388: Riding the Autocomplete
23 Jul 2020How many podcasters does it take to open a bottle of seltzer?
Episode Description:
- ATP Membership Update!!
Please consider joining, but we’re still cool if you don’t. 💙 - Pre-show: Seltzer: 1, Tiff: 0, Marco: 0
- Follow-up: T2 and TouchBar from Gui Rambo
- Apple’s priorities for 🔋/🏋️♀️ for Apple Silicon
- Apple News “Podcast”
- SoftBank is selling ARM to Nvidia?
- Apple To Be 100% Carbon Neutral for Supply Chain & Products by 2030
- Apple says Apple’s 30% is Great [for Apple]
#askatp- If we can go iOS → macOS, can we go macOS → iOS? (via Eduard Rozenberg)
- Will Apple offer CPU options on Apple Silicon powered Macs? (via James)
- Do we really know a lot about Obj-C/PHP/Perl/Javascript/Swift/etc? (via Colby Todisco)
- Post-show: Overcast’s iOS 14 “roadmap”
Sponsored by:
- Hello Fresh: America’s #1 meal kit. Use code 80atp to get a total of $80 off, including free shipping on your first box.
- Mint Mobile: Get your new wireless plan for just $15/month with free shipping.
- Raycon: The next wave in wireless audio. Get 15% off with code ACCIDENT15.
Chapters
- Defeated by seltzer 🖼️
- Follow-up: T2’s role
- Battery gains, instant-wake
- Sponsor: Raycon (code ACCIDENT15)
- Apple News Today 🖼️
- Podcast directories
- Sponsor: Mint Mobile
- NVIDIA 💰 ARM?
- Apple going carbon-neutral
- Apple’s 30% PR BS
- Sponsor: HelloFresh (code 80atp)
- #askatp: Mac pro apps on iPad?
- #askatp: CPU options on ARM Macs?
- #askatp: Language expertise
- Ending theme
- Overcast’s iOS 14 “plans”
Defeated by seltzer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you ever been defeated by a bottle of seltzer? Because I just was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, story time, ladies and gentlemen. Tell me more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s not much of a story. I can’t get my bottle of seltzer that I first got open.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to get a second one and open it instead. Try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for you. So, okay, so it’s a bottle of Hals. And as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe I talked about on the talk show with John Gruber here at the beach, Hals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is wonderful flavored fizzy water, flavored seltzer. It’s my favorite brand by far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for flavored seltzer. Way better than LaCroix. Problem is, HALS is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as fizzy waters go, it is really fizzy to the point where you have to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very careful opening the bottle because even if you’ve babied it and treated it normally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a high chance it will explode if you open it too fast. It is the fizziest of fizzy waters that I’ve ever found.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And sometimes this immense pressurization results in the cap being being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard to open. Like, you feel the bottle, it feels like rock solid. Like, there’s no flex in it at all. You feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s gonna explode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, now slow down. Genuine questions. So this is like a plastic bottle with like a screw top cap?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like a 20 ounce plastic clear bottle with a screw top cap. Just like a soda bottle. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say, if it was glass, all you need is a sword, right? Could do that thing they do with
⏹️ ▶️ John champagne when ships go off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. So normally my approach to this would be to get something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is rubbery, like the back of a potholder or something, and apply that to the cap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the twisting hand so that I have more grip and I can twist it really hard. I got out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potholder number one, made of silicone. Grab it, twist as hard as I possibly can. I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get this thing to budge. Got to the second point where I’m like, all right, you know what, fine, I’ll get a second one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Second potholder on the holding still hand, like the hand that holds the bottle still. Turn, I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cannot open this. Like, I just, I gave up and I just got a different one, but that bottle’s gonna be sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my fridge, like I gotta open it sometime. Do I use like a drill? Like what am I doing? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got a pair of pliers?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe? So you just need a tiny bit of leverage. It’s only hard because it’s so hard to grip because there’s so little surface
⏹️ ▶️ John area and the diameter is so small that you don’t have a lot of torque. You just need some kind of mechanical advantage it’ll come right open.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you just need to do the thing from, you know, kung fu movies
⏹️ ▶️ John where you concentrate all of your power into that tiny little spot for one, you know, It’s all about
⏹️ ▶️ John instantaneous power. It’s not about over time. You just need to get all of your power for a
⏹️ ▶️ John short period of time to just crack that thing open. That’s what you need to do. I thought I was doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, what you were doing, it’s, you’re trying to do it, and that’s your, your strength is spread out over
⏹️ ▶️ John a long period of time and doing nothing. You just gotta concentrate it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. I have never actually been defeated by one. I’ve never even had to involve a second potholder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to involve a second potholder, and then to still lose. This is new to me. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so here are a couple things. First of all, do you remember the, I don’t remember what the name of this was, but there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some stupid challenge video, like the ice bucket challenge, but what you were supposed to do is do some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reverse roundhouse kick and then just graze the top of a bottle and have the cap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go spinning off. So first of all, I need to see film of you trying to do exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reverse roundhouse kick. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John that the one where they had all the videos of people getting kicked in the face?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, exactly. I need to see that. Yeah, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing that. Second of all, my college chemistry is coming back, so PV equals NRT.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you make it—now I’m going to screw this up and I’m going to get so much email—if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you make the temperature go up or down, will that make pressure go up or down? God, I’m dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ John think down. Yeah, but you’re assuming it’s the pressure. I don’t think it’s the pressure that’s making it hard to open, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a stuck cap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah. I think next up is pliers. And if that doesn’t work, I’m going— Drill.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let me ask you another question because apparently I’m full of them today. How much did this cost, this single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bottle of seltzer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I got like the case discount. So just a ballpark estimate. Probably like a dollar to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Throw the freaking thing out and move on.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you got to get it open. What are you doing? Yeah, I’m not going to. You can’t let it win. And it’s black cherry. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John best flavor. Yeah, there you go. It’s mechanical advantage. You use your smart little monkey brain. We
⏹️ ▶️ John have tools. We understand how we can magnify our force by moving
⏹️ ▶️ John over a larger distance with the help of a lever that amplifies your torque by being farther
⏹️ ▶️ John from the center of the cap,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but also gripping on it with,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, we can do this. Or like I said, just give it to Tiff and she’ll open it for you. Did you try that
⏹️ ▶️ John yet? Because that’s another problem is like you use up your initial burst of strength because you gradually bleed
⏹️ ▶️ John out that initial burst of strength and you don’t expect it to be that hard and then after that you’re permanently weak and just give it to a fresh person
⏹️ ▶️ John and especially if they’re good at opening things, Tiff will just take it and go, ka-chick, and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be open. And it will explode all over my office.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And well, come on, you have to have her try now.
⏹️ ▶️ John call her in and get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it. Call her in and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s upstairs now. Like I left it up there and took a second bottle down here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure she can go get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to settle for mango, which is fine, but like it’s no black cherry. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco turn away from
⏹️ ▶️ John the mic and yell. She’ll hear you. I’ll message her.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t message her. Yeah, that’s not as fun. You have to yell. In this house, we yell.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t text message each other from one floor to the other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Syracuse is yelling at you.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s not supposed to yell. Tell her to bring bring get the bottle of seltzer in the fridge and bring it down.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t tell her why. Just have her bring it down. And when she brings it down, say, can you open that for me? Just real casual like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, this year. All right. We need you to go upstairs to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please. Please. And get a bottle of black cherry. How does it have to be a particular one that I just tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to open and failed to?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, no, you’re ruining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, apparently I ruined it by telling you that. Yes. Just tell her which bottle it is, though. I got to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Well, hold on. I got to show you which one it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the excuses begin already. Oh, I didn’t give her the right bottle. She got one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy ones. It’s not the only one. It’s a black cherry one that’s rock hard. It should be. It’s it’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, golly. This is going nowhere good. Real quick.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do it. Do it far away from that computer, too. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, no. Why? Why? Where’s Casey’s computer?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll do it next time. I’m actually, I should cover mine just for safety’s sake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re four or five hundred miles away, but you know you can be too careful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, where’s Gruber’s review unit? I can do it over that one too. Alright, Tiff is back with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two black chairs. Is this all that was in there? They’re both very hard. TWS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I don’t know which one of these it was that I tried to open, but I just tried before the show to open one, and I couldn’t open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Have Tiff open both of them. So you want me to open it? John wants you to open both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Careful, they’re going to explode everywhere. You slowly. Well, put a towel down. It’s hard,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I got it. Tell her I believe in her. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John All right. You got one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, close it. We’re counting on it. That was a close call. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Try the second one. If I’m skilled, I’m going to really have to drink a lot of seltzer tonight. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s my shirt. All right. She’s in progress on the second one. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t. It’s so hard. Oh, even better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, that’s the one you can’t do it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Like bleeding. My hand is bleeding. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. I get harder. All right. All right. Give it a try. And now it’s time for mechanical advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve got a pair of pliers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, John, I want you to open it with a pair of pliers somehow. We have one of that cheap little toolkit upstairs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the channel locks, but I think I lost them to the basement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, pliers are… can you get the pliers from the cheap toolkit upstairs? I know we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably have them in there at least. We’re probably going to need the channel locks. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we need good pliers. Alright, I’ll be back. Alright, she’ll be right back. Give me the one I opened. Here,
⏹️ ▶️ John you opened. You can put it back in the fridge. I’ll bring it tomorrow. Yeah, and channel lock is the kind of pliers you need. So, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right tool for that job. Yeah, but we don’t have good tools here. have cheap crappy tools in like an Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco toolkit. But cheap crappy channel lock pliers will do the job. Well, channel lock is a brand.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s no, it’s a kind. No, it’s not. I know it’s I know it’s a brand all one word,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like, oh, I didn’t. Sorry, I didn’t hear the space in your face. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Channel lock is an American company that produces hand cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like it’s a it’s a what do you call it? A proprietary eponym. Yeah, I don’t even know what the generic term is. What is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Channel lock. Channel lock with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah all right she’s back with pliers now now john says you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open that with pliers you absolutely can yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah you can i can’t i use all my strength i got it she got it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mechanical advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John the hairless apes win again take that bottle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco releasing pressure here. I got I got I’ve diffused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I’ve diffused the bomb.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything’s fine. It’s open. So John was right. It took fliers.
⏹️ ▶️ John a drill. I don’t know what you’re gonna do the drill, just drill a hole in the side of it and let it squirt out into your mouth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honey. Right? Yep. It’s a tech show. This is all that tech news. Bye. I love you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Day Armand, everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Corey Bennett Yay! Did you know, Marco, that the Channelock Company, one word, no spaces, was founded in 1886
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when George B. Day Armand, D-E-A-R-M-E-N-T, a blacksmith from Evansburg,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pennsylvania, did stuff. Michael Moseley
⏹️ ▶️ Marco George Channelock? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BS. Corey Bennett No, turns out. All right, so people who are listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this on the not-bootleg feed, you have missed approximately 12 minutes and 10 seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Marco fumbling with seltzer. And while that may not sound like a good elevator pitch, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assure you, it was quite funny. So if you would like to get a copy of the bootleg feed where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all this shenanigans happens that we cut out for this version of the episode, you’re welcome. That’s staying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in though. Oh, no, no, no. Then this is all bogus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Not all of it. I mean, all of it won’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. All right. So anyway, moving on, atp.fm. You should check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that sort of thing, we do other stuff like that also on the bootleg often where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something goes wrong or we mess with each other or whatever. So that’s the kind of extra bonus content you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with lower audio quality but faster in the bootleg.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are, you and I are just killing it on sales pitches tonight. Oh goodness. All right. Should we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually get the show started? Is that a reasonable thing to do with this juncture?
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait for someone to bring me a black cherry seltzer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Now I’m still stuck with my mango, my second choice here. I probably should have kept one of those other ones. Ah, the struggle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tip opened it, she
⏹️ ▶️ John earned it. Yeah, it’s fair.
Follow-up: T2’s role
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s start with some info from friend of the show, Guy Rambaud, with regard to the T2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think John was mostly talking about this last week and you were doing it off the cuff and you made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of minor errors. And so Guy, with the benefit of listening to it after the fact and being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to pause and probably actually already knowing all this stuff, wrote a little bit about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey T2. This is a tiny bit long, but it’s a pretty good summary of what the T2 is for and how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it works. So, oh no, what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What happened? Tim just messaged me a photo of inside the fridge saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in case you need help tomorrow, and she has placed the pliers in the little bin that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holds our seltzers in the fridge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is excellent. That is excellent spousal trolling right there.
