383: Demand-Paged Outrage
18 Jun 2020Marco discovers restaurants, Casey discovers the Touch Bar, and Hey discovers the App Store.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Guilt, self-care, and Boom Boom Sauce
- Follow-up:
- ATP MEMBERSHIP IS LIVE!!
Please consider joining, but we’re still cool if you don’t. 💙 - ARM Mac dev kits
- Pitching an ARM MacBook Air versus an Intel MacBook Pro
- Tim Cook announces Racial Equity and Justice Initiative
- …oh, P.S., Apple’s Head of Diversity and Inclusion left
- ATP MEMBERSHIP IS LIVE!!
- Casey’s new MacBook Pro
- A New Breed of Macs
- Hey.com’s App Store Rejection
- Post-show: Brief WWDC predictions
Sponsored by:
- Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $20 credit with code atp2020.
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- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
Chapters
- 🏖
- Membership update
- ARM Mac dev-kit speculation
- What if ARM Air beats all Pros?
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Racial Equity & Justice Initiative
- Casey’s new MacBook Pro
- Sponsor: Fully
- ARM early days
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
- Apple IAP rules vs. Hey
- Ending theme
- WWDC software wishlist
🏖
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve got a little bit of weird setup this week Next week is the time that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am hypothetically going to be not at home, which is a semi inconvenient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time and from the from the Perspective of what though there’s nothing going on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next week, right? But nevertheless, I thought you know what? I should probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try out all this new equipment including a brand new friggin computer And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am recording and speaking to you this week from my MacBook Pro, and if everything sounds like garbage, I’ll just lie and say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it was the adorable the whole time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I want to hear more about that computer later, actually, because this is your first new laptop in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while. Yeah, definitely, and we will talk about it. But yeah, if it all sounds like garbage, don’t blame Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blame me. I’ve changed everything except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my microphone my microphone and the preamp. But like, cabling got changed, the computer got changed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything is different. And so I figured, you know what, if I’m going to screw this one up, then let’s screw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one up and not next week’s, which is a little bit more important. Why not both? Yeah, por que
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no los dos. Did you by any chance get the, you know, oxygen-free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey solid monster cables?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, this guy who used to work at Staples, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco have that right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told me that it was all garbage and I shouldn’t do it, and then he got fired for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t get fired for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you didn’t? Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I just was reprimanded a little bit by telling customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the super expensive cables because they were a waste of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lightly reprimanded, I know how that goes. What else going on? How’s the beach?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, I feel bad appreciating anything right now and having a good time right now, but I really am having a good time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s really, after months of misery, it’s extremely nice for my mental health to have some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s, it’s funny you say that. Um, something I wrestle with a lot. Um, I carry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with me a lot of guilt about a lot of different things, not white cars, coincidentally, because those can just happen to you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a listener wrote to us, which I won’t say any more than that. But, uh, white cars can happen to you. I don’t care guilt about that, but I carry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guilt about basically everything else in the world. And it’s funny because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, you know, I’m going away soon and not for a whole long time, but long enough, and I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking forward to it and really excited about it, and I also feel a little guilty about that, but on the same side, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not on the same side, I guess on the flip side of the coin, I feel like. All of us, every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single one of us, the three of us, everyone listening, we all need to take care of ourselves by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever means we possibly can. Maybe that’s buying something frivolous. Maybe it’s getting takeout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a really expensive restaurant. Maybe it’s, you know, going to the beach for a while, be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a day, a week, a month, or a year. You know, whatever the case may be, I don’t think any of us should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel guilty about taking care of ourselves and our loved ones, even though I totally agree with you and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally feel guilty about the fact that I’m excited to be going away and quarantining in four different walls for a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Did you? So have you been to any restaurants yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve gotten plenty of takeout. I have not been to any, and this is going to be really challenging for us when we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on our vacation because even though none of the restaurants in this little town
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we love so much are particularly remarkable, we still really love these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restaurants. I don’t know. I’ve not experienced—is it Boom Boom or Bang Bang Sauce?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tom Moore Boom Boom Sauce. That might be something else. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Fair enough. Well, it’s Bang Bang Shrimp at—what do you call them? What’s the Outback owned Bonefish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Grill. Anyway, point is, I don’t know if Boom Boom Sauce is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most amazing thing that’s ever been put on any food item ever, and it may be. But my assumption
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and my expectation is that it is legitimately very good, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earth-shatteringly good, right? And so these restaurants at this place that we’re going, they’re good. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good restaurants, but they’re not earth-shatteringly good. But part of the experience was that we would go out to dinner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most nights, which is a very unusual thing for us and go to these restaurants in years past and experience them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and eat at these restaurants and we really love that. And you know, there’s no reason we can’t do takeout this year, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of the fun is eating out and our kids thankfully are pretty good for the most part at restaurants.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I always enjoy that and Aaron always enjoyed that and they enjoyed that and I’m a little bummed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not going to be part of the shtick this year unless on the extraordinarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slim chance there’s like literally nobody else on the patio and And then maybe I would consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, maybe, but even then I’d probably just get takeout. But have you done anything, Marco? Have you had your boom boom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anthony Well, first of all, the boom boom sauce can be ordered at one of the delis in a to-go container.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I have been having boom boom sauce on my eggs since we’ve gotten to the beach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the very first day I went there and I ordered, you know, you had to like, you know, give them a list, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text a list to a number and they would bring it to your house basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And on that list was a tub of boom boom sauce from the deli. And I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it whenever I want. It’s just like a Ken’s food service thing. You just have to order a whole gallon of it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s from Amazon or from some kind of food service provider. You can’t get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in regular consumer-sized amounts. And I decided to just leave it be like a special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fire Island thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really enjoy having this part of my life be a whole different mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so much of modern life, you can kind of keep the same and bring with you wherever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go, year-round, anywhere in the world. You know, if you want to, you can have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of things be exactly the same all the time. And for some things in my life, I do that. You know, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I brought my iMac here, and I continue most of my work here and everything. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is nice to have like a different mode that you go in, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain places, or in certain seasons or certain times of year or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is to have a different lifestyle. And one of the reasons I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it here so much is that the nature of Fire Island forces a different lifestyle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a large degree. There’s no cars here. You get everywhere on bikes. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flat and everything is just, instead of roads, there’s just very wide sidewalks and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s charming. And like part of a recipe for charm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to take something that you have to do all the time and add inconveniences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John are something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inconveniences that result in a pleasurable but more difficult requirement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for instance here, to get groceries, you can’t just drive your car to the grocery store and load up and drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home. You have to either order for delivery, which I don’t usually do if I can help it, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a bike or a wagon to the grocery store and you walk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re only here in the summer when the weather’s nice. There’s no cars in the way. There’s no hills.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s flat. It’s kind of charming to have to walk outside in the summertime and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or bike to the grocery store and then bike home. You take these things that in everyday life are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of too easy in a lot of ways, like, or they’ve gotten too easy or they’ve gotten too routine and you add things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that make everyday life slightly more of a pain in the butt, but in ways that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resulted in charming outcomes. That either you get more exercise, you get fresh air, you get to ride a bike around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that kind of stuff. So this place forces a certain lifestyle that includes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that kind of stuff. And this is where, you know, I wear my Apple watch a lot more here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do different kinds of exercise here. I started running this year for the first time ever. Because running here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey We should talk about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. Running at home is, where I live at home, running is-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, that would not be fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s pretty unpleasant most of the year. Just for weather reasons, it’s pretty unpleasant. And it’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hilly, very hilly neighborhood. So running at home is not incredibly pleasant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So at home I like to row on a rowing machine. But here, I like to run, it turns out. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a really nice place and a really nice time of the year to run. I like having a more different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lifestyle here. Like, just to be different as much as possible. Like, I wear different clothes here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have different priorities here. So anyway, I forgot, how do we get on this topic?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know, inconvenience and doing things differently and uniquely. And the boom boom sauce,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And the boom boom sauce.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the boom boom sauce is one other thing that I add to that pile of things that are different. I have an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entirely different flavor profile for my breakfast when I’m here. At home,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we make scrambled eggs a certain way with spinach and tomatoes and everything. When I’m here, we usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do boiled eggs cut in half with boom boom sauce or fully deviled with boom boom sauce on top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s like a full, it’s a whole different lifestyle. It’s part of the charm of like shifting into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this mode. And yeah, I like having more of those things. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use different headphones out here. Like just like, just everything is like a little bit different, oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that I like more or that are better or just different from what I do the rest of the year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I’m glad that you’re there. You sound happy. Not that you sounded unhappy before,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you sound a little bit airier and, yeah, I don’t know if that’s the right word, but like happier, more jovial maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and to actually answer your question that you actually asked, you know, 15 minutes ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John rambled on about how much I like it here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after the day after last week’s episode was my birthday, as you mentioned, thank you for, thank you for that. It turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out that the day before my birthday was the first day in this county
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that restaurants were allowed to be open. And it’s still very restricted. It’s still it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outdoor seating only. The tables are spaced really far apart so they don’t have many, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of tables. And you have to wear masks the entire process unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are sitting at your table. So to and from the table, if you get up to go to the bathroom, like masks during all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times. The servers and the entire staff wear masks all the time. But you can sit there at your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco table outside far from everybody else with no mask on when you were at the table and eat your food.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Part of my birthday celebration is I got to go out to a restaurant for the first time in months. And… Oh, that’s awesome. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was amazing. And you know, it’s a decent restaurant. It’s not like a mind-blowing restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a nice restaurant, but it’s not like, you know, mind-blowing, but it was a restaurant. And when you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, quarantined for all this time and you’ve had at best takeout food, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, we weren’t actually doing that much of because the takeout around us isn’t very good. So we were mostly just cooking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re not that great at it or into it. So it’s been a few months of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really bland food life. And so to celebrate my birthday with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a night at a restaurant, even though it was a very strange experience, all the masks and everything, and all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spacing and outdoor, it didn’t feel incredibly normal, but it was really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was a fantastic way to celebrate. So if you have the option to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that safely where you are, I suggest it. You don’t have to do it all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and obviously it’s up to you what kind of risk you want to take. If you can do it safely in a way that fits your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk profile, it’s a really nice luxury to have restaurants again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m looking forward to whatever that time is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they could really use the help, honestly. Oh, yeah. Like, don’t feel guilty about going to a restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Feel guilty every meal you’re not going to a restaurant because they are desperate for a business right now. Because restaurants,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we mentioned before, restaurants are not, even in the best of times, a high profit business with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of runway. To go three months or whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been with either significantly reduced or no profits,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a lot of restaurants can absorb that. Help your restaurants, go to them. Spend a lot of money at your restaurants.
Membership update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s start with some follow-up and we have to there there’s no way not to start with a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Genuine in deep. Thank you to all of our listeners for For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even considering joining our brand new membership program and for more than I expected of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to have actually joined our membership program The feedback has been almost you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, you almost universally great. I have been overjoyed by the feedback What did we say John that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were in the middle? I was the pessimist and John was the optimist Is that what we concluded? Mad
⏹️ ▶️ John Fientist Margot was the optimist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. That’s what I meant. I’m sorry. Yes. Well, anyway, so I definitely was wrong without question. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I haven’t talked with the guys about where they think it all landed, but I have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overjoyed by it and extremely impressed by it. A couple of things that we want to, well, actually, before we go any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey further, any comments from the two of you about what has transpired in the best possible way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for ATP membership?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s been wonderful. I’m extremely pleased. Thank you all so much for supporting us, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so quickly. My optimistic goal was a certain percentage of our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listener base, and we are halfway there already after one week. So that’s extremely…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is heartening a word? I know disheartening is… Whatever the opposite of disheartening is, I assume it’s heartening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never heard people use that word, but it’s extremely heartening. I’m going to go with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have so much support from all of you, so thank you very much. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on what you might want out of membership, possible improvements we could make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. Surprisingly, most people seem very happy with exactly what we already launched, which is kind of fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have heard a few concerns about things like currency conversion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or annual payments. We’re looking into a lot of different things. No guarantees. We’re going to see what we can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of trade-offs to a lot of this stuff, but rest assured we are looking into a lot of that stuff as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As for the, like, you know, what you get, everybody wants Cooking with John. Steve McLaughlin That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That is absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. John, is it going to happen?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Greenewald Talk about everybody. I saw about the same number. Well, I saw more requests for Destiny. Maybe it’s just because they’re sending
⏹️ ▶️ John them just to me and maybe they’re sending the Cooking with John ones to you. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway, those are
⏹️ ▶️ John stretch goals. We’re nowhere near any of these things yet. So we thank you for the innovative ideas. We will
⏹️ ▶️ John keep them in mind. But a lot of the stuff like that, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and one thing that I can definitely say that we are working on and that we do plan to launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unless we’ve run into some massive like showstopper, but we do plan to work on or I am I’m working on and we do plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to launch a Quote bootleg feed which is a feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that basically gives you recordings of the live broadcast Very quickly after it ends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re looking into that now. I’ve started building some of the support into the CMS We just ran out of time and I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when this will be done But this is something that we are, you know, again, unless some massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showstopper comes up that we can’t foresee, we do plan to do this sometime fairly soon. Maybe by next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, if it’s aggressive, but I don’t know. Oh, next week’s WBC, so maybe not next week, but we’ll see. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna, we probably have a very busy few weeks ahead of us with WBC stuff, so it might not happen before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but we’re trying. We’re working on it. A lot of people have asked for it. Keep in mind, like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this is, is the often requested unedited feed. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for better and for worse. You know, unedited really means unedited. There’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be stuff like, you know, our stumbles. You might, depending on how we do it, you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear a Skype artifact here or there, or you might, like, you know, somebody might drop a word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the Skype connection gets a little bit flaky. Like, depending on how, you know, what end we record this on, how we do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the audio quality will not probably be anywhere near as good as the final released show is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a lot of people don’t care, because it’s still, you know, it’s less than a bowl, it’s not bad. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we’re working on that. It’s basically gonna be exactly what we are broadcasting on the live stream. People have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requested that in large numbers, and so we are working on that. I don’t think any other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standout requests have been coming in. Do you guys think of anything else?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we covered most of them. The currency and longer time periods. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a bunch of other stuff. Anyway, we’ll like, expect the membership to evolve. Like I’m speaking for myself,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m very motivated to try to make the membership program good. Like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about diversifying income and everything, you know, and we’re very happy with the membership signups
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. But realistically, it’s still a tiny fraction of the listeners. But for that tiny fraction, it’s a new
⏹️ ▶️ John relationship with our listeners. Like, you know, not that ad
⏹️ ▶️ John sales and everything is particularly indirect. It’s still fairly direct. You listen to the show. We sell ads on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s not really that complicated. But now with direct payment, I feel like there’s a straight line
⏹️ ▶️ John from listener directly to us. So I do want to provide something that everybody likes. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume that this, the offering will evolve over time, but right out of the gate, uh, we’re trying to hit
⏹️ ▶️ John the top request, which is the bootleg feed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, yeah, we don’t know what the timing will be in terms of when any bootleg will be available. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also at this point making no guarantees about, um, you know, Oh, it’ll always be, you know, within the first half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour after the show, it might be the next morning for us. We don’t know. We’re going to aim for as quickly as possible and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re going to aim for as good sounding as we can reasonably get with as little work as possible. But again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it very well may be that you’re hearing a Skype recording of two thirds of us and a really crisp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recording of one of us. We’ll just see. And it can involve, it can evolve, you know, if, if we start with the bootleg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we do it immediately, but it sounds like dirt and then we realize, well, maybe you’d rather do it in the morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’ll sound really, really good. Maybe we’ll do that. We’ll see. But we are committing to barring,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Marco said, any major showstoppers. We’re committing to having that sometime as soon as can reasonably be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hoped, given that the most busy time of the year starts in a few days. So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to try. Also, something that I thought was extremely kind and flattering, even though it wasn’t flattering to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, was that a lot of people said, well, I don’t know if I want to stop listening to the ads because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ads are really good and I find stuff that I like in the ads and that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea. That’s what the ads are there for. And I just wanted to remind everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both tongue in cheek and seriously, that even if you are a member, that doesn’t mean you have to use the member
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only feed, you can continue to listen to the regular feed, the free feed, even if you’re a paid member.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, you do you, that’s perfectly fine. And I like Marco’s ads and I also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find things that I enjoy in not only our own ads, but other podcasts ads. So that’s a perfectly reasonable thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do. But yes, in summary, thank you so very, very, very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really does mean an incredible amount to all three of us that so many of you have opened your wallets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically for the three of us, and that’s extremely, extremely kind. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really flabbergasted at how the response has been. So thank you. All right
ARM Mac dev-kit speculation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about Xbox 360 dev kits. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of a collected follow-up about the ARM Mac dev kit thing that we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about last show. If Apple’s going to roll out a series of ARM-based Macs or Macs based on some other CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John other than x86, we were talking about what kind of hardware they might give developers
⏹️ ▶️ John to port their applications and test their applications. And we talked about a bunch of stuff, and then we got a bunch of feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John about different theories. The first bit is, when I was talking about how
⏹️ ▶️ John console development works, how you get a dev kit for a console and it’s not like the console, right? And that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John something that game developers deal with in the console world and have forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone pointed out an old item from back a couple generations ago in the console world,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Xbox 360. That was the generation where everybody decided to use PowerPC CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John in their consoles, including Microsoft with the 360. Uh, the one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John early dev kits for the Xbox 360 was a power Mac G5. There was that big
⏹️ ▶️ John picture. I remember of like a truck full of power Mac G5 is being delivered to Microsoft. And
⏹️ ▶️ John at the time it was like, isn’t this weird Microsoft getting a bunch of Macs and they’re not even,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not even part of like their windows thing. It’s all, you know, they’re getting them to do development work on the Xbox 360.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I will put a link in the show note if you want to take a look at that. tried to like resurrect
⏹️ ▶️ John an Xbox 360 dev kit using a power Mac g5 you know I don’t know if it was a
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware from that from that era or just trying to recreate it but it looks like the person got
⏹️ ▶️ John actual Xbox 360 games up and running on a power Mac which is totally weird so yeah development hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John that was internal obviously I don’t think I’m not sure it was ever sent out to game developers but probably
⏹️ ▶️ John was knowing the way console development works very often like first party or second
⏹️ ▶️ John party developers get really weird early access to hardware just to get going on their on their games.
