catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

437: The Right Side of the Mouse Pad

Anti-skip CD players, mouse traction, outlet timers, BitBar, and other ancient technologies.

Episode Description:

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MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. We’re so old
  2. Safari update
  3. Sponsor: Linode
  4. HSTS Preload
  5. iOS 15 per-app settings
  6. Sponsor: HelloFresh (code atp12)
  7. IAP’s influence on AAPL stock
  8. John’s mouse-pad mystery
  9. Boop
  10. BitBar, SwiftBar, TextBar
  11. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  12. #askatp: Apple in Matter/CHIP
  13. #askatp: Chrome in the cloud
  14. #askatp: M1 card for Mac Pro
  15. Ending theme
  16. 🐶

We’re so old

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what do you even know about vinyl? Come

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on,

⏹️ ▶️ John man. I know I used vinyl in a non-ironic way when it was all we had. That’s what I know about vinyl.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I see how it is. Did you use your record player in your car? What was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, like a Cadillac or something? Had some sort of vinyl set up inside one of their cars. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most preposterous thing

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve ever seen. Really great anti-skip protection,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Yeah, right. You

⏹️ ▶️ John balance it on the back of a turtle. I think I saw it on the Flintstones. Oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I don’t have any nostalgia for technologies that we had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use when we were young, just because that’s all that there was. I don’t, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old video game consoles, I like that. That’s different. I have no nostalgia for floppy disks or cassettes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or VHS tapes, because those all sucked. They were terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the same thing with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey vinyl. My favorite is when, and we’ve spoken about this several times on the show,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But when you would have your Discman or equivalent, and you had to choose,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you want to listen to music for an impossibly short amount of time,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but have it not skip? Or do you want to listen to your music for a regularly short

⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of time, but every time you even glance at your portable CD player,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it skips? And this is the choice that us olds had to make at the time, because you would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a portable CD player, and it would either have a rechargeable battery perhaps several double A’s, what have you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it was such a fragile experience that if you jostled it in the littlest

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way, it would skip. And so what CD players ended up doing is they had anti-skip

⏹️ ▶️ Casey protection. And jump in when you’re ready, boys, but my understanding is it would run the CD

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at faster than 1x and have a little bit of buffer in memory. So if it detected a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey skip, it would empty the buffer. And hopefully by the time the buffer was emptied, the CD was playing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and picking up where it left off. But because of that, because it was running even faster than normal, it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would absolutely murder your battery. And it was loud. It was like carrying a fan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your hands. I’m sure you loved this, John. It was your favorite thing in the whole wide world. But it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a crummy choice. You know, do you want to listen to uninterrupted music for, I don’t know, maybe the length of one CD?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or do you want to maybe get two CD’s worth of listening time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and every other every other every other second you looked at it would skip

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was the most annoying thing in the world.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh to me having owned two Discmen one before that transition and one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey after

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no contest like you want the skit protection at any cost because the skit like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean so like the first time when I first got a Discmen I later

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I soon afterwards got my first car in college and it didn’t have a CD player.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it did have one of those like double high gaps under the radio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like it was like a double din height but there was wasn’t anything installed there so just one of those like big black like empty cubbies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And a Discman could fit in that double din empty cubby

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a bunch of felt around it. So my solution was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually just like I had like this big felt pocket that I made with black felt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know I mean again that if you’re picturing something like sewn or anything no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go rougher than that just like maybe a yard of black felt folded up a bunch of times

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into an approximate pocket shape shoved into this din socket is so that my discman

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be nestled inside of it and that actually did help quite a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t perfect you know because I still lived in the east and so we had you know, weather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and weathered roads. And so, you know, the roads are terrible, full of bumps and- and it- it wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always good. But that did buy me a little bit of time with my non-anti-skip

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Discmen. Uh, and you’re exactly right about how they work. They just- they had a read-ahead buffer, basically. The original ones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were like, two or three seconds. And eventually by the end of Discmen’s useful lifetime,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like 60-second buffers. Oh, God, that- it- it was so much better. Even though, like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would rev- it would, you know, murder the battery faster, because it was doing much more work. And it was,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you would hear, like when it skipped, you would hear it kind of reseeking, like realign, you’d hear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rrr, rrr, you’d hear like realigning the laser and going back and spinning down, spinning up. Like you would hear all that going on,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but all of that was way better than having your music actually skip in the middle of it every time you hit a bump.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was

⏹️ ▶️ John worth it for sure. Let’s take a moment to recognize the casual sexism of Walkman

⏹️ ▶️ John and Discman.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Ah, that’s true. And be glad

⏹️ ▶️ John that Steve Jobs, I think it was Steve Jobs, didn’t get his way to call the iMac the Mac Man.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh yeah. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s right, I’d forgotten

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about

⏹️ ▶️ John that. Remember that story? It’s like, that’s what he wanted, yeah. I mean, someone did get away with MacBook, which is not

⏹️ ▶️ John great, but at least it doesn’t have sexist overtones. Anyway, I think your priorities were different than mine

⏹️ ▶️ John when it came to portable music. There’s a surprise. Yeah, I had

⏹️ ▶️ John what I thought was a reasonably fancy, I think it was Panasonic, portable CD player,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m not sure I ever used it on the go. It’s like, well, what’s the point of having a portable CD player? Well, the

⏹️ ▶️ John point of it for me was like, it was literally the only thing I owned that could play CDs. So there’s a big point to it. So then I could

⏹️ ▶️ John buy CDs and listen to them, but it wasn’t so much for the portableness. I think it was probably just because it was like the cheapest

⏹️ ▶️ John thing I could buy because I didn’t have like a stereo to connect a quote unquote real CD player. But

⏹️ ▶️ John if you buy just this one thing, you can hook headphones up to it. But every portable application, I was still

⏹️ ▶️ John heavily wed to cassettes, mostly because I’d made so many cassettes of different mixes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I was really, I really wanted to essentially have my playlists, right? And you couldn’t do that with CDs or I couldn’t do that

⏹️ ▶️ John with CDs, at least not at that point. Um, I don’t think CD burners had been invented yet. Um, so all I

⏹️ ▶️ John had was, you know, my choice was, well, you can bring this thing and a bunch of felt, I guess, into your car, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John and, and deal with skipping. And by the way, I don’t think mine had any skip protection to speak of, or I had

⏹️ ▶️ John like a literal zippered nylon, uh, you know, cases filled with mixed

⏹️ ▶️ John cassettes of all my music and all my quote unquote playlists. And that’s what I played in the car, and cassettes didn’t skip.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey LWL Well, that’s fair. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fair.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you also had to rewind them, and seeking—or excuse me, skipping was impossible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seeking, I guess, was fine, other than—

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John CW I mean, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John part of the skill you develop as a child of the 70s, to know how far to fast forward and rewind on various

⏹️ ▶️ John devices to exactly nail the end of the song.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey LWL Yeah, well, and that’s the thing, is that at least with a record, you can visually see the difference

⏹️ ▶️ Casey between— CW While you’re driving? Yeah. LWL Well, no, of course not while you’re driving, but when you’re at home, you can see the difference. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Oh, man, we’re all so old. See, kids, see, this is what you don’t have to worry about. Like I remember, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think we were just talking about this a few weeks back, that I had a, shoot, it was like a,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a Toshiba Pocket PC that I got a one gigabyte

⏹️ ▶️ Casey microdrive for. So it was, you know, compact flash, but it had a spinning hard disk within it. Same thing that ended up in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPod. And I had a one gig microdrive in it, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had, you know, a couple hundred songs, MP3s on there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I effectively had the world’s crappiest iPod, and I thought I was the coolest kid in the world.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s way better than my carpeuter that I controlled with an amp from a gamepad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s right. I had forgotten you had a carpeuter. Which car was this in?

⏹️ ▶️ John He has one now, too. Sometimes it reboots. Nice. Nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, this was that same car and it was,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was the one where I had all my old parts for my Pentium II after I’d upgraded to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Pentium III and I had everything except a case to make a new computer. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t about to just go buy a new case for all these old parts and that would be a waste of money. I did have a Rubbermaid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tub and a Dremel.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right, that’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yes, so I made a whole like Windows PC

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my Pentium 2 slotted processor and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco installed Winamp and ran it headless in my car because you know, you didn’t have like displays or anything that were cheap

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and available and it wasn’t enough of a hacker to make like a little LCD thing. So I just had it like auto boot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows setting Winamp as the shell in Windows so it would automatically launch it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a game pad and I had some kind of software running that would map gamepad buttons to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Winamp’s keyboard shortcuts. And it worked okay with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of downsides, the biggest being that I had to boot the computer up so I’d get into the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco car and then two and a half minutes later I’d be able to play music.

⏹️ ▶️ John You were living in the future because when cars first started to get their own sort of invotainment

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey systems

⏹️ ▶️ John that was a typical boot time.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, well, I adore Aaron’s car, I really, really do. It’s a 2017 Volvo XC90,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it has two critical faults. Number one, the windows, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey power windows are so slow, I think I could roll them up with a crank better. Kids, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your parents. And secondly, the boot time for the infotainment can be measured in calendar years.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey atrocious how long it takes to boot. Now, the good news is I never have to reboot it as I’m driving down the road, so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve still got one on you, Marco, but nonetheless, it takes forever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to boot, and it drives me bananas.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, at least it doesn’t have the other two problems that mine had, which is that sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something would happen in the Windows installation. Maybe something was showing a dialog box, who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows? But it would just stop working, like in the middle of driving so I would have to like, you know, unplug

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, plug it back in. And then the final problem was that a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rubbermaid tub is not super well made as a rugged computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enclosure. Neither is whatever consumer level motherboard I had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my Pentium II or the Pentium II itself because it’s a giant slot sitting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a very thin board and the slot has the whole CPU

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that big slot case plus the giant heatsink hanging off the back of it. So one time I hit a speed bump and the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fell out of the slot and never worked again. Well, it was on, of course. So I’m sure that didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco help things. Should’ve got the hot plug CPU. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just yank that CPU out, put a new one in, no problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like this really is just your future as a Tesla owner coming for you 20

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So coincidentally, I was at my alma mater this past weekend, which is the first time I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Virginia Tech in probably a decade plus. And I don’t know if you guys ever go to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your old stomping grounds. I would assume of the three of us, it’s most likely that John would, because I think you’re geographically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey closest to it. but it is a eerie experience going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your former college or university and seeing after 10 to 20 years

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much it has changed. And a lot of it looked very much as I remember, but holy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cow, quite a bit of it looked quite a bit different. And if you’ll permit me to tell you the most boring

⏹️ ▶️ Casey old man, or excuse me, embarrassing old man story in the world. So we were there for my brother-in-law’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bachelor party and it was a handful of us. And we decided on Saturday night

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go to a bar in Blacksburg that has a kind of patio-y area.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we were going to go and have a few drinks and then move on with our night.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I obviously have two kids. One of the other guys there has two kids.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And my brother-in-law doesn’t have any. But he tends to go to bed early, as though he has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kids. And so we go out impossibly late to go to this bar. And we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey arrive at the bar at this ungodly late hour. And there was a waitress,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the bar has a restaurant beneath it. And the waitress sees us trying to go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up the upstairs of this bar. And she says, oh, no, no, no, no, no. It doesn’t open until 8.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have never felt older in my entire goddamn life than being turned away from opening

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the college bar at 730 at night on a Saturday night. Because here it is.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking, it’s not even registering to me that this stupid bar wouldn’t be open.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yeah, it turns out it won’t even open until late. And I felt so old.

⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Matzko, Jr. I thought they were going to say, oh, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking for your children? Aaron Powell, Jr. Yeah, right. Wouldn’t surprise me. But yeah, I’ve never felt older in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my entire life. And I told Aaron this story and I think she’s still laughing three days later. Paul

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Matzko, Jr.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and to me, because we’ve certainly crossed this age threshold as well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we’ve reached the point where where not only do we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shamelessly eat early, but I don’t even want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stay out late. Even if it was an option to me, I wouldn’t take it. I actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would actively avoid any place that opens at eight or 10 or one in the morning or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And part of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey this is because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d never been in the club scene. I know that’s a big thing in clubbing, that the clubs don’t even open until

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one in the morning or whatever. I couldn’t possibly think of anything I want to do less

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to something like that. I am perfectly happy to be the old boring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dad, even though I’m not even that old, but still like just to be the boring dad, to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to go out to dinner at six o’clock at night and to want to be home before eight.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, it’s so bad. I wish I was young and I don’t know if I was ever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting, but I kind of wish I was young again. But yeah, but yet at the same token, I don’t miss those days

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a lot of ways. And it’s nice to have more than $5

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to scrape together. There are advantages to not being 21 anymore, but I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never felt older in my life.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do still miss being able to eat a cheesesteak at 10 o’clock at night and not have serious ramifications.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amen to that. Golly. So my freshman year, I wasn’t old enough to drink

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I didn’t drink. Um, and I didn’t have, it was, I was a nerd and I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had nerdy friends. We didn’t have much to do. So it was not unusual on a Saturday night

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to leave the dorms at like midnight and get in one, get in one of our cars

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and drive 45 minutes to Roanoke, Virginia, which was like the nearest thing that vaguely resembled a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey city and get Krispy Cream donuts at midnight, one o’clock in the morning, and then drive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back because we could, and because we had nothing better to do. So I would eat like two or three Krispy Creams at like one in the morning

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then pass out for eight hours. I’m stone sober, mind you, and then pass out for eight hours, wake up right as rain.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I had two or three Krispy Kremes at one o’clock in the morning now, I would still be paying for it three days later.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, me too. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s move on. Tell me, John, you know how I know you’re old? Because you want a reload button

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your Safari toolbar.