⏹️ ▶️ John an assistive device for your drinking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well done. Well done. All right. So some information on the T2 from Guy Rambeau. The T2 chip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not what drives the UI in the Touch Bar when your Mac is running on macOS. It only displays the function
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keys in the Touch Bar when there is no Touch Bar server, which is a macOS process running. When the Touch Bar server is running, all it does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is get pixels from macOS and then blit them onto the rectangular OLED panel. You can verify this by using the show Touch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bar option in Xcode, which works even when the Mac doesn’t have a Touch Bar. The same is true of the Touch Bar in Sidecar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The T2 chip is required mainly for Touch ID and other security features, which are part of the secure enclave,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I almost said enclave there for some crazy reason, but that’s all right, which is part of the secure enclave,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which comes in all of Apple’s chips. The way it works is that daemons on Mac OS act as proxies to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey daemons running on Bridge OS, which is the thing that runs on the T2, a system that Apple calls quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multiverse. So from the point of view of consumers of the APIs for functionality provided by the T2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip, it doesn’t matter if the thing is going over to the T2 or if it’s implemented directly, which means that the ARM Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a touch bar and no separate chip driving it aren’t as big a deal as you’d think.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is bad news, because I was excited by the idea that it would be wasteful to, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, reimplement the touch bar in a single chip, because I didn’t think they would put two of the chips in there, but it sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a big deal, unfortunately. So that probably means they’ll have touch bars, right? Because if it really just is
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of accepting pixels that are drawn elsewhere, and all the other functions it provides are already built into
⏹️ ▶️ John the system on a chip, so you don’t need a separate one, I think they could easily get away, sounds like they could easily get away
⏹️ ▶️ John with a single system on the chip, plus a touch bar. And if they can get away with it, it seems like they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John do it because that’s what they’ve been doing with the touch bar. They just keep including it on their expensive models and you
⏹️ ▶️ John get it whether you like it or not. It’s kind of depressing. **Matt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stauffer** Or I mean, you know, if, what this basically shows is there’s not really a technical reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they have to get rid of it, but there still could be like a justification to gracefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bow out of this now that they are redesigning the hardware in a major way. And especially if they add touch screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the big thing. It’s like, if they add touchscreens, I don’t see how the touch bar would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stay there. I mean, that could just be wishful thinking. If they don’t add touchscreens, then it’s more,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I think it’s more optimistic to expect them to remove it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple does, my understanding is that Apple does gather some basic metrics about
⏹️ ▶️ John how frequently the features they ship in their products are used by customers, right? Just sort of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John completely anonymous, back of the envelope, statistical sampling of like, do people use
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how they know things like Oh, messages is the most used app on iOS, which to be said, like in a keynote or something, right? They
⏹️ ▶️ John only know that because they have metrics on you know, what apps do people want, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the problem with the touch bar is like, well, maybe they would know like, okay, it’s time to touch bar because it’s not a very popular feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is a good time to ditch it ball saving face, blah, blah, blah, touch max, blah, blah, like we said in the last show. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the metrics on a touch bar has to be pretty high, because you you can’t avoid using it. If you ever need the escape
⏹️ ▶️ John key or a function key like or the volume keys like you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t really measure people’s satisfaction with it but it’s unavoidable so the usage numbers of they must say
⏹️ ▶️ John look ever you know people who buy our touch bar max they all use it a ton it’s like we have no choice like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the only place where those keys those quote-unquote keys are so I hope that doesn’t encourage them to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep it around or if they do keep it around they need to enhance it like they need to go some direction or another either make it better
⏹️ ▶️ John and cooler on a on a regular basis or a digit?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and the flip side of the coin is, I don’t know what specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about having their own CPU would make better, cooler, faster, stronger, what have you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, you know, one of the things that everyone keeps saying is that, oh, when Apple controls,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the hard, the CPU and the rest of the hardware stack, they can integrate things better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And maybe that would be applicable to the Touch Bar. Maybe they could, it would enable them to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they can’t but want to do today. I haven’t a clue what that would be specifically, but you never know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ll make it better. Maybe just having it on the same system on a chip would make it less buggy for reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for reasons. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. But- Ultimately, I mean, they could always make it optional. That would be, I know that’s a crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to suggest. Because that would be the real metric of like, do people like it? Are they willing to pay more for
⏹️ ▶️ John it? If they made it a zero cost option, even that would give them some info about, do people want it or they not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. we do have kind of that choice because the Air doesn’t have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, I think possibly one option that might open up, you know, as we make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this architecture transition is assuming that this is probably going to result in an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall increase in performance on the Mac, the Air might become good enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people for whom today they have to buy the MacBook Pro to get the resources they need. I hate the Touch Bar so much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I would step down to the Air for my for my future purchase, who knows? That might become more realistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as performance gets better. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it’s just the performance. I think we might have a question about this later or maybe in a future episode, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the difference, when Apple controls the system on chips for all their laptops, the difference between the MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Air is going to be even more emphatically GPU power, I would imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because I don’t think Apple’s going to make lots of very different cores, right? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the core count will distinguish it, But I don’t expect Apple to make three
⏹️ ▶️ John completely different system-mounted chips that differ in tremendous ways. I expect them to
⏹️ ▶️ John do kind of like what they do with the phone and the iPad, where the iPad is kind of like the phone, maybe with some more cores, but then also
⏹️ ▶️ John a bigger GPU. That’s what distinguishes it. But they don’t have different cores. Whatever the core of the year is or the
⏹️ ▶️ John core of that generation, that’s what you get. Sort of no equivalent, at least until they do the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John of a Xeon-level thing where it’s a very different chip than the lesser chip. So in that case,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t care about GPU, which you probably don’t if you’re just doing Xcode or whatever, it could be
⏹️ ▶️ John that for a given core count, the MacBook Air CPU score is exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same as the MacBook Pro because it’s exactly the same chip. And if you have the same number of cores and you don’t care about the bigger GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is easy to scale because they just add execution units and it scales up very easily, maybe the Air actually would
⏹️ ▶️ John be just as fast for Xcode, again, assuming they give the same speed SSD or whatever. And the people
⏹️ ▶️ John with the MacBook Pro need the GPU power for Final Cut Pro rendering or whatever people do with it, or games,
Battery gains, instant-wake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I take us on a brief aside? Is that allowed, Dad? Because I know we’re in the middle of follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ John only have two items today, so plenty of time for this. We can even open up another seltzer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, it’s still follow-up as long as it’s about something we’ve ever talked about before, even remotely. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John not the definition of follow-up, but feel free to ask me to answer that in robot or not, and I’ll clarify.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, I should do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So anyway, you know, all of us, myself, very much included, have been thinking about, oh, we’re going to get these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptops that have battery life measured in like calendar years, figuratively speaking, of course. You know, these new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Silicon powered chips are going to be just completely gentle on batteries and these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pros are going to go from whatever they claim, like eight hours of battery life to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 16 hours of battery life, maybe even a day of battery life or something like that. And that seems to be the most logical conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the surface because that’s kind of what these chips seem to be aimed toward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, they are being put in these devices like iPhones iPads, that battery life is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pretty big priority, especially on an iPhone. And it occurred to me, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Apple continues to do the Apple thing and they just continue to target eight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours of battery life or whatever, you know, whatever the number is, the actual number doesn’t matter. Let’s say eight hours. So what if they continue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to target eight hours of battery life in this Phantom MacBook Pro that’s going to come in like the fall or in the spring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something, but instead of being a smidgen faster than an Intel Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or an Intel MacBook Pro, instead of being a lot faster than an Intel MacBook Pro, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hilariously faster, just like night and day faster. Like do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they would make, and I’ll start with Marco and then I’d like to hear John’s take as well, do you think that they would, instead of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going for infinite battery life, again, figuratively speaking, do you think they would just go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for broke when it comes to these things being just incredibly, incredibly fast?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or I guess the obvious alternative is, would they try to do some sort of balance where or maybe it goes from eight hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 12 hours of battery life, but it’s still like five times faster than the most recent Intel MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you think, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, it’s hard for me to say because I’m going to nitpick the question as I tend to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John? Oh yeah. I’m going to nitpick the basis of the question, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they would have that choice because if you look at like the way performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increases and battery life work over time, battery life gains have largely come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from advances in managing low power states for the processors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when the computer is not doing much, how much can it reduce that power usage? And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can, you know, it can peak to handle quick performance needs, then it goes back down. Almost all battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gains, you know, in the last decade have been advances in that low power management,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not reductions in the high power state and how much power it uses or how much performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get in a high-powered state. In fact, it’s actually gone the opposite direction in a lot of cases. High-powered states
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of processors actually draw more power now than ever, but we have long battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life because most of the time, you know, they can burst up to that high speed for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fraction of a second, do whatever work they have to do, and then kick back to idle. But the actual performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ceiling, if you’re actually using it to do things to be really fast, burns tons of power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, we don’t know what the performance characteristics of the ARM processors for Apple will be, we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of look at what they are in the iPad and iPhone so far, and they seem to be in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively similar pattern there of like, you know, the low power state can be super low power. They even have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those low power cores that they can, you know, they can enable only those when only, you know, low power stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is needed. And then they have these high power cores that can ramp up real fast. Like they’re going to do the same thing on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe the documentation even says as much, but they’re not going to be able to ramp up that peak power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco magically much further than Intel could, in the same power envelope. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we’re gonna actually see massive battery life improvements when you’re stressing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out the processors. Whatever Apple decides to design their thermal limits in each product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, that’s gonna decide how much heat can you dissipate. Like in a 16-inch MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, that’s, I believe, a 45-ish watt CPU, but the way TDP works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Intel and everything, it actually can go higher than that. that’s just kind of like the target average minimum range that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should be able to cool. But if you push an eight core i9 MacBook Pro, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you push those CPUs all the way, it’s gonna use more than 45 watts until it can, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until it has to hit some kind of thermal limit and then it has to like slow down. But for the most part, like these processors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you actually hit them hard, you get no battery life on any modern laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s been the case forever. So I don’t think the Apple ARM transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna magically fix that. It might make it better, it might give you a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little more performance, or even if it gave you 50% more performance, that would be huge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be a huge deal, but you’re still looking at an hour of battery life if you’re actually pushing the processor hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t think we’re gonna have that kind of jump. I think any gains we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are gonna be on the power management doing lower needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of end, if that makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I mean other John.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the target battery life thing, the issue with the current pro laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they’re all below what I think Apple would decide as an appropriate target. Like for whatever reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple decided 10 hours-ish is appropriate for iPads and they’ve been targeting that for years and they’ve been achieving it, but it’s because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfied with that. And I think customers are too. Like people who have iPads are fairly satisfied with the battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not out and about with them as much so you don’t find yourself stranded with an uncharged iPad because people
⏹️ ▶️ John complain about phones because it isn’t used in the same way. The battery is physically larger on iPads. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad battery life, that 10-hour thing, you could argue that they should be creeping it up over time, but in general, it is satisfactory.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not true at all for the MacBook Pros. The battery, no one is satisfied with the battery life on the MacBook Pro, almost
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what they’re doing. And it’s part of the reason that Marco just said, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ask that machine to do all that it can do, it’s such a difference from that machine being idle,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And then macOS compounds that, because Mac OS does not have the draconian energy
⏹️ ▶️ John controls that iOS does. All that means that an ARM chip in a Mac laptop is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in a much more harsh environment than it would be in even the most powerful iPad, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, I think with an ARM chip, Apple can
⏹️ ▶️ John probably pick a target that it finds acceptable for average usage and achieve it,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like they can design this and say, look, here’s our goal for battery life. is whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John our number of hours using these type of application. Like they have to come up with some kind of scenario that they think
⏹️ ▶️ John is acceptable target. I think that target will be higher than the current target. Cause again, they can choose whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John target they want. They could choose, we want the battery life to be less than the current laptops, right? And just burn everything out, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t. They’re gonna choose a higher target because they can achieve it. And at that target, it will also be
⏹️ ▶️ John embarrassingly faster. Like they don’t have to choose either or. I think they can get more battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life and also completely embarrass any Intel laptop in all benchmarks, right? under all circumstances,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So yes, if you run it hard, it’s going to have shorter battery life, but it will still be longer
⏹️ ▶️ John than if you ran an Intel laptop just as hard. And it will be faster and do more work during that
⏹️ ▶️ John period of time. Like, that’s the beauty of this transition. It’s like the PowerPC and the Intel transition.
⏹️ ▶️ John The same factors that conspire to make it the right time to make the move also mean that the new machines
⏹️ ▶️ John will be really good compared to the old ones. In this case, it’s going to be that they ship five nanometer
⏹️ ▶️ John chips in their Macs, and their best Macs now have 10 nanometer chips in them, right? And that’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John make a huge difference. And also just the general performance per watt gains the performance for our lead
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple’s ARM chips have had over Intel for a long time and do currently. Right. So I expect that
⏹️ ▶️ John the tradeoff they will choose is more battery life than the current ones in the big pro model. I’m talking about more
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life than the current ones and even more performance on the
⏹️ ▶️ John very low end fanless ones. I can imagine them making a different tradeoff, which is adequate performance
⏹️ ▶️ John that is still way better than an adorable, but a really long battery life because we can tune
⏹️ ▶️ John it for that thing. It’ll have fewer cores, it will have a smaller GPU, all that other stuff, right? So I am still
⏹️ ▶️ John of the opinion that we will be able to have our KKNE2, we will get more battery life and tremendously
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger performance. They won’t bounce it really far in one direction or the other. And I think what they’ll do, I think their target
⏹️ ▶️ John for battery life will be higher than current ones. And by the way, Casey, you keep saying like eight hours. What planet are you on
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco eight hours of battery life instead of a MacBook Pro doing any work. That does
⏹️ ▶️ John not happen. Like if you get five hours doing intensive work on a MacBook Pro, you’re extremely lucky.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think they will target maybe an hour more than
⏹️ ▶️ John the current MacBook Pro on whatever measurement they wanna do in sort of average workload, and then the performance
⏹️ ▶️ John will be much embarrassingly better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing I hope that they tackle with this transition, and this might take a few generations because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a pretty big job, but one thing I really hope they tackle is there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this story, and I don’t know if it was true or not, but there was a rumor that went around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it was ever actually backed up by anything concrete, where back when,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think when the MacBook Air was being developed, apparently, allegedly, and forgive me if I’m getting the details wrong, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is from memory, apparently there was a meeting with Steve Jobs in the room where he apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walked in the room and had an iPad and turned it on and it just immediately woke from sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and allegedly he like dropped a MacBook on the table and is like, why can’t this do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you remember that rumor when that was going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I do. Mm-hmm. Yep, yep, yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s always been this huge difference and there’s lots of reasons for it, many of which are good reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why when you open up a Mac, does it not instantly, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t it instantly on? Like the way that an iOS device you power on, you hit the sleep button, it just wakes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. Why in the background during all that time it was closed, Why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t it keep things updating in the background the way that iOS apps do? Why can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it receive a notification and ding at you or something or alert you or keep things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to date or whatever? And there’s lots of reasons for that. And they’ve had all sorts of little baby steps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like PowerNap over time where PowerNap is allegedly supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve that problem of letting things update periodically in the background while the computer is asleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it work for anybody? because it doesn’t ever work for me. Like nothing ever seems up to date.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe I’m just missing its effect, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John It works most, mostly apps that support it are the built-in Apple apps, third-party support for it. I don’t remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember doing a section of the review. I don’t remember what third-party support looks like, but basically if you don’t use Apple Mail
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t care about time machine running, you might not notice that it’s doing stuff, but it does stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, related to this, one of the things that my Mac currently does that I haven’t quite figured out how to stop it from doing
⏹️ ▶️ John yet is, my Mac will wake from sleep, my Mac Pro, will wake from sleep when a reminder appears.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I want the reminder to appear on my Mac, so I can’t tell it, oh, don’t show me that reminder. Like literally, like the Reminders app,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Apple Reminders app. I do want those to appear on my screen, but if my Mac Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ John asleep, I don’t want that reminder to wake it up. And it does, it wakes it from a dead sleep. So
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, there’s enough going on there when it’s quote unquote sleeping, to, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John checking for reminders periodically or it’s accepting push notifications. Like it’s not really asleep asleep, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So that is happening, and I think it does time machine when it’s asleep, and if I used Apple Mail, I’m pretty confident it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be checking my mail, but I forget how widespread that support is. But you’re right, the main issue is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, but what kind of sleep modes are available to me with an Intel processor versus what kind of sleep modes are available with the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple system on a chip? And obviously, the sort of screen-off, fanless, low-power,
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely hostile iOS environment of just nothing runs unless I allow it to run allows
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS devices to be basically running all the time when the screen is off, they’re still running and behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the scenes in a very low power mode, but mostly doing all the stuff that you would expect. Because it’s just as cruel when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote on about running background stuff. Whereas when the Mac’s on, running background stuff, it’s a free-for-all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now when it’s off, there’s just suddenly this new set of rules that the Mac is not used to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and so I hope this is an area that they can tackle. Like when you combine a more instant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on experience, which, and I do think the ARM transition is a necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precursor to doing that well. You know, you have advances, not only is Apple able to control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the power states of everything, but they have those low power cores. So you can do things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only ever use like one or two low power cores when the lid’s closed or whatever. And so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do have, I think, a better ability to have low power states where you can keep things basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awake, but you know, not, in a super low power state, and then you can wake up very quickly. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also when you combine that, but hopefully with cellular options. God, I hope so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That, like, part of the reason I love using the iPad with cellular as an out and about computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has nothing to do with the iPad form factor or the OS and has so much more to do with that instant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wake and constant cellular connectivity. So if you could have that in a Mac, that would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more of a productive travel machine for me when I’m out and about doing small errands and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. I could just have a MacBook that had cellular MacBook Air that had cellular, and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it be instant wake, always on, that would be such a radically different experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than using a Mac laptop today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, to go back a step, I’m a little bothered by you having said that you’re skeptical PowerNap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even works, because I can tell you on my two-month-old MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know PowerNap works because it causes the machine to reboot itself every time. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let’s not forget that I turned it off because that was the only way to prevent it from rebooting itself constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we have different definitions of work, then. Yeah, exactly. It works in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it does something that requires me to turn my computer or crash the computer. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me check. I have powering up off as well. And I also have wake for network access off. I have all the things off
⏹️ ▶️ John because I want my machine, as we’ve discussed in the past, I want it to stay asleep. But it still wakes up and reminders come in. So
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, the sleep mode is still awake enough to know that reminders are happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s prompt. It’s not like a periodic check. There must be some kind of push. So, like I said, wake for network access
⏹️ ▶️ John is not on, but something is getting through to it to let it know. Maybe it’s just a timer. I don’t even know what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on inside there. But anyway, I wish I could stop it from doing that Because all my other
⏹️ ▶️ John devices show the same reminder.
