386: No More Holes in My House
09 Jul 2020More from WWDC, ARM Mac hardware possibilities, the court of app review, and an imminent sunset in Virginia.
Episode Description:
- ATP MEMBERSHIP IS LIVE!!
Please consider joining, but we’re still cool if you don’t. 💙 - Pre-show:
- Phisherman Relieph Phund
- Hamilton is good. Turns out™.
- Follow-up:
- No Target Disk Mode on ARM Macs
- But Mac Sharing Mode will replace it
- WidgetKit and Third-Party Watch Faces
- Unified Memory Architecture & the Mac Pro
- We’re getting Thunderbolt on ARM Macs
- No Target Disk Mode on ARM Macs
- Apple Platform Unification Part II: ARM Mac Hardware
- App Store changes
#askatp- How do we handle migration between Macs? (via Jacob Rosin)
- What do our in-home wired networks look like? (via Franck Hertz)
- What’s the best unsung feature from WWDC? (via Shihab)
- Post-show: The future of Vignette
Sponsored by:
Chapters
- Phisherman Relieph Phund 🖼️
- Thanks, members!
- 👋 Target Disk Mode
- Sponsor: Hover
- SwiftUI in WidgetKit
- CCIX
- ARM Macs will have Thunderbolt
- Mac hardware predictions
- Sponsor: Bombas
- App-review changes
- Hey resolution
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
- #askatp: Data migration
- #askatp: Running Ethernet
- #askatp: WWDC’20 favorites
- Ending theme
- 👋 Vignette?
Phisherman Relieph Phund
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, the masks that I have worn most of the time since the mask era began,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I’ve tried a few different ones and I ordered back months ago, I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these masks from a company that makes fish and Grateful Dead themed merchandise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it doesn’t say fish on it, but it has the fishman donut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pattern on it, which is that pattern of like the pinkish circles on the bluish background it’s in my
⏹️ ▶️ John background. Fishman donut?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, fishman spelled F-I-S-H-M-A-N.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the drummer John Fish. Anyway, so it’s a long story, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is like a symbol of fish and it’s not an obvious one for people who don’t know it. It’s like it’s a subtle thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, well it’s not subtle, but it’s this thing that people who are not fish fans don’t recognize as a fish thing. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the germ theme.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I got a mask featuring this pattern and yes it’s just the same pattern as my Twitter background if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to look at it quickly or make it the chapter art for this chapter. So anyway. Bloody Cheerios. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s it’s a fish thing. Anyway I don’t need to explain what it is you don’t care but the point is it’s a it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a symbol of fishness and fish fandom that even many fish fans might not immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice it as such and so it’s especially nerdy and only fish fans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would know what it is. No regular person would ever know what this is. And I walked around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I walk my dog every day, even during a pandemic, I would still walk my dog. I would just, you know, be careful. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was in the suburbs away from people, you know, walking on the sidewalk, I’d cross the street if someone came the other way, etc. So, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it was careful, but I was still outdoors in public for months wearing this mask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and zero people back at home ever seemed to notice what it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever said anything about it and over the course of a few months i probably passed a few hundred people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not a single person said a word. I come to the beach town day one. I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two people saying hey nice mask and i’m having i’m now having people like as i’m walking my dog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i’m now having people like just start talking to me about fish without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even asking if that’s what it is because they just know like i somebody i was i was you know petting some cute puppy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today and and and the owner was like, so you catch the 89 show they aired last night.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t even bring it up. It’s funny, like this is, I feel like, like this is what normal people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have with sports fandom that I’ve never had. Like the way like you can just wear like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hat for a sports team or something and you can walk down the street and strangers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be able to have small talk with you about that sports team that you both understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is something about like normal society that I’ve never been able to participating because I’ve never had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything about sports. Like I don’t have that in me. And so I always felt like this weird, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outsider, like no one likes the stuff I like, you know, being a nerd, that’s part of life. But you know, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, no one likes the stuff I like. No one understands who I am. And around here, I’m walking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around with my fish mask and I get, it’s like fish fans seem to be nowhere. Like when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the guy who likes fish in the room, you have no support from almost
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re right. Hey buddy. gonna hang out on more college campuses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like around here it’s like they’re everywhere like my people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are everywhere it’s amazing it’s the stoners you mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if that’s it but I’m not even one of those I don’t even know if that’s it but there’s some you know significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overlap between those groups for sure but no I think it’s just like a certain kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music nerd and for some reason I have none of them where I live the rest of the year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and here there it’s It’s just everybody. It’s amazing. I mean, you should
⏹️ ▶️ John get the Moo Moo. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go for it entirely. Right. I agree. I would love to see that. Please.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t believe the drummer for the band. Is that why the band is named P-H-I-S-H? Is it named after
⏹️ ▶️ John him or is it just a coincidence? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco named after him. His nickname is Fish. His last name is Fishman, but they spell it P-H and he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spells it F. I don’t know why.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I knew that. It’s like Eddie Van Halen with a P-H. Van, P-H-A-L-E-N.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eddie Van Phalen. Yeah. just use FISH. I don’t know. Why is he
⏹️ ▶️ John wearing a muumuu? I don’t know. Why does it have red blood cells on it? I don’t know. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John gone from measles to bloody Cheerios to red blood cells.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s been a journey, fellas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re only just beginning. All right. So our first stretch goal was me taking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the pre-show audio, which as
⏹️ ▶️ John one’s keeping track of these, are they? We’re just supposed to say these things and put out ridiculous numbers that we’re never going to achieve and
⏹️ ▶️ John just make stuff up. Someday we’re going to hit one of those numbers and someone’s going to remind us and we’re going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it. That’s fine. So the Fisherman’s Relief Fund, what did you call it? Fisherman’s Relief Fund? Fisherman’s Friend Fund?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fisherman’s Friend Fund. Yes, that’s it. That’s the winter
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll keep Marco and bad tasting cough drops forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They do taste like garbage, but they do work. They do work.
Thanks, members!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, we’re going to cut this from the release show. Hi, future Marco. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just wanted to thank everyone who has become a member because… Wait, wait, what do you mean, oh yeah? I wasn’t even talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Hamilton part, you d***.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just everything you say, he was saying, oh yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything that Gacy says, just cut it right out. It’ll make so many people happy. No, I just wanted to say that we reached an undisclosed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey milestone in membership and we will keep it undisclosed, but that meant a lot to all three of us. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s very kind of everyone who has joined.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is this is going to go in the show. This is in the show. This is good. Our members are awesome. We had a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them now and it’s really good. And we’re very happy. This. Thank you everybody. You’re, you’re being awesome and we’re very happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re very thankful and I’m still working on the bootleg feet. Haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a lot of time to work this week for unrelated reasons. Uh, but nothing horrible. Just, you know, life got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco busy, but yeah, we’re, we’re getting there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. But I just wanted to say, uh, thank you very much because, um, we, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been overjoyed, and some of us, namely me, have been flabbergasted by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey response, and especially for not really getting a whole lot in return at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the moment. And so it is incredibly kind of every single one of you, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are deeply appreciative of it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, thank you for proving me right. When we first started talking about doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, we were trying to argue, as we’ve mentioned in the past, we each had different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bets on how many members we’d get. And so far, everyone is proving me right and not proving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey right. And I think, John, you’re still kind of in contention, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Greenewald Yeah, no, I think we’ve exceeded my expectations now too. Douglas Goldstein All right. John Greenewald Not by a lot, but by a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re still less than half of your optimistic number, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Douglas Goldstein That’s fine. But by reverse prices right rules I still win. So here we are. John Greenewald
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, sure. Chris
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aspen Well, no, that’s not true, right? Because you’ve guessed over the actual amount. So it’s closest without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reverse. Oh, you said reverse. I’m sorry. I missed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco part. Yes. Sorry. Close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without going under. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John double secret probation. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John What is that from? I know that. No, I know that. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is that from? You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that. Isn’t it from… It’s from Animal House.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, Marco gets a reference. What’s going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen that. I’ve seen Animal House.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Marco saw a movie. I’ve seen it. I haven’t seen it in years, but I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. You had the college t-shirt. I actually don’t remember liking Animal House very much, but it has been forever since I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. No, it’s probably not a good movie.
👋 Target Disk Mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, moving on. Let’s start with some follow-up. Hey, guess what? There’s no target disk mode in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ARM Macs, which I guess is a bummer, but to be honest, I think I’ve only used target disk mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a couple of times in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Is this a bummer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a bummer. I mean, look, target disk mode is one of those things that most Mac people never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know is there, but the nerds know it’s there. And it occasionally comes extremely in handy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what it does, for anyone who doesn’t know, very quickly, What it basically does is it’s been featured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Macs like forever and it allows you to boot up holding down like T or option T or something, John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can correct me. And it basically, the Mac that you’re booting up in target disk mode doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boot the OS. Instead, it basically turns itself into an external hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive enclosure for the drives that are inside of it. And then you can connect a different Mac to it over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various cables over the years, you know, that’s evolved as the ports have changed over time. the second computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can access the drives on the first computer as if they were connected just like via an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external enclosure. And so it’s a way to like boot a like, you know, hosting computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a just disk read mode so that you can usually transfer its contents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a new computer. So it’s great when you’re like changing when you’re like, you know, got a new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or your Mac is dying and you have to get stuff off of it and it can’t boot all the way or the screen is dead and you just want to get stuff off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the disk or whatever. And it’s a very useful troubleshooting and migration tool to be able to just read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff over the cable directly. Now, in recent times, it is less necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you have migration assistant getting better, but it still serves a very nice role.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s probably still like, you know, more, it’s certainly more flexible than migration assistant because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you don’t have to be doing a migration to do it. You can just like, if you have a dying laptop, you can put it in target
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disk mode and connect your, connect some other computer to it and just pull off whatever you want. It just shows up as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a disk. And so it’s certainly getting complicated over the years as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like full disk encryption have happened. And I would imagine the reason it’s different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the ARM Max is related to that somehow. It’s related to the physical security of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the data on the disk or something like that. I’m sure they’ve enhanced it even further, et cetera. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they probably have good reason for changing it, but it’s probably going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slower and worse the way doing it over SMB instead. So I do more in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loss of target disk mode. I don’t use it often, but when I do use it, it’s really nice to have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like what I was saying, you can still do something like this, but instead of exposing
⏹️ ▶️ John it as an external hard drive, it exposes it as a server that speaks SMB. And you authenticate
⏹️ ▶️ John against it, presumably using the credentials that belong to the Mac that you’re connecting to, and you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John everything over SMB. And SMB is going to be slower and less feature-rich than directly mounting the
⏹️ ▶️ John drive. And I also assume the reason they’re not doing it is because, well, first of all, iOS devices don’t have it, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM Macs owe a lot hardware-wise to iOS devices. And second, there may be
⏹️ ▶️ John even more security when dealing with the internal storage on iOS devices than there is with Macs, and maybe this was just
⏹️ ▶️ John a path of least resistance. We’ll see. Related to this, by the way, we didn’t mention this last time when discussing how
⏹️ ▶️ John the startup process has changed on ARM Macs. There was that session that we linked to last week that I think contains
⏹️ ▶️ John information, but it’s worth mentioning for people who didn’t watch it. Marco mentioned not being able to remember
⏹️ ▶️ John what key you hold down when you boot into different things, Command, Option, P, R, the Shift key, hold down
⏹️ ▶️ John R, oh no, it’s Command, R now. It’s very confusing. Apple has unified all of that. For the
⏹️ ▶️ John RMAX, you just hold down the Power key, or I guess, what was the Touch ID key, or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, we’re gonna talk about that later, I think. The unlabeled button. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John The one button that’s on your computer that’s not a mouse button or a keyboard thing, the Power key, and that will apparently bring up
⏹️ ▶️ John little miniature interface that will allow you to select what you want to do instead of having to memorize all these weird
⏹️ ▶️ John key combos. So more arcane knowledge will be uselessly stuck in people’s heads
⏹️ ▶️ John forever and people will just need to know you have to hold down one key which is useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a bunch of stuff about the Numax where they can boot more of the OS like that’s one of the APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John volume rolls. Like a miniature OS that has enough of the OS to get something
⏹️ ▶️ John going, including potentially like graphics acceleration and stuff. There’s lots of the other
⏹️ ▶️ John modes that you should be able to boot into, like hardware diagnostic mode or even like recovery mode. A lot of the times
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels worse and slower because it loads limited graphic drivers or it’s not a real GUI at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John or it used to look like classic Mac OS for years, even though you’re running Mac OS X. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is all going to improve matters by booting something closer to a full-fledged
⏹️ ▶️ John OS where you can run actual stuff. So I welcome this unification, although I’ll also miss
⏹️ ▶️ John target disk mode, because that was very handy. And mostly the reason it was handy,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was the speed. Like, directly connecting a hard drive is always faster than connecting to a server, especially back in the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John old days of Apple File, AFS, whatever, I can’t even remember the acronym anymore. It’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so. Yeah, and just think all those websites that you have to, like, whenever you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t remember the key combination and you have to search the internet for a Mac recovery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key combo, and you get these garbage websites that are filled with ads that all you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is digging for the one stupid three-word combo in the middle that tells you what you actually need to know. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all those sites gonna do now? Apple’s putting them out of business.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You’ll have to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to a website to find out where the power button is. I mean, you know, right? Where is the power button in iMac
Sponsor: Hover
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SwiftUI in WidgetKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WidgetKit and third-party watch faces. What’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how much we talked about WidgetKit, but it’s that SwiftUI way to make, to sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John serialize widgets into a bunch of instructions for SwiftUI so that they can run without your
⏹️ ▶️ John application running. And it’s what’s used to make the widgets in the sidebar in Big
⏹️ ▶️ John Sur. And it’s very similar to the complications that run on watches. In all those cases, every
⏹️ ▶️ John complication and every widget doesn’t have an associated app running constantly behind the scenes to power it,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that would be incredibly inefficient, especially on the watch. That’s one of the things that WidgetKit does. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John also talked about third-party watch faces, the ability to vend multiple complications on the new watch
⏹️ ▶️ John OS of the same type. You can basically fill the entire screen, except for the little area that has the digital time,
⏹️ ▶️ John with a bunch of content that essentially comes from third-party apps, but it’s not really a third-party watch face. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of people have noted that there is a private API called underscore
⏹️ ▶️ John clock hand rotation effect in WidgetKit. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that WidgetKit is
⏹️ ▶️ John intended to make third party watch faces. You can imagine making a widget on your Mac that is itself an analog clock
⏹️ ▶️ John or doing some other kind of animation that uses a clock hand style rotation effect.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it does show at least somebody was thinking about using WidgetKit to make something that looks like a clock.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, and if Apple was going to make a third party watch face thing, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John probably work similar to complications in that, again, you wouldn’t be allowed to have an app running on the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time powering the watch face, because that would be very inefficient. There would have to be some very limited system,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like there is for complications, for drawing your watch face. So if something’s going to eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John mature into third-party watch faces, it could be a similar API to what they use for complications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, which to me is actually very promising. I’ve been going under the assumption for a while now that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re never gonna actually allow custom watch faces. And I still think that’s the most likely outcome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I agree, John. I think if they’re going to do it, this is clearly the way they’re gonna do it for power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons. Like, okay, you can give us a SwiftUI archived view or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how are these complications work? I don’t know enough about SwiftUI yet to describe it better. But basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do it with these rudimentary SwiftUI operations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this preset library of things that we allow clock faces to do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are all things that then the OS can do extremely efficiently without calling your code constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. probably how they would do it if they were to ever do it.
