465: Lasers Are Great

13 Jan 2022

More on display tech, App Store payment processors, AirTags PR, and gross printers.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • Fi dog-collar pronunciation
    • Discount code ATP100 for $100 off (not a sponsor)
  • New Ford Mustangs will be available in 2023–2024
  • Sony did show PSVR2 controllers
  • Mirrorless advantages and the longevity of Canon DSLRs (from Justin Krohn)
  • TV technology
    • WRGB OLEDs do have white backlights
    • QD-OLEDs have RGB “filters”/diffusers
      • Samsung’s 2019 $11 billion investment in QD-OLED
    • Micro-LED
  • On “Weird & Complicated” Analog TV (via Moe Rubenzahl)
    • Technology Connections on Analog TV
  • Apple will Allow Alternate Payment Systems in the App Store in 🇰🇷, with a catch
    • StoreKit 2
    • RevenueCat Getting Started
    • Apple wants 30% of Uber/Lyft’s membership revenue
    • American laws don’t reflect Americans’ desires
• John’s gross printer
  • Theranos
  • John’s printer
  • Casey’s printer
  • Marco’s laser all-in-one with the buggy networking
  • Marco’s beloved giant printer (price is currently inflated; it cost $449 in 2016)
  • Marco’s 11x17 inkjet all-in-one (also currently overpriced; it cost $249 in 2018)
• #askatp:
  • What do we think about React/React Native? (via Asajz)
    • Divorce leads children to the worst places
    • Vue.js
    • Angular
      • Note: Not AngularJS
  • How can there be a huge ∆ between data in Photos and the actual Photos Library on disk? (via Todd Vaziri)
    • SQLite VACUUM
• Post-show: Some responses to our health/veganism/leather discussion last week
  • Slow Boring: Is Healthy Food Actually More Expensive?
  • BBC: Climate Change: Which vegan milk is best?
  • iMore: Apple should ditch leather (not mentioned, but meant to)

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

Chapters

1. Follow-up: Fi dog tracker
2. Follow-up: New Mustang
3. Follow-up: PSVR 2 controllers
4. Follow-up: DSLRs and mirrorless
5. Follow-up: TV tech
6. Follow-up: Chroma signals
7. Sponsor: Hover
8. South Korea App Store law
9. App Store/AirTag PR
10. Sponsor: Memberful
11. John’s gross printer
12. Sponsor: Trade Coffee
13. #askatp: React/React Native
14. #askatp: Photos Library disk usage
15. Ending theme
16. Follow-up: Animal products

Follow-up: Fi dog tracker

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, this is boring. Let’s move on. I’m going to cut all this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Although, yeah, well, that’s good, because I only started recording four minutes ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Casey, come on, man. All right, so let’s move on to some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey follow up. We have some follow up from FeeFiFoFum. John, would you like to tell us about this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got to undo my pronunciation here. But so we got an email from the dog collar people, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company name or the product name, and I guess the company name as well, is spelled F-I. and I was pronouncing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it fee because that seems reasonable, but Lucy from the company that’s spelled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John F-I tells us that it’s pronounced like Fido or Wi-Fi. So it’s fi,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like fee, fi, fo, fum, or F with the word I after it. Lucy says, many, many people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go for fee first. We should probably put it as the banner at the top of the website, you think? Every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company that has a weird name should have the pronunciation prominently placed on the website.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Some people don’t have it at all, which is bad, but some people have it like, oh, if you dig and go to the about page and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John read all the texts, it will tell you how to pronounce it, right? That’s better than nothing. But if you have a weird name

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and people instinctively go for the, the quote unquote wrong pronunciation first, you have to like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John address that in an obvious way right in front of people. Otherwise you’re just gonna be called Fi forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s gonna be so hard for me to change this in my mind cause I can’t, I don’t know if I can say Fi.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think Fi might be a better name. I mean, it makes sense with the Fido, Like I understand where it’s coming from. Anyway, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s that. Also, I can’t even, I’m like Casey now. I go for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the right pronunciation and end up with the wrong. The Fi company created a discount

⏹️ ▶️ ^John code just for us. I actually put it in last week’s show notes because they got it to us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in time for that. But it’s ATP100. That’s the $100 off thing. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bunch of other codes. There’s all the same $100 off. If you go to their website, at the bottom of the website is the $100 off code. different $100

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off codes. This is not like a secret that you can only get through this podcast, blah, blah, blah. They continue to not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be a sponsor. This is not a sponsored spot at all, period, whatever. But if you want to enter ADP 100,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can get $100 off their collar. Or you can just enter the code that’s at the bottom of the webpage that you go to buy it on. So I just thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would include that here. Collar’s still working out fine. I actually charged it for the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time since having it. It was only down to like 38%. I think it probably would have made it one month on a charge,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but definitely not the three months that they say is possible if your dog, I guess, stays within Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ ^John range all the time, but my dog doesn’t. She goes out on a doggy play date four days a week,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that is probably draining the battery a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Good deal.

