392: Corporate Relationship Counselor

20 Aug 2020

Spending Casey’s money, driving stick, and the continuing battle between Epic and Apple.

Episode Description:

• Pre-show: Marco spends Casey’s money
  • Marco’s headphones
  • Marco’s flashlight
  • Video review by “SensiblePrepper”
• Follow-up:
  • John’s 🦗s
  • Apple’s fall-event-dates rumor is already wrong
  • Correction about Siracusa’s “Aristotle” quote (Twitter thread)
    • Apology 30b 2-4 interpretation
  • Big Sur touch screen gestures on Lenovo X250
  • Big Sur menu bar icon spacing
  • John’s mouse woes continue
• Epic and Apple are still tusslin’
  • Motion for Temporary Restraining Order
  • Unreal Engine
  • Charlie Monroe
  • Dithering
  • Under the Radar #198: Store Wars
• #askatp
  • Special thanks to Brendon Reyell for creating askatp.fm
  • Why doesn’t macOS let you place your windows just so? (via Nathaniel Cohen)
  • How does a developer with no design skills get better at design? (via Mike Milinazzo)
    • iOS Human Interface Guidelines
  • Where does one start in the switch Windows → Mac? (via A. Krishna Rao)
    • Casey and Marco argue about Mac vs. PC in a prior life
    • Mac keyboard shortcuts
• Post-show Neutral: How does one drive a stick?
  • Gordon Murray Automotive T.50

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
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• Hey.com: Email shouldn’t be overwhelming. Start your free 14-day trial.

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. 🔦 💸
2. Hi. This is Marco Arment. 🖼️
3. Sponsor: HEY.com
4. Big rumor dump already wrong
5. Apologies to Socrates
6. Big Sur touchability
7. John’s rubber problem
8. Sponsor: Raycon
9. Epic v. Apple, continued
10. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
11. askatp.fm
12. #askatp: Identifying monitors
13. #askatp: Design by programmer
14. #askatp: Switch from Windows
15. Ending theme
16. #askneutral: Driving stick

🔦 💸

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve made a couple of just absolutely terrible errors. I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey asked Marco Armand for advice on things to buy related

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to absolutely nothing at all. You know, ATP membership is a thing. If you wanted to go to ATP.fm.com, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey could join and be a member of this very program.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He’s recommending relatively inexpensive things now though, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In my defense, the most expensive pair of headphones I recommended was only $700. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the head. I thought you were talking about the flashlights. Who was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} asking about the flashlights?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That was Casey. Yeah, Casey was asking about the flashlights too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, no, I’ve brought this on myself. I have made this bed. This is not really Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} fault.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just ignore his headphone advice when he tries to get you to buy a $1000 pair of headphones. You can just ignore that and go to the next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one. None of them were $1000 and I recommended one that was like $180 and one that was like $300. One was $899 or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I said that’s what I use, but I wasn’t saying he should buy it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s a different kind than what he wants.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s just I’ve known Marco for 20, 25 years, something like that at this point, maybe more than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that. But anyways, you would think, well, I guess the first 15 of those years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t count because neither of us had money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would think in the last 10 years, I would know better than to ask Marco for advice. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in Marco’s defense, both of these times, I specifically solicited the advice. I have not pulled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any, well, I shouldn’t use that turn of phrase. I’ve not made any moves on either of these items,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I did put a $70 flashlight, which if I recall, I’ll put in the show notes. I put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a $70 flashlight quietly into the Amazon shopping cart and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey within a day, Aaron said to me, what is the $70 flashlight? Why do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you think you need it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I hope none of the product photos have like a person’s hand for scale because that’s not going to help your case.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s really not. It’s like next to a quarter. It’s like, wait, what is this? The doll’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey flashlight. This is the flashlight made for ants.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} They’re not big. big.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way smaller than you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think they are. Steve McLaughlin Oh, my word. But anyway, you would think after all this time, I would know better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than to ask Marco for help, because the problem with asking Marco for help when it comes to purchases is that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will be spending considerably more money than you would like to spend.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Marc Thiessen Well, do you want something good? It’s like people come to me and they’re like, what should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I buy that’s good? And then I tell them and they’re like, that’s a lot of money. Yeah, because it’s good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, there is a discontinuity or at least an area of that graph where the two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lines diverge and do not ascend at the same rate. Very often your recommendations

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are past that point. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wouldn’t say very often. The problem though is that it is often, it is often if not nearly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey always, that the thing that Marco suggests is very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very good. Is better, but it was like quality and price were tracking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty nicely with each other with a similar slope and then at a certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} point price starts going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up a little bit steeper and then you just follow that graph out to the right for a while and all of a sudden you’re like, well, it is better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like my Mac Pro, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That’s where my Mac Pro was. Yeah, right. Yeah, like you can talk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Once every 10 years, I buy something like Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco How often do you buy a flashlight or a pair of headphones? Not that often.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough. Yeah, I solicited this advice because it’s a long and involved story that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will cut down as much as possible. Basically, there’s a old train tunnel that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is being turned into a rail trail park thing. And by donating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a very small amount of money, I have gotten the perk of being allowed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to tour it before it opens, presumably this fall. And this train tunnel, I mean, it’s something like a mile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey long and it’s pitch black in there. And I have flashlights, but I have crappy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like $10 or $20 flashlights. I don’t have something that would illuminate a mile long train tunnel. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this flashlight will not, well, it might, that probably won’t illuminate a mile-long train tunnel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it’s not made for long throw. It’s made for wide illumination of where you are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Which actually is probably better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can get some that are made for super long throw, but then they have a narrower beam. Sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so I asked Marco, hey, I need something that’ll last me something like an hour and a half, and that’ll be pretty damn bright.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What do you got? And so he recommended, and I will put in the show notes, the Olight SR2, 1150

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lumens, USB magnetic rechargeable variable output slides.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Olight S2R Baton 2. Isn’t that what I said? You said SR2, which sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a car. Right, SR71,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right? That’s not a car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or a flashlight.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} He was thinking MR2.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so, but the funny thing is, I wanted to see an example of it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey use. And Marco very graciously said he would record a video and did end up recording a video of it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at nighttime. And it was very impressive. That will not be in the show notes, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey did a YouTube search to see like an example of this in action. And of course, do you remember the name? I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have to dig it up. name of the channel I ended up on. It was like Sensible Prepper or something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as in like Doomsday Prepper. And I realized, oh, this is not good. This is not good for me

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Matt Stauffer Well, the problem with researching any kind of like, you know, let me get a nice flashlight.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Flashlights are part of the quote, everyday carry community. And that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very quickly leads you to guns and gun people. And I just have, I want nothing to do do with that side of it. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like it’s really hard to get good opinions and reviews of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything that even goes near the everyday carry type category of like useful little gear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things to have that maybe fit in a bag. And it’s like you so quickly fall into like a crazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rabbit hole of communities and priorities that you don’t have and don’t want to be in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s so true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I mean, but he’s a sensible prepper so it’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. That’s like a I’m a compassionate conservative right.

Hi. This is Marco Arment.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have a big apology to make. We have gotten so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much feedback, way more than I expected, on an audio problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in last week’s show. Indeed. Last week, there were some, I believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cicadas? Is that right, John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Never found them, but yeah, some kind of critter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, some kind of August bugs. It sounded like cicada bug noise on parts of John’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco track. And I noticed this during the edit, and normally I’d be able to remove such noise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco during the edit and nobody would ever know. This time I tried a couple of ways to remove it, my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usual techniques to do it, and I just couldn’t get it out without like totally crushing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the rest of his high frequency audio and making him sound very weird. And so I thought, you know what,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it won’t be that big of a deal, let me just leave it in, maybe nobody will notice. notice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’re still getting messages on Twitter by email saying like hey there’s some kind of noise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something wrong with the recording and Johnstrak people saying it’s really hard to listen to that they thought something was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wrong with their car and so I am so sorry I later

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco edited I later re-edited the file and so if you read downloaded it after

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a certain point you have gotten the edited version that didn’t have the cicada noise basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco after the first hours of it being out. Some people recommended some different techniques. What I ended up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing was basically a bandpass, but yeah, notching out like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only like the 7 to 8 thousand-ish frequency range that these bugs were in, with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a method that was working better than what I was doing before. So anyway, so the fixed version is out and I greatly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apologize. The funny thing is, I was actually really nervous that people would notice an audio problem last week week because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was using a new microphone for the first time in probably four years. Oh, I didn’t notice. No

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one. Thank God. I think I was kind of hoping nobody would like have a problem with it or it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wouldn’t be a big shift for anybody. But it mattered a lot to me to get this right. And we got zero people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco noticing that because everybody was noticing these very loud bug noise on John’s track

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John questions from the chat room and elsewhere. Yes, I mean, literal insects. There are literal living

⏹️ ▶️ ^John insect creatures outside my house somewhere making noise. And yes, I have all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my windows closed and no, this is not normal. The reason I suspect cicadas is because I think in my area

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a cicada season. Like I pretty much never see cicadas around here. We found a couple of dead ones on the sidewalk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in our travels over the past couple of weeks. So I think this is, you know, anomalous. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s unexpected for us to have any bugs that make this level of noise and further unexpected for them to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so loud that, you know, despite being closed into my little podcasting sarcophagus here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with all the windows closed and no air conditioning on everything all sealed up. Still, they were so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loud. They were just coming through the windows and walls of this building into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into my microphone that should only be picking up like my voice from six inches away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, yeah, right. You have the world’s most sensitive microphone. It just you have a large diaphragm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco condenser like that should pick up everything in the universe and for some reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every other week it doesn’t. Every other week your audio is perfect and I have no idea how because that kind of microphone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can’t get to work right in my rooms

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ever. Because I’m in a room with like carpeting and a bookshelf and weird shaped walls and there’s lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of stuff to absorb the sound but you know I mean yes it does pick up a lot but when I get far away from the mic it gets quieter right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so this bug like it was loud for a bug but still it’s outside and all the windows are closed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and And so it’s not that loud. I’m amazed, I’m kind of amazed that it showed up on the track at all, but obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it did. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So anyway, my apologies to everybody. I will be a little more aggressive in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco future about trying to remove things like that I think nobody will notice.

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Big rumor dump already wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mac rumors, not the website, just the rumors about Macintoshes. Apparently today

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is the day, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we record this at 9 o’clock in the evening on August 19th, I guess West

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Coast is always a little behind, and so maybe something will happen. But we were told

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at some point recently that we would get a new iMac, new AirPods Studio, new HomePod 2, new HomePod Mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Have any of those things happened, gentlemen?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We got a new iMac, but not on August 19th. And yeah, I just wanted to swat this down. I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to attribute to any source, like whatever. Because we talked about it on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever that show was, like a couple of episodes ago, just because it was such a huge dump

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of rumor info. It’s like, wow, someone’s really laying it all on the line with all these announcements and dates. And now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think we can just ignore it forever because August 19th has come and gone and these things didn’t happen. And even though the iMac did happen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it didn’t happen on August 19th. So, so much for the Nostradamus-like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John prediction filled with dates.

Apologies to Socrates

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then would you like to add a clarification about the thing you were trying to quote last week?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is the reason I think people should listen to our podcast, because we’re the only podcast in which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the hosts will try to cite a half-remembered saying from a shareware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John website that really comes from something in ancient history that I couldn’t even remember, and then a listener will write in to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tell us, I know which saying you were talking about, and also, turns

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out, as they say, the popular notion of the saying is a mistranslation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So here we go. This is Nate Mavis, who says the quote you were reaching for is from Socrates, not Aristotle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s from apology 30 B. I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how classics work. Apology 30 B. Did they like number and letter? Anyway, that’s the thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have construed it as some ancient scholars have being virtuous will lead to wealth and other good things. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is me talking about like Apple should concentrate on just trying to make good stuff, and then they’ll be successful because because of that instead of the other way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around, right? He says, but that’s an incorrect translation. Socrates says rather that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John virtue makes wealth good. Not virtue will make wealth and other good things for you. Think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of what you tell a kid playing against cheaters. If you cheat to win, winning isn’t good. Playing by the rules

⏹️ ▶️ ^John virtuously is what makes winning good. So MF Burnie proposes his interpretation in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a paper from 2012, which we will link in the show notes and no other tech podcast will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And Nate says, I spent the chunk of my dissertation defending it in detail, and now I’m in software. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leave it up to you which interpretation is more relevant to Apple situation today. So there you go. I meant the first sense that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being virtuous will lead to wealth and other good things, but the other, perhaps more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John correct interpretation is also applicable, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is actually very interesting and I agree. You will not hear anyone else talk about that.

Big Sur touchability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh my goodness. So there was some hubbub in the last day or two, and I saw that this video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey existed, but I didn’t get a chance to watch. Apparently somebody has dropped a Big Sur beta onto

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a Lenovo touchscreen enabled, I presume ThinkPad, but a Lenovo laptop, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the touchscreen worked? Question mark? What’s going on here?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So first of all, let me start by saying I have no idea if this video is real. But if it is real, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pitch of the video is, yeah, of course, if a touchscreen laptop works and and you touch it, maybe it would just interpret that as mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John movement or mouse clicking, and then why wouldn’t it work? But if you watch the video, the whole point is that the person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the video performs gestures, like pinch to zoom, in the Maps application in macOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the gestures work in the Big Sur beta on this laptop. Again, I have no idea if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John real or not. The reason I include it here, and we’ll put a link to the video, is just so you can see what it might look like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for in what contexts might touch be useful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a Mac with a touchscreen, because whether it’s real or not, you can see someone using a laptop with macOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it, with real macOS apps, and occasionally pawing at the screen. Now, the performance and responsiveness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems atrocious. It’s almost like, is it working? Is it not working? And you see it’s kind of working. So it looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really terrible, but A, it’s on a Lenovo. Who knows what kind of support this is. B, it might not even be real.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And C, it’s a beta. So I thought it was mostly a curiosity, but it’s interesting to see like, one of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first videos in the wild showing presumably real hardware and real software,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John showing someone touching a Mac in the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Additionally, there’s some changes with regard to the menu bar icon spacing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can never remember what these things in the upper right are called.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} What is there a name for them?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Menu extras, menu bar icons. I think menu extras is what Apple calls them or what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they used to be called under the covers. Anyway, we talked about this when we talked about Big Sur, that yes, all the different things being spaced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out for touch, right? And we mentioned the menu. not a new feature the very first big survey to have this in it but here is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ricardo Mori on Twitter complaining about the new spacing not because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know necessarily he minds that it’s like spread out so it’s easy for your fingers to touch but now they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take up more room and so here’s a little screenshot you can see in his tweet where he says my icons used to take up about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amount of room but now that they all have a huge amount of white space between them on a 13-inch laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the icons take up like more than half of the menu bar And so if you have an app with a lot of menus,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re gonna clash in the middle and your icons are gonna get hidden And it’s inconvenient. So this is this is the downside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to sort of spreading Mac OS out for finger spacing or whatever whatever it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re doing whether they’re doing it for finger spacing not bottom line is they’re spreading stuff out There’s all the new large controls The menu bar can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be enlarged the menu icons are spread out from each other and if you have a laptop with a small

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen Suddenly it feels even smaller because there’s all this extra white space between things So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it would be kind of neat to have an option to sort of collapse that spacing if you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a touch screen Mac or if you just, you know, don’t plan on touching your menu bar icons, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John somehow I don’t see that option forthcoming.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it’s so hard not to conclude that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey touch is coming to Mac OS because it seems like so many of these changes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are curious, if not dumb, if that wasn’t the end goal. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey typically Apple does quietly orchestrate their future plans. You know, things like auto layout

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is a great example. You know, it used to be that Apple didn’t care if you laid everything out, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by the pixel or point. And then they started saying before we got bigger phones, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you might want to just think about like a relative layout where you’re anchoring things to other things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and that might be a good call. And then fast forward a few months and suddenly we had bigger iPhones. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it certainly seems that we’re getting touchscreen Macs or some sort of alternate input

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mechanism, if not touch, but I don’t know if not, this seems like such

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a weird choice to just add all this white space everywhere. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know.