CCIX
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John tell me about unified memory architecture in a future arm Mac Pro if you please
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s not much new information about this We talked a couple shows ago about how Apple was pushing the unified
⏹️ ▶️ John memory architecture as a way to turn a potential con into a pro By saying well, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that we don’t Support discrete GPUs. It’s that our integrated GPUs are so
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing And like I said, that’s most that’s mostly true like, you know again the PlayStation 5
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Xbox Series X both use integrate quote-unquote integrated GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re really powerful so right up to the point where you you know everything up to a
⏹️ ▶️ John real gaming PC you can do with an integrated GPU so if you’re worried that oh my MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro won’t have a discrete GPU anymore the graphics could be bad don’t worry about that the only place you got to worry of course
⏹️ ▶️ John is the Mac Pro where it can have like four discrete GPUs eight discrete GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on how you pack them in there and that’s just not gonna work integrated but But anyway, the unified
⏹️ ▶️ John memory architecture of sort of having the CPU and the GPU all share memory has advantages. They’re closer to each
⏹️ ▶️ John other. It can be faster for certain operations, so on and so forth. But of course, the disadvantage is that you’re fighting for memory with
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of the computer and dedicated GPU memory can have a much wider bus width
⏹️ ▶️ John and other advantages that usually aren’t true of the system memory. But related
⏹️ ▶️ John to this is a bunch of existing technologies that are used to mediate between
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU and the GPU trying to share, trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to coordinate with each other and share a pool of memory while also having dedicated memory for
⏹️ ▶️ John dedicated GPUs. One of them is called, this is a fun acronym, Cache Coherent
⏹️ ▶️ John Interconnect for Accelerators, which is CCIX. Let’s see, cache
⏹️ ▶️ John coherent, I get the CC, I for interconnect, for accelerators
⏹️ ▶️ John X, accelerator, I don’t know. Anyway, and it’s pronounced C6. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you thought Mac OS X was hard to pronounce, C6. This is not consumer facing.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no. But anyway, this is an existing standard for doing this type of thing. AMD GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John also support what they call HSA, which allows the CPU and GPU to share memory
⏹️ ▶️ John while also having their own dedicated memory. Hussah. The HSA, yeah. It’s heterogeneous system architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a bunch of standards for doing this. This is not unknown technology. And as we discussed last time, like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the, the most, the easiest thing that Apple could do is just support external GPUs on our Macs. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John totally a thing they could do. Lots of rumors now based on WWDC slides, not listing discrete GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John support or saying, Oh, Apple’s not going to do that. They’re going to, they’re going to do everything integrated, which seems unlikely to me for the aforementioned
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons that you can’t put eight giant hundred watt GPUs inside a system on a chip. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too big. Um, or that they’re going to make their own. Apple’s going to make its own external
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs, which, sure, why not? They’re going to make their own cell modems. They’re making their own system out of chips. They could make their own GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John if they wanted to. Still, it seems the path of least resistance would be, just stick with AMD
⏹️ ▶️ John and support them on only one model, the big, giant Mac Pro. And on every other model, you get
⏹️ ▶️ John a very, very, very fast, quote unquote, integrated GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey which is another
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that Apple emphasized in all their sessions. They have this advice in their documentation and in their talks, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t assume when the GPU is the integrated GPU that it’s the slow one. That’s not true
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Apple ones. Apple’s integrated GPUs are fast. And this is like, they’re saying it mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John like from a programmer’s perspective, don’t make assumptions about, I think they have like this attribute that says, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John is low power or is GPU is low power and I think the Apple ones return true. And they’re like, yeah, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John low power but they’re also really fast. So don’t use low power as a proxy to mean slow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I’m still very optimistic about the potential
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU performance on all of the iMacs. The only one that’s question mark is the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think that’s probably gonna come much later in the transition. So we’ll look forward to seeing what Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has to offer there. But in the meantime, if you’re worried, don’t be because, well, I said
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t be because technologically speaking, Apple can absolutely put a GPU in all their laptops that will
⏹️ ▶️ John more than satisfy your needs, right? The iMac, maybe it’s a question mark,
⏹️ ▶️ John But overall, Apple could choose to have wimpier GPUs just because they don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s an important area to spend die space. I just don’t think they’ll make that choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Based on how good the GPUs are in the fanless iPad, I’m very optimistic about the GPUs
ARM Macs will have Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tangentially related, a few hours ago, Rene Ritchie tweeted kind of out of nowhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe there was a kerfuffle about this, and I just wasn’t privy to it, but as far as I could tell, it was out of nowhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he writes, from Apple, quote, over a decade ago, Apple partnered with Intel to design and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey develop Thunderbolt. And today our customers enjoy the speed and flexibility it brings to every Mac. We remain committed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the future of Thunderbolt and will support it in Macs with Apple Silicon, end quote. Which is good news. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was no brainer. Like I said, Thunderbolt is now royalty free. You don’t need an Intel chip to do it. USB 4
⏹️ ▶️ John is basically Thunderbolt 3 It’s yeah, that’s the Intel is building it into
⏹️ ▶️ John their new CPUs Like it’s all everything’s completely lined up for Apple to get a new support Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt 4 interestingly Doesn’t it doesn’t get any faster Which I just I just
⏹️ ▶️ John looked this up because I didn’t know know what the deal with Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 was I was Confused and thinking USB 4 was Thunderbolt 4
⏹️ ▶️ John but no USB 4 Thunderbolt 3 not confusing at all I know Thunderbolt 4 is just Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ John everything the same speed But it supports like hubs with four ports and has more
⏹️ ▶️ John stringent requirements for cables and other stuff like that So if you look for something with that’s Thunderbolt 4, you’ll know you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stuff that’s optional in Thunderbolt 3 But yeah, there’s no reason Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t support all that I mean upcoming iPads could support quote-unquote USB 4 which is actually Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ John like It’s all it’s all lined up for Apple to be able to do that without including an Intel chip and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know built right into their system on a chip so it’ll be fine.
Mac hardware predictions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk more about Apple Platform Unification and ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John Upgrade already beat us to it, but I thought this was a good topic that tied into our previous discussion about Apple Platform Unification, which mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John was, we ended up going down a rabbit hole of APIs, ATP being ADP,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but also I was trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk about the overall experience of what it’s gonna be like to use that, what kind of applications will be available
⏹️ ▶️ John to you and how they all have to live together and work together and seem like a coherent whole and
⏹️ ▶️ John not seem like you’re running like a bunch of VMs, right? That’s all like one thing. The flip
⏹️ ▶️ John side of that is, what does the hardware look like? We already talked about on the WWDC show that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John touch macs are coming. All signs point to that. The first
⏹️ ▶️ John R Macs will have touchscreens. And if they don’t, I think a lot of people will be very surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John because everything in Big Sur and all the APIs and all the other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John points in that direction. And it just makes sense with Apple’s line. but the episode
⏹️ ▶️ John of Upgrade 304 that we’ll link in the show notes, Jason and Mike went through even more detail about
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff that TouchMacs, that Arm-Mac, TouchMacs, yeah, we should just call them that, that Arm-Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John might have. I think Jason also wrote an article about it. I couldn’t find the URL to that one, but if we can find it, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John put that in the show notes too. I thought it was worth kind of like summarizing here because I basically agree with everything they said, but just to
⏹️ ▶️ John give all the listeners of this show a heads up, What can you expect from
⏹️ ▶️ John the first ARM Mac hardware, aside from it having a touchscreen that you
⏹️ ▶️ John will be confused about how to use because you haven’t used anything except for a Mac for a long time? Did either of you two
⏹️ ▶️ John listen to the show or read any of those articles? Have you been spoiled? I have listened,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I have not read.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, well, you should let Marco go. All right, Marco, describe the upcoming ARM Mac hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the hardware features that it will have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But because I haven’t read everything?