Follow-up: New Mustang

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Uh, we also got word, I think we saw this from a couple of different people that a new Mustang

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is in the works for 2023 or 2024. So I actually, I should have looked this up and I completely forgot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Is the Mustang available brand new right now? You know, the chip shortages and whatnot, notwithstanding.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is, but it’s like, it’s not, it’s an older model that they’re just still selling and putting new model years out with like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different options or trim or, you know, whatever. Uh, but, uh, reportedly there actually is going to be a new Mustang. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, Ford will actually sell cars. Lots of other people who are outside the US point out that Ford does sell cars

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as opposed to trucks and SUVs outside the US. We should have been more clear in our typical US-centric

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing when we say Ford doesn’t sell cars anymore, we meant in the US. But yeah, they sell lots of cars

⏹️ ▶️ ^John elsewhere in the world because no one else in the world is so obsessed with trucks and gigantic SUVs as we are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is true.

Follow-up: PSVR 2 controllers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, and then we lied about something else. Apparently the PSR this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Sony PS VR 2 That is a mouthful They did show the controllers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah in their press release They didn’t have any pictures and the presentation that have any pictures but on their website

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like the pictures for media They did have pictures of the controllers. They look like I forget

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which other Maybe Marco knows these look like the quest controllers their existing VR controllers that are like this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe it’s the valve in there Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the the quest controllers are I mean, sorry, whatever. It’s is it called the quest now? What the hell this quest to isn’t it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, whatever that the thing formerly called the the oculus quest Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the controllers look pretty similar this there’s white and but otherwise they’re they’re pretty similar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and if you look at the controls It’s got like similar to the PlayStation buttons with the different shapes on them and those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those thumb sticks are like PlayStation thumb sticks And you know, so they did show this I don’t think they showed the thing itself They all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some one of the technologies they mentioned And we just worth noting is that they’re moving to what they call inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out tracking, which I think maybe the quest does as well. A bunch of other ones do where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way you know, the way it keeps track of where your body and head and hands are positioned in space

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not with external sensors that you have to put around your room, but rather with sensors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the headset thing and also on the hands. So they see each other.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So they position themselves relative to themselves. Well, they call it inside-out tracking instead of having like fixed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John locations around the room that are trying to keep track of where your hands are Again, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a notable new technology, but it’s notable for Sony to be switching to that from their previous system so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the tech and everything looks pretty good, but You know, no price no picture of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the headset that I could find and I think no real release date yet but it’s coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John along.

Follow-up: DSLRs and mirrorless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Alright, and then Justin Krohn wrote in with regard to Canon DSLRs, and so I’m going to read a little bit of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this. A major advantage of mirrorless that isn’t often discussed is the dramatically reduced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey flange focal distance, or FFD. Having a smaller FFD allows lens designers more flexibility in designing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lenses for the camera, as they can place lens elements closer to the camera’s sensor than was possible with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey DSLRs, and that’s because they need the additional distance for the mirror to flap. This has enabled some unique

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lenses exclusive to the Canon RF or mirrorless line of cameras, shooting, and according

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to Justin, his new personal favorite zoom lens, the 28-70mm F2L. From

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Canon’s white paper on the RF system, quote, “…the reduction from a 44mm flange back distance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the EF mount system to the 20mm of the new RF mount system opens important additional degrees of freedom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in lens design. The pivotal innovation offered by this short distance combined with the large 54mm diameter RF

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mount is the freedom to deploy large diameter optical elements at the very rear of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the lens and closer to the large image sensor. So back to Justin. While Canon simply said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that they don’t plan on making additional flagship DSLRs like the 1DX, etc.,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would still be extremely surprised if the 3 or 5 series get any additional DSLR models.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The R5, which is the mirrorless 5D replacement, has been extremely well received both

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in terms of reviews and in sales, to where they had a difficulty in keeping it in stock for the first year of production.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Same for the more recent introduction of the R3. Canon R&D is focused on the RF line of lenses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as opposed to the EF so any DSLR purchases are buying into a static system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Into the road for those lenses that are far away from the sensors. Yeah, that’s that’s one of the advantages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of I mean the small the APS-C Sensor I have that’s that small