⏹️ ▶️ John The next idea that was suggested by many people was what if Apple just released
⏹️ ▶️ John an add-in card for the Mac Pro and that add-in card had basically you know an ARM CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other stuff in it. Could that work? Well yeah it totally could work but
⏹️ ▶️ John but basically nobody has Mac Pros. So I’m not sure how that
⏹️ ▶️ John helps anybody except for maybe people inside Apple. Like the Mac Pro is the only Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple sells that has PCI card slots in it. And they have not sold a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, I can imagine. And it’s really expensive and they’re not gonna sell more of them by suddenly putting ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John cards in them. So I’m gonna file that under technically plausible and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe even something that they possibly could be doing internally at Apple, but boy, I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine any significant number of Mac developers running
⏹️ ▶️ John out and buying a extremely expensive Mac Pro plus an add-in card to test their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I also imagine the complexity involved in the software and hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco architecture of that, of like, okay, you’re running an Intel architecture computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Inside of it is a smaller, you know, ARM computer that yes, I know they have like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T2 and everything, but this is like a whole separate thing that would have totally separate needs and totally separate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, hardware engineering requirements and all of that for a very, very temporary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution for, you know, but that’s preparing you for a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, very near term probably like within a year future where they’re selling ARM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only Macs. So like they’re already doing all the engineering to make standalone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arm max complete you know arm only presumably standalone max right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they’re already doing like you know they’re having to engineer motherboards and I oh and power management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know all this stuff in a desktop you know desktop and laptop context that’s all gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit different than like an iPad so they’re already doing all that why would they also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a solution that’s only gonna to be around for a year maybe, that is, okay, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also going to build on the ability for this Mac Pro that nobody except John bought to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this entire like daughter card thing, like that’s, it’s just, it’s very implausible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to, okay, they’re already making a, you know, ARM Mac engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform that’s standalone, just ship an early version of that as a dev kit. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way more likely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, unless they already did it internally, but I think that honestly the timeline of the Mac Pro, it was probably too
⏹️ ▶️ John late. Like, presumably they were working on the R Macs on a timeline that started earlier than
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro, especially given how it was kind of rushed out. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple, the idea of having a whole separate computer inside there, Apple’s done that a couple times in their past. They used to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac with a 486 PC inside it. I don’t know if you remember that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh yeah, for virtual PC stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, like with a literal 486 PC. Oh, right. Like an actual Intel 486 CPU and like an entire PC.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was back with the Pizza Box Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John how they used to sell an Apple II card for some Macs, where it was basically an entire Apple II
⏹️ ▶️ John inside your Mac, and so it would run Apple II software on the Apple II card. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ John technically plausible, but highly unlikely. Mac Mini was suggested.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if we talked about this last time, but it’s like, oh, well, you know, suggesting that they ship
⏹️ ▶️ John early versions of a Mac that they’re gonna make. What about just hacking together something, you know, Like back in
⏹️ ▶️ John the day with the Pentium 4 inside a Mac Pro case, that was, let’s assemble
⏹️ ▶️ John a working Intel Mac out of the pieces that we have. We’re never gonna sell this, we’re never gonna sell a Pentium 4 Mac, but we’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John this big case, and we can get a motherboard, and we’ll shove it inside the case, and chip it out, and that’s our, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John their dev kit for Intel Macs, right? You’ve got a Mac mini case. These days, you know, they don’t, I don’t think they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John use this, you know, $700 fancy drilled out Mac Pro case, but a Mac mini case is rarely available,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s really easy to shove a tiny little ARM-based computer inside there, like, I mean, the Raspberry
⏹️ ▶️ John Pis that Casey has, or you could put five of them inside a Mac mini case. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM CPUs are probably relatively small and power efficient and no problem using a Mac mini case.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s a fairly cheap way to make a dev kit that could be economical. And
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably there will eventually be an ARM-based Mac mini, but that doesn’t matter. Like again, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Pentium 4 developer kit they sent had no relation to any
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel Mac that they were making. other than the fact that they use a cheese grater case and eventually they made, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel Macs in the cheese grater case, but everything about it was different. They never used that motherboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John they never used that CPU, they never used any of that stuff, right? So, they could take a Mac mini, shove some
⏹️ ▶️ John guts in there and distribute that. That’s a pretty cheap way to do it. It’s cheaper than even doing a laptop because you don’t have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about the screen and stuff. Although again, it might be annoying to people to have to hook up an external display if they don’t have one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV, in the same vein, how about an even smaller box? hey, we’ve got this little rounded, black
⏹️ ▶️ John rounded rectangle thing that already has an ARM CPU in it. Again, hollow it out, put in a little ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU, or if they’re working on a new Apple TV variant, then maybe they can share some hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. That could work too. It starts to get a little bit too small and a little bit too cute, but hey, who knows, stranger
⏹️ ▶️ John things can happen. Getting even more cheaper, you know, going down the line from
⏹️ ▶️ John a card for your Mac Pro or a Mac Mini or an Apple TV. How about this? Marco mentioned the T2.
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs have had little ARM CPUs in them for a while, especially ones, I can’t think it started with a touch bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was the T1 powering the original touch bar? I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what the hell the
⏹️ ▶️ John numbering was. Yeah, but anyway, most Macs have a T2 in them now. The T2 is,
⏹️ ▶️ John help me out here, is it like an A7 equivalent? I think A10-ish. No, it’s A10 from the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 7, yeah. So it’s no slouch, the T2 is no slouch. You
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s basically a similar CPU to what was in the iPhone 7. slow-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John for a Mac, but plenty fast to just do a proof of concept dev work on it. Unfortunately, the T2 is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in there. It’s not just hanging around for the hell of it, right? The T2, in addition to running
⏹️ ▶️ John the touch bar and doing whatever other stuff like that, it also is like the I-O controller for the SSDs and it does
⏹️ ▶️ John video processing. Although you could probably eke out some more headroom in the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John by shoving something else, it’s not even running, like it’s running Bridge OS or whatever the hell. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s busy. The T2 is busy. and anyone who has a T2 Mac knows
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, it’s taken a while for the T1 and T2 chips to shake out in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of driver support and having weird issues, not just related to the touch bar, but in general. I really
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think Apple would try to shoehorn anything else onto that T2. I really think it’s busy doing other things, running a different operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system. So I think we can set that one aside. That said, if there’s a T3
⏹️ ▶️ John or something in future Macs, maybe that has more headroom, I don’t know. but like, I feel like the chips
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in your computer now are doing stuff. So, you know, especially that
⏹️ ▶️ John one. I wouldn’t want the thing that’s controlling reads and writes from my SSD to all of a sudden be running like
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac software on it, right? You know, our Mac software on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another suggestion was cloud. Hey, why do they have to give anyone hardware at all? Why not just say, we have
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of virtual our Macs in the cloud and you can just sort of remote desktop into them and
⏹️ ▶️ John run your software on there and just trust us, those are all running on ARM. That way we don’t have to distribute hardware to anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of laggy, but you don’t really care. And you just want to make sure your software works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they could do that. But does that sound like an Apple-y thing to do to you? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it sounds like a Google-y thing, maybe. It doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, not that I’m saying Apple doesn’t do, you know, it doesn’t have any cloud expertise. Obviously things like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the photo, the iCloud photo library, and you know, CloudKid.
⏹️ ▶️ John and like Apple’s gotten a lot better at the cloud stuff than it used to be. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the cloud, Arm Max and the cloud strike me as not an Apple style
⏹️ ▶️ John approach. And in the end, developers would much prefer to have hardware in front of them, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John reducing the lag, being more realistic, having more control over it, and you know, if you have to like mess with it or reset it
⏹️ ▶️ John or poke it or prod it, doing it, you know, remotely over the cloud is a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of a distance. And like Marco said about the ARM card, that seems like a lot of work for a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just gonna be a brief transition and then eventually we’ll all just have ARM Macs to test on. So I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gonna happen. And the final one is software only. Not in a cloud, not anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’ll be no ARM hardware at all. All there will be is like an ARM simulator, essentially an ARM emulator
⏹️ ▶️ John that you run on your Intel Mac. And it’s an actual emulator that emulates
⏹️ ▶️ John all the ARM hardware. It’s like, not even like VMware VMware uses native instruction set. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John literal emulation. Yeah, that could work, but in the end,
⏹️ ▶️ John developers want to run their software on actual hardware if possible, and
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple’s making this hardware anyway, I feel like they can come up with some kind of solution that involves actual
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware. I don’t think they would go through the pretty big effort to try to make
⏹️ ▶️ John good enough software emulation of ARM. What they should be doing is figuring out how to emulate x86
⏹️ ▶️ John on ARM and not figuring out how to emulate ARM on x86. So that also seems like a lot of effort
⏹️ ▶️ John for not a big payoff. So of all these choices, I think the one I like the best is the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Mini because it is potentially smaller and
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper than an ARM laptop and it is still real hardware and it lets Apple reuse some
⏹️ ▶️ John of its assets. But honestly, with all these discussions, just because Apple has done
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU transitions twice in the past and we can look at what they did during those times for helping developers
⏹️ ▶️ John really has no bearing on what they’ll do this time. It was it was a long time ago. Things have changed. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has changed. Developers have changed. The world has changed, which is why I think it’s worth even just discussing all the different options like
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud and software only and the Apple TV and stuff like that. But who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, assuming this all goes off as planned next week, you know, there’ll be,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, hopefully some news related to this, but But I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine them announcing a CPU transition and also not at the developer conference telling developers
⏹️ ▶️ John how it is that they’re expected to port their applications, because that’s kind of the point of telling developers
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to know this. So we’ll have the answer to this in a week or so, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. The more people wrote in and we heard various rumblings, the more I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Mini is the most likely solution here. Because basically, they could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost just release the ARM Mac Mini today. Like it could just be the first ARM Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like okay, here’s the Mac Mini. It’s a low profile product. It doesn’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of the fancy power management stuff as laptops and everything. One area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m especially curious about is Thunderbolt. While it started out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an Intel only thing, there were some effort until I think officially started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco licensing it to other people or opened it up to other people about a couple years ago officially.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t think any of those, you know, open to other people products have actually come out yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is also the kind of like bundling of Thunderbolt 4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into USB that is happening. Like USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4, whatever, somehow, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next big version is of Thunderbolt and USB, I think it’s basically unified now. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s out yet. And I don’t think that’s anywhere near ready to be out yet. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were to make an ARM Mac mini, even for just development purposes, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would it output video to a monitor? Like maybe it might be HDMI only.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That seems, it’s possible, but I think unlikely. They could have some kind of weird Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hack, or maybe it could be kind of like the iPad Pro where it only supports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB 3 over those ports and not actually Thunderbolt, so it wouldn’t work with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of Apple’s own monitors. but well, Apple’s one currently produced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor or the last few that they made. So like that’s one option as well, again, kind of a crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option, but you know, in the context of a dev kit, it might not matter so much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s something that they do have to solve. And that also just goes to show like quite how much of a project it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get our Macs, because you have to deal with all the IO that you have either,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, IO types and technologies and needs that either don’t exist on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads or only exist in a significantly reduced way to date. So that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually, like USB4 seemed like the kind of thing it would be worth waiting for before they even released these things. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are waiting for USB4, who knows? But yeah, for the purposes of a dev kit, definitely I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the Mac Mini is the most likely option at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not too worried about the Thunderbolt thing, like, as it is free and open and anyone can license it. And, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the relationship between Apple and Intel is such that I would imagine that Apple would have no problem
⏹️ ▶️ John being first out the gate with a fully certified, custom-made, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For this reason, though?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, no, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, we’re gonna work really closely with you to cut our heads off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but Intel’s other option is, okay, well then we won’t work with you. And then Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John does want Apple’s business and other things like cell phone modems and stuff. And so, you know, Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John needs Apple more than Apple needs Intel, and Intel knows it. So I feel like that they could definitely, And this would have been things
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’ve been working on for years to like build a system on a chip with Thunderbolt built in And when they when they started that
⏹️ ▶️ John project Intel, you know Was probably enthusiastic about it because it’s probably three and a half years ago And same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with us before like the same way that Apple purportedly had such influence on the the USB C connector
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything I imagine the us before standard has had some influence from Apple as well. So I’m not really
⏹️ ▶️ John worried I feel like the Apple will have the iOS situation Sorted out when when they need to
⏹️ ▶️ John and for the dev kit like you said, they don’t need to. A dev kit, you just slap something in a dev kit. Dev kit could just have a complete
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt controller in there. Like it doesn’t have to have any relation to any hardware they’re ever gonna ship if they don’t need it to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also thought about things like, are they gonna provide different amounts of RAM so that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can test your app with different amounts of RAM? Or stuff like that that you don’t really think about in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS land, because everything is just the same. But on a Mac, are they gonna give dev kits with only eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs of RAM, because that is the minimum that people would probably have? or are they going to give them with 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because otherwise it might be hard to test some really big apps on it? Like who knows? Like I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those like little tiny questions are all probably big pains in the butt to Apple in developing such a thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we don’t we don’t even think about it really because like it just hasn’t even come up you know in our in our speculation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level at this point. But it is all stuff that you kind of have to worry about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well but the amounts of RAM that exists today is irrelevant right because nobody’s going to be running an ARM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac on existing hardware or an ARM Mac OS on existing hardware. So if they know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the minimum amount of RAM going forward is 16 gigs, then that, I guess that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they would provide, right? Because it’s only going to be new hardware that is going to be running these chips. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if 8 exists in the wild, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. But like, does that mean like, if you’re developing like Photoshop for ARM, you have to build it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a like a 16 gig machine? That’s the only configuration they offer for the dev
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t Apple have that memory pressure tool? Like, they could ship it with tons of RAM and just let people use the memory pressure tool to
⏹️ ▶️ John simulate what it would be like to have less memory. I don’t know. I feel like that’s the least of people’s concerns.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most people just want to get their software so it doesn’t crash.