Safari update

⏹️ ▶️ John This is an important feature. Apparently Apple agrees. Again, we’re talking about Safari on

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac here. In the Monterey beta 2, not the, well, I don’t know the public

⏹️ ▶️ John beta, public beta just came out, but this is the developer beta number two. When you go to customize toolbar, there is now

⏹️ ▶️ John an option to drag a reload button up onto your toolbar as there always should have been. Couple of caveats.

⏹️ ▶️ John Number one, a reload button is backwards. Apple’s reload button goes counterclockwise,

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the one on iOS has for a while, I think, instead of clockwise, as it should properly go on a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John and in any right-thinking person’s conception of a reload button.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Why?

⏹️ ▶️ John This was quite a spirited, let’s say, debate on Twitter amongst people who are

⏹️ ▶️ John not me about this, but just to let everybody know. The reason it goes clockwise, I mean, surprisingly, no

⏹️ ▶️ John one wanted to debate this premise. Everyone accepted this premise and debated other things, but I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John the way to win this argument in the incorrect way is to chip at the premise that clockwise

⏹️ ▶️ John means forward in time. But we just all accept that because we’re like, oh, clocks. Clocks go forward. Clockwise means forward in time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone accepted that as a premise. And then just spent the time arguing about whether reloading the page

⏹️ ▶️ John is properly represented by an arrow going forward in time or backwards in time. The obvious answer is yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John forward in time is the correct direction. That’s why the reload button should be a clockwise pointing circle. Why does

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple make it go backwards? I don’t know. Who knows why Apple does the things they do. The other thing

⏹️ ▶️ John about this reload button that Apple added is that it is smaller

⏹️ ▶️ John than most people would have expected. Smaller than I expected, it’s smaller than my reload button. It’s so

⏹️ ▶️ John small in fact that the line weight doesn’t even match the forward and back, you know, Chevron things. Oh, that’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very odd, and it’s also not particularly well aligned. But anyway, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is just beta two, like this thing, this little glyph could change, I’m sure. To be thicker, bigger, pointing the right direction,

⏹️ ▶️ John who knows? Either way, I’m glad it’s there. And the final thing is, One of the things that I dealt with with my reload button extension,

⏹️ ▶️ John which you think would have no actual features because it literally does one thing. I’ve struggled with Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John clamping down of security on extensions combined with their limited

⏹️ ▶️ John extension API, because properly what a reload button should do is be dimmed or

⏹️ ▶️ John grayed out or disabled when there is no page to reload. Let’s say you open a new tab on like an

⏹️ ▶️ John empty page or whatever, if that’s your settings, the reload button shouldn’t be active. There’s nothing to reload, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But the only API Apple has ever offered for Safari extensions to do that

⏹️ ▶️ John was to sort of check the content of the page in some way. Like you have to basically have access

⏹️ ▶️ John to the page content. I didn’t want access to the page content. I don’t wanna know what page you’re on. All I wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John know is the answer to this question. Is a page loaded in this tab, yes or no? I just needed a Boolean, but Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John did not provide that API. Instead, Apple provided an API to say, okay, well, if you wanna know if there’s a page loaded, you have

⏹️ ▶️ John to request access to the page. So for a while, my reload button was like, this extension will see all the web pages you visit,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is super creepy. And eventually I just gave up on that and said, okay, look, I can’t do the disabled

⏹️ ▶️ John state because it’s too creepy to ask, quote unquote, ask to see everyone’s pages. Like again, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John doing anything with information. I’m literally treating it as a bullying in the code just to know whether the thing should be disabled. So for

⏹️ ▶️ John years now, my reload button has not dimmed when there is nothing to reload. Apple adds

⏹️ ▶️ John a reload button to the actual native Safari, doesn’t dim when there’s no page loaded. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re in the actual code. You have the source code to Safari, Apple, please. So next beta,

⏹️ ▶️ John aside from, I would say that the important thing to do is to make this glyph bigger. I don’t really care that much about

⏹️ ▶️ John the direction. It’ll be fine. Again, no one notices that it’s been backwards on iOS for ages. Like it’s really not that big

⏹️ ▶️ John of a deal. But not having it be disabled, that seems not great. But anyway, this is beta two. I give them a few

⏹️ ▶️ John more betas to work out the Safari reload button. Clearly the most important feature in Monterey.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I’m actually, I’m very heartened. Did we figure out if heartened is a word? The opposite of just heartened?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is actually a word. I’m very heartened to see their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sloppy rushed attempt to get a reload button in here. Because what this means, even though

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s you know, the line doesn’t match and it’s backwards and everything. Yeah, I’m sure they will get to that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What this means is that I’m not the only person who hates the new Safari UI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What this means, if they made a visible UI

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change in beta 2, I think this means they’re feeling a bit of heat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Safari UI redesign, which was, I think, quite radical on both the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iOS, and iPhone especially, in different ways, both of which I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco despise. I’m glad that they’re adjusting things because this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows that they have gotten that feedback and that they are willing to change the UI. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a small change, but maybe they’ll be willing to make bigger changes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco throughout the summer as the beta cycle progresses. So I’m happy to see that they are, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people have similar opinions maybe, as I do on this, and that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is receiving apparently enough of that feedback, so much so that they are kind of rushing these changes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the beta. So what I’m hoping is that by the time we get to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco September, October, whenever Monterey is released, and I guess whenever iOS 15 is released, I hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a better overall design can be reached.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’d see this as some kind of like mild concession of like, well, we’re not gonna change the fundamental nature of this

⏹️ ▶️ John UI, but I know some people want a reload button. So here, everything’s fixed now. You got a reload. Honestly, the reload button is not

⏹️ ▶️ John the problem with the new Safari UI on the Mac. I still don’t quite know

⏹️ ▶️ John what their appetite is for the bigger problem, which is how tabs are

⏹️ ▶️ John handled and everything related.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I’m glad to see some change there as well. And by the way, I just looked on iOS 14, the reload button is turning

⏹️ ▶️ John the right direction. Maybe I was thinking of 15 where it was backwards or only on my iPad, I don’t recall. I’m sorry, my

⏹️ ▶️ John recollection for a reload button direction. Probably because I have reload button blindness because I don’t like to even look at that one that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John in the address bar because it’s in the wrong place.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But on iOS, you don’t really have

⏹️ ▶️ John a toolbar, so what can you do?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can confirm that reload on iOS 15 beta 2 points forward. Okay, clockwise.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny you bring up the betas because I have only barely used it on iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s because I have it on a test device that I’m not using that much. But I am using it quite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit on my iPad, which is running the beta as well. And I kind of like the idea

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the whole tab group thing, or whatever they call it, where you can have like different work sessions, if you will, with different groups

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of tabs. And I don’t mind the sidebar that manages that. However, the general

⏹️ ▶️ Casey day-to-day tab interface, if you will, in the dancing of the URL bar, do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not like. I don’t mind it on iOS, but again, I’ve barely used it there, but on iPadOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not want. And I can only imagine I would feel even more angry about it on macOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not digging it in either of those places.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, honestly, I think it’s worse on the iPhone because first of all, it’s a bigger change on the iPhone. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think of all of these, I think the iPhone UI is the one that is the worst.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like that’s seriously like I would have installed the beta on my phone already, but I’m still using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a second phone like just toying around with it because mostly because of Safari. Like because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really need to start testing some 15 features on my main phone. So I really do need to install it like probably this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week or next week, but I don’t want to because iPhone Safari is so bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like that, Oh, that UI is such a mess. I hate looking at it. I hate using it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so clunky and every time I use my my phone now that still has 14 on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and I use so far I’m just like ah it just works it’s normal it’s like please I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get rid of it I don’t want to give it up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well it’s funny you say that because again I’ve only used it briefly and maybe if I used it more I would change my tune but sitting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here now I liked it on the iPhone because I like having the address bar down low although it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dancing about I also didn’t tremendously care for. And I did really like the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the affordance for swapping between tabs and like the whole tab management setup. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey liked all of that quite a bit and that’s why I think I give it a pass on iOS. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey none of that is critical on iPad or Mac and so all you’re doing on iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Mac is making the user interface less predictable, less consistent, and less intuitive. None of which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I consider good things.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of Safari on the Mac, I spent way too long fighting with its handling of the

⏹️ ▶️ John various tiny icons that represent your websites. Some people will call them fav icons, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s way more complicated than that because Apple. And as far as I can tell, after banging my

⏹️ ▶️ John head against it for a while, Safari on Monterey

⏹️ ▶️ John does some kind of smart, quote unquote, smart choice when it displays

⏹️ ▶️ John the little icon for for your website in the various tabs in certain scenarios because I was like

⏹️ ▶️ John doing an A-B comparison between my website and dpreview.com, which I just happened to have open another tab.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, how are they getting, you know, transparency in their icon in this scenario

⏹️ ▶️ John and I can’t. And I think it’s like, it decides that the icon is either predominantly light or predominantly dark

⏹️ ▶️ John and puts it on a background in certain scenarios, which for a while before this occurred

⏹️ ▶️ John to me, I’m like, what is going on? Because I was literally copying like the file format size everything from DP review,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and clearing all my caches, which is very difficult to do to delete like the, all the icon caches and Safari

⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, doing all the things that you could do to actually make it reflect your changes. And I

⏹️ ▶️ John just, I made my, you know, local incarnation of a website exactly matched DP review. The only difference

⏹️ ▶️ John was like the content of the picture and there’s displayed in the way I wanted with the transparent background in mind,

⏹️ ▶️ John insisted putting on a, like a white background and around rec or something. So. I don’t know. I kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of give up on that. I really wish Apple would update their guidance on how to get your little icons to display

⏹️ ▶️ John in a reasonable way, but I have a feeling, based on the design of Safari for Monterey, that

⏹️ ▶️ John being able to control how your website is represented in the UI of Safari is not really

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that web developers are ever

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey going to have

⏹️ ▶️ John complete control over again, because Apple kind of decides. You can give hints, you can suggest things,

⏹️ ▶️ John but in the end, we’ll decide how best to display stuff because we have this challenge. this challenging UI where

⏹️ ▶️ John your thing may not be legible based on the ever-changing background and all that other stuff. So

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of disappointing. But anyway, I did end up updating my fav icons

⏹️ ▶️ John on my website in an absurd way where now there’s like every possible format and size that I think is

⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable as available. And still it doesn’t display correctly, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I gave up. Oh, so you feel like an iOS developer then.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I eventually just gave up. for now.

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you want to install your own software, get in there, run some web application back end or something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want a Linux server and Linode is by far my favorite place I’ve found to host

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a server. I’ve tried many web hosts, believe me, and most of them are just mediocre

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HSTS Preload

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, we should probably move to the second item of follow up. The HTTP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey strict transport security. So is this what we were talking about with like the whitelist

⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week? Where is this coming from?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is, this is everybody’s guess. And I agree with them, although I don’t actually have this confirmed from

⏹️ ▶️ John any Apple source, but I didn’t see any contradiction. The question last week was, you know, is some Apple copy on

⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple web pages like Safari will automatically redirect to HTTPS for sites that

⏹️ ▶️ John are known to support it. Remember that? Because people were reporting, hey, the new Safari always redirects to HTTPS. That’s awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ John But then I tried it and it didn’t redirect on my site. And so we found that copy that said it redirects for known sites. Like, what do they mean

⏹️ ▶️ John by known sites? Surely every site is known to someone, right? Known to support

⏹️ ▶️ John HTTPS. Right. And it didn’t even occur to me to think of its

⏹️ ▶️ John abbreviated HSTS, which is a thing that I knew about long ago, but had long since forgotten.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I’m pretty sure that’s what it is. And so what it is, we’ll link to the Wikipedia page, but basically it’s a way

⏹️ ▶️ John for your web server website to tell web browsers, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ John next time you talk to this website, it’s safe to just talk HTTPS with us from the start.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s, it’s communicated through an HTTP header that tells the clients, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, HTTP header on your, on an HTTPS request that tells them you can safely just

⏹️ ▶️ John talk to this server with HTTPS for the next insert amount of time.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s also a bunch of other requirements that go along with that. What is the website?

