391: Worse in Stupid Ways
14 Aug 2020Epic goes to war with the App Store, Apple vs. game-streaming, and an ode to most of Phil Schiller’s work.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Tim Cook does play both sides of the campaign-donation game
- Big Sur Beta 4 tweaks
- “Wallpaper Tinting in Windows”
- Energy Saver Slider
- Single-shot Disabling Live Photos (via James Cocker)
- Preparing Your App to be the Default Browser or Email Client
- Phil Schiller advances to Apple Fellow
- New iMacs
- Epic declares war on Apple
- Apple nails the coffin shut on xCloud and Stadia
- Post-show:
- Neutral: What car would John buy next?
- Casey’s doomed to get a dog
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Chapters
- Tim donates to politicians
- Big Sur beta 4 changes
- Live photos and Camera UI
- Default-email/browser apps
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
- Schiller “advanced to Fellow”
- New iMacs
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
- Epic v. Apple
- Sponsor: ExpressVPN
- Apple as Big Brother
- Apple v. cloud gaming
- Ending theme
- Neutral
- Dogs!
Tim donates to politicians
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I returned home earlier this morning today from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our little beach vacation, and I’m a little sleepy, and I was really excited to see that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have nothing to talk about tonight. Oh, boy. It’s going to be a real short,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s good that we delayed a day on the recording. So your vacation worked out really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. That is very true, actually. You’re welcome, everybody. You are welcome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And really, before today, I thought we already had tons to talk about, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since we recorded lots of significant things that we would typically talk about have happened. And some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them are like, well, I guess everyone else has talked about this already, so by now maybe we shouldn’t talk about some of them, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them. And now we have this amazing…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, there’s so much happening right now. I am so excited. I just can’t wait. This is like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, get the popcorn. I can’t wait to see how this goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s dig in and lest dad get mad at me, we should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start with follow-up and I don’t remember who sent this to me and I apologize. I think it was sent to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m the one who put this in the show notes and I, and I screwed up and didn’t leave attribution for myself to remember who’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who sent this, but I think it might’ve been Kyle’s the gray. If it wasn’t, if it wasn’t Kyle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. But anyway, somebody sent us that Tim Cook does play the game of donating to both sides of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the aisle. We had talked I guess four years ago when we spoke last that –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four years ago slash yesterday depending on how it feels, that Tim Cook, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t think really played that game that much. It turns out he does and this article written … Michael Munger
⏹️ ▶️ John No, Apple didn’t play that game. That’s the distinction. We were talking about Apple the company unlike other companies does not
⏹️ ▶️ John give to individual candidates and that’s the page that we linked to last episode. This is about Tim Cook personally. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure every employee who works for Apple personally potentially gives to some candidates
⏹️ ▶️ John or another. But as the story notes, Tim Cook plays both sides.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, thank you for interrupting me. I’m glad you caught that. Yeah, so a very brief excerpt from the article,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was written in August of 2016. Cook has personally given $10,800 to Republican candidates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and joint fundraising committee committees and $10,400 to committees on the Democratic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side since 2008, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. While he is by no means a large
⏹️ ▶️ Casey donor, Cook has increased his activity in this election cycle, again that’s 2016, with about 90%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those donations coming since April 2015. So yes, thank you for the clarification, John, and whoever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was that sent this to us. Thank you.
Big Sur beta 4 changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Big Sur Beta 4, there’s things that have happened. John, you want to walk us through it?
⏹️ ▶️ John We spent a long time talking about the way things look in Big Sur, the areas where
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s missing some contrast, the various line art designs for everything, the difficulty
⏹️ ▶️ John of telling what the active window is, all that stuff. Since then, Apple has made at least
⏹️ ▶️ John one significant cosmetic change in Big Sur Beta 4, which was not out at the time we talked about it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is to change the one thing that I used as an example of really well done,
⏹️ ▶️ John attractive styling that does not detract from usability, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John the subtle tinting of dark mode windows, I guess, light mode windows as well. But I was using dark mode as
⏹️ ▶️ John a specific example where a dark mode window won’t actually just be dark gray or black, but it will actually
⏹️ ▶️ John have a subtle hint of whatever the dominant color of the desktop background picture is. So it will
⏹️ ▶️ John be like dark grayish with a hint of red, maybe just just a little
⏹️ ▶️ John subtle, you know, to make it look not boring, right, but not in your face and bowling
⏹️ ▶️ John you over. It’s a little bit less subtle in light mode. Anyway, in beta four of all the things they can add
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the stuff we complained about, they added a checkbox to disable that specific effect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just that specific effect is not an accessibility thing. It’s not like where you turn off transparency entirely or
⏹️ ▶️ John increase contrast across the board. This is a specific checkbox in the in like the non accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John preference. I think it’s in the general preference pane. This is disable wallpaper tending in Windows. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like the fact that wallpaper has become the word they’re using here used to be. We marveled at the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that in system preferences you could type wallpaper and it would find like the desktop picture preferences.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like see there. They know that Windows users will type wallpaper so they want to make sure that search term works. Now Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John using wallpaper in their own copy. That’s a regression. I think anyway, what was it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before desktop background
⏹️ ▶️ John Desktop picture. Yeah, that’s what used to be called desktop picture. Um, so yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t it’s it’s boggles my mind that of all the I mean, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this is sort of been the argument for for graphite mode where it’s like, what if you’re doing color work? You don’t want everything on your
⏹️ ▶️ John screen to be subtly tinted by some other color. If you’re thinking your dark mode windows are neutral
⏹️ ▶️ John gray, but they’re actually all tinted slightly blue, it’s gonna script your color perception like I kind of get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the other hand, that is such a narrow feature, then I don’t understand why that raises to prominence
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like in the general preference pane or whatever it is, as opposed to buried someplace deeper. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess if you’re looking for a single, silver lining, it’s that Apple is still at this semi-late stage,
⏹️ ▶️ John considering adding features to the OS that affect the way it looks,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we talked about a lot a show or two ago.
Live photos and Camera UI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we had a lot of conversation last week about whether or not live photos are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good for humanity and John, you incorrectly said that they are not good for humanity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t think that’s what I said. That’s pretty much what you said. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco think that’s what I said. It’s a reasonable summary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that’s a pretty good summary as chief summarizer and chief. You’re fired.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, something that I don’t know how clear I made it on the show, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really honestly didn’t know at the time was that you could, and you said this, John, or maybe it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark, or one of you said this probably, John, that you can disable sending a live photo in like a text message,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I really and truly did not know. And James Cocker wrote in to say a little bit more about that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you tap the live badge on a share sheet, it will disable the live photo only for that share,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, to a shared album, messages, et cetera. And there’s no need to completely turn it off for the photo first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to reiterate, and I think this was covered last episode, but it’s good to say it again. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a photo that you are sharing and if you put it in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey text message or iMessage compose window, so you’ve already pasted it in there, the little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live photo indicator in the upper left is actually a button. I had no idea it was a button. I thought it was simply an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indicator. And it’s a button that you can actually hit, and that would disable the liveness,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, of that live photo just for that one iMessage or text message. Well, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be to say what on a text message, but for that iMessage. And I, again, it was brought up last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode, but it was news to me. And ever since I last episode, I’ve now been more aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what I’ve been sending to people, because a lot of times I don’t need the liveness. I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that word so much, but whatever the motion of a live photo, and I just want the still. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will make you very happy, John. I know that I can turn that off very easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s wonderful. I look forward to seeing your properly curated pictures appear on my
⏹️ ▶️ John shared photo albums. Speaking of things not looking like buttons, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John this sort of famously an epidemic since iOS 7, things that are buttons not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John looking like them. The camera UI and picture UI in particular is very,
⏹️ ▶️ John its style is focused on not having a lot of chrome. So the camera app and everything surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ John it tries not to have things that look overtly like buttons. But that sometimes makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it confusing to people. How do I use these features? Like, for example, in
⏹️ ▶️ John the version, in the ancient version that I’m using, the camera app has the words
⏹️ ▶️ John in the bottom. I don’t know if it’s still like this, like photo, panorama, video, you know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s words, there’s text, right? And you might guess that they were kind of like buttons, like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John how else? Because they fade out in the edges and it looks kind of like a timeline, I suppose I could tap those
⏹️ ▶️ John words and that works. I suppose I could swipe those words and that works too Eventually you learn actually
⏹️ ▶️ John I can swipe anywhere on this entire screen And it effectively lets me scroll through those things
⏹️ ▶️ John to go from video to photo to panorama to portrait or whatever But that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious at first glance just like the live picture thing not obvious at first glance that the little indicator
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean I guess you just have to know that’s the live picture indicator because I don’t think it always says the word live next to it it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a circle in a circle thing. That’s right. That you can tap that and it will, you know, act like a button and change
⏹️ ▶️ John modes. Live pictures in general have this problem. If someone sends you a photo,
⏹️ ▶️ John the little dot will be there if it’s a live picture. And you may be wondering, how do I play the live picture? I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John always been force pressing on it, just because I think that was the first thing that they advertised in like the keynote when it came out, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you force press or something, it plays the live photo. And it does, but
⏹️ ▶️ John your finger is kind of obscuring the thing. I’m not sure if you can lift off of it. There are other ways to play live photos, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no obvious sort of playback controls. So I’m always sort of forcibly
⏹️ ▶️ John smushing my phone screen to get a live picture to play, only to be disappointed that once again, Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John sent a live picture that shouldn’t be a live picture. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco nothing interesting in
⏹️ ▶️ John Arsh. But yeah, I feel like that’s, that aspect of live pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ John among their many problems, one of them is that I think a lot of people don’t understand how to use them. And even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you do, I think like playback controls would seem,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, too obvious for Apple. You know what I mean? Like a little play button or like
⏹️ ▶️ John the word live and a little play triangle. Like even that, like you have to know the… I
⏹️ ▶️ John always wonder how many people know the things that we assume everybody knows. Like we assume everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John knows a triangle facing the right is play and two lines is pause. But why do they know that? What makes us think people
⏹️ ▶️ John know that? Just because we know it? because we grew up with tape recorders and had the word pause next to those two
⏹️ ▶️ John lines and play, I mean, seems like a thing that most people would know. But anyway, that’s not even there. But if it
⏹️ ▶️ John was there, it would still require the shared cultural knowledge of like what play, pause, fast forward,
⏹️ ▶️ John rewind, what all those symbols mean. And you’d still have to know that the word live was referring to a thing called live photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I suppose you would know if you read Apple’s marketing literature. It’s not like your phone comes with
⏹️ ▶️ John a manual. Anyway, technology is complicated and I feel like a lot of pictures, there’s a lot of sort of hidden functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John and not great functionality. I think in the absence of force
⏹️ ▶️ John press, which is going away, or whatever it’s called, 3D touch, which is going away across Apple’s line,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s just long press now, which is kind of worse, because again, I gotta find a place to long press that’s hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John not covering the one interesting thing that’s supposedly in this live picture, right? You know, or I can just long
⏹️ ▶️ John press and then quickly remove my finger and hope I don’t miss any of the playing, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Live pictures are frustrating. Anyway, I’m done. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, the best part of all of this, which I don’t think I really explained
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode, is John is painting it as though I’m sending him text messages hourly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with useless live photos. I can’t remember the last time I’ve sent you a text message with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a live photo. And yes, there is a shared album that’s of kid pictures that occasionally live photos will be added
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, but- Occasionally?
⏹️ ▶️ John They have been 100% live photos for years. That’s not true. The effect was cumulative.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. I put a lot of big camera pictures on there. Thank you very much, Dad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, suffice to say, this affliction apparently is much worse than I ever expected,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given the volume of live photos that John is receiving from me. So I am so sorry, John, to put you through this terrible,
Default-email/browser apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To help you feel better, can you tell me about preparing one’s app to be the default browser or email client?
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC was so long ago, and we had so many notes, and we ended up just ditching a bunch of them because we did like three shows on WWDC topics,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was enough. And I can’t for the life of me remember if we neglected to mention, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John in iOS 13, you can change the default web browser and email client, which is exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John and something we’ve been asking about for a long time. And it’s not everything that we wanted, but you can set the default back for everything. But default
⏹️ ▶️ John app for email and web is a good start, right? because those are two important applications. Anyway, that feature exists. The reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I put it in follow-up is just in case we didn’t talk about it, but also that Apple has put
⏹️ ▶️ John up a webpage on the developer site saying, hey developer, if you want to ship
⏹️ ▶️ John an app that can become the default web browser on an iOS device or the default
⏹️ ▶️ John email client on an iOS device, there is a bunch of rules we have to follow. And this is exactly what we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about many times in the past. Like we were begging Apple to let people change default app
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, Apple, you can define what it takes to be a default app, like set a bunch of criteria, people will
⏹️ ▶️ John follow it, right? It’s no problem. In fact, we want this to happen. And if you read the guide, the guidelines
⏹️ ▶️ John for what it takes to be a default client, you can see it’s trying to stop people from making scam apps like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John download this and it becomes your default web browser. And really, it’s not a web browser at all. It’s some kind of scam thing that steals
⏹️ ▶️ John all your keystrokes and sends all your Amazon links through their affiliate and does all sorts of other stuff or,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, obscures the the address bar or whatever. I would suggest people read these guides because it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John very uh, it’s what you’d expect and it’s exactly the type of guidelines that we
⏹️ ▶️ John like from Apple where they’re doing stuff to essentially protect consumers and the reputation
⏹️ ▶️ John of their platform saying you know, we’re opening this up third parties. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John put an app on the app store that can be the new default browser for users of the new email client, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re trying to anticipate most of the shady things you will try to do and just say those are against rules from the
⏹️ ▶️ John start. And, you know, of course it’ll be a battle for someone to figure out how to make a scammy email client,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite these guidelines, and they’ll evolve over time. But anyway, I like this documentation. I’m glad it exists,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m excited about finally, finally changing my default email client from an iOS for mail,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I never ever want to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what will you be using instead, Gmail?