Sponsor: Raycon (code ACCIDENT15)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Raycon earbuds. Get 15%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your order at buyraycon.com slash accidental tech. Raycon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earbuds are great premium earbuds, wireless of course, and yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are about half the price of any other premium wireless earbuds on the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Their newest model, the Raycon Everyday E25 earbuds are their best ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. They have 6 hours of playtime, seamless Bluetooth pairing, more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bass than before, and a more compact design that gives you a pleasant, nice, noise-isolating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit. And Raycon’s wireless earbuds are comfortable, perfect for conference calls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or listening to podcasts like this one, even when we go almost three hours long. And unlike some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other wireless options, Raycon earbuds are discreet. There’s no dangling wires, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no stems to distract anyone during video calls if they can see your earbuds. So now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the time to get the latest and greatest from Raycon. Get 15% off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your order at buyraycon.com slash accidental tech. That’s B-U-Y-R-A-Y-C-O-N
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot com slash accidental tech for 15% off Raycon wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earbuds. Buyraycon.com slash accidental tech. Thank you so much to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Raycon for sponsoring our show.
Apple News Today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple News has a podcast question mark. Marco, tell me about this asterisk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Apple launched Apple. Is it Apple News today? Is that what it’s called? Apple News today? I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some generic name like that. Anyway, they called it the Apple podcast today at
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Apple News today. Apple plus Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark Jacobs presents Mark by Mark Jacobs. Remember that one? You remember that one?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know. Someone put that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the chat. So this is interesting. Well, I think the story is a little more interesting than the podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they launched this new podcast called Apple News Today that is about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like eight to 10 minutes a day so far. Basically a quick little news recap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it seems to be promotion for Apple News and News Plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That seems to be the reason they are doing it. and partially maybe promotion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple Podcasts because it is kind of an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Podcast exclusive, and I’ll get back to that in a minute. But the podcast itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, have you heard it, either of you? No. Well, you can listen to an overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’ll get to that in a second as well. No. No. No. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of fluffy and light, and it’s kind of bland to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t listen to a lot of these kind of podcasts, but to me it seems kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shorter and worse version of the Daily by the New York Times. Like if you listen to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want like a once a day quick summary of what’s going on in the news and you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to have occasional depth and occasional like interesting topics and well produced and have it be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made by a major news organization, I think the Daily is a way better version of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want a tech version, there’s Tech Meme Ride Home and the whole Ride Home Network. Like, there’s lots of other things that do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Apple News Today, I’ve listened to it so far, and honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find it really low value. But, you know, it’s brand new, they’re getting their feet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under them, whatever. Maybe it’ll get better down the road. The more interesting part of this is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this appears to be, to the best of my knowledge, the first Apple Podcasts exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast that they have launched. And the role of podcast business has really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heated up a lot over the last few years, especially in the area of exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts. This is not incredibly new of a concept. There have been exclusive podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before. Stitcher Premium, I think, is one of the longest running exclusive podcast platforms where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll pay celebrities to do their shows there, and you have to listen in their app using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their paid service or whatever. Luminary famously raised a bunch of money and set it all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on fire and is now setting even more money on fire, trying to reclaim the first pile of money they set on fire, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is always gonna work. So, but much more famously, Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently has been doing all these tons of deals, including buying Gimlet, which disclosure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I made some money from, but also they recently bought Joe Rogan in a very, very large deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there’s all this arms race heating up about exclusive podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple has been quietly hiring people to do what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of sounds like make exclusive podcasts for a while now. And we haven’t really heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything about it or seen any results of it. And I think this might be the very first time that we’re actually seeing the results of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So Apple News Today is a podcast, quote, a podcast that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is listed in Apple Podcasts, but is not seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco public. Now there is an asterisk to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it kind of gets to like, what defines a public podcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has an RSS feed. I don’t know where this RSS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed is listed, but it has one. And if you know the URL,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which 9to5Mac published, anybody can access it, and you can add it to any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast app. It also has an iTunes ID or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash Apple podcast. They’ve rebranded it, but what used to be called an iTunes ID, where you have like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple podcast at apple.com slash something, something slash ID, and then like an eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco digit or 10 digit number at the end. And the way that most podcast apps get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their directory, you know, they get like search results or what to show or whatever. Usually they query the iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API and you can query it for title, URL, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will send you back a list of iTunes entries that have these ID numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have an entry in them called, it’s a JSON dictionary for each one, and all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco title, artist, whatever, and then it has an entry called feed URL. And so normally, what every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast app that I know of, except for a couple of special cases like Google and Spotify that have their own directories,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the most part, most podcast apps that you would all be familiar with, They search the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast directory for whatever the user searched for. They get that feed URL key
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the dictionary for each thing that they fetched. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go to that feed URL directly and that’s the RSS feed. And that’s where all the actual podcast data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is and everything. So the iTunes directory is serving as only a directory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listing to tell you, here are podcasts that exist that are registered with Apple, that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staff has vetted to be seemingly legit, seemingly not illegal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or inappropriate or anything like that, here’s the RSS feed, and then you go to the RSS feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that point forward and Apple’s no longer in the picture. So they really are just like a listing service that’s telling you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s our RSS feeds for these podcasts that we think are legit podcasts. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the definition of what is a public podcast, the way most people interpret that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something you can get to in any podcast app. The more technical side of it seems to be it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a public RSS feed. But realistically, if it’s not listed on Apple Podcast with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a public RSS feed, it’s not gonna seem like a public podcast to most people most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What Apple News Today has is a little bit interesting. Apple News Today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has an iTunes ID. It is playable and searchable in Apple Podcasts. It shows up in the Apple Podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directory, even in the API if you search for it. However, its entry in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the API does not have a feed URL. That’s just missing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it kind of seems like Apple doesn’t want other apps to play this. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if one were to manually set in a database in a podcast app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this feed URL matches this iTunes ID. If you happen to know the right feed URL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you happen to make it public, it happens to play just fine. So most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast apps that have kind of been, you know, on top of this story, you can now search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple News Today and just play it. And it works because most podcast apps have realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, we just add this RSS feed and make it searchable for this title and it will work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think the reason it has an RSS feed that’s undocumented and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listed in the public API is I think Apple wants it to be an exclusive to Apple Podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re trying to gain some kind of leverage over Spotify, which is eating a lot of their market share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the podcast player space. But the Apple Podcasts apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do not do server-side crawling. They crawl RSS feeds directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has some server-side crawling to update its directories and everything, but when you play a podcast in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Podcasts, it is directly crawling the RSS feeds from your app on your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or on your Mac or whatever. And so for the Apple Podcasts app to be able to play this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exclusive podcast without significantly rewriting it and rewriting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some backend server stuff, which is probably a bigger project within Apple than what they can probably get engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources for right now, for it to be playable in their own app, they had to give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it an RSS feed. So I think it has one just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that reason, and they’re just kind of quietly trying to keep it relatively hidden
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the other apps don’t all just play it and take away their slight benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having the show be exclusive to them. So in this way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this attempt at exclusivity to Apple Podcasts for a new show that they’re probably gonna promote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty heavily, this one didn’t really work. We can all play it, although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spotify can’t play it because to be included in Spotify, you have to opt in. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spotify maintains their own directory, they don’t use Apple’s, and they have their own craft that you have to agree to to be listed there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it won’t ever be playable on Spotify in all likelihood, but not because Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t know the RSS feed URL. It’s because Apple doesn’t agree to be included in Spotify’s directory, and you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to agree to it to be included. But for the most part, for the rest of us, it’s this kind of like weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move that Apple has made that is a little unsettling, because Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of power in the podcasting space. They always have. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by far the largest market share of the player. They have the directory that almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every other app for iOS and even some other platforms are just kind of not cool. But even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every podcast app uses their directory as its directory. To
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be in the podcast ecosystem, you have to register with Apple basically. Like if you don’t, you know, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invisible. We’ve been kind of comfortable as an industry with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple having all this share so far because they’ve been pretty benign.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They really, they have all this power, but while they mean a lot to podcasting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasting doesn’t mean a lot to Apple. It’s a very, very, very small drop in the bucket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple, the company. So while they have all this power, the podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco group seemingly has never really had the resources to do anything bad with it. They’ve never really tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like lock it down. They’ve run this API that allows apps like mine to search their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directory, crawl the directory fairly frequently, fairly aggressively,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don’t seem to really care or mind that all these apps are built on their directory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They seem to quietly endorse it actually. They have the biggest podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player in the world by share. So that’s, you know, they have just a ton of power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they have so far been really good at only using that power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to participate in and strengthen the open RSS-based public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystem of open podcasting. It’s been wonderful. It’s been largely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fluke that podcasting has been as good and as distributed and as free and independent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and open as it is for all this time. and it’s largely because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has all this power but hasn’t ever really done anything with it. So now they’re starting to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something with it and that is a little scary. The good thing is they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have 100% power. Now their market share is estimated to be roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 60% of the player market, which is a ton, but 60% is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different from 90% or 95% or 100%. they have enough power that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can start wielding it in ways like this with exclusives and things like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they probably can’t afford to alienate too many people because they have, in a way you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at it as only 60% market share. That other 40% is a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m hoping this is just like a little, I’m hoping this is part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some small effort that Apple gave some money to the podcast team and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, here, make some exclusive, We’re annoyed at Spotify, and they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably make a few more of these things. I hope it doesn’t become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more than that. And knowing Apple, it probably won’t be, because again, podcasting is still a drop in the bucket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the company as a whole, and we know that Apple’s not great at multitasking, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is probably never gonna be a major focus for the company. Even in their services push to try to get more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services revenue, if you do the math and you look at how many people listen to podcasts, and how much money could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they possibly from the podcasting business if they did various scheme, X, Y, or Z, it’s a drop in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bucket for them. So I don’t even think they’re gonna do much like that. I don’t think there’s gonna be another like podcast plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service. I don’t think it’s gonna be like a major thing. I think they might use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more like this, which is this podcast seems to be a promo for News Plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But other than that, I hope and I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re gonna really do anything bad here. But it does give me pause that they did just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch an exclusive podcast for the first time. And they did it in a really basic way. That’s not, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, they kind of like barely even latched the screen door shut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s still a notable move that is a little concerning, but hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna end up as a big deal. It’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. It’s like security through the minimum possible amount of obscurity, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John We just won’t tell you the URL. So it’s weird for a couple of reasons. One, if they just want to keep it out of Spotify’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hand, as you noted, you just don’t give it to Spotify then. You don’t have to hide the URL
⏹️ ▶️ John in the iTunes directory or anything. You can just not have it on Spotify. And it’s an Apple podcast because they paid
⏹️ ▶️ John for its creation. They pay the host. It’s Apple’s property, so they’re making their own podcast, good for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But let’s think about how would things be different if they had just made it just like another podcast? Doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like things would be different at all. Like you said, every third-party podcast app has figured out the
⏹️ ▶️ John hiding of the URL and just connected the URL in their own database. And it’s like, okay, well basically, this podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John is playable everywhere now. The real question is, does Apple consider that to be a bad thing? Will they look
⏹️ ▶️ John up and say, oh, we actually mostly just wanted this to be playable in the Apple Podcast app, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like everyone has figured out our clever ruse and now it’s playable in all the podcast app on
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS. Is that bad? I don’t think, it seems like they don’t consider that bad because they could have locked it down a lot harder, but they didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a question for Marco though. I don’t know if you know the answer to this, but like how does the Apple Podcast app get
⏹️ ▶️ John the RSS URL? Is there another API endpoint that gives them that answer? Is it hard-coded into the binary?
⏹️ ▶️ John Where does that app get the URL from? We all know where the third-party apps got it from, 9to5Mac or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, everyone else got it from just by snooping the, you know, the line between,
⏹️ ▶️ John snooping the network basically, you can figure out where it’s requesting the feed from.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or like, you know, reading the SQLite database or something like from desktop podcast app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once you have an app that’s requesting an RSS feed, it’s pretty hard to hide what the URL is, right? But the point
⏹️ ▶️ John is, where does the podcast app initially get, the Apple podcast app, get the RSS
⏹️ ▶️ John feed URL for the show?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has all sorts of functionality for the podcast app that is not exposed in the public API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They also have a whole sync back end to sync your progress between different devices and everything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing they have a totally separate API that they use. and that the iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API, which honestly, I’m shocked, was ever a thing. I’m even more shocked it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing. I’m happy it is, because it enables my entire business. And if the iTunes API went away tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for podcast lookups, we’d have a pretty significant problem in our business that all of us would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to solve somehow. But as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seemed like this weird one-off thing that they made this API back forever ago for the iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music Store And for some reason, they still run it. And we’re all very thankful. But anyway, I’m guessing that they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own separate API for this, for their own clients. Like, their clients have so much more functionality. An authenticated
⏹️ ▶️ John API, you mean? Not just an open API, like, that you can’t actually use that API because it’s authenticated using secrets
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Apple Podcast has, but you don’t, yada yada, all that business?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, it also could be, I mean, given the relative lack of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical sophistication of this exclusive content, it could also be as simple as, like, they might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have just a different user or something on the API.
