell you things like hosting companies and domain registration and things like that and it’s it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that hard to sell ads to our audience right and that’s why you hear so many the same companies advertising over and over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again because our ads work well for them and and it’s great for us we like them too because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re good companies selling good stuff and you know we can get paid good money but also sleep at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night knowing that we’re not like annoying people or or ripping you off or making a bad show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But podcast ads are a bit tricky as a business model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are mostly good, but over time, they do take an increasingly higher amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of work to sell and to get paid for, as a lot of that ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying has shifted. It used to be that the companies who bought the ads would come directly to us and deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us, and we would send them an invoice and they would pay it and whatever. Increasingly, many of the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advertisers that you hear on most shows are buying through ad agencies. And the ad agencies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are also consolidating and getting bigger and getting acquired and everything. And so when you’re dealing with ad agencies, it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adds more work to the process. It adds more cost all around. We can’t always sell every slot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We can’t always sell the ads at the prices that we want. We often don’t get paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for months. And sometimes we don’t get paid for a sponsor at all. Like if they go out of business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they go bankrupt, or they just don’t wanna pay anybody ever again. Like that, we do get stiffed on an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasional basis. And the ad market is also volatile. You know, it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the real estate market. You know, real estate are like, oh, it’s always gonna go up. You know, people always assume the ad market will do well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it usually does until it doesn’t. And whenever there’s a big like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco economic disturbance like there was with the quarantine, everybody cuts back on their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad spending immediately. And it’s really hard to sell additional ads. It’s also really hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every January or February or August or the fifth week in a five-week month. Like that’s just, podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads have ups and downs and you’re very much tied to the economy or like these random calendar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things about budgeting. So in this quarantine period, we’ve had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was terrible for podcast ad sales. Some shows were hit worse than others. We were hit pretty bad. That’s why you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard so many episodes recently that have had only like one or two sponsors, including this one, instead of the usual three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsors that we have. Now, I don’t want to paint a picture that we’re like dying here. The rest of the summer is looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot better for the ad sales, and again, we make good money, and we’ll be fine no matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you do. But this was a wake-up call to us that we wanted some diversification.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we don’t want this entire show that we love so much to be dependent on the whims
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the ad market. When we have this perfectly good audience, you all sitting out there right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of whom have told us that you’d be happy to support us directly if such an option became available. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are now launching a membership program. We don’t expect this to replace the ads anytime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon, or probably ever. I honestly, I think we’d be shocked if we got more than a few percent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the audience to sign up for it. And we also don’t want to take anything away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what this show has always been for everyone. So, we don’t want to take any existing part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the show and put it behind a paywall or anything like that. You know, and maybe in the future, if ad sales totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tank and we have to make a bigger push for membership, maybe we’ll have to do stuff like that, but that probably won’t happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want to support us by becoming a member, we have one plan, which we’ll talk to in a minute. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight bucks a month for that. You get your own private RSS feed and you get a sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free version of the show and you can put that feed in whatever podcast app you want. We made a nice slick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration, heavily inspired by Stratechery and Dithering. Thanks guys. Made a nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, you know, slick, you know, thing that you can just do it like with a couple of clicks on most apps. I went back the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four episodes, have sponsor-free versions in those feeds, and then all future episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ongoing will have sponsor-free versions. And for now, that’s it. You have the ad-free version of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show, eight bucks a month. And I gotta say, I subscribe to a few Patreons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for ad-free podcasts, and I love it. It’s a completely unnecessary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco luxury. As I said, we have six minutes of ads a week, but it’s a luxury. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most luxuries, it’s kinda nice if you can afford it and if you care about that kind of thing. We hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to add more stuff later. Uh, maybe some occasional member exclusive bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content that wouldn’t fit or make sense to be a part of this regular show. And we’d also love to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your ideas on what else you would like to see as member benefits. But for the most part, what we’re selling is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supporting us and you get a sponsor free feed of the show. Same show, just without sponsors. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to spend eight bucks a month for that, that’s great. If you don’t want to spend eight bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month for that, that’s totally fine too. Simply by listening to our show and hearing the ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the regular version, that supports us perfectly well. So we thank you for that, that’s enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want to support us differently by becoming a member for eight bucks a month, we’d be very thankful for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there it is, thank you for that. We have a lot more we can talk about actually, but like, you know, the implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this, some of the decision-making and why, the stack and everything. I think we should
⏹️ ▶️ John dig into that. We can start by saying that, you know, I’ve already seen suggestions go by in
⏹️ ▶️ John the chat. As you might imagine, when we discussed this amongst the three of us, we had
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of ideas. Like we entertained almost everything. I’m not sure which ones we want to discuss that we entertained.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a couple of them you might be amused by, but we’re starting intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John very simple, right? And we don’t know how this is gonna go, right? You know, there’s one price, there’s one offering,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an ad-free show, like it’s straightforward, It’s easy to understand. We’re not taking anything away from anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing is moving behind a pay wall. Like, if you don’t pay, you get exactly the same show you’ve always gotten. But we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John entertained all possibilities. And so I think it’s important to recognize that we are intentionally starting
⏹️ ▶️ John simple. And we’re just gonna learn from how it goes. If nobody signs up, then maybe we’ve made the wrong offering,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so we’ll figure it out from here. But hopefully,
⏹️ ▶️ John what we’re providing is easy to understand, straightforward, and something that at least a few
⏹️ ▶️ John people be interested in doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think we should also talk about a little bit of the machinations with regard to cost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I think that even though I am very comfortable and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proud even of where we’ve landed, a little sliver of me is disappointed that we didn’t decide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go with what we were originally thinking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It was really funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was really funny, but I think it would have come across obnoxious, which is why we shelved it. But I think it’s one of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it’s a bad joke, but I can’t help but telling it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re totally that dad who tells the bad joke anyway. I am.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s a bad joke. I was heavily in favor of this plan. Go ahead, Casey. It was your idea. No, I thought it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea. It was actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might have actually been Tiff’s idea. Tiff and I derived it like one night.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, that’s right. It was Tiff. Marco came and told us that Tiff suggested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s right. Yes, yes, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, so Marco and Tiff had come up with the idea of doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM plans so you could do $8 a month, $16 a month, $32 a month, or $64 a month. Now, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what would you be getting for all of those higher-tiered plans? The same exact crap you’re getting for the $8 a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we like it because it’s a computery, like the pricing at powers of 2 and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But practically speaking, a lot of things that are like Patreons work like that, where
⏹️ ▶️ John there are tiers. And if you pay more, you get some separate thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John especially for an initial offering, even though the joke about the RAM things was good, it just seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe too confusing and just let’s just start off simple and see how it goes. If there are people out
⏹️ ▶️ John there who are super angry that they’re not able to give us more money per month, let us know and we’ll consider higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t expect a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my thing is like, you should have an other field where people can just type in the amount they wanna pay. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows? I’ve always waiting for that one reclusive billionaire who listens to the show is like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, 10 grand a month, here you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love, Kham in the chat says, come on, this is an Apple podcast. We know it’s 832.64. Yeah, that’s probably true.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re gonna skip over the size that everyone else wanted to, yeah. And we have all sorts of ideas of other things that
⏹️ ▶️ John we could give, but in the beginning, we don’t, you know, we don’t want to overwhelm.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so Marco mentioned member-specific content. I always said like, eventually, someday, years
⏹️ ▶️ John down the line we should eventually get me to play Destiny with those two, but I don’t know if they’re actually going to want to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And that’s not a podcast either, so I don’t even know how that would work. But that’s like stretch goal, five years
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future potentially, if this is still a thing that we’re doing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in the short term, most of the obvious ideas you can think of, we’ve also been entertaining and may actually arrive.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we don’t know what those are going to be now. So this is what we’ve got to start with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And ultimately, we know, if you go apples to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apples comparison, like, well, for eight bucks a month, I could get Disney Plus or something. Like, yeah, we know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s closer to like, if you look at, you know, like, Patreons basically are the real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good comparison here. Many podcasts and stuff that we like have Patreons. They’re usually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they usually have tiers at five or ten dollars a month. That’s, and that’s like what I usually pay. and the average
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what I pay for the ones I support is usually $10 a month. And really, when we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were talking about the multiple tiers, we didn’t really want to have some kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dude ads that we give you, or kind of vague promises, or like DVD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extras. It’s like a lot of Patreons and Kickstarters and everything, they think they have to offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff to people to get them to pay for the higher tiers. But as a supporter, you often just wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support them. you don’t want their stuff, or you don’t want, you’re not ever gonna like, you know, get their like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free email greeting, or you know, whatever the thing is. And then meanwhile for the creators, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are massively time consuming and burdensome and often costly to make. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I as a frequent supporter of this kind of stuff, I don’t want any of that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me pay you the five or 10 bucks a month for your show and get the ad free feed if you have one. And that’s great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s all I want, like, because the whole point is you’re paying who support something, not to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a low priced product. So we wanted to avoid anything like that because not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it generally not worth it for creators and it wouldn’t be worth it for us, but that’s not why we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want your money. We don’t want you to buy something expecting like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive bonus stuff or special access to us, stuff like that that’s kind of hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for creators to actually really give. If you want to pay us for an ad free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed to for extra support if you want to. That’s great. If you don’t want to, that’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. Again, we understand if you just listen to our show and hear the ads, you are already supporting us. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even skip them sometimes. Just don’t tell anybody. It’s fine. We it’s everyone does it. I do it. It’s fine. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are already supporting us by doing that. So if you want to support us more, come be a member atp.fm.