⏹️ ▶️ John You got it. That’s my actual email client. The only time I ever see mail is every single time I
⏹️ ▶️ John tap him out to link.
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Schiller “advanced to Fellow”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s been a busy, what week and change since we’ve last recorded.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the first thing that we should probably talk about is Phil Schiller is quasi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retiring. He has been quote, advanced to Apple fellow and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, Joswiak is taking over marketing. I did not see this coming. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two of you did, but this came out of left field as far as I’m concerned. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’m kind of bummed about it, all the stuff we’re about to talk about notwithstanding. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. I really like Schiller. Obviously, he was on the show many, many moons ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’ve said this publicly, but one of my favorite professional experiences in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my entire life was getting absolutely dunked on by Phil Schiller about car-related things at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the end of that episode because he made all of us, particularly me, feel very, very dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like Schiller a lot. I think by and large he does good work and I’m a little bummed to see him go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A lot more bummed than I was to see Ive showing himself the door. But I don’t know, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you think? Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mazzella Well, I think first of all it’s interesting to consider like, you know, is he leaving? Because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very high up Apple person who’s been there forever, it seems like they don’t actually leave. They just get promoted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of their job. And that’s what happened to Johnny Ive. Like he got promoted into the sky and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ascended into whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John universe that he lives in now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. Like he’s he just kind of got he got promoted and promoted and he’s gone now. He just got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promoted into being gone. That seems to be possibly what’s happening here, but there are a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of differences. I mean, you know, number one is that the little detail that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live events and the app store will still be Phil Schiller’s responsibilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s really interesting to me. know and that could just be a temporary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing he could it could be you know he’s transitioning those two other people over time who knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the big thing is that he has been promoted out of his marketing job and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know and rumors talked about this before like marketing is not what it is other companies at Apple like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Phil Schiller was not in charge of just like making the ads for the products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he has been deeply involved in the product development and in what products get made,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they prioritize or include certain things or don’t include other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He has been so deeply involved in product development at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the… is there a term called foreseeable past? I don’t like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s… reerseeable past? Anyway, he’s been so deeply involved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for or in all what we consider modern Apple product development.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He kinda has his hands on everything. And so this is a significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change. Even if he does what they literally say and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just basically stays on doing live events and the App Store, that’s still a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive reduction in what he’s been doing so far. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t really know how much he’s gonna remain involved in all that stuff? I mean, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the things he did weren’t part of his job title before, but he did them anyway, right? So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that his job title officially includes less, he might do less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that stuff, he might do the same amount of stuff, just with less responsibility or less time every week or something, who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows? So it’s hard to get a read on exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of promotion into retirement this is and how much involvement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s going to have still. We really don’t know. But assuming that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a graceful retirement for him in a way that won’t freak out investors and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much, which I think is probably roughly close to what’s happening, I am really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna miss Phil in this role.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really old school Apple. Like he’s one of the only old school people Apple left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in leadership. And that’s good and bad. He is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco razor sharp at the things he cares about, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how deeply he can cut on things. He really has incredibly good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product sense. He’s always kind of, I’ve always seen Phil as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping the best parts of old Apple in current Apple, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the products, in the priorities, in the style, in the attitude.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that also cuts both ways. He also keeps some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real hard ass-ness of old Apple in areas that we see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the App Store. It’s funny, the first interaction I ever had with Phil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Schiller, he sent, I wrote an article forever ago, thanks for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app review or an ode to app review or something like that, we’ll find the link. And the idea was I was thankful for the concept of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app review because as a developer, only to catch bugs for me, but it let people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel safe installing my apps. And that’s something that we didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really in the world before that. It was much more Wild West in like the world of PC and Mac downloadable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software, an era that Apple seems to pretend doesn’t exist. But the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the BS App Store defense that they’re spouting now is true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like the App Store really did make a very safe environment that people trusted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try out new apps. And as we’ll get to probably later,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to get rid of AppReview. I don’t want to create alternate app stores. I feel differently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some of the payment questions, but you know, the actual concept of the app store I think is good. Anyway, so I wrote this article
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically thanking the AppReview for existing for that reason, and I got an email from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Phil Schiller, which I’d never heard from him before. I was quite honored. And this was during the Instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, And he said something along the lines, he’s like, you know, thank you for your piece. I’ve shared it with the team, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. You know, he’s a nice guy. And then he was like something along the lines of like, good job with Instapaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really deserves its four and a half star rating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just and I just love that so much because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, you know, as I have gotten to know Phil better over the years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is so Phil. And I’ve relayed that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story to a couple other people, you know, in the Appleverse over the years and they all say the same thing like, yeah that’s so Phil.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He is a very like nice person, very capable, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of his work. I’m doing the gym now. I love most of his work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But he has that like sharp edge. He can be kind of a dick about things and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love that. I act because he’s he’s an East Coaster who’s stuck in the West Coast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Possibly why he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ascending into fellowship you know to actually have time to you know go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the East Coast and enjoy it. But you know East Coaster is like I so I’m an East Coaster. When I go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the West Coast everyone on the West Coast thinks I’m an asshole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t try to be an asshole I’m just being me and I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of an attitude and I tell it how it is and some things I care a lot about that comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off as being asholish to certain people especially West Coasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think that’s how Phil is I think he has that same kind of dynamic of like he’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean person he really cares about certain things and he’s very warm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and welcoming except when you step in one of those things he can be an asshole sometimes because he has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be like as part of those roles and so he rubs some people the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong way but I’ve always liked him a lot because that even when the ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that he can be an asshole negatively affect me which isn’t honestly that common but even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when that happens I still appreciate oh well you know he’s being Phil like okay like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I’m okay with it, I accept it, because it’s kind of like, we had the discussion a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months back about how I was kind of like finally accepting Swift, even though Swift is always such a dick, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, well, you know, sometimes I’m friends with people who are total dicks, and it’s like, you know, that’s just, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can be friends with people and appreciate that they can be dicks in certain ways, but you’re still friends with them. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always how I’ve seen Phil. I really respect him, I really like his work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even though he can be a real jerk about things sometimes, about certain things that he cares a lot about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a very old school Apple way, for all of its good and bad that brings in today’s world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still really like him. And so to have him be reducing his role in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the company, I am a little sad about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds like you’re saying that Phil really deserves his four and a half star rating. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John he doesn’t listen to this and hear this. I like him even though he’s a jerk sometimes. I think he would agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the wordsmithing on this press release from Apple is wonderful because
⏹️ ▶️ John these type of press releases is very difficult to walk the line that Apple wants to walk. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco laid out a bunch of different possibilities there. But they don’t really want to pin it down.
⏹️ ▶️ John If someone is slowly on their way out of Apple, you’re not going to have a press release and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John Phil Schiller gets one foot out the door. That’s not the headline that you want on that press release.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the wording here is, Phil Schiller advances to Apple Fellow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now first, Apple Fellow. Apple Fellow is a title they give. Not many people have gotten it. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the most distinguished title you can get. It’s kind of like the gold watch. Thank you. If you look at some of the names on the list, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John link to a list in the Apple fandom wiki. I’m not sure if this list is complete. But some of the people who are Apple Fellows
⏹️ ▶️ John are Steve Wozniak, another person who got a kind of a slow exit, Alan Kay, Don Norman, Guy
⏹️ ▶️ John Kawasaki. I don’t know if you remember him. Atkinson, Steve Capps. There’s not a lot of names.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s like 10, 20 names on this list. These are sort of distinguished people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are very important to Apple who didn’t apparently want to leave Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple didn’t want to get rid of them. But Apple kind of wanted to say, it’s time
⏹️ ▶️ John for somebody else to get a chance to do that thing that you were doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you become an Apple fellow, it’s not a demotion for sure. It’s like the most highest honor
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has to give you in terms of title, except maybe CEO, right? So you’re not being demoted,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re also not being promoted either. You’re not getting more responsibility. You’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John becoming more powerful within the organization. In fact, you’re probably becoming less influential and less powerful.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re a fellow. Now you’re, you’re the wise elder who’s still hanging around and still
⏹️ ▶️ John getting a paycheck, but really the decisions that you used to make about Apple, other people are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to make those decisions now and not you. And even though you might want to still make them, oh, you’re an Apple fellow.
⏹️ ▶️ John So stay over there, right? So he advances to it. He’s not promoted. He’s not demoted.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a lateral move. It’s not a move upward. How about advance?
⏹️ ▶️ John Advance says you’re moving forward, but not upward, but not down, but not out, but not sideways.
⏹️ ▶️ John And twirling. Oh, he’s twirling. Yes, OK. That was Simpsons. I got that one. Yay.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that in itself is interesting. the wording on the press release.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then there are a few sort of realities that we have to be aware of. So first one is
⏹️ ▶️ John that for many, many years now, Phil Schiller, financially speaking, is not needed to work. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as if, and he’s never struck me as someone who craves more money and power. So
⏹️ ▶️ John at any point, many people in his career, many people would have said, OK, I’m done. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John a multi-gazillionaire. I have everything I wanted. I don’t know how many years I have left on this earth.
⏹️ ▶️ John See you later, I’m retiring to go live on the beach
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, right? He could have done that years and years and years ago and had a storied
⏹️ ▶️ John career that we would talk about for years. Like he has nothing to prove to anybody. He’s not hanging in there just saying, I
⏹️ ▶️ John just gotta get one more win. His career and legacy
⏹️ ▶️ John is set. He is a massive success, right? But people who
⏹️ ▶️ John work for Apple and love Apple, love Apple. So I guess he didn’t want to leave, right? But there’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John for those types of people, it’s like, well, when does that see-saw tip? When does it become, okay, I love Apple and I
⏹️ ▶️ John love working, but you know, I am getting older and
⏹️ ▶️ John I do have all this money and it’s stressful to work at Apple. And I love it, but it’s stressful, but I love
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but it’s stressful. I don’t know. And the second thing is, since he’s been there for a really long time,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that you have to deal with in organizations like Apple that are big and powerful and do important things
⏹️ ▶️ John is that, we’ve talked about this before, you want to attract and retain top talent.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if the extremely famous, extremely competent, extremely well-established
⏹️ ▶️ John people never retire, they’re clogging up the top part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the org chart. And that means people who are looking for advancement internally might say,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I can’t go anywhere because Phil is still there. And if Phil’s still there, then my boss can advance
⏹️ ▶️ John it. If my boss can’t advance it, you know, and so on and so forth. Right. And also attracting new
⏹️ ▶️ John people. You know, I want to be hired into the marketing org, but I’m not going to do that because I know I’ll have no
⏹️ ▶️ John room for advancement because Phil’s never going to leave. And how are you going to displace Phil? Right. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like I’m going to he’s going to do a bad job one quarter and suddenly he’s going to get booted. Right. That’s not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the organization also has a reason to. You don’t want to get rid of him. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ John just feel like the organization probably didn’t want to get rid of Johnny Ive. And in fact, they got rid of Forestall
⏹️ ▶️ John because they had to pick between Johnny Ive and Forestall and they picked Johnny Ive, right? Don’t want to get rid of him, but at a
⏹️ ▶️ John certain point, he is kind of gumming up the works a little bit and you want to get some new talent in. Because if you don’t, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you just leave those people in place, everyone else will just go to a different company. And when he does retire, there’ll be nobody to take his place,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And by the way, related to this, you know, Apple is continuing to work on their diversity and inclusion
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. And if you look at their leadership page, there’s a lot of white dudes you see there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Phil leaving opens up a spot. Of course, the spot is just filled by another white dude who is also a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time employee, right? So you might think that’s not making any progress.
⏹️ ▶️ John You do have to get rid of the people at the top to make room. It just so happens that their bench is
⏹️ ▶️ John filled with a bunch of old white dudes. So they’re working on it, right? Baby steps. Obviously, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not the positive move we think it could be to make room, but it’s better than no motion because if Phil was still
⏹️ ▶️ John there, you know, it would be even worse. The final thing is App Store. We’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about a bunch of App Store stuff soon. We’ve talked about a bunch of App Store stuff all this summer. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about it for years, for the entire history of the App Store. And those types of stories seem to get
⏹️ ▶️ John more dramatic and more numerous, not less. The most recent flare up of the hay thing right before WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John was a perfect storm in the bad sense, in the George Clooney movie sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that landed right on Phil’s doorstep. And I’m not saying, oh, there was
⏹️ ▶️ John a big App Store kerfuffle and then Tim said, okay, Phil, I’ve had enough of this App Store stuff. You had
⏹️ ▶️ John a chance to clean it up, but get out. That didn’t happen, right? But if you combine
⏹️ ▶️ John all those three things that I just said, he doesn’t actually need to work. You do need to
⏹️ ▶️ John make room in the org and the App Store is a pain in the ass. I think that combines to both make
⏹️ ▶️ John Phil perhaps finally slightly more amenable to quote unquote advancing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it also makes Tim Cook perhaps lean a little bit harder just on
⏹️ ▶️ John Phil to say, do you really want to keep doing this? Cause I know the aftersores of pain in
⏹️ ▶️ John the ass and you’re doing a good job, but it’s, it’s such a pain and you’ve worked so hard for
⏹️ ▶️ John so long. How do you feel about being an Apple fellow? You can never tell from the outside what the hell’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on inside Apple. I think I would imagine, you know, You can obviously imagine a dramatic
⏹️ ▶️ John version of this where, you know, Tim Cook has hated Phil Schiller for his entire career and just waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John to get rid of him. And you can imagine the totally benign one, which is like, this has absolutely nothing to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that we know about. And it’s just entirely a personal decision on Phil’s part and everything in between there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the bottom line is, as Marco said, he’s not gone, but
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s less there than he was, which is sad for all of us who like Phil and
⏹️ ▶️ John like the old school Apple stuff that he brings. But it’s also good in that it’s hopefully letting in
⏹️ ▶️ John new ideas and new approaches. And that will add at
⏹️ ▶️ John least perhaps some more unexpected things. Now, Greg Joswiak is also a
⏹️ ▶️ John very long time Apple employee, so I’m not sure how much of a fresh take he’s going to have versus Phil. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a different person making decisions. And when different people make decisions, things can happen. When Phil took over the App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store, a bunch of stuff happened very quickly that was all beneficial. So we’ll hope things keep moving in the right
⏹️ ▶️ John direction. So I will miss him. We all have a personal curiosity to know
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what was happening. But I choose to believe that he is on his way
⏹️ ▶️ John to enjoying the pleasant retirement that he
⏹️ ▶️ John so richly deserves, assuming we are all not killed by a virus.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. We can just put that at the end of every segment. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, these new iMacs are great. if we don’t all get killed by a virus.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, that’s true. Right.