John’s rubber problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Finally, John, you’re having a problem with your rubbers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yikes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, I spent all that time, and we talked about it on the show, I don’t know, six months ago or something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John picking out a mouse, trying a bunch of mice, seeing which I felt comfortable, because I wanted a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one with my fancy new computer when I got my Mac Pro. I was using an ancient mouse and it was just not great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I eventually settled on the Microsoft Precision Mouse, which, you know, had some trade-offs out of all the ones I tried.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was the one I liked the best. I even, after that, I’d used it for like a month or so, and I even considered doing the cheese

⏹️ ▶️ ^John grater thing, the actual physical thing that grates cheese from a cow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And buying multiples, right? Because I’m like, well, I like this mouse. I found a mouse that I liked. It took a lot of buying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multiple mice to see if I could find one, but I found one I liked. So why don’t I, maybe they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stop making this one, or maybe they’ll change it in a way I don’t like. Maybe I should buy multiples. But I didn’t, because I figured,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, I don’t know. I used the last mouse for like 15 years or something. I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I’m not going to wear, I don’t need to buy a new one. Like, if 15 years go by and I need to get another mouse, I’ll do the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John research again. But now, for a little while, I felt like there was like some kind of schmutz

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something on the side of my mouse, and occasionally I would like scrape it with my fingernail to like get that schmutz off of there, and it would like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go away. But eventually, I felt some of this thing under my thumb, under my, you know, my left thumb gripping the mouse,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I tried smoothing it away, and it didn’t really go away. And so then I said, let me pick this, let me look at it. I looked at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mouse, and it wasn’t schmutz. The side of this Microsoft mouse, the entire left side,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the right side for that matter, is rubber coated. The whole mouse is plastic, but it’s rubber

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coated plastic on the sides for grip, which I like. It’s very comfortable and it’s a very smooth rubber.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it is apparently so soft and smooth and velvety that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John act of me just using my mouse and having my left thumb in that same position on the side of the mouse,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is how I use I’m a side mouse gripper kind of person has worn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Doesn’t warn it away but has worn a little like first it’s like a little bit of a Slightly shinier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John smooth spot and then there’s like a little lip that I’m it’s not a lip. It’s not the edges It’s the center

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the rubber and I have just made like a little rough patch with my thumb and I’m like, oh no I haven’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had this mouse that long. This is not gonna last 15 years So I don’t know I’m gonna do about this I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the mouse is fine. And if now that I just know that’s what it is. I don’t pick at it, right? it’s not like I’ve worn through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it in a hole and it’s not like it’s peeling off it’s just a little bit worn in that area. If it would wear evenly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know like a baseball glove or something just kind of wear down and get a patina that would be fine but when it wears

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so that it has like a little a little flaky kind of rough bit I don’t really like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that so I don’t know what I’m gonna do about this but I just wanted to update everybody on my mouse woes that apparently buying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John five different mice and trying them each for weeks was Insufficient, but and this is the thing with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think about this with product reviews all the time If you’re doing a product review for a product review

⏹️ ▶️ ^John website or even just for yourself in your life It’s very difficult to know conclusively

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What is a good product from just using it for like a couple of weeks? Especially if it’s something that you intend to keep for a long time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Like say a cheese grater for your kitchen that kind. I love you have to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that every time now

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I mean I can’t cuz I don’t you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway And you buy it, you grate a bunch of cheese, you do timing tests, you do like, this was the easiest, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got the least tired doing it, it made the evenest, you know, gratings, whatever. It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John machine washable, and it was like, all this, you know, dishwasher safe, rather. You say all these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it, and you’re like, this is the one. And then you publish that article, and then, you know, you go off and forget

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it, and one of your employees takes home the cheese grater, and then six months later, it breaks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like you have to go back to the article and say, don’t buy this cheese grater, it breaks in six months. Right, it’s not the best one. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it had the best performance when it was working. Like, you know, this is like in the case of BMW. Yeah, it’s good when it’s working,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but if it dies all the time, it’s not actually the best choice. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m disappointed in my Microsoft mouse. I did some Googling and I found someone with the exact

⏹️ ▶️ ^John complaint for a Microsoft mouse saying I used it for a little while and it wore in the exact same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spot, but it’s not actually my mouse. It’s an earlier Microsoft mouse with rubber stuff on the side. I think they just use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very soft touch rubber for it to be like expensive feeling and nice and it is expensive feeling and nice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I think that soft touch rubber is not particularly durable so and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not like you can replace the rubber on the side or anything so I don’t know what I’m gonna do I like this mouse enough that I would probably just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy a new one every couple of years if after a couple years it becomes dire. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so hard to find good mice these days.

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Epic v. Apple, continued

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The drama continues. Actually, if you’ll give me about 90 seconds, I need to go pop some more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey popcorn. Epic and Apple still killing each other.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Where did we leave off? Where were our intrepid heroes the last we spoke? I don’t even remember. It’s been such a blur

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of anger.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It was basically the very first night that this had come out and they had sued Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Google. Right. But nothing else had really happened yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, Fortnite had been taken down from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but if you still had it installed, it was fine and that’s all that had happened. There had been the lawsuits, there had been the video release,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Fortnite was off the store, but if you still had it, you could still play it. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} And there was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a bunch of context that we didn’t actually have time to get to, and we’ll probably go into it shortly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here. But yeah, so Casey, sorry, what’s new this week?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I may leave something out, but as best I understand, what’s new this week is that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, like we said, Fortnite is removed from the App Store and Apple has told Epic that they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey until a week from Friday, so the 28th, to basically cut the **

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out and start acting nice again. And if they don’t, apparently their entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey development account, their developer account, will be taken away, which means

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they won’t be able to use Xcode. Well, they won’t be able to do anything really with Xcode. won’t be able to do anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with any Apple platforms. And that would be a pretty serious bummer. And I’m still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not clear whether or not there would be a trickle effect on the Unreal Engine, which we can talk about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a little bit more what that is in a moment. But this is the, as I think Gruber has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey described it, or maybe it was Jason Snell, the nuclear option. That this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Apple saying you can go outside and play hide and go screw yourself option.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so that’s what Apple has done. And there’s been a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lot of all of the talking heads like us going around and around and around about what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey makes sense, what’s fair, what’s not fair. And I think there’s a lot more to talk about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this case specifically, but God help me, for the first time I think in my entire life, I actually sat down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey earlier tonight and tried to do like a poor man’s mind map to try to figure out what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is really going on here. I feel like there are maybe five

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey different arguments that are all happening at the same time and are all interrelated about whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or not 30% is fair, whether or not app review is fair, whether or not Apple is being a retaliatory

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey baby and so on. I was going to try to force us to pick

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey these apart one by one, and I just don’t think we’ll be able to do it because they are so intertwined.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that’s been very difficult for me is picking apart and separating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey these different concerns. And maybe we’ll try to do that, just try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to keep an eye on that as we discuss further. I don’t know. That’s kind of the executive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey summary. Where would you gentlemen like to go from here? John, do you have immediate thoughts?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John John Greenewald Yeah. Like I think before we start talking about the other stuff, we’ll just talk about the threatened punishment, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So Apple said, what was it? Were they’re going to terminate their developer account? And so, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the first question may be, is that a thing that Apple can do? And the answer, of course, before you even look it up, you know, is yes, because all those terms

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and conditions that everybody just clicks through and every service that you ever click through terms and conditions on, I guarantee you, they all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, we can do whatever we want and you have no recourse. Like, that’s what they all say. And you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John agree to that, because what are you gonna do, not agree? I mean, you could not agree and not be a developer, right? But like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most companies are able to put language in all of their agreements for all their sort of third party, you’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do stuff on our platform that basically says if you if we don’t like what you do, or even if we do like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for any reason, we could just wake up in the morning, decide, you know what, we don’t like you today, we can take away all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your things, because that’s just the nature of the agreement. Apple’s got the things you want access to those things. This is the agreement, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So yes, the agreement says they can do this. And then in the agreement says this is what it means if we do this, if we terminate your account,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he said he will lose access to the following programs, technologies capabilities. Obviously in these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John legal agreements, very often terms are defined elsewhere, so you have to kind of look up what they mean.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So this first thing that I’m going to read is going to sound bad, but I’m sure it’s defined elsewhere to be not as broad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as you think. So you will lose access to the following all Apple software comma.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now obviously you’re not losing access to all Apple software because that would mean like you’d go into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple store to try to buy an iPhone. They’d be like, are you Tim Sweeney? Get out of here. You lose access or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’d give you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} an iPhone with no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. Like, you can have this iPhone, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} no software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for you. Right, but anyway. The sentence reads differently. All app are software,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SDKs, APIs, and developer tools. Now, I think that’s maybe just poorly written, or Apple software is a term

⏹️ ▶️ ^John defined elsewhere. The S is not capital. So anyway, you don’t get to use the developer tools and stuff. I’m skipping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over a bunch of stuff just to get to the meaty stuff. One of the things you lose access to is the notarization service

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for Mac OS apps. Now, remember, it’s not like you have an iOS developer account and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac OS developer account and TV OS developer account. Although at various times there have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John distinctions related to platforms, you essentially have a developer account. A developer account

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a thing that puts apps on the stores. Now companies can have multiple developer accounts, I imagine, depending on how many legal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entities they have. And we’ll get all into that in a second. But anyway, they have a developer account, right? So this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John agreement is not specific to saying, you know, if you get a developer account, you can make any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of apps. You know, Marco can make a Mac app. I can make an iOS app. like from our own single developer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John account if we want it. It’s not limited by platform. So when they terminate the agreement, of course it’s going to say, we terminate your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John access to the notarization service. You can’t make notarized apps because you don’t have a developer account, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it seems weird because we’re talking about an iOS app, you know, Fortnite on iOS and iPadOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? But now you’re losing access to macOS things, like you can’t notarize a macOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app. It’s like, you weren’t even mad at us about a Mac app, right? We’re talking about, it doesn’t matter. This is the developer agreement.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you lose access to developer ID signing certificates. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not only can you not notarize an app, which is like sort of giving it the Apple stamp of approval by sending it out to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple and then they sign it and send it back, you can’t even sign it yourself with your own developer ID certificate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So developer ID is where the developer can just sign an application and give it to somebody and it’ll run even though

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple hasn’t signed off on it, right? You lose access to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Universal App Quick Start program, which is the thing that gives you the DTK. So if you’ve got a DDK, you have to send it back to us. You can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have that anymore. And then finally, this is a little extra FU for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Epic. You lose access to engineering efforts to improve hardware and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software performance of Unreal Engine on Mac and iOS hardware. So what Apple is saying is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up until now, we here at Apple have worked on our stuff, on like our OSs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and our 3D engines and our drivers and all that stuff, our 3D

⏹️ ▶️ ^John driver software and everything, so that it performs well with Unreal Engine. Because Unreal Engine, which we’ll talk about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a little bit, is a very popular engine for 3D applications on many platforms. And it has been important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for Apple for Unreal Engine-based software to run well on Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and iOS hardware. So what Apple is saying is, not only are we gonna terminate all this stuff and not give you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John access to any of our dev tools or anything, also, we’re going to stop making sure that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Unreal Engine runs really well on our products. Which, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the one hand, it’s like, Well, most people don’t get that kind of service from Apple, where you make some kind of third

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} party library

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then Apple spends its own resources making sure that your library runs really fast on their hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But that just goes to show the nature of Unreal Engine. And what Casey was getting at before is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, okay, given all of this, this is the agreement, they take away all this stuff. What does that actually mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aside from like Fortnite’s not on the app store anymore? Does it mean, for example, that other applications

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that use Unreal Engine are going to have problems? And, you know, briefly, Unreal Engine is a 3D engine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you can license from Unreal, from Epic, and use it to build

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a game on it, because 3D engines are really hard to make, and Epic’s Unreal Engine has been really good for many, many years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It comes with all sorts of stuff. It comes with an entire development environment for you to make your game. It’s how a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John single-person developer shop can make a good-looking 3D game. That single person is not writing the 3D

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engine from scratch. They’re licensing an engine and then building a game on top of it, and it gives you much more than just the 3D engine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gives you physics and scripting and like I said an entire IDE. It’s a very complicated big thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the Unreal Engine actually has really nice licensing terms where I think it’s like free to use until your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John game makes over a million in revenue and then after that the Epic gets like 3% of your revenue or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s used all over the place. It’s used on consoles, it’s used on PC games, and it’s used on iOS games and Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John games and you know the whole nine yards right. So on the App Store now are many,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many games that are built on Unreal Engine. Does this happening to Epic, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their developer account being terminated, does that mean that anything bad happens to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John applications not made by Epic, but that happen to use Unreal Engine? The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John short answer is like immediately no. Like so they terminated Epic’s account, do those games all break?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, they’re all fine. But the medium to long-term answer is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you would imagine that this developer account is the only way that Epic has to continue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John development of Unreal Engine on Apple’s platforms. Eventually Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will release an OS where the Unreal Engine and or the tools stop working or have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show stopping bugs in them. And the game developers would be like, oh, I need to update my game for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the new whatever OS. I’ll need the new version of Unreal that works with the new whatever OS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And Epic would say, sorry, we can’t actually make a new version of the Unreal Engine for whatever OS because whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS is an Apple OS. and we literally can’t build anything for Apple OS because we don’t have access to the dev tools.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you take a very narrow reading, yeah, that’s a thing that could happen. But in reality,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all right, so you terminated, Apple terminated this developer account. It’s kind of a game

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of whack-a-mole to say, okay, well, what if Epic just makes another developer account? We notice that you use the same legal entity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Okay, well, what if Epic’s parent company, was it Tencent or whatever, has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another shell company and they get a developer account and they become the Unreal Development Company that is separate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from Epic and Apple’s not mad at them. Like, this can go around forever and ever. Like, bottom line is there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John practical way for Apple to stop continued development of Unreal Engine and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s platforms, right? Legally speaking, technologically speaking, they could chase

⏹️ ▶️ ^John each other forever. There’s no way to actually stop it, assuming both parties

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are invested in making this happen, right? So the punishment,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John given everything that I said, The punishment is actually kind of bad, but it’s not the end of the world

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it probably won’t affect everybody who built on Unreal Engine, but the probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is where the damage is done. Say it never does affect any other person who builds on Unreal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Engine. If they think it might affect them, they might be like, do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want to use Unreal Engine? Because they’re fighting with Apple and I’m not quite sure how that’s going to turn out. It seems like it’ll probably be fine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but now I have doubts and maybe I’ll use Unity instead, which is a competing 3D engine that works on Apple’s platforms and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other PC and game consoles and stuff, right? So this is actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a fairly strong move from Apple. What they’re doing, even if it never actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quote unquote, does anything, A, of course, the damage is epic because Fortnite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gets off the App Store and they can’t make the money from people using Fortnite on iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John devices. And people who use iOS devices spend a lot of money, so that’s bad for them. And B, it makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people, in Epic’s words in all their lawsuits, damages their reputation. It makes people more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wary about using, building games on top of Unreal Engine because Unreal Engine is made by the company that’s fighting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with Apple and maybe something could happen, could affect my game. And so I think this is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, the nuclear option, maybe, but it’s like, it’s a strong move. It’s something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that has to, you know, Epic has to take this seriously. And again, Epic could have anticipated they’d do this move

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is of course, you know, what does epic have that apple can take away from them?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Their their apps in the store and the dimension of their developer account, right? So I’m sure they planned for this. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this I think a lot of people watching this are thinking this is where epic is going to blink because apple in their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John benevolence, you know, put a press release it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John master risk. Yeah, yeah, the app store designed to be safe and blah, blah, blah, as much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as how great the app store isn’t. Apple goes on to say this is quoting from their little thing thing they send to the press. We very much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to keep the company meaning Epic as part of the Apple developer program and their apps on the store.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The problem I feel like Epic has created for itself is one that can easily be remedied if they submit an update to their app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that reverts it to comply with the guidelines. It actually says revert it to comply