⏹️ ▶️ John HSTSpreload.org is a website that will describe to you what you need to do to sort of comply

⏹️ ▶️ John with all this stuff. And if you comply to it,

⏹️ ▶️ John comply with all this stuff, you can apparently get on a preload list which my vague understanding

⏹️ ▶️ John is that web browsers and other things in the world will now you will be on this known list like

⏹️ ▶️ John this list of sites that are known to support HTTPS I guess it either

⏹️ ▶️ John ships with web browsers look it up but anyway that’s how you get on the list so first of all you can comply with this without being on the preload

⏹️ ▶️ John list you can just comply with it on your website send the header and compliant browsers which is most of them will when they talk

⏹️ ▶️ John HTTPS to your website even once they will see the header and say, oh, this site is telling me for the next

⏹️ ▶️ John year, anytime I talk to example.com, it’s just safe for me to just do

⏹️ ▶️ John HTTPS from the get go. And I thought this was interesting. I

⏹️ ▶️ John have for the longest time stubbornly refused to redirect everyone to HTTPS

⏹️ ▶️ John and just supported both protocols, much to the consternation of many, many, many, many, many, many,

⏹️ ▶️ John many people who constantly tell me on Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco your site doesn’t support

⏹️ ▶️ John HTTPS. It’s insecure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. Your pasta recipe is going to hack everyone’s bank accounts.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. My site’s insecure. All right, anyway. But I was so curious

⏹️ ▶️ John about this standard and how it worked that I decided I’m going to try to do

⏹️ ▶️ John it on my website. And of course, it involved way more than you think it does, because the requirements are like, oh, and by the way, your cert needs

⏹️ ▶️ John to also cover www.yourdomainname. I’m like, www? What decade is this? Because I hadn’t put

⏹️ ▶️ John www.hypercredential.co in my SSL because why would I like again what decade? Why wouldn’t you?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because come on, triple W? Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Why don’t I

⏹️ ▶️ John just spell out World Wide Web? It’s terrible. No, I just like my URL

⏹️ ▶️ John to be hypercritical.co with no triple W on the front.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you should accept. So, okay, even on my sites where I don’t use the triple W,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still accept those requests and I simply redirect them to the correct

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John address.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s that’s I don’t, that’s not, I don’t do that. That’s not what I want my domain name to be.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not. But anyway, HSTS requires it. I mean, it resolved, and it would work, and it would redirect

⏹️ ▶️ John you. But I didn’t have the SSL cert for it, because no one should ever be typing triple W. Right. But that means

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it can’t redirect you with

⏹️ ▶️ John HTTPS. Right. Well, then, you know, so anyway, I had to add it to my cert. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John did that. You know, I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco had

⏹️ ▶️ John to get a new cert, reissue it. It didn’t cost any money. It was just an SSL hassle.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then set the headers, and get everything all configured correctly. And then finally, the site was satisfied,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I submitted it. I guess now I’m signed up for at least a year of having an HTTPS

⏹️ ▶️ John only site. I just want to see if I actually get on the preload list. Part of the standard is that if you stop complying with the standard, like

⏹️ ▶️ John say if I, you know, stopped supporting the triple W, if you stop complying with the list of requirements

⏹️ ▶️ John at any point, then you’re off the list. Like the browsers will just say, oh, I give up and I’ll just go back to, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ John old way. So I don’t, it’s not that much of a commitment, but basically I’ve signed up for a year to be HTTPS only on my website

⏹️ ▶️ John that I only update once a year. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually, I should have piped up about this last week. I knew about HSTS,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve been using it on Overcast since I think the beginning of Overcast, because I’ve always had like pretty strict

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSL stuff on Overcast, because like when I made the whole web thing in 2014

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 2013, like that was late enough in history that I’m like, oh, well, if I’m doing this from scratch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might as well make it as secure as possible.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and to be clear, that’s the right choice for something with actual security.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you have actual user data traveling. If you’re making an actual web application,

⏹️ ▶️ John you should absolutely do this. You should not accept plain HTTP. You should use HTTPS everywhere or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if you have a blog that you post on once a year where you just write a paragraph of text, I don’t think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John super essential. Anyway, continue. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I even use content security policy also on Overcast, which basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it effectively impossible for any kind of user entered content to do things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like JavaScript injection and stuff like that even if I somehow mess up my my server side filtering of that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, what I didn’t know about was the preload list. This is two different things. HSTS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the browser header where any website can say only visit me over HTTPS in its response

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you know and the browser keeps keeps like a local database of that you know with that with that age threshold.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I But I didn’t know about the HSTS preload list. And I knew that Chrome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had been doing this for like known big sites like you know, apple.com, you know, bankofamerica.com,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’m sure, you know, a lot of stuff like that. But I didn’t know that there was a way for anybody to just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco submit a site to it. So that’s pretty cool. So yeah, hstspreload.org and you can do that. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked at it for Overcast. I think I just about qualify.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would just have to do, I added the include subdomains thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I hadn’t ever done that before. And I wanted to run that for a little while just to make sure that nothing weird breaks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had forgotten about. And then I’m probably gonna add it to the preload after that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just to save, I’m not gonna save myself, it’s probably too late, but to try to save myself a flood of feedback,

⏹️ ▶️ John and just to be clear for all the listeners, if you’re wondering like, what’s the danger in running a website without HTTPS?

⏹️ ▶️ John Since HTTP is just plain text, Anyone can make your website look like anything because it

⏹️ ▶️ John is trivial to intercept it and totally change the content. So if you’re worried about someone, you know, changing the

⏹️ ▶️ John content on your website to make it look like you’re a terrible person or something, use HTTPS because

⏹️ ▶️ John it is harder to do that. That’s why people say that even if you have no security and you’re not a web application

⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t have, you know, you don’t have anything that you care about security, doing plain HTTP basically

⏹️ ▶️ John makes it so that anyone in between you and the person trying to read your website

⏹️ ▶️ John can make it look like your website says whatever they want because it’s plain text. And if you read,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Dave Weiner had a big thing on this, but a lot of the old school internet people say, yes, it’s plain text, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of the beauty of it, that it should still be accessible through plain text,

⏹️ ▶️ John security be damned, just because it is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a

⏹️ ▶️ John more accessible media without requiring SSL everywhere, and so on and so forth. I’m not sure entirely by that argument.

⏹️ ▶️ John But what I’m saying with supporting HTTP is that I do want people without

⏹️ ▶️ John HTTPS to be able to do it. Say someone’s booted into system 7

⏹️ ▶️ John or something, or I don’t know, like Netscape 1.0, or doesn’t support modern TLS standard, I still want them to

⏹️ ▶️ John be able to pull up my website, because it’s just got text on it. And I’m willing to

⏹️ ▶️ John suffer if someone decides to man in the middle of my website and change everything about it, because I can always

⏹️ ▶️ John say to that person, or they say, hey, this website says you’re a terrible person. I could say, try HTTPS. Does it still

⏹️ ▶️ John say the same thing? Uh, but so far that hasn’t happened. So you can choose what you want to do on your

⏹️ ▶️ John website, but apparently what I’ve chosen to do on mine is for the next year to be HTTPS only. So

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re welcome.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love the devout hatred

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of triple W or WWW or what have you. And yet your, your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey insistence on supporting. HTTP.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John totally different things. The triple W is like saying, well, you can name your kid, whatever you want, but we’re going to put triple W on the front. No.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I picked the domain name for my website. Oh my god.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, but everyone else supports triple W. No. Exactly. It

⏹️ ▶️ John looks ugly. It’s not nice. My domain name is really long to begin with. I don’t want triple W on my

⏹️ ▶️ John website. And there are many other parts of DNS that make it probably not a good idea to make your top

⏹️ ▶️ John level domain your website. Like, there are limitations there. I understand that. I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ John willing to deal with them to have a nicer word in the URL bar.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ John yes, I know, half the web browsers high to triple w anyway so it’s basically invisible. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John you know I was gonna say I’m still not willing to give up on that one but I basically just did I guess so anyway don’t use triple

⏹️ ▶️ John w when you link to me I’ll start sending you to random bad pages are giving you 500 errors.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s more symmetrical because you have to have the dot-co or dot-com in my case so it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s three on one side three on the other.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got two on one side and nothing on the other and a big bunch of everything in the middle.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll do www worldwide worldwide dot hypercritical.co. Always on. All right iOS 15

⏹️ ▶️ Casey always on worldwide.

iOS 15 per-app settings

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 15 can adjust more than just text size. Turns out, if you go into Settings, Accessibility, and Per

⏹️ ▶️ Casey App Settings, there’s a whole cornucopia of things you can do in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and you can add apps like as an interface to say, add an app you want to customize something about. You can customize the text size,

⏹️ ▶️ John the button shapes, transparency, contrast, or reduce motion

⏹️ ▶️ John even. Tons of stuff that you can do per app. So if you didn’t know that was there and there’s some app that you’d like to tweak something

⏹️ ▶️ John about, check it out in iOS 15.

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IAP’s influence on AAPL stock

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Abel Demos writes, I mostly agree with Marco on Apple relaxing IAP rules, but I think Marco has left out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey why Apple values its IAP earnings as much as it does. Relaxations on IAP rules will reduce stock

⏹️ ▶️ Casey value by more than you think. The App Store is the segment of their business that is growing the fastest.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey By relaxing IAP rules, they wouldn’t just be giving up today’s earnings, but tomorrow’s growth as well. Despite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the App Store accounting for about 6% of total revenue, it accounts for about 15, 20% of total profit due to high margins.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thus, a large portion of the value in Apple stock is derived from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wall Street’s expectations of growth in services, which itself is mostly driven by the growth of IAP earnings.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that might be why.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is to address Marco’s point of like, you know, Apple is seemingly defending the small corner of their business at the cost

⏹️ ▶️ John of the rest of it. This is a plausible theory

⏹️ ▶️ John of why that might be, because even though it is a small corner, or like kind of with any sort of rent seeking

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, a companies are rewarded for a situation in which it appears that

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that is growing rapidly will always pay them. So some big percentages that they control, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Anything like that, like that, you know, it looks good for your future financials. Even if the thing you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John taking a percentage of is tiny now, if it’s growing year over year at a huge rate, people can just extrapolate that

⏹️ ▶️ John and say, well, Apple gets whatever percent of that. Again, the profit margins on the app store being even higher

⏹️ ▶️ John than Apple’s already very high margins on its hardware. This email says 70% for

⏹️ ▶️ John the App Store margins versus 30% for

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that hardware one is actually a little low, and I’m not sure where the App Store one comes from. But either way, you can imagine the margins

⏹️ ▶️ John on the App Store are higher because they’re not creating physical products and shipping them around and all that other stuff, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And so yeah, lots of things that don’t make sense if you just look at the

⏹️ ▶️ John balance sheet amount wise start making sense if you realize the dollar signs in people’s eyes

⏹️ ▶️ John of like, if trends continue, this will be a whole jillion dollar business, and Apple will get this huge profit margin

⏹️ ▶️ John on it, and then your stock price gets rewarded. I think it is, I mean, it’s plausible,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it is also a fairly pessimistic and cynical take on Apple’s motivation to say

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is making decisions based on their stock price. Whatever you think about Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m sure they are profit and revenue and growth motivated, Generally

⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, even though people will say Tim Cook gives lip service to the idea of not doing

⏹️ ▶️ John things to help the stock price, but then does things that help the stock price, just look at the stock price under Tim Cook’s tenure,

⏹️ ▶️ John I still think if you were to ask him, he would give an honest answer, which is that he’s just trying to do what he

⏹️ ▶️ John thinks is best for the business without regard for the stock price. And the reward for that is a growing stock price.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in various earning calls, not earning calls, like shareholder meetings where Tim Cook has gotten

⏹️ ▶️ John questions, He’s, what does he said, like, you know, screw your ROI or whatever. And they were asking him, why

⏹️ ▶️ John are you doing this thing that doesn’t- The bloody ROI. Yeah. Cause he became British to swear about

⏹️ ▶️ John that. Yeah. So it’s obvious that depend, you know, that he has a set of values

⏹️ ▶️ John and he’s not beholden to the stock price. The more plausible answer is that

⏹️ ▶️ John this is one of those values that Tim Cook believes in. And he’s not doing it for the stock price. He’s doing it because he believes

⏹️ ▶️ John that this is either the right thing for Apple to do as a company or just

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of Apple’s rightful reward for its work,

⏹️ ▶️ John or that it actually does make the app store the better. But I don’t think, for as cynical

⏹️ ▶️ John as you want to be about Tim Cook, I don’t think that he is actually massively motivated by

⏹️ ▶️ John doing what Wall Street wants with respect to the stock price. He certainly doesn’t need the money himself. He is not beholden

⏹️ ▶️ John to Wall Street for what he does. But in this case, I think what

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has been doing regarding the in-app purchase rules also coincidentally aligns with the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that Wall Street is rewarding them for?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s probably some of both. In general, Apple has historically always been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty stingy and also pretty greedy. And look, it works for them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how they got to be where they are in part. You know, that’s not the only reason they got to where they are, obviously, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have been stingy and greedy for a long time in many areas, and they are very,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, successful and big. And so it’s hard to argue that they should do anything else.