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to see if your opinions line up with theirs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well, besides the stuff that’s been reported of things like, you know, changes to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boot process or whatever else, I’m guessing we’re gonna have like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, really nice thin laptops, probably at least the like lowest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end ones won’t have fans, and I think we’ll have incredible battery life, and I do think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree that we’re gonna have touchscreens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that they’re gonna have touchscreens right away. I really don’t. I concur that it will happen. I just don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll happen immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the reason why they are bringing over iPhone apps from day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I think there’s two reasons. Number one is to give this new platform a vast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of content, you know, a vast amount of software from day one. Um, but I also think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the reason why iPhone apps will work so seamlessly on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because they will have touch screens. And if you don’t have touch hardware, then you have a much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much larger chance that arbitrary iPhone apps just won’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as expected on Macs. And I don’t think Apple would want that kind of customer experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Well, you two are both thinking small. I mean, Marco’s thinking small. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John granted, Marco didn’t read the article here, but I was listening to them talk about it. I was like, I hope they talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about this, and then they did. And then I hope they talk about that, and then they did. My visions of this hardware exactly match
⏹️ ▶️ John what they discussed. But Casey, you seem like even though you’ve read all the stuff, you think if that stuff’s coming, it’s not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John right out the door? CASEY
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MULLIGAN Based on no facts whatsoever, I would suspect that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we see initially, like the very first ones at the end of the year, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think will have something novel about them, but I don’t think it will be this masterpiece that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike and Jason have envisioned. And I think that would mean something like, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe Face ID, which they spoke about, maybe Face ID would be in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptops right when they’re released. That would be something novel and interesting, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey altogether unreasonable. The one thing that I will say that really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had an exploding head emoji when I heard them talk about it, which seems so obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in retrospect, which means it’s probably going to happen, is rounded screens in the same way that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad and the new iPhones have it. I never would have thought of that in a million years. and as soon as I said it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John because you don’t watch WWDC sessions. That’s why. Safe area insets.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mike’s doing his homework.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco If you haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John watched the sessions, a bunch of Mac stuff has safe area insets now. And if you’ve done iOS development, you know what safe
⏹️ ▶️ John area insets mean. Guess what? Rounded corners are coming to Mac screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, no. I don’t want that. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually don’t have a particularly negative opinion. In fact, I like the rounded screens on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything I’m using today. But it would be weird having that on a Mac. But I think my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vision is that their first release, which they’ve said would be this fall, and I’m envisioning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it as being laptops, but maybe it wouldn’t be, but I would envision laptops that may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or may not have a wildly different industrial design, but I think will have something novel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for sure. And again, Face ID is a great example, but maybe it’d be something different. But I don’t think that there’ll be a grand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey departure. Another possibility, although I don’t think it would be the case, is like maybe they look the same,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you can optionally include the cellular radio that Marco and I have been begging for for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not earth-shatteringly different, but it’s novel. And then I think sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2021, if the world hasn’t ended by then, then I think that’s when they start to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really unleash the crack and start doing really new, interesting, and different—I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would normally say novel, but I don’t think I want to say that right now—new, interesting, and different stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I get the feeling you think they’re going to come out of the gate fierce. So what do you think is happening?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, just briefly on the rounded corner thing, I think I mentioned this in the last show and Jason mentioned an upgrade as well. The original Mac had
⏹️ ▶️ John rounded corners, not actual physical rounded corners on a CRT, but it would draw black pixels in the
⏹️ ▶️ John corners of the screen to black out that area, right? So it looked like it had rounded corners. So you’re saying, I can’t imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John rounded corners on a Mac. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John had to look, I remember a couple of years ago, I had to look and think, wait, are the corners still rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac? and I was shocked to learn that they were not. So then, I just assumed they rounded, but
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously the radius is going to be bigger. Presumably it’s more like an eye, but if you wanna know what the radius is gonna look
⏹️ ▶️ John like, just take a big Sur window and drag it down to the corner of your screen and see how that radius lines up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Imagine the screen matched that perfectly. Like that’s a good bet. But yeah, no, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, there’s always the possibility, as we said several shows back, that they do the Intel thing. It’s like, look, if we wanna get
⏹️ ▶️ John our Macs out the door ASAP, We should do as little redesign as possible and just take
⏹️ ▶️ John our existing Cases and put arm stuff inside them and ship them and they’ll be boring in that way, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the only reason they would do that is time constraints Like this is how we can get them out the door the fastest, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the simple easier first step, but If they do that, which I really hope and think they
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t that’s just a you know a time constrained
⏹️ ▶️ John step to what I think they’re shooting for which is A Mac with a touchscreen with rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John corners on it with FaceTime with touch ID with a cellular modem Like all
⏹️ ▶️ John like all the things they list and these articles There’s no reason we’re not going to get all
⏹️ ▶️ John of them eventually like this is the new face of Mac hardware, right? It
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, it would match up perfectly with With the iPad right on
⏹️ ▶️ John one more iPad thing promotion, right? All the stuff that’s available on the iPad, when
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac is just a bigger and more powerful iPad, you get that stuff quote unquote for free.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have to do any extra work for ProMotion, iPads already support it. Rounded corners, that’s a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John OS and software changes, they’re already committing to that. Touch screens, you gotta move controls around, that’s all there. Face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID, you know, it’s very, support for things like the Apple Pencil, like
⏹️ ▶️ John remember the DTK that we’re not allowed to talk about. Reports tell us that what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John inside there is very much like an iPad. iPad already does all of these
⏹️ ▶️ John things. It’s like they would have to take it out for you not to get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, does that mean, what are they going to do for things like the Pro Display XDR that does not have rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John corners? You just do what the original Mac did, but just don’t draw on those pixels. And you can have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John cohesive experience. And maybe on the Pro Displays, obviously, individual applications can choose to draw over those areas,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it wouldn’t be like some hardware feature that’s stopping you from
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But like that I think is the, you know, Apple platform unification is
⏹️ ▶️ John what makes, when you look at a Mac and an iPad next to each other, in the beginning they looked
⏹️ ▶️ John and behaved very different. And I think a year or two from now, they’re going to look and behave
⏹️ ▶️ John very similarly. They’ll be able to run a lot of the same applications. Their
⏹️ ▶️ John aesthetic design will be similar. They will support all the same input methods. the Mac will be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to have more stuff going on at the same time and be able to have more RAM and more storage and more screen space,
⏹️ ▶️ John more of everything, but not different by nature, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And most of the time when you’re using an iPad, you’d be using the touchscreen, but it supports a trackpad and a keyboard. And most of the time you’re using a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, you’re using a mouse and a keyboard, but it also supports a touchscreen, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the future of Mac hardware. I don’t see any reason for that not to be the future
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac hardware. Like I said, I think it would be harder for Apple to not implement those features because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John already there. I mean, obviously you need OS support and there’s big hurdles to overcome. And that could be another reason. Second reason
⏹️ ▶️ John that Casey’s idea of them being boring in the beginning could be true is one, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John stopgap hardware, but two, software support takes longer than they expected. We, you know, lots of times
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware is delayed at Apple because the software isn’t ready. So integrating Face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John into Mac OS or integrating cell modem support into Mac OS may take longer and they won’t bother
⏹️ ▶️ John shipping in the horrible realm until does. Hell, I can imagine a Mac laptop with a U1 chip in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why not? Like, you know, that’s a Mac laptop that someone holds up to do AR stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Especially if it’s a foldable convertible. That was funny. Mike and Jason were also talking about the ideas of convertible
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs that can fold over and be tablets or whatever. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John reminded of what I think was the, probably the first article I ever wrote for Macworld Magazine, back when it was a paper
⏹️ ▶️ John magazine. It was an article about just that. It was an article about a Mac that
⏹️ ▶️ John was a laptop, but you could fold it over on itself and then it would run iPad apps, but it was Intel, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it would run Mac OS on Intel and it would run iOS apps
⏹️ ▶️ John also on Intel, just like they run in the simulator, right? Cause you know, iOS was already
⏹️ ▶️ John running on Intel. So it was no problem having an Intel machine that can run both. Turns out Apple went the other direction
⏹️ ▶️ John and made both of them ARM. But I’m not willing to commit to the convertible yet,
⏹️ ▶️ John although obviously I’ve had that idea for a long time, but all of that other stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the input methods, all the features, all the aesthetics, I feel like that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the future of Mac hardware, especially on the laptop line. Things get fuzzier with
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro and the iMac, but if you can envision an iMac as, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, as we said the last show, a really, really, really big iPad with way more power,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes perfect sense to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I do think that that is the eventual end. I’m less convinced that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the near term. But if I’m Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m worried about what people will think about this transition, like if I think I’m concerned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that your average consumer is going to be scared off from buying a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of this, which I don’t think an average consumer would, I don’t think anyone in that category really cares,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but take it for a moment that they’re worried that the average consumer is going to be pessimistic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this sort of thing. The easiest way to get your average consumer to get over that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to say, oh, well, look at this new hotness you can get. You can get touch, you can get face ID, you can get all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this stuff that you’re familiar with from your iPad or your iPhone and you can now have it on your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too. How amazing is that? And like I think I said on the WWDC episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m not mistaken, the number one way to to get me, not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really count in the grand scheme of things, but the number one way to get me to upgrade from this computer I bought a month ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is if there’s some sweet new industrial design or some sweet new capability that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have now. I don’t know if I would ditch the computer that I just bought strictly for a cellular modem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if it had a cellular modem and if it had touch, even though I don’t think I want touch, but everyone I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has done it, loves it. If it had touch, if it had face ID, all this put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together, suddenly I’m going from a computer that I thought I was going to use for years to a computer that I used for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like six months. Suddenly I’m on the Marco timetable of laptop upgrades.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. You remember the last time they did the transition from Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it was a conscious strategy or not, one of the effects of them essentially leaving the Macs the same but just switching
⏹️ ▶️ John out the guts was a comforting factor.
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac. It looks the same as it did. Because what was important at that time was our customers really like Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t rock the boat, they’re going to be scared by this transition, sell them something that looks and behaves exactly like it did before, and they will feel comfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ John They won’t even know it’s running Intel. But today, Apple’s in a very different situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where most of Apple’s customers don’t care about the Mac. They don’t own a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they don’t care about the Mac. They’re the iPhone company. iPhones and maybe to a lesser extent
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads. So the way to make people comfortable with a new line of Macs is to make them more like
⏹️ ▶️ John phones and iPads, that’s what people like. Apple, I don’t think is as worried about disturbing
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac users. And then even on the Mac side of it, Apple is playing catch up here. PCs, quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John PCs, have supported touchscreens for a very long time, right? Microsoft,
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft itself has a big giant tablet computer that’s a giant iPad. Like if people,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s, for the people who are in the market for a Mac, they’re aware that personal
⏹️ ▶️ John computers exist and they see what features they have, Windows Hello, the thing, you know, Microsoft’s Face ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those things have been around for a long time. People might use that at work, even if they have a Mac at home, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John making the new line of Macs, A, more like iOS devices, and B,
⏹️ ▶️ John catching up to the capabilities that PCs have had for years, that’s the, you know, quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote, safe bet here, not to just keep them the same. Keeping them the same, if it’s done at all, would be,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, again, for expedience and they just need to get them out the door they didn’t have time to send out the fancy ones. But
⏹️ ▶️ John all of those redesigns are more attractive to customers, not less. Like there’s no one who’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John scared away by that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we’ll see. I’m extremely excited to see what the late in this year brings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and also scared because I don’t want to spend another pile of money. I don’t really have to file a need to spend at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they put out a small fanless laptop, you know, you’re going to buy it. Like, you know, you know, you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John get, it’s going to have face ID and it’s It’s going to have a touchscreen and the battery’s going to last forever and it’s going to be way faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than your doorbell was and you’re just going to buy it. And the excuse you’re going to make is, oh, well, it’s not replacing my big six
⏹️ ▶️ John inch. I still love that one, but I wanted to get this one for my little laptop and then you’ll just use that little laptop for everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to have a 12 and a 13 inch because remember I bought a 13 not a 16. That’s right. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yes, now you will. Yeah. And it’ll be faster than your 13, which will be really sad for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, it will. I was just today doing some,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m working on something new, we’re hopefully going to talk about that in the post show, but I was working on something new and I needed to plug in a physical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device for reasons that are uninteresting. And I had power plugged into my laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already. I was doing work on the laptop because I was doing it in Big Sur because it’s new stuff. And I had power plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and then I just grabbed a USB-C to lightning cable and just plugged it in as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you know, gentlemen, how convenient it is to have more than one friggin’ port on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a laptop? Oh my goodness, it’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the only part I’m not optimistic about about ARM Macs, the port situation. Because iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices are not known for their proliferation of ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s true. So I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure. One more thing, and again, Jason already beat me to this. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John remember if he mentioned it on the show, but he definitely wrote an article about it for Macworld. Another factor in
⏹️ ▶️ John potential ARM Mac hardware is the touch bar. The touch bar, if you squint,
⏹️ ▶️ John can be viewed as a way to bring touch to the Mac without making touch Macs. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not big fans of it in the show. Some people hate it, some people love it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John most people are indifferent to it, I feel like. When your whole screen is a touch screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John the touch bar makes far less sense for a bunch of reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in all fairness, it makes pretty little sense now, but we still have it on everything. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, I think I’m on the same page with Jason. You can go two ways with this. One, get rid of it. It’s a great time to get rid of it. The hardware’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be amazing. It’s gonna be distracting. Apple can save face by just being like, look at all this amazing new stuff, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John touch bar will go away. And if they get asked about it, they’ll be like, well, the whole screen is touched now. It’s a perfect PR answer where
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple never has to admit that the touch bar never really caught on, or, you know, whatever, right? And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that you can do with the touch bar, you can do much more with an entire touch screen. It’s not quite the same because
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the stuff like while you’re on the keyboard is harder to do even if it’s just up a little bit on the screen, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John quite the same. The second way they can go is really lean into the touch bar and have a touch
⏹️ ▶️ John screen on your laptop and then a much bigger touchable area above the keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe twice or three times the height, sort of an extension of the screen, a second touch screen, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John seems far less likely to me. For one of the reasons that Jason
⏹️ ▶️ John cited, The way the Touch Bar works now is the little T, whatever, T1
⏹️ ▶️ John or T2 chips drives the Touch Bar, and that’s its own little separate ARM computer
⏹️ ▶️ John that runs its own little weird OS that it draws the Touch Bar and does all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s not, and that’s how it’s architected in macOS, like this whole big, you know, second little
⏹️ ▶️ John computer running a thing and communicating to it. They would have to completely re-architect that because they’re not gonna put two ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John chips inside the ARM Macs. They’re not going to have a big system on a chip and then a smaller system on a chip just
⏹️ ▶️ John to run the touch bar. Like that would be an incredible waste of resources and power and everything. To do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they wanted to run it, they’d have to run it all off of one chip, but that’s an entirely different architecture. Nothing would be running bridge OS anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be quite an investment. And so I don’t think they’re going to make that investment to bring the touch
⏹️ ▶️ John bar over unless they have plans to enhance the touch bar. They haven’t really enhanced touch
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. Certainly have enhanced it hardware wise. It’s been more or less the same. And software wise, you haven’t heard much about it lately.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? So I feel like this is the perfect opportunity for Apple to ditch the touch bar
⏹️ ▶️ John and save face. I hope they don’t double down on it and make a much bigger touch bar
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m not a particular fan of that. Or if they do, please just put some space between it and the keyboard so we don’t accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John hit the Siri button, please. Anyway, it just seems like it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John a waste of resources and space and power and just everything. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John these are Macs are as I described with all of these features, there’s so much cool
⏹️ ▶️ John new stuff that even the people who really love the Touch Bar, I think, will be placated by how much amazing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John they get in return.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think this also probably, like, first of all, I think I’m with you. I don’t see them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bringing it over if we do get touchscreen Macs. And if this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is indeed where we’re going, which I think is likely, it certainly does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give one possible justification for why the Touch Bar has not been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touched, sorry, really much at all since they launched it. Like it has almost changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero. Like ever since it was unveiled almost four years ago now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost nothing about it has changed or gotten better, including all the bugs that are still in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, no, that’s patently untrue. It got better when it got smaller and we got the escape key back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fair enough. When they chopped pieces of it off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that was much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the actual functionality in and of the bar itself really has not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changed in four years. And it is kind of, for many reasons, baffling why they still ship it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is so mixed, reviewed. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s baffling that it’s still required and everything. But yeah, I think this does give them that chance to save faces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re like, well look, the Touch Bar, it wasn’t a failure, it paved the way for Touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max. You know, just ignoring the iPad. But we’ll let them have this one. It paved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way for touchscreen Macs. And now the whole screen is a touchscreen. And they just quietly just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t ever mention the touch bar again. That, I think, would make a lot of sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just did a search in the developer app. I don’t think there were any touch bar sessions to this WWDC. And I think the earliest
⏹️ ▶️ John one I could find was from 2017, WWDC 2017. Like, Apple did make a push for third
⏹️ ▶️ John party developers to support the touch bar. Support touch bar in your app. Here’s how you use it. Here’s how you can customize the controls
⏹️ ▶️ John based on what’s going on in your app. Lots of apps did adopt that, so did Apple’s apps, and they showed them off and so on and so forth, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the evangelism surrounding the touch bar has really slowed down. So, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could slow down for a bunch of reasons. One, it could slow down because they’re gonna double down on it and make a giant, super-duper touch bar, but
⏹️ ▶️ John two, it could be slowing down because it’s just gonna go away when the Macs go touch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe the Touch Max will be like, what was it, the Nintendo DS, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the keyboard is a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen is a screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we talked about that when we were in the depths of our keyboard despair, right? That
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey oh, they added the touch bar and
⏹️ ▶️ John just soon the whole keyboard’s gonna be glass and it’s just gonna be a dual screen situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Seems like they’re not going that direction, and luckily, and they fixed the keyboard, right? But I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can picture in my head, especially the laptops, what these laptops look like. Like I just see them in my head. I
⏹️ ▶️ John see them, I see their shape and their size and just like their iPad-ness and all the features
⏹️ ▶️ John they have and the specs and then Big Sur fits right in there and you throw a big syrup
⏹️ ▶️ John there and you run a bunch of iPad apps on it and it all comes together in my mind. It’s starting
⏹️ ▶️ John to really make sense. The iMac and stuff are a little bit different. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely willing to believe that the first iMac out the door is going to be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what is it called?