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the guidelines they agreed to which applied to all developers. I love that every time Apple references

⏹️ ▶️ ^John develop the guidelines after the congressional hearing, they always say The guidelines,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which by the way, are totally the same for everybody. The guidelines, which apply to everyone equally. The guidelines, which as we know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are the same for every single person. The guidelines, which are have no exceptions, like they always had a modifier to you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can say it all you want now, but you can every time you say guidelines, you can say which apply to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everyone equally. It doesn’t make it true. You just can’t just keep anyway. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John setting that aside. So the apples giving them an out. First of all, they gave him this deadline, whatever it was the 28th and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then they’re saying, just fix your game. Just take out the little thing that lets you pay with a credit card and change it back to the way it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all will be forgiven. And so a lot of people are thinking, all right, well, maybe Epic has made its point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and maybe Epic will continue to pursue the lawsuits, but maybe just to come back to a safe position

⏹️ ▶️ ^John while the lawsuits grind on through the courts. Maybe they just released a version of Fortnite that removes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the or they don’t have to release it. They can just turn off the server side thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} enables

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enables that feature, right? No more paying with a credit card and getting 20% off. It’s back to normal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or they could just stick it out and say we’re willing to take the potential reputational damage, we’re willing to have Tencent open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a shell company to take on Unreal engine development, like whatever, we’re in it for the long haul. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t expect this is the end of the story, but it’s a bold counter move by Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this, you know, more next week I assume.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think bold is being generous here. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco should erase any doubt in anybody’s mind whether Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the IBM in 1984. Like yes, clearly they are. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my god, they are really not doing well in the court of public opinion right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They couldn’t possibly have made a worse counter move if they’re trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at all seem like the good guys.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And by the way, the reason I think people are saying they look like a bully, just to make this very clear, is that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, the fight, such as it stands, like, you could just say, OK, well, you submitted an app that violated the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rules and were angry at you and we pulled the app, right? And that could be like, you know, that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, well, you did a bad thing with that and we rejected your app. Right. That’s all they had to do. Right. Well, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not I’m saying is that like that would seem proportional. It’s like you submitted a bad app or you rejected your bad app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you broke our agreement. Like you did a sneaky thing. you broke the agreement and technically yes we have according to our agreement we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can do all sorts of stuff because of course our agreement tells us we can do whatever the hell we want in fact like I said Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can terminate your agreement for any reason if they just feel like it right there doesn’t have to be a reason but as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco was saying it seems mean to say well we’re just fighting over this one app you really got a you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got to terminate my whole developer account like we don’t just develop fortnight there are other games by us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the store like we do other things that’s why it seems like bullying because it’s like okay, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this happens all the time. And the only time we’ve seen entire developer account termination is if you’re like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John putting up malicious software, which I think would be a proportional response. You have shown you are not responsible enough to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have developer account. You are putting out software that spies on people, tries to steal information. Yeah, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but but you know, talk about treating all developers equally. Facebook’s account should have been terminated many times. Uber’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} too, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and lots of big companies do all that. Their accounts are fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so that I mean, that’s the thing. Like, it’s a measure of how big is epic? Is that because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John biggest Facebook? No. Are they as important to Apple’s platform as Facebook? No, no, is they important in Netflix? Probably not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Like, you can kind of go by the market cap of the company or kind of go by like, you can, you can size it up. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think is a big, important company and their parent company is even bigger and even more important, but they’re not Facebook,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So anyway, that’s why it’s that’s why we’re all saying this seems this seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bullying, because they had a response that would seem more proportional that would fix the problem,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is like, hey, someone’s app is on our store violating the rules, which this is another thing, not to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go over a tangent here, but I’m slightly confused about this. All right, so the app’s not on the store, but if you still have it, you can play it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, that’s the kind of compromise we would expect, because Apple doesn’t want all these kids to get mad because they can’t play Fortnite, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But on the other hand, we can’t have Epic breaking the rules, right? But those kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who are still playing Fortnite, they can still use their credit card, whatever, to get 20% off, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. is, and that’s the thing about like the app, you know, enabling new features after it goes out, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the thing that all apps do, but it’s technically against the guidelines if you read them, you know, right, that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually doesn’t have a good way to stop those transactions other than pulling the app entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like breaking it for everybody, which they don’t want to do because then people would really be angry like, hey, my kid can’t play Fortnite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right now I’m super angry. I don’t want to say good adults play for tonight to whatever, like, the user should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be very upset if you broke your thing. So Apple has to just kind of grin and bear it. And while this grinds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on, yes, new people can’t get fortnight. But honestly, a lot of people already have for iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John devices, it is a very popular game. And in the meantime, they can all be buying V bucks for 20%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off. And that’s got a burn apple, right? So I feel like maybe this, you know, bullying response

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is in response to sort of epic having one over on them because they can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John learn, you know, it would hurt Apple more to literally stop fortnight from working for everybody, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s one more question when they terminate the developer account before I stop working for everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s a good question. So as far as I know, so like there’s there’s multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways of you know, Apple developer account expiration slash termination. So if your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco account just expires, like if you don’t renew your developer account, your account expires, you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco submit new builds to your app and your app disappears from the store, but anybody who has it, it can still run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you can still redownload it from the purchases tab. Same thing if your developer certificate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just expires and you still have your account, but like your distribution certificate that you built the last copy of the app with, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that expires, nothing bad happens. You just have to make a new one before your next app update. But otherwise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it still stays in the store, people can still download it and use it, etc. That’s all fine. If Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco revokes your certificate in a malware kind of way, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they actually revoke the thing that says it’s okay to run this, then you have a Charlie Monroe situation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which we still want to talk about. Then you have a situation where the app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on iOS, I think, just crashes on launch and just refuses to run without any explanation. On the Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s when you get the dialogue that says, this app will damage your computer and you should move it to the trash.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I have so much to say about that. But anyway, that’s like revocation at Apple’s level,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not just like, you know, this is no longer valid, but like all previous signed things are now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco invalid from this app. So I don’t know what happens if Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco terminates your developer account, but not for like a malware kind of reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think if you have the app, it continues to run. I think we’ve seen this like with various

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco times whenever people have tried to like put emulators in the iOS app store and they’re up for like a day

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Apple figures it out and takes them down. I think they still run after that for people who already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had downloaded them. So if that’s the case, I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all copies of Fortnite out there would be remote killed if their developer account got terminated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean this so what you described are the various options. What we don’t know is inside Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you hit the big terminate account button, like does that make any of which of those things does that make happen if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any? Obviously Apple can do whatever they want regardless of what that button normally does. They can decide a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John la carte we’re gonna terminate the account and we either are or aren’t going to revoke your certificate but it’s on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the table as one of their options and it’s not clear from their threat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they’ll choose to do when they do this termination. To give an example of emulators like I downloaded an NES emulator like on day

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two of the iPhone or something. Somebody put up an NES emulator and that worked for years. Now when somebody put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up the NES emulator, this is early days, but when whoever put up the NES emulator. That’s a violation of the rules,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s also not malware, but it’s also kind of a blatant violation of the rules. And there’s also intellectual property

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things. Uh, it’s kind of a judgment call whether apple to think would apple have terminated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that developer’s account again, it’s not a clear cut case of like you’re trying to do something like really terrible,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, like steal people’s personal photos or something like that. Right. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you were breaking the rules. So I would imagine that they didn’t terminate that developer’s account, they just rejected that application,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? But who knows? Right. But either way, it seems clear that they can choose to let the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app live on. But the caveat on the face in the case of fortnight, if you let the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app live on, literally millions of people will continue to be able to bypass in that purchase and get V

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bucks for 20% off, giving epic money. Obviously, it’s not sustainable long term because you know, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want new customers and stuff like that. But boy, it really makes me think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t imagine Apple tolerating three more years of 100 million people

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} bypassing their in that purchase

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just because they refuse to reject the certificate for the game. But on the other hand, does Apple want to break Fortnite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for every single one of his customers? So they’re starting to get between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a rock and a hard place here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s the least of the problems. I mean, my big problem with this. So lots of people have pointed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out what epics real motives here might be. Yeah, they want to make they want to bring their app store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to iOS and take 12% of everybody’s, you know, cut instead of having to pay Apple 30%, whatever, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to me is separate. That’s like, what Epic wants to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with their money and everyone else’s money is not really material to this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco conversation. What’s material to this issue is like, first of all, like whether Apple’s rules

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are anti-competitive and whether they’ve overreached or whether it’s too big now and has to change or whatever else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then secondly, from that, their treatment of Epic in this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whether that’s kind of, you know, quote, fair or not, whatever people think. And I think no matter what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you think of Epic, because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything about Epic, I don’t care. But what, when I see what Apple’s doing here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you look at it, kind of a big picture scenario here, Apple’s in a really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco questionable place with antitrust and control and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco monopoly and anti-competitive behavior. I think it’s well supported by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lots of evidence around the world, the EU, the US Congressional Committee, their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco position is worthy of arguing, is worthy of consideration whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco regulation needs to be applied. It is not a given that they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a hundred percent in the right with their with the status quo. So Epic has filed a lawsuit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to challenge this. Whatever you think of Epic and how they’re doing this, the idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of filing a lawsuit to challenge Apple’s policies and control

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this area, I think is a valid argument to have. I think that deserves to be heard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and to be argued. What Apple is doing in response to this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is such a bullying move that what they’re effectively doing is shutting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down the potential to have this be argued in court. They are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco throwing such a bullying move here that what they’re basically saying is we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco aren’t even going to allow this to get anywhere near arguing in a court or in front of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco judge or anybody. We’re going to destroy your entire business first so that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nobody can challenge us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, they’re not destroying their business, but they are doing the strongest move they have available. And the attempt to scare them into presumably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not pursuing the lawsuit, there’s nothing Apple can actually do to stop them from fighting. I mean, you can sue anybody for anything, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But this is an intimidation tactic. Like, here’s our threat. Here’s our big hammer. We are going to do this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. Here are the consequences of this thing, and the consequences are far-reaching and damaging to your business. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not gonna destroy Epic. Epic has, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} this is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, I don’t think Apple’s platforms are their primary source of money, although it might be almost 50%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of their money, getting close to it. Anyway, but Epic, if they’re stubborn,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can plow ahead with their lawsuit. And by the way, I listed Tencent as their parent company. They’re just an investor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They don’t have a majority share, but Tencent is very big, is what I was getting at. So this is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s an intimidation move. It’s a bullying move. It’s a counter move in the current thing just to see if they blink. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is trying, as we said before, it’s trying to give them an out. It was also at the end of that other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little thing. It says, we hope you’re able to cure your breaches of the Apple program license agreement

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and continue to participate in the program. What Apple wants is for them to get back in line. And it’s saying, here’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John carrot. You get back in line, you can continue having Fortnite. We’ll go back to making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure Unreal Engine works real well. You keep your developer account and we just go back to the way things are, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you know, so yeah, I think it’s, it’s not going to immediately destroy Epic’s business. It’s not that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big of a hammer, but it’s trying to scare them off. Now, so let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say they do this. They say, okay, okay, Apple, fine. Here you go. We changed Fortnite back. We didn’t even have to release a new version because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s all done server side.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} We changed it back to the way it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was. And now it’s just backed in that purchase and you get your 30%. The lawsuits still exist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This, the letters that Apple has sent, as far as I’m aware, do not say, hey, epic. And also, by the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way, you have to drop your lawsuits, right? So I don’t know if you want to put that into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s credit column or whatever. And I don’t know if there’s been a back channel, but Apple is not making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dropping the lawsuits and explicit condition of this. It’s clear that they want them to go away. And it’s clear they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to intimidate epic as much as they possibly can. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t like epic could release new version and say, okay, we’re in compliance now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John See you in court.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but we know epic. I think the reason why they didn’t just file

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lawsuit, you know, without changing their app, they didn’t just file a lawsuit saying, you should change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your policies and then keep their app compliant. Instead, they intentionally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco provoked the rule so that their app would be kicked out of the store so that they could be damaged

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so they could have standing to to sue. I’m not a lawyer, so forgive, you know, I’m going to try to not get too far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into the legal side of this, I don’t know it, but I think their case is probably easier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make if they are more damaged. Like, if they can show that Apple had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much power that they got, you know, that they lost X millions of dollars a day

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or, you know, whatever with this one thing, that actually might help their case

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or it might help illustrate that Apple has too much power. Now, when I look at this move by Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this developer account threat, my first thought was, oh no, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lost their cool. If you’re fighting with somebody and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lose their cool, usually it’s good for you because if they lose their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cool, they will start making moves that are maybe hastily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thought out, that are maybe, you know, going to hurt them or can be used against them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco later. And so in this case, It looks like Apple lost their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cool with this and made a threat that was really big and really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over the top, I think. And I don’t think it was a good idea for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple to have made this threat. Because not only does it make them look even more like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco jerks, and honestly I think it kind of makes them look desperate, But it also shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the world, to all the world’s governments, to all the world’s consumer protection

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco agencies, to all the world’s congresses and legislators and to the courts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quite how much power Apple has. And it’s too much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s the whole thing right now with the legislation possibly or regulation around them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They do have too much power. They should be regulated. They should have an injunction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco granted against this action while this lawsuit’s pending. They have too much power, and they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco abusing it for anti-competitive purposes. And so for them to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have made this extra move, you know, taking it off the App Store, as you said earlier, that’s all they had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do. And then, you know, let the lawsuit proceed and let that work out over time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco To also then threaten this, I think, makes the case better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for everyone who’s fighting against them to say, no, look, they need to be regulated. They are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco acting as an abusive monopoly now. They are trying to actively shut down not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only competition, but legal challenges against them in ways that they probably shouldn’t be able to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think this actually hurts Apple’s case and makes it even more likely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they will be more heavily regulated down the road. That’s why I think this is a bad move,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I think they will come to regret this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, it was clear from day one that Epic doing this stuff, like, you know, they knew they were going to get kicked out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They weren’t surprised about what happened. And getting kicked out was part of their plan. Because like you said, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like legally speaking you need to do that. Because you can say, here’s how we would experience harm. But you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a stronger case. You can say, here’s how we did experience harm. It’s not a hypothetical anymore. It’s a literal thing. Because if you argue in court,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if we did this, then Apple would do that. And Apple could say, how do you know we would do that? We do weird things all the time. You have no idea what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we would do. It’s like, well, here’s what you actually did. The downside for Epic, especially with what I, you know, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re right about this thing still being in the store with a 20% option is, is now Apple can show damages too. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they can say for the last year that this, this has been, you know, in court,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Epic has been on the store, not paying us our 30%, which they should be as part of the agreement. So we’ve continued

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to allow users to download their app and here’s how much money we lost from in V-Bucks, right? You know, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple has, can cite damages as well. Not again, not just a hypothetical where Apple could say, well, if we let people do that, they wouldn’t give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John us a 30% and say, Actually, they didn’t let us give her a 30%. And we were nice and didn’t kick it off the store because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we didn’t want to anger our users but here’s how many millions of dollars we lost, right? So it’s double-edged sword there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But for sure, having all of these bad things happen, in all cases, like they did with Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too. They went on Google, they got kicked out of the store, they sued Google, they’re gonna cite the fact they were kicked out of the store. Like it’s, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, it’s a clear strategy, it just, it’s a little bit tricky. Something people have discussed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on and off about this. Uh, epic is complaining about all the stuff with the app store. They take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too big a cut. They have too much control, yada, yada. Lots of people say, well, epic and unreal and all that stuff. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John participate in the game console world as well. And the game console world is essentially exactly like the app store.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can’t release something for the Xbox or the PlayStation without going through Sony. Sony