⏹️ ▶️ John I would add to stingy and greedy. I would add controlling. Of course. Because I feel like that

⏹️ ▶️ John it sounds bad when you say controlling. But I mean that in all the senses. Like stingy means don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John spend money. You don’t have to. Greedy means like, hey, there’s, you know, well, that’s your word. I probably wouldn’t describe it to them.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I would definitely say stingy, as in they have so much money, they don’t seem to want to spend it all. But controlling is the big one, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is if there is something that could go either way, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John leave it up to Wall Street, our customers, our developers. Let’s us make a decision

⏹️ ▶️ John and control it in such a way that if someone disagrees with us, if our shareholders

⏹️ ▶️ John disagree with us, if our customers disagree, if our developers disagree, we have control over it. So controlling is the

⏹️ ▶️ John word I would use to, the value that Apple is pursuing with the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ John is that they want to be in control.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s definitely part of it as well. But I think ultimately, when it comes something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes them a lot of money, they are not super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco morally principled necessarily. If it makes them a ton of money, they usually keep making that money.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t really fault them for that because, you know, they are such a big company and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a public company at that. You know, suppose like Tim Cook wanted to make a big stand and like pull out of China really fast or something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, lose a whole bunch of money by pulling out of China. That would, you You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, by a lot of people’s measures, that would be a pretty good moral move. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of like instant money loss that was quote unnecessary would probably,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would imagine, again, not being an expert in this area, result in possibly a shareholder lawsuit.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook would almost certainly be pressured to step down and possibly be forced to step down

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the executives. Like it would, there would be serious ramifications just by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how big they are and that they are our public and everything else. But something like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco relapsing the App Store rules, I understand why the Apple attitude, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, for all the wonderful things that we love about this company and its products, they certainly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some attitude issues and one of those is arrogance. And maybe arrogance is a better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco word than greed, but it’s kind of hard to tell the difference sometimes. When things are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this big, Like when you’re talking about 6 or 15 or 20%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some kind of revenue category or the whole company’s revenue, that’s enough money that they’ll overlook a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in this case, it’s a combination, I think, of they’re making a ton of money

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also they believe they are fully in the right thanks to their culture.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The culture they have, the way they view themselves, they still view themselves as the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco underdog despite being the man. Like they are, like they became IBM slash Microsoft,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoever they were fighting against in their early days, like they are now that or bigger. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the monsters that they fought in the past. They are now those monsters to the rest of the industry. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t think so. They still think they’re the underdog. And they spent so long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having the entire media and tech world telling them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this BS about themselves that was wrong, or telling them that they were wrong, or that they were bad, and they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucked, and they were doing things wrong. They spent so long having that be told to them that they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco developed an incredibly thick skin for rejecting any outside

⏹️ ▶️ Marco criticism and any outside viewpoint that says anything other than Apple is right, Apple knows best,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple’s doing what’s right. This is one of the reasons why we see occasional things, occasional signs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this leaking out these days where it seems like they have trouble reading the room sometimes. they put something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there that generates a certain like immediate negative reaction and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems genuinely surprised by that. Even though to all of us on the outside, it’s obvious that would be a negative thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it seems genuinely like they are surprised by a negative reaction to things. I think it’s because of this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of cultural, I wouldn’t even call it a blind spot. It’s like a cultural character flaw they have. They spent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so long having to defend themselves and proving themselves right over time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they have a really hard time seeing when they’re not 100% in the right. And they have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard time thinking, because of that underdog psychology, they have a really hard time thinking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they might not deserve some part of what they have now or what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can take now. They think they deserve all of it. And they do deserve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of it, but when you have an area like this app store, Shakedown

⏹️ ▶️ Marco business they’re in, see also casino games for children, There’s a lot of areas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this that are kind of gross. It’s really hard for anyone in Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ever see it that way because of this culture that is deep-rooted in the company.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it goes top to bottom. It’s not just the handful of older executives who were at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top who were there in the early days. This is a culture that runs deep through the whole company because they keep telling themselves

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same stories over and over again. And so ultimately, this is not going to be an easy thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ever break for them. I hope they do find a way to find a better balance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of these areas. Now, whether they would actually relax the IAP rules

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what kind of profit this would actually cost them in practice and what that would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually do to the stock price and how much that would actually matter to the company

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the associated things with the stock price, I wouldn’t make a lot of big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco assumptions on big movements in any of those areas. So, for example, if Apple were

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to relax the rule on IAP and would allow people like Netflix and Amazon or whatever to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco show their own payments in the apps. By the way, whether it is shown in a web view

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether it’s kicked out to Safari for the web browser, I don’t think that distinction matters at all. And I don’t think Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinks the distinction matters at all because it doesn’t. No one cares. All it does is make the flow more complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you are allowed to use like a UI text view in your app to enter a credit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco card versus you’re required to kick out to Safari, that doesn’t matter at all. That distinction is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a distinction with a difference. Anyway, assume that companies are allowed to use their own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in-app purchase things and they can use Apple’s if they want to. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think every app would instantly jump to dumping Apple’s thing because that’s not how anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco works. I wouldn’t, I’d keep using it in Overcast. And if apps offered both,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I think they would be pressured to by many of their customers, in most examples, except for the very biggest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, stuff like that, where there’s so much user momentum behind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, the company that runs the app is able to dictate terms way more than their customers are.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In most cases, I think most apps would continue to just use in-app purchase.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the really big companies would have the option not to, and people like me,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we could offer our own thing too, but I think many of our customers would tell us,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, you know what, we’re gonna use an app purchase and that’s fine. And honestly, that’s why I wouldn’t even probably bother doing my own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing unless I wanted to do some kind of readability revenue sharing kind of thing that would require a lower commission

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it effective. But otherwise, I don’t think I’d go that route. I think most developers wouldn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s not that their app store revenue would go from whatever it is today

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to zero. Most of the companies that would add in-app purchase stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like their own in-app purchase stuff, aren’t using Apple’s system today. You already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like, you know, Netflix, Amazon, like these companies already aren’t using it. So you wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be losing their money. They already lost their money years ago if they ever had it in the first place. What they would lose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is some of the App Store money. Now, it’s hard to know how much that is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the area they’re probably more worried about is the gaming market, because that is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by most people’s measures, a substantial portion of App Store revenue.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not substantial, isn’t it? Like 85% of the App Store profit is games.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if we have good data on that, but I think the estimates we’ve seen have it pretty high like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just like close to 50, it’s like the vast, vast majority of income from the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ John is games in every estimate that I’ve ever seen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, me too. And so if they were to have some kind of exception where they would just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, all right, games still have to use an app purchase, but everyone else, now you can use your own thing if you want to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would make the difference even smaller. But even supposing they allowed everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do their own in-app purchase, including games, this isn’t gonna go to zero. I don’t even think they would lose 20%,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the games would have the same market pressure that people like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me do in our apps of like, yeah, we can put our own credit card system in, but if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t also support in-app purchase, tons of our customers out there either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t or won’t use our purchase system. Apple’s in-app purchase system is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good. It has a lot of limitations, but it’s overall a pretty compelling option

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for much of the time. If you have, for in the case of games, you have things like kids using devices

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have parental controls on them, and you have the ability for like, you know, the parent to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco approve a purchase one by one or to set allowances and stuff. Like you have great capabilities in the in-app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchase system now that games would be heavily incentivized by just the sheer numbers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. Games can afford the 30% because people will use it. And if they put their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own system in, a lot fewer people would. So ultimately, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think a ton of this revenue, this App Store revenue would disappear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple relaxed this rule. Some, yeah, some of it probably will. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know if it would be enough that we’d notice the regular growth of this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco margin, of this revenue rather, is so like, you know, nice, even going up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it might even hide this dip like as it happens slowly over time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I don’t even know if it would be noticeable because I think ultimately what you’d end up with is probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least 80% of the current App Store revenue and probably even more than that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 80% is a lot less than 100% though. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think it would be something that’s happening gradually over time. It’s still, look, it’s not the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone. Like it’s, yeah, this is a lot of money. It’s not the iPhone. It’s not, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ridiculous massive portion of Apple’s money. And because it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would happen over time, I don’t think you’d even notice in the stock price. I think what you might notice in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stock price is if there’s a threat of heavy government regulation coming in, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably has more of an effect on the stock price than the potential that they might lose a total

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what, 2% of their revenue maybe, if they lost some portion of the absolute. Like, what do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we, I don’t even think we’d be talking about 2% of their total revenue. Like, I think it’s so, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers, like what the company makes is so much and so massive from all the other areas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their business. The App Store is also not their only services revenue. Granted, it’s most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, which I think is kind of gross as a concept, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they would lose that much money from this. And what they’re risking by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inviting antitrust-style of regulation onto them from major world governments,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is much bigger than this. And so I still maintain that it’s a terrible strategy for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to stand firm on this. But I think the reason we’re seeing them stand firm is a combination

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what Abel here says in this comment about it is a lot of money in absolute terms and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they’re afraid the stock price would go down. But also I think, as I was saying earlier, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinks they are entitled to all of this. And they think they built this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire ecosystem and they’re entitled to a slice of every single thing that happens on it. I think that argument

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is both incredibly arrogant and also incredibly deeply flawed, because lots

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things contributed to this, and lots of other people probably think they deserve it too. Like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, your ISP, your cellular carrier, your processor manufacturer, maybe Samsung for making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your RAM or your display, Cisco for all the routers involved along the way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the people who lay underground cables or undersea cables for internet connectivity everywhere. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of people think they, you know, anyway, I don’t want to get into all that now, but there’s a deep rooted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cultural belief in Apple that they deserve all of this. And that’s going to be very hard for them to ever get over. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s the reason we’re seeing so much stubbornness on this, not that they are afraid of losing 20% of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their revenue, because I don’t think that’s, I don’t think it would be anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Two things, just to circle back on to Abel’s point, his main point was that it’s not about the size of the revenue, it’s about

⏹️ ▶️ John percentage of growth. So even though it is a small, currently a small slice of the pie, if you look at it as what percentage

⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple’s growth, like all of their growth is happening and services and everything else is more or less stagnant.

⏹️ ▶️ John So even though it is a tiny percentage of their revenue, it could be like, you know, a 2% change in

⏹️ ▶️ John their revenue could be a 50% reduction in their growth. So that was his point with like the why potentially

⏹️ ▶️ John Wall Street might, you know, be afraid of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that. And he

⏹️ ▶️ John was extrapolating from that to saying, and that’s why Apple’s doing it because they care about the stock price. And I don’t really quite agree

⏹️ ▶️ John with that. And the second thing is on Apple’s, you know, on Apple’s general

⏹️ ▶️ John motivation, money-based motivation for making decisions. I think part of the reveal

⏹️ ▶️ John of the Epic trial and seeing all the internal emails is that to my recollection, every time I saw

⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of email discussing some controversial issue within Apple, nobody was there to say, we can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John do this. It will lose us too much money. In fact, all I ever saw was the opposite. Lots of emails saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John someone is super mad at us for one of our policies, but they’re kind of important. what can we do to make

⏹️ ▶️ John them happy, right? Or, you know, famously the Phil Schiller one of like, should we really be doing 30%

⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time? We’re making a lot of money on this. Maybe we can lower it. Like at no point, high level

⏹️ ▶️ John executive, low level person, whatever, at no point did someone say, yeah, but if we did that, it

⏹️ ▶️ John would make us lose money. I’m sure they’re in there, but the vast majority of the emails that I remember seeing,

⏹️ ▶️ John they were highlighted, usually highlighted to show Apple in a poor light. So it’s not like they’re cherry picked

⏹️ ▶️ John to make Apple look good. Like these are emails that you would say, look at Apple doing this thing that they said they never do. Like it would

⏹️ ▶️ John show them to be hypocritical or disingenuous or whatever. But in general, people debating were trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of do damage control inside Apple, not saying, but we can’t do that

⏹️ ▶️ John because we demand to make money. So I don’t think that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John way Apple works, is worrying about the stock price or worrying about absolute values. But I do think it is a larger

⏹️ ▶️ John moral stance, business stance, like Marco was saying, that not in such a I don’t think in

⏹️ ▶️ John such a sort of craven way as Marco puts it, but in general, like the evidence of what Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John believes it deserves is embodied by their policies, right? That’s just the bottom line and the inflexibility of those policies.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, clearly, Apple thinks this is a reasonable arrangement, whether or not they

⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s like justified or deserved. I did a blog post about this ages ago of like, it’s not, you know, in any kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John economic arrangement, arguing about who deserves what or whatever. It’s an interesting debate to

⏹️ ▶️ John have, but in the end, if it is a reasonably efficient market of some kind,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I would say, you know, for the most part, these things are because they’re much less regulated than other areas, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is why the government’s looking into it. The only question is, is this arrangement

⏹️ ▶️ John agreeable to all interested parties? Right. That was I forget what post I wrote about this, but it’s like.