⏹️ ▶️ John Surface Studio Pro, like the big drafting table thing. I don’t think Apple’s there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be quite a bold move for the first iMac out the gate. I think they could ship a more traditional iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John without a touchscreen, like no touchscreen, big 27 inch iMac, new industrial design, but with
⏹️ ▶️ John Face ID, right, no cell modem, right? Like the iMac is, I think, gonna end up
⏹️ ▶️ John being the more conservative one out of these, unless they go full Surface Studio, which I would love,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like that’s more of an ask, because laptops are their bread and butter, and I feel like that’s where they’re gonna concentrate all
⏹️ ▶️ John their effort to wow us out of the gate. You know, look at this new line of laptops. They are amazing, they do things no Apple laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John has ever done, and they’re faster than the Intel ones, and they have all these features. Like, that’s such an easy sell.
⏹️ ▶️ John Trying to explain a drafting table iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John is harder, I think, just ask Microsoft. Like, you know, for artists, sure, like it makes perfect sense for them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for everyone else, like, hmm, I’m not quite sure about that. And if it doesn’t do that, if it doesn’t fold
⏹️ ▶️ John down like that, having a touchscreen on an iMac is pointless. Like, that really is ergonomically
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. Even though, yes, I know, people still stab at the screen on their iMacs and their kids do too. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes as much quote-unquote sense just because like every once in a while I want to dismiss a dialogue with my finger. I get it. I totally
⏹️ ▶️ John get it, but a touchscreen of that size With you know that kind of digitizer resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John and refresh rate is quite an expense for just so you can dismiss dialogue So I feel like until
⏹️ ▶️ John Until and unless the iMac folds down like a drafting table. It’s not touch screen time.
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App-review changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there have been some app review changes over the last, I don’t know, month or so. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were aware of this, but we’ve had so many other things to talk about that we haven’t really had a chance to discuss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And honestly, I haven’t even really looked that much into it. So I’m going to need some help from you guys. But one of you, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, has put some very helpful things in the show notes. So I will kick off the conversation by reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, quote, two changes are coming to the app review process and will be implemented this summer. This is a quote from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First, developers will not only be able to appeal decisions about whether an app violates a given guideline of the App Store review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guidelines, but they will also have a mechanism to challenge the guideline itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What? Second, for apps that are already on the App Store, bug fixes will no longer be delayed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over guideline violations. What? Except for those related to legal issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Developers will instead be able to address the issue in their next submission. This sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. I don’t think I’ve said that about the App store in a little while, but this sounds very good. Is this not very
⏹️ ▶️ John So the thing about App Store rules is that Apple is judge, jury,
⏹️ ▶️ John and executioner. Like, Apple, like, there is no, like, when you make an appeal, like, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John the process, like, OK, well, we’re going to talk, let me talk to your manager, essentially, is what you’re asking. But the manager works for the same company
⏹️ ▶️ John as the other employee does. Like, at any time, Apple can make any decision
⏹️ ▶️ John about anything, right? And we know things are enforced inconsistently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people have different experiences with seemingly similar problems at different times at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time. It’s all very arbitrary and confusing. So when they say, we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to have, you have your appeal, but you can also challenge the guidelines,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, how does that work? If you appeal and they say,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, actually, you are in violation of the guidelines, and you say, well, I think the guideline is dumb, then Apple say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the guideline. I mean, like, I don’t understand the process by which an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John developer has any hope of changing Apple’s mind about what a guideline could be.
⏹️ ▶️ John That they couldn’t, you know, they were unsuccessful during the appeal for their app, but then somehow they’re going to be successful.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no jury, there’s no judge, there’s no impartial third party, there’s no,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you’re always talking to the same person. It’s like, oh, well, okay, well, argue with me in a different way. Okay, well, now,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s just, Apple does change its mind in response to developer feedback. This is a process that happens. The App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store rules have evolved over time, but I have a hard time being optimistic about these individual
⏹️ ▶️ John policy changes. Even the stuff about bug fixes no longer being delayed over guideline violations. That’s another one of those things
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like, a thing that annoys developers, we wanna hear that that’s not gonna happen, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still gonna happen, right? It’s still going to sometimes, and even though they said it wouldn’t, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like what Apple’s saying is, we’re gonna do better, which good, great. I love for them to do better,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think it’s good for them to say that, and they’re saying all the right things. But it strikes me as a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John theatrical to give new venues for you to talk to the same
⏹️ ▶️ John entity and keep pleading the same case and hearing them say, no, we disagree.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, I don’t know. Maybe I’m going to pass the message on the road today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t see how this works any other way. I mean, because you’re right. It’s not like there is some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of unbiased third party arbitration board handling these complaints.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is not gonna be very likely to override
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own guidelines and allow you or everyone an exception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just make a good case for why it should be. Because Apple has their own good case for why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should be and they’re gonna say, well, you believe you should be able to break this rule and we’ve decided you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to break this rule and in addition, we’ve decided the rule is valid. People reacted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this pretty positively when they discovered it, but I have a hard time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco envisioning before we actually get any actual outcomes here from people actually challenging the system, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently isn’t even in place yet. It says it’s being implemented later this summer. So who knows when people can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start filing such challenges against the rules. But are we really going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get exceptions to the rules? And furthermore, is there a precedent here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to make an exception for the rule. Does that exception apply to all developers? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course not, right? So what this could do, if anybody actually gets challenges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approved to the rules, it just makes the playing field less level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everybody else. Which we already know it’s not really a level playing field because big companies and strategically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important apps already get a softer hand applied to them for a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff than like small all indie apps do. And as you mentioned so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco geniusly, Jonathan, the rules are kind of gerrymandered to allow exactly all the apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple can’t really afford not to have, and we can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they can’t allow these things for everybody. Anyway, what this does is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best case scenario, it gives developers a way to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves advantages by bugging Apple a lot, basically, for a rule to be changed, possibly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that makes the playing field unlevel for everybody else. So I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. We’ll have to see how this works out in practice. It doesn’t sound as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as what I think people want it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think there are, I mean, first of all, pulling back again, this is Apple saying, we
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to make changes to make your life better. So like, forget about the details.
⏹️ ▶️ John Big picture wise, this is a positive thing. Apple is trying to do something to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the App Store review process less annoying for developers. You give a thumbs up for that, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always difficult because there’s only two parties here, and they do have their interests, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple bending a little bit and saying, okay, we have been holding the line, but we’re gonna change
⏹️ ▶️ John ourselves now. We’re gonna be nicer to you. Like the bug fix is not delayed
⏹️ ▶️ John over guideline violations, right? At least now, when Apple says that publicly, when that happens
⏹️ ▶️ John to you, You can cite something that Apple said and say, hey, you’re not supposed to be doing this. You said
⏹️ ▶️ John you weren’t going to do this. And then they might say, oh, yeah, you’re right. OK. Right? And sometimes they might say, actually, this is one of those exceptions. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, mostly positive, but that’s the problem with this process. It’s very fraught. Like, another
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that real, quote unquote, real court cases have is that usually the public record, you can see the proceedings of the court case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas you can’t even see other people’s radars. Right? That’s why open radar exists. Right? So it’s not like you’re going to see, speaking of
⏹️ ▶️ John precedent, it’s not like you’re even going to be able to know, I think what other people, when they go to challenge
⏹️ ▶️ John the guideline have said in defense of that guideline, where it’s all just a private thing that happens individually.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think from Apple’s perspective, having, you know, can I speak to your supervisor?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I speak to your supervisor’s supervisor? Having another level to go up, again, it’s kind of like going into
⏹️ ▶️ John a fast food restaurant with no shirt, no shoes, and the person at the
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, you know, it says no shirt, no shoes, no service. and you say, I demand to talk to your manager. The manager
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out and says, yeah, the sign says no shirt, no shoes, no service. I demand that you talk to your manager. And then that person’s manager
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out. Yeah, the sign says no shirt, no shoes, no service. Can I talk to the CEO? And the CEO says, yep, that’s our rule.
⏹️ ▶️ John No shirt, no shoes. Like, you can keep asking again and again. If they really believe that’s the, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but having those escalation paths is one more step that developers think they can
⏹️ ▶️ John take before running to the press, which as we know, never helps.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Which brings us to hey.com.