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Matzkoff So if you pretended to be Apple Podcasts, that field would be filled in in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco response. Brian D. Walker Maybe, I mean, I don’t know. That wouldn’t surprise me either. Because again, the podcast team within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, they don’t seem like they get a lot of attention and resources from the parent company. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always seemed like this kind of wonderful, incredibly benign and useful side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco project that’s enabled this wonderful entire industry, but that Apple has never given a ton of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources to or bad. It’s been wonderful. I’m so happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been this way. Everyone listening to this show, everyone listening to podcasts today, owes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that to that exact dynamic of the podcast business being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly locked up by Apple in terms of market share and power, but that Apple has just kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as a participating and enabling member of the completely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open RSS-based ecosystem, as opposed to making something totally locked down where it was all and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is what everyone else does with podcasts, like that’s what Spotify does, that’s what Google does, that’s what Stitcher tried to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, everyone else is trying that method. Spotify is having quite a bit of success with it, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re having a scary amount of success. But the world of podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being as awesome and free and open as it is, owes that in almost entirety
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple and to the way Apple has treated this. So if that dynamic is gonna change with an Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is scary to all of us. But fortunately, it has gotten so big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so mature and so diverse during that time that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, as I was saying with Apple having quote, only 60% market share now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s so big and so diverse now that they won’t be able to screw it up too badly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if they try to. And hopefully they won’t even try to. Because among
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people, I’ve met a couple of the people who work in Apple podcasts And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have their heads on straight. Like, they know what they are, they know what they do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they know their importance, and they seem to embrace their role in the open ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they seem to have good intentions. Ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re generally in good hands, and I think they’re gonna stay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small enough part of the company, like by revenue and importance, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they probably won’t get anything screwed up too badly. It’s funny, actually, I had a chance to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meet Eddie Q once, extremely briefly. We were like walking past each other in the press area once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the only thing I told him was, hi, I’m Marco, Overcast, blah, blah, blah. And I said, thank you for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not ruining podcasts. And please keep it up. And
⏹️ ▶️ John too. I don’t know if he knew who I was. But I mentioned podcasts to him. He’s like, I haven’t ruined that? Wait a second. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said, yes. second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we’re podcasting owes its entire existence to Eddie Q basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John The benign neglect of Eddie Q. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes. Eddie Q is a very busy man. And this is this is why this is why we are how we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s too busy to deal with podcasts any many, you know, more intrusively than what we than what we have now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is good. Leave it alone,
Podcast directories
⏹️ ▶️ John You mentioned that it might be like a problem if the iTunes podcast director went away.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s like a classic crisis unity there. So first of all, right now we have a problem in the
⏹️ ▶️ John open podcast ecosystem that Apple owns the directory. It’s not a big problem because like you said, they’ve been good and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a good, a benevolent dictator is better than an evil dictator. Right. But still dictator
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to be truly open, there should be an open directory. Right. So let’s say one day, you know, someone in Apple changes their
⏹️ ▶️ John mind and says, you know what? But forget about it. That iTunes podcast directory is proprietary. You
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have access to it, third party people, tough luck. The good thing for us and the bad thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple is that it has been open for so long that many, many people have copies
⏹️ ▶️ John of that directory as of the second they shut the door. You have one, lots of other people have one.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have the info. And so from that point on, you could go in two possible directions
⏹️ ▶️ John out here. The good path would be, oh, everyone gets together in the open podcast ecosystem and
⏹️ ▶️ John collaborates on some open podcast directory that no one company owns or controls and it’s a collaborative
⏹️ ▶️ John exercise, it’s all touchy-feely granola and everybody just shares the directory, right? And what
⏹️ ▶️ John that would mean, it would be worse for podcasts because they’d be like, oh, you have to add yourself to the iTunes directory and also the open podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John directory because if you wanna be playable in the other 40% of podcast apps, you gotta be in the open directory
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you wanna be playable in Apple’s thing, you gotta add to the iTunes directory. And then also add yourself to Spotify if you care about
⏹️ ▶️ John that, right? That would be bad, but at least we would have dislodged ourselves as a community from
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple controlling the directory because we’d have the open directory, which started as an exact match of the iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John directory and from there expanded in fits and starts and it would be a battle to actually get people to know
⏹️ ▶️ John that the open directory exists, get people to submit to it. Like it would be hard, but I feel like you could
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. In fact, if you were very successful, you can get to the point where people only submitted to the open podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John directory and Apple started reading from the open podcast directory to populate its, you know what I mean? Like that would be the tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ John success scenario. then you’ve you’ve dislodged yourself like podcasts are like using that now. And there’s no,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s all open and free and peer to peer. And just, you know, the bad thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that could happen, which is probably more likely knowing the world the way it is as they close the doors,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s got a copy of it. And some new proprietary company springs up and says, we’re going to be the new Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going to be the new private company that controls the podcast directory for the outside world because Apple’s keeping their director to
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves. So now we’ll be the new evil dictator out here for the quote unquote open directory world,
⏹️ ▶️ John ha ha, everyone has to submit to us because we have a hundred million dollar VC money to advertise to the whole world
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re the new open podcasting directory. If you want your podcast to be listed anywhere except for Apple’s app,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to list us. And they spend their hundreds of million dollars to spread that message and eventually everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John does that and now they’re the evil company that controls it, right? So- I mean, we have that, that would be Spotify.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how that would go. Right, but they’re not even pretending to be open. Like this company would totally be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, we’re the new Apple, We’re the new, for the open podcasting world. Because all they would be is a
⏹️ ▶️ John directory. They wouldn’t be a service, they wouldn’t be like Spotify. Their whole play would be, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just a directory and we don’t charge you any money and everything’s open. They would, you know, and they’d spend all their VC money to
⏹️ ▶️ John get to the point where they can start turning the screws. But they would just be a directory, right? That’s the evil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version. I mean, I think there are companies that are trying, they’re just really small and nobody really cares.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah. And it’s because Apple’s directory is open. How are you gonna compete with, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously the scenario of benevolent Apple controlling directory is way better than the
⏹️ ▶️ John evil dictatorial other company. But the longer this goes on, the more I
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of wish that podcasting was as open as the
⏹️ ▶️ John web or, I mean the web is a problem too. So this is the problem with open stuff where you want to direct your things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Podcasts is small enough that you can imagine having an open directory. Again, like usenet groups
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything, where, I mean, I don’t know the technical details about how using that works, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John having distributed, I guess DNS is similar, any of these things where there’s a directory, it’s a problem. The web, you say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, the web is open, anyone can put up a website, but the web is so big that you need these huge billion dollar
⏹️ ▶️ John companies to bank a search engine from, and then you get something like Google, where yeah, technically the web is open, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna find anything on it, you’re going through some company that has to have some way to make money because it’s such a big job. But a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John directory in the grand scheme of things is not that big. Like someone could start a Patreon and run a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John director for the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco internet. Well, I wouldn’t assume
⏹️ ▶️ John that. If only people would submit to them, that’s the problem. But like the actual volume of data,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the number of podcasts in the world is way smaller than the number of web pages and does not grow as fast. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the actual volume of data is such that you could get a reasonable AWS bill that you could pay
⏹️ ▶️ John with a well-supported Patreon and have a small couple-person company that
⏹️ ▶️ John runs it. It’s just that no one would send you your podcast. That’s the big challenge. That’s why the VC people are dangerous there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there are a few exacerbating factors here with podcasting. So first of all, it’s way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a human problem than an engineering problem. Your AWS bill is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staffing. One of the biggest, most important things the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directory does is vet stuff and and keep out a large amount, not 100%,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a large amount of spam and illegal stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco porn stuff that you don’t want to deal with. They do a lot. And to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t surprise me if the approval editorial side of the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Podcasts team is larger significantly than the engineering side. I bet it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know that, but I bet it is. Because they have to have people who speak every language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going through probably thousands of podcast submissions every day or week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figuring out which of these are legit that we should enable in our directory, and which of them are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just bots or scams or copies of other people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts that this person’s uploading illegally as their own, or porn stuff. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much that they don’t allow in the directory that they filter out with human review.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have to have a lot of humans a lot of different regions and cultures and languages to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to adequately review those things. And then there has to be, you know, some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way where like people, when you have a directory, you’re going to have disputes, you’re going to have problems, you’re going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco claims, you’re going to have to have people who, again, who, who know all the languages, who can, you know, respond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to claims and disputes from all over the world for all different kinds of language content, and who have to resolve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disputes. When somebody says, Hey, that’s my podcast, and someone else copied it, somebody has to resolve that dispute. If somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files a DMCA report, you got to look at it, you got to figure like, is this legit? If they file a trademark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dispute, you got to look at that. So it’s a very human, messy, expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to run. In a way, Apple, again, part of the reason Apple has done a great service to the podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business is it would never be possible for apps like mine that have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one-person staff to ever have anything close legitimate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful directory that isn’t full of, it doesn’t just get spammed constantly. It’s already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard enough. There were some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird, dangerous, hateful podcasts that got through Apple’s directory that I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to remove over time from, that had omit from Overcast’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promotional areas. You don’t want them showing up in your, hey, you might like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy hate content over here. So even me keeping up with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is nearly impossible as one person. To have the entire world of podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go into your directory and submitting stuff all the time and to have so many apps like mine just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of assuming that if it’s in the Apple Podcasts directory, it’s probably not gonna cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems for me to display it in my app. Even simple stuff, like I don’t want, if you search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for certain keywords, it would be kind of bad if somebody’s artwork had like porn in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be something I’d have to deal with, and with Apple Podcasts, I don’t have to deal with that, because they are very strict about that. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have rules against it, they have people reviewing it, and so as a result, I don’t really have to worry that my app might accidentally display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco porn and somebody doesn’t want to see it, because it’s all from this review directory. So you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have people looking for that, you have to have people responding to those. So there’s all those issues, And then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also this weird, really obnoxious podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco producer cultural issue regarding RSS feed locations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and RSS feed changes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when you are on any other part of the web, suppose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you make a website. Suppose we’re in the bad old days of GeoCities, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people did not own their own domain So if you made a blog somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your blog was some-servers-name.com slash some-directory slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your-user-id. And imagine you wanted to change hosts. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would create a new one and you would move everything over, and the only way for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your old audience to find you at the new place would be if you either left a link up forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and left that old account open, or if the old account host was willing to do a redirect, which most of them weren’t. warrant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was kind of crappy. And so in order to mitigate this, people eventually learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who produced, you know, websites professionally, hey, we should own our own domain names, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can point that to whatever host we’re on. And if we happen to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where URL is, we can implement something called an HTTP redirect. What a great concept.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can you can even specify in the redirect whether this is a temporary redirect or a permanent one. So if you move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your site from one URL to another one, you can have the old one send a 301 redirect that says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a permanent redirect, and then sites that have any kind of bot or app or bookmark or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your old one should then be updated to point to the new one. It’s right there in the spec, it’s technical, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s clear. That’s not how podcast RSS feeds are treated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the real world, almost ever. Podcast RSS feeds in the real world are treated the way web hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be treated, where people host like big to small, lots of podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they host their RSS feed at some service that’s giving them analytics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or ad insertion or something. The RSS feed is almost never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your publisher’s domain name. It is almost always at some stupid service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when their business unit changes and they want to go to a different service, or if it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s a novice and they’re like, Hey, I wasn’t this free thing, I’ve hit their limits, now I’m going to my own WordPress site or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they got to move their feed. They don’t do redirects. Ever, ever, ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know why. This part of the web and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it works technically and moving hosts around never reached the podcast business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way people do redirects in the podcast world is they go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple and and they say, change my RSS feed from the old thing to this new address.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they expect every single other app to update as a result.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to. For a while, Overcast didn’t for the first couple years or few years, and it was a constant problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I had to eventually build in the support for these quote redirects where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple ID just points to a different URL now and there is no HTTP redirect in place for it. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now the ID goes somewhere else every so often to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’ve moved, and when they have moved, I have to move, I have to change what feed I’m crawling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s this weird, like, administrative redirect, basically. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, that can be done not only, like, by people in their interface, but sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have to, like, email Apple and say, hey, I lost control of my podcast account. Can you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please reassign it with this new feed? And then some human at Apple Podcasts has to evaluate that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see like, is this legit? Is this a scam? Is this like, did this person really lose access? Are they trying to take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control of someone else’s feed? So it’s a really messy problem. And podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a whole, they see Apple Podcasts as it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the entire world to them. The, and like their podcast exists, not as a URL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an RSS feed, but as an entry in Apple Podcasts that they can redirect, that they can point to whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want to point to at any given time, worry about the HTTP backend of everything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be yet another thing that if the Apple Podcast Directory became closed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we would be screwed on that. The rest of us out here, we would be totally screwed on people doing these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco administrative redirects because they would just never tell us. Like whatever directory we would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch instead or try to assemble, they would never tell us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it feels like all this stuff can be overcome. Like everything you described is true, but the internet itself has a long history
⏹️ ▶️ John solving these exact problems. Again, I go back to Usenet, which I don’t know the deep technical details of, but it was very similar in that
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, anybody can make a news group. Well, how are you going to stop people from making a million news groups? How are you going to stop people from making porn news groups?
⏹️ ▶️ John The answer is you have a bunch of administrators of various servers who basically work for free and
⏹️ ▶️ John making a news group had a process and all just a bunch of unpaid people, you know, collaborating
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure that there aren’t a million news groups. And porn, well, they just made a bunch of porn news groups and they’re over there if you want to find them and they’re sectioned
⏹️ ▶️ John off, right? Later in the more modern internet times, Wikipedia has basically every problem you just described.
⏹️ ▶️ John The biggest one to overcome is how do you get people to update stuff on Wikipedia? And that’s like, oh, if podcast producers only
⏹️ ▶️ John tell iTunes about the update, why would they tell some open directory? Well, they tell some open directory because they want the other 40% of
⏹️ ▶️ John the podcast players to be able to hear their content. And it’s annoying for them that now they have to tell two places. But, and again,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do a good job of it, you can shift the center of gravity so that the podcast producers just start updating the open
⏹️ ▶️ John one and then Apple pulls from the open one because the open one can’t pull from Apple because they closed it down. But all of these problems,
⏹️ ▶️ John spam, porn, how do I pay all these people, verification, like Wikipedia has all those problems
⏹️ ▶️ John in spades. And Wikipedia is not perfect, far from it, right? But it’s a much larger scale system than a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John directory in terms of sheer number of entries, probably even just in English. It’s this huge,
⏹️ ▶️ John large, you know, it’s in multiple languages and all that stuff, right? These are solvable problems. We have a way as a community
⏹️ ▶️ John based on open standards with a bunch of loosely assembled volunteers to provide
⏹️ ▶️ John this public good on the internet, which is this relatively small in the grand scheme of things directory full of podcast information.
⏹️ ▶️ John But getting from where we are now to there has this dangerous middle area where lots of things can go wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s much more straightforward for someone to get a few hundred million dollars of VC money and advertise that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re the new quote unquote open podcast directory and get everyone to start submitting to them and pay people like
⏹️ ▶️ John you said to do all the things that you described the old fashioned way just by giving people money and then get everybody to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John and get everybody to stop sending it to Apple and then start turning the screws and mess with
⏹️ ▶️ John So I agree that there’s lots of danger between where we are now and that goal, but every time I
⏹️ ▶️ John think about Apple having that much power and us just relying on their kindness
⏹️ ▶️ John and their good sense, like someday all those people with kindness and good sense are going to retire and hopefully they hire people
⏹️ ▶️ John behind them who also have kindness and good sense. But in the end, like you said earlier, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly protected by the fact that the amount of money that podcasts can
⏹️ ▶️ John ever add to Apple’s bottom line is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco insignificant
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as they’re concerned, so they’ll never pursue it unless they get much, much, much smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John or spin off the podcast business or something terrible like that. But I don’t know. I do dwell on it because
⏹️ ▶️ John an open podcast directory is absolutely a thing that could exist with systems that have been proven to work. It’s just very
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to get from where we are to there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In conclusion, please Eddie, never retire.
Sponsor: Mint Mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Mint Mobile. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still using one of the big wireless providers this year, have you asked yourself what you’re paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for? Between their expensive retail stores, inflated prices, and all the hidden fees on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your bill, you’re being taken advantage of because they know you’ll pay. Enter Mint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mobile. Mint Mobile provides the same premium network coverage you’re used to, but at a fraction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the cost because everything is online. Mint Mobile also saves on retail locations and overhead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they pass all these savings directly to you. So every plan comes with unlimited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nationwide talking and texting. Yet Mint Mobile makes it easy to cut your wireless bill down to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just $15 a month. And with Mint Mobile, stop paying for unlimited data you’ll never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. Choose between plans with 3, 8, or 12 gigs of 4G LTE data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan, and keep your same phone number. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ditch your old wireless bill and start saving with Mint Mobile. To get your new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wireless plan for just $15 a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free, go to mintmobile.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s mintmobile.com. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month at mintmobile.com. Thanks to Mint Mobile for sponsoring our show.
NVIDIA 💰 ARM?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nvidia is going to buy Arm?
⏹️ ▶️ John Arm? I forget who owns Arm now. Is it SoftBank? I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t know. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John right. The ownership gets passed around, but apparently the company that owns it is thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of selling Arm. And this is all just rumor stuff. One of the rumored potential buyers is Nvidia.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just want to touch on this briefly because, for a couple of reasons. One, Apple is not super duper
⏹️ ▶️ John friendly with Nvidia. If you haven’t noticed over the past years decades or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John Why exactly there’s all sorts of reasons there’s business reasons. There’s technical reasons back when Steve Jobs was
⏹️ ▶️ John around there was personal reasons But the bottom line is you don’t see a lot of Nvidia GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John in Macs for a long time And they’re not buddy-buddy so the question is it what so what if Nvidia
⏹️ ▶️ John buys arm? Forgetting second is I why Nvidia might want to buy arm whatever what if they buy it? but
⏹️ ▶️ John could that be potentially harmful for Apple? And the quick answer is, well, no. Apple’s got an architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John license. They’re all set. They can make chips. They don’t need ARM for anything except for this license,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I don’t know if this is rumor or truth, but it’s a perpetual license or whatever. Like Apple was an early investor in
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM. Like whoever buys ARM, they’re not stopping Apple from continuing to make quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote Apple Silicon chips, which by the way are ARM. Apple just doesn’t want to say that, but whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So yeah, whoever buys ARM, not a big deal for Apple. But that’s just short-term thinking. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you think on the scale that Apple thinks, and maybe in this next item we’ll talk about the scale that Apple thinks,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re fine until and unless the eventuality
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve talked about many times actually comes to pass, which is what if ARM becomes the next x86?