⏹️ ▶️ John In the end, that’s all that matters. There are there are multiple people involved in this. There are users that are developers and

⏹️ ▶️ John there are Apple and Apple may dictate the policies, but it has to choose policies that

⏹️ ▶️ John keep people happy enough that there’s not open revolt and Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John got people in open revolt now. So whether or not you think Apple deserves X, Y, or Z,

⏹️ ▶️ John um, you know, getting back to the game consoles, which was the example I use, the game consoles are way worse than Apple, but somehow game consoles

⏹️ ▶️ John are able to manage that relationship so that everyone involved at least sort of grudgingly goes along with

⏹️ ▶️ John it because this is like mutually beneficial and Apple. their policies seem to

⏹️ ▶️ John have shifted off of that, you know, sort of happy medium where everyone is equally disgruntled

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think basically everyone is in open, or at least the big powerful people are in open revolt and as soon the government

⏹️ ▶️ John is in open revolt and this is a bad situation. And even if I 100% agree that Apple deserved

⏹️ ▶️ John every single penny they’re collecting, which I don’t, but even if I did agree, doesn’t matter who deserves what. All that matters

⏹️ ▶️ John is, is this deal working or is it not working? Right now it is not working So

⏹️ ▶️ John something needs to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they believe it’s not working.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, they believe it when they’re pulled in front of Congress. Like, like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s a sign

⏹️ ▶️ John of things not working because that doesn’t happen on its own. It doesn’t happen because like Congress is doing this out of the goodness of its heart. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John they have powerful enemies who are making this happen. And those enemies are supposed to be their quote unquote partners

⏹️ ▶️ John in like the win win scenario of the App Store. And that relationship has just been disintegrating from

⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix, who used to be giving hundreds of millions of dollars per year to giving them zero. As you noted,

⏹️ ▶️ John that is, you know, sort of the beginning of the end. Like, yeah, it’s I agree that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple maybe thinks like this is salvageable. We can save this. Like, it’s not a big deal. Like, I think they may be in that mode.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But I from my perspective, the the arrangement that they have, despite the fact that they

⏹️ ▶️ John are so much nicer than game console platform owners, they have

⏹️ ▶️ John their their their powerful customers are much more angry than game consoles, powerful customers, which is saying something

⏹️ ▶️ John because game consoles, powerful customers are generally pretty angry. The fact that there’s a big Twitter thread on

⏹️ ▶️ John just today about someone complaining about how poorly Sony treats them and how little control they

⏹️ ▶️ John have over things like, again, if you think the app store is bad, just look at how consoles work. But somehow over the decades,

⏹️ ▶️ John these incredibly controlling console makers have managed to keep enough

⏹️ ▶️ John artistic people engaged and involved and rewarded to keep making

⏹️ ▶️ John games for their platforms. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be here. Right. I mean, a bunch of game consoles aren’t here. Sorry, Sega. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not easy to do. But, you know, right now, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John are walking that line with a bunch of super angry developers who nevertheless say,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m still going to keep making games for your platform because it makes me a lot of money.

John’s mouse-pad mystery

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell me about your mouse pad.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is such a weird one. I just threw this in here because this is a strange topic week.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because I’m paranoid about my simple little programs that I run 24 hours a day. For a while, I was

⏹️ ▶️ John going over, mousing over to my little Switch Glass Palette, which is in the upper right corner of the screen. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I would notice when I got over to it, my mouse would seem like it was lagging. I’m like, OK,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is not I’m not using a Bluetooth mouse. That’s not what it is. It’s plugged into USB. And I’m like, am I doing something in my

⏹️ ▶️ John app where like I’m spiking the CPU and the mouse compass, I have a bunch of like invisible drag readings to know when

⏹️ ▶️ John your cursor is in there for a variety of, you know, Switch Class looks simple, but it’s, it’s actually ridiculously

⏹️ ▶️ John complicated, the shenanigans I do to try to make it make the functionality work. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John like maybe I’m doing something with the CPU, is it spiking or whatever? And, and like, and it was reproducible.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, every time I go over there, the mouse cursor lags, like my, like my CPU cores are saturated

⏹️ ▶️ John or something, or like it’s a Bluetooth glitch. And, you know, and I looked, you know, I had

⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode open, I looked and like, that’s not actually happening, like, nothing is going wrong here, it’s not spiking the CPU.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then I, you know, immediately jumped to the next thing is like, well, that is on the right edge of my screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John And when I mouse over to the right edge of my screen, my mouse is on the right half of my mouse pad. So maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s actually the right half of my mouse pad, that’s the problem. So I put the cursor on the left side of the screen,

⏹️ ▶️ John but then picked up my mouse and put it over on the right half of the mouse pad. Guess what, my mouse can’t track

⏹️ ▶️ John very well on the right half of my mouse pad. And it’s blowing my mind, like

⏹️ ▶️ John how long have we had optical mice, right? It’s not like I’m mousing on a glass table like Casey, like this

⏹️ ▶️ John is not a challenging surface.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t use a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John regular mouse anymore. Come on, man. I know, I

⏹️ ▶️ John know, but you do it on a glass table. It’s a good joke, though. I have like a box stock

⏹️ ▶️ John fabric mouse. It is black, maybe that’s not good, but a box stock black fabric

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse pad. And presumably the optical sensor in the bottom of this fairly expensive Microsoft mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John should be able to track on a very textured, you know, woven fabric, you know what a fabric mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John pad surface is like. I’m not challenging this mouse. And yet the right half of my mouse pad,

⏹️ ▶️ John my mouse tracks poorly on it. I can just pick up the mouse, put it over the right side, have my cursor anywhere on the screen in any

⏹️ ▶️ John app. And it like, it’s not, it’s not related to the computer. It’s just literally my mouse pad and the mouse. And this

⏹️ ▶️ John is, I think the first time this has ever happened to me. And you know, however many, since 19, I’ve been using my since 1984.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been cleaning mouse balls and rollers, and I’ve tried every kind of optical mouse, and never before have

⏹️ ▶️ John I seen a mouse that has trouble tracking on a fabric mouse pad surface. I just wanted

⏹️ ▶️ John to share this story with you. What am I gonna do about it? I don’t know. I have like sheets and sheets of this mouse pad fabric

⏹️ ▶️ John that I cut to exact dimensions. Maybe I’ll get a new sheet. But it is a scientific

⏹️ ▶️ John curiosity to me. What in the hell

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is it about the right

⏹️ ▶️ John half of my mouse pad that’s different than the left? Because to the naked eye, they look identical.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounds delightful. You know, you could just switch to a track pad.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, why would I do that? That’s terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you could use my Teflon coated mouse pads.

⏹️ ▶️ John I did use them for a while. In fact, I have an actual Apple branded, you know, Teflon coated mouse pad from,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s Teflon, but it’s the same type of hard plastic, slippery, hard plastic stuff. It was like Apple in the like

⏹️ ▶️ John Palatino font with the ridiculous kerning from the 80s.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s hard plastic, it’s probably not Teflon. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably, I mean, it’s too old. It’s probably too old to be Teflon. It was before like gaming mouse pads and things where it had to be super

⏹️ ▶️ John slippery, but it was hard plastic and slippery. But that was like, you know, we were worried about mouse ball traction back

⏹️ ▶️ John in those days. And actually the first, the first mousing surface that I used at the suggestion

⏹️ ▶️ John of my grandfather, who was instrumental in convincing my parents to buy an original Mac, he,

⏹️ ▶️ John because he was a, you know, woodworker, he’d made his own, like, setup for his computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John And he had a big piece of glass that he put on top of his wooden desk. And he would slide under the glass. He

⏹️ ▶️ John would slide under the glass various things that he had printed for himself on his image writer to remind him of like

⏹️ ▶️ John how a Mac works and all the different functions and everything, right? Like little, you know, and you could see them through the glass desktop. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John um, the original Mac mouse on a glass desktop was

⏹️ ▶️ John actually a pretty good service. That’s what he promoted. He said, you should get a glass desktop, like actual top to your desk

⏹️ ▶️ John because the mouse ball grips well and the mouse ball was a weighted ball with grippy rubber on it. And as long as your

⏹️ ▶️ John glass wasn’t wet, which hopefully it wasn’t near your computer, there’s actually a pretty good traction between the ball and the glass. So

⏹️ ▶️ John my first mousing service was glass with a weighted ball mouse on an original Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I only introduced the mouse pad concept maybe around the time of ADB

⏹️ ▶️ John when we got our first ADB mouse and I think maybe the Mac came with a mouse pad or something or we bought one at Egghead or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I’ve been on mouse pads ever since.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good to know.

Boop

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we’ve had in the show notes for forever and a day, there are two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool geeky Mac apps that you would like to bring up, John.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is one of the great things about the Mac is there’s tons and tons of different ways

⏹️ ▶️ John to do stuff. And everyone can sort of choose which way best

⏹️ ▶️ John fits their brain. And the task I’m going to describe, I’m sure if you’re a Mac user,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can think of 100 ways that it could be done. If you are a developer, you probably have whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John your favorite way to do it, and you do it that way. The example I’m going to pick is something I find myself having to do frequently

⏹️ ▶️ John at work, which is to pretty format some snippet of JSON. You get some response

⏹️ ▶️ John from an API. API doesn’t care about pretty printing. You just want to be able to see with your eyes to be able to parse it, and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a wad of crap. Some people may say, oh, I just go to

⏹️ ▶️ John prettyprintjs.org or some website or whatever, and I just paste it in there and do it. And some people say, no, don’t paste

⏹️ ▶️ John proprietary stuff into websites. you’re revealing company secrets, you should have a local pretty printer or you

⏹️ ▶️ John should do it from the command line or I have a service in the services menu that does it. And like, that’s the beauty

⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac. I use LaunchBar to do it like this. You know, there’s a million different ways you can do this on the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John For whatever reason, I never was really happy with all those ways that I described and more, like I’ve done many

⏹️ ▶️ John of them, right? You know, there’s so many ways you can do it. You can make a little script to do it and launch that script from a command key. You can have

⏹️ ▶️ John a little thing in the menu bar, like again, the beauty of the Mac. And somehow I discovered this

⏹️ ▶️ John app called Boop, which is a good name, B-O-O-P. And it

⏹️ ▶️ John is basically a way to bring up a text window and you can

⏹️ ▶️ John paste some text into there and then do crap to it. And you may look at it and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John every app does that, LaunchBar does that, what is it, not Albert,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Alfred does that. You

⏹️ ▶️ John can do it with Quicksilver, you can do it in the services menu again. Like this seems like an app that has no point because I can do these things

⏹️ ▶️ John another way. But the point of it is that for a certain set of people, apparently me included, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of least friction fastest way to do this. You just bring up boop, paste in the thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then you do a command to like reformat and you have many choices besides just pretty print JSON.

⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, it is completely a pluggable system where you can, again, if you’re a programmer, write very simple little plugins

⏹️ ▶️ John to manipulate whatever you pasted in any way you want. And then it goes away and no, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you ever did it, like making a temporary BB edit document or doing it in a scratch pad and sublime

⏹️ ▶️ John or like this, you know, I do it in a buffer and Emacs like again, whatever fits your brain, but I just wanted

⏹️ ▶️ John to suggest this app because I like this class of app that is like a thing that you can do in a million

⏹️ ▶️ John other ways, but here’s one more way to do it. Oh, and by the way, it’s completely pluggable by programmers

⏹️ ▶️ John where you can just write a simple shell script or Perl script or whatever. And it has like a plugin API that you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have to like compile anything. You don’t need to use Xcode. You can just extend this to your heart’s content. If you

⏹️ ▶️ John like this kind of interface. If you like bring up a window, paste in text, do a thing to it, close the window and be done.

⏹️ ▶️ John Boop is pretty cool. Check it out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is I actually might give us a shot. I’m normally very resistant to installing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new Mac utilities. I don’t think I have really good reason for that. It’s just how I am.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have a good justification. Some people will be like, well, I want to be able to run like the most stock setup

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible. For me, it’s not quite about that. It’s more like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it takes a lot of utility for me to add something to my Mac setup,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I’m much more willing to try stuff on iOS, say what you will about iOS and safety app stores, high-loading, all that crap.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Say that for another day. So this actually looks pretty good, because I will frequently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco open up a new textmate window and use a bundle to maybe do something like that or something, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of this stuff, yeah, I think I’ll give this a shot, because I think this could be a lot more streamlined

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a lot of the ways that I solve these needs

⏹️ ▶️ John today. And it comes with a bunch of stuff built in. Like when you press Command B, it gives you like

⏹️ ▶️ John an auto-complete and you can type JSON and you’ll see, there’s not just pretty print JSON, there’s convert, let me just do it now, hang

⏹️ ▶️ John on. I’ll just type JS, evaluate JavaScript, JSON to YAML, query string to JSON, JSON

⏹️ ▶️ John to query string, format JSON, YAML to JSON, JWT decode or JWT if you would like,

⏹️ ▶️ John minify JSON, CSV to JSON, JSON to CSV. Like this is just me typing JS in the auto-complete of

⏹️ ▶️ John the built-in actions. And of course, if there’s some, again, if you’re a programmer, this is kind of a programmery tool,

⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s some action you want, it’s like, no, I want you to do exactly this. You can write that plugin in whatever language

⏹️ ▶️ John you want, more or less, and plug it into this. And now you’ve got your own, you know, convenient

⏹️ ▶️ John tool to do this. Again, if this particular interface appeals to you, and the only kind of way to tell whether it appeals, like

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t think it would appeal to me until I had tried it. And then I realized, oh, pretty printing JSON

⏹️ ▶️ John that way is better than the 900 other ways that I routinely do it. it just because I can activate it

⏹️ ▶️ John quickly and it goes away quickly and there’s no sort of cleanup and I like their pretty printer,

⏹️ ▶️ John the default one that was built in, so yeah, check it out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s like the cleanup I think is a really good angle. Because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the iOS app drafts is one of the great wins of this philosophy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of not making people manage documents when they don’t need to or want to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think this is one of those things like, so many times like I’ll do that again, I’ll do something like an in text made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I will maybe I’ll do something in the terminal with you know, I’ll like copy something to the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pasteboard or whatever. And then I’ll do you know, pb paste pipe, JSON PP or whatever. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, you can do that. And then I’ll like I’ll pipe that then to mate for text mates, then I’ll have a new technique window. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now Okay, now I have a new window. And where does that go? Well, most of the time, it just sits around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, maybe it gets hidden and minimized somewhere. And then I find it like a week later. And as I’m, command

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tilting through all my textmate windows, trying to find something. And there’s like 17 single-use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco textmate documents that I did something like this in, that now they’re just cluttering up my textmate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco window. I’ve got to close them. Do I want to save? No, I don’t want to save. It’s just, so yeah, I can see this being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco potentially useful.