Hey resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John nicely done rules in the app store actually change
⏹️ ▶️ John in practice? Does it change because one developer developer yells about it? Well, maybe of their Microsoft or Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John or Netflix or Amazon, maybe that’s how it happens. But really, things in the app store change
⏹️ ▶️ John when they become a big enough problem for Apple that it is in Apple’s interest to change them. It’s stopping
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of apps from being put on the store, or a bunch of developers the same
⏹️ ▶️ John complaint, not just one of them, right? Like, it just, that’s when things actually change. The only time an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John developer can change things is when that individual developer makes a lot of noise and makes a big press story.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then suddenly that one developer becomes a problem for Apple because Apple hates bad PR. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John company does. Who wants to see your company’s name in a bunch of stories going around the
⏹️ ▶️ John web where you are put in a negative light? Oh, Apple’s at it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Their app store reviews are hurting this developer. The developer is the victim. Apple is the big baddie.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not a story that Apple wants to see, right? And that’s what I’m saying. Having another level to escalate gives you
⏹️ ▶️ John one more step before people feel like, well, I have no more recourse. I had a thing. I appealed. They rejected it. The only thing I can
⏹️ ▶️ John do is complain to the world about the injustice that has been visited upon me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, the developer, the hero of this story, I’m trying to do a thing. And Apple, the villain, tells me I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John do the thing. And Apple is mean. And let me tell the world about it, right? So the hey.com thing we don’t I want to rehash,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a couple of shows ago where we talked about it, you can look it up on the web over links in the show notes to see the whole big drama.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when last we left it, Apple had sent a letter to the Basecamp folks
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, here are some things you can do to make your app compliant. One of the examples was, you could consider,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, that is an email app by the way, hey, you could consider having the app function as marketed, an email
⏹️ ▶️ John client that works with standard IMAP and POP email accounts, where customers can optionally configure the hey email service.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so that’s one of the complaints was, people download your app and it does nothing. I forget the exact quote, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John you get the app and if you don’t have a hey.com account, the app doesn’t do anything. And of course you can’t tell them how to get a.com account in
⏹️ ▶️ John the app or you can’t, you can’t actually give them an account on the app and you can’t link them to the website, all these stupid rules, right? So the saying
⏹️ ▶️ John someone could download your email app, think it’s supposed to be an email up and get it and just be staring at and going, I can’t use this to read my
⏹️ ▶️ John email. So I said, why don’t you just make the hey app into an
⏹️ ▶️ John email app that You can use it with any Popper IMAP email server. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it also happens to work with hey.com. That would be a way you could put the app on the store.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what Basecamp did in a genius PR move is they said, we
⏹️ ▶️ John just sent the Hey app 1.0.3 to the App Store, introduces a
⏹️ ▶️ John new free option for the iOS app. Now users can sign up directly in-app for a free temporary
⏹️ ▶️ John randomized hey.com email address that works for 14 days. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get the app and you can, right in the app
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do a thing, which is get a free thing for 14 days. There’s no in-app purchase because you’re not actually making
⏹️ ▶️ John a purchase. There’s no, you can do that all in the app. So now the app does function. If you wanna see what Hey
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, you download this app, you do the thing, you get a random temporary email address that lasts for 14 days, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The genius of it was announcing that to the world. That’s part of their ongoing PR campaign to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John here are the mean things Apple’s doing to us. And by the way, here’s this giant webpage listing other apps that do the exact same thing we’re doing, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John got approved. And you know, the whole sort of PR campaign that has essentially been won by Basecamp in this scenario.
⏹️ ▶️ John By pre-announcing that they have submitted 1.0.3 to the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John and describing how it works, they’re daring Apple, they were daring Apple to reject them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, Apple did not say that this would be
⏹️ ▶️ John acceptable. They said, you can make it an IMAP or a PopClient. And Basecamp said, we’re doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they didn’t make it a pop and IMAP client. What they did was not one of the example things listed
⏹️ ▶️ John by Apple that Apple said, here are things you could do to your app to make it acceptable to us. Basecamp did none of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t mean that the thing they did also wasn’t going to be acceptable because Apple didn’t give an exhaustive list. They just said, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John here are some things you can do. But Basecamp didn’t do them. Basecamp did its own thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The result was Apple approved, hey, 1.0.3. So it’s in the app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John the beef has been settled, I would consider this
⏹️ ▶️ John massive victory for Basecamp. They essentially bullied Apple in the public sphere
⏹️ ▶️ John into Apple doing what we all think is more or less the right thing, which is let them have their app, it’s not the end
⏹️ ▶️ John of the world, it’s gonna be fine, right? There are other apps that work like this, the world doesn’t end. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple correctly surmised this is not worth fighting. In reality, we don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, the Hey app being on the app store with this trial thing is not a big deal. No, it’s not a pop and I’m app client,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what they did is good enough. It fulfills the requirements that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it fulfills the things we can say face publicly because what we said in public was, oh, you download the app and it doesn’t work. And now you download
⏹️ ▶️ John the app and it does do something and we’re happy with that. Nevermind the utility of a randomized email address that works for 14
⏹️ ▶️ John days is of questionable value. But either way, I think it was fine even before they added that feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So this is one of the ways,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the ways that is not available to most people, uh, to change app store rules, make a big
⏹️ ▶️ John stink in the public about it. Be, be a well-known beloved company like base
⏹️ ▶️ John camp, right? Uh, be a loud mouth like DHH, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John make noise, uh, and tell the world about what you think
⏹️ ▶️ John is unjust about, you know, what’s happening to your application and then fight with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple in public. Apple did it too, Apple sent their response to apparently to other websites
⏹️ ▶️ John before they sent it to them. Like they said, we’re gonna respond to you but we’re also gonna respond to a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of websites and the websites got the response even before Basecamp did, right? But then Basecamp
⏹️ ▶️ John coming back and saying in public, we just submitted 1.0.3 and normally, the only people who know about this
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple because who else sees our app submissions? But let me tell you the public what we just submitted to Apple so that you know later
⏹️ ▶️ John when they reject us It’s like, man, it was, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a game of chicken, but it was perfectly lined up, you know, not by any grand plan, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally, right? To be right before WWDC when Apple wanted this story to go away, and again, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John the right thing to do was always just to let the Hay app be in, it was, they followed Apple’s existing,
⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly nice rules as best they could, and there are other apps that do the same thing, and the world
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t end, and someone who downloads free hay app and doesn’t figure out how to use it can just delete it
⏹️ ▶️ John like it would have been fine, but in the end, Basecamp
⏹️ ▶️ John won this. And would they have won a similar process if they had appealed?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they think they did appeal the original thing, but if they had challenged the guideline itself,
⏹️ ▶️ John would they have been as successful as they were with a giant public bloat before WWDC? I’m going to say no,
⏹️ ▶️ John because a one-on-one conversation with the challenge of the guideline
⏹️ ▶️ John committee, that’s very easy for Apple to go, yeah, no, we think you should do something different, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s much harder for Apple to have that same, take that same stance when everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John out in public and someone’s making a bunch of noise about it and there’s a million stories all over and it’s leading up to WWDC. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an imperfect system that we have, but you know, Marco mentioned like a, an impartial third party
⏹️ ▶️ John or some kind of arbitration. Not that, you know, anybody in this situation is impartial, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the The third party in this is the public, right? They are the third stakeholder, developers, Apple, and the users,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the only way users become a stakeholder is mediated through the press.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, when people find out, oh, Apple rejected this app, and someone reads the story and say, that doesn’t seem fair, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John like that app, or I think that app should be accepted, or it would be cool, or whatever. If enough of those people get worked up
⏹️ ▶️ John from stories they see in the press, that influences Apple because users are stakeholders in this situation,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re the ones who buy Apple’s products. So that’s why I was mentioning
⏹️ ▶️ John that court trials or whatever are usually public. In this case, so we know there
⏹️ ▶️ John are no secret tribunals or whatever, but in this case, it’s kind of important that this stuff happen in public
⏹️ ▶️ John because without that happening, users have no say in the process. It’s just between Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and developers, and Apple can stomp on developers much more easily in private than it can in public
⏹️ ▶️ John once the users know what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I thought it was extremely well executed by the base camp folks or the HEY folks, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, why is it all caps? Like it’s, it’s, I’m not in love with the name, but I can, I can see why they did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but all caps, come on. Anyways, I, I, it was so deftly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so well executed. And I think if my recollection serves me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, which it almost never does, I think Marco called this like move for move before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this all shook out. And Marco had said, you had said that this is what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to happen. And that’s exactly what ended up playing out. I remember looking at this all happen in real time and being like, wow, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you could see as soon as they started making a stink about it, you’re like, well, Apple’s not going to like this. They’re going to they’re going to want
⏹️ ▶️ John to make this go away. And they’ve done this a million times before. Like whenever there’s a big stink, it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John easy for Apple to come up with a face saving compromise to make the story go away and live to fight another day.
⏹️ ▶️ John And right before WWDC, they’re very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco motivated to do that. Yeah, and both companies were. In this case, both companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had taken very strong public stances. Both companies had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot to lose by backing down to the other’s demands. And so they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found a way to not back down. They found a compromise that made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sound like both companies were really happy with the way everything went, and both companies were getting exactly what they wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the reality is probably both of them are great in their teeth the whole time, but it doesn’t matter. You know, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let them get out of that conflict without either side really giving,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving ground on like the principles that they brought to the public as like, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what we stand for. Period.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And it’s, it helps that Apple’s like, when it was secret before it was out in public,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s reasons for rejecting the app were slightly different than the reasons when it became public. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s reasons always started shifting. That tends to happen. Like, why am I getting rejected? And you get a bunch of different reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it was like, is the most recent reason I was given the real one? Or was the first one the real one?
⏹️ ▶️ John The remedies suggested seem not to address the reasons the thing was rejected in the first place. It’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John so confusing. But by having those different answers, it allows Apple…
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple gave them enough room by giving them examples. And even though they didn’t implement any of the examples, they implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John something similar and so Apple can say yeah there you go we you changed your app
⏹️ ▶️ John and we let you in everybody wins and honestly Basecamp didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John change their app they added one minor feature right which must have been a pain to implement but still like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the app itself works the way it always did I think Basecamp considers the app to be the app for people who have
⏹️ ▶️ John already signed up and this whole thing that they had to add for the trial is only there to appease Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John But really, they just wanted their app to be for sale. So success for them and Apple like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d have to know what Apple’s real reason for rejecting was to know how satisfied they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can tell you Apple is not satisfied to have a big public fight and look like the villain.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, have this compromise, they would much rather be, you know, everybody loves them. And they’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’re coming from a position of strength and developers are clearly in the wrong. That’s not what happened here, right. But if you knew,
⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple’s heart of hearts, if a corporation could be said to have one, what was the real objection
⏹️ ▶️ John here? Was it the fact that they don’t get 30% of all Hey! subscriptions? Was it the fact that the app
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work when you download it? Was it the fact that it doesn’t work as a regular email client? Was it
⏹️ ▶️ John misleading to people in the store? Like, if Apple’s concerned about misleading apps in the app store, I have some news for them about other apps they might wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John look at before the Hey! email app. Right? So they say a bunch of things, it’s always so hard to
⏹️ ▶️ John tell what the real objection is. So since we don’t know what the real objection was, don’t know how satisfied they are
⏹️ ▶️ John with the app as it exists. I feel like they just wanted to go away and it’s like fine you can have your
⏹️ ▶️ John app in the store. It makes me wonder how little could Basecamp have done and still gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John the app back into the store. Doing nothing is probably wouldn’t have worked because Apple would have said we’re at an impasse you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John change anything about your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey app but if they had changed literally anything
⏹️ ▶️ John about their app like we made the icon a different color now can we go in Apple would be like okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John You changed your app, it’s a compromise.
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#askatp: Data migration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jacob Rosen wrote, I will be upgrading my laptop to the new MacBook Pro in a few weeks, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly is probably like six weeks ago now, but sorry. I was curious, what are your methods and views
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on data migration? Do you guys tend to bluntly mirror everything over with Migration Assistant or rather do copy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data over by hand, leaving potential trash money to junk behind? We’ve covered this a few times in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it gets asked constantly, so it’s worth covering again. As I’ve said a few times recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I view basically all of my computers with the exception of the Synology as ephemeral,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there’s very little, if anything, on any of my computers that I am unwilling to lose at a moment’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notice because everything is duplicated somewhere else. Like code is on GitHub,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictures are on the Synology, I don’t know, anything, bookmarks are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in iCloud, all that stuff. My mail is in Gmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All that stuff exists somewhere else. So the good side of that is that when I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new Mac or if I want to, you know, reinstall an OS on a Mac or if I want to put a beta OS on a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not really a big deal. There’s not that much I have to copy. It’s all coming over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from other places. And if you can get to this life, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not easy, I will be the first to tell you, and you oftentimes need like a multi-thousand dollar NAS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or, you know, hundreds of dollars in web services that you’re paying for, like online storage each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month. But if you can get there, it’s amazing. And very quickly, I’m not going to belabor the point now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two things that I can point you to that will be in the show notes. One, I wrote a post in 2016
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the sorts of things I do before getting rid of a Mac and when creating a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installation like settings and things like that. But more recently, last year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the end of last year, I wrote about Homebrew Bundle, which if you’ve used Ruby’s Bundler,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s basically the same thing but for Homebrew. And it can also do things like Mac App Store apps, it can do GUI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, and it’s basically just a way to just very, very quickly get all of your dependencies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installed. And if you haven’t tried this or played with this, I really, really recommend it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, last I remember hearing, I thought you were a migration assistant person. Is that still the case?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I am. Yeah, I will occasionally, like every few years, I will start my laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over. I almost never start my desktop over. I think I’ve started my desktop over like twice ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the in Mac land. But yeah, I will occasionally start my laptop over with a clean install and everything. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, that’s that’s rare. That’s not the common case. Otherwise, I’m using migration assistant.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, John. I’ve been migration assistant for many,
⏹️ ▶️ John many years. And so far, it hasn’t steered me wrong. I haven’t done a fresh
⏹️ ▶️ John one in forever. And yeah, migration assistant’s been working for me. Every time I do it, I have trepidation
⏹️ ▶️ John because I never, it’s, well, last time it was 10 years, but it’s always so long between times that I do it, I’m like, did
⏹️ ▶️ John I do a migration assistant last time? Did I use ethernet? Did I try to do direct connect? Did I connect with Firewire?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did I take out my hard drive and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco clone it to the other
⏹️ ▶️ John one? Like, all those other things go through my mind, but in the end, I usually just end up doing migration
⏹️ ▶️ John assistant. I think for this one, I did, What did I do? Did I do a migration assistant
⏹️ ▶️ John with a, I think it’s a migration assistant with an external drive or with a time machine backup. I don’t even remember. The point
⏹️ ▶️ John is my Mac is the same everywhere. I’m not, they’re not ephemeral. It’s a real lived in place
⏹️ ▶️ John with stuff everywhere. So I bring the whole thing with me. I need all the stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is only when I’m going from one Mac to another. When I do things like installing Big Sur and stuff, none of
⏹️ ▶️ John my stuff is there. That Big Sur isn’t even signed into the same Apple ID. This is all, you know, an abundance of caution
⏹️ ▶️ John from being a Mac OS X reviewer. Do not let beta OSs have any access to your real
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, that’s why I have multiple Apple IDs. So there I have none of my stuff. I don’t even like keeping my other drives
⏹️ ▶️ John mounted. Like I frantically unmount everything
⏹️ ▶️ John as I put it into Big Sur. I’m like, you don’t see those disks, ignore them. There’s nothing there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do have Big Sur signed into iCloud, which is risky. I will be the first to tell you that your approach is safer. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also agree that I unmount, you know, it always asks, well, do you want to mount Macintosh HD?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is my, you know, Catalina installation. No, no, no, you do not want to mount that. I do not
⏹️ ▶️ John That should be a member stretch goal. Get Casey to rename his hard drive. I saw it with your Big Sur
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Like, everything was called like Macintosh HD, and it was like called Macintosh HD Big Sur or something. Like, just
⏹️ ▶️ John rename your hard drive. Give your computer some personality. I know it’s a frame rule, but give it a name. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Give the computer a- What is your actual computer called in the sharing thing? Like, what is your, what is your like,.local DNS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Casey’s Mac Pro, I think. Where’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sharing? I’ve got to find it. Casey’s iMac Pro. Yep. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John terrible. Give it a name. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the worst. If you don’t give it a name, we’ll come up with a name for you. Like, you can have a theme. Naming
⏹️ ▶️ John your computers, and my suggestion is name your computer and name your boot hard drive the same as your computers. You don’t have to think
⏹️ ▶️ John of one name then. And have it themed on something that you like, right? And give it a custom icon
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can convince the stupid APFS merge volume thing to accept your custom icon, which is getting very difficult.