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t issue illegal instructions or use some data format
⏹️ ▶️ John or byte ordering that makes the ARM CPU flip out. a good old, but that stuff will sort itself out.
What if ARM Air beats all Pros?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Todd McCann writes, and this is kind of related, thoughts on how Apple spins it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the ARM MacBook Air is faster than most or all of the MacBook Pro models.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a really interesting question, and I’m sure there are examples in history where this has happened. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess the October event that Marco and I were at where they kind of didn’t really talk that much about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the difference or how much quicker the iPad Pro, the then new iPad Pro was than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MacBook Air. And I think just focusing on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery life perhaps would be the most obvious answer to me. Like not even talking about speed, but more saying, hey, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new MacBook Air, if that’s what it is, this new MacBook Air gets 89 billion hours on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one charge. It’s amazing. And it’s great and so on, and not even really talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about speed. And oh, it’s also very fast. And we didn’t really make compromises on speed and maybe leave it there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why wouldn’t they brag about the speed? They would say this new ARM MacBook Air is faster than our old
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro. And you may say, well, if you don’t have a new MacBook Pro, what you’re saying is the MacBook Air is
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than your current MacBook Pro. And they’d say, yeah, isn’t it amazing how great our Macs are? And of course, the
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro will eventually become ARM or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re comparing it to their old model, right? And I don’t think they would hurt the sales of the, because
⏹️ ▶️ John pros are buying the existing Intel MacBook Pro or Mac Pro or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they needed to run their existing software, right? Or like, I don’t think it would say, oh, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna buy a MacBook Pro, but now that the ARM Macs are out, I’m gonna buy that and not be able to run any of the software that I need to run.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is not actually an issue. I think they would brag about it like crazy and say, isn’t this amazing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now our lowest end computer is faster than the highest. And honestly, that’s not an unrealistic thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to imagine. Certainly in single-threaded, it should be. And then maybe even multi-threaded, depending on how many cores
⏹️ ▶️ John there are in the MacBook Air ARM CPU thing. So I think Apple, this is a problem Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John would love to have.
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Racial Equity & Justice Initiative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tim Cook wrote on Twitter, the unfinished work of racial justice and equality call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us all to account. Things must change and Apple’s committed to being a force for that change. Today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am proud to announce that Apple’s racial equity and justice initiative with a $100 million commitment. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just had to show us up, Tim. We put some we put some links in the show notes. People have been donating, but you got to show us up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In all fairness, his pockets are deeper than ours.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And all the things with companies announcing that they’re giving some amount of
⏹️ ▶️ John money, the sport on Twitter is to calculate what that would be based on a normal person’s income.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like Facebook gave like a million dollars or something. That’s like you giving $1.32, right? So $100 million at least is
⏹️ ▶️ John with a little bit of heft, but honestly compared to Apple’s market share, market cap, or whatever the amount of cash
⏹️ ▶️ John they have on hand. $100 million is the least Apple could do, don’t you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, there’s a good video attachment if you wanna see Tim emoting
⏹️ ▶️ John into the camera. All this corporate communication in the coronavirus world is weird because
⏹️ ▶️ John it is like higher production value than you sitting in front of your computer in a dark room for your Zoom meetings.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not up to Apple’s usual standards because it’s like, I mean, I guess Tim probably did come into the office
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe had someone set up a camera or maybe he did it himself, but it’s kind of quaint to see
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of prosumer level media coming out of these multi-bazillion dollar corporations
⏹️ ▶️ John just because we’re all, you know, social distancing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And totally unrelated, Apple’s head of diversity and inclusion is left,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a little uncomfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. It’s, it’s not great timing for
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, I don’t think any of us know this. This just came out what today. So I don’t think any of us know enough about the situation
⏹️ ▶️ John to know is this a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just that things are happening, let’s say, on these
⏹️ ▶️ John fronts at various companies. Apple is no exception. I’ll put a link in the show notes of the story where you can read about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, with the exit of Christy Smith, who is, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ John leaving Apple to spend more time with her family. I don’t know if that’s a euphemism, but that’s what the press release said,
⏹️ ▶️ John or the quote from Apple said in this article.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that ever not a euphemism? I don’t know. I mean, every like literally every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some high power executive or high profile executive, you know, leaves or gets fired or whatever, they always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say to spend more time with their family and you know, I like spending time with my family. That’s the kind of thing I might actually do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But does that really happen at that? Like in these
⏹️ ▶️ John it has to happen like when when high powered executives actually stop working like they’ve made their millions
⏹️ ▶️ John and they don’t want to work anymore. They are leaving to spend more time in there. So it’s got to be true at least once in everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John career, right? Like you’re not unless they don’t have a family or something. But yeah, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a euphemism. So we’ll see if the person immediately gets another job at another company, then it was obviously BS. But if they don’t and they never
⏹️ ▶️ John work again, and which is totally plausible for people at this level in Apple that they would have enough money
⏹️ ▶️ John to not have to work again, especially with all their stock and everything. Who knows? But anyway, diversity inclusion will be reporting
⏹️ ▶️ John to Deidre O’Brien, who is the head of HR and which she’s also put in
⏹️ ▶️ John front and charge of retail. Am I remembering that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I keep up with all the palace intrigue at Apple. But anyway, things are happening over there. They’ve given $100 million
⏹️ ▶️ John and the head of diversity inclusion is out. Hopefully things are changing for the better.
Casey’s new MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I mentioned earlier that I am recording on a brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer this week. I received my 13-inch MacBook Pro, I think, late last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, if I remember correctly, and I am using it to record this episode just to play Everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Safe and get that out of the way before I have no alternative options very soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I thought I’d talk about what I think of modern Mac laptops, laptops because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you recall, I had one of Marco’s beloved 15-inch MacBook Pros when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was still at my jobby job, which was two years ago now, by the way, my how time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flies. And at the same time, I had my beloved MacBook Adorable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the single port MacBook, just MacBook, not MacBook Air, not MacBook Pro, just MacBook.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That thing is still kicking aside from occasionally typing more letters than I’ve asked it to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think it will soon become, and I think it will soon become Erin’s computer. And she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will finally, after all these years, retire the one that has gone in the drink like 17 times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s exciting. But yeah, I finally got this 13-inch MacBook Pro. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if I ever said it on the show, but I did end up going with 32 gigs of RAM and one terabyte hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did that because I figured, and the same reason I went MacBook Pro, one of the reasons I went MacBook Pro rather than Air,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want this computer to last a few years. I don’t want to have to replace this in a year. He says now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not knowing what the ARM MacBooks look like, but I don’t want to be forced to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade this in a year. And so I want something that’ll last a bit. And I don’t want a 16-inch, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though I would absolutely have that if it was my only computer, since it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not my only computer, and I have this wonderful iMac Pro actually right behind it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What I did was I went 13-inch because I really want something as close as I can get to my adorable, but that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey useful. So here we are. I, and I have my first touch bar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’ve only ever used this. I’ve only ever used the touch bar at like the Apple store for like five minutes, or my dad’s 13
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch MacBook Pro that’s a couple of years old now for like five or 10 minutes. Um, but yeah, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d talk about a few things. Um, first of all, I’ve been touting for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in fact, this is probably going to come up in an ask ATP later. if we have time anyway, I’ve been touting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brew Bundle, which is kind of like Bundler on Ruby. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it basically does is it allows you to say, here’s all the Homebrew stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to install. And you just put a list together and then you say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Homebrew, look at that file and download all the things. And this can also include GUI apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it can include Mac App Store apps, and it works really well. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of the reason I’ve gotten to this point of believing my computers are to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ephemeral is because all the stuff I really care about is in the cloud or on my Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So like code, for example, is on GitHub, pictures are on the Synology and in the cloud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t really have like Office or like Pages documents anymore. That hasn’t been a thing for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me in years. And even still, I have that on the Synology and in cloud services. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what makes these computers feel ephemeral is that I can basically type one command and get 80
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 90 percent of the way to having my computer be the way I want it to be. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installations are just those. That they’re installations. They don’t tweak settings. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adjust this or that to just the way I like it. But it does work out really nicely to get kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steady state, not a steady state, like a base state, like a foundation of the pyramid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with only really one command, which is super awesome. That being said, I was doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was having it install some things and I don’t remember if it was at Xcode, doing the Xcode installation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if it was somewhere else, but all of a sudden, oh no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, that’s a fan I hear. I haven’t heard a fan come from a laptop in years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like this at all. This isn’t good at all, and here it is. me, the guy who makes fun of you two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idiots, for being so deeply offended by any sort of noise whatsoever. I’m mostly looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at you, John. Any sort of noise whatsoever. And suddenly I find myself, after having two or two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a half years, whatever it’s been, of not having a fan in my laptop, I hear this thing just spin up and I’m just disgusted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by it. And it’s ridiculous how just gross it felt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now with that said, it doesn’t spin up the fans very often. not been egregious by any means, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was so startling and striking that even as I was watching TV and kind of multitasking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could still hear these fans and I found it so incredibly gross. Now, that being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, the touch bar. I am only a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week in and I don’t know what to think about the touch bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My initial impression was, Oh, this is kind of clever. And then it became, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t get to like volume easily. It’s like a two-step process for volume and for brightness and who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew how often I adjusted volume and brightness I guess I do it a lot because it’s really annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having to do the little slidey dance Like I know you can keep your finger on the on the touch bar and slide left and right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that is that is kind Of nice, but I don’t know. I find the not having the control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strip frustrating now. I should state plainly up front I haven’t really done any sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey System level tweaks to the touch bar. I haven’t gone in to figure out like I think there’s a way you can always have the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control strip active or do other tweaks like that. I haven’t really done any of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also haven’t noticed any particularly stellar use cases of the Touch Bar. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only done a smidgen of Xcode development on this thing, and so I have a feeling once I get used to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the options that Xcode puts on the Touch Bar, I might end up liking it quite a bit more. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I touch type and because I don’t look down at my fingers while I’m typing, I just don’t see it that often, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not an original thought. People have been saying this for years now. But I just don’t see it that often and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t offend me. I’m not grossed out by it. I’m not sure it has really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brought anything to the table though. Then I installed BetterTouchTool. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use BetterTouchTool years and years and years ago when it was pretty new. I used it because I wanted to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some more interesting swipes on my then brand new Magic Mouse. Then I put it away after having used it for like a year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two and hadn’t looked back since. But I was vaguely aware that you can do some nifty stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the Touch Bar and Better Touch Tool. And so I installed it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that has changed, dramatically changed, the way I feel about the Touch Bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because what I have right now is, I have it set up, and it’s very simple at the moment, but I have it set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up such that it has a little battery meter for when the battery’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being discharged. it has a little icon which is a little emoji that’s a button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that will let me flip back and forth from day to night mode, which I don’t really do that often, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found it’s often enough that I’m using this machine at night where I’d prefer it to be in dark mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for whatever reason, it doesn’t automatically switch to dark mode until either I’m not using it or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s well after sunset, whatever the case may be. So having a little toggle on there’s really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I also wrote a little shell script that will figure out how many members we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have. And I put a little thing on the touch bar that’ll show me right there how many ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey members we have, which, which right now is not that exciting, because it’s pretty much leveled off. But at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first was super freaking cool. I have this little display on my touch bar that shows how many members we have. How awesome is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I have this little like widget area on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t actually answer you how awesome that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think it’s super
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re reinventing iStat menus in the touch bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I am. In so many ways, I really am.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should have like, oh, god. I just, I’m picturing you
⏹️ ▶️ John coding away on your fancy new laptop and accidentally brushing against the thing that changes into dark