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decides what goes in the platform. Sony’s rules about qualifying your game for the PlayStation are way more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John draconian than apples like, you know, it’s not. a reason the app store has, you know, hundreds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of thousands of millions of apps and PlayStation does not have millions of games,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Sony tightly controls their their their story. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back in the day, it wasn’t an app store was like literal plastic discs. But these days, this digital version of all these games and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can also buy plastic discs. And that’s a whole discussion for the time. But anyway, game consoles are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, very much like this. And the game console vendors to platforms take a big cut.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John According to Apple’s research in that paper they put out, the cut is actually similar to the app store, 30% ish, depending on,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, all sorts of deals or whatever. So why isn’t Epic suing Microsoft?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why aren’t they suing Sony? Like you, you know, you’re, why aren’t you suing them? They’re doing exactly the same thing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you, right? They take a percent, the same big chunk out of your thing. They don’t let you do all the stuff you want to do. They don’t let Epic have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its own, you know, game store inside PlayStation. Like every single thing they’re saying about Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the same situation. Why aren’t you suing them? Right. And I think before we get to antitrust,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which I think, you know, Marco has already weighed in on and I’ve mostly not been weighing in on yet because I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s so much talk about before even considering antitrust, you know, getting back to my argument from last week,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, the reason that Epic is not suing Sony and Microsoft,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s, it’s the same, it’s the same root problem that Apple has, right? The platform owners,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, Sony, Microsoft, their job is to try to create that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John win-win-win situation where developers, users, and the platform owner all succeed together.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you may look at it and say, well, why is Epic mad at Apple and not mad at Sony?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s the job of the platform owner, to make sure that people aren’t so mad that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sue them. And so the simple explanation is that despite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John epic having butted head heads with console makers at various times, in fact, having very similar sort of head butting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arguments about internal purchases and selling inside and outside store like these things have played out in the console

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world. In fact, sometimes specifically with epic many times, the game

⏹️ ▶️ ^John console platforms have better manage their relationship, this little triangle relationship between users,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developers and the platform. They’ve managed it better enough better enough, not like their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developers aren’t mad at them sometimes not like users aren’t mad at them sometimes, but they’ve managed it better enough that they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the situation, right? It’s not that the rules are different is that the people who are the platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^John owners have better than Apple been able to say, it’s our job to make sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people don’t get so pissed that they sue us, right? And that sort of relationship, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you want to pin it down to like, well, what have they done that’s better, right? Game console makers understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gaming and the gaming market better than Apple does in many ways and one of those ways is that they understand it’s a lot it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an entertainment industry right and it works more like you know making movies and tv shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where those platforms actively cultivate talent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and participate in this win-win scenario where they will help pay for the development of a flagship

⏹️ ▶️ ^John game for a timed exclusivity right they will recruit talent they will invest in studios

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that make games they will help you market your game they will sell branded versions of your console

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are like, you know, Gears of War branded, right? All this relationship between Sony and developers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is why developers hate Sony less than Apple, or why Epic does anyway, right? Because Sony

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is there saying, here’s a bucket of cash, we’ll dump over your head. You know, or Microsoft says,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, develop Gears of War, here’s millions of dollars to develop it, keep it on our platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only, we’ll make a special Xbox that’s Gears of War branded and we’ll sell it in the store with Gears

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of War. And Epic is like, yes, We like you. This is good. And Apple’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put your app on our store, give us 30% and $99 a year. Like it’s a different, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that type of relationship. Like consoles have first party games, consoles have timed, platform exclusives

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mostly. I’m not saying that Apple has to do that. I’m not saying just about games or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All I’m saying is that the game console makers have better managed their relationships. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s what Apple is doing wrong. They’re not making sure everybody is happy. Many things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spin out of that. Once the war starts, once the shooting starts, it just gets worse and worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And like Marco said, losing your cool is not good. I wish I could remember this specific example. There’s actually a specific example of Epic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John intentionally going against the rules and butting heads with one of these console makers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they settled it more quietly and more amicably than Apple has done

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so far. I mean, this isn’t over yet, right? But I’m saying like, you’re always gonna have flare-ups and the big players

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like Epic who are cranky are always gonna butt heads with you. You’ve got to manage that, right? You know, at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John end of my art of the possible thing. Do you wanna be right or do you wanna be happy? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do you wanna just be like, well, we’re just sticking to our principles and then get sued and have this giant disaster? Or are you gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say like, even though I think I’m right, let’s get back to the part where we all win. Let’s get back to the part where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we at least find an acceptable compromise because we get an advantage from you being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on our platform and you get an advantage from being on our platform and our customers want your game, so let’s facilitate. You gotta

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get back to that win And that’s essentially, you know, it’s not as if that what Apple is doing is, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s a separate argument to be like, is Apple, is it more important or worse for Apple to be doing it versus a game console

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever? And again, I’ll say that for later. But just bottom line, the game

⏹️ ▶️ ^John console makers have have historically done a better job of managing their relationships. And I feel like Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John needs to go to a corporate relationship counselor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was just epic is on the couch. How do you feel when

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} when Apple tells

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} you they’re going to terminate your gas?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like feel bad. I feel like Apple doesn’t appreciate me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, tell Epic how you appreciate it. I don’t know. This could be a whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco skit. I can’t do it on the fly. Yeah, and this is the kind of thing that Apple is historically not good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at. Like Apple dealing with other companies in general, it’s not very good at,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco especially when the negotiations are actually negotiations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and compromises on both sides, as opposed to Apple just being able to dictate things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s the way Apple likes it. They’re real happy with those relationships.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, right. When it comes to Apple having to work with companies where they don’t have all the power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the discussion, they’re historically quite bad at that, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And by the way, that is that scenario happens all the time in the app store when it’s Apple versus an individual

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developer. Apple tends to find a way to definitely handle those conflicts because they have all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the power. And so they’re not usually super jerky about it, at least not intentionally. Sometimes, again, Charlie Monroe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidentally jerky, right. But in general, in these scenarios where it’s a single lone developer versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John giant Apple, Apple finds a way to get past them. We’ve talked about a million of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app store things over the years, like, oh, some developer had a thing with Apple. But because Apple has literally 100%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the power in every possible way, they get resolved, and we move on, because Apple essentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just runs you over, right? You comply, or you go away, but either way it’s solved. But when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not one dinky little developer and instead another billion-dollar corporation, Apple doesn’t know how to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its words and talk about its feelings, then we hit a pier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, my word. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know. It’s tough because on the surface, I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see why Apple is acting the way it is. I completely disagree with their course of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey action, but I can understand it at a surface level. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Epic did something that is expressly forbidden. You know, they, they,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not only did they do this like run around where they downloaded this update directly into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app, which I know for games, that’s sort of kind of allowed, but it seems like the way they did it probably wasn’t allowed, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey beyond that, they had this third party, you know, payment system that is expressly not allowed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it seems like there should be a consequence for that. I mean, that’s seems pretty straightforward. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then they escalated by suing Apple. Well, you know what, you right back. You don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know how you’re not allowed in the store anymore. Again, like on the surface, this, I can understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how these, this seems like a reasonable series of actions. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I just, I feel like nobody at Apple has taken a step back and said, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as, as we said last time, are we the baddies? Nobody has said, is this really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey appropriate because we are not the scrappy upstarts anymore and I’m not the first person to say that in the last couple of weeks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I won’t be the last but so much of Apple appears

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from the outside to be thinking of themselves as the beleaguered upstart and they’re not. They are IBM now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and if you want to enjoy the spoils of being IBM,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then you need to act like a grown-up and Apple is not acting like a grown-up right now. And it’s just, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey crummy. And you know, the other thing about it is, and this is what I was alluding to earlier, like so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of this is intertwined with so many ongoing kerfuffles that Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey involved with if not directly started. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why did Epic decide to do this end around and try to take money directly?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, did they do that because they want a direct relationship with the customer? Well, maybe, but I don’t think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. Did they do that because they wanted to make it easier on the customer? Well, certainly not because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in-app purchase is unequivocally easier on the consumer. It may not be easier on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the developer, but it’s easier on the consumer. It’s not easy on the consumer’s pocketbook. Fair, fair.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s a good point. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} easier-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it was saying that more than half of the customers picked the cheaper option. I’m like, really? It was only slightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more than half? I thought 100% of the customers, maybe they were suspicious because they’re like, wait a second,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this must be some kind of scam, but yeah, customers want it to be cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah, absolutely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so why did the Epic do it? Well, I mean, obviously, they wanted money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they wanted more money. But I think that in a large, to a large degree,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Epic, as many other people have said, this 30% is just too darn much, the rent is too dang high.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And, and, and I don’t think that’s an unreasonable perspective.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And, and, and then like the App App Store like this is another different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey topic like is the App Store and app review reasonable today?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, actually, before you get to that, the 30% 30% being too darn high again, consoles also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John charge 30%. It’s you have to add a solid qualifier. It’s too high for what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Epic feels like it’s getting for its money. That’s you know, that’s the difference. Why aren’t they made at Microsoft?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re paying Microsoft 30%. Why? How are they happy with that? It’s because I guess they feel like they’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John value for their money. Again, maybe they’re going to do a branded console, maybe they’re going to help them with marketing, maybe they’re going to advertise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their game in their marketing materials, maybe they have a close relationship about exclusive future games, like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John corporate relationship management, right? That’s, that’s what the console makers are doing better than Apple. So when we say 30% is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too high, and someone says, Oh, Microsoft charges 30%. How’s that different? Microsoft is managing the relationship better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s it’s more than just that 30% number. Clearly, epic thinks for this 30%.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A we’re not getting enough value and B there’s extra pains in our ass. Like, you know, dealing with Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is worse than dealing with Microsoft. Even though it is, you know, harder to get something onto

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the consoles than it is into the App Store, as far as Epic’s concerned, at the level that it plays,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it has less of a problem, not no problem, because again, I think that Epic is super mad at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John console makers too, but so far, not as mad as they are at Apple. And so, yeah, you just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. If you are a platform and you’re dealing with an Epic and Epic is important to you and they have Fortnite, and it’s a popular game,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John manage that relationship better. So 30% is too high

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the value that you think you’re getting. Like, that’s the qualifier on everything in any sort of relationship. Are we all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay enough with the terms not to literally go to war? And so far, the answer with Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no, we’re not okay. And the other console makers like, for now, we’re okay enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. And, and the other thing that got me thinking is I was talking to a friend of mine, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mostly about the idea of like side loading. So, you know, should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it be possible for an iPhone to install an app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that somebody downloads over the internet? So, yes, you can side load now with like a developer certificate, and if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you sort of kind of know what you’re doing. You can even side load using what is it, Alt Store or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That again is fiddly and complicated, but you can do it. But should side

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey loading be allowed? And at first, my initial reaction was, hell yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because this is no longer just a phone. This is your primary computing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey device. Even for some people like myself, I spend more time in front of a computer than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey most people, like a traditional computer. But nevertheless, in so so many ways, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey say my iPhone is my primary computer. And this is getting into the whole, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is the iPhone a console, which has floated around many of our friends’ podcasts, but particularly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Dithering recently. And whether or not you consider the iPhone a console, I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think that the iPhone is, for many people, their primary computing device. And if it’s their primary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey computing device, shouldn’t they be able to put whatever software they want on it? And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a very slippery slope. And at first, I would say yes, and And then I thought about it and I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think that’ll, no, I don’t think so actually. So then that brings up this topic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of curation, which is what my friend brought up. Like the app store is curated. Now you can take curated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to mean only the best. You can take curated to mean not actively hostile. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey take curated to mean, well, it may be garbage, but at least it doesn’t steal your data and crash.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, maybe it’s not actively hostile in that it doesn’t steal your data, but it also doesn’t crash. so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ways to, to, to, to take curated. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that that’s okay. And I think that most Apple customers want a more curated experience, however

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you define curated, but we are how many years in the iPhone 13 or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like that? It was 2007, wasn’t it? Yep. Okay. So we’re 13 years into the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at this juncture. I feel like it is reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to let consumers make more choices for themselves. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that we really need Big Brother Apple to be running interference for us quite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as much as they have been. Now I wouldn’t necessarily take that all the way to allowing side loading,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but for example, what was it, the Xbox thing from last week? I already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey forgot the name of it, Xbox Live or something like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} that. cloud. Thank you. X

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cloud. Yep. Yep. X cloud and stadium.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the actual name. That was the code name. I still don’t know the real name. Fair enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, whatever, you know, the streaming gaming services or even like an emulator, like take a take a Nintendo emulator.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like one of the things that Apple said is well, hold on. We can’t we can’t verify that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all these games are not trash. So no, you can’t have that in the app store. Uh huh. Why?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like, let the consumer decide.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, because they couldn’t verify that this game is gonna use an app purchase. That’s that’s the real

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Well, that’s, yeah, you’re right. You’re probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right. We can’t review all these games to comply with this extremely anti-competitive, problematic rule that we have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Right. No, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right. And so at this point, 13 years on, I mean, the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is almost old enough to get a learner’s permit in most American states. Thirteen years on,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that customers understand what the iPhone is about, and the iPad too, I’m picking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the iPhone, but you know, what iOS is about. And I feel like we should be allowed a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey little more choice. And I don’t think that we’re the scared little children

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the corner wondering how to use this new computing platform. Again, I don’t think side-loading

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is the answer, but I feel like there should be a relaxation of what is allowed on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey App Store. And that doesn’t necessarily explicitly relate to Epic, but I think that that’s one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of these boiling points that I’m seeing lately is that people are saying, we want more choice and Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey saying, no. And that’s crummy and I don’t like it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, because I think the role of keeping users

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco safe. Which is very important. Yes, I like that a lot. And I actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I said this last week too, I actually don’t want side loading or alternative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app stores. That’s not what I would hope for as an outcome here. I’m totally fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco having the app store continue to be the only way to get apps. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as a slightly further step from that, I would be okay with side-loading

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco long before I’d be okay with alternative app stores, because the OS has technical limitations.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I talked about this on Under the Radar this week. The OS has technical limitations where an app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco currently cannot install another app. And if that were still allowed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if apps could be installed through enterprise distribution, basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco through that kind of like managed side loading procedure. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they couldn’t themselves then install other apps so you could have apps that were distributed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on websites but you couldn’t have good alternative app stores unless they would just be like giant web views or something. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’d be fine with that too. But ultimately, I actually don’t really think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco either side loading or alternative app stores are incredibly necessary or compelling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on iOS. However, the App Store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, overstates its value. Apple overstates the App Store’s value in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco terms of curation and user safety. There’s lots of apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the App Store, I would say the majority of apps in the App Store, that are total garbage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s lots of apps in the App Store that steal your personal information in ways that you don’t necessarily think or expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or are fully disclosed on, many of them by Facebook. lots of apps in the App

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Store that do crash or that don’t work as expected or that don’t work as advertised

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or they don’t provide all the evidence functionality because AppReview is neither perfect nor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thorough nor consistent. The App Store is not actually providing a huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco degree of safety, consumer protection, stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Most of the safety and consumer protection come from the operating system. They come from the the technological

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco limitations that it isn’t that apps, you know, aren’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, reading each other’s files and installing persistent demons behind the scenes that you can’t uninstall.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They aren’t avoiding that because App Store policy wouldn’t let them. They don’t do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they can’t on iOS because the OS blocks that kind of behavior. Like, it is literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco impossible to do the kind of things in iOS unless you found some kind of security exploit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I know the point you’re getting at and it’s mostly true but like the thing is is like, practically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speaking, if you were able to very easily get people to download applications that Apple never looked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at, the way it would be damaging is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those are the applications that would use private APIs to find the exploit to do the thing. You know what I mean? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not to say that you can’t get something with an exploit through the App Store, because if you find a really good exploit, you might not have to use private