#askatp: Running Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Frank Hertz writes, do you all run Ethernet and drill holes and do that sort of thing yourselves? Do you hire people?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In order to have my office computer, oh my God, as I’m reading this, John is literally moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the doc around and writing next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John week. What is Casey named his computer? What is Casey named his computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey What is Casey named his computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Computer’s, parenthesis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S. I’ll delete it later, don’t worry. And I’m not gonna give Marco a good edit point because I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s funny. No, I’m letting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in. So Frank continues, in order to have my office computers on Ethernet, I have had to stick with coax files.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the Verizon router can be in there getting files from Coax. Ethernet from Fioswitch would need new cables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everywhere. So I think basically what Frank is saying is he was living in my old world where I had Coax coming into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my router and it had to be the Verizon router because of that. And then I had Ethernet to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away from there. So now I do have Ethernet coming in to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my router. So I’m using an Eero because I genuinely do like it, although they did send this to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in terms of wiring the house, I have not done so. What I will say, however,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that, and we’ve talked about this in the past, you can get a Mocha Bridge, which is basically a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that goes either from Ethernet to Coax or the other way, from Coax to Ethernet. So I have two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these. I have one in the office and one downstairs in the entertainment center. And what that allows me to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is if you get fancy ones, and I was sent some by a very, very kind listener,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you get fancy ones, they can do near gigabit speeds. And so I tested like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week ago, coincidentally, I tested the using fast.com, uh, what the speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were downstairs. So this is ethernet from the laptop to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hub or switch, I guess, actually, then from the switch to the Mocha bridge through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coax to the office, Mocha bridge to Eero, and I was getting something like 650 ish,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, megabits per second down when I have gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service. So it’s not perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot easier than wiring your whole darn house. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a perfect world, I would have wired the house or had a house that it was already pre-wired.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if you’re too lazy like me and you don’t need a whole bunch of drops, I would really consider looking into a pair of Mocha bridges.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It can work out quite well. John, you have an ancient home, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you would like to describe it, it is always falling apart. So I assume you have ethernet only in your office?
⏹️ ▶️ John So, the bad thing about having an old house is I have no earthly idea how to run
⏹️ ▶️ John cables through these walls that are covered with horsehair plaster and, you know, lath
⏹️ ▶️ John and just filled with old newspapers and dead mice and like ridiculously large
⏹️ ▶️ John ancient dimensional lumber
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to drill through. Like I don’t, trying to run wire
⏹️ ▶️ John to someplace where it isn’t is extremely difficult. The good thing about having an old house is there’s lots of holes in
⏹️ ▶️ John it. When it came time for me to run cables,
⏹️ ▶️ John my Ethernet cables, it just so happens that the main places I needed Ethernet cables, I already had existing
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly gaping holes in my ancient house between them. So, someone, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John previous owners had already drilled a gigantic hole, presumably for coax cable, to the
⏹️ ▶️ John television area from the basement. You know, the first floor television is right above the basement.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that hole is huge, and so it’s got, yes, it does have coax going through it to the television, but it also has ethernet. So I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I ran that myself, just, you know, basically all my wire running has been in the basement, right, the Fios comes
⏹️ ▶️ John in my basement, and the basement is not, it’s half finished, but the finished part has a drop ceiling,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, holes, and the rest of it is not finished. So I basically ran the ethernet cable myself from
⏹️ ▶️ John the Fios thing, there’s a router in there, my Synology’s in the basement, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff down there. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John from that big cluster of stuff, the ethernet continues, One of them goes along my basement up to my television.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another one goes along my basement and into my computer room, which is just on the opposite side
⏹️ ▶️ John of a wall from the television. And there’s a gaping hole there because it used to be like a three-season porch that they closed
⏹️ ▶️ John in, but they didn’t close it in on the inside. So I have an easy place to get ethernet into here. Those are
⏹️ ▶️ John the only places the ethernet go to my house. They go to my television and they go to my computer room. Every place
⏹️ ▶️ John else is wifi. I would love to have ethernet up in the second floor somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s what Eero is for. And the only thing we use it up there for is just sitting in bed looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at the iPad, which is plenty fast for that. And then I do actually have coax
⏹️ ▶️ John going to the second floor because the people who own the house before me ran coax everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John including to the kitchen. Remember in the 80s when it was cool to have cable TV in your kitchen? There
⏹️ ▶️ John is a coax cable in my kitchen behind my refrigerator, hanging there,
⏹️ ▶️ John just doing nothing because we don’t have a television in the kitchen. Yeah, there’s coax everywhere. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John the technique for running coax back in the day was, so the coax is in your basement. Oh, you want it in
⏹️ ▶️ John your bedroom? Let’s do this. I’m gonna drill a hole through the wall of your house to the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m gonna shove the
⏹️ ▶️ John coax through there, and then I’m gonna bring it up to the second floor, and I’m gonna drill a hole from the outside of your house
⏹️ ▶️ John into your bedroom, and I’m gonna shove the coax in there, and then I’m gonna squirt some silicon caulk into two holes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Let me remind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, when I got my gigabit service done, I had told the guy, oh, you know, I’m really sorry, but the ONT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in the back of the house, were in my office is in the front right, you know, the opposite corner of the house, literally across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the upstairs in the opposite corner. You know, I’ve scoped out, here’s where I think you can go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the walls, blah, blah, blah. And he listened. He said, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. He said, well, here’s the thing. I’m not allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to drill through any—I’m not allowed to do any sort of interior work whatsoever. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. I’m like, well, what are you going to do then? So he takes like this three-foot drill bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think he was in my office and pushed that into the wall and drilled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right outside, just drilled all the way to the outside and ran ethernet cable around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the bottom of the trim of our house from the back left, if you will, from the back left corner all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way down and around to the right and then went all the way up to the second floor and then just like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sprayed some silicone or sil-sil-sil-silic-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Silicone in that case. Oh God
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bless. I’m going to get this right when I’m dead. But anyways, sprayed some of that stuff in there and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called it a day. It’s worked for a year and a half now, so I can’t really complain.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when we got our house re-sided, I got to fix all of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the terrible cables that had been drilled out of it. When
⏹️ ▶️ John all the siding was off the house, I could finally fix it. So that’s solved it. I even, the only one that I could really entirely get
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of is the Fios, because that comes from outside of the house, but I cleverly tuck that underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John the new siding. So there’s no more holes in my house, which I’m glad about. But yeah, I would love to have Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ John in more places. My suggestion is, if you’re trying to do this, you can run Ethernet yourself. Like it’s a very thin, light
⏹️ ▶️ John cable. You can have these little clips that hold it on or whatever. But the difficult part is always getting
⏹️ ▶️ John through the walls. Don’t try to do that yourself unless you’re very handy, because there’s things in the
⏹️ ▶️ John walls that you don’t want to hit with a drill, like electrical wires, and even worse,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably, if you survive the electrical wires, plumbing. Mm. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there’s lots of terrible failure notes. And here’s the thing. Professional electricians, obviously, are way
⏹️ ▶️ John better at this than random people. But professional electricians are not magicians. Depending on how your
⏹️ ▶️ John house is set up, there is no physical way to get wires from one place to the other without drilling holes in things. That’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John the wire gets there. Do you already have conduit in your walls? Probably not, and if you don’t, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna have to drill holes. It’s not magic. And so if you want holes in your house and
⏹️ ▶️ John in your walls, no matter how carefully you fish things, it’s a difficult business.
⏹️ ▶️ John So obviously if you’re building your own house, building conduits for all the wires so that you can string new wires in when the new
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy fiber optic stuff comes out in 20 years or whatever. But if you’re in your own house,
⏹️ ▶️ John see if you can find weird little holes or little crevices or walls that you won’t notice a wire
⏹️ ▶️ John along. You can fairly, you can get pretty far just with some, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John tape and little clips and some wire that is colored in an inconspicuous way. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John with speaker wires, I don’t have any place to send speaker wires, but I have like surround sound quote-unquote at 5.1.