Membership tech
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s some interesting tech details of this my my favorite one before we start talking about like the website
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything Hopefully hopefully everyone the chat is already signed up. So you already know what the website’s like, but We already have 71 members
⏹️ ▶️ John the the interesting Most interesting test tech bit here is to streamline
⏹️ ▶️ John the production of the ad free feed Marco lover of
⏹️ ▶️ John dynamic ad insertion has made reverse of that which is static
⏹️ ▶️ John ad removal The forecast tool that he uses to chapterize the shows
⏹️ ▶️ John now has a feature where it can export the ad-free version. I don’t know exactly how this works. Marco, you want to explain it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, sure. So basically, this is one of the areas in which,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry, this is going to be a Marco Heffy episode. If the haters out there, I’m sorry, you might as well stop now. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one of the areas where owning the entire stack of production tools,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is strategically very good for me. Back when I made Forecast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe I said on the show that one of the reasons why I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just get it out there for free and not try to charge like, you know, 30 or 50 bucks for it and make nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it, is because it had value to me as somebody in the podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space as both a podcaster and the owner of Overcast. It had value to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have some some kind of control over a podcast production tool. Because then if I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add features to podcasts at the production side, I had a place to do that. And then I can do things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like add corresponding features to overcast and give MP3s a certain ability, like the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of I have my floating chapters where the chapter spec has a provision where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a chapter that does not get listed in the list of chapters, but just appears at a certain time range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nothing actually reads or writes those, But the provision was there in the spec, so I said, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll implement that. So I implemented it in Forecast and in Overcast. So now, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a chapter podcast and you want to display a chapter that merely shows up at a certain time range but is not listed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the table of contents, you can do that, and it works. So there is value to owning the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stack here. In this case, first, we built a CMS. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one of the big reasons why I built the CMS when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we did it. Stop, stop right there. We did not build a CMS. I would love to take credit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this. But two of us complained and moaned about a handful of design decisions, and one of us actually
⏹️ ▶️ John Complained? That’s important user feedback. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say two of you were design consultants. Fair enough, fair enough. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We were wanting to do it for a while, as we said, things like controlling the RSS feed and how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything works and everything. We wanted to build exactly for our needs in part to support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a membership program. The way I build things is for the long term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with as much under my control as possible. So this is the things like minimizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external services is a big part of this. When a service is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessary, I like to choose conservative, stable, long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services. companies have been there a long time. And I like to choose low-level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building blocks instead of like high-level all-in-one solutions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I want to do is own as much of the customer interaction and the customer billing relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as possible. For example, rather than going to Patreon or Memberful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we built a site on Linode and we host our files on Libsyn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I built the whole membership payment program on Stripe. You know, building a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hosting platform, or a podcast CDN and stats service, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a payment processor, which is what those three companies are respectively, that’s no small feat. It’s not worth doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for almost anybody ever. So that made sense to Alex Forrest. Those are major problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are really hard to do. I’m not gonna become my own credit card processor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I also don’t want to go to somebody like Patreon where they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this whole big platform and I would simply be like, we’d be like one tiny member
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. And we would be at the whims of whatever they decide to do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every company seems good for a while if they’re good, but then you don’t know what’s gonna happen in the future down the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco road. Why have a dependency if you don’t need it, right? So we built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the CMS as these low-level building blocks that you, the customer, either will never see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or might only notice, like, you know, you’ll see a Stripe logo in the footer of the payment page or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s it. Like, you know, you’re not, these aren’t like hitting you over the head. Like, you’re not going to Patreon to sign up for us. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to our site, and you’re signing up directly on our site. And we control all that. We don’t have to worry. Like, if we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna go to some, like, new podcast subscription membership management service, what if they go out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business next year? Like, we don’t have to worry about that kind of stuff. Stripe is not going anywhere. Libsyn has been around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like 15, 20 years. Like, they’re not going anywhere either. Linode is not going anywhere. Like, these are solid,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long-term, low-level building blocks and that’s the way I like to build things. So, that’s the CMS part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s lots of interesting stuff about the CMS, but we’ll get to that some other time maybe, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, as John mentioned, here I’m setting myself up for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every week producing two copies of the show. You know, one with the ads and one without. What the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest of the podcast industry does now is called dynamic ad insertion. We’ve talked about it here and there before. This is one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons why you can occasionally, if you’re listening to one of the major shows from a major producer, you will often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear a recent ad in an old show, or you will hear a local ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some local car dealership or some event that’s happening in your town, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds kind of creepy the first time you hear it. And the reason why is they’re doing dynamic ad insertion where they have their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MP3 files of the show they mark certain timestamps to insert ads at. And on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco download, they look at your IP address, they either do a direct geolocation lookup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and figure out roughly where you are, or they do something even creepier where they look it up with one of those data broker services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and find out exactly who you are. And then they inject ads that are relevant to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly into the show at your download. As I mentioned earlier, the MP3 file format
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really like hackable. You can basically splice MP3s freely and as long as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do it remotely competently, you can be really sloppy, you can make a lot of mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As long as you do it remotely competently, it’ll work, it’ll play. And so that’s what a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of big publishers do now. They dynamically insert ads and anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually do kind of the opposite now. As John said, I am statically deleting ads automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where Forecast, the tool that I use to include code, the chapter markers and the mp3,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I write, already had the concept of sponsor chapters, like recognizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsor chapters by the prefix, and you can edit what the prefix is by default, it’s what we use on this show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsor colon, and so it recognizes those and it highlights them in the table view so you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily see them, and that way I always check to make sure like, are they actually, you know, do they have the right durations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly, and then I can make sure they all have links and everything, and so it already had this mechanism of It also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a feature called export air checks, where people who buy ads, a lot of times, they will want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hear a copy of whatever ad you read before they pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. They’re like, give us an air check, which is just a fancy industry term for the copy of the ad as you read it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the show. And so I have a feature in Forecast. I never wanted to do this. So I have a feature in Forecast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that says export sponsor air checks. And any chapter that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has the sponsor prefix that you’ve set, it will just export those separate files that include only that plus or minus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or plus like a couple seconds on your side etc. So I already had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mp3 splicing, sponsor recognition, chapter markers, and I’m already making the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with chapters. So I built in a feature into Forecast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to automate the creation of the sponsor free versions by simply having a menu item
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will export a copy of the same file without without the sponsor chapters in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as you hear the show, the way the sponsor-free version sounds, it’s exactly the same show, the way it sounds is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you hear, and then you hear the sponsor here, and then you hear the sponsor closed music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, the way the ad-free version works is you only hear the ad closed music, and then it goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the next topic. So you don’t hear the ad open or the ad, You hear just previous topic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the next topic. To do this in Forecast, I had to first figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco macOS app notarization, because the last Forecast update predates Catalina.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also then had to add support for dark mode, because the last update also predated Mojave. It was in 2018. Oh, wow. That’s crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the main reason I had to update the Forecast app besides adding this feature was I had to improve the precision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the chapter markers, because it turned out that the way I was, what Forkast does to achieve its amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed and make your fan spin so fast, is it splits up the file into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however many cores you have. So on my iMac, I have 10 cores, it’s 20 virtual hyper-threading cores. So it splits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the files into 20 parts, encodes each of those parts separately in parallel, and then glues them all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together at the end. It turned out the way I was gluing things together was actually adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one silent frame of audio, which is like something like 11 milliseconds. It was adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit of audio at every joint that was silent. And it split them on silences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you wouldn’t ever notice. Like it wouldn’t like split in the middle of a word, so it wouldn’t be inserting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silence anywhere you would notice. But it was enough that the chapter markers would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very slightly off as they were later in an episode if you were encoding with a high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core count machine. Because you would have all these segments that were joined, and so a chapter marker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be off by a half a second. And the problem is, when I’m placing these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so precisely to make sure that the audio flows correctly when it performs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sponsor removal splice, and it doesn’t have a weirdly long gap, or it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut off half a word somewhere, a half a second of imprecision is too much. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first, and this is all to save me a small amount of work every week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First, I had to improve the mp3 joining algorithm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Forecast. You know, when I first wrote it, like four or five years ago, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had less knowledge of the mp3 file format than I have now. So I was able to do that just by knowing, like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s right, it’s this padding frame that the lame lib is adding, you know, whatever. So I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to do it correctly this time. So first I had to like figure out the notarization, add dark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode, update lame, then improve the precision of chapter markers by rewriting the way I joined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. My goodness. But all that, I was able to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because I control my production tool. You know, like it, it’s a very, it’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powerful thing like to, to have that. And you know, it’s, it’s like a slow build. Like this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is how I like to do things in my entire career. If possible, Like, you put in a lot of work up front to do ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that save time over time. This is one of the great things about being a programmer. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can, if you have some annoying task that you have to do every day or every week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even once a year, you can write a script and you can spend three hours writing a script
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna save you one minute a day, but that’s satisfying, and eventually that might be worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But now I have ad-free versions. As I said, I only did the last four episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad-free. I didn’t go back any further than that. And then there was also issues with overcast that were kind of led to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I developed a ping API to kind of make the private feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update speed be as fast as the public feed. Because what you wouldn’t want is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a premium feed where everybody has their own little feeds, like a premium offering, you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the public show to go out And then, and have that be picked up by all the apps really fast, because it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco popular feed, and then have to wait like two or three hours for all the member feeds to pick up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same episode. Like, that would be not good. You know, you don’t want your members to have a worse experience than your non-members,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? You want it to be equal or better. So I developed an API in Overcast where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time we publish a new episode, and this is a public API, it’s on the Podcaster Info page, the Ping API,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Overcast now has an API where you can say, all right, the feeds that begin with this prefix just got updated, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go crawl them now, instead of waiting possibly up to an hour or whatever that you might otherwise crawl
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. So again, we produce a show here, I control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the production tool, I control our biggest client. It’s a good place to be. I know not everybody can do this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you do this, when you have this kind of stuff, it’s amazingly strategically valuable. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push things forward, you can make new features or make things better for everybody just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on your own needs because you know what your needs are because you’re also a podcaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s important to remember when Marco’s talking about all these things about how he has his production tools and the app and the CMS
⏹️ ▶️ John and blah, blah, blah. This is still using all just open standards. MP3 is an open standard that Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John did not invent. Chapters are a part of the standard that Marco did not invent. Anybody can make tools that understand these.