⏹️ ▶️ ^John APIs. You might not have to do anything that they can detect, right? But once you have that side channel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s way easier once you find an exploit to say, now we’re home free. So the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS is supposed to stop all of those things. But if you find an exploit, and especially I feel like unfettered

⏹️ ▶️ ^John access to private APIs and to be able to poke around like that, that’s how you find a hole in the sandbox more easily. In fact,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many of the jailbreaks require some kind of in like that where you can get arbitrary code execution so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can get to private API. So all I’m saying is it makes it more challenging for the technical limitations

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just described to hold. Because obviously they’re not foolproof. And app review

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is even app review. It’s not full proof, but app review is one more stage where Apple can say, OK, are they trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to bypass our technical limitations? Let’s use our tools to detect it. Without that extra step, you’re just relying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on technical barriers. And they’re never perfect. Like exploits are found all the time, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is not a completely black and white situation. But certainly, most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the benefit that we, like you were saying, most of the benefit that we enjoy is from the technical barriers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not from the quote unquote curation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Sure, but many of those same tools are running through the notarization service. So like when you submit your binary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for notarization, it’s scanning it for a lot of those same kinds of things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, but if you had a side channel, you wouldn’t have to notarize it either, right? Like the whole point of a side channel is I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John somehow distribute this app to users and Apple never sees any part of it. I won’t notarize it, you know, maybe it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use developer ID.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think that’s necessarily a given. I mean, they could have it work the same way that, you know, enterprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco distribution works and well

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know and resolution I guess are those binaries ever going through Apple servers well anyway it could be like on the Mac where on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Mac like now you know with modern OS is like you you really have to jump through hoops to run something that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not developer ID signed and I think soon or already notarized and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so they could do the same thing on iOS for like they would have to be notarized binaries and everything so like some of that attack area

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could be reduced I mean there are ways to get around that like you can you know construct the selector

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from strings like there’s all sorts like you know ways that you can get around there their static analysis

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} tools.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the thing is, companies like Epic, I think the reason Epic wants to relax the rules is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you just relax the rules a little bit, Epic would find a way to essentially bootstrap their entire store. All they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need is a tiny little corner, like it’s like, hey, go to our website and click this link and it will use some weird exploit to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get their foot in the door to bootstrap the process, which will pull down, you know, like you can, it doesn’t take much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is the thing with security flaws. Once you can get that little thin end of the wedge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in, And you see it from the easy jailbreak stores and the ways they try to make enterprise certs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less annoying. If you can get that in there. And it’s worthwhile for a company the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John size of Epic to play that whack-a-mole game with Apple. We’ll use this weird exploit to get the thin edge of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wedge in to be able to bootstrap our store install process. And then once we get that, we’re off to the races.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then we won’t require anything to be notarized. Or maybe we’ll notarize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it behind the scenes and make an ICUI for it. it’s worthwhile to them monetarily speaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to go through heroic measures to make it as, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as less annoying as they possibly can than all the things that Apple throws up, right? So it’s still,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, and I don’t think Apple wants to engage in that war, right? You know, it’s more cut and dry when it’s like there’s the App

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Store and nothing, right, you know, so, it’s, that’s why every time we talk about side loading, it becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, ah, mm, eh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from both perspectives, it’s, it seems like it can’t be as good from a user’s perspective,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then from Apple’s perspective, if they open that door even a little bit, it’s a new war you’re waging

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a new front. Now all of a sudden we allowed this, but now we have to find everybody who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can find the little path that we’ve allowed and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use that to bootstrap their entire universe that is filled with Bitcoin mining or God knows what.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, well, again, this is why I’m not pushing for side-loading or alternative app stores, really.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think the world would end if we had that, but that’s not my ideal outcome. My ideal outcome is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco App Store policies get slightly relaxed in the most problematic areas. I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would not want Apple to totally lose control of distribution and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco software quality on iOS. They’ve already lost a lot of it just by size.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The value of the App Store from any kind of store perspective, like you were mentioning earlier about game consoles

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you have things like cooperative marketing efforts between in the platform vendor and the apps and everything, or the games

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything. And here, you know, you don’t, the App Store does not do much for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any apps marketing anymore. There are way too many apps. Not a lot of people are just casually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco browsing the App Store as a thing that you do every day. Like, you know, like when the phone was new, you would just kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco casually browse the App Store because you had no apps. It was like a fun thing to just browse around.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Hey, let’s install whatever’s here. This looks nice. I’m going on a plane. Let me go to the games page and see what games

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are new and install some games. These days, it’s a much more mature system with a billion apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the store. The marketing value is nearly nothing. Even the apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that get featured, they have less traffic going to them than they used to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because it’s just, again, people aren’t doing that in the same way that they used to anymore. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the app store design doesn’t help either. It’s very low information density. You have very few apps per page, et cetera. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all these things combined to be like, this is providing very little marketing benefit. The hosting benefit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is something that exists, but it’s something that you could host yourself for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pennies or dollars per month. It’s not significant that they’re offering that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What the App Store mainly is offering here is that app review process and the payment integration for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the upfront purchasing and everything, and the ease of the payment integration. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what they’re offering. And so anybody who says 30% is not worth it for that, I agree

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with. It’s not worth it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for Apple to be in a position where they can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dictate, we are going to take 30% of all your money that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goes through this platform, was a totally reasonable-ish,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean it was never incredibly great, but a reasonable-ish position to take when they were small. And the argument I made last week

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is, like what Casey was saying earlier, This is now a major computing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco platform. This is a huge part of lots of people’s lives in really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco critical ways. Like imagine, I imagine a couple of scenarios here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to help make this point a little better. A, imagine if Windows PCs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Macs were this way from the start. Imagine if all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco PC and Mac software for the entire history of those platforms

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Microsoft and Apple respectively were controlling everything that could possibly ever get written on them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and forcing everyone to put 30% of all commerce through them. Imagine if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Google Chrome and Apple Safari and every browser, imagine if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco web browsers required that all web commerce had to pay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them that happened through their browser or they would make their sites unbrowsable in their browser.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Imagine now you might say, oh well you know Apple built this whole system on mobile. Okay that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interesting. Apple is not the only company that has contributed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco massive critical infrastructure on mobile. I would argue that if Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco deserves 30% of all transactions that happen on phones, so does your carrier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What if AT&T all of a sudden decided, you know what we’re going to demand 30% of all transactions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that happen through our network or you have to remove your phone for an hour like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ISPs broadband cellular component makers network providers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like what if Cisco decides you know what all this traffic is routing through our switches we built this infrastructure we deserve 30%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of all money that goes through it it’s it’s a ludicrous argument and you can start to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how if any company really did this you know if for a large portion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the economy it would crush that economy and it would severely restricted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would cause lots of problems and everybody would probably be better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off the entire economy would probably be better off if those gatekeepers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did not do that after things get to a certain scale and you look at game consoles

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that game consoles are fundamentally different they just are they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco general purpose computers they serve a significant part of an economy but not like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a broad part. They serve a narrow part in certain specialized ways and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco General-purpose computers, PCs, Macs, and yes, mobile phones, are a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much more broad tool, much more essential to everyday life. In the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way that like you know certain services like you know your your water and electric supply are regulated as essential services.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s how these computing devices are. They are essential And it makes no more sense that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple deserves 30% of everything that goes to their platform and can dictate everybody that goes on and off of it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than if AT&T or Comcast or Cisco or like so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of those other things, if they would do the same thing. No one here deserves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to lock up an entire market in a way that has this much impact on the economy and has massive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anti-competitive forces at play as well. We’re beyond that level of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco companies can do whatever they want because it’s their company. Again, once things get to a certain size, they go beyond that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is the monopolist’s style and role and duty to always say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we built this, we put all this money into it, we deserve to retain our control. They always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say that. Standard Oil, I’m sure, said that. The railroads back in the day,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m sure they said that too. That is their job to play that card and to try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to drum up public opinion and the court’s opinion to say, We built this and we deserve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to run it however we want. But that’s not how society works. Like capitalism in its

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco purest sense doesn’t work. You need like exceptions and regulations that are part

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the system to keep it healthy and to keep the economy from being locked up and having these giant monopolies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco form and kind of crush everything under them. And this is that size now. This is that kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of thing. And in the same way that AT&T shouldn’t be able to say, we are now going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just take 30% of all your money that goes through our network, Apple is now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too big for that. And their platform needs to be regulated to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco preserve this entire section of our economy, of our society,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of everyday consumer and business usage of their platforms. They need regulation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They are too big to have the control that they have and the way they exercise their power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s too big and too important for that now. and the needs of society are now above that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve still been studiously avoiding the antitrust stuff and I don’t want to delve into it this late stage in this episode, but I will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leave it in the topic list because I’ll give my take on antitrust stuff maybe next episode. But I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do want to save myself from another flurry of emails, assuming there’s no bugs outside my window.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} First,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the name of the xCloud thing, Project xCloud was their streaming gaming thing, is just going to be part of Xbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Game Pass, which is their subscription gaming service. It’ll be part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Second item, I mentioned Microsoft and Gears of War branded Xbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all that other stuff. Microsoft actually bought Gears of War a couple years back,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bought the entire franchise, right? That, I imagine, is another example of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John corporate relationship management. It’s not like Microsoft stole it from Epic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They bought it with lots and lots of money, right? That’s, you know, we’ll make a game, It’ll be exclusive for your platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then, oh, well, actually, we’d like to make a new franchise. And Microsoft’s like, well, we kind of like Unreal. What’s come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to agreement? Here’s a giant bucket of money. Can we have, or not Unreal, can we have Gears of War? Here you go, here’s Gears of War,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? That’s better corporate relationship management and talent retention than Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is doing. And somebody in the chat room earlier said that, can’t believe he’s listening to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple fans arguing against the walled garden. Why don’t you just use Android, if that’s your argument? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think any of us are arguing against the walled garden. We’re just saying we’d like the garden to be better tended,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Or we’d like the rules of the garden to be different. In fact, you know, we just got done talking about side loading.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’re not arguing against the walled garden. It’s not a walled garden anymore. It’s more of like a walled prison. It’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not fun to be in here. We’re not like frolicking through the flowers and sitting on a bench and appreciating nature. Some people are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John angry, right? It doesn’t mean the concept of a walled garden or a curated space is bad. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John game consoles. Game consoles are the most walled garden. They’re very, extremely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John closed walls, very tight control. And I like game consoles for those reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the platform owners who succeed learn how to cultivate with both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John money and encouragement and marketing and everything you, every tool they can possibly imagine, talent that makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John creative things. That’s part of, we talked about this with Apple arcade. Apple kind of, sort of got a a tiny bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a clue of like, hmm, maybe we should give people money to make good games

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for our platform. But the scale they’re doing with Apple Arcade is nothing compared

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} to the scale

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the console makers do it. Like console makers, how much money does Sony pay to Naughty Dog

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to put The Last of Us exclusively on that platform? Like that bucket of money could pay for all of Apple Arcade 75 times over.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now Apple might say they’re being savvy and saying we’re not putting all our money into these big buckets, but there’s a reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when everyone says AAA games, most people don’t think of phones or iPads, even though there are some really great games for phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and iPads. You know, I still think Apple doesn’t quite understand. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting back to walled gardens, like I personally love walled gardens that are beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gardens. They have walls, but the beauty of the garden is worth it enough for me to pay the admission, to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the console, to sit down and play the set of games that Sony has decided are allowed to be on their platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And given the amount of time I have, I appreciate the fact that of all the games on the platform, I could actually scroll through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the list of all of them, and there’s a small enough number, and the best ones are really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really good. That’s why I keep buying Sony consoles, right? So, like I said, I don’t wanna get into my personal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take on the anti-trust stuff now, because we have so much Ask ATP that I think I wanna get to, but I wanted to address those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John small items just so we get slightly less feedback.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by the way, if you already tweeted at me before you got to this point in the show, that happens. can you do?

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askatp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And I’d like to take a very, very brief detour, and I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like to thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Brendan. Us? Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, right? I’d like to thank Brendan Riel, who put together AskATP.fm,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is a search engine for Ask ATP questions and answers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And this, I think, was born from me saying, why is it that we’re asked how to move things between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey computers 85 times a year. And so Brendan took it upon himself to put this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey together and it is stupendous. So thank you Brendan for doing that. That is extremely cool and I’m sure took

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey forever.

#askatp: Identifying monitors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on, Nathaniel Cohen writes, I have a three external monitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and laptop screen setup. Two of those monitors are identical with the same make and model.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The OS therefore seems unable to reliably identify them. Their identities frequently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey become swapped and I usually have a once per day fun time with the Mac OS monitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey arrangement slash resolution configurator. This functionality for configuring monitors as exposed by the OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is horrendous. The arrangement tab does not identify any of the monitors, even when you click and drag to adjust their position,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you have no idea which monitor you’re affecting. Similarly, the UI for display configuration is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey needlessly spread out across N windows if you have N monitors, and it’s impossible to tell if two monitors have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the same make and model, which window corresponds to which monitor. I guess there was a question

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey here. My question is more of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco comment. Right. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I put this in there. I mean, the question is probably like, don’t you think this is bad? So a few-

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Thoughts? This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} reason I put- That’s the reason I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put this in there. So first of all, it’s been so long since I used multiple monitors that I actually had to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, connect to my external monitor, my external monitor surrogate, which is my sidecar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad, to confirm this. And I don’t, I’m too old to remember how it used to be, but I double checked,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and of course now I forgot again. But anyway, and Mac OS has pretty much always had a way to do exactly one of the things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he’s asking for, which is, what monitor is this? In the arrange panel, where it shows you little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John squares or rectangles, each one represents your monitor. If you have one big monitor and one small monitor, it’s easy to tell which is which.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} The big rectangle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the big monitor and the small rectangle is the small monitor. But what if you have monitors that are exactly the same size?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How do you tell which is which? If you just click and hold on the little rectangle, it will put a red border

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around the monitor that you are clicking and holding on. You’ll click and hold in the little preference pane on a little tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John representation of your monitor, but then that actual monitor will get a giant red outline around it, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in real life if you look at it. So anyway, that feature does exist. It’s not obvious that it’s there, but you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John identify the monitors in that way. Right, so then you can tell which one you’re rearranging. The other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of this though, has a tie into one of my Switch Glass War stories, which I’m not gonna have time to go into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entirely here, but I will give the short version of it, which is when you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John monitors connected to your computer, like, and actually before I get to that, the thing about the windows being spread

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out, this is the thing that Mac OS does and has always done, I think, for adjusting monitors. If you try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to adjust the settings on the monitor, you have system preferences open and you got the monitor preference pane.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And when you pull up the monitor’s preference pane, yeah, it’s whatever your main window is that has system preferences

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it will show the monitor’s thing. But then on every other monitor, you’ll also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see a little miniature monitor’s preference pane that has the settings that apply to that monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if you wanna change the resolution of a particular monitor, you bring your mouse cursor to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that monitor where there is a window sitting there says pick one of these resolutions, pick this color depth, whatever, pick this rotation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing and the window in that monitor applies to that monitor. Right? That’s a system that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they use for a long time. It’s a little bit easier than having to do like, okay, well first I click the little representation of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my monitor and then now I know all my future changes apply to that monitor. Like it’s better when they,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s better when every single monitor has dead center on it, a window and that window

⏹️ ▶️ ^John controls the monitor that it’s on. In fact, I like that feature so much that when I made switch glass,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the features I wanted to have is that the little switchy palette thingy you get one of those on each

⏹️ ▶️ ^John monitor and if you want to adjust the settings I made one preference window or I tried to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do this I muddled a little bit anyway I made a preference window and when you open preferences you get one preference window

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on every single monitor and if you want to adjust the settings of the little palette on that monitor you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use the preference window that’s on that monitor right so I use the same approach which most people maybe aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John familiar with or that seems weird but to me it seems very a fairly clean way to do it I I modeled it because I put global