⏹️ ▶️ John The speaker wire is all just out there. I’ve just hidden it behind sofas or on the mantle
⏹️ ▶️ John behind all the photographs so you can’t see it, right? There’s lots of ways
⏹️ ▶️ John you can run cable and be less conspicuous. And in the end, eventually you just don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to care that much, right? What I wouldn’t suggest is just stringing it along your floor, because you
⏹️ ▶️ John will trip over it forever and break everything and it’ll be terrible. Even if you try to tape it down, that won’t work either. So don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But right up until that point, get creative because having ethernet in places is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, your approach is to just buy a house with it already in there, I assume?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can find one. No, my approach is like whenever I have access to inside the walls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my house, which is not very often, then it’s like, if you’re doing a major renovation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then have them install wiring then because the walls are already open and accessible. Otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what John said is pretty spot on. I think there’s an important little lesson the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco middle of this which is like find an area where you can run cables quote for free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so a basement or attic usually is perfect for this because Ethernet cables can be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long and still work fine and take advantage of that you can do like if you can get from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the source room or whatever to either the attic or the basement then you can kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of run whatever because no one cares what it looks like there so you can just kind of run it like you know across the insulation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beams in the attic or whatever or you know clip it to the ceiling with wire clips in the basement and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then pop up wherever you want it to be and so that way you are like making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holes or drilling through way less of the like pretty finished part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the house that’s usually a very very easy way to do it or you know as you know the coax
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trick go outside for part of a run wrap it around the house on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and go back in if there’s somewhere you you can like discreetly hide that. Otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for actually doing like in-wall work, and actually if you wanna do like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a real like in-wall professional job where you have ethernet jacks as part of the walls and you know, going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between rooms, that’s definitely something to hire out to professionals unless you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very handy with that kind of stuff yourself. But finding those professionals is tricky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The good thing is that in recent years, a lot of the like custom nice house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco builders, a lot of people demand like smart speakers in the walls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. Sono systems run throughout the walls and everything. And so many more of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like installers and electricians and things like that, many more of them have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developed the skill of running network wire because non nerds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have wanted it for more things. And so that benefits us nerds. because when we say, hey, can you just run like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cat six or cat seven cable everywhere? Uh, they’re like, well, okay, yeah. So do you also want speakers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, no, no, no. I don’t want that. Please don’t do that. Oh, how about this smart home? Nope. Don’t want that either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just want these ethernet jacks in these places. And another tip there, you know, I said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cat six or cat seven, make them install the highest end ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable that exists today. Right now that is cat seven as far as I know. Um, because you know, or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As John said, if you can get them to install conduit, which is just a pipe in the wall with like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poles in it, like string poles. And so when cables change down the road, they can like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull a new cable through the existing tubes that are already in the wall. That’s a wonderful dream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice. Good luck finding that. And then good luck, if you can’t find it, good luck getting it to work. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming you can never replace the cables easily, obviously make them put in the highest end cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that exist when you do it. When I did my house, that was Cat6, and that was, jeez,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight years ago now, and that’s still totally fine. I can’t do the full 10 gig
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speeds in most cases, in theory, but that’s fine, because I don’t yet have any 10 gig
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equipment, and it’s been almost a decade since I did that wiring, and it’s fine. So, that was the best thing at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s lasted almost a decade, and it might last longer while still being pretty useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s certainly, get whatever you can get. today it’s Cat7 I think, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the highest end network wiring, the installer will complain because it’s more expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cables are thicker, they’re harder to work with, but you’ll be happy in 10 years when it’s still
#askatp: WWDC’20 favorites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, this was not strictly speaking an SBTP, but one of us spotted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and since I don’t know, it must be John. That’s the rules. One of us spotted this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and added it and I think it’s a great question. Shehab writes, what has been your favorite thing to come out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of WWDC this year that flew under many people’s radar or wasn’t featured in the keynote? For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, it’s been the historical stack when long pressing the back button on navigation bars. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a good answer for this yet because I haven’t really spent enough time with either. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent a fair bit of time with Big Sur, but certainly almost none with iOS 14. In fact, just yesterday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put it on an Aaron’s old iPhone 10 so I wish I had a better answer for this. The thing that jumps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to mind though, which certainly is on a lot of people’s radar is the non-full screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone takeovers. You know, when they just, it just shows as notification center, or I’m sorry, like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notification dropping down from the top of the screen and doesn’t take over the entire darn phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t have any really good unsung heroes. John, do you have any unsung heroes?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, my obvious answer is the APFS time machine changes, which definitely weren’t in the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John and didn’t even have sessions we found out about afterwards. But my other one, going the other direction of things that were
⏹️ ▶️ John actually like at WWDC was I love the iPad cursor session. It’s one of those sessions where there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not really much for developers to do. They always try to spin it like here’s how you can make your cursors, but it really is mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John explaining the philosophy behind how Apple did its cursor work and how cursors work in iPadOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because once you understand that, then when we say, when you’re making your cursors, follow our lead,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And here’s a bunch of rules, you know, whatever. Like, I love those sessions. Like, speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of the file system, they sometimes have sessions about the file system that are like that, where
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not really anything for you to do. Maybe there’s one or two new APIs for doing like the APOS clones, but they really just want to explain,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re the file system team, here’s a bunch of stuff we did, and here’s why. And yes, there’s always some developer
⏹️ ▶️ John impact angle, but it’s really just explaining their reasoning. And those are great. Like, I think those are incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John valuable because you need to have the low level sessions where it’s like, here’s how to do this particular programming task,
⏹️ ▶️ John but those high level ones explaining a philosophy, those really serve people well to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m faced with a problem, I, that wasn’t discussed at WWDC, what set of values should
⏹️ ▶️ John I use to make decisions about how to handle it? If you watch that iPad cursor session, you know, where Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is coming from with with cursors on the iPad, and hopefully when you’re making your cursor, even if they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t address your specific need, you can say, well then, what would Apple do in this situation? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how does this fit into their philosophy? I highly recommend that session if you wanna take a look. And by the way, I’ve, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John one more thing, I know we were talking about Mac hardware, but like, software-wise, pretty much everything they
⏹️ ▶️ John said about the cursors for the iPad thing is applicable to the Mac. The Mac’s cursor support is
⏹️ ▶️ John very much like it was in Next Step, because that’s where it came from, and it’s very much like it was in Mac, because that’s where Next got it from.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it hasn’t changed a lot. The iPad cursor system is sort of the next generation
⏹️ ▶️ John to leap in basic cursor control. It wouldn’t, you can’t take it exactly as it is and just
⏹️ ▶️ John slap it on the Mac and say done because the Mac is a different environment. But many, many of the ideas, technologies,
⏹️ ▶️ John lessons, everything about it, I can imagine coming to the Mac in the next year or two, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t had a lot of time to look into many of the sessions yet, unfortunately, because life has been very busy for me recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think so far what I’m most excited to look into are the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco split view changes and all the new stuff in SwiftUI. I mean, it’s not quite under the radar in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sense that everyone was talking about the SwiftUI stuff. But stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lazy stacks that basically I had to make much more performant lists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tables and stuff like that. And the split views having really like finally a native
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three column mode and how that reacts between the Mac and iPad and phone. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very interested in diving into that. Cool. All right, thanks to our sponsors this week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hover, Linode, and Bombas. And thank you very much to our members who support us. Go to atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join to join us. and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco begin, Cause it was accidental, oh it
⏹️ ▶️ 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ Podcasts so
👋 Vignette?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I can give you the long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drawn out story and put the punchline at the end, but I’ll pull a Hamilton
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and put the punchline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco at the beginning. Skip, skip, skip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Go ahead. I’m the damn fool that’s considering shooting vignette.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey words, I’m- You’re so living in 2015. I know I am.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so bad. I am really, really genuinely considering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is the official Silicon Valley- Sunsetting. Sunsetting. Thank you. Sunsetting vignette. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s for destiny weapons. Oh God. Oh God. I’ve awoken the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco beast. Um, so anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m thinking about, you thought fish was bad. You started, yeah, you entered destiny territory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. I was having fun this episode, but it’s all taking a turn.
⏹️ ▶️ John actually it’s the same. You know, you’re trying to think of the Silicon Valley euphemism for when they’re getting rid of a product and they
⏹️ ▶️ John try to make it seem nicer. They’re using the term in exactly the same way in destiny. They’re getting rid of things in the
⏹️ ▶️ John game, but they don’t want people to be mad about it, so they’re literally calling it sun setting. They learned it by watching
⏹️ ▶️ John you, tech industry. Oh, dad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so anyway, so let me kind of set the stage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, wait, hold on. And thank you very much to our members who support us. Go to atp.fm slash join to join
⏹️ ▶️ John You really need to just write down the spiel.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like, you had the spiel down for seven
⏹️ ▶️ John years, and now there’s this been monkey wrench thrown into it. And it’s just, we just, let’s put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a document, we’ll workshop it together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I’m going to put it in the middle. Editing works wonders.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember when I made you say bull Siri? All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, moving on, gentlemen. So here’s the situation. For a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever since Vignette was released, it had in, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call it extreme circumstances, but not necessarily that extreme, It had some memory management problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know to this day what I was doing wrong. I don’t doubt I was doing something wrong, but I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I was doing wrong, but it was having some memory management problems. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You should rewrite it and go. Well, it’s funny you say that. I did rewrite pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the entire crawler, um, using, um, NSOperation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I actually feel like it’s pretty good. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like that may be fixed and that’s actually sitting in test flight right now. And that’s been a lingering issue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s been really frustrating. And I haven’t really, really narrowed down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the root cause is, other than just plain using too much memory. But again, I’ve done a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve spent a lot of time in instruments, nothing has jumped out at me, it’s my fault. It probably is my fault, but it’s not clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me where or how it’s my fault. Meanwhile, for at least the last, like six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months, Facebook has been deeply unreliable with Vignette. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one thing that I’ve found that seems to work for a lot of people is, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this sounds nuts, I will be the first person to tell you it sounds bananas. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if somebody reports, oh, you know, Facebook is just not working for me, I’ll tell them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch from Wi Fi to cellular or vice versa and try it again. And like eight or nine times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of 10, it all starts working. I have no idea what that’s about. My current theory is some sort of caching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the URL session subsystems. So also in TestFlight is a build that cranks the caching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down. So maybe that maybe would fix the problem, but it’s been lingering for forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I can never reproduce either of these problems. So for the life of me, I’m just shooting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blind. I don’t know what I’m doing in so many ways, but particularly around these two bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then about a month ago maybe, Twitter got rid of non-auth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access to profile photos. So it used to be that you could go to a special URL and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not like some super hacky thing. It was just, you had to know what the URL was, but you go to this URL.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think for any Twitter user, if I’m not mistaken, even ones that were protected,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could at least get their profile photo. And that was it. And that worked for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me up until about a month ago. And now they’ve, they’ve killed it. And there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s not a lot of really great ways to work around that, work around Twitter, one thing I could do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is start, instead of like crawling the web to get this stuff, I could start registering my app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an actual Twitter app, so it has its own like, um, authorization token or what have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. And now this is different than having a user log in. The users would still not log in, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app would be known to Twitter. And then I believe, I haven’t looked at this in a little while, but I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get 900 profile requests in a 15 minute window, which is okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you could have 900 Twitter contacts in a single contact list. Like I have people writing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me saying they have 10,000 contacts, which I think is freaking crazy, but it is what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s not really a sustainable solution. Meanwhile, while all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is going on since day one, the contacts framework has some very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting API limits, and I feel like you’ve run into this Marco with audio stuff if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you can only save but so many contacts to the contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey database in so much time, or else it gets angry at you and tells you no, no more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, is this documented anywhere? Of course not. That would be way too simple. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that hasn’t caused problems often, but it does occasionally cause problems. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of that is to say, the app is feeling even to me like it’s creaky and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fragile, and I’m not really proud of it anymore the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was when I first released it. Now, I have a couple of options where to go from here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could go all in on it, and I could start doing like login
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Facebook, login to Twitter, maybe at that point, login to LinkedIn, which is a very popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey request. Because once I’m doing like this OAuth login dance for these services,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of much less hacky, much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more reliable crawling of profile photos. So that would fix a lot of problems. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t want to do that. Like it feels, it’s not gross, but it just feels gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, especially since I started marketing it on how it’s all about privacy because you don’t have to give your credentials to anyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including me. I really don’t want to do that, but it is a solution to my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the other solution to my problem is just frigging kill it. and sitting here now, not having heard your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opinion from the two of you, that is what I’m leaning toward. Part of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a not small part of that, is because I have three different things that I think I want to build
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are brand new. One or two of them in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be very good if I could do that by the time iOS 14 is out because they’re using new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 14 things. So I’m looking at my summer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and what I probably should be doing is doing these vignette fixes and updates and improvements.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what I want to be doing is the new hotness and the new ideas and seeing if those stick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And vignette is making money. It is definitely making money, but it’s not making a large amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money. And it’s not making enough money that I feel like I would be really shooting myself in the foot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, to, to, to remove it from sale. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is many words to say, I think I want to sunset it and I think I want to put it to bed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me if I’m wrong. Marco, let’s start with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So, first of all, I agree with you. You probably, probably should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kill it, but we’ll get to that in a minute. The one thing to consider here is that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not being forced to adhere to a certain timeline on making this decision. There is no rush