⏹️ ▶️ John Our private and public feeds are just plain old RSS feeds that any podcast client can play. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re all within this open ecosystem. It’s just that because it’s open, anybody can make apps that deal with them,
⏹️ ▶️ John which means that Marco can make apps that deal with them, and so he has. Same thing with our website, it’s using PHP, it’s on the web,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a plain old website using open standards. It’s just nice to be able to control
⏹️ ▶️ John as much of that as possible and as feasible. Related to that,
⏹️ ▶️ John since we control it, we wanted to make it a good simple experience. Hopefully the people in the chat room who are our super fans have
⏹️ ▶️ John figured out the website and have not stumbled over anything. But we spent a surprising amount of time trying to figure out how
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it, make the experience obvious and simple enough. It’s just like one or two screens, like it’s not complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just go there, enter some stuff, click some buttons, and you’re done. It’s very simple. That’s what we wanted it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John But one of the simplifications that I had my heart set on in the beginning that turns out we couldn’t do was
⏹️ ▶️ John sign in with Apple. The thing that we talked about on the show, I’m a big fan of this service. It’s like, oh, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you already trust Apple, and if you’re listening to this podcast, maybe you do already, you can, instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of signing in with an email address or something, you can do sign in with Apple. And we wouldn’t even know what your email address was if you didn’t want us
⏹️ ▶️ John to. You’d just be completely anonymous as far as we’re concerned. you wouldn’t have to maintain any
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of separate login credentials, it would just be like your Apple ID that you already have. And that would be an
⏹️ ▶️ John option for people who wanted to use Sign-in with Apple. Unfortunately, Sign-in with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John strongly suggests that you have an application associated with like an iOS application
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And you can kind of make like a dummy application just to satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ John its desires, but we don’t have an app, we have a website. There is no like ATP app,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We didn’t want to make one. So unfortunately, the reason we don’t have Sign-In with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is right now it’s not really designed to be just a way for people to log into a website that has
⏹️ ▶️ John no associated app whatsoever. We do support Apple Pay through Stripe. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the payment process is really easy if you have Apple Pay and you want to use that and you don’t want to have to enter credit card number. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John be done in less than 30 seconds. But for now, no Sign-In with Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, as John said, if we could just get away with not having your email address at all, that would be wonderful. you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I would jump at that. You know, I mean, and believe me, I thought of various ways I could try to get away with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having an email address for anybody. But the problem is like, when you’re taking people’s money directly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to have some way of accounting for them so that like you can, so if they have a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can email you and say, hey, I have a problem. Here’s my email address, can you look up my account? You know, otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it just makes, it makes stuff a lot harder if you don’t have that. And our payment processor, Stripe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collects the email address anyway. So we already are in possession of it anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indirectly. We have access to it, it’s in our data from Stripe. So at that point it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, we’re already exposed to it. If you think about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco personal information is almost like a virus. It’s like, well, if it passes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near your hands, it’s on you, so you have to take the precautions to protect it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have to have a privacy policy anyway, you might as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well also provide a decent login experience and be able to fix people’s issues when they email you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the problems that we had when we were thinking about should we add Sign-in with Apple before we realized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you really are encouraged, that it really needs an app, and when Apple strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encourages something, it basically is a rule, not a suggestion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if it isn’t a rule now, it will become one later, so you might as well treat it like a rule now. But one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problems with signing with Apple is like, if you have signed in with Apple, many people will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it the first time they sign up, or they will not use it the first time they sign up, and then when they come back to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco site a few months later and want to log in, they will try the other thing. If they used it the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first time, they will try not using it the second time, because they’ll forget whether they used it the first time or not. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will either not see their account and email you saying, my account’s missing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or they will inadvertently create a new blank account, and then they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write to you saying, all my stuff’s gone in my account. So you create all sorts of customer friction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and customer support problems whenever you have multiple ways to log into your service or app. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideally, if you could make it just one way, you totally eliminate, how did I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign up for this? And you still have issues of people with multiple email addresses deciding which one they want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. But at least you reduce the number of problems and problem sources you have by one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big one, by just saying, okay, you don’t have to worry about whether you log into our site with Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Facebook or Apple ID or anything. You just log into our site with an email address, period. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there it is. I don’t even have a password. I use one of my passwordless login systems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we put a lot of work into the subscribe flow. Again, special thanks to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Show Techery and Dithering podcast, Ben Thompson and John Gruber.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The system that Ben Thompson has devised over there for quick subscribing with the cool QR code and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we ripped it off completely 100%, with permission, but totally ripped it off, totally shamelessly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So thanks to them for innovating so that the rest of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us can reap the benefits.
⏹️ ▶️ John One final nicety that Marco added, and you can correct me if I’m wrong about understanding this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you sign up as a member and you get your special member feed and you add it to your podcast player of choice using
⏹️ ▶️ John our cool little page that lets you do that. And then you unsubscribe,
⏹️ ▶️ John you stop being a member, you don’t have to change your feed. Is that correct, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ John will continue to work for you, and then it will just become the non-member feed, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So suddenly, you won’t have to delete the feed from your podcast player, then resubscribe to the public feed, and then delete the public
⏹️ ▶️ John feed. You can just keep that feed there forever, and the content of it will change based on
⏹️ ▶️ John whether you are currently an active member or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it’ll tell you, it’ll prefix the title with subscription expired. So it’ll be very clear that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is an expired member subscription, but the content will still be coming in and there’ll be a link in each post for you to renew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to. Your member feed, as long as you don’t delete your account, your member feed will continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work just fine as a copy of the public feed. And then as soon as you wanna resubscribe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future, member stuff all shows up again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and you can, of course, delete the feed and resubscribe to the public one too, we’re just saying this is a nicety so you don’t end up with this weird
⏹️ ▶️ John dead feed that doesn’t work anymore. One thing that may not be clear, or at least wasn’t clear to me, about
⏹️ ▶️ John your membership that you’re paying for, it’s not calendar month. So if you become a member now, you’re not like missing
⏹️ ▶️ John out on like the first couple of shows in June. It’s based on your sign-up date,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s simply, you know, time range from now. You’re buying, you know, a month from now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so, and it renews next month. And you can see it’s, like, man, Stripe is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good these days. I mean, so I’ve built, I’ve used Stripe a couple times over the years. It’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been great. It’s always been like, great company, super amazing API,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely easy to use, like breath of fresh air compared to the old days of PayPal. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now it’s even better. Like if you can believe, if you are building anything with payments,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I strongly encourage you to use Stripe because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so good. Stripe, not a sponsor of this episode. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’d be amazed how much functionality we got from them for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost no effort at all. Like the Stripe integration took me two days for the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco payment system. That is subscribing, including Apple Pay, including support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the cards that use 3D Secure that need like, you know, send you a text message to verify the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge before it actually goes through. Like all that stuff is supported and a whole billing portal where you can go in and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change your credit card number if it’s about to expire. It’ll email you a week ahead of time of expiration and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can see your billing history, all of that. And it took me two days to build the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration. Again, Stripe has always been good, but it’s even better now. So if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building something that requires credit cards, if you’re thinking about it, you’d be shocked how easy it is. So yeah, thank you to Stripe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for being awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There were a lot of design decisions and things that went into this. I don’t think we need to belabor it anymore right now, but we might visit it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the future. Or as we make other choices, we might revisit those in the future. But I do want to thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco one more time for putting in the overwhelming amount of work on doing this. And if you want to get Marco a birthday present,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can donate to the three organizations we’ve already talked about. And or you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ATP membership program. And, and would be better. And would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. Let’s do and. I’d rather, if you’re going to only give eight bucks a month to somebody, don’t give it to me. give it to one of them.