⏹️ ▶️ ^John settings at the bottom but then I labeled them global settings. Anyway, it’s whatever it is. Yeah, anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this problem of like, okay, like that’s the app that I wanted to make in Switch Class. Seems easy, like I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just make, you know, I’ll walk through the list of monitors and I’ll put a little, you know, on first launch, I’ll put a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John palette on every single monitor. And then when people make, you know, if pick preferences,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ll change the settings. And then when they change the settings, I’ll save them. But I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to save the settings for each monitor. Like, all right, I made this palette really big in the upper right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I gotta say, okay, really big in the upper right applies to this monitor. Well, what is this monitor?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I need some way to identify monitors, just like Mac OS, you know, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John poor Nathaniel needs some way to identify monitors. So I’m gonna save this state. I’m gonna save somehow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this monitor. And I thought foolishly, this would be an easy thing to do. There’s probably some API you call that just gives

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you some kind of identifier for the monitor that’s unique to that monitor, and you just save it. But,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, nothing in software development is ever that easy, especially in this weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John edge case areas that I’m wandering in macOS, right? Turns out there is no really good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way to do that. There’s a bunch of ways that look super tempting. One of them is like a monitor ID or display ID

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you get. And the very first thing I did is that, oh, display ID, there you go, that’s easy. And it’s like some big number.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you save that number, when you launch it again, Uh, and you say, and you look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up the, just go through all the displays, you’ll find the one with the same ID and it matches up. I’m like, this is great. I’m like, ah, but what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if this number changes every time you reboot? So I rebooted my computer number stayed the same. I’m like, well, problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John solved. This is like day one. Um, what a great developer I am. I’ve just solved this problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Uh, no, that’s a trap. Uh, so I don’t, I forget what it is. Like Apple doesn’t promise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that this thing does what it does, but it’s called like ID or something. And it, and practically speaking, it works. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, I figured I was done. And then I started getting weird bug reports from people. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it turns out if you have a Mac laptop with a discrete and an integrated GPU, when it switches

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the discrete to the integrated GPU, that number changes. And the bug reports

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was getting for this were mind bending, because I was like, A, this never happens for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And B, what in the world are you talking about? Like, what do you mean? Like, when I do, because again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they would do something unknowingly that triggered the use of the discrete GPU. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they did that, and then they launched the app, like it would pull the settings from the discrete GPU number, because the numbers were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stable, but they were different numbers for discrete and integrated. It took me so long to figure that out. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that doesn’t work. So I need some other way to identify it. There’s a bunch of info you can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using weird-ass C APIs that tell you the vendor, the make, the model

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number, and the serial number. I’m like, I’m home free, because even if you have the exact same monitor, they’re not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have the same serial number, right? All right, crack developers, what was the problem with this API?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Private? No, I mean, this is Mac, I can do whatever the hell I want. No, not private.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know. Maybe you need, Casey should know, it’s your computer engineer. Hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sucks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy some random ass monitor and you call these APIs. Oh, this one doesn’t return anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for serial number. This one doesn’t return anything for model number. This one doesn’t return anything for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vendor. Monitors, like, and in the APIs, they say, you can call

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this API, and it will return a number representing the vendor, or it will return FFFFFFF.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And monitors in the real world, and I need all three, I can’t just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do make and model, because again, if you have two identical monitors, which a lot of people have, I still can’t tell what monitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is. They’re both the same make and model. But they return nothing for anything. And then the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John internal display, sometimes returns weird stuff because the internal display is made by weird different manufacturers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So that little API is out the window. Can’t use that because hardware is like, I don’t have a serial number. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know what you’re talking about. Finally, what I settled on was there’s a color, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is it, color sync or some color space. There’s some API that does some crap that I don’t understand out of the covers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that gives me a number that is my best effort. It is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s stable across GPU switches, even on monitors that don’t return a serial number, returns a stable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John identifier. I honestly have no idea where it’s coming from. And I think it’s related to like color sync thing, but the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS does have some way to identify the monitor. I don’t think that is even a hundred percent reliable, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reliable enough that I no longer get these bug reports. All this long story is to say that the act of, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac OS, the act of identifying a monitor so that you know the next time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the computer breaks up, that’s the same monitor I saw before, is actually extremely difficult. And it would not surprise me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if the Herculean efforts that I went through to make sure this works in all weird scenarios

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not what the monitor arrangement handling of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac OS proper goes through. Because I can imagine Mac OS proper might use, for example, the make model and serial number

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and just say, well, of course, everything always returns a serial number, and then just not care about some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cheap knockoff monitor that doesn’t do that. Right? Or maybe the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John color sync thing or whatever it is that I’m using, one of the failure modes is in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nathaniel’s specific case with his specific monitors. So, I don’t have a good answer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for you, but I can tell you that this problem is not well solved in Mac OS. And it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John surprise me that you’re having these problems. And I would love, I mean, I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John follow this on a radar at some point or feedback or whatever, I would love for Apple to provide APIs that perform this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John function, because I think being Being able to identify the same monitor across

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boots is important. I kind of feel for Apple though because if you literally have an identical monitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that monitor just lies or just doesn’t tell you anything about itself and there’s another one right next

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it that does the exact same thing, how do you tell which monitor is? I mean, maybe someone under the cover is again

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the GPU identifier, but like on boot up when it senses these two monitors, like maybe you could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tell what port they’re connected to. I don’t, I don’t even know. Anyway, this is a hard problem. I’m sorry, Nathaniel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s one of my many miniature war stories about dealing with switch glass. And I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for all of us. Just have a single monitor, that’s the solution. Get a really, really big $5,000 monitor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s my advice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John excellent. Six if you want the stand. You know what? I’d actually forgotten about the stand until Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said that, so thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you. You’re welcome. But I recommend expensive products.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now let’s not forget. All right, Mike Milonazo, or perhaps Casey List, writes, As a part-time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey developer with no design skills, I struggle with finding ways to improve the look and overall design

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of my apps. I can’t afford to pay anyone to help at this point, so I’m looking for resources that I can learn from. I often look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at popular apps as well as other apps in the same space as my apps, but I feel like it’s one of those you don’t know what you don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey situations, where I might not recognize small details, buttons with a slight shadow, spacing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on different elements, et cetera. Do you know of any websites or YouTube channels that do app teardowns that could be a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way for me to hear experts give constructive feedback? Any other resources you can recommend a part-time developer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with little artistic sensibilities? Well, I’m all ears, gentlemen. What do you got?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I should have an answer to this, but the simple answer is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no, I don’t. I have gone into this process myself for the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reason. I too have been a developer with no design skills that couldn’t afford to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pay someone else for help. I have now moved into being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a developer with some design skills who doesn’t feel like paying people for help because I like doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything myself if I can and it has all sorts of benefits for things like speed and workflow and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything doing it that way. First of all, there’s no shame in this. Like there’s no shame in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my apps are kind of ugly and I don’t know how to help and I can’t afford a designer. Like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a very common place to be for developers. So there’s no shame in this, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, own it as Mike is, so that’s fine. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t be afraid to actually address this and call it out in public and be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco vulnerable in this way and solicit feedback from people who will give it. Also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are like just kind of certain general principles that you can start with.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One of the best is like you could actually read the Hig. I haven’t, but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could because it like when it comes to things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sizing of controls spacing a lot of design comes down to just following

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the platform standard and many of ios’s tools and and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know things like auto layout things like even the hell was that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s some kids. I just threw a rock at my window

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What seriously terminated his developer

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} again?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah It should be all right. They ran

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey away I was gonna say are they looking to like flirt with you or something is this like you know in late 90s early 2000s date movie

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unlikely go to the window. Maybe it’s some romance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Are they holding up a boombox perhaps Marco hasn’t seen it neither of I I just know the reference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think I’ve seen like bits and pieces like on TNT or something anyway auto layout Swift

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco UI you get a lot of this stuff for free of like following the standard spacing following

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco standard sizing etc so a lot of it is like if you if you don’t actively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mess with it it will be right and so that’s that’s that’s like one way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to kind of ensure that you have like a reasonable design is just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco follow things that are as standard as possible if you can one of the other major areas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of design becomes typography. And this goes to not only like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how you lay out your text, but where you lay it out in the UI, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco style of text you use for different elements, what sizing, what spacing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how you word things, how you capitalize and punctuate things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And all of the like the style of how to do that is all spelled out in various style guides

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all over the place. You know, Apple has style guides here and there. You can also just kind of look at what other apps do. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you’re writing your setting screen text or whatever, you can go and look and see like, what do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most other apps do for capitalization of this setting? Do they capitalize every word?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Do they capitalize only the first word? Stuff like that. Like, you can kind of look at other apps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is how I’ve learned most of my app design skill, if you can call it that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Taking cues from what do, what do Apple’s built-in apps do in this way? what and and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look at the really boring ones like mail like what like how how how do apples built-in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps like the settings app how do you how do they design this thing what size

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco icon do they use in this context what style of text and capitalization days in this context

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco etc that’s a lot of design right there and then as you get more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco comfortable with this when as you start to make things fancier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just kind of be careful like dip your toe in things slowly so for instance if you want to do something like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco add a custom font that’s a risky move you can do it well you can do it poorly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be careful go into it slowly like add like one font not seven

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s step one use it you know gently like dip your toe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in slowly don’t pick like a super extreme font with like tons of overt personality

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that that might be off-putting to people and stuff like that. As you’re sizing your text or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco picking colors or at least shades of gray for your text, don’t use a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of different shades or a bunch of different colors. Pick a small number of colors and a small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco number of sizes and a small number of styles. Stuff like that. So you end up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dipping your toe slowly into custom design rather than looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a ransom note from made of torn up magazines and so yeah but other than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I unfortunately I can’t actually recommend like specific

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco YouTube channels or books or websites to do this because not only do I not know of any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off the top of my head and I didn’t really read or watch any but also if you start asking designers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know you can go to like you know various designer websites or forums or have designers yell at you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on Twitter if you ask them what is the right way to do this or what’s the best way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do this or how do I make this better? They’re all going to give you different answers. They’re going to disagree with each other,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re going to be contradictory, many of them are going to be wrong, many of them are going to be bad, or many of them are going to actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work worse in the context of an app because designers aren’t all perfect. I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how many developers do you know who are perfect? I think I know zero.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you think about development as a practice it’s pretty much impossible to do it perfectly and you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ask for developers in a room how to do something you’re going to four very different answers and design is the same way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco designers don’t all agree on everything they’re not just one like monolithic block that they can give you like that the one true

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco answer they’re gonna have recommendations that are all over the map and some of them some of them are gonna be bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco designers some of them gonna be great designers and it’s kind of hard to tell if you don’t know what you’re getting ahead of time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so it’s actually really hard to involve other people in a in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a great way here Like no one person is going to tell you everything correctly and everything you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need to know. So it is worth developing this skill on your own. It is worth like developing a sensibility

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of at least like general guidelines of like here’s, I can make a pretty good version one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then if I get a lot of feedback to a certain point, then maybe I can adjust the screen or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco adjust this, you know, font or move this controller or if my users are not finding something or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they’re complaining about how something looks like maybe then adjust it. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco overall this is a worthwhile skill to develop, but it is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t unfortunately know of any good shortcuts to do it except try to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mimic what the system apps do as much as possible if you have any doubt a design choice.

#askatp: Design by programmer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll just make one modification to what Marco said in one edition Modification is I think you should read the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hague the Apple human interface guidelines Yeah, it’s not going to be super helpful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not gonna tell you exactly what to do, but there’s tons of text there And even if you disagree with it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s it has a rationale and you will find things in the Hague Especially if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not an experienced designer that you hadn’t even thought about that you hadn’t even thought this was a thing To make a decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it all even if you disagree with the decision that the Hague says or it seems weird or whatever you don’t agree with the rationale,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just knowing that this is a thing that you should think about and make a decision about is valuable. So I would absolutely read

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Hague. You know, not read it as the Bible, but read it just to sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get the lay of the land, you know, start learning what it is that you don’t know. And the addition I would say is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, find other developers to bounce things off of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ideally, they’d be more experienced developers, but even if it’s just a bunch of people who are at the same level

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of experience, having other people put their eyes on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you’re working on really helps. So I’ve been a Mac user since 1984. I know what Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John UIs should look like. When I was making my first Mac app, I could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tell it was wrong. If you have experience with the platform, you’re like, well, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a designer, but I’ve been using a Mac for years and this looks messed up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was very able to tell that I got a bunch of controls I’m laying out in a dialogue. It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look right to me, like it’s off. And I can even tell you what specifically was wrong with it. It feels heavy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on this side and this spacing feels too tight. It’s like, okay, well then what if you just make the spacing bigger? It’s like, no, it’s still wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I have a finely tuned sense of what is right and wrong from vast experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the platform. But what I didn’t have vast experience with is, say you’ve got this bucket full of controls. How

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do you lay them out in a way that doesn’t feel wrong? It’s real easy to do it when you just have a simple problem or like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the examples from the Hig. But what about when you’ve got your app with your stuff in it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and experienced Mac developers say, oh, I’ve been faced with that same bucket of controls and here’s how I dealt with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. I did it like this, I did it like that. And again, they’re not going to agree, but the way I essentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John workshopped like in my very first dinky little Mac app, the one tiny little preference window, I bounced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it off a bunch of vastly more experienced Mac developers and they also didn’t agree, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But we could all agree it was wrong and they had some good ideas about how to make it better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then I essentially took the idea that I like the best and modified it with my own taste, and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would bring it back again and say, what do you, I mean, I think Marco was in the channel, in case you were both in the channel when I was doing this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would relay out the dialogue and say, what do you think of this? And then five more opinions would chime in, and then I would, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do the same thing. Find the opinion that I agreed the most with, give it a try, and try it again, and iterate, and so on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so forth. That’s a great way to learn, and obviously maybe you’re not gonna have access to a Slack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John channel with like, people with decades of development experience, but surely you have access to some other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developers and law of averages mean that some of them will be more experienced or better designers than you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That combined with what Marco was saying, you know, you just gotta put in the time and do all those things and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think you’ll be fine. There’s no become a great designer in 21 weeks course that you’re gonna find on YouTube that’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do what just putting in the time and giving it a try and you know, doing some basic background reading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and bouncing ideas off your friends. That’s all there is to it.