⏹️ ▶️ John mode, like having your whole screen change to dark. And then you brush it again, and it changes back to light.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, talk about, I mean, I know it’s in theory non-destructive, but that is a severe change.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s my question for you, I guess. Do you find yourself accidentally brushing your fingers up against the touch bar? Has that not happened to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not that it definitely has happened, but not that often. I can’t recall a time I have grazed the dark mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toggle that I’ve set up. But one thing I have noticed, and I don’t know if it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am hitting the touch ID, which, by the way, I didn’t even have this in show notes, but oh, man, touch ID is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice. Like just for one password, if nothing else, touch ID is super nice. I use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Apple, you know, my Apple Watch is always on my wrist. So for unlock, it doesn’t really get me that much. But for one password,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s great. But anyways, to answer your question, I feel like maybe because it’s Touch ID, maybe it’s something else, but I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I’m grazing the Siri button fairly often when I have the little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minuscule control strip or whatever it’s called, where it’s just three or four icons. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the first thing
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody removes is that Siri button. Yep, just that button.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customize all the built-in stuff too. Just yank that right off there. Oh, cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I keep, I think, three or four things there. So I have, in the upper right, I always have the show desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco F11 or whatever normally, and so it puts it kind of near where it was. And then I have brightness,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume, and play pause. That’s it. And then I just, I let the system do the rest of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve tried BetterTouchTool. I ran it for a few days. I couldn’t really get into it myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not really my style of how to do things, and I couldn’t configure, I just couldn’t figure out a configuration I liked. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, it’s a little fiddly for me. But everybody always writes in and suggests it, so I’m glad you found some use for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I don’t want to make this whole thing about like, you know, how much I hate the touch bar because we don’t have time for that again, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the benefit I find to it is almost none. One thing I actually like about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the auto-fill suggestions on filling out web forms. That is the only thing about it that is an improvement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my life. Because otherwise, like it turns out all that stuff you mentioned at the beginning of this, like it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out you adjust brightness and volume a lot. Yeah, everybody does. on a laptop, those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very commonly done things. And with the Touch Bar, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be one key press is now at least one tap, because you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap to open up the volume thing, and then you have to slide it over. And even if you do the thing where you tap and hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just move your finger, you’re still doing at least one tap. And it’s worse, because you have to look a little bit more closely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see if you’re actually hitting it. And if you’re watching a video, the Touch Bar will have probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gone to sleep since the last time you touched it. So first you have to tap it to wake it up. Then you have to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adjust the thing. And so it makes this very common thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have more friction than it had before. Sometimes significantly more. And then what’s even better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is quite often, I don’t know if you’ve been using it long enough to run into this yet, quite often the touch bar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will just freeze. And you’ll have to run some command to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reboot the touch bar to make it work again. And it’s had this problem ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since the Touch Bar started, almost five years ago, or almost four years ago. It’s just buggy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in addition to being questionably designed and of extremely controversial utility,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s also just been really buggy its entire existence. And it seems like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not working on it at all. Like, it has gotten no love,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no changes, no updates, and apparently no bug fixes for its entire life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yet someone loves it so much, whose opinion matters so much, I think it’s Phil,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s on every single Pro laptop and you cannot remove it. Someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really important loves this thing and refuses to offer an option without it, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to actually make it good, or to fix its basic bugs. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just drives me nuts. Everything about it, it drives me nuts. But anyway, you can keep going with the positive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of this review, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the Fudge Bar is actually one of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and John, you never really interact with the Touch Bar because you’re always on an external keyboard. Is that right? Even with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your work computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I use the keyboard a lot now. Because I mean, I got tired of switching back and forth, so I just used it. Especially
⏹️ ▶️ John since I’m now kind of wandering around the house to escape my kids and their Zoom meetings for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco school, at least, right? So a lot of times
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good that I’m on a laptop for work, so I’ll go someplace else and actually work on the laptop as a laptop. But I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John long since given up on the Touch Bar. I used it for more than a year to try to like, you know, do all the tweaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John remove the buttons, customize. I just never ended up using it. I don’t accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John hit it that much anymore. I think I probably accidentally hit the area where the Siri was, because I was accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John activating Siri all the time, and once I removed that, that wasn’t a problem, but I have it set to be pretend you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of keys mode. So it just shows F1, F2, like that’s permanently, it doesn’t even change
⏹️ ▶️ John per app anymore. Because I was getting distracted by it changing. You know, it would change, like I said, Xcode, it changes
⏹️ ▶️ John to custom things, and Safari, it shows the thumbnails, and just, I didn’t even need that visual noise in my
⏹️ ▶️ John life. So now it literally is a worse version of buttons for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I’m not trying to convince either of you that you’re wrong or anything, but my initial impression is, Hey, that’s a neat thing. And, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If there is one of us who would like it, it’s you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I’m not convinced I will like it again, or I will continue to like it in like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month or two. But sitting here now it’s, it’s novel and interesting and neat. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool, I guess. But in general, the laptop is really great. Hey, did you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guys? I have a actually breaking piece of news. Having more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than one port on a laptop is really freaking convenient. Who knew?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who knew that that would be so convenient? Why didn’t you guys tell me about this a long time ago? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so convenient. Turns out. Turns out indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so, it was so delightful having, you’re not having to get a dongle out just to plug in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two things at once. And that actually brings me to, you know, one of the things I’d been plugging in fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often is a, uh, is an ethernet adapter because one of the few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that I wish was still on these computers, you know, I could live without the SD card, whatever, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t even necessarily need a old USB port. Like I’d probably prefer it, but I don’t need it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you know what I really wish was in these darn computers was an ethernet jack. I know it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would make them way too big and in or to just it would be bad in so many ways
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I would totally take an ethernet jack I would even take one of those heinous like pop-out ones we were talking about last week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would take one of those man. I absolutely would but anyway I’ve been plugging in these dongles and the particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB C Ethernet dongle I had that I’ve that I’ve had since the adorable was new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For whatever reason and maybe this is something I missed but it has been extremely flaky and it seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it was particularly perturbed about being placed… how many alliterations can I get in here?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was particularly perturbed about being placed on the… no, not the port side. Darn it! I almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had another one! On the right-hand side of the computer. And I don’t know, aren’t there like some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird differences about the left and right side ports or something like that? Or is that only about power delivery?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There have been certain models where the, I believe the right side ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t have as much data transfer bandwidth on their Thunderbolt controller as the other side ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because the CPU only had a certain amount of bandwidth or a certain amount of PCIe lanes or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was, I believe, limited always only to the 13-inch four-port models. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if that’s true of the current generation or not. Regardless, it wouldn’t matter for the purposes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your Ethernet port. It would matter if you’re hooking up big monitors and stuff or massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAID arrays that actually max out that bandwidth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. And so I have a new USB-C ethernet adapter coming, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I suspect this one is just a piece of garbage. But yeah, having multiple ports, really, really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really enjoy that. Who knew?
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ARM early days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to thinking both before it arrived and after it arrived, like, am I going to want to return this in a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after we know potentially what’s going to be happening with an ARM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPU and new fancy laptops? And I think I stand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by what I said last week, which is I can see myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folding when it comes to like some sweet new industrial design or even just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, you know, black spray painted black color because God I wanted that black polycarbonate MacBook so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey badly. But short of that, I don’t think I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be on the bleeding edge of an ARM transition. Sitting here now, I don’t have any Mac apps. I have no plans for Mac apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think I want to go through all the, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, like pain of having all of my software stop working,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what you guys were talking about earlier. Like, I don’t know, and we don’t necessarily need to get into it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say stupid stuff like FFmpeg and YouTube DL and other like shell stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use really often. Do those have, you know, installations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for ARM? Will somebody put those together? I mean, I don’t have any interest in building this from source, although I know I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could, like, how is that stuff going to work? And you can, you too can treat that as rhetorical or not, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I want to be on the bleeding edge of having all of having my entire tool chain not work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so even if there is some sweet and sexy new Mac book announced next week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if it has some sweet new industrial design sitting here today, ignorance is lists.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I would want to, Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That pun just happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I went there. I’m gonna get so much email. Anyway, I don’t think I want a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ARM laptop right now. In two or three years, oh yes I do. But sitting here now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think so. Am I crazy to think that or does that make sense?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we went through one transition when the Mac, one CPU transition when the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John had a bunch of, you know, command line utilities, right? So the PowerPC to Intel happened in
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac OS X era. And so we know how this shakes out. What happened when you had PowerPC
⏹️ ▶️ John Max and you had whatever, FFmpeg or Wget or whatever the hell you were using
⏹️ ▶️ John from the command line? And then the Intel Max came out, and yeah, the people who maintain those projects tweak the makefiles
⏹️ ▶️ John so that they built on x86 Max. I mean, you may say, oh, well, they were just going to x86, and it’s easy, all those things are already built in
⏹️ ▶️ John x86. But it’s not the same. We have different compilers, different operating system. You can’t just use the Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John makefile on a Mac. Anyone who’s tried to compile something from source knows that, unless the program is very simple.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are obviously tweaks you have to make. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten one to work. Yeah, there are obviously tweaks
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to make. But yeah, I feel like the, this gets into a whole other issue that we may touch on in a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit, but like the people who maintain these projects, whether it’s YouTube DL or FFmpeg or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, at the time of the Intel transition and probably now, it’s not unreasonable to think
⏹️ ▶️ John some of them, some of those developers who work on those projects might be using Macs themselves. And so are therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John highly motivated and in a position to know how to, make it so that they build on the
⏹️ ▶️ John RMX. And obviously the more obscure the command line you’re telling them you’re using, the less likely it is that
⏹️ ▶️ John someone will actually update the make files for it, but eventually all software that is in active use and being developed
⏹️ ▶️ John will get ported. That’s my hope, unless something really terrible happens related to this,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I think is the topic that I just moved up in the notes because I want to touch on it now, because I won’t have a chance to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about this once W3C goes and we know all the answers. I’ll try to make this quick because
⏹️ ▶️ John I do want to get to the topic that’s after that. I was thinking about this after last week’s show when we were
⏹️ ▶️ John going through like, oh here’s what the ARM Mac, you know, looks like it’s coming, let’s speculate about what it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like and you know, we talked sort of in the, about the stuff that’s likely to happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But a lot of the feedback as evidence from the follow up about the dev kits has been, okay, well we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s likely to happen, what about stuff that seems like it might be unlikely but is still
⏹️ ▶️ John plausible? And one, you know, my description of a theme that ran through all that feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John is, the thing in the notes here, is a new breed of Macs. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea is that an architecture transition is an opportunity to change stuff up.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have to, there’s nothing about an architecture transition that says you have to change the rules of the game and really, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, redo, but it’s an opportunity to do that. It’s a discontinuity. Things are going to be all screwed up anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John so if there’s something you want to do, do it now because when everything’s up in the air it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the perfect place to do it. Get all the pain out of the way at once. A lot of the pain they’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the way already just from getting off of 64-bit so they don’t have to have 32-bit ARM CPUs, deprecating old
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs, getting rid of carbon, lots of stuff has happened leading up to this.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the transition to ARM gives Apple the opportunity to really rethink everything
⏹️ ▶️ John about this product line, way up to and including no one suggested this but I thought of it and
⏹️ ▶️ John again the least likely thing is you don’t need you know this new
⏹️ ▶️ John line of arm-based computers that run a mac os like
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t even need to be max they don’t they could run an operating system that’s not called just like they made ipad os like
⏹️ ▶️ John wow brand new operating system yeah I mean we all know it’s the ios that you’re running before you
⏹️ ▶️ John just gave it a new name what if apple just says the mac has run its course There’s no more Mac and now we
⏹️ ▶️ John have a new brand name for these computers that are basically, you know running Mac OS But we’re gonna give that
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system a new name because the one that runs on arm is not Mac OS it’s whatever OS and these are new whatever computers
⏹️ ▶️ John like rebrand right and Change all the rules about what it is now
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this is gonna happen The Mac has a huge amount of value in it or ever but like that’s at one end of the spectrum if you
⏹️ ▶️ John use as a Spectrum the other end of the spectrum what we talked about last show It’s like oh, they’ll be max, but they have arm CPUs and you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a normal transition Between those two endpoints, though, there’s lots of interesting things that can happen. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John just musing about them. One of them is, you hear a lot of people talk about, oh, will
⏹️ ▶️ John I not be able to run non-sandbox applications anymore? Will everything need to be notarized?