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ARM Macs finally happening?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, we have one big topic we need to talk about, which is going to make me friggin’ miserable. Bloomberg says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the ARM transition is happening in what, a week and a half, two weeks, something like that? It’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at WWDC, or at least it will be announced anyway at WWDC. And this would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only be depressing if you had a brand new laptop arriving tomorrow, which I definitely don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of amazed at how much mileage that
⏹️ ▶️ John has gotten slash German have gotten out of essentially the same story Like I think we’ve had basically
⏹️ ▶️ John this same story as a topic on this podcast Not just a our max But I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John this specific story with these facts in this publication on this show
⏹️ ▶️ John like three times, right? So kudos for you know getting the page views I don’t think there’s much new information
⏹️ ▶️ John except they’re becoming more and more insistent that no really WWDC, which is in a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of weeks as we record this, this is going to be the coming out party for ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac. They don’t, you know, and with the typical hedging they always say as early as, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John well it could happen as early as any point in the future. That’s kind of, you know, anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re hedging and they’re like, oh, there’s not going to be hardware available, but of course you have to announce the transition before you have the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John for most cases because if you just released ARM Macs nothing would run on them and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John all this This leads us to discuss all the same questions. Now, the fact that they, why are we talking about it for a third time then? If it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s not really any new facts and it’s just, you know, being more insistent on the dates that they’ve said many months ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think as they become more insistent and as the date comes closer, I start to believe more
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like, well, they’re still insisting and it’s getting closer to the day. We all know kind of like, you know, the leaks get more,
⏹️ ▶️ John more solid, the closer you get to the date of when they’re supposed to happen. practically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John if the longterm rumors of like our max in 2021 are true, you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John have to tell people about it before you try to sell them a bunch of hardware that doesn’t run any apps, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So, WWDC is the time you would tell them and you probably don’t want to wait until
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC 2021 if you’re planning on having any, selling consumers max in 2021, that’s too late. So, unless like so many other
⏹️ ▶️ John things in this world that have
⏹️ ▶️ John been, you know, delayed by coronavirus, that if coronavirus hasn’t thrown a giant monkey wrench into their plans,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m starting to believe that this upcoming WWDC is going to be the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the move away from x86, move away from Intel. I don’t even know how to phrase it. We keep saying RMAX,
⏹️ ▶️ John but as we’ve discussed in many past shows, oh, it could be anything. Could be any kind of Apple processor. Could be RISC-V, could be
⏹️ ▶️ John AMD, could be, anyway, RMAX. We’re pretty sure that’s what’s coming. That’s what Bloomberg
⏹️ ▶️ John says. as, and WWE could be the date.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m very much looking forward to this. I mean, we’ve been talking about it for years now as the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we assumed was probably going to happen someday. And it has kind of felt over the last year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so, like it seems like it’s getting close. If it finally is happening, I’m so excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even though, again, we’ve talked about so many times, there will be losses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco along the way. But I think we’ve already hit most of them. It’s not a coincidence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Mac OS in the last couple of years has dropped support outright or deprecated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major functionality that is considered like older legacy that you think might be hard to support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our tradition. So things like 32 bit support, OpenGL, you know, like the major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that have cost us a lot of apps, especially, you know, 32 bit has caused a lot of apps to be killed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. You know, a lot of the old old APIs that were 32 bit only, you know, those aren’t coming over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why do you think Apple’s been doing all this house cleaning on Mac OS? It’s not just for fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s clearly in preparation for this transition. So it does seem, it seemed for a while that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imminent. That seems more likely than ever now. And especially when backed up with this pretty firm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco report. I’m very excited to see this. I cannot wait. I do think we are probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to lose bootcamp, any kind of x86 emulation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is out the window. and a lot of PC hardware compatibility is probably gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost as well. But I think that will be worth it in the end.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to remember what was the presentation where,
⏹️ ▶️ John was it the most recent WWC? There was some recent Apple presentation where I remember talking
⏹️ ▶️ John on the show about how the whole presentation was like, it was like a giant subtweet.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember saying that like, the presentation was basically screaming, we are making our Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like it was, the
⏹️ ▶️ John presentation was like, that’s exactly what I said in the past episode of ATP, I can’t remember the episode number, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John the presentation was, here at Apple we have a bunch of new products, and this one has
⏹️ ▶️ John an A-whatever processor in it, and let me tell you how great those A-whatever processors are, and it’s got this,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s got that, and they just went into how great they are making these system-on-a-chips, that was obviously an iOS device or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were so into it, and they were just telling you about all this cool stuff, and either just before
⏹️ ▶️ John or just after that, they had talked about a Mac product, And it said almost nothing about the CPUs, because
⏹️ ▶️ John A, we knew that they were not remarkable, and B, everything that they were saying about
⏹️ ▶️ John the A series, you knew if you knew the tech stuff, is not true of the Intel CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other thing. It’s not super power efficient. It’s not made on a new process size. It doesn’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ John neural engine. Its GPU isn’t way better. It doesn’t have more cores. It has none of that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, I was not gonna say this in the presentation. It costs Apple hundreds of dollars to Intel, whereas this one cost them
⏹️ ▶️ John less than $100 or whatever. The whole presentation, the subtext
⏹️ ▶️ John was, Apple makes great CPUs, our CPUs are great in ways that Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs are not, but they didn’t say that. That wasn’t the time for that presentation. When I saw that presentation,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, oh, it’s on now. It’s clear that they are just, that there’s no turning back now.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the tech strategy, everybody knows it, and their presentations have been leading up to it. So when they
⏹️ ▶️ John do come on stage and present this, this is the thing that I’m thinking about as we come closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to WWDC, how do they position this? Right, we talked about this when we were talking about it years ago. It’s like, oh, do they just
⏹️ ▶️ John use ARM for the low-end laptops? Do they keep the big ones, x86? So they try to make a 64
⏹️ ▶️ John core processor for a new ARM-based Mac Pro. This is back, we didn’t even know they were gonna make a Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, how do they deal with the software situation? Like, how do they present this?
⏹️ ▶️ John And now that we get closer to the date, the sort of default strategy that everyone believes
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes much more, there’s much more support for it. Like that presentation they gave was
⏹️ ▶️ John not a presentation preparing the way for Apple to say, we’re pursuing a dual
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU strategy where we’re gonna have, you know, forever Intel CPUs and ARM Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time. No, that presentation was all about how Apple makes amazing CPUs. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John makes better ones. Isn’t Apple awesome? Don’t you wish these were in all of your devices? So I think right
⏹️ ▶️ John now, a couple weeks out from WWDC, if they do this, the positioning is the same as it was for Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John and the same as it was for PowerPC, which is basically these new, a whatever, you know, these
⏹️ ▶️ John new Apple-made CPUs are better in all the ways that we care about than the CPUs we
⏹️ ▶️ John currently use. They’re faster, they use less power, they have more features. They’re not gonna say this, but they’re cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and the pitches, and eventually, all Macs will be
⏹️ ▶️ John used this because it’s better, just like they said with PowerPC And just like they said with Intel, in fact, with Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John if people were around for that transition, the specific pitch they made, which may sound weird in today’s world of
⏹️ ▶️ John smartphones and iPads, but the specific pitch they made was that PowerPC was just too power
⏹️ ▶️ John hungry, ha ha. Like they couldn’t put a G5 into a laptop, they weren’t power efficient, and Intel’s
⏹️ ▶️ John roadmap had CPUs that had much better performance per watt. It wasn’t just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, Intel CPUs are faster. They were at that point, they definitely were faster, but the pitch was,
⏹️ ▶️ John these are faster and use less power so we can put them in our laptops. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple’s thing is like, there are ideas for computers that we have that we can’t make with available PowerPC
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs. Within the roadmap doesn’t have anything to help us, like say a laptop. If you can’t, if your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John is still G4, but your big desktops are G5, and the G5 is faster and better than the G4, and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no prospect of getting a G5 into a laptop, that’s a pretty dire situation. Obviously, it’s not that dire
⏹️ ▶️ John now, But all this is to say is the pitch was, this is the future
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac. And yes, there’ll be a transition and it will take a while and here’s how we’re gonna handle the transition and don’t feel bad about the Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John that you already have. Like all the stuff that people are worried about, like, oh, you’re gonna announce an Intel transition but then you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be selling people PowerPC Macs. What if someone bought a PowerPC Mac the day before that presentation? That happened,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a thing that happened. We all survived it, it’s a bumpy transition. Your Intel Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John will be fine for probably the lifetime of that computer because these transitions take time. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, I feel like this has to be positioned as the future of the Mac is whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing is that Apple wants to move to, whatever they call these things if they’re A-series, M-series, you know, whatever they
⏹️ ▶️ John are. That’s gonna be for every Mac. It may take them longer, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s two or three years until they get a Apple-made CPU that is appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John to replace the one in the Mac Pro or something. But I think that that has to be the pitch
⏹️ ▶️ John is, we make great CPUs, we’re bringing them to the Mac. Even if they say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, our first line of Macs will just be the laptops. I will be shocked if they make any commitment
⏹️ ▶️ John to like in perpetuity continue to make Intel-based Macs because that’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John the way Apple does things. And honestly, it doesn’t really make any sense because I think, you know, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the one thing we’ve discussed in the program over and over again. I think Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John proven the capability to make an appropriate CPU for every Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that they sell, including the Mac Pro. They haven’t actually done that yet, as far as we know. Maybe there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John something in a secret lab or something. But I think they’ve proven they’re able to. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John the only difference in terms of, you know, the chips that like in an iPad and in the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is basically the number of cores. The individual cores are now competitive. Everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a matter of money and time. You know, bus widths, memory support,
⏹️ ▶️ John IO, you know, PCI Express lanes, these are all solvable problems. even the minor
⏹️ ▶️ John barriers that existed before that I used to insist could be solved by money. Those have come down without the application
⏹️ ▶️ John of huge amounts of money. Thunderbolt is now an open standard and you can be certified as Thunderbolt compatible even if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John made by Intel. Like all, you know, and Marco mentioned the 32, 64 bit stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John has resolved itself. Like everything is all set up. Everything’s all lined up for Apple to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s easier now than it has ever been in the past. And I feel like the positioning simply has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the future of the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so excited and disappointed about WWDC this year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it was a unique pleasure being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around you when Swift was announced and when, you know, it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, it wasn’t the Mac Pro announced when we were in the keynote audience?