New iMacs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true new iMacs. So new Intel CPUs new AMD graphic cards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSDs across the line, although you can option the Fusion Drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s also options for 4 terabyte nature by the SSDs. There’s true tone Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John inch model You can still get a fusion drive the cheapest way to get tons of stuff So no,
⏹️ ▶️ John no more iMacs come by default with a spinning hard drive, but one of them you can ask for I was about
⏹️ ▶️ John celebrate that. You can still ask for it. On the non-Retina, by the way, 21.5 inches,
⏹️ ▶️ John the non-Retina Mac, you can get with a spinning drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why, like, every time they update the iMac, and you could still buy it with, like, that terrible old hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the terrible non-Retina screen, I always make fun of it. I’m like, why in this day and age can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you still buy a spinning platter Mac or a non-Retina Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this time, they, I guess, asterisk now, but they mostly got rid of the spinning platter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So finally, every Mac comes standard with an SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re still a little bit small, but okay, we’ll work on that some other time. And they’re very expensive for the amount of space,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but again, we’ll work on that for some other time as well. So, thank God, the era of the spinning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disk coming on new Macs is actually over. But who would have guessed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the era of spinning disks would end before they stopped selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-retina screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s because that model is totally in Apple’s weird world. The price conscious model,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the cheapest of everything they can put in it. It’s the reason Fusion Drive is still there. It’s like, well, what if I’ve got a lot of photos, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have a lot of money? Well, we have this option for your Fusion Drive. And by the way, Fusion Drive is a brilliant
⏹️ ▶️ John innovation that I talked about as a fantasy years and years before it existed because, you know, me
⏹️ ▶️ John and file systems. And it when it came out, it was a great idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that gave great value and great performance. You can get tons of storage for way less money and still get
⏹️ ▶️ John way better performance than a spinning disk. It’s just that that era was a transitional period. And we’ve now left that
⏹️ ▶️ John era. And now as these are big and cheap, and Apple should just ship them everywhere. And so you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in this non retina model, for the price conscious people like, Oh, well, what if I want the cheap
⏹️ ▶️ John one, but I want a little more storage, I’ll try upgrading, how Yeah, but try advancing to a Fusion drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because it’s not a downgrade because you’re getting way more space, but it’s not an upgrade either, I’ll tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And they’re always have been a little bit weird with their software support and everything like that. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John and like you said, the non-retina screen, that whole iMac model probably needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to die. But that brings us to the other point about these new iMacs. When you say new iMacs, we don’t mean new
⏹️ ▶️ John new. You look at them, they look exactly like the iMac looked for eight years or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same case design. As far as I’m aware, this is an open question, maybe we want to hear the answer, know
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer to. Same thermal design as the old 5K iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? I think. Yeah, I haven’t looked at the teardowns, but I’m pretty sure that’s true, that it’s basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it doesn’t, they don’t all look like iMac Pros inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so there, you know, it does not have the iMac Pro thermals. So if you still want something that’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John relatively quiet while under load, this is not it. But it’s got, otherwise, it’s got a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John other pro-ish features like the nanotexture display, which used to be a still is
⏹️ ▶️ John a $1,000 option on a $5,000 monitor. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and which I do not like, by the way, I did not get the nanotexture one on purpose because I saw it in person
⏹️ ▶️ John at WRC and I did not prefer it. But if you do prefer it, you can get a new iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously the expensive 5k one for a mere $500 additional cost
⏹️ ▶️ John with a nanotexture display. And that, I mean, obviously this is the old iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So there’s nothing really new about them. They’re just, you know, different insides. And of course the nanotexture display
⏹️ ▶️ John and True Tone with presumably the new sensors and yada, yada, but it’s not an entirely new industrial design. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we spent past couple of shows talking about mostly in the context of Big Sur, touch-based Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the things you will not do with a screen with a nanotexture display be touching a lot. In fact, you’re not supposed to do
⏹️ ▶️ John anything to it except for touch it with the special cleaning cloth that Apple gives you and only the special cleaning cloth that Apple gives you.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, I mean, this doesn’t say much of anything about the future of touch Macs because obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re going to offer a touch Mac with a screen the size of a 5k iMac, it’s going to have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on some kind of hinge thing like the Surface Studio Pro or whatever and this is not that machine. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that you can get the nanotexture display on what I assume is the last gasp of this very
⏹️ ▶️ John old design of the iMac doesn’t say anything one way or the other about uh touch base Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is kind of weird and many people have noted this that on this
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac you can get the nanotexture display but you can’t get it on the quote-unquote pro
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac it’s not even an option on the pro iMac the iMac pro has not been revised in any way other
⏹️ ▶️ John than you know the internals being being bumped. I think they bumped the GPU recently. They got rid
⏹️ ▶️ John of the 8 core version right and the 10 core is the default now. They balanced the lines so if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you say, oh I see the Pro 1 starts where the non-Pro 1 leaves off, except for the nanotexture
⏹️ ▶️ John display which is kind of weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m calling it now. The iMac Pro will never be updated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and this one, does the iMac Pro have a 1080p FaceTime camera or no? I didn’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, they gave this thing a better, the 5K iMac has got an upgrade to its camera so So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a better camera for all of your coronavirus teleconferencing, you know, better resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John better low light performance. They’re quote unquote studio quality microphones, which everyone says do not
⏹️ ▶️ John sound as good as the ones they put on the new 16 inch MacBook Pro. But whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John This looks like if you if you need an Intel Mac and if you think you’re going to need an
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel iMac and you think you’re going to need an Intel iMac for a while because say the application you’re running on
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you’re not confident will even be ported to ARM or This is a great machine with the only
⏹️ ▶️ John caveats being it’s not going to be as quiet under load as the iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John The case isn’t as dark a color And you can’t go up to you know 12
⏹️ ▶️ John cores or whatever the high core count I think everything else about it is basically the same
⏹️ ▶️ John Between this and the iMac Pro in terms of the specs obviously the nanotexture so all
⏹️ ▶️ John this is to say If you want a really good non pro iMac get this machine
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s really good. If there was no, you know, ARM transition, we’d be saying We’d probably
⏹️ ▶️ John be saying well, this is the last last great iMac before they redesign them in this case What we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John say is this is probably the last great iMac before they a redesign them be use a different CPU. So
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a boring announcement, but in some respects if you were just waiting for that, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John for a really good 5k iMac with great internals You can spec this machine to be
⏹️ ▶️ John like that and you can even get it now textured but you shouldn’t because it doesn’t look as good. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, I disagree. I mean, I only saw the texture at the same time you did it at the WVC thing last year when they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like demo building set up, but I thought it looked great. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would turn me off from potentially ordering it, though, is as we discussed when you were ordering yours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like how difficult would it be to get a fingerprint off of that thing or like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I’m a person. I cough and sneeze sometimes and sometimes a little dot of grossness gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my monitor and I have to wipe it off with like a microfiber cloth or something. How hard would it be to clean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those little dots of grossness off of the nanotexture? I don’t know, but I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d be willing to spend an extra $500 to find out and then to have basically an uncleanable iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen in front of me or one that’s much harder to clean than flat glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the idea of a matte screen. I would like it a lot more if it was somehow possible to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the matte texture be on the inside of the glass to the outside although I don’t think that is reasonably possible but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise I’m actually pleasantly surprised at how much they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update for this because they could have just done a CPU spec
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bump and that could have been it like your CPU and GPU and that’s it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would think for a you know for a product line that’s about to go through a architectural transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here like you would think as you said like this is probably the very last you know Intel iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update that’s gonna happen and you would think that they would just phone it in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only do a spec bump because at this point like people who are like real power users are looking at this and probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking like can I skip this and just wait for ARM? Like if you’re kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’ve been kind of eyeing the iMac and you see this update are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gonna jump on it knowing that ARM is about to happen? Some people are. It’s still probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great computer it’s probably a great buy but if you can wait you probably are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna wait and so they and they know this so they could have just phoned it in because the only people buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this are people who really can’t wait who really need something now and can’t afford to wait you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to another year and a half maybe for whenever the arm one comes out so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could have phoned in and they didn’t like to have things like true tone in the display the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the nanotexture option, to be messing around with the default storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, that’s pretty nice. The new microphone array, the FaceTime camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ John The same video card that’s in my Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s all nice upgrades that they didn’t have to do, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do them anyway. I love seeing this. This is the kind of thing, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during the dark old days of the Touch Bar generation, or the butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard generation of MacBook Pros, it really seemed like Apple was kind of giving the Mac like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as little attention as possible. And that has turned around so much in the last couple of years. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really shows that they really have their eye on the ball for the Mac again. And they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrades and advances like this that aren’t necessary. Again, like this could have just been a boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU and GPU thing, but instead they gave it a whole bunch of other stuff. And that’s really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see. Now, I am disappointed that this does basically say the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pro is dead. And I’m only holding myself together here because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m waiting for the arm position to see what actually happens next. It’s gonna change everything probably, but what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did, you said it, John, they basically just like, moved everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down a notch in like what configuration you get for the base. The base model now comes with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a higher configuration that it came with before. But the options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are available, the components that are in the iMac Pro are the same that it launched with. Just now you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the 10 core instead of the eight core, et cetera. And that’s, you know, they did the same thing with the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro in the past, when it was gonna be a while before the next one, like they would do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same move. And so I think what this is saying is the iMac Pro is not being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touched anytime soon. And therefore, if it isn’t being touched anytime soon, it’s probably not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be touched before the ARM transition happens. So therefore the iMac Pro is effectively dead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which again, would make me very sad because I’m using mine now, it is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best computer I have ever owned. If they never replace it with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like it, I’m gonna be pretty upset. But I’m hoping that the ARM transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes the iMac itself so good that maybe the iMac Pro wouldn’t be necessary anymore. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they would actually still have something called iMac Pro that just has Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it that is really amazing and still has like the ridiculously over-budgeted thermal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design so it can stay silent no matter what, and still has all like the high-end workstation parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and other areas. I would love that, and I hope that’s what they plan to do. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a little bit disappointing though that it’s gonna be a while before there’s a new one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s gonna be a while. Like the iMac Pro isn’t necessarily dead, it’s just we don’t think there’s gonna be another
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel iMac Pro, that’s what we’re saying. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they bump the iMacs,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that another Intel iMac, doesn’t seem like there’s gonna be another Intel iMac Pro. We were all assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John that the next set of iMacs that are not Intel won’t look like these because this industrial
⏹️ ▶️ John design is very, very, very old. It needs to be revised. When they revise it, it’s essentially a marketing exercise
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can imagine them taking the exact same industrial design, you know, some new industrial
⏹️ ▶️ John design, but that same one across the entire line and using it for the plain iMacs and then
⏹️ ▶️ John just decide, hey, if we put a Xeon in it, we call it the iMac Pro. But just like they did with the current
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac, The iMac Pro case is the same as the iMac case on the outside and on the inside. It’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John different and the cooling system is very different. However, but we’re all hoping that they take what they learned from the iMac Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ John put a robust cooling system into the next generation iMac and that that can accommodate Xeons,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also take that same cooling system and just put it on, you know, well, whatever the arm
⏹️ ▶️ John equivalent of Xeons is. You maybe you won’t need a big, beefy cooling system for the ARMBASE MAX
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but you could you could have a line of iMacs that spans the same capability range
⏹️ ▶️ John and you could make one a slightly different color and put Pro at the end of it and that’s just an arbitrary marketing
⏹️ ▶️ John distinction But yeah, I’m Hopefully they’ll all be redesigned. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the wild card Of course is touch it is a special iMac with the hinge for touch But the other ones don’t have it who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John we can all fantasize about what future iMacs will look like but it seems like this is the end of the line for Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John iMacs and the iMac Pro will Still go out on top because you can still get an 18 core one
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s still the most powerful iMac you can get and yada yada. But, you know, the 5K iMac got
⏹️ ▶️ John one last chance to make itself better. And still noisy, but it’s way more powerful than it used to
⏹️ ▶️ John be. And by the way, real time follow up, the iMac Pro does have a 1080p FaceTime camera already. So that distinction
⏹️ ▶️ John between them is gone as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I’ll be sad if this was a one and done effectively for the iMac Pro. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, we still don’t know what Apple Silicon is going to look like. and it could be that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so darn fast that the distinction is, like you said, it’s just a color
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the case and little else. And I don’t know. I’m still super excited. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to get down on this tangent because we have a lot more to cover, but I’m still super excited to see exactly how fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this Apple CPU will be or the Apple CPUs will be in Macs because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we’ve seen so far far as really an iPad CPU, and goodness only knows what a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proper Mac Apple CPU will look like. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s what it is. I do love this machine. Two-thirds of ATP hosts, I swear, by the iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, I think so much of whatever direction the product line takes in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depends on the thermal characteristics of Apple Silicon. How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do they work that out? How hot do their chips have to run to achieve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain levels of performance in different product lines? Whatever their flagship laptop is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently the 16-inch, whenever there’s an Apple Silicon version of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much power do they give that CPU? Is it a 45-watt part like the current one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or can they get enough power out of a 30 or 25-watt part? Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the case of the iMac, right now you have pretty big, hot Intel CPUs running in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the regular iMac line, but then the iMac Pro has a larger thermal capacity, a whole different design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in part to accommodate higher wattage Intel CPUs. What do they do with Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMacs? They can kind of choose whatever thermal envelope they want and you know just maximize whatever performance they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get out of that, but we don’t know like how hot will the Apple Silicon CPUs spike up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What kind of fan noise do we expect? Like how will they configure all that? Those are all massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question marks in how they’re going to allocate their product lines and the power they give each one and the cooling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they give each one, what kind of fan noise they will tolerate, what kind of fan noise they will deem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unacceptable and will lower the power or build bigger heat sinks, we don’t know. That’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff I’m super excited to see. I don’t honestly care as much about how much does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new iMac with Apple Silicon outperform the old one in Geekbench.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That to me is interesting, but that’s not the heart of it. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to know is, can they make a regular 27-inch iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is so silent under load that the iMac Pro has a lot less reason to exist?
Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of stuff on Linode. I spend a lot of money there every month, but I’m getting a lot out of it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve looked around the industry a lot over the years, and they are always the best value in the business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They also have amazing support. They have amazing capabilities, as I said earlier. They also have stuff like a new
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and for sponsoring our show.
Epic v. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So as we record, it is Thursday, the 13th, lucky number 13.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And over the course of today, there’s been some activity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I, I’m, I’ve been plowing through popcorn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all darn day watching this all go down. So I’m going to do my best to summarize. Please interrupt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me because I’m talking way out of my comfort zone. Cause we’re talking about video games now. something that Marco and I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just so much about, but, um, there’s a very popular game called Fortnite.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just been out for at least a few years now, and it is on iOS and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can buy like coins or points or what have you that you can spend in the game. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until today, you had to do that via apples and app purchase. If you’re playing it on an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device, exactly what you would expect. So you have to, you know, use the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Epic who makes Fortnite would have to use Apple’s APIs, and would give Apple a 30% cut, etc., etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, today, a couple of, well, several interesting things happened. First of all, apparently there was an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update to the game that came in outside of any sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app update. So, the game updated itself. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assume that that’s because it’s using like Unreal or whatever, some sort of game engine under the hood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But one way or another, the game updated itself. And as part of that update,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it allowed you to buy these coins, credits, whatever’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly from Epic, the people who make the game. And they would give you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 20% discount against the IAP price. If you went direct through them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey naturally Apple didn’t like that. And so Apple said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can’t have Fortnite in the app store anymore. Those who already have it can still play it, but you cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, no new people can download it and this isn’t going to work for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All of this so far was surprising, but not, you know, okay. It’s a bold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strategy cotton that, uh, that’s a reference, John. It’s a bold strategy cotton, but we’ll see how, we’ll see how it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plays out. And, and Epic apparently knew exactly how it was going to play out as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we all did because they immediately said, we’re suing you Apple. And they put up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 45-second, and I thought it was just hilarious, the absurdity of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems to be getting very mixed reviews from our kind of circle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But a very funny parody of the original 1984 Macintosh ad called 1980 Fortnite.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I found it quite enjoyable, even knowing nothing about Fortnite, but maybe you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t. And so one way or another, Epic seems to be going to war with Apple, if not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legally. I mean, they are suing Apple or they’ve brought a suit against Apple, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or another, they are definitely starting a war with Apple in the court of public opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have some mixed feelings about this, but the more activity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’ve seen lately, and some of it we’ve talked about on the show, some of it we will talk about on the show, some of it we haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet talked about on the show, a lot of things that Apple is doing starting to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see with regard to the app store is starting to seem more and more gross and more and more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actively anti-competitive. And so on the one side, a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been saying, oh, well, you know, don’t get too riled up about two complete, you know, corporate juggernauts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting into a fight with each other, which is true. But at the same time, I am very here for watching this all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play out because this is just, this is something else. I don’t know which one of of you would like to start,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but maybe Marco will make Jon suffer even longer and have you give your opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the other non-gamer, and then Jon, you can tell us what the reality is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jon So, I think really, if we wanted to make Jon suffer, I should also try to summarize what Epic and Fortnite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are. Matthew McLaughlin Yes, please. I would love that. Jon I’m not going to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sake. But yeah, I, first of all, with the disclaimer, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this all happened, within the last few hours. And so this is a developing story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re trying to comment on it as much as we can in a somewhat intelligent way, but everything’s changing all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for instance, they also have already gotten kicked out of the Google Play Store and have already sued Google,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like just in the last few hours. So Google is also now involved. They had a suit ready to go for them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. So this is a big thing. I think, I’m gonna call this now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re gonna look back on this as one of the biggest stories of the year. This is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big deal and I think it’s gonna have very important outcomes, however
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it goes. And it’s part of a bigger conversation, of course, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a big deal. So, and I’m also sitting here for popcorn because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really side with Epic on most of this. Not all of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but most of it. And I say this as the biggest Apple fan, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, when it gets so big that it no longer needs to compete,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they get greedy and they get complacent. And we’ve seen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we see the complacency aspect play out in things like the butterfly keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like the kind of, you know, crap Macs they shipped for a little while there in the middle. And, you know, they fortunately have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed that. The greedy side we see in things like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pricing of SSD upgrades, and then we see it in a really big way when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it comes to their services revenue push. And we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a little while now the way that they’re willing to make their products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse or at least not as good as they could be in order to push services revenue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is going to continue to be and is definitely being a corrupting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and corrosive influence on Apple and its products and its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customer satisfaction. Because in order to extract more and more services revenue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can make things that people like and are willing to pay for willingly, and they do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you can also like tighten the screws and extract rents and taxes from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that you have control over because of your position that you didn’t necessarily earn,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that no one has a choice but to pay you. As we saw in some of the documents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that came out of the congressional hearings a few weeks back, it sure looks like Apple makes a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money from the latter than the former in the services category. The App Store was by far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the biggest slice of their services revenue, and the services revenue is the biggest growing section
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple’s revenue. So they need that. They need that to not only keep their revenue growth going,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then that also keeps the investors and the stock market happier with Apple’s future because they can show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, even though our product growth is slowing in various ways because it’s such a mature market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can now grow in services. And what we’ve seen with these documents that have come out so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far is basically that what that means is not necessarily like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making another News Plus magazine subscription. It’s extracting more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money from the App Store, which is basically, you know, it’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple making things that people want and getting paid for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s a lot more of Apple extracting the tax on all transactions that go through this entire commerce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystem here because they can and because they can dictate that no one else can make any other choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a recipe for just incredible greed and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of self-distortion on their part of telling themselves why they’re doing the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing and trying to tell the world that same thing and we can kind of see through it and they seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to. You know, and there’s been a good discussion on a few recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes of Dithering about this too, about like, and this kind of plays into the cloud gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing with Microsoft xCloud that also happened since we last A lot has happened since our last episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have a lot of Apple fans saying, well, Apple built the store. They deserve to be paid for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. No one should be in the App Store for free. I guess you don’t count things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook and Instagram, but okay, we’ll rule out most of the biggest apps in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store that are there for free because they don’t have any anti-purchases for anything because they’re advertising-based businesses, but okay, we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rule all that out. Suppose we actually say Apple deserves something for their store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree, Apple does deserve something for their store. 30% of all transactions, or 30% of most transactions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 15% of the rest, that’s a lot. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when that’s the only option, that’s an overreach. Apple also has built something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has gotten so big that you can no longer make comparisons to things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game consoles. You can say something like, well, you know, if you wanna have your app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Xbox, you have to play by Microsoft’s rules, and they take a certain percentage and have all these terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they review everything. Yeah, that’s okay, that’s true. That’s a game console.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A phone these days, especially one of the two major phone OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms, is much larger in its role in society
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and much larger in its role in business than any one game console
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has ever and will ever be. You reach a point when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a general purpose computing device that, you know, an Xbox is something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is used solely to play games or I guess occasionally like DVDs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, but like for them pretty much it’s a game console. It’s a specialized piece of hardware that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plays a special type of software. It doesn’t have a lot of general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purpose computing uses. People aren’t logging onto their game console to pay their bills
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to have video chats with their school. It’s a specialized thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not becoming the default interface to an entire era of commerce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and communication the way that computers have. I think you can look at a similar example back when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone system was being built. When the phone system was being built, we established all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of useful precedents of how to look at what’s going on today with this. the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone companies basically form monopolies and they built out a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of infrastructure all across the country. That was a very big expensive project. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built it out and they deserve to succeed commercially for that. And they did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They got paid handsomely and they also abused the crap out of their monopoly and eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to be regulated and broken up and then eventually reform it. We’ll skip over that part. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they built infrastructure that got so big and became such a critical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of everyday life and modern commerce and communication and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it became so big that they weren’t allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to simply dictate everything that happened to and with it anymore because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was too much a part of modern life it got so big that it had to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regulated by some kind of external government forces, antitrust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regulations, consumer protection stuff. All that stuff had to come into play because it had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten such a big part of society and so important to entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive sections of the economy and of everyday life and businesses and everything. It was so big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it transcended its initial thing of, this is somebody’s private playground, And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it became, this is an important part of society that needs protection and regulation around it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would argue, I am arguing now, that the iOS platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in particular the phone, honestly the iPad hasn’t gotten this big to matter so much to this degree, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone in particular, and Android, but Android works differently, but the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has reached that point now where it is such a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market and so much of society and business and commerce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and communication and just functioning in everyday life these days so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of that relies on phones that you can’t just say well Apple can do whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want they built it you know they can they can regulate what happens through it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the economy happens through it So it’s you could say that when the iPhone was really new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for years and years and years Apple has earned all the money well some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the money they’ve made from the App Store. That’s another discussion another time. But you know for years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could make that argument they built the store they should profit from it how they see fit and we have the right to go somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. We don’t have the right to go somewhere else anymore. If you make certain kinds of businesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you have no choice but to have an app on iOS. You have no choice but to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play by Apple’s rules and pay Apple’s taxes. Once you cross a certain size it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco becomes necessary for consumer protection and for economic protection and for economic regulation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and growth to take that control away from Apple to some degree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the only question to me is like to what degree is that necessary or to what degree is that warranted?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve made my position on this pretty clear in recent discussions on this topic, you know, back when Hey, thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened a few weeks back, like, I don’t actually want epic to be able to make their own app store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually don’t want side loading either. Although that might be forced by Oh, God, that’s yet another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing we didn’t have time to talk about. But the whole, you know, Tick Tock being forced to sell and possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WeChat. Oh, God, that’s, that’s a mess. I will get to that in the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not pushing for side loading or for alternative app stores because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see there are other problems with that for the platform for potential security and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hoping that’s not where this goes what I want to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution here is for Apple to get rid of the reader app distinction that allows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Netflix to have their own payment system and just not talk about it but not hey Get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of that distinction and let any app do what Netflix does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and let any app say in the app you can go to our website to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either sign up or purchase credit or whatever. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a compromise that I think would remove almost all of these problems from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Apple has shown now more than ever they are not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to budge on this unless somebody compels them to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco government consumer protection agencies you know the European Union US
⏹️ ▶️ Marco antitrust that all might compel them to but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now epic has sued them and and this is also going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to push on that epic’s a big company and fortnight’s a big deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a huge deal that I don’t know anything about. I can’t, I’ve never seen Fortnite. I don’t know anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All I know is that it’s a massive game that a lot of people play. It’s a really big deal and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is an Epyx only game. Like, Epyx is a big deal. So for somebody this big,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s as if Microsoft or Google or Amazon sued Apple. Like, this is such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive thing. I think we’re at kind of a breaking point now. You know, between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the European Union looking into this, the the US antitrust hearings that I mentioned a minute ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have Spotify filing complaints in various governments and agencies about this, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you have Epic suing them and having this massive public campaign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about to happen or happening now. I think we’re at a breaking point. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, if they don’t know that, they should. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this is actually finally going to change Apple’s rules. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s the thing, if Apple doesn’t change anything, if they just keep going hard-headed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into this, making everything not only the same strictness, but increasing strictness over time to extract even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more money out of people in the App Store, they’re going to be compelled to change it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much bigger way. If they keep tightening their grip, they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to lose control much more so than if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loosen that grip just a little bit, still like on their terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think if Apple wants to preserve the App Store as the only way to get software on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have to relax that Netflix rule they have to let other cut they have to let everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do what Netflix does and they have to let people doing that say so in the app go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our website to sign up or pay them that they would make less money from the App Store for sure but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they would make a ton less. Because Apple still has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this amazing payment system that has a lot of really big strengths. They could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still give themselves an unfair advantage, which is still anti-competitive, just less so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they can still have only their in-app purchase be the thing that apps can actually build into the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what Epic did would still be against that rule, but it would be a lot more defensible on Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point of view if, like, third-party things could even exist and be mentioned at at all. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a payment system that I think I and most developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would still elect to use because everyone has stuff built in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t have to try to convince people to trust me to enter their credit card stuff into my app and my weird system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all that stuff. I could just offer a payment sheet and have it be, you know, look at this, swipe here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco double click here, whatever, and you’re paid. That’s great. I would gladly continue to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Apple would have try a little bit harder to keep a lot of other people around. Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to try a little bit to actually compete, to actually maybe offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower rates. Maybe they could offer better features. Maybe they could offer things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like refund control that we were talking about last time we talked about this. Right now Apple doesn’t have to compete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don’t. Like Apple’s in-app purchase system is not as good as other things, not only about the percentage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they take which is so massively high, but also again as I was discussing last time we talked about this like about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features things like you know control from the company’s point of view having a close relationship to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers being able to see exactly who paid what and be able to issue refunds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it doesn’t work out and you have some kind of customer service issue like Apple doesn’t compete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now Apple wins by by a fiat right now like they win by default because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve made rules that say that no one else can do it Apple does a lot better and produces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better things and ultimately, usually makes more money when they are forced to compete and make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their stuff actually better than the competition. That’s true across their entire business. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do better both with output quality and with money when they have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of a fire under them and they have to actually compete in the market. And so I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hope, I’m rooting for Epic here, not to get what they want in the lawsuit because I think it’s too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want Apple to have to relax that rule, because that would make a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of problems significantly go away. Not all their problems, for sure. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still have lots of anti-competitive behavior in the app, in the App Store rules,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have lots of anti-competitive behavior in the OS, like that crazy thing they’re doing with news promo links in the latest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beta. We’ll talk about that some other time probably too. That’s ridiculous, right? They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starting to do a lot of really gross anti-competitive behavior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the push for ever more services revenue. And so if something forces them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take a small step back and loosen that grip a little bit in a really important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, that would actually really benefit them and their customers and their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products and the app ecosystem. I think that’s a very good thing. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never before this, before this lawsuit, I didn’t think it was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. I thought, yeah, it would be nice if some government makes them do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s probably not gonna happen. Now, this is, we’ve been getting closer and closer to this recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is now, I think, the straw’s gonna break the camel’s back. I think they’re gonna have to do something. And whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re compelled to by a lawsuit or by a government, or whether they finally just realize,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, enough is enough, we’re getting too much heat for this, we are at risk of losing much more control,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we better just deflate this tension ourselves. I think there’s a chance of something finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening here. And if that’s true, that’ll be the biggest news to happen in the App Store in 12 years. All
⏹️ ▶️ John A couple of months ago, I think it was when we were doing the talking about the Hey App Store thing, I wrote this
⏹️ ▶️ John blog post, my annual blog post.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It occurs to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it occurred to me after posting it, well, feedback that I got that people might not know what the title
⏹️ ▶️ John was about. The title was The Art of the Possible. Do either of you know what that one I’m talking about in the title? It’s a reference.