⏹️ ▶️ ^John small sensor also means you can have small lenses And I think the distance from the lens also helps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything be a bit more compact with the mirrorless cameras is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some people who are applying to our discussion last week really just extolling the virtues of being able to see through the lens

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s gonna take the picture, right? And they say, no, no electronic viewfinder has come close to that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Electronic viewfinders continue to get better and better in terms of responsiveness. They have like 120 frames per

⏹️ ▶️ ^John second, very high resolution. No, it’s probably not going to be exactly the same for a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John while as literally looking through the lens because that’s real time, real light going to your real eyeballs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but there are advantages to the electronic viewfinder as well in that electronic viewfinder can be brighter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than what you see through the lens because it’s an emissive screen that you can adjust the brightness of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And sometimes that is useful. And if you have really bad vision, they’re probably about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, there are like retina screens at this point for my eyeballs

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} and really good cameras as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well. So I think the trade-off is well worth it for the compact size and apparently there’s an advantage to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lens design as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would say like, I don’t, I mean, having, having spent a lot of time with both, I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco electronic viewfinders will ever be as good as optical viewfinders in the ways

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that people care about when they make this distinction. However, I think there’s just so many other advantages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to electronic viewfinder based cameras, like the whole mirrorless, that whole world. There’s so many advantages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there that we’re just gonna let that go. Like not everybody will, it’s always gonna be some people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep the optical viewfinder, just like some people still use. things like range finders today, even though there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more modern alternatives that most people use. But there’s always gonna be something like that, but I think it’s just gonna become

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a narrower and narrower part of the market because everyone’s choosing mirrorless despite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the fact that electronic viewfinders are worse in certain ways because of the other value that they’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as a result.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Which ways do you think they’re worse though? Like it used to be the thing was like basically frame rate, like reality doesn’t have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frame lag behind it, you’re just literally looking through the thing. So as soon as you move the camera, you see the change. but at 120 frames per second,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like that has basically gotten that one good enough that most people can’t tell. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the only thing left is color reproduction and resolution. And I think the advantages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the viewfinder, like the fact that it can light up and be brighter than what you’re actually seeing, probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John balance those out. I know people just want it because it’s traditional and because 120 frames per second is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only on a few high-end cameras and it drains the battery faster so you don’t use it all the time. We’re not quite there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yet, but I think we’re getting close to the point where there won’t be a strong argument for why you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need the optical viewfinder, especially because there is like, oh, I like being able to look through the thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you can’t look through it when you’re taking the picture because the mirror blocks you, right? And like, oh, that’s only for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a short period of time. Well, if you’re trying to shoot at 30 frames per second, you know, it’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blacked out for a very long portion of that time as the mirror goes flap, flap, flap, flap, flap. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then I don’t think you can really look through the viewfinder at all while you’re taking video on one of these cameras, which is a big application

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a lot of these, you know, the big interchangeable lens cameras to do video. And yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the mirror has to be up the whole time during video and you’re not seeing anything then, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, but like, I’ve always enjoyed it’s like how the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco optical viewfinder system is just direct and simple. And there are advantages, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you mentioned, you quickly mentioned battery life. And I think that’s one of the reasons why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco DSLR, or why mirrorless cameras rather, have had such horrendous battery life for the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco portion of their takeover of the market compared to regular SLRs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they’re having to run these screens all the time and having to run the image sensors to capture data for the screens

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and display the screens and light them up and everything. And that’s such a more power hungry process than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what a DSLR is doing when it’s not taking a picture, which is almost nothing. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are advantages in practice to optical, But as you mentioned,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are also advantages to electronic that optical systems can and will never achieve.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And mirrorless will never really have an optical system. And so the industry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has moved on, and everyone holding on to the optical systems will be forced to move on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at some point as well, unless they just want to keep being relegated to decreasingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco useful parts of the product line.

Follow-up: TV tech

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, John, tell me about TV technology. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some self-follow-up. I’ve been listening to myself in the last episode. I got a few things slightly wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I heard myself stumbling over them when I was saying them, but I just pulled the wrong answers out. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first thing, WRGB OLEDs have white backlights, not blue. The QD

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OLEDs have blue backlights, but WRGB have white. And I stumbled because I realized what I was saying didn’t make sense unless they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John white. So the white backlights in WRGB OLEDs, It’s a big white field of LEDs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Every one of them is the size of a pixel, so they’re individually controlled, right? But each one of those white lights shines