⏹️ ▶️ John You weren’t next to me for Swift, but Mac Pro you were. Both times. Both Mac Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there you go. Exactly. The point is being in the room for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, the reality distortion field is different and has been since 2011,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s still amazing to be in the room when this is happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If this really is going to be announced in a couple of weeks, I’m going to be real sad not to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, I may not have been there anyway because I might not have gotten a ticket, but it would have been really cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have been able to see it in person. I’m really curious how they’re going to handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cheering and the hooping and the hollering over something that arguably really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be cheered and we should be hooping and hollering over. I’m curious to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see how they handle that if they’re just doing recorded videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m also curious to see what I think about this computer that’s arriving tomorrow, which I actually am
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking of you when I said, What if I just bought a Mac with the previous CPU? It’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw you fretting about that. What about yourself?
⏹️ ▶️ John before I ordered my Mac Pro, I had insisted many times, I understand that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple may have to be switched to ARM and I’m gonna buy the last great Intel thing. And honestly, it’s not even that great in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of single-core performance. The iPads are probably faster, right? I’m resigned to it slash
⏹️ ▶️ John fine with it. People are asking, how do you feel about that? I’m excited for ARM Macs. I’m not depressed about my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. I love the Mac Pro, it’s great, right? And I’ll be fine with it. Maybe it won’t last me 10 years,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Maybe I’ll replace it with another, you know, I bought multiple cheese graters before, I can buy multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John mega graters again, maybe someday. But anyway, I will, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll survive. It’ll be perfectly fine. I’m excited for ARM Macs, even if it’s just laptops, which I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John like in the beginning, because having lived through two CPU transitions before, every one of them has
⏹️ ▶️ John been exciting. PowerPC was super exciting for, I mean, PowerPC itself was exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John for lots of reasons. There was lots of political reasons and other things that we can get into in old man mode in a different show maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, the main thing was that it was faster. It was so much faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than the old, you know, ridiculously faster, demonstrably faster. And who’s not excited
⏹️ ▶️ John by that, right? And even this is even, you know, back in the 90s or whatever, when computers were getting faster all the time anyway. Even in
⏹️ ▶️ John that environment, the switch to PowerPC showed a lot of speed. even in an operating system that was still
⏹️ ▶️ John largely emulated because huge swaths of Mac OS were still 68K code for the longest time. Then the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John transition, again, Apple was in a bad place. They couldn’t put a G5 in a laptop. The Intel Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John were right out of the gate. You used them, you’re like, oh. I remember like, you know, of course, compiling Perl
⏹️ ▶️ John on an Intel Mac. I’m like, holy cow. You would. This compiles so much faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than it does on my like dual G5 Power Mac, right? It was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, it was the next day is like, oh, you have a dual G5 power Mac, try this middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of the road wimpy Intel Mac. I’m like, well, you know, this giant cheese grater surely will come by. No, the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John one was so much faster. I hope we have that same excitement. If it’s, maybe it’s not raw
⏹️ ▶️ John speed, maybe it’s just like, oh, the battery on the laptops last like iPad length, like 10 hours long,
⏹️ ▶️ John and before this, before I was only getting four hours. I don’t know, but like, I’m hoping that
⏹️ ▶️ John these Macs will be compelling. And for anyone who has never gone through one of these architecture transitions.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re scary and they can be bumpy, but my main memory of the previous two transitions is excitement.
⏹️ ▶️ John As a tech nerd, it’s an exciting time to be involved in the Mac. You would think it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a scary time, and it would be like, oh, I’m just gonna leave the Mac and come back when things settle down, but to me, it’s always been exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re probably gonna start out with the MacBook Air. Like, it’s the best-selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac by all accounts, and it is very mainstream and very good, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one problem it has is it’s kind of slow. And I’ve also heard that the thermal system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not super awesome, that it’s kind of like, you know, not a very graceful or high-capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermal system. And so, you know, if you can take that computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep what everyone loves about it, and give it significantly better performance and probably better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life, that’s a great update. That’s all it needs to be. And many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the buyers of the MacBook Air don’t need a lot of the higher end pro use cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the transition might be a little bit bumpier. And this is why I think that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen the idea floated that possibly the high end products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would stay Intel for maybe a little while longer or a significantly longer time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that maybe ARM is potentially only in the laptops for a while. Or maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops and the Mac mini or something like that, maybe ARM doesn’t come to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Pro or the iMac Pro or the Mac Pro quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. Maybe it waits another couple years before that. In the meantime, you have ARM where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really has, where it matters most, which would be the smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery-powered things, like the MacBook Air. And that would be fine, and that would also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give people who rely on high-end apps, high-end hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of more specialized stuff like virtualization that not everybody really needs to do, but some people really need to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would give all that time to transition. And for those people to either find a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform or for tool makers to fill that in, like to make x86
⏹️ ▶️ Marco virtualization, or rather emulation I guess it would be, on our Macs, stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s so many paths you could take here. And what’s really interesting, what I can’t wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see is what some of these decisions that have been, like what they decide about things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boot camp or emulation, things like that. And then I wanna see the first ARM Mac. I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curious. If it is something like the MacBook Air or even a return of a 12-inch MacBook, but ultimately I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it would probably just be the MacBook Air, that would be an amazing computer. I would probably buy one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be so good. I can’t wait, I really can’t wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that scares me a little bit about the potential for the laptops getting these processors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first, which I think makes the most sense from what we know today. I’m worried, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually applicable as well to something we haven’t mentioned, which is a potential iMac refresh. I’m worried that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe the processors will be new, and well, obviously they will be, and maybe some other,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, things around that will be new. Like, let’s just say like a version two of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Magic Keyboard, or whatever it is they’re calling the keyboards these days. Like all that is fine and dandy, but I’m really worried that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s going to be some new hotness looking like, like aesthetic quality to it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what that would be, to be honest, except on the IMAX where obviously like smaller bezels and so on. But, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m scared that I’m going to get this laptop tomorrow, which I am genuinely very excited about. I’m really, really stoked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have something that’ll perform a lot better than my adorable, even though I love it, it’s not fast. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really excited for it. And I think John, you’re right when you said earlier that it is, it’s going to last like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire lifetime of that laptop, I don’t think it’s been cut short by a potential ARM release. What scares
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, and it doesn’t even scare me if like this potential ARM laptop has twice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the battery life of my forthcoming 13-inch MacBook Pro, like I don’t operate away from a charger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that often, so I’m not worried about that either, but if it looks cool, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so stupid, I’ll be the first to tell you it’s so dumb, but if it looks super cool, like Can you imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they brought back, like maybe not the polycarbonate, but like the black MacBook? Do you remember how friggin’
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool those things looked? Oh, something along those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines. I mean, they look great in 2006 when they came out. I don’t think they looked, like I think that was a time period. Sure, sure, sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s not gonna, they’re not gonna bring back plastic. I don’t see that happening. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think you have to worry about it
⏹️ ▶️ John looking that cool though, honestly. Like, I mean, not to slam Apple’s current
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco laptop design,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for two reasons. One, most of Apple’s devices
⏹️ ▶️ John have had their skins pulled in to such a degree that there’s nothing left
⏹️ ▶️ John to trim and all you’ve got is surface finishes of color, so I suppose they could make a black one, but they probably
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t. And the second reason is, during both of the previous transitions,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s MO, whether intentionally or just because of momentum, has been to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John you computers that look just like their predecessors, but their insides have a different CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and it makes sense from a design point. It’s like, well, what if your CPU transition doesn’t exactly coincide with
⏹️ ▶️ John a complete redesign of all your computers? You can’t really do that. So let’s just take this
⏹️ ▶️ John case that previously came with the PowerPC and put an Intel chip in it. And the second part of that that could be intentional
⏹️ ▶️ John is like we want people to understand this is just a Mac. They’re not weird, they’re not different. This computer you bought
⏹️ ▶️ John last week and this computer you bought this week, they look exactly the same. One has an Intel CPU, one has
⏹️ ▶️ John a PowerPC CPU, right? that could also be an intentional strategy. But I think the other
⏹️ ▶️ John one is more compelling. Practically speaking, Apple is not capable of
⏹️ ▶️ John physically redesigning its entire line of computers or even a specific one. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve just refreshed most of their computers, right? Which I think leads into this other rumor. This is related to
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC, that the rumor about the iMac being replaced with a new design. And what they mean by new design here
⏹️ ▶️ John is, like you were saying, Casey, like the case, essentially. Like the current iMac design has been around for many
⏹️ ▶️ John years. Everyone thinks, oh, you could get one with a smaller chin, smaller bezels. Maybe it could look
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Pro Display XDR. People have all sorts of ideas, but the bottom line is the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably due for a physical redesign. And this rumor is
⏹️ ▶️ John not that this would be like the ARM iMac, because ARM Macs are, you know, there’s no rumor that says ARM Macs are coming this year.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the rumors say ARM Macs would be coming next year at the earliest, but you have to tell developers about it ahead of time. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a developer conference, so people expect them to be announced, to give developers time to rebuild their apps, yada
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, right? But the iMac rumor is, oh, and they’ll introduce a new iMac. So what this
⏹️ ▶️ John would mean, and this may also blow people’s minds who haven’t been through the previous two transitions, is they would announce
⏹️ ▶️ John an ARM transition, and in the same presentation say, look at this amazing new Intel-based iMac?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because they’re not gonna stop selling Macs once they announce the transition.