⏹️ ▶️ John No. I wrote this title the same way Dan Morton puts movie references in his subheadings,
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking of course everyone will get that reference, but then all my feedback from this article led me to believe people didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Politics is the art of the possible. It’s a famous saying, I forget who said it. It’s trying to describe,
⏹️ ▶️ John what does it mean to be into politics? You’re trying to come to
⏹️ ▶️ John an agreement that everybody can live with.
⏹️ ▶️ John the art of the possible, because if you can’t come to any kind of agreement, you get nothing. Like if I can’t get all of
⏹️ ▶️ John us or enough of us to agree on something, then we get nothing and we don’t go anywhere. So politics is the art of the possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And pretty much everything I wrote in this Hey article, I didn’t spend much time dwelling on the details of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s applicable to the current situation as well. The app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of stakeholders in the app stores, obviously Apple, there’s the application developers, there’s the users, there’s the the larger
⏹️ ▶️ John societal issues, but those three are the main ones, the Apple developers and users, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And what Apple has expressed publicly and through its actions for
⏹️ ▶️ John the most part, especially in the beginning of the App Store, and trying to get to is everything
⏹️ ▶️ John we know and love about the App Store. Marco talked about a bunch of it already, a place where an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John developer who nobody knows can make an application and sell it
⏹️ ▶️ John and actually make money from it But because customers who trust Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will be willing to try this app they’d never heard of from this person they never heard of called Instapaper because
⏹️ ▶️ John they trust that Apple is making sure that it’s not going to destroy their phone or computer
⏹️ ▶️ John or steal all their money. Because I trust Apple, and by proxy, I now trust Marco, and I’ll use his app. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the kind of virtuous cycle there, right? And then Apple is hoping that people with good ideas for
⏹️ ▶️ John applications like Instapaper write those applications for iOS. because if people
⏹️ ▶️ John can get that application on an iPhone, then they’ll buy the iPhone because Marco’s app makes the iPhone more
⏹️ ▶️ John valuable to customers. And that’s the sort of virtuous cycle, right? Customers want to feel safe. Customers
⏹️ ▶️ John want to have access to good applications at a low price. Developers want to get access to customers who are willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to spend money and not deal with all the hassles. And Apple wants to facilitate that because
⏹️ ▶️ John then they’ll buy the phones and Apple will get a cut of those applications they sell. That’s how everything works together.
⏹️ ▶️ John That has been what has made the App Store the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think that’s still been Apple’s vision. But
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been drifting from that vision because of things unrelated to the vision.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nowhere in that vision is, oh, and by the way, let’s make the stock price go up. Nowhere in the vision is, we’re the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John company in the world, but let’s also double our services revenue. That’s not part of the virtuous cycle.
⏹️ ▶️ John The money comes out of the virtuous cycle. I tried to look this up online, but apparently Ambrosia Software’s
⏹️ ▶️ John website is down. But Ambrosia, I think it had an Aristotle quote or something. I don’t know. It’s not in English anyway, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a translation I imagine. But it was like, um, it was like, wealth
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t come, virtue doesn’t come from wealth, but instead, uh, wealth comes from virtue
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. Someone in the chat room will find the quote for me. But it’s basically, if you want to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of money, don’t set out to try to make a lot of money. to try to make
⏹️ ▶️ John good products that people like and want. And if you do that, money will be a side effect because
⏹️ ▶️ John if people like your products and enjoy them and you make good ones and you keep doing that, people will be motivated
⏹️ ▶️ John to give you your money. That is the story of Apple’s success. Like this is not, I’m not saying anything controversial. I think every
⏹️ ▶️ John single person who works and has worked for Apple in the modern era will be nodding their heads. Yeah, that’s how we work.
⏹️ ▶️ John We make good products and that’s what we’re concentrating on. We just wanna make, we don’t even worry about competitors. We just wanna make the best
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever that we can make. We want to top ourselves. We want to be the best of the best. And yeah, we make
⏹️ ▶️ John a ton of money because we make good things. It’s so much simpler when you’re just making a product. When you have
⏹️ ▶️ John an ecosystem, the calculus doesn’t change that much. That cycle I just described
⏹️ ▶️ John where we want all the great apps to be on our devices, and we
⏹️ ▶️ John want developers to want to be on there because they’ll access the customers who trust us and give us money, and it just goes
⏹️ ▶️ John around and around. Everybody’s all smiles. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple still seems very attached to that dream, but there’s this fourth stakeholder,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, I don’t know, profit motive, power motive, paranoia, calling it greed
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, you know, it’s not, I don’t think there’s a single person making these decisions who literally
⏹️ ▶️ John craves more money. Like everyone making all these decisions has more money than they know what to do with, and it’s probably, you know, a hassle
⏹️ ▶️ John to them at this point, like it boosters millions. Like they have too much money, right? Power is different than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that can come from being an underdog wanting to make sure you make, you know, as God as my witness, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John never be hungry again. Like Apple will never be beleaguered again. It’s like, all right, take off, ease off there. Right. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not none of this stuff is part of the virtuous cycle. Right. Users don’t care about that. They just care. Apple stays
⏹️ ▶️ John in business. Right. Developers don’t care about that. Developers just want access to the customers and they want,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, to be able to develop for the platform and make money. Right. And Apple should just
⏹️ ▶️ John want everybody with a good idea for an app to put it on the App Store. And, you know, obviously, they’re going to make some
⏹️ ▶️ John money off of that and get a cut of it or whatever. But basically also that their devices
⏹️ ▶️ John become more valuable because they have all the great apps on them. And that’s, that’s the cycle, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And in the past several years, Apple has been stubbornly
⏹️ ▶️ John refusing to get back to that politics and the art of the possible and say, is it possible
⏹️ ▶️ John to do what we want with this set of rules? Is it possible
⏹️ ▶️ John for every developer to really want to be on our platform and for those developers to be happy and
⏹️ ▶️ John for every developer who has a great idea for an app and for every developer like Epic that has an incredibly popular app?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it possible for them to totally want to be on our platform? And is it possible for the customers to want to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy from them and trust them and get low prices and so on and so forth? And is it possible for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to facilitate that thing? Is that all possible with the current set of rules? And the answer increasingly has been no.
⏹️ ▶️ John I talked about this ages ago when I wrote something about ebooks for Ars Technica when he was a book publishers.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple was in the mix then as well. Not every business has 30%
⏹️ ▶️ John handy to give to Apple, like literally doesn’t have it. Books are an example of that. Like there’s a bunch of people who
⏹️ ▶️ John make money off books. There’s authors, there’s the publishers, there’s the retailers. There’s not an extra 30%. Oh, and by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, also the iPhone vendor platform. Like there’s just not that much money to go around. None
⏹️ ▶️ John of those groups want to shave, you know, divide the 30% by four and shave that off of that. Like it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not viable. And then there are, you know, big companies that, okay, maybe 30% is available, but I’m a big company too. Epic’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that big, but anyway. Microsoft, right? Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, or a company that may be very tiny, but instead just decides they don’t want to give Apple 30%,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Basecamp, right? If Apple wants all
⏹️ ▶️ John the applications that they have to be the best that they can be. But these developers say, eh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not really jazzed about following these rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then we kind of get to be at an impasse. And even before people doing essentially civil disobedience
⏹️ ▶️ John here, where they’re like, I know your rules. I’m breaking them on purpose to make you punish me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I’m going to use that punishment as part of a PR campaign slash lawsuit. Even before
⏹️ ▶️ John we get to that stage, We were in a situation where Apple versus
⏹️ ▶️ John developers and this constant struggle was making the apps worse for customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when every time Marco says, oh, I want people to have different alternate payment methods and I want Netflix to be able to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John people to go to netflix.com to sign up. I think that’s too
⏹️ ▶️ John little. Like that is like the, you know, begging for scraps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apps would be better if you could sign up for them in the app. The Kindle app
⏹️ ▶️ John is better if you can buy ebooks using your Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John inside the app. Like we like forget about all these people in these companies or whatever and
⏹️ ▶️ John just look at it from a customer’s perspective. A bunch of things in the app store are
⏹️ ▶️ John worse than they should be and could be technically speaking because of business crap that nobody cares about. So we were all
⏹️ ▶️ John been dealing with these weird apps that are worse in dumb ways, that
⏹️ ▶️ John people probably don’t even understand or think about. And I don’t wanna say, oh well, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John you still can’t sign up for Netflix in the app, but they should be able to tell you where you can go to netflix.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they should be able to sign up for it, because from a user’s perspective, why can’t I sign up, it’s a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can sign up for Netflix. Why can’t I buy Kindle books on my phone? How awesome is that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a cell connection, I wanna read a book, two seconds, I go into the, I press Kindle, I go bop, bop, bop, bop, and I get
⏹️ ▶️ John a book and I read it. And why can’t I do that with all the trust and everything that Apple provides in the paint, like
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to explain to a regular person doesn’t know about all this stuff, why you can’t do that. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John either they’re so young that it’s like, I just thought that’s the way it always was or never really thought about it or their
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes will just start to glaze over. But the bottom line is this leg of this three legged stool here. Make
⏹️ ▶️ John it so the apps are, you know, the customers love the apps and the best they can be. Apple has already failed
⏹️ ▶️ John in that regard because of this battle between Apple and developers. Users are getting screwed by having apps that are worse in
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid ways. And so the art of the possible is like look Apple You’re never going to get
⏹️ ▶️ John to or back to depending on how you look at it that virtuous cycle
⏹️ ▶️ John if Already you’re making your product worse because of your fight with developers
⏹️ ▶️ John and then on top of that if your fight with developers escalates to the point where the developers are Like not only do
⏹️ ▶️ John I not like this not only do I resent you for? for the things that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John making me do to be on your platform, but I’ve had enough and I’m just, I’m literally going to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John war with you. Like I’m a big company too and I’m not just going to grumble to you in private.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not just going to complain in the press. I’m going to file lawsuits and I’m going to try to get
⏹️ ▶️ John government to take you down. I’m going to call in the refs essentially to say, all right, I don’t, I can’t deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with you anymore. I hate this so much that I’m willing to get kicked out of your store.
⏹️ ▶️ John not quite yet willing to say we’re leaving the App Store and not develop before because they still want to be in the App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they want things to change so badly that they’re willing to sort of harm their business to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. Still not quite at the point now because these are big companies or whatever where they’re willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John all do it, like collective action. Like can you imagine if, you know, Microsoft,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google, Facebook, Netflix, HBO, Epic, if they all
⏹️ ▶️ John made a joint press release and say we’re all pulling our apps from the App Store, right? No one would do that because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, HBO is going to pull out and Netflix like, Oh, HBO is gone. Let’s stay in. We’ll be the only team in town
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like they’re because they’re competitors, right? They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to collude with each other to punish another competitor. That’s probably illegal for some reason, whatever, right? But we’re not at that stage
⏹️ ▶️ John of collective action. But individual actors, whether it be a tiny company like Basecamp or a larger company
⏹️ ▶️ John like Epic, are deciding now to do more than just grumble.