⏹️ ▶️ John As in, eventually, like the whole industry moves to it. You know, if we’re coming out of right now a long period
⏹️ ▶️ John of time where x86 was it, like personal computers use it. Eventually it came to dominate on the server.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was just everywhere. It was so everywhere that Apple switched to it. It was just x86 was everywhere, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple during that time gained a lot of benefit and added a lot of value
⏹️ ▶️ John to its product by selling you a thing that could also virtualize
⏹️ ▶️ John your server. Cause hey, if you have an Intel Mac and x86 Mac and use x86 on your servers,
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna run a virtual, you know, a virtualization environment on your laptop that runs Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John at more or less full speed so you can test your stuff that you’re gonna run on your x86 servers, great, that works
⏹️ ▶️ John great. What if you wanna run Windows? Hey, we can run Windows at full speed. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John reboot into it, you can run it in virtualization. That added value to Apple’s Intel Macs. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the reason they switched to Intel. As we come out of the Intel, Wintel, x86,
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere era, now we’re not in an era where everything runs ARM. Now we’re in this weird place where
⏹️ ▶️ John PCs and servers on x86, all the billions of mobile devices
⏹️ ▶️ John run ARM, Apple runs ARM and it’s kind of split up here. But if we eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John get to a place where everything’s ARM, there’s ARM on the server, all the phones and tablets run ARM,
⏹️ ▶️ John all PCs run ARM, and they run ARM on Windows, right? All the game consoles are on ARM. Just everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to ARM, it becomes as saturated with ARM as it was on x86.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that comes to pass, which is still an open question whether we would ever get there, But if it did,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s products would gain value by being a place where you could virtualize your server environment,
⏹️ ▶️ John run Windows, do all the things. Like that would add values to Apple products. And like I said, if they have a perpetual
⏹️ ▶️ John license, all right, they’re fine. They don’t care who owns ARM, they’re good, right? What Apple would be worried about for the long term
⏹️ ▶️ John is what happens when the ARM equivalent of x86-64 comes along? And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean literally 64-bit, because obviously ARM is already 64-bit. But that’s something that happened in the x86 world. Intel had
⏹️ ▶️ John x86, and they wanted to go through an architecture transition to what they thought was going to be the successor,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was not x86-64. It was the whole Itanium thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, they were going to make an advance. And it turns out their advance was crappy for a variety
⏹️ ▶️ John of technical and business reasons. It didn’t take off. But AMD came up with x86-64, which was a more straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ John 64-bit enhancement of x86. And that turned out to be the thing that the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John industry moved to. So when we say Intel Macs today, they’re running x86 64. It’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ John x86, right? If arm ever does something like that, we’re like, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the next leap in the arm instruction set. And everybody adopts that except for Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they say, Okay, well, you know, all you arm servers, this is the next leap, this is our next instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John set, it’s the new variant of arm, it’s incompatible with the old variant, but it’s our new next step. And it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John new architecture and it’s new IP and Apple doesn’t have a license to it. If someone that Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like and you know or someone that doesn’t like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John owns ARM during that time they have the ability to turn the screws on Apple and say well you have a choice now
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple you can continue to make your own chips however the hell you want it you don’t need us you have great chip designers like technically you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need us but if you do that you no longer can run easily or at all in virtualization
⏹️ ▶️ John this new ARM instruction set that’s gonna come out 20 years from now that’s incompatible with the current one, right? In the same
⏹️ ▶️ John way that x 80 64 was, you know, incompatible with, with, obviously it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a 64 30 bit transition. But anyway, you can imagine if someone owns arm and they do that and they become the new intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will make advancements in their instruction set. And if they won’t license that, if apple’s license doesn’t include
⏹️ ▶️ John that, because you know, it’s very easy to make something that apple’s license doesn’t include some entirely new thing. That’s a problem for
⏹️ ▶️ John apple and that would force them to make a choice. They would either have to pay the money to this company
⏹️ ▶️ John that owns the new arm instruction set or they’d have to go off on their own and neither one of those is
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly attractive. Now maybe Apple’s not thinking that far in advance or
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Apple already has enough of a stake in the company that they feel like you know, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John you know ace in the hole here is no matter what happens with this whole ARM deal at any point we can just buy
⏹️ ▶️ John them right and they could say yeah whoever owns them at any point if they become a problem for us we can just dump
⏹️ ▶️ John money on their head and now we’ve solved this problem because in the grand scheme of things, arm is a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John fraction of Apple size and they can always do that. But the question in the near term is,
⏹️ ▶️ John do we want to do that now just to nip this problem in the bud and just buy up
⏹️ ▶️ John arms business just to protect future stuff? And the reason I mentioned this is because
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple was going to go its own way with his own instruction set, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John now would have been the time that they did that, but they didn’t. They moved the max to arm all their, all
⏹️ ▶️ John their, you You know, other things run ARM, it’s ARM. Like, it’s compatible.
⏹️ ▶️ John The ARM instruction set, right, is not an Apple proprietary instruction set. They don’t control,
⏹️ ▶️ John they influence the instruction set, probably in a strong way, by suggesting, perhaps, that ARM should include this instruction,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is used for, you know, like that type of thing, but technically speaking, they don’t 100% own and control
⏹️ ▶️ John the ARM instruction set, right? Even though they call them Apple Silicon chips, because the chips themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, Apple’s things. but the instructions that they run is a variant of ARM that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can look up and standardize and everything. So I’m interested in this negotiation
⏹️ ▶️ John and sale just to see if Apple cares enough now to just say, like, if we just buy them now, we don’t have to worry about this anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if they say, we can buy them any time we want. Why the hell would we spend money on them now? Because if you buy them, you
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta deal with all the other people. Our licensing ARM, and it’s just a distraction. You don’t wanna license things to a bunch of people. That’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John business Apple is in. Apple’s in the business of making its products, It’s not the business in licensing the FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ John protocol so everyone can interoperate with it, like Steve Jobs said on
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not what they’re into, right? So the smart money says Apple just ignores this and lets whoever
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to buy ARM buy ARM. And the smart money says whoever buys ARM is gonna be nice to Apple because they’re a
⏹️ ▶️ John big customer, presumably. I mean, does Apple pay ARM any money now? Or is it just like a
⏹️ ▶️ John one-time thing where they just get their perpetual license and never talk to ARM again? I don’t know. But I would imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John that they would still collaborate with Apple. So it’s probably not that big of a deal, but it got me thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John how important it may eventually become under some scenarios for Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John actually control the instruction set that runs all of its things. Who knows, if this is so long ago, if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 20 years from now, then maybe they’ll just move everything to RISC-V, continue to call it Apple Silicon,
⏹️ ▶️ John and use an open source instruction set that nobody owns, and then the problem is solved again
⏹️ ▶️ John for another 20 years. Probably not a big deal, but I just thought it was an interesting story going by today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know what would happen, but it certainly seems to me like it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solve some problems if Apple just said, well, that’s ours. Like, we own that now. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with you that they would have little to no interest in doing any of the licensing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and stuff that’s been going on so far. It kind of reminds me a little bit, and this is a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very loose analogy, but it reminds me a little bit of Dark Sky, which was bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few months ago. And they’ve heard, they stated pretty much immediately that the API was going away for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey third parties in something like a year, year and a half or whatever. And I almost wonder if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, if they were to buy ARM would just say, well, you know, all the stuff that we’ve already got contracts for, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, yeah, we’ll keep that going, but there will be no more evermore, you know, forevermore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it would be like, it would be in Apple’s interest to continue licensing if there is even a glimmer
⏹️ ▶️ John of getting to the point where ARM is everywhere, because again, Apple derives value. They want the same instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John set that’s on their Macs and on their iPads to be on the servers. They want it to be the thing that Windows runs
⏹️ ▶️ John on. They want it to be everywhere, right? Because that adds value to their products by being interoperable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re not there now. So if they bought them today, they don’t have that much incentive to continue licensing, except
⏹️ ▶️ John for the fact that if you were to shut those doors, you’d make a lot of enemies, first of all. And second of all, the whole rest of the world would
⏹️ ▶️ John just come up with something different anyway. And now you’re isolated again. And like, you know, I think with the Intel transition
⏹️ ▶️ John and with the move to ARM, Apple has continued to acknowledge that it is valuable
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on the same page as everyone else when it comes to an instruction set. You will not, the benefits
⏹️ ▶️ John you might gain from having your own secret proprietary thing, use that for the implementation, which they do. They certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Their system-on-a-chip are great, right? But it’s better. Apple wants to be on the same
⏹️ ▶️ John instruction set as everyone else. They just wanna have the best implementation of that instruction set. And that’s basically what they have with mobile and
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM. Everyone else is using ARM on their phones too. Apple’s ARM chips are just better, right? That’s a great place to
⏹️ ▶️ John be. The only potential risk is this. Oh, well, what if what if the people who actually own arm
⏹️ ▶️ John a get mean about it and be it? They would have to have a new and incompatible a new new IP,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically, because I’m sure Apple’s license cover is like anything that is remotely looking like arm, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John like the company that that owns arm goes the next leap. You know, it’s just as simple as having a new like
⏹️ ▶️ John SIMD extension or one or two new instructions like you could make a new thing, give it a new branding so that it falls outside
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s architecture agreement. right? And get the whole rest of the industry to move to that and now Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John isolated again? I don’t know. I’m probably overthinking this. In reality,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s going to buy it and just reap that sweet licensing income and be friendly with Apple and we won’t care
Apple going carbon-neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Apple announced, was it today, yesterday, sometime recently, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re going to be carbon neutral for its supply chain and products by 2030, which when I first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read that, I was like, well, I mean, it’s going to take a while. Then I realized, oh God, we’re already in 2020. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rate we’re going. We’re never going to leave it. So maybe they do have time, who knows. But in theory, they will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey carbon neutral for its supply chain and products in less than 10 years, which is super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As someone who’s become more and more of a tree hugger as I get older, I really appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this and I think that this is excellent. I’m impressed by it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like from what little I’ve read into it, it seems like there’s a lot of, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot, they’re doing a lot with solar, they’re doing a lot with wind. And then I guess they’re doing whatever that thing is where you like purchase credit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that to offset carbon that you’re using. I never quite understood how that worked, but basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you put it all altogether it should be completely carbon neutral.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, as Apple says in their press releases, like Apple’s own operations of its own buildings and all that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff has been carbon neutral for a while. This is ambitious and impressive because they’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, like so obviously Apple controls its stuff like it controls the electricity that runs Apple Park
⏹️ ▶️ John and all of its stores and all the other stuff. And yeah, like you said that the offsets are mostly what they do, which is like
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have access to get solar power to the store. But what we’ll do is we’ll pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for solar power to go to someone who’s near a solar plant, offsetting the carbon
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re causing by using electricity from this coal-fired plant that’s near our store. They’re basically trying to say, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much CO2 is going into the atmosphere before we make the store and how much CO2 is going into the atmosphere
⏹️ ▶️ John after we make the store. And they’re carbon neutral if that amount doesn’t change. Like, we made a new store. It’s using electricity, but the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of carbon that’s going to the air is not increasing. That’s carbon neutral. That’s That’s my understanding of it anyway. So a lot of it is
⏹️ ▶️ John with offsets, but offsets aren’t a cheat or a trick or something. It’s just a practical way
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to do it because maybe you make an Apple store and there’s no way to get solar power to it. What are you gonna do? Not make the
⏹️ ▶️ John store there? Right, like they’re, you know. So offsets are a reasonable thing to be doing. But this is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, Apple stuff is all carbon neutral, but what about all the tons of company that Apple buys
⏹️ ▶️ John from? Someone is manufacturing Apple stuff, whether it’s, you know, Foxconn or whoever, you know, some other
⏹️ ▶️ John company is manufacturing it. And that company has factories and has workers and has and they get parts
⏹️ ▶️ John from some place and those parts are manufactured in different factories and this is the whole supply chain, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John their goal is to use their power. As far as I understand this, to use their power as a very big buyer of
⏹️ ▶️ John things and someone who puts a lot of money into manufacturing and you know, all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John to get it’s the people it buys from to do the same thing that Apple does is you have to be carbon
⏹️ ▶️ John neutral to get this contract and that just trickles down the Also, if you want a piece of the big iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturing contract, which is probably very lucrative because they make a lot of iPhones and they’re, you know, expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John to make and you know, you can charge a lot of money for the assembly because the product itself, you know, like if you want that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to be carbon neutral. And then, you know, all the way down to the thing, the company that you’re getting the tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ John screws from that hold the iPhones together. If you want the tiny little screw contract for the iPhone, you have to be carbon neutral.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why it’s a 10 year plan. It’s like, okay, well, we can’t just say that today because we would know what met build stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But 10 years from now, the goal is we we use our power and influence in
⏹️ ▶️ John the industry to do this to to cause everyone else to be more environmentally
⏹️ ▶️ John conscious, even though it’s annoying for them. And even though it costs them more money, we’re hoping that net net, they will agree
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is worth their while to do this to as a side effect, improve the planet, yada, yada, yada. But
⏹️ ▶️ John really, if you want that Apple contract, this is what we want you to do. And normally, people use their buying power
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, if you want that Apple contract, You better give us the lowest price. You better guarantee your parts all work perfectly.
⏹️ ▶️ John You better eat any costs on losses. If you’re late, you lose all your money. That’s normally what companies do
⏹️ ▶️ John with their power is they destroy their suppliers. See Walmart and other companies. They use their
⏹️ ▶️ John power in a capitalist system to crush their suppliers, to cause human
⏹️ ▶️ John suffering down the chain, to make other people make less money, make them more sad, and hurt
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And Apple, I’m sure, does that too because they’re a big company. But to offset that
⏹️ ▶️ John a little tiny bit at least, Apple also tries to do good things. And this is a good thing that Apple is doing, not because
⏹️ ▶️ John they make more money, like, oh, it’s all marketing. They, Apple would just say they have green products. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that the marketing advantage of this effort comes
⏹️ ▶️ John close to matching what it’s going to cost Apple and the entire supply chain in terms of time
⏹️ ▶️ John and money and effort to make this happen. Apple is doing this because they think it’s the right thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. And yes, also it’s good for the company, for PR, so on and so forth. But if it was really such
⏹️ ▶️ John a clear PR win, every company would be doing this. Every company isn’t doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is one of the standouts in this. And so the other link we’ll put in the show notes is
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a Medium post by Lisa Jackson who’s heading this initiative and also a Vogue article profile of
⏹️ ▶️ John her. You can read these interviews with her and read what she has to say in her own blog and
⏹️ ▶️ John decide for yourself if she’s a corporate shill, cynically doing something so they can put green leaf sticker
⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple boxes or whether she really believes in it. I think she really believes in it. I think Apple as a company really believes in it
⏹️ ▶️ John and I applaud them for doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is really excellent. And I don’t know, to some degree, I almost feel like you kind of have to go on faith
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they’re doing what’s right. They’re doing what they’re saying, but I tend to believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. You know, Tim doesn’t seem like he’s really interested in BS. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, this this looks excellent to me. I haven’t had the time to read the interviews or the Medium post, but I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point. And I’m really excited for this. It really makes me feel good that a company that I really enjoy and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care about is trying to do the right thing. And I think that’s something that Tim Cook’s Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been doing better and more of, is doing the things, not because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re easy, but because they are hard, that’s a reference, John, and doing them, the things that are right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that’s what they should be doing. And even though it’s really not in a company’s interest to do what’s right, a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time it’s in a company’s interest to make money, which often means it’s in their interest to do what’s wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for Apple, they’re not perfect by any stretch. There’s a million things that Apple does wrong. But I think more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most companies, they genuinely do try to do what’s right. And I admire that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re spending their entire BS budget on the App Store 30% thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, they do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. The reason I buy the sincerity for a lot of these efforts
⏹️ ▶️ John is they like they happen regularly and they don’t happen in
⏹️ ▶️ John response to some problem. No one is out there right now saying Apple is polluting the planet. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the worst polluters in the world. I mean, for someone says it’s somewhere because everyone’s always saying something bad about
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, Apple has a pretty good reputation in terms of environmental impact of their efforts,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? They’ve always been trying to make the packaging smaller, to reduce their carbon footprint, to recycle more.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, everyone, because they’re the biggest company in the world or one of the biggest tech companies or whatever, but I don’t know what their market cap
⏹️ ▶️ John is now. But anyway, because they’re so big, uh, there’s always going to be someone saying Apple, you’re not doing enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple’s reaction to that is not to sort of get cranky about it and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, argue their reaction to it is always to try to do better themselves. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they would agree that they have more to do and then they just keep doing it. Like they were
⏹️ ▶️ John already carbon neutral themselves. They could have just coasted on that and say, look, we’re all, our stuff is carbon neutral. We can’t control what our suppliers
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Uh, but their answer with this plan, the answer to a question that very few people were asking except for the
⏹️ ▶️ John most extreme is, well, what about your suppliers? Can you do something about them? And Apple’s saying, yeah, actually, we’re going to have a goal that our whole
⏹️ ▶️ John supply chain is carbon neutral. Um, and you know, and there’ll be further efforts, right? So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple is 100% trying to do the right thing here and I admire them for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And as Marco said, there’s plenty of other things to complain about even within the supply chain. Like there’s this
⏹️ ▶️ John carbon neutral stuff. Even this could be implemented in a way that’s uh, you know, draconian. And
⏹️ ▶️ John of course there’s all the, the human labor issues of like how are they treating their workers and apples
⏹️ ▶️ John and trying to address that, which has proven a lot harder than this carbon neutral stuff because they have all these
⏹️ ▶️ John agreements with their suppliers that you have to not make your customers work overtime and yada yada. But Apple also has
⏹️ ▶️ John in their contracts, Oh, if you’re late your entire company goes under because we get all the money, right? And so you
⏹️ ▶️ John know this, the incentives are aligned for their suppliers to say, yes, yes, we’re treating our workers well. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not working 20 hour shifts and then make them work 20 hour shifts. Right? So challenges
⏹️ ▶️ John remain, But on the environmental stuff, I’m glad to see progress.