⏹️ ▶️ John Will I only be able to install apps from the Mac App Store unless I go into a developer mode? All
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff that we’ve talked about in terms of security and running signed software, and all the way down to, oh, will I be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to build FFmpeg and just run it? it’s not signed or whatever? Will I not be able to download arbitrary applications
⏹️ ▶️ John without doing stuff like disabling system integrity, whatever the equivalent of that may
⏹️ ▶️ John be, like disabling security features? Is this the time that Apple can really lock down the Mac? Right? Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing about the ARM transition says that that has to be the case, but we know Apple has wanted to and has been working
⏹️ ▶️ John towards making the Mac more secure, as secure as iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John and iPhones or whatever. This transition is an opportunity for them to change the rules
⏹️ ▶️ John of what constitutes a Mac to change all those rules about what software can be installed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think any of that is likely, because again, what the hell is the point of the Mac if you’re just going to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it into an iPad running a weird OS, right? But I’m on the lookout for things like
⏹️ ▶️ John that happening now. And even though obviously getting rid of the Mac and calling it something else is ridiculous,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not putting it past Apple to give this new line of ARM-based
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs some kind of prefix or suffix or other kind of branding that distinguishes them
⏹️ ▶️ John from the Macs that came before it. Again, I don’t think it’s likely. We talked about the likely stuff last show. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John my last chance to say, here’s all the weird stuff that could happen, probably won’t, but could happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the hell they would call it. I don’t know what the prefix or suffix could be, but it is an opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John to distinguish, again, especially if you’re changing the rules to distinguish this new line of ARM-based Macs from
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous ones. If you’re changing the rules about what software can be loaded and sandboxing and third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John software and they’re more locked down or whatever, and you have a boatload of good news to share like, hey, these
⏹️ ▶️ John are the batteries last a long time and these are super fast or whatever, you can tack on a bunch of maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not so appealing things in that same package and brand it as, you know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t I’m not even speculate what a name might be but those are all things that are up in the air this
⏹️ ▶️ John goes back to what I was saying before was like just because what they did one thing from 68k
⏹️ ▶️ John to power PC and a similar thing from power PC to Intel doesn’t mean that they have to do the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ John playbook for this transition that was a long time ago and the the 68k one even
⏹️ ▶️ John longer ago Apple is free to make moves like that that it thinks is
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing it towards its new unified future where everything runs Swift UI and everything runs on an arm arm based CPUs that
⏹️ ▶️ John they build themselves and the iPad and the Mac move closer to each other. And like, there is this future that we
⏹️ ▶️ John seem to be moving towards. And this architecture change, if it actually happens, is
⏹️ ▶️ John a point where Apple can make all sorts of changes. And the thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though most of the stuff I’ve laid out here is like, oh, they’re probably not gonna do that stuff, right? There’s something from
⏹️ ▶️ John this bucket of probably not going to do that’s going to be in there, like maybe a good thing that we think
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not going to do like, oh, you know, like last week, Mark was saying they’re probably not going to do boot camp. Maybe it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ John they do do boot camp and it’s good news. Hey, it was a thing that really we didn’t think they were going to do at least out of the gate,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they did it. Yay. But it could also be a, oh, by the way, this default security restrictions,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, don’t let anybody install any Mac outside the Mac app store, which developers would hate. And they’d have to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody how to like, you know, disable, you know, go to system preferences and click the lock icon and enter your admin password
⏹️ ▶️ John and click a thing that lets you run applications. Don’t come to the Mac App Store. But if they’re gonna do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John now’s the time to do it. Because, especially if you, you know, these are branded differently or whatever. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John those are, I tried to be brief, I’m sorry. But those are my thoughts on a new breed of Macs. If there’s gonna be a new breed of
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs, uh, the spectrum from all the way from they’re not even called Macs anymore, to
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re exactly like we said last show, but with one thing that is either a bit of good news or bad news. That’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John my mind now, as we are, uh, you know, less than a week out from WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s definitely possible. Um, oh, and before I forget some quick follow up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, I just wanted to try to avoid a week of email from people telling us this Casey, all your FFM peg and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything’s stuff will be fine because it’s already compiled for arm because it runs on raspberry pies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well as, um, there is some arm use in the server world as well. I know it’s not like super mainstream,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s also not super obscure at this point. Um, so a lot of stuff has been compiled for ARM already, just for the server world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but definitely also for Raspberry Pis and stuff like that. So yes, while John said it’s not, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take those exact same makefiles and run them on Mac OS with that modification, I’m sure most of the hard work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has already been done. And so many of those packages should be able to be updated like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Homebrew without too much effort, I would imagine. So anyway, that part, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you should worry about. The part you should worry about is closed source software. You know, all these open source
⏹️ ▶️ Marco packages, like somebody somebody can do the work if it hasn’t already been done and make a compile and make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work but if you have some closed source app that you that you’re relying on that is not currently maintained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s where you’re gonna have the problem. If there is a compatibility layer for running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco x86 code on the new RMAX which I honestly I think that’s a big if I wouldn’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect one because I think it will be too slow and too crappy so if there is a compatibility layer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect it to only be around for a couple of years. It’s not gonna be in the OS forever, the same way Rosetta wasn’t in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the OS forever. But John, I think your concept, or your potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea for what if they make other big changes to the Mac line, I don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any new product name things necessarily. Like, cause I mean, what would they call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Knowing today’s Apple, they would just call it the Apple Book. All the, they have no other good names.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if they ditch Mac, like what would they call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Book, the Apple Pro, iApple, I don’t, you know, they can’t make new names for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs anymore, they just.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the Mac name has way too much value to digit. I was just pinning that as an end of a spectrum.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but so I wouldn’t expect a new name because I think having, giving the ARM products a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unique name or, you know, suffix or prefix or anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that would only make sense if they were intended to only ever be part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the product line, rather than replacing the entire product line. And I doubt that I really doubt that the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the the plan is for arm to go across the entire product line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over a few years most likely. So I wouldn’t expect that to really be like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t expect this to be a temporary or partial product line conversion. And for that reason, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think the naming would actually change
⏹️ ▶️ John meaningfully. The thing to keep in mind, though, and this is weird for historical reasons, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they They did this with the PowerPC transition. They called them PowerMacs. They gave them all a
⏹️ ▶️ John prefix. Now it’s weird because they were already PowerBooks, but they were 68K. So I know it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John quite track exactly, but they literally said, they said, and now the new PowerMac because they had a PowerPC
⏹️ ▶️ John and they just called them PowerMacs forever and ever until, until eventually I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the Intel’s when they finally dropped it. But yeah, so it’s not inconceivable that that could
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. is obviously a cooler name than anything we can think of off the top of our head related to
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM. They’re sure as hell not going to call them ARM Macs or Apple Macs or A Macs or Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Arms or Mac Airs or like, you know, I’m so afraid to even speculate about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John naming things, but the name prefix thing is not without precedent.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t predict it. It is obviously a less likely scenario. I’m much more interested in like, oh, now’s the time we change
⏹️ ▶️ John the security settings on you and make it more difficult for you to install stuff from the command line tools. So I’m more worried about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s, first of all, that’s a valid concern because, you know, Apple, they do have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pattern of locking down the Mac slowly, more and more over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making things a pain in the butt, slowly, more and more over time, in the name of security. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly, I do think the ARM transition will totally remove and drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any software API that is currently deprecated. So things like OpenGL,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think OpenGL will run on ARM ever. I think that’s just gone. So any software that uses it, it’s been deprecated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a couple years now I think. I seriously doubt that’ll make it over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, Bootcamp I think is gone. I think anything related to x86 I would predict
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not supported at all. So we are going to have some losses there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as for like, you know, bitter pills to swallow with the rest of the OS, any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new restrictions on our software abilities or our hardware peripherals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s going to be, I don’t think there’s going to be any like you know massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes to what most people ever need to do, including developers you know because the reality is that they sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of Macs to developers so I don’t think they would ever have things like making it so you can’t compile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your own version of FFmpeg or anything like it might continue to be an increased pain in the butt but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re already on that track anyway. Like I don’t think it would be anything more of a pain in the butt than what we already have to deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with with Catalina and its various BS. So I think they wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make this transition as kind of transparent and smooth as possible because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they don’t want is to ruin the Mac. You know, like they’re trying to make the Mac better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco presumably, like I think they’ve shown a pretty good track record of that over the last couple of years now, after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very dark time, but they’ve gotten through that, I think. we’re now in the light again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, for the most part, except for Casey’s text bar, but otherwise like, you know, we’re forgetting there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so like, I, I trust them that like they’re trying to keep it good. Um, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, I don’t think they’re going to use this opportunity to really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break or like super unreasonably lock down a significant amount of new stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’ll be, you know, Mac iOS 10 dot, whatever, whatever we have to 16 for the next one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whichever is the first version that supports ARM, it’ll just be like any other Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release, where things are a little bit more ratcheted down in certain ways, like you’re not gonna get unsigned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kernel extensions. You might not get any kernel extensions, who knows? But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think you’re gonna be dealing with stuff that is going to be a big pain in the butt or highly restrictive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what almost anybody needs to do with their Mac. especially if you get rid of legacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware support needs, which is a lot of reasons why you might need kernel extensions, for instance. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just say, all right, these new Macs only support USB whatever, peripherals that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support standard whatever, if you have certain restrictions like that in place with new hardware, which would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty reasonable for new stuff, I don’t expect there to be big additional restrictions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they want this transition to just be like, Here’s the Mac you already, here’s the Macs you’ve already had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know what this is, you know what to expect, it’s a Mac, it runs Mac apps. Asterisk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that had been recompiled for ARM. And then that’s it, and no other meaningful restrictions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kernel extensions are going away even if we don’t transition to ARM.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like that’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John a multi-year thing. Yeah, it’s just, and this is just an example of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the transition being a place to just accelerate even existing plans. Like, oh, actually kernel extensions aren’t gonna go away in Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John until 10.17, but on ARM they go away in 10.16 just because how about we just never have them
⏹️ ▶️ John there? Then problem solved because nobody’s kernel extensions are written for ARM now, so we just say no They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gone. They’ll probably be gone from x86 at the same time Anyway, I want to do two quick hits here before I move on to
⏹️ ▶️ John the next thing. You mentioned Intel You know emulation.
⏹️ ▶️ John What are our predictions? Marco already said he does not expect ARM macOS to have
⏹️ ▶️ John any form of x86 emulation so you can run old apps without recompiling them. Casey, your opinion? your guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would want there to be something like Rosetta or Rosetta 2, if you will. I think that would do a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to alleviate a lot of the pain of moving to a place where software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t really exist if it wasn’t built by Apple. But I don’t know how possible that’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on the hardware. If this hardware is really as screaming fast as we hope, then maybe it would be doable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it would be fine. I also think, though, that Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not afraid to use the stick rather than the carrot. And so it wouldn’t surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me if Apple perceived it as, well, if we have Rosetta 2, that’ll let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the developers that have x86 software not have a fire under their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bottoms to compile for ARM. And we really want them compiling for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ARM, so screw it, let’s just not offer it at all. And if they really need this software, they’ll virtualize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with VMware or what’s the parallels, or whatever the case may be and do a Mac OS, you know, an x86
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac OS installation on top of that, and that’ll be good enough for them. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna say I want it to be there, but I don’t think it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, especially since Apple seems to be on their high horse about how mighty and powerful they are these days, which we’re about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, keep in mind, like anything, like, you know, we were talking earlier about, as when John was talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about options for a dev kit and there being a software only one and you you very quickly corrected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself and you said simulator to emulator because the simulators
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iOS apps are able to be really fast because you’re running native code the whole point of this transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be it would have to emulate arm like on the Intel and same thing in reverse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now if to run Intel software on arm you can’t just do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like full speed simulation or what hypervisors do with like virtual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machines and stuff where you are able to run full native speed and native code you can’t do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when you have a different architecture you have to emulate the whole thing and emulation is really slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there are you know like Rosetta was a pretty advanced emulator I’m sure maybe there’s you know also you know similarly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know advancing techniques that we’ve developed since then that have made emulation a little bit better than it used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still a a really slow process. So, like running software in Rosetta was something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you could do it, and some stuff was, you know, you wouldn’t notice the speed difference,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a lot of stuff you would. And so I don’t see that being a great solution for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people for most apps. And that’s why I don’t think Apple’s gonna ship it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John So one thing from history that was going around on Twitter when people were discussing this, like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know for a name of it was, but the thing that emulated 68K on PowerPC,
⏹️ ▶️ John very quickly, I don’t know if it was on the first set of PowerMacs, but maybe on the second or third set of PowerMacs, could emulate
⏹️ ▶️ John 68K faster than any 68K Mac ever actually ran it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the emulator was faster than the hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, it helps that the PowerPC was much faster than 68K, and it also helps that that was in the period in the 90s or whatever, when
⏹️ ▶️ John chips were getting so much faster every year. And we just talked about Rosetta, but
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m getting at is that both times, has done this, their emulators have been really
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Obviously, yeah, emulation is slower, but you know, both times, again, both times did
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the past. Moore’s law was much more in effect than it is today. So they took advantage of that
⏹️ ▶️ John and it gave them the backward compatibility story, a pretty good backward compatibility story. In fact, with the 68k
⏹️ ▶️ John to PowerPC, a backward compatibility story that Apple itself needed because they didn’t get their whole operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system onto PowerPC for like years after the transition, just because there was so much legacy stuff there
⏹️ ▶️ John but they did such a good job with those and I understand all the reasons that you both think they’re not gonna have one
⏹️ ▶️ John they all make sense to me but just something my gut is telling me because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has done it twice before and they were so good at it that there’s enough institutional perhaps wrong-headed
⏹️ ▶️ John institutional momentum behind it that it would be part of the transition strategy and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to predict I probably wouldn’t put money on it but I’m going to be the odd one out here and predict if there actually
⏹️ ▶️ John is a a way to run x86 software on these arm things using emulation and yes it will be slower and yes it won’t be as
⏹️ ▶️ John good as either of the two transitions but i just i just feel like it’s in apple’s dna
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this and i have my fingers across like casey said i want it to be true and i think i just want it so much that
⏹️ ▶️ John i’m willing to predict the final thing we can’t take as long on this but those will be quicker names for mago is 10 16
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a story that we’ll put in the show notes where someone’s going through like things that apple has trademarked trying to pull the names
⏹️ ▶️ John out of it catalina came out of these trademarks the remaining ones that are still trademarked are Mammoth, Monterey,
⏹️ ▶️ John or Skyline. And of course, it could be something entirely new. Of Mammoth, Monterey, Skyline, and other
⏹️ ▶️ John of your choice, what would you predict as a 1016 name? Steven McLaughlin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If the arm transition is happening, it has to be Mammoth, right? Because it’s it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey marketing just plays itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jared Polin Because Mammoths have arms?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven McLaughlin No, no, no, because it’s a Mammoth change. Jared Polin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven McLaughlin Like this, look at this Mammoth change, and it’s Mac OS Mammoth.
⏹️ ▶️ John the reasoning the reasoning works that tracks Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man so I keep with the disclaimer that I don’t know anything about these actual places in California
⏹️ ▶️ John thing yeah none of us know this is all just blind okay you can pick you can pick other you can a name of your choice it’s probably a city
⏹️ ▶️ John in California or maybe they’ll just break the name scheme and call it something totally different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah fair enough so it was mammoth Monterey was Thurman skyline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mm-hmm that’s a that’s a place name not like the chili chain and Cincinnati, but that’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maps. Okay, so I think the one that sounds the coolest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Monterey. Therefore, that’s not the one they’re going to pick. I think the one they’re going to pick is Mammoth. It’s the weirdest.
⏹️ ▶️ John think I don’t know. I don’t know enough to pick an other. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Monterey is the most likely, but I’m rooting for Skyline.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Skyline would be a better one for sure. I just think that if I’m Apple, I would choose Mammoth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steven Puckett Real-time follow-up, Skyline Chili still exists. Michael O’Brien I’m very excited. Steven Puckett It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still a Cincinnati-based chili chain. Michael O’Brien Not in California. Steven Puckett No, definitely not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We had them in Columbus, and I’m pretty sure, like, I don’t think it really leaves Ohio, though. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it traveled from Cincinnati to Columbus, halfway across the state, and that’s about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Michael O’Brien So, quickie, because I can’t resist now, and we’re never going to end this show. This is going to be a 12-hour show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do universal binaries come back, and are they still called universal binaries?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would imagine so. I mean, it would probably work the same way. Like, you know, the FAT binary system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe, supports any number of architectures. So this would just be like another one that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be in there, potentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, not for the Mac App Store, because that will do what the Mac App Store does, which is strip down
⏹️ ▶️ John to just the code that your particular machine needs. But for individual developers, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’d be able to make them fat.