⏹️ ▶️ John That shows a complete breakdown in this virtuous cycle. It was already pretty broken. You’re already there
⏹️ ▶️ John fighting was already causing the apps to be works and the experience to be worse for customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when the experience is worse for customers, people like apples, iPhones, less, right? And if
⏹️ ▶️ John fortnight someday literally isn’t available on the phone, that’s going to make people like iPhones less. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve talked about this before, in the context of Facebook and the game and Netflix and the game of chicken, like as big as epic is,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you could not watch Netflix, or use Facebook on your iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would hurt Apple a lot, right? It would hurt Netflix and Facebook a lot, too, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it would hurt Apple way worse. We’re not at that stage yet, but this is a complete
⏹️ ▶️ John breakdown. And Apple’s stance so far has been to cross their arms
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, you may complain, but we are not budging.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my argument has always been not to the refs and the government to say
⏹️ ▶️ John how they should regulate things, because I have no faith that our current government can do anything competently as evidenced by look around you
⏹️ ▶️ John and not to try to say, here’s some tiny modification that Apple could make
⏹️ ▶️ John to appease people enough so they go back in their corners and grumble, because I think the current situation is already crappy. Crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ John My appeal has always been to Apple to say, you have lost the Apple has lost sight
⏹️ ▶️ John of what has made the app store the app store. They’re already damaging their own prospects and their own
⏹️ ▶️ John potential future profits by insisting on rules that have been proven not to be
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfactory to all parties involved. The current set of rules are damaging the situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even getting into whether it’s like, oh, it’s your right to do it, or it’s a legal, I don’t even care. I’m not I keep not
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about it talking about antitrust stuff, just from a business perspective. If they keep
⏹️ ▶️ John doing what they’re doing, it’s not working. Politics is the art of the possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t just say, well, if I can’t get everything that I want, then, then that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they’ll just continue to damage their platform if they care just you don’t have to appeal to the sound it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John fair you’re charging too much and the amount of money it’s just forget about that forget about fairness forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John greed or anything like that. You’re doing the wrong thing for your products
⏹️ ▶️ John and platform it is making your stuff worse. In the long run it is going to hurt
⏹️ ▶️ John you it’s hard to see that now where it’s like because success hides problems right? Hey, Apple, we’re a huge company our stock price is at all
⏹️ ▶️ John time high service revenues doubling everybody loves it. What do you mean we’re doing the wrong thing? Every number I see
⏹️ ▶️ John and every chart I see says we’re doing exactly the right thing. This type of stuff is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the damage in this does not show up in the moment. It shows up later, right? You don’t want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John get to the point where Facebook pulls off your platform. Right. You don’t even want to get the point where Epic gets kicked
⏹️ ▶️ John off your platform. It’s already gone too far by that point. And but you say, well, don’t worry, they’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John back. Facebook has said the same thing about advertisers, boycotting them. It’s like in the end, we have the power and they’ll be back.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing is, if Apple is right, or if Facebook is right, that actually we can hold
⏹️ ▶️ John this line, because actually we do have all the power. That is yet more evidence, which I think is part of Epic’s plan, yet
⏹️ ▶️ John more evidence that we do need to call in the refs. Because if, in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John a company can continue to do things that are harmful to developers and users, but good
⏹️ ▶️ John for it, and nobody can stop them, nobody in the market, the customers don’t have the power to use
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and the developers don’t have the power to do it, that shows there needs to be some government
⏹️ ▶️ John intervention because they are being a harm to society and none of the other stakeholders
⏹️ ▶️ John can apparently stop them. I don’t think that’s exactly the case now. I think Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John big developers do have enough influence to change things, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If only because Apple does not have 99% market share and Android exists, although Android
⏹️ ▶️ John is modeled very much on an app store, so there’s, I don’t wanna get into the Android store stuff, But the point is
⏹️ ▶️ John that if Apple stubbornly refuses to see that what they’re doing is A, not the right thing for
⏹️ ▶️ John their business and B, not working, then Apple had better hope
⏹️ ▶️ John that developers like Epic can change their mind because if Epic
⏹️ ▶️ John and Microsoft and Facebook and Netflix and HBO can’t change Apple’s mind, if Apple really
⏹️ ▶️ John does have the power to just cross its arm and say, no, 30% of everything, sorry, you don’t like it, someplace
⏹️ ▶️ John else, then Apple deserves to be regulated, needs to be regulated for the good of society.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s also not a place you want to be. Just ask Microsoft. It’s not great for your reputation. And it takes a while to
⏹️ ▶️ John recover from that. So I look at the Epic situation and it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John to me exactly like the Hayes situation, exactly like every other argument. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if developers, if you don’t like the App Store, go someplace else. And it only matters
⏹️ ▶️ John until the companies that go someplace else have an effect on Apple? And what will
⏹️ ▶️ John it take, what will it take Apple? What will it take to see that people are not happy? Obviously, Apple can’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Kindle app not being allowed to buy books is bad for Apple. They obviously can’t see it. It’s been that way for years
⏹️ ▶️ John and years, and Apple’s like, eh, it’s bad, but honestly, people should buy from the iBook store anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John That kind of stupid strategy checks thinking like, epic Fortnite, whatever, you should use Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Arcade. Like, Apple can’t own everything, can’t be the best at everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not okay to say, well, we don’t care about Kindle. Everyone should just buy everything from us. Like we cannot live in a world
⏹️ ▶️ John where everything is Apple and Apple’s everything, and they get a cut of everything. Like that’s not a world that anybody wants to live in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in fact, that’s not a world that Apple should want to live in, because your motivation to make good products disappears in that scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ John arguably already happening in some areas. I don’t want Apple to be doing things to its product to advance its other
⏹️ ▶️ John strategies. Oh, we’ll get more subscribers to our service revenue. Oh, let’s make virtual workout tapes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Let’s you know, like, and that’s not what I want from Apple. I know those are new ways to make money,
⏹️ ▶️ John but honestly, Apple does not need to make more money at this point. That’s like I wish I could just sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of flip a switch and turn Apple into a nonprofit and see their decision making change. Right. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not going to go out of business tomorrow. You got billions in the bank. You’re the biggest company in the world. Stop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Stop doing what you’re doing. It’s bad and wrong. But Tim Cook is not does not listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to this podcast and cannot be convinced. And the very worst thing that can
⏹️ ▶️ John happen to Apple is they continue down this road and eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John and quote unquote win because I don’t know anything about the legal things. My impression is that I don’t think these lawsuits
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to go anywhere, but will be cited in any government action that
⏹️ ▶️ John takes place, assuming a government ever does anything ever again having to do with anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John could happen conceivably in a couple of years, government could start functioning again. And if that happens and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John finds itself on the receiving end of regulation. As I’ve said in past
⏹️ ▶️ John shows, historically speaking, our ability to write laws that
⏹️ ▶️ John regulate technology sector is not great. And also, like as much as I said that the refs should
⏹️ ▶️ John be called in, our refs are not great in this area. Even the EU,
⏹️ ▶️ John GDPR and everything, like even when your heart’s in the right place and you got a lot of smart people doing it, it’s really difficult to do. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much better if a company just wakes up and says, You cannot hold the line on this. You’re already
⏹️ ▶️ John screwing up. We all just want to go back to like it was in the beginning. Let’s all be happy together. We
⏹️ ▶️ John want developers to be excited to make money. We want users to have awesome apps that they can’t get anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John that are as good as they can be and are not limited by non-technical limitations.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we want Apple to be successful and make money from that. That’s how it was in the beginning. And somewhere along
⏹️ ▶️ John the line, we’ve lost our way. So, Apple, just wake
⏹️ ▶️ John up, man. Because it’s not that hard. It’s not that hard to make a change. The
⏹️ ▶️ John last thing you want to do is have someone dictate the change for you. because it comes from the government it’ll probably be dumb.
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Apple as Big Brother
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we’ve said this a million times. I’ve said this a million times. It’s so frustrating because it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems so much more gross because we don’t know what’s being talked about inside. And all three of us know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plenty of Apple engineers and all three of us are told constantly, yeah, the biggest critics, the biggest Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey critics are on the inside. And I’m not saying that’s not true, but man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the outside, it sure seems like Apple’s just being greedy and selfish and has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lost touch with what makes Apple, Apple. And I, you know, I keep thinking of a 1980 fortnight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The entire premise of that was. Apple is the machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now they are the conglomerate. They are your big brother. And they’re the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones that are doing the gross things that, you know, a mere 35 ish years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we, we thought were disgusting. Well, not Marco and I, cause we were barely, barely alive at that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, But, you know, but maybe John had opinions about it back in 84 and it’s, it’s, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, it’s so tough because the thing, and I think we were talking about this last week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that I like about Apple is because is that it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as, as a sports team, if you will, it’s a good team to root for. They’re not, they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ones that have won forever. They’re not the ones that used to win, but still think they’re good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, oh god, I want to make so many sports references, but I don’t I don’t want to have the entire internet yell at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me But yeah, you know, it’s not like they’re the Cowboys there I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resist, you know, the Cowboys used to be good They’re not good anymore. And hey, you remember football at all? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, yeah, Apple Apple is Is the team that stank and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got good and and some of us more than others But all three of us to some degree were there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that team ascending, you know It’s like the last dance that with that came out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of months ago about the Bulls was so good and it was about how the bull in part about how the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bulls stank and then Jordan came along and Phil Jackson came along and they got good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Having ridden the wave from bad or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Marco and I’s case mediocre to good was super exciting But now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like we’re we’ve crossed over the top of the bell curve and we’re now going downward
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the other end And that’s not a good feeling for someone who really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey likes his team. I’m having a real hard time reconciling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that because like, I don’t know, something, the butterfly keyboards never got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me as much as I think it got to like you Marco, and that doesn’t make me right or wrong, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, that’s another example of the team really kind of failing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just feel like over the last year or two or maybe four or five,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was a machine and a team that was firing on all cylinders
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe isn’t anymore. And that’s a tough thing to come to terms with.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, the, the history of people making a 1984 parody ads where Apple is the big
⏹️ ▶️ John brother is a long and storied history. It’s not the first time this has happened. Right. And even when,
⏹️ ▶️ John even when it happened there with IBM as the, as the, the big the big brother figure in the original Macintosh ad, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Those type of that type of advertisement marketing where you you position your competitor
⏹️ ▶️ John as as being dominant and powerful and trying to crush opposition like in business like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s generally the case you you’re the reason they’re called your competitors because they’re competing
⏹️ ▶️ John with you and you like to say well they’re big and mean and we we want to
⏹️ ▶️ John do the right thing and they want to to control you, right? And Apple, given their tendencies of wanting
⏹️ ▶️ John to have things just so and have a system that is
⏹️ ▶️ John limited in ways that they think is beneficial to the product, is very often put up as big brother.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I’ve got to do things the Apple way. I can’t build my own Macintosh. I have to buy them from Apple and they’re so
⏹️ ▶️ John overpriced, right? Or, you know, the app store, the walled garden. I can’t just load any software on. I can only
⏹️ ▶️ John put the certain Apple stuff on. Oh, I can’t just use a regular mouse. I got to buy an Vmouse because Apple has to
⏹️ ▶️ John have everything their way. Apple wants to control everybody. Apple is big brother. They’ve been calling Apple big brother since the company
⏹️ ▶️ John was going, you know, practically going out of business. It was still big brother because, you know, there are, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on what constituency you’re coming from, you’re like, I want to do a thing. Apple won’t let me do a thing. Therefore, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad. Just having Apple be in the big brother position is not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John bad writ large. It may be bad from one company’s perspective or even bad from a user’s perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ John Say you want to build your own Mac and Apple won’t let you. Apple is bad from your perspective. But from
⏹️ ▶️ John a different perspective, you can say, well, that’s what makes Apple stuff Apple stuff. They have control
⏹️ ▶️ John of the hardware, and it makes their computers have fewer problems. And that’s why people like them. You may
⏹️ ▶️ John not agree with that because you want to build your own PCs, but there are a bunch of people who have a different opinion than you, and they like Apple stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s always going to be that divide of Apple is doing a thing, this other
⏹️ ▶️ John constituency does not like it and finds it limiting and controlling. But there’s another constituency that
⏹️ ▶️ John likes it. And Apple’s position has always been, yeah, we’re doing this thing that we’re doing, even though a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t like it, because we think it makes our products better. And we think by having better products, we will be more
⏹️ ▶️ John successful. And the high-minded thing of, in the end, we really just do want
⏹️ ▶️ John to make great products. We don’t just want to make money. We don’t just want to be successful. This
⏹️ ▶️ John warped American mindset that the ultimate lofty goal of every company is simply to make money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has, A, never professed that, and B, I don’t think they believe it, if only because everybody who runs the
⏹️ ▶️ John company doesn’t need money. Like they’re not doing it, maybe they’re doing it to win a corporate game or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, but at most levels, people who work for Apple really do want to make good products.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes in making those products, you have constraints and rules that either your competitors
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like, or in many times in Apple’s histories, large portions of customers don’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, if you want to build your own PC, you’re going to spend decades not liking Apple because they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let you do that. But there is another constituency that does like you for doing that because it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer simpler. And those are Apple’s customers. Same thing with the iPhone. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Android offers a different operating system with a different set of tradeoffs that most people like because it’s cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John and because you can have a diversity of hardware, you don’t have to buy your phones from Google or whatever. Android
⏹️ ▶️ John sells many more phones than as if Android is an entity, but there
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco are more Android phones
⏹️ ▶️ John than Apple phones. The trade-offs that Apple makes with the iPhone appeal to a certain set of customers, in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of customers who want to spend money on software, which is good for developers, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that dynamic of Apple as big brother and Apple, quote unquote, doing the wrong thing and are we the
⏹️ ▶️ John baddies, it’s very important when analyzing that to think, just because
⏹️ ▶️ John someone doesn’t like what you’re doing, and especially if they’re a competitor or wants to be a competitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Epic wants to have its own app store and take its own cut of everything. And in fact, Epic does have its own store that competes
⏹️ ▶️ John with Steam, right? Just because a company like that is mad at you doesn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John mean that what you’re doing is wrong. You have to always look at it from the lens of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John are we doing this thing that people are mad about because it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes for better products, because it makes our products more valuable and useful and desirable
⏹️ ▶️ John to customers, which in turn leads those customers to wanna buy our stuff, which in turn leads to our success? Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John such a simple formula. Apple professes it all the time. Every earnings call, every time someone asks, like we don’t think of it that way. We think