Apple’s 30% PR BS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we want to talk about that 30% study? I know almost nothing about it, so I am useless.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark wants to say something about it. He can’t. I don’t think we have anything good to say about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I haven’t read it because it’s, I mean, we all know what it’s going to be. It’s going to be like a PR puff thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple talking about how much they’re contributing to the economy by allowing and enabling the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business of everything going on in the world right now that flows through their phones and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their stores and how it’s all their fault. This is all happening. They’re going to claim responsibility for the entire economy, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all that to try to change the discussion away from their pretty clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anti-competitive issues with various App Store policies. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just the next thing in their continued campaign to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deflect all the legitimate criticism of what they do with App Store and purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rules and things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair conversation from their end because they have, they’re clearly like, again, as I said, they’re spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their entire BS budget on this. They have a point of view on what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing, and it is, I think, far from everyone else’s reality.
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Matz Yeah, I think that Apple’s biggest weakness in this area seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the sincere belief at high levels in Apple that it is actually reasonable,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That the profits and the money and everything are apportioned in a deserving
⏹️ ▶️ John way, like that Apple really thinks that it does deserve what it gets because, in fact, maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ John even deserves more because Apple made the platform and all these software vendors would be
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing without the platform. And the reverse side of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they really believe that and also don’t believe that they don’t believe enough on the reverse side of that, that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t be Apple without all those apps that third parties made. That’s the most dangerous place to be because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you sincerely believe that you are being wronged, it always seemed that Bill Gates believed this in the
⏹️ ▶️ John antitrust trial back in the 90s, you’d see his testimony. He believed in his heart of heart that
⏹️ ▶️ John he was getting a raw deal and everything that Microsoft got they deserved and everyone else was just complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John and trying to dethrone them because they held all the money and power. And you can see how you can get into
⏹️ ▶️ John that mindset, but if you’re in that mindset, you’re not going to make your case well. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, these ungrateful developers, I can’t believe
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t see what we see, which is that we deserve this, and just be quiet
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, right? That’s not a good place to come from. And very often it seems that there is
⏹️ ▶️ John that sincere belief inside Apple. They feel aggrieved, and they feel like what they get is what
⏹️ ▶️ John they deserve, and they probably even deserve more. and you’re never gonna come to sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of an amicable agreement like that. Now, I don’t wanna get into the whole legal, anti-trusting, anti-competitive stuff because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John my opinions are probably different than most people’s on that. But in the end, it doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s what’s legal and there’s what makes everybody happy. You really do need to come,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re a platform vendor and you have a reliance on third-party application developers, which Apple 100% does,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what they may think in their deepest moments of aggrievement, if that’s a word,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to get a relationship that makes everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John at least a little bit happy and at least a little bit unsatisfied. You have to strike a compromise. You can’t have an adversarial
⏹️ ▶️ John relationship with your developers. You just can’t. Whatever the deal is, whatever the grievances are, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John find somewhere that you can both benefit. And arguably, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t really crossed that line over the course of this whole time. Developers aren’t fleeing apples platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are lots of complaints apple makes changes just enough to keep everybody sort of on an even keel But
⏹️ ▶️ John if the massive resentment from developers is about the 30% grows or if various political
⏹️ ▶️ John factions that don’t even represent developers But use them as a political tool decide it’s time to take down Apple for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John legal ideological or political reasons That’s a problem for Apple and I think I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft trial I mean And there’s a couple lessons to Microsoft trial, but one of them is if you as a
⏹️ ▶️ John corporate entity act like Bill Gates as an individual did in a testimony, it’s not gonna make you look good and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to make you a friend of developers and it will take a while to heal that relationship. The other lesson of the Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John trial is that, yeah, it seemed to go bad for them, but in the end, money, power, momentum and some
⏹️ ▶️ John good decision-making after that led to the Microsoft of today, which is resurgent and better
⏹️ ▶️ John off than it was then, arguably from a technological and business perspective. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, Apple’s probably too big to fail.
Sponsor: HelloFresh (code 80atp)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by HelloFresh. Get fresh, pre-measured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ingredients and mouth-watering seasonal recipes delivered right to your door with HelloFresh, America’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one meal kit. HelloFresh lets you skip those trips to the grocery store and makes home cooking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun, easy, and affordable. They have so many recipes to choose from each week to help you break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of your recipe rut. There is something for everyone, including special needs like low-calorie,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vegetarian, or family-friendly recipes for you to choose from every week. All of these have fresh, high-quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ingredients, over 90% of which are sourced directly from growers, and they cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out stressful meal planning and grocery store trips so you can enjoy cooking and get dinner on the table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in just about 30 minutes most of the time, or even 20 minutes with their quick recipe options in case you’re a little short on time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can save up to 28% by using HelloFresh versus your grocery store shopping trips, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their carbon footprint is is 25% lower than store-bought, grocery-made meals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They also offer contactless delivery to your doorstep because they are committed to making fresh, delicious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco food available now more than ever, and they’ve taken extra steps to keep their employees and customers safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HelloFresh also donated over 2.5 million meals to charity in 2019, and this year is stepping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up their food donations amid the coronavirus crisis. You can, of course, easily change your preferences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with HelloFresh. If you need to skip a week or change your delivery day, that’s all, you don’t have to worry about any of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s all super easy, they let you do whatever you want with that. So feeding the whole family has never been easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever your needs are with HelloFresh, with diet, with portion sizes, with preferences, with delivery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times, they have something for you. Go to hellofresh.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 80ATP and use code 80ATP and you get a total of $80 off,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including free shipping on your first box. So that’s remember, 80ATP, because you’re saving 80
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks. So hellofresh.com slash 80 ATP with code 80
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP, 80 ATP, for a total of $80 off your first box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Additional restrictions apply, please visit hellofresh.com for more details. Thank you so much to HelloFresh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show.
#askatp: Mac pro apps on iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP and Edward Rosenberg writes, if our Macs can run iOS apps, could iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey soon run Mac apps? What if the new touchability of Big Sur apps in their toolbars is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about touchscreen Macs, but about bringing Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Xcode to the iPad? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I understand the logic here, but I don’t see any of that happening. In no small part because all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these apps that Edward is citing, those are all AppKit apps as far as I knew, And that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be extremely not fun and not easy to bring back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the to iOS. And so I just I really don’t see this happening. But, Marco, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s even worse. Those those are probably Pro Kit apps, which is even a whole other level. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m with you. I don’t think I don’t think the major Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro apps are coming to the iPad in a meaningful way anytime soon. And part of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is about the frameworks they’re built on not being available on iOS, as you said. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another part of that, that’s probably an even bigger part, because if they really wanted to, yeah, they could rewrite the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Final Cut UI for iPad. They could rewrite the Logic UI, all billion screens of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, for the iPad. They could rewrite Xcode for the iPad, or they could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make Xcode Lite for iOS, which is kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sort of what Playgrounds is, Ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of these apps would have significant real world trouble running on iOS because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of them depend on a platform in which you are heavily multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and making heavy use of lots of external files and plugins and all sorts of other stuff. External tools,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrating with the workflows in lots of different ways. And while iOS can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically do a lot of that stuff, it’s so much more of a hindrance on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so much more clunky, many of those tools and plugins and everything aren’t available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iOS. You could probably bring over each of these apps to iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however, the ecosystems around them either can’t or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t be there in practice. And with all these pro tools,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not gonna get any pros to actually switch over and to actually start using these in meaningful volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPad. So, until those ecosystem dynamics change, which may
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never happen. So, until all those other pro tools get involved. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m using Xcode, I’m not just using Xcode. I’m also using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GitTower, and I’m using Terminal, and I’m using web browsers, and I’m using Textmates to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the website of things. I’m doing so many other things. I’m using command line tools. I’m using build scripts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that deal with other tools. it’s not just one tool that you’re using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m using terminal windows to connect to MySQL instances, there’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a development workflow besides just what is in the Xcode window itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so much of that stuff would be clunky or impossible or missing on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the same thing applies to when pros use Final Cut and Logic and everything. So, again, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it happening for those reasons in particular, and while Apple could technically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make these apps available on iPad, I don’t think they would because ultimately, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody’s really asking for the reality of what that would actually be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, one of the reasons that they brought iOS apps to the Mac with Catalyst is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac can handle you chucking a whole other bunch of frameworks on there. So they basically brought a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of UI kit over and suddenly you launch a Catalyst app and now it’s loading this whole other set of libraries that your other Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John apps aren’t loading. The Mac has had a bunch of different APIs for you. You mentioned ProKit, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is this private framework that a bunch of Apple’s Pro apps use. And then some apps are running AppKit, and then some apps
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be running Carbon. And it’s just, the Mac has always had lots of different frameworks and
⏹️ ▶️ John libraries there, and it’s wasteful. It’s wasteful to have a lot of them. There’s a reason, you know, Carbon, why don’t we have two of them all the time? It’s a wasteful development
⏹️ ▶️ John effort, but you don’t wanna have them all in memory. That’s why they got rid of 32-bit. It’s a waste to have both 32-bit and 64-bit
⏹️ ▶️ John copies of AppKit in memory, just because you launched one 32-bit app that uses AppKit, now you have 32-bit
⏹️ ▶️ John equivalents of all those libraries and memory, it takes memory, right? But you can get away with that on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John at various times because the Macs just have more RAM. If you wanted to bring Final Cut Pro to
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad, I mean, Final Cut Pro doesn’t run on iOS. Yes, they have the same core OS, but
⏹️ ▶️ John A, you’d need all the frameworks, you need ProKit, AppKit, whatever bits of foundation that it needs, all sorts of frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. So right away, you’re loading a whole second set of libraries that no other app on iOS is loading. So now you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John doubled your memory footprint. Because when you run five apps running UIKit, there’s just one copy of
⏹️ ▶️ John UIKit in memory. But there’s also OS features that don’t exist in iOS. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not a lot of them, but enough of them that Final Cut Pro or underlying things use that you would
⏹️ ▶️ John need to either add those features to iOS, add those particular behaviors
⏹️ ▶️ John or those particular system calls or kernel abilities or whatever else. Even if something as simple as, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS doesn’t have swap. And the Mac OS does. And Final Cut Pro might rely
⏹️ ▶️ John on swap existing and not being killed when it gets out of memory during a brief period. Like, bringing
⏹️ ▶️ John it over would be a big deal. And the iPad, and certainly the iPhone, don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of overhead. They usually have just enough RAM to get by with a bunch of apps running iOS. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna give iPads twice the amount of RAM so you can suddenly load AppKit apps on them. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John AppKit and ProKit apps, or whatever, right? And Apple’s behavior when trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to quote unquote bring apps to the iPad has been the opposite. It’s been to
⏹️ ▶️ John make a new app that fits within iOS and then bring that to the Mac. Remember they
⏹️ ▶️ John did that with iWork? You know, like they don’t want, they want to re-envision Logic or Final Cut
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro or whatever, or Xcode for that matter, for the iPad. And there’s the new vision of how it’s gonna work and
⏹️ ▶️ John it works with touch and it’s, you know, it’s a different conception of how it works. They don’t just take the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac apps and port them. So there’s a whole bunch of philosophical and hard and fast hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually monetary reasons why they’re not gonna do this. Like the monetary reason is you’d have to pay more to have iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John with more RAM just so you can support this probably unsatisfying, very clunky, memory hungry
⏹️ ▶️ John port of Final Cut and you have to change iOS to support it. And in the end, if they wanted a way for
⏹️ ▶️ John you to edit video on the iPad, they’d do what they’ve already done with iMovie and stuff. They’d make a way for you to edit video on the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad that is iPad-centric and that is actually good on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the same way that like Final Cut or whatever, there are iPad audio apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do not look like a straight port of Final Cut or a straight port of some Mac audio editor. They look like purpose-built
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad audio editors and that’s what that market wants. So I don’t expect this. People
⏹️ ▶️ John will also ask about virtual machines, like, oh, if you just run a VM, that ARM-based Mac VM inside
⏹️ ▶️ John there, then you don’t have to worry about all the operating system framework things, but you still have to worry about the RAM, even more
⏹️ ▶️ John so. You’re running a whole second OS in there. So maybe we’ll get there someday where iPads eventually have
⏹️ ▶️ John enough RAM where you can run little Mac virtual machines and run Mac apps, but then you run into all this stuff that Marco talked about, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is, oh, you’re gonna run on Final Cut? I guess your 17 terabytes of video footage are just gonna be hanging
⏹️ ▶️ John off the edge of your iPad, aren’t they? Oh, they’re not? I guess you have a 10 gig ethernet. Oh, you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John that either, do you? Hmm, well, how will it be reading those files over Wi-Fi? Oh, can’t stream 8K footage
⏹️ ▶️ John from your, you know, Like, there’s always associated stuff with these pro apps that,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the iPad’s just not the right platform for them. So, don’t hold your breath for this, but someone will probably
⏹️ ▶️ John jailbreak one and run a cool little Mac, ARM-based Mac virtual machine sometime in the next few
⏹️ ▶️ John years and that’ll be a fun, that’ll be a fun YouTube video somebody will make.