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Apple IAP rules vs. Hey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is going on with Hey, the email app and inbox?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because we’re not saying that word. Stop.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Cut that out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also hate inbox, but you know, here we are. You know, I, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only have so many things I can be outraged about. And so I haven’t really followed this very closely and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey falling down to my job as as Chief Summarizer and Chief. But my understanding is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and interrupt me when you’re ready, that they released this new email app, a pay email app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the first run experience on the iPhone is basically put in your username and password.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you don’t have one, you need to figure out by magic or a divining rod where you need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go in the rest of the world to get yourself a username and password. And I guess the initial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, 1.0.0, came out. And then when they tried to get 1.0.1 out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then Apple said, no, you can’t do this because in-app purchase, in-app purchase, in-app purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then there’s been a big brouhaha ever since. Mostly because David Hennemeyer Hansen is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very well-known developer and CEO or CTO or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the internet and is from Basecamp. And what is it, 37 Signals? Is that right? Was that the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name? It was formerly 37 Signals. They made a product called Basecamp and it became the main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing they did. And then I think eventually it became the only thing they did, and so they renamed the company to Basecamp.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right, right. So, I mean, that’s kind of the extraordinarily too brief summary. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have feelings about this, but I don’t know if they’re fair because I haven’t looked into this enough. Which one of you would like to take me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the deeper blow-by-blow summary of what’s actually happening?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think we need to go blow-by-blow, but I think this is, so this is interesting for a couple of reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s interesting because of the timing. You know, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John talked on this show over many, many years about, oh, App Store rejections, this was rejected, it seems like it shouldn’t have been.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, this is not a new story. It’s the shape of the same story. It’s like, oh, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, tweaked the rules or changed them or interpreted them differently and it’s affecting this developer
⏹️ ▶️ John and it seems unfair and the developer, depending on who there are, complains about it. Like, that’s the same old story. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the timing is interesting for two reasons. One, it’s happening right before WWDC. Here we are, the
⏹️ ▶️ John week before WWDC, not great timing for one of these things to blow up, as Casey mentioned, because
⏹️ ▶️ John David Hennemar-Hansen is very loud on Twitter and is already famous, and there’s a lot of stories being written about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t love that. You know Apple hates this. Apple does not want this to be a story anywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John regardless of what the actual specifics of the
⏹️ ▶️ John issue. Apple hates it when there are stories like this. That’s why the things you say don’t run to the press. have to have
⏹️ ▶️ John this. And second is that Apple is in the process of, in various legal battles, and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John even in the United States, antitrust rulings against
⏹️ ▶️ John them in the EU, and potential legislation in the United States going through Congress. And it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a good time for this issue to come up on that front either, because Apple’s lawyers are busy writing
⏹️ ▶️ John lawyerly-type press releases, disagreeing with decisions in the EU. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not tracking the individual legal cases here, but it’s like, you know, it’s anti-trust. It’s like, do these tech companies have
⏹️ ▶️ John too much power over the market? And it seems like there’s growing momentum in the various
⏹️ ▶️ John legislative bodies across this planet to see if there’s something that can be done to check,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just Apple, but all the big tech companies, you know, for all the reasons you would imagine. Privacy concerns, market
⏹️ ▶️ John power, competition, anti-competitive behavior. Apple has been down this road before with Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John and the e-book thing, and they lost that one. This is just generally
⏹️ ▶️ John bad timing for Apple and maybe good timing for everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else. This specific instance here, if I was
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk about this, I feel like I could talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John it with someone at Apple without reference to antitrust, to
⏹️ ▶️ John individual developers, to fairness and rule changing and power
⏹️ ▶️ John and monopolies and everything. The argument that I would make and I have always made
⏹️ ▶️ John and will continue to make on this specific issue is that it’s better for everyone, including
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, if Apple just gets out of its own way and lets people make better applications. We had the same
⏹️ ▶️ John conversation when the Kindle app was out there. The Kindle app is a better app if you can
⏹️ ▶️ John buy books on it. It just is right. And Apple doing everything
⏹️ ▶️ John in its power to make that not happen. Oh, you can’t even mention that you can go buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the things on amazon.com. This is all old news. I’m sure the rules have changed since then. But that whole
⏹️ ▶️ John thing of make it so the app doesn’t say anything about where you can sign
⏹️ ▶️ John up for Netflix. People would just have to know that because it wouldn’t be better in the app if you could sign
⏹️ ▶️ John up for Netflix right there in the app. And Apple would say, you can do that. Just give us 30%. And it’s like, Apple, we
⏹️ ▶️ John know it’s not gonna happen. No one wants to give you, Netflix does not want to give you 30% of their
⏹️ ▶️ John income or 30% of the signups that are through the app. Like, they used to do that and they don’t anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, there’s a lot of money that went away. Same thing with Amazon. Amazon literally can’t give you 30% of every
⏹️ ▶️ John ebook sale because there’s not that much money to wring from that stone. And David Hennemeyer Hansen
⏹️ ▶️ John and Basecamp sure as hell don’t want to give you 30% of all the hey.com subscription. Like, no one wants to do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John by making these rules and thinking if we make these rules, we will have enough power to force
⏹️ ▶️ John this to happen. like history shown, it just doesn’t happen. No one’s going to give you that money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so all it does is it makes the apps worse in the App Store, apps that are inexplicably
⏹️ ▶️ John worse where you can’t do things that you would the developers want you to be able to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The users want to do them, but it’s just not happening. This is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a situation where interest and incentives are correctly aligned to make better and better
⏹️ ▶️ John apps. Everything is aligned to be oppositional and to result in us getting worse apps and us getting
⏹️ ▶️ John worse apps in the end reflects poorly back on Apple. I’m sure they’ve heard this argument a million
⏹️ ▶️ John times like this is the whole debate. Is it better to try to go for that 30%? And of course, they have arguments about it. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John control and we don’t want to send you to a scammy website to use other people’s payment methods and yada, yada, yada, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the goal that Apple is shooting for a world
⏹️ ▶️ John where they have all the control and also get all the money and also have apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that have all the features the customers expect is never going to happen. Like the app store has
⏹️ ▶️ John been around long enough to know that’s not gonna happen. The companies will not give you or can’t, literally
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t and stay in business, give you that 30%. So given that that’s the case, stop trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ John fetch happen. Like you’re not gonna, Apple’s not, Apple’s not going to ever get it all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Best case scenario, we get this tense cold war where our apps are inexplicably stupider
⏹️ ▶️ John than they need to be, developers are cranky, and Apple’s platform has apps that are worse
⏹️ ▶️ John on Google’s platform, the competing platform, the dominant mobile platform apps
⏹️ ▶️ John have fewer restrictions in this particular regard and the apps are better for them. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John good for Apple. And so I, you know, every time one of these things comes up, I just hope that like whoever is
⏹️ ▶️ John arguing the side that I just articulated, which I’m surely has been argued inside Apple for years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope they get a little bit closer to winning. Like, so the more damaging and annoying this, this
⏹️ ▶️ John particular blow up is about hey, dot com, an email service being subjected
⏹️ ▶️ John to rules that other maps weren’t, but that are eventually rolling out across every like it’s, you know, it’s a story we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John seen before and it’s a sad story and it’s stupid and the restrictions don’t make any sense to consumers and the restrictions are
⏹️ ▶️ John very annoying slash company killing to the developers involved and we
⏹️ ▶️ John get worse apps like I hope I, you know, I’m excited that the
⏹️ ▶️ John DHH on Twitter is super loud because he can afford to be super loud and he’s using his
⏹️ ▶️ John fame to good effect and it happening through right in front of WWC with the antitrust stuff going on. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that all comes to head and let’s Apple before it’s too late give up
⏹️ ▶️ John on its on its impossible dream of having of making developers
⏹️ ▶️ John both give it 30% of the money and also make better applications for consumers. That’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my feeling on this issue that like, I, you know, I don’t, I don’t want to root
⏹️ ▶️ John for, for like a PR blow up, but sometimes, uh, that’s just the only
⏹️ ▶️ John way things change. And I really hope this time it doesn’t just like blow up and then fizzle again. And on that,
⏹️ ▶️ John on the, on Apple’s side of this, the thing that I’ve going for them is that if they have a WWDC and introduce our
⏹️ ▶️ John max and they’re all super amazing, that will change the conversation. And for a while people will forget about, Hey.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’ll kind of be a shame. And honestly, I don’t want Apple’s WWDC to be overshadowed with stupid app store stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want Apple to do quote unquote, the right thing, meaning the thing that I think that they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been resisting doing in favor of the strategy that’s producing worse outcomes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this, this kind of stuff just makes me mad. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has, you know, it’s a big company, there’s a lot of sides to it, there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of personalities in it. And we see multiple sides of it at different times. One of the dark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sides of Apple is that they can be incredibly power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hungry and shockingly stingy. You know, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say that certain things are a good value, certain things, like every WDC, when they open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up some API that we thought they’d never open up, we’re like, wow, that’s great. We really surprised, you know, they really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprised us there by opening up, you know, this API that seemed that it would be locked down forever or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then there’s this dark side where they do some things and they stand by certain things that are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco embarrassingly stingy for a company that produces premium products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and prides itself in quality and Almost unconscionably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stingy for a company that has so much money as they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like It’s a bad look to be super rich and super cheap about stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the biggest areas of this is the stupid in-app purchase rule. So this is the same rule,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you mentioned, that prevents Amazon from offering in-app purchase. Although now there’s an asterisk on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now Amazon kind of sometimes can offer in-app purchase because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs Amazon more than Amazon needs Apple in certain ways. And so they negotiated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and made a special deal. Netflix famously, like, you know, they had in-app purchase for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while. They removed it. that caused friction, that hasn’t been resolved yet, but Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is allowed to do something that now hey.com can’t do, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the compromise that Amazon had and in many places still has, which is, okay, we don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use your in-app purchase system because 30% is a lot. I often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, or all the money I’ve ever made from Apple, all the apps, everything, like, you know, Instapaper,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the magazine, Overcast, all the money I make from Apple, they keep like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost half as much again more than that. I have made Apple a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money over all these
⏹️ ▶️ John years. And Netflix has made, like when Netflix canned their in-app thing, like they had numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it was like hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe it was even billions. Like Netflix gave Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John the 30% cut for a really long time and arguably they benefited from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and it was, I mean, it was really 15% behind the scenes for like, they had a special
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s still like hundreds of millions of dollars, right? And so when, this gets back to my earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John point, when Netflix stopped that, those hundreds of millions of dollars just stopped cold, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple was like, no, we like hundreds of millions of dollars, like, well, you know, and as
⏹️ ▶️ John you said, that hasn’t been resolved like the Amazon thing has done. And of course, you know, as we’ve mentioned many times in the
⏹️ ▶️ John past, not everyone is Amazon and Netflix, so good luck negotiating a special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal for yourself. Right, and so the way it’s been, you know, to date,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until fairly recently, is if you didn’t want to use or couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Apple’s in-app purchase system, you could have an app where it gives you a login
⏹️ ▶️ Marco form, but it never mentions, like, where do you create this account?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the rules have actually gotten more strict over time. It used to be that you could link out to Safari. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clamped down pretty fast on that after a couple years, I think. Then it was like, okay, you can’t even do that, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can at least mention, like, go to our website to sign up. And in recent years, you can’t even do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In recent years, you can’t even mention a website that you could go to create an account. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco link to a support page that if you click a few links in the in-app browser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after you get there, you can get to a purchase page. They have gotten remarkably strict
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like, okay, if there’s any way to get from your app to a purchase page,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it’s like 17 levels deep after they’ve already jumped out of your app into a web view,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that still counts and they prohibit that. Well, apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last few months, this has gotten even more restrictive to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now certain types of apps, and how they’re defining this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems vague. The statement they gave to some news outlet basically said like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumer versus business is the distinction, but that’s stupid, as I think John Gruber wrote, like there is no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference between consumer, like that’s not an enforceable distinction, and it’s just clear BS from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John gerrymandered it. Like they basically drew the outline so it exactly so it included like Netflix and Amazon. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was like there’s a bunch of other stuff like oh reader apps or apps for content. Like if you try to read the
⏹️ ▶️ John language it’s like are you trying to say Netflix and Amazon’s Kindle store? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t, you know, consumer business doesn’t make any sense. And then the previous language also doesn’t make any sense about like well
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re a reader app. So email is not a reader app but Netflix is? Like what do you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you’re viewing content that had been licensed elsewhere, like it’s all this language that’s basically written
⏹️ ▶️ John to specifically include just the things they wanna include without naming them by name.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, like the rules changed apparently, you know, several months ago to say that even if you follow
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the rules that Marko had outlined, also if your app isn’t one of these apps that we want to be like this, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. Right, so no matter what, and they’ve decided that Hey is one of these apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that basically, yeah, Jeremy, you’re doing such a good analogy here, because it’s ostensibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supposed to be this codified system with fair rules, but in reality, it’s not at all fair, and it’s all political,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s all to achieve this basically sinister goal. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pure, blatant, shameless greed. This is Apple being a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dick. And look, I’m a huge Apple fan. We all are. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happily celebrate when they do great things, and for the next few weeks, we’re probably gonna be celebrating the great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things they’re about to announce to us. But this situation with this rule and the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve treated this rule over time is Apple being a huge dick all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it seems like their incredible dickitude is increasing over time with in particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this rule. All I can speculate is they must make a ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of money from particularly this rule because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you mentioned like this This rule, this one thing about totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prohibiting any other outside payment system in many types of apps from being at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all mentioned or even now at all existing in certain types of apps, even when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s totally reasonable to have a separation like that, like in this case, I think it’s totally reasonable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one rule and the way they operate this one rule is responsible for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a massive amount of not only negative sentiment, but of antitrust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco action and antitrust probes and any competitiveness actions by governments. They are totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warranted. I mean the response Apple posted, and what was it yesterday,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the European Commission probe thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey whatever that was?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The response they posted and the big puff piece they posted about all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money that they eat, that they enable in the economy from the App Store, that was such a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pile of bullshit from so many different angles. It’s a terrible look for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes them look like dicks. Leading into what they hope to be a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, rah rah, look at us, everyone’s great, we love you, developers conference in a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They lead with that pile of crap?