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you to decide. Like, you don’t have to decide right now, kill it, or work on it all summer. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not your only options. You know, you have many other options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The one that I think you should probably pick from like the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pragmatic point of view is leave it in the store, but just don’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it anymore. Now I know that you probably don’t want to actually do that. What you probably want is like a clean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break to either make it awesome and something that you can be really proud of. and you just said you’re having problems with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, or just totally remove it and it’s gone forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that way you don’t have to feel bad that people are getting something that’s maybe not your best work anymore or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, right? So the reality is that you do have this third option of just leave it there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and don’t work on it for a while. Whether you want to take it is up to you, but that is an option.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is an option, but to briefly interrupt you, I don’t love that option because it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is currently in the stores is saying it works with Twitter and it doesn’t. It just plain doesn’t. Now I could put in like a little update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like pull the Twitter out for example, but it’s I feel like I’m not literally stealing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people’s money, but I kind of feel like I am, you know what I mean? And so at the very least if I were to leave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in the store, which is an option, you are correct, I would need to do maybe a day’s worth of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work in tearing out the things that just plain don’t work and rejiggering the way it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presented in the store and and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Yeah, so the other things to consider here are the environmental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the macroeconomic conditions that you’re in right now. And I’m not talking about the virus. I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you created Vignette right before iOS 13 came out that had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that built-in feature to share people’s content and photos with everyone automatically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You finished it really fast to get it out there before that WDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the end. So it had like a nice summer where the system had not sure locked its main functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you got a great amount of sales, and it went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. So for the initial amount of effort you put into it, it paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off well. Now as you go, it’s kind of like a peak oil kind of thing, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you got all the easy money out of it already. As you go further, it’s going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder and harder to advance the app in meaningful ways, because all the low hanging fruit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is picked. So now you’re faced with these much larger things of like, deeper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service integrations, you know, authentication, logins, registering as an API client and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco becoming like a whole app for these other third party services, which by the way, is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible business to be in. If you can avoid it, you don’t want to have to rely on these third party service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their logins. Like, for your business, that’s a terrible idea. It puts you in a terrible spot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They change and shift their rules all the time. you’re never gonna be a priority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them, so that’s not a good idea in general, but if you can help it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not be one of those. So anyway, so to make the app move forward at all, or to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even maintain its functionality as you have conditions like Twitter messing up their, the method you were using and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, and Facebook being unreliable, to fix those things, or to potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even fix those things, requires a ton of effort on your part to dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change the way the app works, to dramatically expand its problem set and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add many more screens and possible error conditions and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it would dramatically expand and bloat the app. It would add way more to your workload to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extract marginal more money out of an already mature product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is kind of in coasting mode right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t make a lot of sense to do all that work unless you think there would be a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upside on the other side of it. And there probably won’t be, because in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Sherlocking has continued, and these functionality, you know, the, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share my avatar functionality is slowly spreading throughout people’s usage. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, the need for this is going down over time, not up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for you to be investing a huge amount of effort to what would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco result in a marginal increase in sales in an environment where demand is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going down over time, that’s not smart. So I suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you either leave it as is and maybe just like, kind of don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mention Twitter in the description anymore, like you know don’t promise something that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John can’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rely on, so just like remove some of those mentions of that or just take it off the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store and move on because no one’s forcing you to keep working on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this like you don’t have to feel guilty about that decision. What you have new ideas you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to work on, work on them like that’s cause you’re cause first of all you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably more potential upside financially and professionally like you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more potential upside from working on something new right now than for making like a point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update to vignette that you have to break your back over to actually do all this crap and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only a small handful of its users will even notice or care about. So you really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should, if you have something else that you’d rather be working on, which you said you do, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a better place to spend your time right now. So the only question is what you do with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vignette, whether you let it coast or whether you kill it. But working on it significantly, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think is a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re right and I do want to hear, John, what you have to say, but something I didn’t state in my kind of opening monologue is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I don’t see this difficulty really changing and by that I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have any leverage over Facebook, over Instagram, over Twitter, over anyone else. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really at any moment they can pull the rug out from under me or pull the football away from me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there’s nothing I can do about it. And that’s already sort of happened and I’m looking down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this tunnel of this happening over and over again. And I just don’t think I want to be on that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey treadmill. I don’t think I want to deal with that. It’s not fun for me. It’s not great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my users. It’s just kind of crummy for everyone involved. And because of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s another big reason why I’m really strongly considering just being done with it and just pulling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it from the store. But John, what are your thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John You fell victim for one of the classic blunders. You and Mark have already said it. The most famous is never get involved in
⏹️ ▶️ John a land war in Asia,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but only slightly less well known
⏹️ ▶️ John is this never read an application that relies on third party APIs. Um, and so there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s other ones like this, like this is a silly, you know, uh, thing. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John when, if you’re making an application that has
⏹️ ▶️ John certain aspects to its functionality that make it more difficult to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John over time, the bar gets raised for how successful that product needs to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the two big categories, that’s not even the biggest one. I would say the biggest one is never write an application with a server-side
⏹️ ▶️ John component, Marco. Because to sustain
⏹️ ▶️ John a server-side component, both its complexity and its cost, you need a much higher level of success than
⏹️ ▶️ John a wad of code that lands on somebody’s device and runs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could also say, like the other examples, never write an application that has a huge amount of creative content. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John say games, aren’t those ideal? No third-party APIs? And it all runs locally.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m not going to make a network-based game. It’s going to be a local puzzle game. It just runs, and it’s fine. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, now you have creative content. And you think, oh, well, I just need some artwork and some sound.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then eventually you realize how much work that is. Maybe some magazine articles.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are certain categories of applications that have attached to them this
⏹️ ▶️ John huge amount of hidden baggage, which doesn’t mean that they’re bad to do. Like, the best applications, to get back to the server-side
⏹️ ▶️ John component, overcast is as good as it is because of the server side component. The server side component adds
⏹️ ▶️ John value, but you have to make sure you’re in a situation where I’m gonna put in the work and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to spend the money and the time to do and add the complexity to do this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John because it will make my app more valuable and customers will see that value and give me more money.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need that part to connect. So if you can do the big game with a huge amount of creative content,
⏹️ ▶️ John or God forbid, you’re gonna do a network based game with third party API integration and a huge amount of credit
⏹️ ▶️ John content, it better be a pretty big hit game, right? Or you better be getting paid a lot by Apple to put it into Apple Arcade or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, right? And third party API stuff, it’s the same deal. Like you, as
⏹️ ▶️ John you noted, you are, you know, that’s to quote another thing from
⏹️ ▶️ John old SNL sketch, you gotta ride the snake and the snake is Facebook and they’re a bad snake,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, or Twitter or any of the other APIs. Like you said, at any moment, they can go away. Now, the normal version
⏹️ ▶️ John of this for applications is, oh, Apple’s going to release a new update every year or so, and that could
⏹️ ▶️ John break my app, and that’s a pain in the butt. But users, I feel like, are much more accepting of, on a
⏹️ ▶️ John yearly basis, when the new OS comes out, maybe some of my old apps don’t work with it immediately, and maybe some never make it to
⏹️ ▶️ John the new OS. They’re grumpy about it, but they’re less grumpy than just some random day of the week, all of a sudden, the
⏹️ ▶️ John app that they just paid for stops working for an invisible reason that they can’t detect, because Twitter changed its API, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you’re scrambling to be like, oh, I’ve got to change my app to chase this API, because Twitter’s not going to consult you when they
⏹️ ▶️ John change their API, right? Facebook’s not gonna consult you. And what if it’s just flaky on a particular day? And what if they
⏹️ ▶️ John add these invisible limits? And like tracking Apple’s OS changes, at least you get a WWDC and you know it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of on a yearly cadence. But third-party API stuff is, you know, and again, the server-side
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, it’s like now you have to keep the server up and keep it running and networking problems and just, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anytime you’re considering an idea for an app, think about how much
⏹️ ▶️ John invisible baggage is attached to this particular kind of application. And
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t bail on it because of that, but make sure that you factor that into your equation and see if it balances
⏹️ ▶️ John out with, I expect this many customers and I’m gonna charge this price and if I get this amount of success,
⏹️ ▶️ John does that offset the baggage? Vignette probably made sense
⏹️ ▶️ John as kind of like an app that you would make for a moment in time and be useful to a bunch of people
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was priced, what was the price? It was like 299 or something
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for the online?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that’s that I think it all matched up for what it was
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But as an app that you’re going to maintain for years and years across OS updates
⏹️ ▶️ John across API changes, that doesn’t seem sustainable again, unless unless you have a steady stream
⏹️ ▶️ John of fairly significant, a significant percentage of income, based on like you have the big burst.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then after that, it goes down. If it’s gone down to a trickle, you’re not it’s not worth investing
⏹️ ▶️ John more time to maintain that trickle, right? the app has done its job. Like learn from underscore, like
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s got a million apps and he mercilessly cuts them loose when their time is over, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Vignette is very much like a sort of single serving underscore style
⏹️ ▶️ John application. And you know, you’ll know when it’s time to invest more
⏹️ ▶️ John time and energy into a particular application. Maybe it has a service side component. Maybe it does rely on third
⏹️ ▶️ John party APIs, but you’ll know based on customer response, based on your own enthusiasm for developing it,
⏹️ ▶️ John your own enthusiasm fed by customer response, right? Like it won’t be a mystery when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worth time to invest more money versus when it’s not, right? And I feel like if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John leaning in the direction of not continuing to do it and you have new ideas, it’s a no brainer, go for the new ideas. As for
⏹️ ▶️ John whether you actually pull a vignette or just take functionality out of it, that’s up to you. I don’t know what the steady trickle
⏹️ ▶️ John of income is compared to the amount of effort you put in. But I can tell you for the two tiny apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that I made, I was very conscious. One of the reasons I haven’t written maps is because I’m so conscious of
⏹️ ▶️ John the potential maintenance cost of any application that my apps
⏹️ ▶️ John are intentionally very simple because the only maintenance cost I’m willing to endure is the yearly Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John maintenance cost of they’re gonna release a
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware and I gotta get my stuff working. That’s enough for me. I’ve been resisting adding features to Switch
⏹️ ▶️ John Glass for a long time, both because I don’t want the features and because it’s like, look, yeah, I can add these
⏹️ ▶️ John features and it would be fun and I could rewrite it all using the new Swift UI so I can do all sorts of stuff. what’s like but
⏹️ ▶️ John is that going to give me any amount of new customers? No. Do you want do I want those
⏹️ ▶️ John features personally? No. So don’t do it. Let it lie. And my things don’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to any servers, don’t rely on any third-party applications, don’t have a server-side component. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying that’s what you should shoot for, but that feature set matches up with
⏹️ ▶️ John the meager amount of income they get. So I’m happy with them and I will continue to maintain them because I need to run them all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time. But vignette seems like the equation tipped a while ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think so. And the thing is, I don’t have a large support burden,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I have enough of a support burden. You know, I’m getting like a handful of emails a day and some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John them are… Oh, kill it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like some of them are very nice, very, very nice. Like, hey, you know, I really tried this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it didn’t work for some reason. I’m not really sure why. Is there something I can do to fix it? But most of them are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand why I paid for this. me my money, which of course is wonderful because up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until sometime soon, I can’t give them their money. I have no mechanism for doing so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, the best thing I can do is point them to that page on Apple’s website that says, here’s how you get a refund for an IAP, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an app purchase and whatever. So I think, uh, it’s like the, the support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey burden and I don’t even answer all of these emails, but I answered more than I probably should bother answering. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that kind of drags me down and I’m not really that proud of it anymore. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it was new, but it’s already gotten creaky. It’s already showing its age at all of a year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and change. So even though you could make a strong argument to just let it sit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the store or, you know, you know, make whatever small tweaks I need to make so that I don’t feel embarrassed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by it and then let it sit and just chill in the store. And that would probably make me at least a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of money. Uh, but I don’t, I don’t really feel comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that. And, and I don’t think it really does anyone any good. It doesn’t do users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much good. It doesn’t do me much good. And, you know, the numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming in, you know, the, the, the checks coming in from Apple are not completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weight, like it’s not nothing, but it’s not enough to really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey justify the kind of stress that I feel like I’m, I’m carrying by keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it out there. which is why basically I had already decided to kill it. It was just a matter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, are either of you guys gonna give me some really strong reason not to? And it sounds like neither of you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey providing that, which is fine. That is totally fine. I mean, you know, a couple people in the chat have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, and I don’t want to get specific about it, but the trickle from vignette
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is considerably less, considerably less than what membership is now providing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s even more reason in my mind to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kill it. Look at it this way. It’s not like, you know, a death
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this app that’s like a source of mourning. You’re clearing your plate to work on stuff that you’re excited about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And the nice thing about Peak of View, which I am still proud of, and it’s not perfect either, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s much closer to perfect than Vignette is, but Peak of View, even though it’s, I think, responsible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for considerably less income, that only relies on Apple APIs. And that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean I will never have to do updates. In fact, I think there’s a couple have to do for iOS 14, but it’s much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more like switch glass than it is like vignette. You know what I mean? Where I’m not beholden to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of these other entities that are massive and I’m not even on their radar. It’s not like I’m on their radar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they just don’t care about me. I’m not even on their damn radar. So the more I think about it, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more I think it just needs to go away. And I would think by the time this episode is posted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not soon thereafter, it will probably be gone. All right. Thanks, gentlemen. I really genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appreciate it. That was very helpful to make me feel like I’m not totally bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there something happy we can talk about? Yeah, not for this reason anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right? Should
⏹️ ▶️ John have talked to us sooner. I didn’t know I was having all these problems. We could have advised you to ditch it earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I probably should have, to be honest. We’re such good friends. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yeah. No, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like having support emails and having crash reports and the API is changing, but you haven’t changed the app. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine that being stressful. That’s the last thing that you want, is to know that like the app that was working before, because
⏹️ ▶️ John of no fault of your own, they just changed their API. Now all of a sudden your app is broken and you have to either scramble
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix it or live with knowing that it’s broken, that’s terrible. Yeah, get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of it. It served its purpose, it did very well, it had a wonderful life, send it to a farm upstate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and to that end, part of the reason I hadn’t killed it yet was I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought that this whole NS operation based spider re-architecture,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really thought that was gonna fix a bunch of my problems, But then, like, actually, Instagram may be broken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with what’s in the store right now, I don’t remember, but it’s fixed in test flight. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then Twitter, when, so Instagram was broken briefly, and then Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was broke, is broken, and like the combination of all of these things put me over the edge and made me just think, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just, it isn’t worth it. I just don’t think it’s worth it. So that’s where I’m currently sitting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like I said, sometime probably tomorrow or the day after, I will just pull it from the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Farewell vignette. We knew ye something. I don’t know. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know how this…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco hardly knew you. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t hire me for any funerals. Goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t seen it. Just gotta wait for Shakespeare to come on Disney+.