#askatp: CPU options on ARM Macs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, James would like to know, each line of Intel-based Macs has a range of CPU options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available. Do you think Apple Silicon Macs, like a new MacBook Pro, will also have multiple system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ownership options, or will they simplify the offering? I think this is a good question. We kind of alluded to this earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they would only offer one. I think, John, you were talking about this pretty early in the episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it will be only one. I think it will be, this is the chip for the 13-inch MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is the chip for the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and that’s that. John, I’ll give you a chance in a second to weigh in one more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time in a little more detail, but Marco, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m actually going to go the other way on this. I think there will be multiple options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on at least some of the products, probably the higher end ones. Two reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. Number one, some of the products, like if you look at the Mac Pro for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the iMac Pro, or even to some degree the highest end of the other products like the 27-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac or the 16-inch MacBook Pro, usually in most of these products you have significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differences in core count between the low end and the high end. Now some of this is just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the way Intel has done their product lines and everything like that, but some of it’s also because, like, there are significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differences in need. So for instance, like the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro have huge ranges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in how many cores you can get and therefore how much parallel performance you can get for your CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s thousands of dollars in price difference between the low end and the high end. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does make sense to offer that for profit reasons alone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re not gonna put the biggest chip they can possibly make in every one if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can charge you $3,000 extra for the 40-core version for your Mac Pro compared to the base model that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might only have 16 cores or whatever. So there’s a pretty significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco profit margin motive to just have segmentation on that basis. A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second reason that’s related economically is one thing we talked about in the past, binning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This idea that when you’re making chips, not all of them are going to have all their cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work properly. Not all of them are gonna be able to run at full speed because you’ll have minor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imperfections from the manufacturing process. And so you will have, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the manufacturing of these chips, you’ll have some that can run faster than others and some that can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only run eight cores instead of 12, or 20 cores instead of 40, or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is gonna have the same issues with their manufacturing as Intel does, as everyone’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making chips. You have the same issues when you make these large, complicated chips for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main processors with high-end computers. They’re gonna have binning of different chips into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different abilities and speeds. So they might as well do something with them so they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do what everyone else does. They can sell the ones that didn’t pass the test at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high speed, clock them down, and sell them as low speed chips at a low price. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can only make a few that can run all the cores super fast, then they’ll make that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a high end option for a high price. I don’t think they’re gonna be able to escape that dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simply because they’re making the chips their own way now. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hesitate to say themselves because they have a fab partner. Presumably, I assume it’s TSMC making the chips. Although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if we know that. It is, we know it. Okay, good. So yeah, so there is still a chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fab making these chips that will have all these economic issues with them. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a feeling there will be multiple options for anything that is high-end.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The low-end products, things like the MacBook Air, if the 12-inch comes back, maybe even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other 13-inch Pros, or maybe if the 14 happens, that might, because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of half high-end. But I’m guessing the low-end products might not have multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options. But the high-end ones almost certainly will for those reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, all that stuff about bidding and everything is the inescapable reality of Silicon manufacturing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing is, that’s true of every chip they’ve ever made for iPhones and iPads too. And historically speaking, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has chosen not to do that with the iPhones and iPads. You can’t get an iPad with a faster
⏹️ ▶️ John clock chip. You can’t get an iPad with more cores. you get what you get, right? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John though the Mac line, since it goes up so much higher, eventually you get to the point where you can’t do that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John what I think they’ll do is, there will be fewer CPU choices because the low end
⏹️ ▶️ John to the low mid range will just have one choice, just because that’s the way Apple has historically
⏹️ ▶️ John done things with its own system on its chips, right? So there won’t be on like the low
⏹️ ▶️ John end MacBook, whatever, like, or even the MacBook Air, you won’t, oh, you can get the i7 or the i9, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just be one chip, right? But as you start getting closer to the higher end machines, yeah, they’re absolutely, and they’ll vary
⏹️ ▶️ John things like core count. Like I don’t even know if they’ll vary clock speed, but they’re gonna definitely say, okay, well, you can get it with
⏹️ ▶️ John the regular CPU or the big one. And then of course the Mac Pro, they’ll have seven options, then they just get ridiculous in price, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So they can’t avoid giving options. I think they will give fewer than they have with Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, I’m not entirely sure where they’ve been so insistent that like, you know, every single Mac down to the lowest end
⏹️ ▶️ John has like one CPU option, another one for a little bit more. They could have
⏹️ ▶️ John just chosen, and I think they have with a few models here and there, just chosen one CPU for them, but they always said, well, Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John will sell us another one of these that has a slightly higher clock speed. We’ll take 50%
⏹️ ▶️ John margin on that. We get the chip from Intel for 50 bucks more, you pay us 300 bucks more, done and done.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I just don’t think they’ll do that from a manufacturing simplicity perspective when they’re the ones paying to
⏹️ ▶️ John chips, just because they haven’t done it with their phones and iPads, even the iPad Pros. The closest they come on the iPad Pros you got more
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM with the one that had the one terabyte flash or whatever but the system on a chip have just been the same and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they will stick to that simplification for everything at least halfway up their line.
#askatp: Language expertise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Colby Toedisko writes, as a person super new to code, I feel like each language is nearly infinite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so daunting to learn all of. Knowing so little of the industry, I’m curious how much you guys know of your preferred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey language and how much is spent on Stack Overflow to keep learning. This is extremely hard to quantify.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. For me, looking at Swift particularly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know some of it, maybe even a lot of it, but I don’t know if I would even go that far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know some, and there’s a lot, a lot, a lot I don’t know. The good news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is for most of it, I either have a vague notion of what things do or how I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could accomplish something, but I wouldn’t say I can solve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any problem immediately without having to consult with Stack Overflow or Google or DuckDuckGo or what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you. And for any language I’ve ever worked in professionally for any amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, Even C Sharp, which I did for probably longer than anything else. I mean, I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C Sharp pretty well, but at best I knew half of the language, 75% of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey language maybe. I mean, the thing is there is so much breadth and so much depth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to all of these languages that I don’t think it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonable to expect to know a whole ton of it. The idea for me anyway is just to know enough that you can understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the gist of what’s happening and know how to look and dig to get more information if you need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to. I’ve been picking on Marco first a lot. John, what do you think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Griever In my experience, it’s rare for working programmers to know the language
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re working in to extreme depth. Like in most companies and most teams, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one or two people who you know as the language gurus. But that doesn’t mean the other people are lesser programmers.
⏹️ ▶️ John The point is, you don’t need to know anything that you’re you’re working with in huge
⏹️ ▶️ John amounts of depth. You need to know enough of it to get your work done, but there’s very rapidly
⏹️ ▶️ John a point of diminishing returns, which is why most developers, unless they’re actually interested in languages, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know every obscure nook and cranny of the language they’re working with, even if they’ve been working with it for years and
⏹️ ▶️ John years, just because there’s no benefit to them knowing it. But if they come across some thorny thing, they know, oh, ask this
⏹️ ▶️ John random person. They know the intricacies of this particular feature of C++, and they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John help me debug this situation. And I think that’s a reasonable, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a smart thing to do. Like you spend all your time like, oh, I can’t write anything in this language till I know everything
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. That’s wasted time. That said, the question was how much do you know
⏹️ ▶️ John about your preferred languages, blah, blah, blah. Through both my inclination to be a language
⏹️ ▶️ John nerd and an accident of history that has allowed me to use Perl for years and years and years,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know way more than anyone should ever know about Perl. Like just, I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Marco has the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about PHP. It’s like, I know all sorts of nooks and crannies in Pearl. I’ve done all sorts of things outside
⏹️ ▶️ John work that have nothing to do with work that has let me explore all the nooks and crannies. And it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a benefit at work, other than me being the person people go to at work when they have some obscure Pearl problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John which fine, I’m glad to help. But in day-to-day work, it’s not worth the time and effort
⏹️ ▶️ John that I put into it. And you don’t get there unless you really, really apply
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself and or use the same language for a really, really long time. and arguably I’ve been working with
⏹️ ▶️ John Perl way longer than any person should ever work with Perl too. So I think it’s fairly rare for that to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John To give a more modern example, Swift, I know very little of Swift. Like the good, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve talked about this before, this is not really what this question is about, but like knowing languages with lots of features
⏹️ ▶️ John lets you very quickly get up to speed in any other language because you’re like, okay, well, where’s this feature? Where’s that feature, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, like Barga was talking about the whole async await and promises and stuff. If you’ve never used a language
⏹️ ▶️ John with those features, It’s kind of weird to wrap your head around, but once you use a language with them, then like Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re saying, okay, well, how do you do that in Swift? What’s the equivalent of Swift? Do you have futures in Swift? Do you have promises?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have async await? Do you have, you know, whether it’s exactly the same or a little bit different, you know, do you have coroutines?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like just, if you know the concepts, you can just jump into a new language and you’re just like, okay, you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to explain to me what this is. Just say like, does your language have this? And if it does have it, how does it work? And then you can be like, oh, it works a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit differently than the thing I’m used to it working. and you can sort of build from there, right? Which is why I’m able to
⏹️ ▶️ John write, you know, two apps that are on the Mac App Store, knowing very little Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ John And practically speaking, most of the time that you’re spending on Stack Overflow,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re looking up stuff about APIs. It’s all about APIs. Language is like, okay, you just gotta get enough language to get
⏹️ ▶️ John by. It’s all APIs, because we’re building on top of this huge stack of stuff. You’re always looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at how do I do this thing in this API? And if you ask the question of how well people know APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a similar thing. You could look at an app and say, wow, this is the best Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app I’ve ever seen. I bet the person who wrote this knows everything about AppKit. Probably not. Probably just like any other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, that to know an API like a language, there’s one person on the team who knows every
⏹️ ▶️ John nook and cranny of AppKit, but everyone else knows enough of AppKit to write an app, but never has delved into that weird
⏹️ ▶️ John corner that you don’t even use in your app. Why would you? With all things, there’s a point of diminishing
⏹️ ▶️ John returns. And in particular, for languages versus APIs, if you’re doing pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much anything. You need enough of the language to get going and to be able to fix bugs, and then you’re just gonna spend
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of your time figuring out whatever umpteen APIs you have to work with, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where the bulk of your actual effort is. It’s not in language problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I find I’m very similar in that. As soon as I saw this question, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was going to, if John didn’t, I was going to make the distinction between APIs and languages as well, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my preferred languages so far, being C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PHP, and Objective-C, they’re all fairly small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages in the sense that the languages don’t have a lot of language features, or at least they didn’t when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first learning them. Some of that has changed now, but they all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had fairly few language features compared to something like Swift, which has a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of language features. Part of my resistance to Swift so far had been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t like having a lot of language features. I like small,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple languages where you’re relying on the functions and APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and libraries you’re calling to do the cleverness, not having a bunch of built-in stuff in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language itself. This is why I love C so much. C is a very small language, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know there’s a whole bunch of weird edge cases of certain behaviors that nerds like to pick on, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part, it’s a very small, simple
⏹️ ▶️ John language. But that’s kind of what I was talking about, in that C, yeah, syntactically it’s simple, but C is
⏹️ ▶️ John fiendishly complex at the deep level. And if you had some weird C problem, you’d need to go find
⏹️ ▶️ John some C guru and say, I don’t know enough about C to say, what the heck is going on? I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out what this bug is. And they’d be like, oh, it’s a super obscure feature of C that you’d never had any
⏹️ ▶️ John reason to know, but let me tell you about it. Like all the different corners of undefined behavior in C, like there are nuances, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole point, There are nuances to C, which is syntactically simple language that with not a lot of features,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you will never need to know if you just are a C programmer just doing normal stuff. The same is true for Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like. There are obscure features in Swift that you will never need to know. It’s just that Swift has way more features
⏹️ ▶️ John that you will need to know than C, right? Right. Because it just has more features, period, right? But all languages,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter how simple they look, there are dark corners of that language that only some language nerd
⏹️ ▶️ John knows that you probably don’t need to know and shouldn’t worry about pursuing and to becoming an expert in,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless that’s your thing. The people who are language experts in your team or your company,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re probably that because they’re into it, right? It’s the whole reason I learned all the nooks and crannies of Perl, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I was into it, because it interested me. But if it doesn’t interest you, it’s not gonna hold you back as a programmer. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to know those to write a really great app or a really great website or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and I’ve said before, whenever people ask about getting into programming or doubting their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skills, you can be a very successful, working, full-time programmer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco employed by someone else or working on your own as your own business without being that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great of a programmer. You only have to be moderately capable and you have to care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you have those two things, you’ll be fine because you’ll be ahead of almost everybody and you’ll be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco churn out stuff that works just fine. And yeah, so to actually answer the question, how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these languages do I actually know? I know a lot of C and Objective-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know a lot of what PHP used to be, but PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of stuff added to it like in the last five or so years that I haven’t really kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with. But the core of PHP, of what it was up through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about PHP, the late five generations,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very familiar with that part, and that’s most of what I use. Objective-C is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that big of a language once you get past the C part. Like, you have to know C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what Objective-C adds on top of C is not that much, relatively speaking, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other languages. So I’m able to know a lot of that because I’ve worked with it a lot. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change that much, although it still is occasionally adding things which is kind of fun,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t change that much. So I know a lot of Objective-C, But my real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stored up strength, like my real built up strength over time as an iOS developer is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowing Objective-C really well. It’s knowing UIKit and Foundation really well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because as we were saying, it’s much more about the frameworks and the APIs of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco achieving what you need to do. One of the reasons I know PHP so well is that I know all the built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in functions and all the weird idiosyncrasies of, God, what order does the inarray parameter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go in? I know all that stuff in PHP because I’ve worked with it forever. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to use UIKit pretty effectively. I know where a lot of the weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little edge case behaviors in UIKit are, and I know how to do certain difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things in UIKit because I’ve been programming in UIKit since it existed, since 2008,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was able to start doing it. So I have a lot of experience programming in UIKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any new language that you come upon, or any new platform that you start programming for, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to take you way longer to learn the UI frameworks and all the utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frameworks for the other low-level stuff. That stuff is where you’re going to spend all your time. And that’s where something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Stack Overflow searches can be great. Because that’s what I… Whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m searching for something, I’m usually not searching for, hey, how do you make an array in this language?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That kind of stuff you can figure out in a weekend if you’re an experienced programmer, or even a few weekends if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. But figuring out, how do you set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the accessibility label on a custom button that has this one behavior? That’s the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff that you have to look at documentation or Stack Overflow for. And it doesn’t matter how much experience you have as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a programmer, you just kind of are always looking for that kind of thing. And that’s just part of the job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as John said, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having to search for things, but you get better at being able to find them quickly because you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of the terminology of what you’re looking for. So you can say things like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do I make a loop in this language instead of how do I do something more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once automatically with a number that goes up each time? Like, you know, that’s you learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the terminology for what you’re looking for so you can more easily find it. That’s how you get better over time. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by magically memorizing everything or knowing every framework or API that you’re going to come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across in infinite depth immediately. That never happens. You just get better at stumbling through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the rest of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will say that there’s one level of competence that it is actually useful to get to in at least one
⏹️ ▶️ John language, especially languages that have, I don’t want to say standard libraries
⏹️ ▶️ John or have lots of features. So the standard library is a concept in lots of languages. has its
⏹️ ▶️ John own where they build the entire foundation of Swift in its standard library. And it’s actually pretty big. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the C standard library. You can consider the world of Unix system calls as a thing. Like Perl is my example
⏹️ ▶️ John in that Perl, it has a bunch of built-in features that almost exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John mirror the standard Unix APIs for doing stuff. For good or for ill,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do. But there’s a lot of them, right? So if you know Perl, the language, or if you say
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the language, and if things like doing file I or built into the language as they are in Perl. It’s not even a
⏹️ ▶️ John library. It’s literally built into the language. Open, close, read, write, all that stuff with files that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John built in. If you have a language like that with lots of stuff that’s built in, like Swift arguably has
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of stuff quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in the standard library. PHP does
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. Right. If you learn those languages, learn the
⏹️ ▶️ John main 80% that you need to know about those languages, you will reach a point where you can
⏹️ ▶️ John write a program that just uses those features. Again, going from Perl, it’s like, what if you just need to
⏹️ ▶️ John do a bunch of file IO and do a bunch of math and have a bunch of data structures? It’s good to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to reach the level of competence where you can just write that program from top to bottom and never look anything up. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to look anything up for the basics of Perl. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you do want to get there in some language. The problem with most modern development is, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, what if I get there with the language? It still doesn’t help me. I’m still looking up stuff with UIKit or AppKit because you just can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John fit those in your head. They’re just too darn big. I have too many frigging arguments you forget, which are they go in, the names are weird, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John riding the autocomplete, like you’re doing the best you can. I would say riding the autocomplete is an example of looking something up, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John Perl, bless its heart, like there’s no good IDs with autocomplete. So if you don’t know what it’s supposed to be in Perl,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just gotta type it, right? Using Xcode for a long time, I was driving some Perl and I was waiting for it to autocomplete.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course I knew what it was gonna be, but I’m like, do I have to type that
⏹️ ▶️ John no autocomplete. Anyway, I think it’s good to reach that level of competence in some language
⏹️ ▶️ John because it lets you, you know, this is about like the language you know best or whatever, it lets you do like
⏹️ ▶️ John your one-off little thing that you just need to do for yourself without constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John looking stuff up. Right, it breaks your flow. So if I’m, you know, like my, you know, we all wrote our
⏹️ ▶️ John own stupid little blog engines here. I wrote my stupid blog engine in Perl. I didn’t need to look anything up when I was writing that. It just all does is
⏹️ ▶️ John manipulate a bunch of files and make HTTP calls and like it’s, you know, and shell out to the rsync
⏹️ ▶️ John command. Like, that’s all basic stuff. so I could just write it. And it’s nice to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, to just, to get to the point where you can just write a thing from top to bottom and never have to look anything up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s really nice to be able to do that in a language that has lots of features built in. Oh, file I, oh, that’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John built in. Regular expressions, that’s all built in. A whole bunch of basic data structures, that’s all built in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift has that, PHP has that, Perl had that, JavaScript to a lesser extent has that because they lean on
⏹️ ▶️ John this NPM thing for like everything. But anyway, I would suggest trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to reach that level and whatever languages that you actually like. Because it’s just, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine programming if I knew no languages that well, because it would just
⏹️ ▶️ John be too much of looking stuff up. Before there was the web, we would look things up in like, you know, on man pages.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you’re like typing, you know, whatever, man three, sprintf to try to figure out what the hell the format
⏹️ ▶️ John string is for this one particular thing. It’s, looking stuff up is annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna have to do it almost all the time in your regular job. Try to learn at least one language, enough
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to do little projects without looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff up. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Mint Mobile, Raycon, and HelloFresh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thank you very much to our members who support us directly. If you want to become a member, get a whole bunch of cool benefits,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to atp.fm slash join. Thanks everybody and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they did a meme too Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John check podcasting’s so long.