⏹️ ▶️ John They read like a lawyer wrote it. Didn’t read like a lawyer wrote it and not a PR person? Because you know, you know, when there’s like a legal
⏹️ ▶️ John case in the courts, whatever it’s about and like whatever the outcome is, like there’s a verdict or something and there are of statements
⏹️ ▶️ John from the lawyers. Lawyers always say the most lopsided, one-sided,
⏹️ ▶️ John do not acknowledge the other side has any good points whatsoever, whether they’re on the winning side or the losing side. But especially if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John on the losing side, it’s like, we disagree with this judgment. This is what they were saying. We disagree with this judgment, and we think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is the best company in the world, and developers love it, and everybody’s great. And it is not like a PR
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that tries to be balanced and have the desired effect. It’s like a lawyer wrote it and said, there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John other side but our side. Apple is right and that is all there is to it. And that’s why if you read it as a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John developer, like, are you kidding me, Apple? Hardworking, what is it, like determined developers? It’s a level
⏹️ ▶️ John playing field. It’s like none of these words are true. Like, it’s like every word of this is wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was very bad. But it read exactly like you would see a lawyer ever say after a legal case. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that’s, not that it’s excusable, but it didn’t surprise me. And like, when there is a legal case
⏹️ ▶️ John and you come out on the losing side, your lawyer puts out a statement like that. And the fact that we read it as developers, like, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to look at that. that’s for like politicians and lawyers so yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just it’s a terrible look like do they not know or do they not care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how bad this like it’s it’s so just blatantly disrespectful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of our of our intellect honestly it’s the kind of thing you’d expect our president to put out if he was slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more articulate oh let’s not go too far
⏹️ ▶️ John he doesn’t understand these words
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah it’s true but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so like stingy and double talky and just distorting it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s almost like trying to gaslight the public into thinking that we’re not being screwed as much as we are by Apple’s rule
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and it’s just it’s just it’s awful and for a company that prides themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the principles they claim to pride themselves on to then also be acting like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just this this crazy double talk that is not a good look at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Their strategy for doing these changes it’s not a new strategy but like their strategy reveals,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes it clear what they understand about it. So the strategy whenever they have a rule change like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, well, we’ve decided now that actually these certain kind of apps are allowed to let you sign up elsewhere and
⏹️ ▶️ John these other ones aren’t, right? Whatever the decision is. The strategy they use seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sense if you’re like, oh, they’re trying to be gentle to developers, right? What they do is they
⏹️ ▶️ John make a change in this policy and maybe they update the wording or whatever, but they don’t immediately ban every app, right? They wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to have to update your app, right? So that spreads out sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John outrage, right? Because they make the new ruling and like if they just suddenly banned every app that like, oh, we’ve decided actually
⏹️ ▶️ John email apps can’t do this and they ban like every email app that does this and we’ll put a link in the show notes to
⏹️ ▶️ John DHH’s Twitter thread where he says, look at these five email apps, they all do exactly the same thing as us, how
⏹️ ▶️ John come they’re not banned, right? That’s not a thing that Apple does. They don’t say, okay, we’ve changed the ruling,
⏹️ ▶️ John all these email apps are banned, we’re pulling them from the store. What they do is wait for one of those email apps to do an update.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they say, yeah, about that. Actually, there are new rules. You’re no longer in compliance
⏹️ ▶️ John with blah, blah, blah. And then you have to go back and forth and deal with trying to get a human. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John do that on a case-by-case basis with each individual thing, sort of demand-paged outrage.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as each one of those tries to update, that spreads out the story so there’s not a critical
⏹️ ▶️ John mass of things. And you’re like, isn’t that better? Isn’t that kinder than pulling all
⏹️ ▶️ John the email apps from the store? Wouldn’t that be an incredibly hostile thing? Like you’re not even getting any notice, you’re pulling all the
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, like it’s just terrible. It’s better to spread out like that. But by spreading it out like that, it reveals
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple clearly knows, which is this is an incredibly unpopular, potentially damaging
⏹️ ▶️ John rule change. They don’t, Apple does not have the courage of its convictions to say, we think this rule
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the best interest of everybody, users, Apple, and developers. They know it’s not in the best interest
⏹️ ▶️ John of developers. And I think they also should know by now, it’s not in the best interest of users given how we
⏹️ ▶️ John know developers will react to it. And so they try to do it slowly and sneakily
⏹️ ▶️ John and just kind of like, oh, when you try to update, we’ll remind you. And they probably think they’re being
⏹️ ▶️ John kinder and gentler by doing that. And in some respects they are, but I think it reveals what they
⏹️ ▶️ John know to be true. That this is such an incredibly unpopular and potentially damaging change, they
⏹️ ▶️ John literally can’t afford PR wise to do it how they would do a good rule change. Say the rule change was,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, guess what? We’re not taking 30% anymore, we’re taking 25. You think they would demand page that out? No, they would announce
⏹️ ▶️ John it and it would apply to everyone instantly because it’s good news. When you got bad news, don’t really say anything
⏹️ ▶️ John and spread it out. And that’s just like, it comes off as sneaky and shady, even though I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John motivated internally by trying to be kind with that. And I see that angle, like there is an aspect to that,
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you find yourself having to do that, maybe rethink the rule change you’re making.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The App Store has always had this problem of the rules as written are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty vague in a lot of ways. They leave a lot to case-by-case interpretation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ve always been enforced pretty inconsistently. I’ve heard stories about them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically wanting to make examples out of developers. That’s one of the reasons why people like James Thompson, who have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco public apps, like he makes Pcalc, and he’s been screwed over in weird ways so many times by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AppReview, I’ve heard that that was actually intentional to make an example
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of popular developers so that they spread the word so Apple doesn’t have to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I used to think that whenever they would have one of these slight changes or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco negative changes to the way a rule was being enforced, and they would pick on some developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used to think that it was just random, or that maybe it was down to, app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews, it’s a bunch of humans. Maybe some of them interpret things differently at different times and they just have to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, get there, get their enforcement consistent and they were just going to get to it. I no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer think that I think it’s very clear that when they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they have these like behind the scenes enforcement changes that usually by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in this case also are not updated in the like published rules,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rules. Like there was not a published rule update a few months ago that made this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rule start being enforced differently, but it was. I no longer think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just because they like want to be gentle about it or don’t want to tell us. I think it’s a tactic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a tactic to really help like extort money out of people because if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publish the rules the way they are in all honesty in direct clear terms like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then somebody like Basecamp releasing a new app would already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know before they developed the app over months or years they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already know we can’t do this without supporting an app purchase and that might affect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether they choose to make it how they choose to price it etc.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the actual the rule change that forbids this type of thing actually did happen many months ago the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the that Basecamp, logically, was not just reading the letter of the rules,
⏹️ ▶️ John but saying, how does the App Store actually work? And in practice, the way the App Store actually works is there are existing email apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that do this. There’s lots of apps that do this. Right, so regardless of whether or not the rules,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the rule changed back in whenever it was. If you read it closely, it’s like, are we a reader app? Are
⏹️ ▶️ John we a business app? Like, you know, whatever. Those words have been in there, but then you look at the actual store
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, well, it basically comes down to interpretation. It’s like, well, I think these rules would
⏹️ ▶️ John forbid our app, but there’s lots of it’s open to a lot of interpretation. So let me look at what’s actually happening on the store,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is what all developers do like to do their due diligence. We have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to anyone we have to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Apple never fully
⏹️ ▶️ John their rules. But but what I’m saying is I don’t think Apple needs to change the text to comply
⏹️ ▶️ John with this rule because the text that is in there fits with the gerrymander that they’re doing. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John but the thing is, because they slow roll it because because they don’t automatically enforce it at once. If you look around and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, what’s actually happening on the App Store. What you may see is, oh, it seems like this is allowed. I see a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John other competitors doing the exact same thing. I bet we’re good. We’ll just watch and make sure they don’t change the rules and you watch and they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually change the text. But little do you know that the text changed three months ago. And Apple is in the process
⏹️ ▶️ John of slowly rolling out their interpretation of those rules. You think you know the interpretation
⏹️ ▶️ John because you see this app on the App Store already. But really, that developer is going to find out the next time they try to release a point
⏹️ ▶️ John release that they’re mistaken about the interpretation of those rules. And like that, that slow rollout
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it’s so terrible because there’s just no way, like the tools we have are we can look at the text,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then we might have a different interpretation and we can look what’s happening in the app store. But then what’s happening in the app store
⏹️ ▶️ John is a, you know, a trailing indicator of what’s actually going on because of the way Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John rolls out these type of policy changes. And like I said, I can imagine them thinking they’re trying to be kind with the slow
⏹️ ▶️ John rollout, but it makes it just impossible to figure out what’s going on. it just, you know, it just kind of shady.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, at this point, I have thrown out all possibility of their doing this trying to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind. I think it used to be that they were trying to be like a little bit weasely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about avoiding bad PR because, you know, whenever you change the rules publicly, if it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be in the direction of making things more restrictive like this, it will generate bad PR. So I think they try to just do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it quietly and hope no one notices, which is, you know, absurd, really, because everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John we will notice. And I think it backfired on them now, because if they started
⏹️ ▶️ John slow rolling out this change in March, it just so happened to have come to the head right
⏹️ ▶️ John now. Like if they had done the change all at once, they would have taken the bad PR in March. But by doing the slow rollout where you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t really have control over how slow it rolls out, because you don’t know when people are gonna try to update their apps, right? And getting unlucky
⏹️ ▶️ John to essentially like that, hey,.com was launching right before WWDC and they’re a high profile app and they have enough
⏹️ ▶️ John money and nerve to say the F you to Apple, right? And by the way, DHH
⏹️ ▶️ John has already testified in front of Congress in the US about tech antitrust issues. So it’s the perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John storm of bad timing. And the DOJ is talking to him again. So this is a perfect storm of bad timing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is one potential consequence of a slow rollout of a rule change. And
⏹️ ▶️ John boy, obviously, Apple can’t plan for these things. And coronavirus, I’m sure, put
⏹️ ▶️ John a monkey wrench into all this. But it’s like, not this. Live by the sword, die by the sword. If this is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be your strategy, this eventuality of like, you know, someone inside Apple might be mad and be like, how do we let this
⏹️ ▶️ John happen the week before WWDC? It’s like, you only have yourself to blame. Like there’s, you were in control of this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John process. You decided to do it this way. And this is the consequence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. And again, like, I don’t, I don’t think this is even being weasel anymore. Like, like I used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be being weasel-y. Let’s try to avoid bad press by just not publishing anything and just hope it goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away. Right. Like, like when a kid, like gets in trouble and they bury their, their head, their head in their hands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they just like, Oh, if I can’t see it, I won’t get in trouble. I hate like the problem will just go away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I think it used, I think it started out that way. But now I think with this rule in particular, the way they’re enforcing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this and the way they have been enforcing this, I think it’s a tactic because you are able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build your entire business, build the entire app, spend God knows how much time and money building
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out a service and an app and everything, get it into the store, maybe even get version 1.0 out there. and then when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to submit your bug-free update, bam, you gotta issue this right now, or you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add our payment system right now. It’s like, I think it is now a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tactic to be punitive and to be kind of extortion-y, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really get people when they are most desperate. And look, they’re trying to launch a service right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. Like, hey.com, they’re trying to launch a service, and instead of being able to launch it now, now they have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serious problem with the interface that is on probably the most popular device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be used to access that service. And they can’t, like Apple’s holding it hostage until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they pay up, until they agree to their extortion scheme. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charitable way to look at this.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve chosen the least charitable way, that they intentionally let 1.0 through to get their app launched
⏹️ ▶️ John and then took the 1.0. I’m not willing to go that far and think that that was intentional strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not quite what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that their strategy of not publishing these rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John having conversations ahead of time. Like, if that’s a thing people could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Yeah, not having conversations ahead of time, not publishing the rules. Their entire, what Apple always has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco told developers when it came to questions about whether App Review would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approve something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s like submit it and see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The answer has always been, just build the whole thing and submit it and we’ll let you know later, right? Which is not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not really anything, right? So I honestly think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way they’ve been doing things where they let people build entire services, build entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, spend lots of, you know, spend years possibly, millions of dollars maybe, like building out services,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then only to have AppReview slam the hammer down after they’ve already done everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and because their entire economics model rested on the like vague interpretation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this rule that now Apple decided to change their mind on, You have to believe that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco result of that, much of the time, is developers saying, oh, fine, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess we’ll support your 30% now because we have to. It works. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategy of being weasely about this and being vague and shifting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their enforcement over time is profitable for them. I have to imagine this all goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to one of the big root challenges Apple faces is revenue growth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Their product lines have been slowing down dramatically, and the economic conditions of the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are definitely not gonna help them out this year. And so they’ve been driving for services revenue, and it’s been working. They’ve been making lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of service revenue, but services revenue is often consumer hostile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or developer hostile or both. They have a significant financial motivation to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ratchet up the extraction of money from existing customers and existing developers. So these rules are never gonna go the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco direction. They’re never gonna like, people always think every time you see, they think like Apple’s, maybe this year Apple will lower the cut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re never lowering the cut. We’re just lucky they don’t keep raising the cut. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do search ads.
⏹️ ▶️ John They did lower the cut. They lowered it for the subscription thing after the first year. It lowers. They lower it if your name
⏹️ ▶️ John is Amazon or Netflix like it has happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Asterisks, a lot of asterisks everywhere. And not not in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, you know, mass way here. This is one of the like when you have a significant push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for ever increasing aggressive growth on services revenue, the result is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be increased friction and tension between you and your customers and your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers. Because one of the most common and easy ways to get additional services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue is to just tighten the bolts and extract more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the same thing, or make things more strict, or get more stingy with important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that make people wanna pay more money to get around it, that you have to pay to get around it, or in this case that you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lose more of your revenue to Apple. That’s just gonna keep happening. There are some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services revenue streams that it’s beneficial. You look at, okay, well if they offer some kind of service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people actually want and they offer it at a reasonable price, we talk about Apple Arcade, that seems pretty okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Apple Arcade, five bucks a month, sure, we’ll pay that. You don’t feel ripped off by paying for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Arcade. You pay it if you want to, no one’s forcing you, and it’s fine. So there are ways to get good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services revenue. But then there’s also ways that you just kind of put a tax on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a system that’s already in place, or you use your power over people, or your lock-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or your monopoly power to extract rent from everybody in ways that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not really providing the value that you’re extracting, you’re just extracting it because of the position you’re in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple is doing a lot of that latter one as well. And I see that only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increasing over time. And that’s why like, I, you know, when I see crap like this happening in the app store to developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, first of all, I know there is no way that a guy complaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Twitter, even a very popular guy, or a bunch of podcasts talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how Apple’s being a dick here is actually gonna change anything. They’re clearly making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way too much money from this, and they’re not about to cut into their services revenue, especially not this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the only way this is gonna change is if governments force them to. And Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walking a really fine line with this rule because this one rule, as I said earlier, has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearly inspired so many government probes and will continue to do so for any functioning government. Ours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be doing it too, I don’t know if we are. At least the EU has some kind of functioning consumer protection stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they’re doing it at least. But this one rule about allowing alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco payment systems and not allowing alternative payment systems in the app, If that one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rule was relieved a little bit, the entire Spotify complaint would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco evaporate basically. Like so much of the antitrust issue with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple and the App Store would go away with just this one rule being relaxed. It wouldn’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be fully relaxed. It could go back to like, you can link out to Safari for your own payment method and then go back to your app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which would be a huge relaxation of the rule. That alone would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remove any teeth teeth to any of these complaints, any of these antitrust filings and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would kill it. But they won’t even do that. So obviously, they’re making a ton of money from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, and it’s only going to get worse over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and they’re also backed into a bit of a corner. Like I shouldn’t be making excuses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple, because I echo what you’re saying, Marco, that this seems in extremely poor taste
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just mean, just downright mean. But from Apple’s perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they’ve shown all of the services revenue, it’s not like they’re going to throw it away. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imagine Wall Street and the damage that they would take from Wall Street if all of a sudden they were like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, we just thought we’d be nice today and we’d reduce our cut and we’d allow people to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around our IAPs. And you know, that’s cost us a billion dollars or whatever the number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may be, because at Apple’s scale, it might be that much. So I just, to your point a second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, like why would they ever relax these rules? I think as much as I, as much as I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to believe that Apple is a company that wants to do right by its customers and do right by its developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultimately. I should have stopped with Apple as a company period
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and companies are made to make money. And Apple, like you said, Marco is making a shed load of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money on all of this, and they can’t stop making a shed load of money because that’s what their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey investors are expecting and that’s who Tim works for. Tim works for the investors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I come back to something that I feel like I always heard from Gruber and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe it wasn’t him but that’s where I always heard it, which was that and I might even butcher