#askatp: Switch from Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hey, Krishna Rao writes, I’m a longtime Windows user since the early 90s, but I love my iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and iPad. The new move to Big Sur and Apple Silicon that can run apps across Apple platforms

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has me finally contemplating the big switch. Where do I start? I’m a power user and want more than the basics.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s such an open-ended question, I don’t even know where to start with the answer, to be honest with you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you want to laugh, you can look through the exchange that Marco and I had 15, no, 12 years ago now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPhone or iPad existed?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Was it? I thought it was after the iPhone, but maybe you’re probably right. Maybe it was 2006. I thought it was 2008.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But anyways, we a long time ago had this conversation publicly via Tumblr,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and so you can go get a good laugh about that. But I don’t know. Where do you start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This question doesn’t make it clear whether this is about hardware or software. Is it like what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hardware should I buy or where should I get started learning about things? I mean, on the sort of software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slash knowledge side, listening to weird nerdy podcasts like ADP is a great start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because even though, especially if you’re new to the platform, a lot of the stuff we talk about is gonna go over your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John head. Just through osmosis and exposure, you will start to learn things about the platform. Again, kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like reading the Higg. You’ll learn what the issues are and the lay of the land.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe you won’t understand the details, but you’re like, oh, this is a thing and that’s a thing. And maybe you’ll hear us talk about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something like, you know, clipboard managers or something. I mean, which you probably know from windows already anyway, but just as an example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a category of app that we talk about as if it’s just a thing that everybody knows about, but maybe you’re not familiar with, or like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, quick launchers, like LaunchBar or whatever, and that will send you down a rabbit hole. And then, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John outside the podcast world, finding websites or people to follow on Twitter that are themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac power users, and just, you know, absorbing the fire hose of those websites,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those blogs, those Twitter streams, you will pick up everything you need to know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about being a more advanced user on the platform. Like I know people always want sort of the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I said, the 21 day course or whatever, just like here you go, here’s everything you need to know. And people always want someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to create those and they hope they exist. But the thing is, stuff like that dates very quickly and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has a huge amount of opinion inserted into it and generally isn’t financially,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, very advantageous, so they tend not to exist. Or if they exist, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John either were never valuable or they’re no longer valuable because they’re too far out of date, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people who learn that way, people are like, look, just tell me everything I need to know. Like I learn well from videos, I learn well from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reading, tell me that about this new thing. In most new things, that doesn’t exist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The example I always go back to, I think I wrote about once, is like remote control cars. Like tell me everything I need to know about remote control cars.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like, no, that’s not, it’s not the way it works. What happens is you get a car and you build it and you break it and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy a bunch of magazines filled with stuff that you don’t understand and you read them for a year. And at the end of the year, you know more than you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did at the beginning. That’s it. Like there’s no course, there’s no instruction, there’s no smooth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John path to learning. It’s just dive in there and expose

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yourself to the things that you want, you know, the things that you want to achieve,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find people who are already there and then just absorb their output. Even if in the beginning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t make any sense to you, it will eventually. And that’s the way we all got to where we are. We didn’t know anything about computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and we just went to, you know, we just sat in front of it and plugged away or went to the computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John class or the computer club. I took typing courses, they called them, but we were typing on computers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which meant that I could figure out how to print my name on the screen in between the typing, you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no shortcut, just like the designer questions, no shortcut, but the good news is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s tons of resources, no matter how you wanna consume it. If you like YouTube, there’s plenty of YouTubers where you can just watch them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John start talking about tech stuff. If you like podcasts, hey, here you are, right? If you like blogs or websites, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tons of those out there. just finds the one that appealed to you and just start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John start absorbing. You will learn. And if this is a question about what computer to buy, I’m sorry we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John failed you, but more specific next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time. Yeah, where do I start? Buy a Mac?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, that’s step one. Which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one? Yeah, I know. Awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Buy a laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, don’t do that. It’s terrible. I can’t even agree on that. You’re not buying anything till the ARM Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come out. So, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} hold that thought.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But like I mean would you tell somebody like don’t switch to our platform right now? I don’t think I would tell them that I think I would you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know It’s not the best time in the world to buy a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our platform I didn’t know what I didn’t get my check you get a check. It’s not my platform. You don’t get your 30%

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right my 30% Yeah, no, I would I would say I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say especially if you if you’re a longtime Windows user thinking of switching because this person says

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because of the arm transition and the ability to run iPad apps, right? You know, that has me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finally contemplating the big switch. Yeah, wait for ARM. If you can, wait for ARM, for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you’re switching platforms, like that means you’re already on a platform and you’re fine, stay there. It’ll, you know, wait

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until ARM Macs are available. They will hopefully be compelling and that’s the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is specifically attracting this person.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and you probably won’t have a long wait. I mean, maybe like another month before the first one is available and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} probably gonna be a laptop, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah. And only two years until, in theory, they’re all available it’s a two-year transition if all goes to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plan. Yeah, exactly. All right, well thank you very much to our sponsors this week, Hay.com,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Squarespace, and Raycon, and thank you to our I’m not.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco members who support us directly. You can learn more about that at atp.fm join

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we will talk to you next week

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over they didn’t even mean to begin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, it was accidental John didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do any research marco and casey wouldn’t let him because it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accidental, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can find the show notes at atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s So that’s Casey Liss, M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the anti-Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse It’s accidental It’s accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean to

#askneutral: Driving stick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental, tech podcasts so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey long. So Alex Keeling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wrote in, and I think this was supposed to be an Ask ATP question, but we wanted to move it to a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ask Neutral question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Are we doing that Alex?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s a thing now. Alex asked, she was asking about general stick shift

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey driving techniques and advice. And I don’t have the actual letter written to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us, but basically, how do you drive a stick? I could answer this question

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and then John will explain that everything I’ve said is wrong, even though it wouldn’t be. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey let me just cut to the chase and ask John, how do you drive a stick?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re not going to, you can chime in on these bullet points. I feel like we can all chime in on them. We’ve all driven stick.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, this wasn’t directly from her thing. I just like listed a bunch of, uh, you know, cause she was just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John asking in general, but this is my list of like things that people talk about it, about driving stick and maybe I left stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off, but just chime in, go ahead and tell us what

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think about all the bullet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey points. All right. So, uh, to start, uh, how do you learn? Uh, they’re very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very different ideas about how to do it, but I, and I’ve only taught a couple of people to be honest with you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but what I like is starting out without using the gas at all. So you’re stopped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Instead, you, using your left foot of course, you slowly come

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off the clutch until you see and or feel and or hear the engine start to bog a little bit because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the clutch is starting to pick up. And then you push the pedal all the way back down, do that again

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to feel where it is the clutch is starting to grab. And you do that a whole bunch of times, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not even intending to move. You know, hopefully you’re on a flat surface and you’re just kind of staying still. And you’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a feel for where the clutch is really grabbing. Then you do the same thing extremely slowly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but eventually let yourself get to a roll. So you’re eventually all the way off the clutch. And then you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stop and you do that again. And you do it super slowly a whole crap load of times. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey once you get a feel for how that works, just make it faster. Simple right? That’s all you got to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that’s how I like just learning how to get going.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The other, well, it used to be pro-tip, but not as much anymore because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of electronic parking brakes. But the other thing you can do is if you’re ever on a hill and need to take off, particularly if you’re in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a front-wheel drive car, which most are, then you can use your handbrake to hold

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you where you are while you’re doing the whole dance with your feet and then release the handbrake with your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hand once you start to creep forward. That is a very neat trick that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I didn’t know for a long time and I wish I’d known when I was first learning. But in terms of technique and advice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am a big believer in John’s first bullet here, which is downshifting and engine braking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what that means is as you’re approaching, say, a stoplight, you would—and let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey say you’re in, I don’t know, fourth gear because you’re just around town. As you’re approaching the stoplight and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see it’s red, downshift into third and then come completely off the gas. And what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is it? The compression of the engine will force the engine to try to slow down. And when you’re off the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey clutch, that means if the engine’s slowing down, your wheels are slowing down. And so I’ll downshift once or twice, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even three times, coming up to a stop sign or stop light. And that’s, again, downshifting and engine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey braking. And I am in favor of this. Some people would argue that that’s a poor choice because you’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rather wear your brakes than wear your engine. And I understand that. But I don’t know. I’ve always done it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, before I move on to the next bullet, thoughts about that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You should do all the bullets because you’ve already gone through learning and downshifting. So I’m going

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go ahead. OK. All right, I’ll carry on then. Common guidance, which I am terrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at, do as I say not as I do, keep your hand off the shifter. It’s bad for the lift linkage. It’s bad for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the transmission potentially. Just don’t touch the shifter if you’re not actively shifting. I often

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rest my hand on the shifter, which is not at all what you’re supposed to do, but you should keep your hand off of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you want to make things smoother, and this is kind of like moving from novice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to amateur level, if you want to make things smoother on a a downshift, then you can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what’s called rev matching. So let’s say you’re cruising at, and I’m making this up, but let’s say you’re cruising at 40

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey miles an hour in fourth gear and you’re at 2000 RPM. Well, you know, or you will learn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey over time that if you were to downshift at 40 miles an hour from fourth to third, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that will bring you to about 3000 RPM from 2000 RPM. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what you can do in order to make things a little smoother is you would press the clutch, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would blip the throttle, do a little with your right foot to get the RPMs of the engine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up to about 3000 RPM or wherever you think it’ll land, and then you come off the clutch. And the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you do that is because then the engine and the transmission are all in their appropriate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey relative speeds, such that there’s no like jerking backward and forward.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The opposite of this is just popping the clutch, which means you’re doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I say, 30, 40 miles an hour in fourth gear. you press in the clutch, you downshift to third,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and you just come right off the clutch real fast. Then you’ll feel that like, of your whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey body shifting as the engine and the transmission are coming back into an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even relative speed. So I again, strongly encourage rev matching.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It will make your downshifts particularly considerably smoother.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Then if you want to go from novice or you’ve gone from amateur to novice, Now, if you want to go from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey novice to expert level, you can do what’s called heel towing, which is something I also do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is kind of difficult, although I do it in the wrong way. So the way you’re supposed to heel toe is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’re supposed to put the toes of your right foot on the brake, which is the middle pedal,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and you’re supposed to twist your foot such that the right heel can press the gas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pedal. So the idea is…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What makes you think that’s the way you’re supposed to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it? Because it’s called heel toe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think you I mean I understand that it can be done both ways but I think the way you describe I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say the way you described is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wrong way. Well in this in the way I described is not the way I do it I’ll describe how I do it in just a moment but like if you ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see like racing drivers doing what I would call a heel toe downshift

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I almost always see them done with a twist of the foot such that instead of your foot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know instead of your toes being at midnight and your heel being at six toes are at like 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and your heel is at like four. Um, and again, that’s not the way I do it, but that’s the quote unquote standard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way of doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. Well, you just, I think that’s the opposite of what you just described. I’m basically, I’m saying heel on the brake toe on the gas, but you were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying toe on the gas, toe on the brake heel on the gas,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey correct? Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s the way I always thought I saw it was that you’re, you’re twisting your foot counterclockwise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I, whenever I see videos of people’s feet, I always see heel on the brake toe on the gas, and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way I think of it. Obviously both of them will work. It’s just, you know, anyway, continue to do the description. Like, why are we, why are we touching the gas

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the brake at the same time?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right. So the, the theory is you’re, especially if you’re driving in with a quickness, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all, you know, it doesn’t have to be that way, but often if you’re driving with quickness, you’re coming up into a turn very quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You’re going to brake as you’re entering the turn. And then on the way out of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey turn, you’re going to want to stand on that gas as much as you can. But because you’ve lost all that speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the turn, you’re now in the wrong gear. So the idea is you will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey start your braking and then press your foot on the clutch to come down a gear. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as you’re braking and your foot is on the clutch, you’re already on top of two pedals, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would like to do that blip of the throttle to do the rev matching that we were just talking about at the same time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So you now have three pedals you need to interact with and only two feet to do it unless you’re extremely gifted. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what you would do is you would blip the throttle with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey potentially your heel, potentially your toe, or what I actually do, and I’ve done in every car I’ve ever owned,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is I keep my foot vertically oriented. My toes are at midnight, my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey heel is at 6 p.m. or a.m. or whatever, but I will roll my foot. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m rolling as though—I don’t know how to—it’s so hard to paint a word

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey picture here, but I’m rolling the right edge of my foot such that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} hitting the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gas. This is terrible podcasting. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} is terrible podcasting. I’m so happy this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the after show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So you roll your foot such that you can press the gas with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the right side of your foot and the brake with the left side of your foot. Now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey someone in the chat is saying, oh, this is racing technique and not safe driving. I disagree, actually. I think it is safer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to not disrupt the balance of the car. So this is more necessary in racing, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I still think if you’re coming through a turn and you need to downshift, the last thing you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey want to do is disrupt the balance of the car. And if you’re popping the clutch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or doing a whole bunch of things in serial rather than parallel, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can disrupt the balance of the car. So that’s what I would call heel toe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shift. And John, I’m genuinely curious to hear how you perform such a maneuver. because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey again for me it’s a roll with the left foot on the left side of the foot on the brake right side of the foot

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} gas.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh my god I just I have you know I drove manual for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably 10 years I never did any of this stuff except downshifting sometimes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} surprise me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it was fine I like I never lost a clutch I never blew out an engine like it’s fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you you don’t need to do almost any of this. The electric

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey car on her speaks. Yeah Yeah, exactly. Thank you, John. But hey, Alex asked, what do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we recommend? Well, this is what we recommend. This is the crash course.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is what Casey recommends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so far. Alex asked about, quote, general stick shift driving techniques and advice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is none of that. Casey added his own bullet point for learning, but everything else, I think, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one more bullet point, Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey last one. I’m trying. I’m trying. I’m trying. And then finally, double clutching. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m a little weaker on this. This is not something I ever do, but the idea is typically with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a car with Syncros, which is basically every modern car, you would just –

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey let’s say you’re going from second to third. You press on the clutch, you move the shifter, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey come off the clutch. Well, it used to be and it still is in certain circumstances like 18-wheelers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for example that in order to get the transmission and the engine spinning at reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rates, you need to kind of modulate that yourself. So instead what you would do is you would push the clutch in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get the, the gear shift in neutral, come off the clutch, push the clutch in again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then put the gear shift in third and then come off the clutch and that’s double clutching. And maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John has a legitimate reason why you would do this in a modern car. I, I never, ever, ever do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this. And that is all the bullets that John put in. And off the top of my head, that’s actually all the things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I, oh, well, actually one other thing. If you live in a snowy climate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or if you’re in a situation where you maybe you’re on a slick road

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or something like that, it is possible to start from a dead stop in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey years other than first gear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s spoken as someone who didn’t learn stick on a car with 75 horsepower. There is that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I assure you my Volvo wagon could not come start in any conditions in second

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gear. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} come on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It had four gears plus an overdrive button and second gear was not gonna send you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anywhere. One of my happiest moments with my Maxima was when I was starting from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a stop going uphill, a pretty steep stop, and the Maxima did not have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hill hold. It was too old for that. This was a 1996 Maxima, so long before that was a common thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I got it from a stop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I thought I was in first, and I was uphill and I just… slowly crept up the hill, and I thought,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco man, that was harder than I thought. And then I realized I was in third. And I just started in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco third, uphill, and it didn’t stall. It made it. It didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of extra power, but it did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make it. It had more than a giant Volvo wagon that probably weighed a million tons with a 75-horsepower

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey engine. Yeah. All I’m saying is, if you’re in a modern car and you’re in snow or something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is potentially advantageous to start in second, or potentially even third, because you’re putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey less torque against the wheels that are driving the car, and that would make it less likely to do like a burnout

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or whatever the case may be. Oh, burnout! If you’re in a front or rear-wheel drive car and not an all-wheel drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey car, give the car way too many revs, you know, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 RPM as you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sitting still, and then just pop the clutch. And that’s basically all you need to do. Although in a modern car, you’re probably going to need to turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off traction control and all that jazz, but you can do it. That is the list, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let me try to add as you’re talking, John, the things I just came up with. But where did I go wrong? What did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I forget? I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to be going into learning because we have a separate thing for that. Maybe I’ll talk about that. I am, out of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this podcast, the only person who has successfully taught another human how to drive stick as far as