⏹️ ▶️ John I like their website too. It’s got a nice demo of the app. If you’re like, you’re wondering what the app is, just go to the website. The top thing is an animation

⏹️ ▶️ John showing it to you. But their main bullet points, the top one really shows like how,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess how most people who started their careers on the web do things. The main selling

⏹️ ▶️ John point is stop pasting company secrets into random websites, because honestly, of all the ways that I just ascribed to do this,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think people essentially going to Google and asking Google to do it or finding or

⏹️ ▶️ John bookmarking, I don’t think they use bookmarks. So just like typing JSON pretty print into Google, going to the first website and pasting their,

⏹️ ▶️ John their company’s proprietary API into the thing without thinking that’s how most people do it. So, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also love the company or the group or whatever that built this is called

⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK at best. I like that. It’s like neutral. We’re not setting expectations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey too high here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like that user in the chat, Adge Larso says, it’s like paper plates,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for JSON. That’s perfect.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is perfect. Oh, goodness. All right. And then I’ve had Boop installed,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I keep forgetting about it, so I haven’t used it that much, but obviously I liked it enough to install it.

BitBar, SwiftBar, TextBar

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I discovered this next thing, and I have opinions about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Would you like me to introduce it, John, or would you like

⏹️ ▶️ John to? Yeah, go for it. Like, this has been in here so long that there’s actually some history

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey now attached

⏹️ ▶️ John to the item. When it was first put in there, it was a new, interesting thing, and it has had a journey.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so this is a thing that I think Jason and Dan at Six Colors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey brought to my attention called BitBar. It was in

⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes before that, just FYI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh my God, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about this now?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I

⏹️ ▶️ John had it in the show notes so early and then everyone starts blogging about it and now it looks like I’m following them and then

⏹️ ▶️ John it just got old and then there was it. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were there before it was cool. Don’t worry. I

⏹️ ▶️ John was totally into BitBar before it was cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so BitBar is an app that lets you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put the output of like shell scripts into your menu bar. So as an example,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey although I don’t use BitBar anymore and we’ll get to that in a second. As an example, I have the current ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey membership count in my menu bar. I have my garage door status because why wouldn’t I? And we’ve talked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this recently, but why wouldn’t I? And actually, thanks to friend of the show, Mark Edwards, I have bespoke

⏹️ ▶️ Casey garage door icons now, which is a development since we last spoke about this on the show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I feel like there was one other thing I have up there, but I don’t see anything else right now. So anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it lets you put the output of shell scripts on your menu bar, which is super cool. And you can used for any number

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things. I think Jason Snell has like his actual house’s temperature, you know, exterior

⏹️ ▶️ Casey temperature, because he has a weather station in his house, that he put up there. And there’s all sorts of different stuff you can do. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually use a reboot called or not a reboot, I’m sorry, an alternative, I guess, or a revival

⏹️ ▶️ Casey called Swift Bar. So a quick history, Bit Bar was a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then it kind of fell into disrepair. A person decided

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, whose name escapes me, I’m so sorry, oh my God, a person whose name escapes me decided to reboot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it as a Swift app and rewrite it from Objective-C to Swift. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I’ve been using is SwiftBar and I’ve actually contributed extremely minor things to it. So you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could say I have in part written SwiftBar except not really. So anyways, SwiftBar

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is excellent. It is rewritten in Swift. It works with all the BitBar plugins that you can find generally speaking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it works out really well. And meanwhile, the original author of BitBar has decided,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know what I want to do when I want to make a native Mac app? I want to write that in Go.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So there is a BitBar reboot now written in Go, if that’s your thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. All of these are free. They are excellent. Again, I’m throwing my weight behind SwiftBar,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you can do what you like. But they’re very, very, very cool. And it’s fascinating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can put darn near anything in your menu bar, if you really, really want to. And it’ll obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Casey automatically refresh itself if you so desire. These are very, very cool apps. And I really enjoy them. John, what are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you using bit bars with bar or whatever for?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not actually using that one that much. I just thought it was neat, because like it’s the same. It’s the same philosophy

⏹️ ▶️ John of tool, which probably doesn’t have particularly wide appeal, which is maybe why these are not like huge commercial successes or commercial at

⏹️ ▶️ John all. But it’s a GUI Mac app. But it lets you extend it by writing.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you said shell scripts, it really is just like literally any kind of command line executable you want. Because like

⏹️ ▶️ John in the case of Bitbar, like you essentially emit text to standard out in a format that Bitbar

⏹️ ▶️ John understands in a sort of a little ASCII format. And with it, you describe, hey, I want to have a menu. I want there to

⏹️ ▶️ John be five items. I want this to be the first item, the second item, then a separator. Then like, it’s not just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, put this text in the menu bar, although you can do that. And it’s super easy to do that. Again, it’s like the simplicity. It’s like Unix tools,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Oh, so, you know, like in the classic Mac days, it would It would be like, oh, I have a pluggable menu bar utility and

⏹️ ▶️ John you got to write like code resources and use Apple’s IDE or Code

⏹️ ▶️ John Warrior or something to compile these little things. And this is like, no, the Unix way is you just

⏹️ ▶️ John write a thing and emit text on standard out and our app will parse it and do what

⏹️ ▶️ John you say. And the simple case is simple. You just want to put some text in the menu bar, emit that text more or less

⏹️ ▶️ John from, again, from any way you want, from an executable that we can run that writes the standard out. And that is

⏹️ ▶️ John an interface that appeals to developers and Unix nerds. And it is just so low friction. Like if you just want

⏹️ ▶️ John to do that thing, like putting the number in the menu bar, takes you two seconds, you’re done, right? And it’s same

⏹️ ▶️ John thing with Boop, like that it is extensible, but extensible in a way that is

⏹️ ▶️ John accessible to developers who don’t really want to like buy into your whole system. They don’t want to fire up

⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode. They just want to do a quick thing. And so it’s sort of like the, again, another thing I love about the Macs,

⏹️ ▶️ John marrying a really nice GUI with Unix underpinnings. And

⏹️ ▶️ John when they meet, it’s so rare that like there is an app that is like half Mac and half Unix and is good in

⏹️ ▶️ John both apps, that they really stand out to me. So that’s why I thought this was a nice pair.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real time follow up. Alex Masnov is the SwiftBar person and really,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really good people. So I apologize, I completely blanked on your name. But I’ve been using SwiftBar for quite a while

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is it is really, really great. And it doesn’t mean the others are bad, but I favor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift bar and I really

⏹️ ▶️ John like it. And I think this is another example of like, it shows that this is a good idea. Kind of like one of the early ones was

⏹️ ▶️ John things that come up when you hit command space, kind of pioneered by quick silver, popularized by

⏹️ ▶️ John quick silver, but launch bar predates that I believe. Um, but anyway, that was such a good idea that there are a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ John apps that are like that, whether you call them launchers or whatever, like the idea that you would

⏹️ ▶️ John make a, a, a GUI, you know, the GUI idea of like, it pops up, you do stuff with it and it disappears

⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, pops up on command space or whatever until Apple tried to steal that back. But I totally always

⏹️ ▶️ John switch it back to be my launcher thing. But then it’s like, Oh, you can do anything for that prompt. You can type text, you can do this and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of apps sprung up the fact that like bit bar, I don’t know if it was the first one, but that like now there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John Swift bar and the reboot of the bar, like it’s a good enough idea that this is like, I feel like a category of app now

⏹️ ▶️ John that yeah, lots of people can take different runs at implementing it. But I think what they’ve just hit on is a good idea.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think boop is also a good idea. It overlaps a lot with the quote unquote launchers because a lot of them,

⏹️ ▶️ John including quick silver, have a way where you can bring up the interface and types and text and manipulate it. But boop is

⏹️ ▶️ John a much cleaner interface that is really purpose built for just this one thing and you don’t have to to mock up your laundry with it.

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you seek it out, but it’s also really, really easy to use. Everything is done with visual,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco intuitive, easy to use tools. You don’t have to be a nerd to understand them, which means also, not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only is it faster for nerds to do it because we don’t have to get down to nitty gritty, but also if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco making a site for somebody else, you can kind of just get them started here and hand it to them and say, hey, just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just go here and then they can do it themselves. You’re out of the picture. You don’t have to be supporting

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#askatp: Apple in Matter/CHIP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. And John Strand writes, what do you make of Apple’s relationship to Matter or Chip,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or as I like to call it, Choip? Are there competitive dynamics between Apple and the other players, Amazon,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google, Samsung, others, that might affect or limit development of the standard? How nice will Apple play with others in the area?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And could they be a positive influence on the issues of privacy? So to back up a step, what was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey once known as connected home over IP, which I abbreviated some people called Chip,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has now been renamed Matter. And the idea is it’s a bunch of these companies, again,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amazon, Google, Apple, Samsung, et cetera, that are coming together to say, let’s come up with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one particular like API or interface or what have you for smart home things. So you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have to have things that only the Amazon tube can talk to and that only HomeKit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can talk to and so on and so forth. I maybe I’m naive, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see why this is anything but a good thing. Having all of these people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey together and trying to reach some sort of collective conclusion

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on things, I don’t really see why this is bad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or why there would be competitive dynamics other than let’s just try to find the best solution. But maybe I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey childish and naive. So John, what am I missing?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t follow this space too closely, but to me, as a casual observer, it looks like what happens

⏹️ ▶️ John in a lot of industries like this. If you know, after the initial sort of burst of innovation

⏹️ ▶️ John and attempts to gain supremacy, if no one party gains sufficient supremacy

⏹️ ▶️ John to dictate terms of the entire industry, it eventually becomes in everyone’s collective

⏹️ ▶️ John interest in these types of markets to agree on some kind of standard, because basically

⏹️ ▶️ John they all agree. Look, we all hate each other and we’re all competing, But we will all collectively sell more

⏹️ ▶️ John smart home crap. If it all works with each other and because none of us could

⏹️ ▶️ John get enough share to basically box out everyone else and say, I don’t care about your standards like we are dominant,

⏹️ ▶️ John that apparently didn’t happen enough in this industry. So they just say, OK, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John we tried. We all tried to dominate. We failed. Let’s all do this thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s all somehow agree on some standard that we can live with, because after that,

⏹️ ▶️ John now competition is freer. They all they all believe that they this this deal will allow them

⏹️ ▶️ John to get an edge because now we will be able to get our devices into homes that have your device in

⏹️ ▶️ John them, whereas before we couldn’t. But they all think that, right? They’re all like so I I think this is a good move for consumers. I think,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Internet has shown when there is some kind of common standard for interoperability of tech products, especially

⏹️ ▶️ John network tech products. That’s a good thing for literally everyone involved. Right. it. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John if we were America online had taken over instead of the Internet, it would be worse for everybody, including

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco America. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not including America online because they kind of got the wrong idea. But anyway, for stuff like this,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, TCP IP, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, it is good that their industry standards for that

⏹️ ▶️ John home stuff, it will be, I think, good that their industry standards that now as for whether

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple being part of this will will improve privacy? As

⏹️ ▶️ John they said in the episode of The Simpsons, I haven’t listened to the top four episode, Marco, but do you

⏹️ ▶️ John know this reference I’m about to make? For some of the members of this consortium,

⏹️ ▶️ John this may mean much less privacy. What I’m saying is I think matter probably isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John up to the privacy standards that Apple may dictate if it had full control of it. But for other members of this consortium,

⏹️ ▶️ John it will mean much, much more security. In other words, without this consortium, They would just do whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ John hell they wanted. Who cares about security? Because all they cared about was getting devices out, right? I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ John people who know more about smart home can name individual brands that behave in this way. But I’m sure that

⏹️ ▶️ John the bar has been raised by to comply with matter or whatever. A lot of these

⏹️ ▶️ John companies have to have much more security. And the reference I was trying to make, kudos to

⏹️ ▶️ John anybody who got it through that giant thing. I will give you your internet points if you

⏹️ ▶️ John honestly tell me that you got the reference before I explained it. It was the

⏹️ ▶️ John comic book guy talking about Pondfar, the Vulcan breeding

⏹️ ▶️ John event, saying where they breed every seven years. And he said, for some of you, this will

⏹️ ▶️ John be much less breeding. For others of us, it will mean much, much more.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to answer your question, I did not get the reference. It

⏹️ ▶️ John was a comic book guy, not your favorite character. Don’t spoil it for me. I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listened yet. I think the actual, like I haven’t been following the actual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco details of Matter slash Chip slash Joyp is to know exactly like what the spec

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. I do know that generally speaking, HomeKit has significantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher security and privacy requirements than like the Amazon Alexa stuff or the Google

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. But you know, just as John was just saying, like having what’s basically a format war

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on in a hardware area is never great for consumers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you do eventually just want to kind of settle out and do, okay, just one thing that’s unified slash universal,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, either it encompasses everything or everything else died except this thing. And then consumers can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just buy that kind of gear and not have a whole bunch of like garbage tech