⏹️ ▶️ John we just wanna make the best products. And nothing about the situation with the App Store can be backed up by that. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just wanna make the best products. Really? You think it’s the best product when I can’t buy an ebook in the Kindle app? Is that the best product?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, service revenue, no. What happened? What happened to the reasoning?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s right there in front of you. They have to bail on it. And that’s how you know when you’re the baddies. It’s not because someone puts you into a 1984
⏹️ ▶️ John at his big brother. It’s because if your reason is not simply, this makes the product better for customers, which in turn
⏹️ ▶️ John makes the customers want to be our customers or in turn gives us money blah, blah, blah. Like it’s a straight line.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how it’s supposed to work. If you deviate from that, it’s time to say, are we the baddies? Or more
⏹️ ▶️ John importantly, like I said, it’s time to say, is this working? As again, but I always say to Apple, is it
⏹️ ▶️ John working? Is this going the way you want it to go? Do you have the very best apps that are the best
⏹️ ▶️ John they can be and customers love it and developers love it? It hasn’t been true for a real long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I’m talking in circles. We’re not going to have time to probably dive into the cloud gaming stuff here, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I can briefly touch on it. We didn’t really talk about the gaming aspect of Epic just because it’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ John an issue. Although there is an interesting side conversation about the ability to update apps after Apple approves them,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a thing that has been available to all developers through various means, but it doesn’t change the fact that Apple’s going to boot you out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the store and there’s really no way that Apple can solve that problem unless they also solve the halting problem. So
Apple v. cloud gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John The cloud computing thing. We talked about this when we talked about Google Stadia, which was the
⏹️ ▶️ John last big entry on the show that we discussed. Briefly, the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea is instead of buying a thing that runs games and installing it in your house and using it,
⏹️ ▶️ John instead the thing that runs games is somewhere else far away from you in the data center. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you merely access it remotely. You see the pictures that are being generated by that thing in a faraway data
⏹️ ▶️ John center. And your control inputs are sent to it. And in response to your control inputs,
⏹️ ▶️ John you see the results. People call it streaming gaming, remote gaming. It’s basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like you have a game console or a gaming PC, but it’s not in your house. It’s really, really far away. And there’s a bunch of tactical hurdles to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as we said, when we discussed it in Stadia, hopefully someone will find the episode number. The reason people
⏹️ ▶️ John keep trying to do something like this is because there are lots of benefits, both financial
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, technological, if it can be done in a way that is
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfactory. Thus far, it’s good for some kind of games. It’s not really good for other kinds
⏹️ ▶️ John of games. But as we said, when Stadia came out, people are going to keep trying to do this because
⏹️ ▶️ John the upsides are just too big. So there’s a bunch of things that do this. Google Stadia, NVIDIA GeForce Now, Microsoft’s
⏹️ ▶️ John XCloud was the code name. I forget what it’s called. Microsoft, I don’t know. Some of the chat room, we get it. Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox gaming, streaming, whatever. Microsoft XCloud. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John market that’s not going away. It’s also a market that Apple didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think about when they made the App Store rules. It didn’t exist when Apple made the App Store rules, and it came into being and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John did not change the App Store rules to allow for it. And so all of these services
⏹️ ▶️ John are against the App Store rules. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John in some respects, like, okay, well, people come up with new technologies, new business plans, new
⏹️ ▶️ John schemes for doing things all the time. And it’s okay to give Apple a little bit of time to think about it and how they want to handle
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But at this point, there are enough of these services are out, and none of them are allowed on the App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store. And so Apple is once again being left out of a thing that everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else is doing. Customers clearly want these services because people keep making them. So if someone is signing up for them,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And if you own an iOS device,
⏹️ ▶️ John you might want to do this, right? And if you can do this on your iOS device, it makes that device more valuable to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you can’t do it on your iOS device, might make you consider a different product, all of that is bad
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple. Apple wants all the apps that anyone cares about to be available on their phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good quality apps from big-name companies like Microsoft and Google and
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony and you know whatever like is in the gaming realm. Like these are not minor players in the market. Epic
⏹️ ▶️ John for that matter, right? This entire category of product
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to be excluded not because Apple thinks it will make its products worse, But because they think it’s a threat
⏹️ ▶️ John to their ability to extract money from everybody who goes through the app store because we don’t Want these little miniature app stores hanging around that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason it’s against the rules Oh, so you’re going to go into the streaming thing and then within the streaming thing you can get a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of games Like you know epic wants to have its own little store its own little epic store where you buy games and apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like whoa You can’t make mini app stores inside the app store. That’s been a rule since forever that way
⏹️ ▶️ John would lead to madness All right, fine, right but apple’s job is figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out a way for your users to be able to use these services
⏹️ ▶️ John so that the iPhone retains its value and doesn’t become, oh, that’s the place where I can’t use any
⏹️ ▶️ John of the streaming gaming services. Because even though they’re not super popular now, the fact that people keep trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it and the fact that they keep getting better means that someday eventually streaming gaming is going to be an important enough application
⏹️ ▶️ John that it would be as if iOS did not support any streaming video services because the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John app store had come to fruition at the time before streaming video services and the streaming video services came along. Apple said, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like having a miniature store where people will be able to like, you know, subscribe and sign up
⏹️ ▶️ John for a service or buy movies. And we don’t want to do that because we already have our Apple TV plus service. So we don’t want any of those things
⏹️ ▶️ John in our platform because we already have a place for you to buy all that stuff. Can you imagine an
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone that could not do streaming video because of some BS business reason to protect revenue for Apple? That
⏹️ ▶️ John is a less valuable, less useful product. And in the long run, it would have made Apple less money if the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t play Netflix. Now I’m not saying streaming gaming is the next Netflix because honestly I think the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John is still not there. But it’s getting better all the time and a bunch of these services are out and if Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John rules do not allow for it and they don’t change their rules to allow for it or come up with some kind of compromise
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the companies by recognizing, hey, this is the thing, we’ll have to come to some agreement where that we can work out. Again, the art
⏹️ ▶️ John of the possible, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, tell me what it’s gonna take to get you
⏹️ ▶️ John onto the App Store. Let’s find something that we can both agree on. We’re not, both would be super happy,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’re also not gonna say, nope, it’s against the rules and we’re not changing the rules at all and we’re gonna play a
⏹️ ▶️ John game of chicken with you. And in this game of chicken, Apple basically lost because all the services said,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re mad at you, Apple, but guess what? We’re not gonna be on your platform. We can’t, you won’t let us on your platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John We could not come to some kind of an agreement where we can be on your platform. So we’re just not on your platform. So as you get an iPhone, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t use any of these services from it or your iPad or whatever. And maybe Apple thinks that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John victory. Aha! Apple Arcade will win out! Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John still does not quite understand gaming for a variety of reasons that we don’t have time to get into, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John getting rid of all these streaming services on gaming services on iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John does not really increase the attractiveness of Apple Arcade. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, it would be better for Apple if it could find some way to accommodate these
⏹️ ▶️ John type of applications on its platform. deciding
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re not going to and declaring victory when those things leave your platform is not a winning strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s the same same argument over and over again. I really wish
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would come around on this sooner rather than later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week Linode, ExpressVPN, and Mack Weldon. And thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to our members who support us directly. You can learn more about that at atp.fm join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you 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
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Accidental, check podcast so long.
Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was news a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago, that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three-pedal Accord is dead. I’m sorry, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my question is, let’s assume, and I’m sure you’re going to blow a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of holes in this question, but I’m going to, because I’m an idiot, I’m going to try one more time to ask you a question and see if you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer a hypothetical. If you were to buy a new car, a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car today, what would you buy?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to buy an Accord 6-speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because today it’s still sold. Okay, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So thanks. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Syracusing that question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey All right. Seriously. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the funny thing is I left a parenthetical in the show notes for myself, but I chose not to read it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John parenthetical…
⏹️ ▶️ John The listeners can’t see the show notes, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The parenthetical reads, assume for the purpose of this question that the 6-speed Accord is unavailable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new and you want something new.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I guess we go into the future when they’re all sold?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Correct. They are all sold. But it’s otherwise the lineup of cars available is the same as
⏹️ ▶️ John today. So you know, based on my past actions, what actually is going to happen here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to keep using my extremely low mileage, well-loved 6-speed Accord
⏹️ ▶️ John for way longer than than most people think I should, just like my Mac Pro, while I wait for
⏹️ ▶️ John something that I find a satisfactory replacement. I mean, that’s totally on brand
⏹️ ▶️ John for me, and I’ve proven that I can do it with something that ended up being about as expensive as a car.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, that’s honestly my answer. It’s like, I like
⏹️ ▶️ John my car the way it is now. Obviously, if my car got into an accident or something, I needed to get another one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have available to me other copies of essentially my same car, if not
⏹️ ▶️ John identical, than the current generation one. Those will exist in the market and will be available
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to purchase. So it’s not like I can’t get that. So there’s nothing really
⏹️ ▶️ John to stop me from using a six-speed Accord for a very long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you told me I wasn’t allowed to, some sort of game show rules, like, but you’re just not allowed to have one. You have to pick some other car, then I would, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there are other, there are a few, but other six-speed cars that I considered when I bought my Accord, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mazda 6 stick shift. Now, I don’t know if they’re also getting the stick shift. They probably are. But
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming they weren’t, that’s what I would look at. And if I can’t get an Accord, I can look at a used one of those, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you continue to narrow the game show rules, saying, OK, well, you can’t have a six-speed Accord, newer
⏹️ ▶️ John used, and you can’t have a Mazda 6, six-speed newer used, it’s like, what are you trying to get me to do? Like, you’re just going to eliminate
⏹️ ▶️ John every sedan with four doors that has a stick shift until I pick a different car? Like, that’s not much of a fun
⏹️ ▶️ John exercise, right? The real answer is that I will continue using my Accord for way too long.
⏹️ ▶️ John And eventually, if there are no more stick shift four-door sedans available for
⏹️ ▶️ John me to purchase in any reasonable way, because I keep my car so long that even the used ones are super old,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m gonna replace it with electric, right? That’s the goal, right? Oh, thank God. Like, I mean, what else are you gonna do? But
⏹️ ▶️ John right now there’s no electric that fits my criteria because my price range,
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike the price range of my Max, is very, very low when it comes to cars. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John spent more than $25,000 on a car in my life. So don’t expect me to hop into
⏹️ ▶️ John a Model S, even though I think it’s a great car. But I do kind of dislike Tesla. Anyway, and all
⏹️ ▶️ John electric cars are super expensive. Name an electric car that has four doors and is basically like
⏹️ ▶️ John an Accord, but electric. They’re all way out of my desired price range for cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if I keep using this Accord until it’s 15 years old, Hopefully by then, I will be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John get, hell, it might even be a Honda, a reasonable electric four-door
⏹️ ▶️ John car, and that’s what I will replace it with. But that said, I’m not entirely giving
⏹️ ▶️ John up on the whole six-speed thing. Obviously, they’re disappearing from cars all over the place, but the places where they remain
⏹️ ▶️ John and the places where they may even spring back up are weirdo cars for weirdos.
⏹️ ▶️ John specialty, you know, weird specialty cars, especially if like, if my kids go off to college I don’t need a
⏹️ ▶️ John four-door anymore. What do you call it? The Civic Type
⏹️ ▶️ John R and the Civic Si has also gone, too. But anyway, it’ll be back. Like, the next generation of Civics, I think they still have sticks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to see you driving a Type R. That would be
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. I mean, obviously not this generation, right? But generations change. Honda’s cars change. And
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m saying is that I could find myself in a smaller car when the kids are gone. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need a big Accord anymore if they’re living on their own, right? And this is the timeline I’m thinking about for replacement.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, how long are you gonna use my cord? Like my cord, what is it? It’s a 2014 and it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John under 30,000 miles. I don’t drive a lot. I take pretty good care of it
⏹️ ▶️ John and Hondas last a long time and I could continue keeping this Honda running assuming it doesn’t crash by just
⏹️ ▶️ John putting money into it. Like what needs to be replaced? Like a new brakes, new tires. Yeah, yeah. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has a timing chain, not a timing belt. I put a new battery in it recently. the
⏹️ ▶️ John water pump and alternator and air conditioning compressor are going to go eventually. Maybe in seven
⏹️ ▶️ John years, I’ll need a new clutch. But it’s possible to keep. And it’s not hard to find Honda Accord parts,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me tell you. It’s possible to keep this car going for a surprising amount of time, assuming one of my children
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t crash it when they’re driving. So my current plan is
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t been looking for a new car. I’m still not looking for a new car. History has shown that I tend to skip Accord generations,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they always come out with a generation that I hate. And I have to wait five years for it to be gone. So then they come out with one that I like.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ll just be sitting back here, driving my car that I like, hoping that a stick shift
⏹️ ▶️ John accord comes back. And if it doesn’t, by the time I’m really ready for a new one, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John a $30,000 electric will be on the market and I’ll buy that and it’ll be the most expensive car ever bought, but I won’t get the nanotexture.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s not in your price range of $25,000, but I think we’ve briefly mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show that my parents got a Chevy Bolt, probably about a year ago now. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as I want to say it’s a piece of garbage, it’s actually pretty nice. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given how relatively affordable it is at about $40,000, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crud load of money, don’t get me wrong, but given what it is, I think it’s reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey affordable. It’s actually a very good option for you. And hopefully over time it would get cheaper. I’ve heard the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey e-Golf is, which is discontinued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John now. But I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John heard that’s- Why do you keep naming these cars literally never own or drive or be seen in or near.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you kidding me? A Bolt? I would buy a stick shift Civic before that. I would buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a used stick shift Civic before that. I do not like anything that looks like an SUV,
⏹️ ▶️ John eliminate. Anything that looks like a turd, like the Bolt, eliminate. No Prius, no Bolt, no hatchbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what, like, just because I drive in a Accord, you think, oh, he doesn’t care what a car looks like. I do. I
⏹️ ▶️ John like how the Accord looks. It looks like a car. It’s a car shaped car. Got a dog dog-shaped dog in a car-shaped car.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Bolt is not, I don’t know what shape the Bolt is, but no. No Nissan Leaf, no Bolt,
⏹️ ▶️ John no e-Golf. I don’t even like that weird Honda Electric thing that Marco likes. The e?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s not to my taste. Not saying these are bad they’re just not for me. Not for me.