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but Apple cares about Apple first, its users second, and developers third. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is one of those cases where we haven’t gotten past step one, that Apple cares about Apple and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little room in Apple’s heart for anyone but Apple. And that’s really unfortunate because as you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guys had said way early on, these decisions that Apple have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made, to my eyes, inarguably make these apps worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They absolutely do. And this was covered earlier, but I can’t emphasize it enough. They make the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps worse, but they make money. And that’s more important to Apple, which to some degree is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of why they’re They’re there, but it bums me out, and I guess when I get angry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I like to delude myself into thinking that Apple is a company made up of good people, which is true,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to do right by everyone. That’s not really as true as I want it to be. They’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do right by Apple, and if they do right by other people too, then sweet. That’s a good bonus, but ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re trying to do right by Apple. I can’t necessarily fault them for it, but it just kind of bums me out that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this company that I want to celebrate for being just and right and progressive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultimately, at the end of the day, is still just a company and it’s still just a money-making machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s where the services revenue is so corrosive to that. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you consider just what they were for the most part before, just make good product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sell them to you, it’s much easier to align what is good for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with what is good with their customers and what is good with their developers. If you’re just making great products and putting them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there and people want to buy them and then people want to run software on them, that’s great for everybody. And that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did for a long time. And that’s what they still mostly try to do today. But then when you also then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to push into services, you introduce these potentially very corrosive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incentives that actively fight against your customers and your developers, but benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple a lot. And it takes a certain degree of probably like self-control,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, to avoid those corrosive influences and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not go down that route as you pursue services revenue. And Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco messed that up in a few ways. Like I think iCloud storage being so stingy is one of those ways, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free tier of that. This kind of stuff is just gonna keep happening because now if you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the company financially, they need services revenue more than anything. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the only area of the company that is significantly growing right now. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at what the product lines have in store and the world economy being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of in a crapper right now, they’re gonna be relying on services revenue for growth for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably. Because everything else they sell is pretty mature. Maybe someday they’ll release some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AR goggles that’ll take over the world in some way, but so far that’s not here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that might not happen. So services revenue is gonna be the main driver of growth financially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, and they’re going to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ratcheting things down or up, some metaphor is very strange, but they’re gonna keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ratcheting things to a more painful direction to get that extra money out of services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue. And sometimes it’s gonna be things that we want that we’re happy to pay for, and sometimes it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a company that spent most of its existence not even having to make that kind of trade-off,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that for most of its existence, it could just make good products and keep making more good products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and keep making their products better, and that generated their success. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never really had to develop the muscle for self-control against the corrosive influences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some of these services or revenue streams. So they’re really bad at it. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they will find that balance or if the money’s too good for them and it’s going to corrupt what makes them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so great. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Fuli.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thank you to our members for supporting us as well. You can go to atp.fm slash join to see for yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Harmon,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check the podcast so
WWDC software wishlist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually don’t necessarily have any need to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an extensive WWDC predictions thing, but I would like to state on record, which is now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to convince me, it’s going to cause the universe for it to be wrong because I’m feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very smug about this prediction. But I just have this gut feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there’s going to be some pretty interesting developments on iPad. And I think specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around the home screen. I can’t tell you why, as in I literally, I don’t, it’s just a gut feeling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not that I’m trying to hide anything. I can’t tell you why, but I think that there’s going to be, I’m not sure there’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multitasking changes that we all really want, but I think something about the iPad home screen is going to be significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different this year. Even more
⏹️ ▶️ John icons. Yeah, right. List view for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco springboard. I really hope that it is a like refinement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year for the most part. I know. Oh, I hope so too. I know we probably won’t get that. And we just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finished talking about like, you know, ARM Macs and that’s, you know, an architecture transition is not a small deal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in a way, like, it helps to do that transition if the OS is fairly stable otherwise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hopefully, at least on the Mac side, I really am hoping for a stability-focused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. Every time I see any like major new Mac feature, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concerns me now. Because I’m like, first of all, that means they didn’t fix the whole bunch of bugs they could have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixing at that same time. And then second of all, the Mac features are so often like really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buggy and half-assed for the first few years that they’re out, possibly forever that they’re out. Please stop touching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac in most ways and just like refine what’s already there because it needs it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then yeah, for the other platforms, I’m again, I’m hoping for a re-refinement year as well because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 13 kind of sucked for a while. The only platform I really hope to see major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco progress changes on is watch OS, because it needs it the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most still like watch OS is still so primitive and limited and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what apps are allowed to do. Swift UI helped a lot. But it did, but there’s still a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go. And Swift UI itself, I hope gets, you know, a significant update for its second year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, what do you I forgot about catalyst until this exact
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we’ll get it we’ll get catalyst versions of the message speaking of not touching the I really hope they do replace the messages
⏹️ ▶️ John app with one that has feature parody, even though, even if it’s a quote unquote worse app, because the current non-catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ John message app is no great shakes on the Mac. If you want a real stability, this is something I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we haven’t talked about on the show and I haven’t heard talked about anywhere really, but like, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, I want this year to be like a stability year where we just do refinement and stuff, you know the best way to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t do an arm transition this year. Just delay it another year. Have this be
⏹️ ▶️ John a refinement year, like you just said, like, oh, no major new features. Maybe you get new Catalyst apps on the Mac, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, everything is like, it’s all stability release and also no ARM transition. And we would all be sad
⏹️ ▶️ John because we’ve been talking about ARM transition and all the rumors. I think we’d all be disappointed because we’re all getting psyched up for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But that would sure be a more stable year than, oh, by the way, architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John transition. So I’m not rooting for that, but we have to put it out there as a possibility. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially with coronavirus. And it could be for like uninteresting reasons having to do with manufacturing it really isn’t like Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote fault, or they just got cold feet and pushed it out another year. Things like this
⏹️ ▶️ John happen, all right? So I just, if you’re listening to this show before
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC, I want you to at least have some preparation in your mind, like maybe it won’t be Arm’s Year, and then you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be pleasantly surprised when it is, and you’ll get to enjoy it all the more. But that is definitely a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it a stability year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco An Arm transition happening this year would actually let most developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treat it like a stability year for the app side. And maybe even most developers in Apple, too, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most developers are not writing architecture-specific code anymore. Those days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are long behind us for most apps. For most developers, an ARM transition actually would not require very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much work at all. It would be a lot of work for some developers, anybody obviously writing assembly code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and anybody relying on all the frameworks that we were talking about earlier that are probably going to be deprecated like OpenGL,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most developers of most apps, there’s not going to be much to do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that actually might kind of enable a stability year, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a lot of different fronts.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s also your dependencies, like if you’re if you’re, I mean, I know you don’t use a lot of dependencies in your code, but that’s not the case for other applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you have to also wait for all your dependencies to be sort of both ported and validated on
⏹️ ▶️ John arm. And you know, it’s it’s quite a long chain for a long applications, not even entirely under your
⏹️ ▶️ John Control how easy it is to port your app. I don’t think it’ll be a big deal again We’ve gone through it twice like
⏹️ ▶️ John developers will get it done but the bigger the app the more potential there is for it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John Quite a lot of work just to get the thing working and you know and and and performing
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I guess the other aspects like oh just because it compiles and runs and doesn’t appear to be any bugs. How’s the performance?
⏹️ ▶️ John Presumably these new CPUs will have very different performance characteristics some some for the better It’s like oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much faster than it was before. I didn’t have to do anything, but sometimes sometimes, depending on how Apple optimizes the
⏹️ ▶️ John libraries or how the libraries you’re using are optimized, or maybe if you’re a big company, you wrote a bunch of stuff yourself that was tailored
⏹️ ▶️ John for, not with assembly code, but tailored for what you know to be the strengths
⏹️ ▶️ John and weaknesses of x86’s vector instructions or whatever, could be very different on the
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM stuff. Or it could be that the ARM CPU’s like, to get the best performance, you really have to use this new API
⏹️ ▶️ John that uses the built-in neural engine or something because it doesn’t have the generic hardware to do what you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to do. Anyway, this stuff is always more complicated. Hopefully, for the pitch for
⏹️ ▶️ John small developers, like, look, you’ll be able to port your app in like a day. It’ll be up and running, and then it shouldn’t be a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John But companies like Microsoft and Adobe, changing anything in that giant
⏹️ ▶️ John house of cards is always going to be quite a headache. Luckily, they have a lot of money and people, so I’m sure it’ll work out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, if you had one Ricky pick for WWDC, what would you pick?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what you mean by that. I refuse to acknowledge gags from other shows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fine. If you had a risky pick that you would like to pick for WWDC, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for nothing but bragging rights, what would
⏹️ ▶️ John you pick? I don’t know. I mean, I think I already made mine
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of predicting
⏹️ ▶️ John x86 emulation on ARM. Let’s see. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, I haven’t really been keeping up with the rumors. Because I’ve been believing the ARM transition ones, and I’m like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more than enough. Beyond that, I’m with Marco. I’m mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John hoping that there’s not anything that I’m not thinking of. I would be so overjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John if bugs got fixed with existing features. I mean, the only thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I haven’t heard rumored at all that I would be excited about, that I think is worth doing, is improvements to Time
⏹️ ▶️ John Machine taking more advantage of APFS. But that’s it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that will happen eventually no matter what, but it would be cool if they made further advancements this year,
⏹️ ▶️ John just because. But like everything else, I just want to fix all the bugs and make everything
⏹️ ▶️ John better and faster and more stable and have a cool ARM transition. And all the iOS and iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, that’ll be cool too, but it doesn’t really affect my life that much. So yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all I got. I got x86 emulation on ARM and time machine improvements for APFS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Those are pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are pretty good. I hope that if they do any kind of significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac features, which again, I hope they don’t as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if they put a lot of effort into changing the Mac beyond the ARM transition,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might be a failure to read the room. What most Mac developers want is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stability. The Mac has been suffering in that area for a while. But one thing I would hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for with the Mac is if they do touch it at all, If they insist on touching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I want to see some evidence that Catalyst can be used to make a good app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have yet to really see much of that, including from Apple’s own apps. I know people are picking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the new developer app being pretty crappy on Catalyst. It seems so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Catalyst still is nearly impossible to use well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even for Apple. And so I really hope that we get some kind of progress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that front. If this thing is ever going to be good, we should see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some progress towards the direction. You know, like, like I was, I was complaining earlier, like when the touch bar first came out, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was pretty mediocre and then nothing ever has changed about it. It has never gotten better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope catalyst doesn’t follow that same path. Like if you’re going to have this thing that came out really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy and really mediocre, like let’s see some movement in the direction of being good. It wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a lot, I don’t think, but it seems like they’re doing almost nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I hope, I really, really hope that Catalyst version two is better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And beyond that, I’m hoping at the framework level, SwiftUI should get a lot better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s wonderful as a 1.0, but it would be a lot more useful if a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limitations were lifted and a lot of bugs were fixed and performance issues were solved and everything like that. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the watchOS side, I want everything to be burned down and started over, as they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I wish for every year, but as they do every couple of years, I want you to actually do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, this summer I’ve been using the Apple Watch significantly, as I mentioned earlier. It’s always shocking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, like, how weird of a platform it still is for apps, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited it still is, how buggy it still is, even with Apple’s own built-in apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does Apple use AirPods with Apple Watches to play music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequently. Do they know, like there’s tons of bugs with like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one ear having its volume set to zero all the time for some reason until you adjust the volume and it goes back up. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s like weird bugs that you would think they would run into. But anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. The watchOS stuff, I’m always gonna have a massive watchOS because it’s always gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need a lot of work. So I’m hoping for some big improvements there. But everything else, please just do stability releases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The watch doesn’t need it because it’s already so unstable. There’s no expectation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is everyone in favor of Catalyst messages? Because I totally am. Even if it is just as bad as current Catalyst apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want feature parity. It annoys me so much that there’s things I can only do on my iPad and iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John as? You know, like do all the screen effects and be able to see them and add little,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s not, it doesn’t have feature parity. It’s just not as good as, it’s not as
⏹️ ▶️ John capable as the iOS version. And I know if we make a Catalyst, it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John worse in a bunch of ways than the Mac app, but Catalyst will mean, in theory, I’m assuming, that it
⏹️ ▶️ John would actually have feature parity. And so that way it could go in lockstep with the iOS version. So if they add some
⏹️ ▶️ John feature to Messages, it will come in both of them at the same time instead of having this lag or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, Messages could be a better app overall, right? So I share Marco’s hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that Catalyst apps get better. I think they will, because it was the first year for Catalyst. It was bad. We all know it’s bad. The apps are
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, right? But year two, If Apple’s gonna continue to have this be a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure it will improve. And I’m hoping that the apps that they bring, and what was
⏹️ ▶️ John the other app that desperately needs to be ported? I forget. So we got Messages, and what’s the other one that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John keeps having rumors about that? Was it Maps?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or is Maps already
⏹️ ▶️ John Catalyst? No, it’s not. Anyway, this type of situation, like the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that Catalyst is made for, that there’s something on iOS that wouldn’t be on the Mac at all, except if there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John way to get it there with you reusing the UI code. That’s why, that’s one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John that Catalyst exists. Apple itself needs to start doing that. Where they did it before with like voice memos
⏹️ ▶️ John and a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s like, okay, yeah, right. You’re right that those wouldn’t be on the Mac if you couldn’t just reuse the
⏹️ ▶️ John code for iOS. But honestly, yeah, they’re more like a proof of concept. Messages
⏹️ ▶️ John is getting into serious apps that you care more about. Hopefully they never do it with Mail.
⏹️ ▶️ John Boy, that would be a nightmare. Mail has gone Catalyst. be like, no, I just destroyed that application.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, you know, speaking of messages, a slight tangent, something I really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really want, and it doesn’t seem to me like it’s impossible, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, I really want to have support for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, what do you call it? The, the tap backs, the, you know, thumbs up, thumbs down, ha ha exclamations, et cetera,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to have support for those in mixed format group messages when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re text messages. So, you know, Erin’s entire family is on Android phones and we have a couple of group
⏹️ ▶️ Casey texts with members of her family. And it is not unusual for the iPhone users,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is basically Erin and me and our future sister-in-law, to, you know, thumbs up a comment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or thumbs down a comment or ha-ha a comment or whatever the case may be. And because it’s a group,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess it’s not strictly speaking an SMS, I guess it’s a group MMS message, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes out is, liked, I’ll be there soon. You know, like the words, liked, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be there soon, instead of the message that reads, I’ll be there soon, having a thumbs up on it. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John me… It says Casey liked, I’ll be there soon. Casey laughed at, I’ll be there soon, right? Isn’t that what it says?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it doesn’t attribute it as Casey said, I don’t think. And I’m not going to try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to look it up now. But one way or another, it’s clear that it took the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey verbatim message and put the word liked and then quotations around it. And so you feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I feel like this is a solvable problem with computers today, that we could look back at prior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey messages and see if anything matches verbatim and see, maybe we should just throw a tap back on there if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re an iOS or MacOS person. I really wish that worked. That would be very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very nice because it’s very, very annoying. But this is the thing, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the incredible things Apple does in general, and as much as we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey poop all over them, Apple software developers seem to be a pretty smart, pretty talented group.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I think to my eyes, one of Apple’s bigger problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a software development point of view is how unbelievably myopic they are. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quintessential example of this was how great Apple Maps has always been in the Bay Bay Area, but has been utter garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for was utter garbage for the longest time everywhere else. And Hey, guess what? If everyone is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working in the Bay Area that works on Apple maps, it’s going to be great there and it’s going to be garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everywhere else. And so one thing I hope that comes from this God awful pandemic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is if Apple were to, you know, somehow actually start to acknowledge that there are other parts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the country that exist and Hey, people might want to live there, then maybe things like that’ll get better. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this relates to my messages complaint, because I would bet that most of these Apple engineers just don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exchange text messages with Android people that often. I mean, why else would this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not be a fixed problem already? And it’s just, that sort of thing just really chaps my hindquarters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When it’s something that’s a real bugbear to me with Apple software,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but because it’s like, just barely off the happy path, I suspect that nobody at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John I think tons of Apple people have
⏹️ ▶️ John conversations with people who don’t have iPhones. I mean, it’s the same reason you do. Like, they may work for Apple, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John automatically mean their entire family works for Apple. Like, I understand their constraint, like your idea of like, oh, if you see a verbatim message
⏹️ ▶️ John with the word liked in front of it, but that obviously doesn’t work. What if someone legitimately types a message like that, and like, where did
⏹️ ▶️ John my message go? Oh, it turned into a thumb because you happened to, you know, it’s this, there’s all sorts of problems. Like, you’re limited by
⏹️ ▶️ John the SMS network, right? It has very limited bandwidth. You don’t want to put inline stuff in there that comes out as garbage on non-iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I understand the problem, And obviously Apple’s solution is that everyone should have iPhones. But in the
⏹️ ▶️ John meantime, like in the meantime, you Casey, you can solve this problem by typing different things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Use your words, Casey. don’t just communicate with a little thumb.