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s useless in a couple years, like my DVD plus RW drive. I think in this case, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I mean, home stuff in general, like all the connected homes, smart home devices,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re pretty crappy. And I still use a few of them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been reducing my reliance on them over time. They’re pretty bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any help they can get to become good, I hope they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get that help. I recently went all in on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePods here in our house. Stopped using the Amazon stuff almost entirely.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If anybody has a solution to operate a HomePod outdoors, I’m curious to see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what my options are. Just

⏹️ ▶️ John put it under your deck, it’ll be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. But otherwise, for the most part, we’re operating just HomePods.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Therefore, we’ve also switched to just HomeKit as the voice slash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart controlling API for things in the house. And that’s not too hard because we mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have HomeKit compatible stuff. And in fact, one of the big annoying areas we didn’t have it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our thermostats. We were an all Nest household. Nest thermostats

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are terrible like everything else Nest makes but they were the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly the least terrible option that we had among all the other terrible options. However

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they became the most terrible options when they mostly stopped working with their internet service and I stopped

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being able to like add them to the house or do almost anything with them or work them reliably.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So on the recommendation of the entire internet, about a month or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two ago, I switched our thermostats out for Ecobee’s. Ecobee’s? Ecobee’s? I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s Echo or Eco. Anyway, it’s like the only home care thermostat basically.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my overall opinion of these has like a little mini topic in here that I’m going to wedge into this ADP topic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This ASCII topic. I’m going to side load it in here. My overall

⏹️ ▶️ Marco opinion of the echobee thermostat is that it looks worse than nest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is harder to adjust than nest the app is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about as bad as nest app but it works with homekit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that makes it worth having done all that stuff and it’s not nest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so sour on nest after all the crap they put me through that I just don’t want any nest in my life.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s it’s not it’s not the bad thing. And the thermostats look okay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and work okay. But critically, they work at home kit. And that’s been really nice. Most of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately, as with everything home kit, they work about 85%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time. And so it’s great that 85% of the time kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of sucks. The rest of it though, when I have to like, manually go Oh, why? Why is the downstairs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermostat not responding, who knows? Let’s go into the Ecobee app. Well, it works

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine there.

⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t heard back from your devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And this is not just a HomeKit thing. The Amazon Echo family of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things and its various smart home devices that work with it aren’t great either. Like I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, one of the only things I use like an automation smart home thing for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore is we have an ice maker in our kitchen And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a little loud when it runs. And so I wanted to put a smart outlet on it to basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a timer so that it would only run basically while everybody’s asleep and not anywhere near it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it wouldn’t be too loud when you’re trying to watch a movie in the next room or something like that. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had this outlet set to run basically for midnight to noon every day and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is this outlet is, it’s like an under the counter kind of half built-in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ice maker, kind of like the way a dishwasher’s installed. So like to get to the back of it where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it plugs in, you have to pull the whole thing out from under the counter. So it’s not something you want to be doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequently. You want to put it in there like at installation time and not mess with it after

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Um, so I put the smart outlet back there and it’s like, I went on Amazon and just found like whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really small. So it would fit back there really small home kit and Alexa compatible smart outlet. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco figured make it compatible with everything. And it’s this like smart things brand that seems really garbagey, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knows? So I put it back there and it works fine most of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Except that one time, like a couple months ago, it just stopped

⏹️ ▶️ Marco working. And I’m like, okay, well what do I do? I have to like pull the ice maker out and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, pull the whole like drain tube that it’s attached to and everything, make sure I don’t mess that up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s a whole thing. Make sure I don’t scratch the floor or break the ice maker in the process. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a whole thing. But I did it, I pulled it out, I reset the stupid thing, I put it back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, Smart Outlet worked again. Okay, today I’m cleaning the ice maker.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m still cleaning the ice maker, which requires you to run it during parts of the cleaning process, at 11.30

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the morning. And I think, uh-oh, this is going to turn itself off in a half hour.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me log into the app, which is some weird, smart things app, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never got to work with HomeKit. Let me try to log in, let me open the app and see if I can control it from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And I open the app, and it has logged me out. If I was ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco logged in, I don’t even know. I try to make an, I try to sign into an account. Oh, I don’t have an account.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, okay, now I don’t even know what to do here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, all right, I have no way to control this outlet unless I pull the whole ice maker out again, which I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t wanna do, I still don’t wanna do. So I’m just like, okay, let me look at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to replace this with like another HomeKit compatible outlet. And you try to look and see what’s available,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s almost nothing on the market except for some weirdo no-name,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those Amazon brand names. You know what I mean? Where it’s like the Markov generator,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand name of random vowels glued together. It’s like, okay, well, I don’t know if I trust

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that enough to put behind a built-in appliance and to have it just work forever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco indefinitely. So anyway, this is the kind of experience I have with almost every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart home device of any standard, whether it’s HomeKit or the Alexa stuff, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Buck and Wemo, Phillips Hue, I’ve tried so many of these things. They are all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost good, but they’re just a little bit unreliable, or you have to occasionally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unpair it from your entire house and repair it for God knows why. Even the Ecobee thermostats,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting them up on HomeKit required jumping through weird hoops with their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup have them even show up to HomeKit and then like sometimes you have to like reset it all the way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then go back through the whole process again to get it re-added to HomeKit. It’s like none of this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is good. None of this is good enough to be installed in someone’s house behind an ice maker or whatever. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that you install in houses you kind of expect it to work reliably indefinitely into the future

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and none of this stuff is good enough. So all this is to say that if chip

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or choip or matter or whatever can somehow be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than what we have now, whether it’s through, you know, better device management

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like authentication and control via these various APIs and stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether it’s through different radio protocols by adopting thread and stuff like that, however

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it happens, it needs to happen. Smart home stuff has been around now for quite a while,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should be good and it’s not. And it’s not the question of like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t buy the cheap garbage, you can buy the, if you buy the nice one, it’s better. No, the nice ones aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. They’re not more reliable. It isn’t like if you go with the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product because then it’ll work 100% of the time. Nope, doesn’t. Or the Amazon stuff, you can go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that, nope, doesn’t. I don’t have any experience with the Google stuff, but I imagine it’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar from what I’ve heard from other people. None of this stuff is good. None of it’s that reliable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of it’s easy for most people to do. And most of it requires you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mess with it like every six months somehow for some reason. And I just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to get past that point in the technology. Like we can do this as a society. We’ve made technologies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can last, that can be low maintenance and reliable. Things like light switches, regular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. They last a long time. They’re very reliable, very simple. We need to get to that point for smart

⏹️ ▶️ Marco home stuff. and we’re so far from it now. So I hope that Matter brings us closer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just thinking of the device my parents had that we would hook up to the lamp that was in the window at the front of the house

⏹️ ▶️ John when we went on vacation. And it was basically plugged into the wall and then it looked like, kind of like a large version

⏹️ ▶️ John of a countertop kitchen timer. Like it had a big dial on it and you’d adjust these two little plastic

⏹️ ▶️ John things. One would be adjusted to the on point and one would be adjusted to the off point and then from it would be a power

⏹️ ▶️ John cord. And it was just literally like a ticking clock type of timer that would make the

⏹️ ▶️ John lights go on at this hour and go off at this hour. And it was not computerized. It did not

⏹️ ▶️ John have any smartphone functionality. Wi-Fi had not been invented yet. The internet was not in

⏹️ ▶️ John anyone’s home. But it could reliably turn that light on at 7 p.m.

⏹️ ▶️ John and off at 9 p.m. or whatever hours were supposed to fool the very dumb burglars into thinking we were home and not on vacation.

⏹️ ▶️ John There was probably a technology connections video about these devices, but if there’s not maybe you

⏹️ ▶️ John can ask him to make one. Unfortunately for your ice maker situation probably wouldn’t help you because

⏹️ ▶️ John if you could fit one of those back behind the ice maker It would probably work reliably for years, but in the situation

⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re like, oh, no, it’s 1130 You still need to get back there to the timer to make it not

⏹️ ▶️ John turn off I’m sure there are other better solutions, but I’m saying is that Your needs are

⏹️ ▶️ John so low-tech that you probably don’t actually need anything smart here You could probably get away with something

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot dumber or maybe farther down the line of the electrical system if you really need to. But your larger point about this stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John being crappy is true. And I think the main advantage that Matter would bring, like I was saying before, is

⏹️ ▶️ John that thing that you had to do where you got to do the Echobee setup, but then do a second setup

⏹️ ▶️ John to get it onto HomeKit. I had the same thing with my smart outlets. The native app has its thing, but then if you wanted to do it on HomeKit,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re doing something separate. Not having to do two things, not having to have two systems, the

⏹️ ▶️ John quote-unquote native one, and then also we’re compatible with HomeKit, Even if they’re both supported as peers,

⏹️ ▶️ John as equal peers, there’s always like, well, you know, which one am I setting it up on? And maybe one is more reliable

⏹️ ▶️ John than the other. Just having one system at least lets these manufacturers concentrate on making that one system

⏹️ ▶️ John reliable, rather than trying to support all the systems. Because, you know, my smart outlet supports the

⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon stuff, the Google stuff, and HomeKit. It supports all three.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s hard to support all three, I bet. If they could just support one, that would be way better. So I also look forward to

⏹️ ▶️ John unification.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and hopefully, maybe if there’s some really good reason why this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff is so hard to make it reliable today, like with the current standards, again, whether it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like authentication stuff, whether it’s networking challenges, whether it’s physical things like WiFi,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco radio problems, as opposed to a thread or Bluetooth or whatever, Zigbee, all those different things, fine,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, I hope the industry has a good reason why things have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been such crap so far, and that they’ve fixed that in this newest standard. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have experience now. They have real world experience with all these standards out there to date.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hopefully now, they have figured out, okay, a new standard is required for a good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason, and that good reason is we can make these things good if we add a new standard, and so here it is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If that’s the case, I am very much looking forward to it. I just, I hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the case, because the way it is now is kind of embarrassing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do have to say that even though it hasn’t been six months yet, the Lutron Caseta stuff that I’ve put on the screened-in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey porch has so far been pretty much bulletproof. And that is smart switches.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they have an outlet. I believe that to be true. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re—and it’s expensive stuff. I think each of these smart switches is like easily 50 bucks,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe close to 75, which is a lot for what you’re talking about, especially since a dumb version

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this is like literally $2. But no, it’s been working really, really well and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have zero complaints so far. So you should try that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks.

#askatp: Chrome in the cloud

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving right along. Peter Waller wants to know, I was wondering if you all had seen and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any thoughts on Mighty, a service that streams Google Chrome from the cloud, similarly to Google Stadia or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey NVIDIA GeForce Now. The service is in beta and is expected to cost $30 a month. That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like a complicated, crazy expensive way to get around the quote, Chrome is too slow, quote, problem. Am I missing something?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that’s my take, too. I haven’t tried any of this. I haven’t dabbled in it. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my initial impression is the same thing. Like this is just to make Chrome not suck. But tell me gentlemen,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is the actual reality here? Fraud and porn maybe?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, if you think of like, what are the possible applications for a web

⏹️ ▶️ Marco browser that’s hosted by somebody else for you? It’s probably like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco leaving fake reviews on stuff. Like I don’t know, like what else? I mean, I’m sure there are legitimate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses for this, but I think there’s gonna be a lot of crappy uses for it as well. It’s like just stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’re not thinking of. It’s like potential scams you can run. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe I’m missing something.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think this is one of the, we talked about this when we talked about streaming gaming services. It’s one of those sort of eternal

⏹️ ▶️ John dreams of computer slash network architecture at

⏹️ ▶️ John various times is to think that, you know, a thing that people are doing

⏹️ ▶️ John locally that has problems, if we could do that remotely, we could solve,

⏹️ ▶️ John we could solve some problems. Like, so let’s say, you know, we can have very powerful computers or we could have computers that

⏹️ ▶️ John are closer to the thing they’re trying to talk to, or we have computers that are optimized for this one task or all sorts

⏹️ ▶️ John of things that you can think about doing that you say, look, when we do it in our data centers,

⏹️ ▶️ John we can do it better than you can do it near you. And all that we need is the network connection

⏹️ ▶️ John to be, you know, to be robust enough to be low, lower, low enough latency. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ John all the sort of the qualifiers, kind of the similar thing to gaming of like we can run the games at our data center. not to have expensive video

⏹️ ▶️ John card. We can, you know, have economies of scale because we can share resources when they’re not in

⏹️ ▶️ John use. They’re not just idle sitting there like someone else will be using them right. Remember, I don’t know if you remember network

⏹️ ▶️ John computing son was super into network computing like oh, well, you know, you’ll have a thin thin client

⏹️ ▶️ John on your end your network computer and it, you know, won’t have a lot of smarts in it, it’ll just have enough to talk

⏹️ ▶️ John on the network and the real computing will happen somewhere else. And that’s great for us because we make servers and, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of models like this. And every time they’ve been tried, so far, even when

⏹️ ▶️ John the balance of tech seems to make sense on paper, like finally the bandwidth is enough or for certain

⏹️ ▶️ John genres of games latency is acceptable, they still haven’t really caught on.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think in the case of this specific scenario of like what people’s browsers do bog down and people’s