Overcast’s iOS 14 “plans”
⏹️ ▶️ John I put all these screenshots in this week. We didn’t even get to it. I’ll just add more for next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week Our doc is massive. I have so much to say on some of these. Yeah, we will see that
⏹️ ▶️ John for next week Yeah, I didn’t I didn’t do the update today. This is all these screenshots are before the update
⏹️ ▶️ John So I did get one updated screenshot from Twitter of the new battery thing But anyway, yeah, I don’t want to add too many more
⏹️ ▶️ John screenshots We have plenty to talk about but I tried to make some of them square for you mark. How did you say?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, cuz you know that chapter art has to be square.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I said what I’ll do instead what I really need I don’t want to distract you from this, so don’t actually do it. But I found
⏹️ ▶️ John myself wishing we had static content upload to the CMS, because I want to just put these links in the show notes. Like, they
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t all be chapter art, and people who use players don’t support chapter art. If we’re going to be talking about pictures, which we will
⏹️ ▶️ John be on a future show, I would like people to go to the show notes and see the picture that’s loaded from a web
⏹️ ▶️ John page, because I have all the actual images, right? And it’s like, okay, why don’t I do that? Oh, where are we going to host
⏹️ ▶️ John the images? I’m going to end up hosting them on my own website
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco again, like the other
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that are there. CMS will get static content, but you can do that after you’re done with Overcast stuff at the end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. You think I’m going to be done by the end of the summer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, you’ll be so
⏹️ ▶️ John sick of it, you’ll be dying to add static content upload to your PHP website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, god. This is going to be another one of those situations where I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m basically starting Overcast stuff now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s end of July. Assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that iOS 14 and everything probably launch a little bit later than usual,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which even that’s an optimistic assumption, but let’s say they launch in early October. I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I’m not gonna make it in time for that. Because there’s too much to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just for iOS 14 compatibility?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, compatibility, I don’t have to do anything. Compatibility, it works great unchanged.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, well then there you go. As long as you have something you can ship that says, yes, this works
⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS 14 on day one, I figured that problem done, and your other projects can take longer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and because what I want to do, I talked a little bit about this on Under the Radar this week. What I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do is much more substantial, like reworking of a lot more of the UI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch app, stuff like that. Stuff that’s going to make me basically have to require iOS 13
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least, which I don’t yet. I still require 12. Require 13 at least, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more accurately, probably require 14. And so I really shouldn’t release something that requires 14 before like December or January probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think I’m just gonna have what ends up being a very long beta test, where I’m gonna very slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build this stuff throughout the whole fall and hopefully launch it in the winter sometime when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can responsibly launch something that requires iOS 14 and watchOS 7. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I’m looking towards. But what that means is I have lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of time that I’m gonna blow right past the iOS 14 ship date
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re probably not gonna see like an overcast widget on day one, which I don’t think is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad of a thing because honestly I don’t think an overcast widget would be that useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was gonna say, what is it gonna do then? Because you’re not gonna have like play state or anything like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in all likelihood. So I don’t know what you would, like do you have an overcast complication? I don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It all does is show the overcast logo unless you launch the site, unless you launch the app. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because basically, for people who don’t know, I think we covered this already, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way complications work is very similar to the way widgets work, which is you just basically render
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a static thing and you give it a timeline of future values to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you say, at this time, change this value, or whatever. So it makes perfect sense if you have a weather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forecast few hours, you can totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give a complication like, all right, at this hour it’ll be this temperature, at this hour it’ll be this temperature, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that works for that kind of app. For a podcast app, that doesn’t work for a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functionality. You can’t really use it for play state at all, because you don’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a chance to update it as often as you want. It might fall out of sync with the reality of what’s going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what’s being played, and you can’t really do rich things, like have it be constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adjusting during playback. that doesn’t really work in practice with these APIs. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only thing that really makes sense to use a widget for that I can think of so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of like what some of the Apple stuff does for like the podcast and music app of basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just offering like a little grid of like podcasts or playlists, like what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up next? And you could tap it to play it. And you could say like, all right, make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these three playlists buttons on the screen. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m sure people would use that. I don’t think it would be a lot of people though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for everyone who thinks they’ll use it now, that’s wonderful, everyone thinks they’ll do stuff like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the OS comes out and no one does it. Because it turns out this is not a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API for the kind of app that I do, like the kind of like, you know, live updating, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like interactive.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not an API for interactive stuff. Like that’s, I think people are envisioning they’re being a little square on their
⏹️ ▶️ John home screen that is a tiny little application interface and you can’t do that with the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API. Yeah, not at all. And I don’t see them ever doing that again. Like the old ones, you could kind of do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, the old Today widgets. But one of the big problems with the old Today widgets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you swipe over to whatever page or you pull down whatever page is displaying them and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they all start loading. And it’s just like the old dashboard for macOS. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open it up and everything has just been frozen in time. but it has not been updating, and then everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to update for a second, and then the things you want pop in. That sucks as a user, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could tell the system was always kind of struggling to do it, whereas the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new Swift UI-based, complication-based widget setup is something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that basically can get pre-rendered and can just update in the background without ever launching your app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the big thing. Your app’s process is hardly ever launched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually update that data, because it requests a big block of time ahead of time for it and can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display that and can have that ready to go as soon as you swipe over to display that page, that data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there. It doesn’t have to wait a second for the app to launch and then render it. It’s already rendered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s wonderful from a user perspective for the few things that it’ll work for. So for things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weather or to do stuff like that, that’ll be great because it’s gonna just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there without that little delay of having to wait for it to load and update itself. Downside is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a whole bunch of apps like mine where it doesn’t make a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense to use it for those apps, and there’s not a lot for those kind of apps to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Given that it’s tailored to information display, like I’m trying to think of what kind of information would I want
⏹️ ▶️ John from, like, because a weather app wants to tell you information about the weather, and like Calendar is another example. I can tell you here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your next two events today, right? Or, you know, even something as simple as like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, here’s how traffic is looking for your ride home. Like all sorts of things, there’s information that could
⏹️ ▶️ John be displayed, right? What does Overcast have to tell me? Mostly just scenarios don’t apply to
⏹️ ▶️ John my podcast life, but you could say, you know, you could designate
⏹️ ▶️ John favorite podcasts and say, there’s three new episodes in your favorite podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John and just show a little icon. So you got a new episode of this podcast, new episode of that, like just to know what’s waiting for you in Overcast when you get
⏹️ ▶️ John there. It’s an information display. I don’t even think you can, can you do individual tap targets? I think you just get one tap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole thing. You can on the medium and big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sizes, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s right, yeah. But not the small one, even though it’s way bigger than a finger. You can only get one tap target.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, information display, or how many hours of podcasts, I would never wanna say that number, so don’t ever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco do this, but how many hours of podcasts are
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting in Overcast right now, waiting for your information display? Because podcasts, things happen kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like weather during the day. New episodes of podcasts are released, and you have some amount of progress through
⏹️ ▶️ John the podcast you’re in. So in a little widget, you can imagine It’s showing kind of summary of
⏹️ ▶️ John your podcast life. Here’s what you’ve got waiting for you when you get to the point where you wanna listen to podcasts and here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where you were. And that type of information display fits within the widget model.
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone cares about that information to dedicate even four squares worth of space on their home screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. That’s the thing is like, how many people are going to actually wanna devote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quarter or half of a screen to that? Like I just don’t, like I’m using the beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been using it since they came out on my main phone. And I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively little use for widgets so far. And the way I see myself using this so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, I have a feeling I’m gonna end up using, like once iOS 14 is out and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m probably gonna end up regularly using between zero and two widgets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t think a podcast app would make the cut, even though I use my podcast app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly, which is why I made one. I like, I’m using it all the time, But even I, I don’t think would have a use
⏹️ ▶️ John I think light users might like it. Like I think the main thing, even though yes, I know there are notifications that you can get, but hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John a new episode of This American Light came out and you know, it’s your favorite, your designated favorite podcast. So you like to know what comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ John A notification comes and goes, right? But maybe you don’t have notifications on or maybe you forget about it. Glancing
⏹️ ▶️ John at your phone, like you’re getting, you’re getting to your car, you get into your car and you’re like, oh, what do I want to listen to? And on your home screen, you
⏹️ ▶️ John see three little icons of like the new episode of This American Life, the new episode of ATP and the new
⏹️ ▶️ John episode of whatever. and of course you pick ATP because it’s your favorite podcast. You know they’re waiting for you. You don’t have to launch
⏹️ ▶️ John the app. Like that sort of thing, should I listen to the music or should I listen to the podcast? Today you have to launch Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ John and look into it. But if you have this mechanism that’s just gonna bubble up, oh, new episodes of your shows just
⏹️ ▶️ John came out and those three little icons are in a little square that can save you a trip into the app. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work for someone like me who has a million podcast subscriptions. There’s no way I can make any sense of them in any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John widget. It’s just overwhelming. But if you only subscribe to two or three podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, maybe you dedicate that. Because it does have utility. You look at your phone on your way
⏹️ ▶️ John home and you decide, is it podcasting your music for this ride? You’re like, oh, new episode of
⏹️ ▶️ John the show I like came out. And then you tap on it and you’re writing to Overcast and listening to that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, I mean, that’s why I know I have to do widgets for reasons like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just make it a giant Overcast icon that’s the size of four squares. And when you tap it, the app launches.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the watch complication.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I definitely have to do widgets for reasons like that. Like, those are legitimate benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and some people will want them. But I think it’s a pretty small group that’s gonna end up actually using it in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, that’s why I’m not like, rushing to be there on day one at the expense of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other things. There’s a lot of features I’ve been working on that I’ve been building up for months or trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build for months that have nothing to do with iOS 14. That I could launch for iOS 12 if I wanted to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I have to allocate my time of like, how much time am I actually gonna spend doing iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 14’s new stuff for widgets that maybe 1% of the customer base won’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any benefit from whatsoever? Or should I be spending that same amount of time first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing something that I don’t even have to bump up my requirement for, for OS version, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more people would actually find useful, that my customers are actually asking for? And things that customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been asking for for a long time or things like I have to fix my watch app because it’s broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, surprise. So what a surprise, my Apple Watch app needs to be rewritten.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Welcome to every time ever. So yeah, that’s something that’s affecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my users a lot more. It’s affecting my reviews. So like that’s kind of on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fire right now. I have to deal with that. And doing some fancy new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing for iOS 14 that isn’t even out yet and that when it does come out, how much these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end up being used in practice is going to be a huge question mark. That’s just a lower priority.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s going to remain a lower priority for months probably. So I think what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually going to happen is I’m going to probably not even start the widget stuff until very late in the beta period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I’ll have a chance then to see iOS 14 actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get released before my widget stuff is likely to be released. And then I’ll get a chance to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what people actually use, what people actually say. Hopefully my beta testers at that point will be able to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me on iOS 14 how much they are using widgets and how much they actually want out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine. So I can have some idea of do I spend a month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing just widget stuff? Do I spend just a weekend doing a smaller version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one? I don’t really have a good concept of that right now. Whenever it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two years ago, when the first Siri Shortcuts API came out, that took a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while. That took substantially more time than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ever expected it to, way more time than that feature should have taken,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was used so far by almost nobody, and that ended up being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost not worth doing at all. Like, my entire shortcut stuff is almost not worth it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Last summer for iOS 13, they gave me something I really wanted, because they thought I wanted it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They gave like full-blown, like serious support for music libraries and podcasts. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can do way more with shortcuts than I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was able to do like the first time around. And it deprecated everything I wrote for shortcuts. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all that work I did that was way more work than it was worth is useless. And I had to remove a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it already. I’m gonna have to remove more of it soon. And I have to replace it someday. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s all these new abilities that I have with what they released last year that I still haven’t even gotten to using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because other parts of the app have been more important to work on, or there have been other more pressing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features, and the people who use shortcuts mostly haven’t been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking for any of that stuff. And I don’t even know how many of my competitors use it. Like, I know Castro just launched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that new Siri shortcut support recently, like I think a month ago, they launched like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an in-depth Siri API for the Siri stuff was added last summer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they are usually way more on top of new OS features than I am. So that should say something that it took them almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year to do it. And I haven’t even started that. And again, I don’t think I’m really planning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on doing that for a while. Just because like so much of these new APIs that come out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the power users will ask for them because it’s cool and it’s new and we have these new OSs and we want to use these new features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then in practice, almost no one uses a lot of this stuff and you don’t really know before the release what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be used and what’s not. But every time I’ve skipped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those potentially trendy things that was gonna be a lot of work, like iMessage apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never made one of those. Because I couldn’t think of a good reason of why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone would want that for a podcast app. And it turned out to be not really a thing for my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app category, and most app categories. And so I saved all that time, and I’m glad I didn’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m kind of taking the same wait and see approach on the widget. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I need one. I will do one. But I don’t know if I need a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of work in one, or if it can be something a lot more simple.