Dogs!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of dog shaped dogs, this is a complete tangent. I have been getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of pressure from the homestead that it’s dog time for the list family and I’m resisting
⏹️ ▶️ John Hmm. You’re getting a pressure from where is this pressure coming from? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John from the little ones or the larger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one? The larger one which is in vertically larger and the elder the larger of
⏹️ ▶️ John is this a collaboration between Aaron and Declan, like who’s the leader in this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s more Aaron than Declan, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John he’s definitely on
⏹️ ▶️ John board. You’re doomed because.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, I know. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only a matter of time. If it’s just the kids asking, you’d be like, ah, kids, they always want things. But if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your wife asking, you can get a dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I, it seems like it’s going to happen despite my protestations. It’s just a matter of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. I know John has a different opinion, of course, but I will say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a small, non-shedding dog has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it would have to be a non-shedding dog. I will not stand for dog hair everywhere. And plus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I’m allergic to shedding dogs, but I know I’m allergic to cats, and I know that’s not apples to apples, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, even beyond the allergies, I just don’t want frickin’ dog hair everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s a lot of practical, real, I mean, look, I love any dog, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a lot of practical benefits to small, non-shedding dogs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Oh yeah. So, when I was growing up, we had, well, when I was really little,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we had a standard poodle, then a Wheaton Terrier, then a different standard poodle, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a cockapoo, which is a Cocker Spaniel poodle. And I think I would want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something more along the cockapoo size class, which is a little bit bigger than hops
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot. Mike Corsi Cockapoo is a lot bigger than hops. Have you seen hops?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny. It depends on the cockapoo that that breed has a wide size range
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I see a lot of cockapoo’s around here and they’re not hop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They they can be typically between about 20 and 40 pounds like they’re they’re they spent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a very big size
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the one that we had I think was on the 20-pound range Well, yeah, we you know, my my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do my brother-in-law’s brothers-in-law
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco brothers-in-law
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, brother-in-law law. They have dogs, one has a German Shepherd like purebred and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and so forth. And I like the dog, I would not want that to be my dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other one is just a mutt, a rescue mutt. And I’ve been around both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them a lot and I don’t think I’m allergic to either of them. So I don’t think allergy is the problem, but especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the German Shepherd, I just do not want that much damn hair in my house. No
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Yeah, German Shepherd’s a whole other category. I had a non-shedding dog and a shedding dog, and If you don’t want dog
⏹️ ▶️ John hair, don’t get a shitting dog. But I have to say, having had both of them, maybe it’s just like, because now I’ve got the other kind,
⏹️ ▶️ John not having to groom my dog and having my dog essentially. We were, I was thinking about this, musing
⏹️ ▶️ John about this out loud, when we’re all stuck here in coronavirus and getting like at-home haircuts or worrying
⏹️ ▶️ John about not getting at-home haircuts, my dog always looks perfect. Never needs to be shaved
⏹️ ▶️ John or styled or groomed, or it’s just always, always perfect. Can you imagine if people like that? You didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to get a haircut and your hair always looked absolutely perfect. That’s my dog. She always looks perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Except that every time you sat on something, you’d get up and your hair would be all over it.
⏹️ ▶️ John well, her hair is all over the house, that’s true. But I’m saying like, in terms of this point in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ John She looks perfect, the house is covered in hair. In the other, first point in my life, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, it’s great that there isn’t dog hair over everything, although, by the way, depending on the dog, dogs
⏹️ ▶️ John can be stinky too. And although stink doesn’t show up, it’s still there. So anyway, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John nice because not a lot of shedding, right, great. But the hassle of having
⏹️ ▶️ John to remember to groom the dog and be procrastinating about grooming the dog and having your dog become overwhelmed with fur, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John a phenomenon that Marco is very well familiar with where you feel bad because the dog can’t see anymore and it’s just a giant fur thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and then getting it shaved. The hassle of having to bring the dog in, like I find it a hassle to give myself
⏹️ ▶️ John haircuts and now to have this another being that I’m responsible for giving haircuts to, I already had to do it with the kids and now I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to give the dog a haircut. It’s a nice break to say, yes, we’d have to bring the dog to the vet and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John and walk the dog and do all the other things. But one thing we don’t have to do with the dog is get the dog a haircut. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, anyway, if you don’t want shedding, yeah, get a less sheddy dog because no dogs are zero
⏹️ ▶️ John shedding. No, humans aren’t zero shedding either. Like there is going to be some hair in your house. But
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as you’re not allergic, you’ll live with it. My only thing that I would ask you, my one request to
⏹️ ▶️ John you kind of like, well, it’s not like the live picture request because honestly, what do you care what I think about your dog? But I think there is an
⏹️ ▶️ John epidemic of big, goofy dogs with curly hair. I know people
⏹️ ▶️ John love that. It’s part of the doodle series. It’s like poodle mixed with something. Right, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, I think there’s too many of them. I think we need more dog variety in the world. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see another- This is coming from the guy who insists on a dog-shaped dog. But yes, okay, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have me do the non-dog-shaped dog so we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John have more variety.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, I mean, arguably these doodly dogs aren’t particularly dog-shaped either. They’re just big, goofy
⏹️ ▶️ John pieces of fried chicken. What? Have you seen the fried chicken thing? It’s like, identify this picture.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it a cockapoo or a piece of fried chicken? That’s actually very hard to tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I also think, personally speaking, that it’s nicer to pet a dog that doesn’t have like a really, really tight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. I’ll agree with that. So I agree with some of what you’re saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first of all, on the haircut versus shedding thing, I think while having to get your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dog a haircut is inconvenient. It’s also like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once every three months kind of thing, as opposed to having to vacuum of dog hair constantly every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day. I think it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John very. Not a vacuum every day. You just learn to live
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the part of the part, you know, the stage I’m in in my life is like I’m not cleaning up human’s poop
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. I’m still cleaning up a dog’s poop. But the fact that there’s dog hair all over my house, I’m able
⏹️ ▶️ John to live with. I mean, I think I would always be able to live with it. Some people just can’t abide by that. They’re just like, I can’t have dog hair
⏹️ ▶️ John all over my house. Fine. You do you, right? Some people don’t care at all. I care a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit, but I find as I get older, I care less about dog hair all over my house.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So that’s, you know, you know, how, how nice to, obviously we look at your car cases, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John clear that you want to keep your things very nice and neat. And by the way, you know, if you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John bring your dog to the vet in a vehicle, one of your vehicles,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s not going to have dog hair in it it’s going to have a dog in it. And good luck protecting your vehicle in all possible
⏹️ ▶️ John ways from dog, because hair is not the only way that they can strip your car.
⏹️ ▶️ John just part of having a dog, I feel like, is they’re going to mess up your life in some minor way. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John get a very small dog, like Hops, they mess up your life in less ways. That’s part of the reason people like these
⏹️ ▶️ John little tiny toy dogs that look like tiny little rats. Hops is not a rat dog, but Hops is just outside
⏹️ ▶️ John the rat category. He’s 15 pounds.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco He’s not a rat
⏹️ ▶️ John dog, but he’s, I don’t know, what’s the next step up from that? Beaver dog? I don’t know. Oh my god, what is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening? I will say, I don’t have a lot of these problems that you have. I would also say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the shedding front, you know, you said like that no dog sheds zero. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different degrees between like a, you know, really like a basically non-shedding dog and a fully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shedding dog. You know, there’s like, of course, there’s like the kind of like constant sheddingness of most dogs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the like phased like blowing their coat shedding this of things like Huskies
⏹️ ▶️ John and German Shepherd thing where you can get a whole other dog out of that dog by coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah but when like when you have the various you know doodle combo kind of things what most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people don’t realize is that if you want a dog that doesn’t shed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of the parent breeds have to not shed if one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those parent breeds that it’s mixed with sheds you will have a partly shedding dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How much of a part depends on the dog that’s you know kind of like you know luck of the genetic lottery at that point it varies but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so golden doodles golden retriever shed like crazy poodles don’t so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that dog has a pretty good chance that it’s going to shed somewhat and it varies per golden doodle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cockapoos guess what cocker spaniels shed and so cockapoos do shed somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you know Casey because your parents have them right so like you’ve seen this like they shed a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my wonderful little hops doesn’t shed at all because neither shih tzus nor poodles shed
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming you’re getting any kind of precise breed mix if you get like we did and just you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a rescue dog we have no freaking idea what dogs contribute to your dog you just get what you get
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like your children it’s just a random connection you know you and Aaron and whatever and trace
⏹️ ▶️ John your family trees and whatever combination that is that’s what you’re getting in your kids. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea what my dog is, but it’s obviously some kind of shedding dog, but also some kind of dog that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hair. Yeah, rescue is obviously the way to go. Like we like we we went to a breeder merely because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am allergic to shedding dogs and I wanted to be really sure that I was getting a dog that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not cause allergy problems for me. And and sure enough and Hopps doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even when I go to like my my in-laws house they have two cockapoos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do have to take allergy pills more when I’m there cuz like if I don’t take one I can feel like my eyes start to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get itchy within a few hours of being there it’s not like a severe thing not like the way it is like if they had a cat I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even be able to sleep there but so but it is like minor allergy irritation I notice every time I go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there because even cockapoo shed a little bit but meanwhile I can like have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my face and hops all night and I have nothing nothing about
⏹️ ▶️ John me are you all done with cleaning up human poop, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, asterisk. So, Michaela got potty trained a couple of months ago, three or four months ago, during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quarantine. But she still has diapers for nap time and night time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That being said, it’s been a minute since she’s done a number two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a diaper. It’s been quite a
⏹️ ▶️ John while. So, you can see a lot at the end of the tunnel, but I feel like it’s good not to overlap them. It’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John good to give yourself a little grace period, and then you go back to cleaning up and other dogs and another creature’s poop routinely.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, by the way, I mean, you might want to get into the part where you can potentially sleep. I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John early your kids wake up, but depending on the dog, your dog may actually want to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s like you get to the point where finally the kids are sleeping past 6 a.m. and you’re like, Oh, now finally I can sleep past 6 a.m.
⏹️ ▶️ John because what the hell do I got to wake up for? And then all of a sudden the dog’s like, Oh, hello. Not every
⏹️ ▶️ John dog’s like that. Not every dog wants to wake up at 6 a.m. Sometimes you could train them to sleep later. But it is
⏹️ ▶️ John nice to have a break between now my kids are finally sleeping, and I don’t clean up their poop,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can live like a human being for a month and a half. And then I go back to having a new baby that is literally never going to
⏹️ ▶️ John grow up and go to college, and I’m always going to be carrying its poop around. That’s a dog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you. Yeah, you’re really, really selling it, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Really selling
⏹️ ▶️ John it well. It’s part of the experience. Like, I mean, I had a longer break from all of that, right? But we eventually got a dog, and now
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re back in, like, when we went on vacation, went on vacation, and unfortunately, the place didn’t allow dogs. We would have brought our dog
⏹️ ▶️ John if the place allowed dogs. So, you know, we had the dog stay with we have someone that watches
⏹️ ▶️ John our dog. And, you know, she likes there. It’s fun for her to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when we’re on vacation, we don’t have a dog. Part of the vacation is not not having to wake up at the crack of dawn, take
⏹️ ▶️ John the dog out. Like as bad as that sounds, that’s that’s part of it. So be
⏹️ ▶️ John prepared to have a glimpse of the good life where you get to sleep past 6am and then to give it
⏹️ ▶️ John all up again in exchange for the undying love of a dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me append my earlier statement. There is a lot of practical advantages to small, non-shedding,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco late-sleeping dogs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think late sleeping is a thing that you can count on, though. It might happen. Might
⏹️ ▶️ John not. It really depends on the dog. Other than age, I don’t think there’s any
⏹️ ▶️ John really good indicator of how late the dog is going to sleep. I mean, obviously, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John influence this. You can try to adjust the dog’s schedule to not wake up that early, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John My impression is that the smarter the dog is, the more and the more difficult it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be for you to get the dog not to do what it decides that it wants to do, and some dogs just want to wake up early and go
⏹️ ▶️ John outside. At least they’re not freaking nocturnal like cats. Oh yeah, we