⏹️ ▶️ John computers aren’t super powerful and have tons of RAM and if you open a lot of tabs in Chrome it does, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John chug right or to kill your battery like there’s There’s so many, like, there’s lots of technical reasons why this thing would

⏹️ ▶️ John make sense, but the enemy of this approach is just how fast everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ John computers keep getting. I mean, phones, phones are so phenomenally fast at web browsing now

⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s really hard to make the argument that if we do this in our data centers, we can browse,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, better than you can. Like, it’s probably true, like, their computers

⏹️ ▶️ John can be optimized for this task and will have more RAM and can actually be faster, but not faster

⏹️ ▶️ John enough, enough of the time to pay certainly $30 a month for the privilege, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also isolation and security, like all the stuff’s happening on our servers, not on your device or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But, and there’s still the old bugbear of bandwidth and latency. Can you tell

⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not running locally? Maybe it’s probably easier to fake it out in a web browser as

⏹️ ▶️ John opposed to a game, but what about games you play in the web browser? What is it, Microsoft’s xCloud

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is finally allowed, quote unquote, on Apple devices through their web interface. Like, there’s lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of reasons why I don’t think this deal at $30 a month makes sense for most

⏹️ ▶️ John people. And that’s why it’s probably doomed. But people keep trying for this one because on paper, there are a lot of advantages.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in individual scenarios, it can make sense. But as a thing that sort of,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, has a place in the market, like that maybe it’s not for everybody, but it’s a firmly

⏹️ ▶️ John established market. So far, no one has been able to crack this nut, whether in gaming or certainly in web browsers

⏹️ ▶️ John or in general computing. Sun’s network computer didn’t work out. You know, the rumors

⏹️ ▶️ John of the original iMac were is it gonna be a set-top box called Columbus that would kind of be like a lightweight network computer,

⏹️ ▶️ John the one on your TV? That’s not what it turned out to be, it turned out to be the iMac, but lots of companies have had this dream

⏹️ ▶️ John over the years of a small, thin device on your end that connects to our big, powerful server somewhere else

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll be great for us because you’ll buy the cheap device and we’ll charge you per month or whatever. Keep trying, everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ John It will probably work out eventually because it is a good idea, but I don’t think this

⏹️ ▶️ John is it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stop trying to make that happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, they need to keep trying to make it happen because it is a good idea. But this,

⏹️ ▶️ John again, $30 a month so you can have a web browser running elsewhere when our phones run JavaScript at speeds

⏹️ ▶️ John unforeseen. If you brought an iPhone back in time, even just a couple of decades,

⏹️ ▶️ John and said, I’m going to benchmark this this little magical thing against your most powerful

⏹️ ▶️ John computer, people will be blown away. Like the web is really fast on iPhones. Anyway, the web is insanely

⏹️ ▶️ John fast on iPhones. Still not a lot of RAM. Like there’s still advantages to this. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John always the distance thing like how close is your iPhone to the server? We have a you know, a 30 gig Ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ John connection to the trunk of the Internet and you’re on stupid Wi Fi. So instead of you

⏹️ ▶️ John sending the entire multi megabyte content on the stupid web page across, you know, 4G or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll do all that over our wired connection and just send you the picture of the page that renders as a result. Like there

⏹️ ▶️ John are advantages, but $30 a month, nope. argument here.

#askatp: M1 card for Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, friend of the show, Brian Hamilton writes, do you think Apple would ever make an M1 card for Intel Mac Pros

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to enable some of these M1 only monitory features? I personally don’t see that happening,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know. Marco, when you inevitably get your Mac Pro, will it be with an M1 card? Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Riello Not a chance in hell. I think Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I mentioned in the past, I don’t think Apple is looking backward at all on this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition. I think they’ve moved on. Like anything else they do for Intel in the future,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if anything, is going to be really half-butted and only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bare minimum that they need to do. I think they’re, like we’ve seen these rumors of like possible component updates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the existing Mac Pro, like new CPU and GPU update, because they appear to be supported in software. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might happen. Even then, I’d kind of be surprised if it happened, honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think Apple’s head is no longer in the Intel world. So to put any unnecessary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco engineering effort into extending the life of Intel machines with a hardware product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would add an M1 to them, no, no chance.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just to give some historical context for times that this is, either Apple has done this or it has happened to Apple, the

⏹️ ▶️ John original Mac had a thing, what was it called? It had a great ad where it was like, it was

⏹️ ▶️ John a third party thing where you basically, it was like an IBM PC that you would slap onto the side of your Mac so it could

⏹️ ▶️ John run IBM PC software.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, what was that called? Mac Charlie, maybe? I remember the ads for it very vividly from back

⏹️ ▶️ John in the day. Macs had Apple II cards in them, which made sense for education. There was basically like an entire

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple II on a card that you could add into a Mac for schools that needed to run Apple II software. At the

⏹️ ▶️ John same time, there were a series of basically more modern Intel

⏹️ ▶️ John computers on a card, like a 486 that you could put inside your Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John they were called like DOS compatible, right? Cause it basically had a tiny 486 PC on a card inside

⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac. I think that’s why people even think of this cause Apple has, you know, cause it has

⏹️ ▶️ John been a thing so many times for various reasons. And obviously all the, all the signs has happened. Like how many people

⏹️ ▶️ John do you know who’d ever actually even used one of these let alone even knew they existed, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John In the case of M1, the only scenario I can see Apple doing this is if

⏹️ ▶️ John something very disastrous happened with the ARM based system on

⏹️ ▶️ John a chip for the Mac Pro. Like, you know, I don’t know, the yields were bad or there was a fatal flaw in the design,

⏹️ ▶️ John something that just really terrible happened and Apple’s like, oh, what are we gonna do? It’s gonna take us, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, an extra two years to come up with an ARM chip for this Mac Pro because

⏹️ ▶️ John the ARM system on a chips are so cheap compared to Xeons, for example.

⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple was in this dire situation, I can imagine them saying, We’ll just keep shipping Intel Mac Pros

⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll put an M2 or M1X or whatever on a little card and shove it in there so that people can

⏹️ ▶️ John use it for the functions that it’s faster for or something like that. But that would, to be clear, this would be a colossal failure

⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple. It would not be a plan that Apple’s subscribing to. It would be like, something terrible has happened.

⏹️ ▶️ John What can we do? And because the Mac Pro is so horrendously expensive, you can absorb the cost

⏹️ ▶️ John of literally an entire, you know, M1-based Mac or M2-based Mac on a card.

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nothing compared to the cost of, an overall cost of a Mac Pro. So they could do

⏹️ ▶️ John that, but I haven’t heard that they’ve had any disasters, you know, in my great pipeline that I

⏹️ ▶️ John have into the chips

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s working on. So yeah, I don’t think this is gonna happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, HelloFresh, and Linode. And thanks to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our members who support us directly. You can join, atp.fm slash join.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’ll work whether you go to HTTP or HTTPS, because it’ll redirect you. And thanks everybody, we will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. John

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let

⏹️ ▶️ Marco him, Cause it was accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. And you can find

⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcast so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long

🐶

⏹️ ▶️ Casey On a completely random note, we took Penny to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey day boarding. Not puppy play date, but day boarding today because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not this coming weekend, but the weekend following, we’re going to need to have somebody, not us, take care

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of her for a couple of days as we do wedding stuff for my brother-in-law.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we took her, we were trying to ease her way into things because she, and I presume

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not unusual for any dog, but for her particularly, She really doesn’t like new stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at first. And so we took her and dayboarded her today and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dropped her off at like 9.30, picked her up at like 5.30. And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was, I think, a little challenging for the people at the dayboard. Like, she wasn’t mean, but I think she was like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very resistant to them and so on and so forth. But seeing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a dog who I think genuinely thought you would, you know, I think she thought we would,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey she would never see us again, even though it was a total of eight hours. Uh, and then we come and pick her up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ve never seen a creature more happy in my entire life than she was when we picked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey her

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. Uh, so funny. Do you guys, you guys never ever bored your dogs, do you?

⏹️ ▶️ John I do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you do? Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So we try to

⏹️ ▶️ John find places in general that take dogs, but that’s not easy. Like, so this, you know, we’re going,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, down to Long Island at some point this summer and we look for, uh, you know, rental places that would take

⏹️ ▶️ John dogs, but as you can imagine that it’s not common. Uh, and so, yeah, but we, but we, you know, that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good what you’re doing, like trial running that or sort of like finding a place that you trust or people that you trust to watch your dog

⏹️ ▶️ John is important and getting your dog used to the idea. Um, the person we board

⏹️ ▶️ John with now is also the person where a Daisy goes on her doggy play dates, right? So it’s, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a familiar place where she goes frequently. And she’s been boarded there multiple times

⏹️ ▶️ John Still you as you noted you kind of get the suspicion that the dog doesn’t understand to think this is it I’m never gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John see they mean like literally every time Yeah, because you can’t explain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean in all fairness like I think hops has that impression every time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we leave the house, right? Yeah, like every

⏹️ ▶️ John time you leave the room.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, it’s like that’s I think part of the reason why dogs are so like Over-the-top happy to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see you and you get back is that they thought you were gone forever every time you leave

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I wonder about that on the doggy play dates, which, you know, she’s been going on for her entire life. It’s not a mystery.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like there is some something to be said for routine like they understand that this will come and go, but the boarding must

⏹️ ▶️ John be like, wait a second, this play dates lasting a really long time. Right? Exactly. Right. So, but

⏹️ ▶️ John but it, but you know, it’s having somebody you trust and especially since this person boards dogs

⏹️ ▶️ John and has the play dates like it’s, it’s, you know, it’s her friend group, so to speak, right. That she’s familiar

⏹️ ▶️ John with smells and places that she’s familiar with. So it’s the best you can do. It’s not as good as being home and with your people

⏹️ ▶️ John all the time, but sometimes that can’t always happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and it’s funny as I was digging into this, because we got a recommendation from some really good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey friends of ours that have a couple of Westies, but as I’m digging into this, just kind of seeing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s available, there’s everything from like a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey place nearby, not the place we went, but a place nearby has like a different level. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey many of these borders or kennels, you call them, have, you know, different levels. And there’s the, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, steerage plan all the way through. And this one particular place near us has the presidential

⏹️ ▶️ Casey suites, where they have chandeliers and elevated beds and things of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that nature.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey BOWEN

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s awesome! LAZARTE Well, it’s awesome, but it’s like… So, before I became a dog owner, this is like, you know, before I became a parent,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey same story, right? Before I became a dog owner, I swear I would not be that dog owner that is like, frou-frou

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will only have the best of the best, you know? know, frou-frou will always have an elevated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bed and chandeliers in her, in her kennel. Like it’s a fricking dog guys,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, come on. Um, and so I don’t, I don’t absolutely love the place we took

⏹️ ▶️ Casey her because it’s basically a cement box that she was in. Um, but,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I, it’s going to have to suffice for the next, you know, for what we’re going to do an overnight next week, a single overnight

⏹️ ▶️ Casey next week. And the next weekend is, you know, I think it’s two or three nights that she’s going to be gone. And then we’ll see if we stick with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or not. But the people there are super nice and she seemed no worse for wear when we picked her up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s just, it’s funny the level that these places will go and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how over the top and preposterous it is for an animal that I think really just does not know any better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco LWJ Well, I mean, it’s complicated. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for one thing, they do know to a degree, you know, that’s part of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, they pick up so much on the human’s reactions and emotions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about things. Like, if the human is dropping them off and has the clear emotions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, this is a good thing, this is gonna be great, it will put the dog more at ease. The dog,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, once the dog figures out that they’re being left behind, they’re not gonna be happy about it. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s better to be left behind like at a slightly more positive emotional state from the human.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the human being super upset and nervous about it, because then the dog will pick up on that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, I’m a sucker for this. I was the same kind of person. I’m not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be one of those over-the-top dog parents, but of course I mostly am, because I love my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dog. One thing, I’ve heard this from a couple places, I forget

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the origin, but two things to know. Number one is the perspective of, Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your dog is part of your world. You are your dog’s entire world.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s an asymmetric relationship. You go off to work, well, if any of us had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco jobs, but you know, like you go off to work and you know, like you go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, you have a whole world around you. Your dog is one part of your world. But like, yeah, but to your dog, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are the entire world. Like they, it’s just all about you. So that’s one thing to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco conscious of. And the other thing that I forget where I heard this as well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was so good, but it was something along the lines of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, somebody was like filling up their dog’s water bowl and they were using the filtered water.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And someone else asked, why do you use filtered water? Because, you know, the dog doesn’t care or doesn’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the guy said, because he would do the same for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s adorable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey cause like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to your dog, like your God, like, you know, your dog loves you so much. So like, I feel like that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the combination of those two things, like it makes you want to do nice things for your dog,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it probably doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Even if dogs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like theoretically shouldn’t or can’t know or care about the difference between,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the crappy option and the good option, you just want to do good stuff for your dog. Cause your dog is so awesome to you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Your dog would eat you though. So there’s that. My dog? Really?

⏹️ ▶️ John You died in your house and your dog is there and no one’s feeding it. You’re eventually going to eat it. I mean, the dog might be sad while it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John eating you, but your dog will eat you. Oh my god. Oh god. Ha ha ha ha. Beep.