⏹️ ▶️ John When they announced the Intel transition, it’s not like, no more Macs will be sold until the first Intel-based
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac is released. And same thing with PowerPC and 16. That’s just not the way the world works, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not inconceivable that they could introduce a new iMac, probably do that at the first part of the presentation,
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, here’s a great new iMac. Here are its specs, here’s its price. Doesn’t it look cool? Ooh and ah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then later say, and now, an important transition for the Mac. We’ve done this twice before and put in the slot. You know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know how this is gonna go, right? And I don’t think people will be like, but wait a second, you just introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John an Intel Mac. It’s like, yeah, and we’re gonna be selling them in our stores for the next year, and people are gonna buy them, and they’re gonna use them,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re gonna work, because they’re Macs. It’s all fine, right? But that being
⏹️ ▶️ John the case, it’s not like they’re saying, okay, well, the first ARM-based Mac, whatever it may be,
⏹️ ▶️ John has to look radically different to give Casey Fomo.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like, I don’t think that’s gonna happen, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re just gonna look, whatever Mac it is, especially if it’s like the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air that was just physically redesigned, it’s gonna look like that. Like, that’s it. I mean, the best they could do
⏹️ ▶️ John is maybe give it a new color is available or something like that, but their colors haven’t been that daring lately either.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I do not expect the ARM transition to coincide with amazing style change. That said,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey amazing daring style change to any of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s Macintosh lines, the laptops, desktops, anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that I don’t like the current style, I do. I really like how my Mac Pro looks. I like how, I think they’re all attractive computers
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re fine, but I’m always willing to have things mixed up. I’m frequently jealous of the
⏹️ ▶️ John surface finishes that the phones get from year to year, different colors, shiny
⏹️ ▶️ John matte, the glass covering, the pastel things, the product red ones, the whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John that jet black one. There’s an adventurous spirit in the phone line that is not present
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac line. And I certainly welcome that, but I’m just not expecting it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By the way, semi-real-time follow-up. I am pretty sure, and I think it was my name is T in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the chat that pointed this out. It was the Brooklyn Academy of Music event
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Marco and I were actually present for physically, that they were going on and on about how amazing the processor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is and the then brand new iPad Pro. And then they started talking about the then brand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new MacBook Air. And yeah, it’s great because of all these things and there’s a processor
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. It also has a processor in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And so I’m pretty sure Marco and I were there for that. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was brutal. Yep. Yeah. One final bit on the RMacs. A lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people have been speculating about the hardware that developers would use to
⏹️ ▶️ John work on their apps. So I kept saying, you have to tell developers so they can rebuild their apps, but you’re not gonna sell
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs based on the new processor until the next year. So what the heck are developers going to test on? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John when they did the Intel transition, they had this thing called the, what, the developer transition kit or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John where they would sell you a Mac that was basically an existing cheese grater Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, power Mac, but inside I believe it was a Pentium 4. Correct. It was like a PC motherboard
⏹️ ▶️ John with a Pentium 4 and they weren’t selling it to you, you were essentially renting it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you had to give it back to Apple at the end. And anyway, developers could get this, they gave Apple whatever it was, $1,000 or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you got a cheese grater with a Pentium 4 in it. And you would use that to
⏹️ ▶️ John port your app. It was an Intel-based Mac, it ran Mac OS X, and you would open up Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John and bring your source code into it and try to get it to build and test it and everything like that. And then after the period
⏹️ ▶️ John was up, you sent that back to Apple and then what’d they do? They gave you the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual production Intel iMac as an option or something. You could choose to either get your money back
⏹️ ▶️ John or they would send you an Intel iMac. I forget, but the point is, Apple has various ways to
⏹️ ▶️ John get hardware to developers so they can do their development. But that hardware they give to developers isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like a secretly ready ahead of time Mac on the new architecture. It’s like this weird mongrel
⏹️ ▶️ John beast. It’s like dev kits for consoles, right? They don’t, they’re not production systems. These are not consumer
⏹️ ▶️ John systems. Like, Apple never shipped a Mac with a Pentium 4 in it, except for these developer transition kits. They were all
⏹️ ▶️ John like the core, you know, the core architecture, whatever. But the Pentium 4 ones were good enough for
⏹️ ▶️ John people to do their porting work because it’s the same instruction set or whatever. So everyone’s thinking, what
⏹️ ▶️ John are they gonna do this time? What kind of thing are they going to give developers so
⏹️ ▶️ John they can actually build their Mac app on ARM or whatever these
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs are gonna be. And since the rumor is that these are gonna be ARM Macs, everyone says,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, they don’t have to worry about that because developers probably already have tons of ARM-based devices in their house, like they’ve got an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. So why not let them run macOS on their iPad or something
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s already ARM hardware and it’s probably similar enough to the ARM Mac hardware that’s gonna come out because the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John are that the Mac hardware is based on the A14 chip that’s gonna be in the next gen iPhone and all that other stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So it’s not like Apple’s making an entirely, the rumor is that Apple’s not making an entirely different architecture. It’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John derived from the same iPhone chip that they’re making a million of anyway. Let everybody run
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS on their iPads or maybe even on their iPhones or run on your iPhone and have a project to
⏹️ ▶️ John an external display and all sorts of theories like this. They are technically
⏹️ ▶️ John plausible, but they don’t strike me as likely simply because the
⏹️ ▶️ John straightforward solution of just giving people a Mac with an ARM chip in it, even if it’s some weird
⏹️ ▶️ John slapped together thing that you have to ask for back at the end, Apple’s done it before and it worked perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Like if they have a better solution, if they’ve already done the work to
⏹️ ▶️ John make iPads do this because that’s how they’ve been developing internally, sure, maybe they could do it, but I feel like Apple’s gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that is the most straightforward for them. And without knowing for a fact that Apple has been developing
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS and running it on the iPad internally, I have to think that they’re gonna give
⏹️ ▶️ John people, give developers access to something that looks and behaves like a Mac, but it’s got an ARM chip inside
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and then they’ll probably want it back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, you’re probably right about most of that. One major difference though that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have to consider is that the number of Apple developers is so much bigger now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it was back then. And even if you rule out all the iOS-only developers, which is probably most of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even just the number of Mac developers is way bigger now than it was in 2005, 2006.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it wouldn’t surprise me if the idea of like, give people something that they have to then give back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the end is just too large of a scale to do this time. Like to make that, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would just be so, first of all, it would probably be like incredibly wasteful. Like all the electronics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’d be manufacturing and then having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John recycle at the end of
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I mean, they could let them keep it too. Like, there’s no reason, you know, it would be useless for you, because it would
⏹️ ▶️ John probably be unsupported by the next actual release version of MacOS, but you could have them keep it too. But I see what you’re saying about
⏹️ ▶️ John the scale. Although, speaking of scale, didn’t they do something similar with Apple TV development? Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, a smaller user base, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I got one, but it was, it was, you just, you paid a dollar, because they had to charge you something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some kind of accounting reason. So you signed up as, like, you filed, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a request to get one of these, and if they granted it, and it was through the developer account system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if they granted your request, you were allowed to buy an Apple TV for $1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I forget whether that was actually before they were available. I don’t think it was. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyone else could buy them as well, but you just got yours maybe like a week ahead of time or something, or like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was obviously certainly cheaper, and that was the main issue there. But I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was something like this. it’s very possible that they can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release a whole Mac to the public with very little software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco available for it. Although the funny thing is, if you look at how much software people run on their Macs that is not made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Apple, I mean, yeah, most of us run stuff that is not made by Apple, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet Apple could sell a MacBook Air tomorrow that only ran their software for the first few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months that it was out, and it wouldn’t sell zero copies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft ran that experiment.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Microsoft did Windows on ARM that
⏹️ ▶️ John had very little support from third-party applications, and it didn’t sell that well, but I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a product that they sold. Yeah, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco released it. So I think what’s possibly a more likely outcome here is maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple sells a laptop, but only, like, they actually sell it. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the first ARM Mac. Here it is. It’s a MacBook Air or something, or maybe a 13-inch MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s something like that with, you know, it’s exactly what you said. It’s like, whatever the current,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, case and design, it’ll look exactly like what we sell now, because we’re not going to put any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco additional work into this, like, you know, kind of beta product. And it’ll just have arm guts inside of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’ll be compatible with almost nothing, but you can use it for development. And maybe they sell it only through the developer portal. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe you have to log into your developer account to buy it, and then, you know, you sell it to developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you, maybe you even call it a beta product, you know, and that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you try to keep it out of the hands of the general public as much as possible, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least discourage people in some way from using it. Maybe it can only run software that you sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your developer ID and nothing else. Somehow you make it so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most regular people are not gonna wanna get their hands on one. But then, otherwise, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a regular product that developers can buy. Something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe. Well, the way they would make it discourage is they would say, look, this is not gonna be supported by the next version
⏹️ ▶️ John of macOS. This is not a supported machine. It’s just for you porting your software. From
⏹️ ▶️ John that point on, pretend no one gave back those Pentium 4s. Those would have not been supported
⏹️ ▶️ John by later versions of the operating system unless Apple explicitly did it. Someone in the chat room was saying that it used BIOS
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of EFI. I forget if that was the case, but that was a weird machine, right? And so as long as
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re upfront about what you’re getting into here and tell people, don’t buy this
⏹️ ▶️ John expecting to use this as your Mac. That’s not gonna happen. This is for your, it’s a developer transition kit.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a dev platform. Like I said, with game consoles, it’s ample precedent. Every console game that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John available at launch was developed on a dev kit, on provisional, weird, mongrel
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware that everybody, you know, like the whole world of console development, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is how it works. You get a dev kit. The dev kit often is very, very different
⏹️ ▶️ John from the console that’s released to people, you know, in hardware and software, especially if you’re gonna be there on launch.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, those dev kits, Historically, they’ve actually been very expensive. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John ship them to developers all over the world. And I don’t know if there are more Mac developers than there are console
⏹️ ▶️ John developers. I have to imagine there’s more console developers when you add Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all together.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s gotta be more of them. And it’s a proven system. And then again, in the console world, they
⏹️ ▶️ John charge you thousands of dollars for these dev kits, which are useless to you, essentially, especially if you have one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John early ones before the console actually launches, because they may have
⏹️ ▶️ John major differences to the actual production hardware. But that’s how the sausage
⏹️ ▶️ John is made. So, and again, you can’t buy, you can’t just go into Target and buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a PS5 dev kit. Certainly now you can’t, you can’t buy a PS4 dev kit. You have to go through Sony and you have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a developer and you know, so I feel like there are established systems for this. The developer transition kit was weird