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I know. That’s not true. Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I taught David Karp how to drive stick. A child’s human.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} My own child’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey human. Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Fair enough. He was only 19 at the time. Does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that count? Hmm. Yeah. Anyway, I’ll talk about that some other time. It’s a whole different thing Downshifting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John versus engine braking like the trade-off Casey mostly got it all the points. I want to make but the trade-off is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is not I would say it’s not between like wearing your brakes versus wearing the engine It’s wearing your brakes versus wearing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your clutch, right? So when you when you engine brake you’re not letting the clutch shift But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is more stress on the clutch in a situation when you wouldn’t be doing it at all You’re downshifting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engaging a lower gear, and if you’re not doing rev matching, all of a sudden, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transmission is going faster than the engine, and then the transmission is connected to the engine, all of a sudden it speeds the engine up, and yes, that is wear on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engine, but it’s also wear on the clutch, because you’ve just touched a clutch to the transmission,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’ve mated those surfaces, and they were turning at different speeds, again, if you didn’t do rev matching.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you don’t engine brake at all, you will wear your brakes down way faster, And you say, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brakes actually are more expensive than a clutch. If you look at how much it costs to replace four brake pads, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more expensive than one clutch if you look at the parts cost. Unfortunately, the clutch is inside your car in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a place that is hard to get to. And so changing your clutch tends to be way more expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than changing your pads. All that said, I mean, I feel like that’s the trade-off you’re doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it is essentially unsafe not to do any engine braking in a stick shift car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, maybe it’s because I’m using cheap cars. The brakes alone without using any form of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engine braking will make you feel like your car is worth braking because it does. Any car with a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John non-manual transmission uses some form of engine braking to help slow the car down. Like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an automatic transmission does not shift into neutral as soon as you try to come to a stop from 60 miles an hour. Like, try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that in a stick shift car in a safe way. Go 60, hold down the clutch, and try to brake. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then do the same thing with downshifting. It’s night and day. So you have to downshift and use engine braking. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has to be part of your driving. You don’t have to do it horrendously. You can do some braking with less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engine braking. You can downshift less aggressively but I feel like you you have to know how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Downshift an engine brake even if you just do it as like a matter of I some find myself doing it as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John routine like a Stopping from 30. I will go through all the gears back down to one sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I you know while I’m doing that I’m barely Engaging the gears in between just because it’s a casual stop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s just a good habit to get into and my history has shown like I sold my 1992 Accord

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just as the clutch was going and that was an over a ten-year-old car like eventually all clutches

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wear out whether you do engine braking Or not, but it’s not like you’re gonna wear through your clutch in the first year or whatever. It’ll be fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Please learn how to downshift and do engine braking Keeping your hand the shifter. No, don’t do that. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think most of the stories about how bad it is are sort of like like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tales that we tell each other, legends, urban legends about, oh, it’s going to mess up your linkage and you’re putting stress on the, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even sure if that’s true, but there’s a more important reason. If your hand is on the shifter and you like sneeze and you knock

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it out of gear or do something like it, just don’t have your hand on a control surface that you’re not planning to control.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re just asking for you to screw something up. So don’t rest your hand on the shifter. Isn’t the steering wheel a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John control surface? Right. But you have to constantly steer, but you don’t have to be constantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shifting how much how much control of your hands are you losing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you could get startled or whatever like it’s I mean obviously you have to be steering like you if you could avoid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John holding the steering wheel and you didn’t have to steer then yeah you shouldn’t hand shouldn’t be that either but you have to steer but you don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to constantly be shifting so why touch your hand to a thing that you could potentially screw up when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no reason you need to be touching

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it don’t also have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no again like in my probably decade of driving stick I don’t think I ever accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco knocked the car out of gear like that’s It’s kind of hard to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But do you rest your hand on the shifter the entire time you’re driving? Of course. It looks cool. That’s terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Don’t do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Don’t be one of those people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was totally one of those people, and it was fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am one of those people, but I know I shouldn’t be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, maybe in some kinds of cars, or some older cars, or some newer cars, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually is bad to rest on the linkage. I just don’t know if that’s specifically true. I feel like the safety thing is more compelling.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But in general, it’s not, I’m not going to say sanitary. It’s not like proper

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technique. It’s like piloting a plane and leaving your hand resting on the landing gear switch. It’s like, oh, I’ve never accidentally turned it on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just get your hand off of it. Do you need to use landing gear now? Then just don’t have your hand on the switch. Oh, I never accidentally turned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it on. Just don’t do it. Rev matching, if I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fancier cars, I would probably be more into it, but my cars tend to have so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little power that this is not that big of an issue. That said, it’s kind of hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not to rev match once you get the hang of stick, because you know, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you’re about to shift, and you know the engine is not going fast enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the gear you’re about to engage. Like you’re about to pass, right? You downshift, at least I do in my wimpy cars. I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to downshift to pass anybody. That’s always gonna happen, right? And when I downshift, I know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the engine needs to be going way faster in this gear than it’s currently going. You’re gonna get a head start on that. You’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, well, engine, get ready, because if you don’t do it and you just downshift, you have to, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in my wimpy cars, you have to baby the clutch engagement so you don’t suddenly lurch because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the delta is big and there’s not enough torque and power to just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of overcome that easily. So you have to baby the engagement and if you don’t baby the engagement, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s lurchy and it’s like, why don’t I just cut to the chase and get the engine up to the speed that I know, round about the speed. And the question

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, how do I know what speed needs to be? You just know it needs to be faster than it is, right? The bad part about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, depending on the size and weight of the flywheel in your car,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blipping the throttle, like this was something when I was looking at that cool, what is it, the T50,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what the hell is the name of that car from the guy who made the McLaren?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Oh yeah, I know what you’re thinking of, I already forgot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the name of it. It either has like no flywheel or such a lightweight flywheel that it would literally be impossible for a human

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to blip the throttle, because you’d blip it and then it would go up briefly and then go right back down before you could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even engage the gear, right? So it all depends on you having a flywheel in your car that says, OK, when I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blip the throttle, I can then go back to changing the gear and get it into gear before the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engine reverts to its previous speed. And in this super fancy $2 million supercar with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no flywheel, you can’t do that. And in modern cars, they do the rev matching for you a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lot of times. I have never actually driven a car with its own rev matching. But certainly, the engine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer can do it better than you ever will, because A, it knows the actual speed it needs to be. And B, it can do that while your feet are doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things. Yeah. I’ve driven one. My dad’s Corvette has optional automatic rev matching.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it’s on by default, but it’s fairly easy to turn off. In fact, yeah, his car, which is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seven-speed stick, has paddles behind the wheel as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John though it’s- Yeah, I was just going to say, you know why they do that? You know why it has paddles

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there? It’s for the rev matching. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so- No, no, no, no. Those paddles are the paddles that you use to shift the car if you don’t get it with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stick. Sure. And GM, being the cheap

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} car company, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t want to make a separate steering wheel without the paddles. So they just want to have the same steering wheel. So they just take the paddles and they put them in, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just write rev match on them, they connect the wires to a different function. But you literally have two gigantic pedals,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same exact pedals that you would get for shifting that Corvette if you didn’t have a stick, and they just put a white rev match

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the top of each one, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is. I don’t think it said rev match at the top, but otherwise I think we’re saying the same thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and yeah. The ZR1, Doug, that video I had about the ZR1, I was laughing at that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} part,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, why the hell does this car have these giant paddles? Like, oh, so it can be the same steering wheel, so they don’t have to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a second

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part. Yeah, they turned this bug into a feature.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anyway, but his car does do it, and it was more accurate than when I did it. But I think that’s for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me, that’s part of the fun is is trying to get a good rev match downshift. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I quickly disabled it, although if I was like taking it to the track or something like that, I would probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey leave it enabled.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, heel toe. I am terrible at I don’t know if it’s because I have big goofy feet. I don’t know if it’s because my little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hondas don’t have pedal spacing or positioning that is amenable to it. But I am so bad at it that I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve never found it to be. I’ve never been successful enough at it to find it to be enjoyable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or useful with with the things I already described it just like Human rev matching and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John careful clutch engagement you and the fact that I’m not really going that fast in an accord

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I’m not unsettling the chassis through

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} corners Casey, I feel I kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Relate to the people who are saying this is kind of more of a racing thing Like if you’re worried about the chassis becoming unsettled in corners

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slow down like yeah It’s a cool thing to play with or whatever And maybe if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I had a sports car again if I had a car with more power or a car that even had the notion that You might attempt this I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John assure you that no none of the Honda’s that I’ve ever owned had a notion that people can try He’ll tell I know I find it very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John difficult to do and I’m not good enough at it to ever do it So I would set that aside double clutching I only put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on here because I used to know a lot of people back when I was a teen Who would swear by driving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their car with synchros and double clutch and I said, yeah You don’t need to do it because the synchros and by the way The synchros are the thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that make sure that when you engage the gear that the the actual gears that are going to engage with Each other are turning at the correct

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speed so you don’t have so you don’t take a tooth gear Turning faster than another tooth gear try to mesh them right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John double clutching in the big trucks I don’t actually know how they work in behind the scenes but it’s basically like Like Casey said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you take it out of the gear and put it into neutral and then you have to bring the engine up to Speed so that when you engage the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gear the two gears that you’re gonna engage are moving at the right speed I think you’re actually also responsible for modulating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the throttle to get the engine up to speed and then you engage, and if you don’t match the speeds and you try to engage them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re essentially taking two big metal gears moving at different speeds and trying to mesh them and you get terrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John noises and you destroy stuff, right? But for cars with synchros, I don’t know if I just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is this crop of weirdos that I went to high school with but like, oh yeah, you should totally double clutch your car with synchros. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John learned how to do it when I was learning stick and I did it for a little bit and as far as I can tell, it’s absolutely 100%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pointless. Like it’s worse, it’s slower, it’s not fun to do, and there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reason to do it. So my advice is, unless you’re driving a semi, which by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they probably have automated transmissions now anyway, but like, unless you’re driving a semi that requires it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John double clutching is not a thing you need to know exists or learn how to do. Starting in second, third, yeah. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, this is where you have to know your car’s power. Me, I’ve always been having weak cars. Starting in second for sure,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the snow is a thing you should do, although I would still say that I had to start on a hill in second. Many

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} of my cars

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t really have enough power to do that, snow or no snow. And burnouts, you’ll just wear through your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tires. Don’t do that. It’s all about getting the power to the road. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fun, burnouts are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fun. Margo, do you have anything to add? Tell us, we should all buy, drive electric cars?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, yeah, I mean, A, electric cars do neatly solve many of these problems. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re gonna drive stick, don’t let this conversation turn you off of it. This may sound like it’s a crazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing to do that’s really hard, and you have to do all these things to do it right, and the fact is, none of this is necessary, you don’t have to do any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of this and you’ll be fine. So it’s like, I drove stick for all that time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and yeah, never had to do almost any of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff. That’s the thing I think about stick shift driving, Marco, you saying you didn’t know or care about this and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were fine. In my experience, when someone says, I know how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to drive shift stick, there is a wide range of experiences you would get by driving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the car with them. Like lots of people, like wider than you would expect. Everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh, well, you know, you don’t, everyone knows how to drive and people are good drivers and bad drivers, but the range

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, like the things I’ve seen people do in a car where they’re ostensibly driving stick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sometimes boggle my mind. I don’t know if it’s because of it’s a gap in learning or no particular standards

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or just people have bad habits, but boy, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. You know, I’m not just saying like valets who like just have to know enough stick to park a car, like people who own stick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shift cars and you get in the car with them and you’re just like biting your tongue. It’s like, what are you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing? And like, you’re jostling around and they don’t know how to engage the clutch and everything. I don’t know why that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is. Obviously it’s much less of an issue now because nobody has stick shift cars. And I feel like the longer this goes on and the rarer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sticks become, the more this problem will solve itself because the only people who have them are hopefully people who know how to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, but I don’t even know. But anyway, sorry to interrupt. Continue. I agree with you. You don’t need to know all this weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff. You can be happy and just drive a stick and you’ll be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and like Marco said, I mean, this is expert level and extraordinarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fast data dump as to what John and I think about driving a stick. But really and truly, you don’t need 80% of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this. And you probably won’t hear 80% of this because Marco doesn’t care about it and he’ll cut it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey before it gets released.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, I’m just keeping this in. You will hear it from other people who drive stick though. That’s why I think it’s important to cover all these points. You’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find somebody who will look like a wise expert and will tell you that you should double clutch your car with synchros and just don’t listen to that person.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, that’s why I think it’s worth knowing all this stuff. mostly just so you know to dismiss it. But I do think the engine braking one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the thing you have to know how to do. If you don’t, I feel like your car is less safe because you have way worse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John braking power, way longer braking distances, and it’s just not a good habit. Do not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stop your car from 80 on the highway down to zero with the clutch depressed the whole time. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad for your brakes, it’s bad for your life. Learn how to engine brake.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s actually, that’s the one thing that like, when I was a newbie stick driver,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like for my first few years driving stick, I didn’t do that. And then I eventually developed that skill and that was like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco significant betterment of my stick driving abilities.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I actually don’t think it makes any difference in terms of the ability for the brakes to stop the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey car. Like I don’t think the brake boost is, in most cars anyway, driven by like engine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey RPM, or if it is, it’s a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} small difference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, it’s not the brake boost, it’s just that the engine, like, it’s not the, so when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connect a fast moving transmission to a slow moving engine, some energy has to be spent to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speed that engine up. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} energy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coming out of your speed, of the vehicle. Like the kinetic energy is being used,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the kinetic energy as translated through the wheels, through the axle, into the transmission, is being expended

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spinning the engine up from 1,000 RPM or whatever it dropped to, up to like 2,000, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then you do it over again because you shift to a lower gear, the engine goes down to 1,000.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not only that, but the engine vacuum is doing way more than just like spinning up the engine every time you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shift. Yeah, I mean, I’m saying like, spinning the engine because it’s moving slowly, there’s lots of things that make it hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to spin the engine up. Like, you know, you’re not giving it gas to spin the engine up. The entire amount of energy is coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the speed of the car. So you are bleeding off speed by using it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John constantly spin the engine up from a lower RPM, right, to a higher one, and then repeating that process, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then the second thing is, even if the brakes have the ability to stop in the same distance, they’re, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re gonna produce more heat in those brakes. have wimpy brakes, lots of small cars have very, very wimpy brakes, and if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stopping from a high speed, they’re not good at, you know, they get hot, they get worse, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brake fade, right? Especially if you’re not in a sports car that’s used to that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} type of thing. Yeah, that’s the big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reason. If you ask the brakes to do the whole job themselves, you’re asking a lot of your brakes. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially if you drive a dinky economy car that has tiny, tiny brakes, maybe drum brakes in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the back, and tiny little, you know, discs with, you know, wimpy calipers in the front.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it also it becomes more reasonable or more more extreme if you think about like suppose you’re driving down a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mountain and so you’re Going downhill for

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} like 15

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minutes straight like you’re if you’re riding only the brakes that whole time Yeah, you’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have overheating problems and that’s that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no good. They catch fire. Just like in Ford versus Ferrari, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, there you go. And and finally with regard to engine braking like what if you’re slowing down?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But then suddenly there’s some sort of hazard that you need to speed around around. So you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey want to be in the most appropriate gear for the current speed in the car because if you’re caught

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unawares and you’re in like neutral or something and then you suddenly need to use the accelerator

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to swerve around a child or a dog or something, that’s not a good place to be. You want to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in gear already. So all you have to do is slide your foot off the brake and onto the gas to get power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as opposed to being in neutral or in way too high a gear such that you’re either going to bog when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey try to go or you’re you’re just not going to have any forward motion at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all. Yeah. And if you’re in gear, if you’re in the correct gear for whatever speed you’re decelerating in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you will have shockingly instant torque response when

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} you hit that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accelerator.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not sure about the accelerating around a child scenario, but that’s what I was getting at before about the sort of habit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of downshifting. Just constantly being in the appropriate gear for your speed is just a good habit. Like I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said, even if you’re just downshifting through the gears, even if you don’t even engage the clutch between some of them, just constantly being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the right gear getting you so that if you did need to use the gas for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever reason it’s ready to go and you don’t have this process because the process is not just getting into gear the process

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is decide what gear is appropriate for the current speed put the car into that gear and then you can go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whereas if you just routinely go up and down the gears in order based on your speed as just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of like a habit that you just do without thinking about you will always be in the appropriate gear for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speed and ready to go again and that’s you know again that’s what an automatic transmission or an automated manual that’s what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re doing for you, right? They’re, and of course, they can shift way faster than you can and all those other things. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s your hint on engine braking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Automatic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transmissions do not put your car in neutral. They use the engine to help brake the car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John As you slow down, automatic transmissions will downshift to be ready to be in the appropriate gear and to do, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So will DCTs. Yeah. You can’t just put the DCT in neutral very easily and coast to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a stop. It really fights you on that. it really wants you to go down through the gears as you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slow down.