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was a rental and they wanted you to return it. But then in some ways that’s kind of an Apple-y move where they don’t want these things
⏹️ ▶️ John out there in the world. You know what I mean? And that’s the firmest way to explain to people,
⏹️ ▶️ John this will not be your Mac for the next five years. Like, we’re not gonna support it. Just pretend it didn’t exist. It is a
⏹️ ▶️ John developer transition kit. It’s a kit, it’s not a Mac, it’s just a kit.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason, I think people can go back to the iPad thing, is like I said, I think the only reason they will do that
⏹️ ▶️ John is if they’ve already been doing that internally. If the way they’ve developed this is internally,
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than making a dev kit, they’re like, well, we’ve already got iPad hardware, So why don’t we just use that as a dev kit inside Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ John If they’ve already done all of that work, then yeah, they’ll just do that for external people as well. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I question why they would do that work internally because internally is exactly where they make these weird transition kit
⏹️ ▶️ John things. So I’ll be very surprised if the iPad is the transition kit but if it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gotta be something they’ve been doing internally for a long time and they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John saying we’re going to leverage that work. Why would we repeat that work with something that looks more like
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac. Certainly the iPads are fast enough and we’ve already got this cool keyboard thing and we’re all set
⏹️ ▶️ John to go. It’s already a weird, not so floppy laptop, so let’s just go with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we’ll see. Gruber had a big post about how un-Apple-like it seems and how
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be weird to have a touchscreen with an OS that isn’t touch-based. When I read that
⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber post, often on Daring Fireball there’s a post that I will read and nod my head and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, I agree with every single part of this. But when I get to the end of it, I start to have flashbacks
⏹️ ▶️ John of the earlier Daring Fireball post from years ago where I agree with every single part of it, but it turned out, all
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is sound, logical reasoning, but it turned out to be wrong for like, because like apple gonna apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sometimes they just do something different.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, boy, I agreed with that post. Everything made perfect sense. And it does, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we just decided to do something different. It’s like, oh well, that’s the difficulty of predicting Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just an organization full of people, and sometimes decisions happen one way or another based on the things you don’t know about or just
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes whim. It’s like when you do, if you were to try to make a decision, do the big pros and cons column,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can be misleading and you’re like, look, I’ve got all these pros and very few cons, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John second con down is may cause death.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And you look at the list and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you did a blog post that just showed the pros, you’d be like, wow, this is a slam dunk. Look at all these
⏹️ ▶️ John pros. They all make sense, they’re all logical, but if you don’t dwell on this one con, it’s like may cause death.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eh, you know. So anyway, I’m not saying the iPad Developer Transition Kit may cause death, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it really depends on how much you feel, how you feel about that keyboard and
⏹️ ▶️ John touching the screen on your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I received a text message from someone inside your house, John, and it said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something along the lines of, I have never been more tempted to touch John’s screen than I am right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. It made me so happy. And I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I told this individual that they should not, and even though you were bad cop that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, I still didn’t think that they should. That’s how you know I love you, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no one should touch my screen. Why would anyone do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I have no, I can’t think of a thousand different reasons, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was that on, I forget, was that on this show or on Rectif? Sorry, I talked about it on my screen. It must have been last episode on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this show. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that it’s never been
⏹️ ▶️ John touched. Yeah. Yeah. Why break the streak?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you can’t. there. Social distancing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsor this week, Notion, and please give to the charities we link to in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes. And finally, thank you to our new members. That’s really great if you signed up and we really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appreciate it. So thank you very much and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes at atp.fm And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so
After-show
⏹️ ▶️ John Now we’re in the after show and I can tell the most obnoxious
⏹️ ▶️ John slash funny slash still obnoxious idea I had for the pricing tiers. You know, so Tiff came
⏹️ ▶️ John up with the 8, 16, 32 thing and we were like, oh, I don’t want to do that. Let’s just start simple blah blah. I’m like, wait a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John What if we have a thing where the more members we get,
⏹️ ▶️ John the higher pricing tiers you unlock, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So to be clear, it’s not like when Pinboard launched, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every member that subscribed added a cent or a tenth of a cent or something to the price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the next member. So it’s not that. You’re saying you could still sign up, but you would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the ability to pay more money as everything went up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s not even that. It’s like, so the people would sign up, and the original would just have the one pricing tier, and they’d all sign up at that
⏹️ ▶️ John one pricing tier, but then after you get 100 members, you unlock the second pricing tier. Now those people who
⏹️ ▶️ John already signed up, they got their pricing tier and it’s still there, but they’ve unlocked the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John for future people to pay more if they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ John nonsensical. Right, right. And the more members you get, the higher pricing tiers get unlocked.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t mean anyone ever has to pay them, they just get unlocked. I see a lot of stuff like this in video games, where you’re like, unlock
⏹️ ▶️ John harder difficulties. Like, why am I unlocking a harder difficulty? I had just enough trouble getting through this. Congratulations,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve unlocked nightmare mode. I don’t wanna unlock nightmare mode. me a week to get through the hard
⏹️ ▶️ John mode. I mean, again, Tiff enjoys that. But I thought it was funny, the idea of the more people
⏹️ ▶️ John sign up, the more you unlock it, mostly because just it would be a curiosity, like to see, will anyone,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you unlock the $128 a month mode, it’s like, will anyone sign up for that? And then each week we could
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey far, no takers
⏹️ ▶️ John if we get more members, we’ll unlock 256.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like one of the biggest reasons why we decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to have multiple pricing tiers is like, you know, eight bucks a month. We’ve recognized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like slightly premium for for what we’re offering for, you know, what other podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and YouTube channels charge for their patreons. We’re at we’re like right at or slightly above
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the basic level. I feel like five and $10 a month are very common price points for these kinds of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So eight is right there in the middle. I think I would have a hard time sleeping at night if somebody was paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us $64 a month for this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t have any trouble at
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the proponent of
⏹️ ▶️ John the open text field. If you want, just type a number. Type a number you want to pay us per month and we will accept
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But no one’s gonna actually do that. So this is all just funny things to think about. But then again,
⏹️ ▶️ John we thought that idea of putting wheels on a shirt for $4 actually was funny too. And that was the most popular shirt because
⏹️ ▶️ John people are weird. That’s true. Anyway, we’re starting simple. but we have a lot of ideas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real-time follow-up with regard to shirts, by the way. I think it took, if I recall correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alex Cox sent me a text message at exactly 8.01 Eastern time saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the shirt still available? Which I thought was extremely well-played. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was very grumbly, but I thought it was very well done. But I definitely did get a surprising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of tweets that did not strike me as trolling. People saying, oh gosh, I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forget. I knew I was going to forget, and I forgot. So all you people who are responsible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and actually buy when we ask you to, I appreciate that because you will be surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how many people say, oh, oh no, oh, it was me this month, or this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey season, I guess I should say. It was me, it was me this time. It was almost me this time. Yeah, I always
⏹️ ▶️ John wire. It has been me. Like I’ve said in the past, I’ve forgotten to buy our own shirts. Yeah. You know, my kids
⏹️ ▶️ John wear them, and you know, we bought, and sometimes you just, like, oh, I’ll get around to it. I miss, what did I miss? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I missed the, when we did the multi-color shirts, it was like all different colors. I forgot to order those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah. I ordered all my stuff for this like within eight hours of it ending.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Now, I think I was the first of us because we all use the same account, you know, so we can get it at cost.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think I was the first one of the three of us to do it. And I was, I thought like eight hours out. So maybe I was more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than eight hours, but I certainly didn’t think I was, you know, I didn’t have a lot of extra time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I definitely procrastinated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Normally I order one of everything at the beginning of any sale because what you don’t want is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for somebody to get to the site and see that there’s been zero sales. That just looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always want to put in any of our orders first before we announce it to the public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that way they get there and say, oh look, people are buying this. It’s happening, right? Because you don’t want there to be a big zero
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Bateman That’s why we all signed up for ATP member accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I told anybody, hey, here’s the link. I signed up for the second one, and then I deleted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yep. Hey, you got to test if account deletion works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, you could just like, now that we’ve deleted those numbers, you can just assign two to the
⏹️ ▶️ John audio increment column that probably has like seven in it for my thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. There is no auto increment column in this. This is a random ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John Such a weirdo. What? There’s the UUID people, and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s the auto increment people, and I am an auto increment person. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To be fair, this is not a UUID, it’s a random integer. There’s a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are you doing, that’s making me even more
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco upset. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey well, everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s your job to have so many members sign up that it shows Marco why it’s a bad idea to use a random integer
⏹️ ▶️ John as a unique key in a table.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why? It’s a really big integer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s what everybody says.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There’s a reason UUIDs exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a really big integer, it’ll be fine. Everybody, now we need to have,
⏹️ ▶️ John what, like two and a half billion signups And then we will show Marco the error of his ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not 32-bit. 64-bit, sure. OK, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey anyway, there’s a reason UUIDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t MySQL have native support for UUID columns? Probably. Why are you just making it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. MySQL has all sorts of support for native storage of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly complex value types. But you’re generally better off not using that support, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s weird. When they say native, though, it’s probably all strings under the covers anyway, knowing MySQL. Yeah, right. It’s like not
⏹️ ▶️ John actually native, like packed binary support for UUIDs like real databases have. It’s always just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, well, there’s some code that will generate a thing, but we store it as a string in a Varch archive.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just went to our member admin page. We don’t have anything on there yet, huh? Nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I wanna see a count, man. You gotta give me a count.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you, we have 117 members so far. Hey, that’s excellent. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John by that. How many people are on the stream? Like 400? Oh, that’s brutal.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I just wanna know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the people who listen live are like our absolute Like biggest fans because some of their up like in
⏹️ ▶️ John the middle of the night or an early morning and weird times because a time Zone, so if you’re listening to live stream and listen to all
⏹️ ▶️ John this BS and everything You are very likely to be a super fan who at
⏹️ ▶️ John least consider becoming a member So this is like the best case scenario for signups.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean in all fairness We have a like 25% conversion rate among this group. Like all right, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m saying. Like this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John best case Yeah, obviously they will not. 25% of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners will not sign up. That would be amazing. Like, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of optional payment for anything that was above that was above like 10%. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you only you won’t break double digits for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure we’re going to I’m not sure we’re going to break 1%. This is nothing we’ve discussed. I have this optimism versus pessimism.
⏹️ ▶️ John How many people are going to want to sign up for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco membership? So we’ll see. Yeah. Casey basically thinks no one’s going to sign up. I think everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to sign up. And John’s kind of in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey middle. That’s an exaggeration.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was the most pessimistic for a long time until we started talking to other people who had membership programs
⏹️ ▶️ John and learned what their conversions are. And I’m like, all right, well, I feel like we could probably do about
⏹️ ▶️ John as well as them. So I was super pessimistic in the beginning, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been coming around. So you’re right, I am kind of in the middle now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would love to get 5%. That’s kind of my target of like, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can probably do it. I don’t think it’s gonna be super easy to get 5%, but I don’t think it’s out of reach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I think that’s kinda like my
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, ever the optimist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that would be a pretty good goal. But if you look at like, you know, Hello Internet, you know, like other kinda like nearby
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows and their proportion of, but it’s different, because like everyone offers different stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like some people offer nothing and it’s just like pay to support
⏹️ ▶️ John us. Can we tell the live streamers the thing that I didn’t mention in the show that I desperately wanted to, but you didn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to? I forget, oh, the Ask ATP priority thing? That was a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. No, the CB thing. The CB
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing? Oh, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Oh! Yes, I can mention it? Yeah, yeah, go for it. I think that’s fair. So, someone mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat before, discounts on merch. I think that we’re absolutely going to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t have a merch sale now, so it’s irrelevant, which is part of why we didn’t want to talk about it, but if you’re listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to the live stream right now and you’re wondering, hey, are they gonna have merch discount codes for members?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we are planning to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, we already worked it out with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Content Bureau and everything, but the problem was that, Yeah, we didn’t want to launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a membership immediately after our merch sale ended and say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next time we sell merch you can get a little discount.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I wanted to do that because I think people understand the arrow of time and can say, yeah, I understand. You didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John launch the membership until after the sale was over. Like, we didn’t, this is not ideal timing, okay? We’re not, we didn’t, like coronavirus
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of forced our hand a little bit on this. Like we’d been talking about it for a while so things could kind of rush. But anyway, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John wondering, if I sign up for a membership, is there a possibility of discounts on merch in the future? The answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes. Yeah, and we know the timing on this is weird. Like, right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now is not a great time to be launching a whole new thing. It’s like, hey, everyone give us extra money! It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the greatest time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But we’re in it for the long haul here.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no time like the present, so we understand that it’s weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything’s a bit weird now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We didn’t want to take any time out of our WWDC show to do it then. Yeah, definitely not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, you know, it’s like we didn’t, but we wanted to have it in place by then cause we know it’s, we’re going to be very busy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all the WBC content for probably weeks afterwards. So like, yeah, it’s, it’s a whole thing. There was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were, there were a lot of considerations that went into this timing, even though it seems like it sucks. Basically it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks less than other timing would have sucked. That would be nearby.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to state for the record that I am not above, I’ll call them stretch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goals for lack of a better terminology, but if John really does want to play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey destiny with Marco and me and do it in some way that, you know, we can have people watch it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Twitch or something like that. If I don’t know what the number is, but if enough people become members, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine, sure. You want to make me suffer? Fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m volunteering both of you for this. The only reason we’re not doing it right now is because I don’t know how. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the only reason we’re not doing it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, and Tiff probably knows how. We’ll do that as soon as we can make cooking with John. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make, I wanted to make a cooking show with John just not me cooking just like filming John cooking and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know That’s harder than what I was but I’m just planning you just need to show screen like screen sharing like that Now is
⏹️ ▶️ John like a thing with cameras in a kitchen I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated but still like imagine how good cooking with John would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be no I disagree if you’re gonna do it then it needs to be John tries to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey teach Casey how to cook.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah Well, that’s that’s the whole destiny angles. I’m trying to teach you to how to play destiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part. John teaches Keisha to cook over Zoom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you remember when we were all at John’s house and I shredded or grated cheese unsatisfactorily?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he gave me like 10 minutes of crap
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. Like someone who had never been in a kitchen before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s about accurate. And so, can you imagine? I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey commit that I don’t know what the number is, but I am ready, willing, well, maybe not able, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m ready and willing to figure out how to make this all possible so that if we get enough members…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the best thing would be to do what Queer Eye does, where like, John teaches Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something about cooking and then Casey has to do it and John has to watch, but he can’t say anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s brutal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, anyway, you’re distracting from my destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey idea, which I think is much more feasible. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Tiff knows how to do all this game streaming stuff. And maybe when the PS5 is out, like we’ll set something up and we can
⏹️ ▶️ John figure it out but that’s like in the distant future when we get our act together we have all
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of wacky ideas for things that don’t make sense to do except for if there’s this group of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are like paying to be members and that would be like you know member again
⏹️ ▶️ John like for the chat room people if you have ideas even though we’ve discussed like probably all of them send them in because it’s like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially voting by like not that this is democracy but like if a million people say that they
⏹️ ▶️ John want this or don’t don’t want that, that will influence what we may or may not do in the future. So if you have ideas
⏹️ ▶️ John about member specific stuff that you want, feel free. The only thing that’s really off the table is
⏹️ ▶️ John removing things from the show for the free people because as we said, we don’t want to do that. So like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I think you should make the after show, put it behind a paywall. Nope, that we’re not doing that. We
⏹️ ▶️ John thought of that, but we said, let’s do it. Right. So you know, that’s not that again,
⏹️ ▶️ John if if 90% of our listeners become members, we’ll put the whole show behind a paywall, but that’s not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of you are asking for the unedited live stream, similar to what The Incomparable does with their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bootleg feeds. That is something we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. We’ve actually talked about that more than arguably anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t want to do it because I think it sucks, but if, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John You can imagine listeners in the live stream, you know why Marco doesn’t want to do it, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey gonna sound crappy and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be edited and like you know everyone who listens to the livestream knows what the live stream is like. I was in favor
⏹️ ▶️ John of it because it’s a thing we’re doing for free anyway and we would still do it for free by the way we would still
⏹️ ▶️ John stream it for free like everyone who’s listening now you’d still be able to listen for free and do whatever you want
⏹️ ▶️ John but this would just be like what if you’re not awake at that time and you still want to hear the Garbagey livestream? There would
⏹️ ▶️ John be a feed with the Garbagey livestream in it for members. But maybe nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John wants that. I don’t know. Like, anyway, we started simple. We’re thinking of things. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John figure it out as we go along. But if that’s something that you want, write in and tell us. You know, baby
⏹️ ▶️ John steps. We still gotta, you know, figure all this stuff out and get it churning
⏹️ ▶️ John along and see how many support requests we’re gonna get from people can’t figure out the website or whatever.