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through a thing that has a color filter. And it takes white light and it goes through the red color filter. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that red color filter only lets through the red portion of the white light, right? The red wavelengths.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then there’s a blue filter that only lets through the blue wavelengths. And there’s a green filter that only lets through the green wavelengths, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When you’re filtering light in that way, when you’re taking white light and only letting through the red, the green, or the blue,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re losing brightness because you’re just discarding all the other wavelengths of light. The backlight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is emitting a bunch of different wavelengths of light. And then of course, WRGB has the W pixel, which just lets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through the white light, right? Straight through, but that washes out the colors, right? So that’s why one of the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that OLEDs have trouble getting bright, they are intentionally filtering out a lot of the light from their backlights. And remember,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the magic of QD OLED is the backlight is blue because that’s cheap to make and you can make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it super duper bright. and then the quantum dots don’t filter out wavelengths because it’s just blue light.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like pure blue, just blue wavelength that with the quantum dots change the light. I mean, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, the light hits this material that excites it and you know, we put the link in the show notes last week of little electrons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John changing energy states and stuff or whatever, but it essentially changes the wavelength of the light from blue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into red, from blue into green, and then just lets the blue through on the blue side. But apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John QDL LEDs do have quote unquote filters them which act as diffusers to make sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the light goes out in all directions. The thing is the diffusers don’t end up blocking a lot of light because by the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time the light gets through the QD layer it is very purely blue red or green

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already and so the red filter is just blocking out any wavelength that didn’t get converted by the QD

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OLED by the quantum dots and the quantum dots are very efficient much more efficient than the filter so you’re taking a hundred

⏹️ ▶️ ^John percent of your backlight and putting it through the QD layer maybe you get 80% of it out and then that gets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John diffused. Whereas in WRGB OLED you’re taking 100% of your white light and cutting off like 60%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it to just get the blue wavelength or whatever. So that’s why in theory QD OLEDs have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the potential to be much brighter. And of course there’s no white subpixel to wash out the saturation of the light. So the QD OLEDs have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better viewing angle because that diffuser is the very last layer in the layer cake and spreads the light out in all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John directions. So you have amazing viewing angles. Especially it’s also especially problem on WRGB

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OLEDs that off-axis, even before the brightness changes, you tend to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a tint to it, like the most recent high-end LG WRGB OLEDs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get like a reddish tint off-axis, which is kind of annoying, and QD OLEDs don’t have that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they could potentially be brighter. And I found an old story when looking at this from 2019 about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Samsung’s investment in their QD OLED factory. they put $11 billion into this in 2019

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be able to make QD OLED panels. So yeah, this is kind of, it’s almost like Silicon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Fabs where like it takes a lot of money just to be able to eventually many years later get a factory that can make these things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And finally, I think we mentioned it briefly in the last show, but it’s worth mentioning again, micro LED

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is still the holy grail. That’s where every single sub-pixel is like a red LED, a green LED and a blue LED.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Instead of this business where there’s a white LED behind the color filters or a blue LED behind quantum dots, Why not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just have a red LED, a green LED, and a blue LED? You’re done, right? The answer is because it’s insanely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expensive to do that. That’s what we want. That’s what everybody wants. But those screens are five and six

⏹️ ▶️ ^John figures at this point. But they look amazing. So if you’re super, super, super duper rich and you have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really big house, because it’s actually kind of hard to make these things small, get a micro LED TV, but be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John prepared to pay as much as Lamborghini for one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, no, it’s worth noting. So you put a video in our notes, which I’ve put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the show notes, and it’s some individual like recapping CES and talking about the $180,000, something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like that. It was over $100,000, which I know you just said, but really think about that people, $100,000 plus for a television

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that some people are apparently able to and willing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to spend the money on like a 90 inch, $150,000 or whatever it is TV. It’s bananas. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re more expensive when they get smaller. Like they used to sell them that they were like 700 inches. Cause like, as you can imagine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you make the screen bigger and bigger and it’s still like 4K resolution, it’s much easier to make a red, a blue, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a green LED when they’re not that small. At

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that point, I believe you have a scoreboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right, exactly, that’s the same technology, right? But when you try to say, I want it to be 4K or even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worse, 8K, and also be, quote unquote, only 90 inches diagonal,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to make those things so tiny, and it’s so expensive. And even now, the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they do it, there is a segmented display technology. Like, they can’t make one screen like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. They have to make these sub-screens, and then they just tack them together, they make like tiles basically, and they just tack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the tiles together and hope that you can’t see the seams between them. And they do a pretty good job of covering it up, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s very expensive. And it’s expensive because of the manufacturing. They have like robots, like putting down these microscopic little red, green, and blue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John LEDs, and they all have to be right next to each other with no spaces between them, and uniform and bright, and they all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to work. It’s expensive, but yeah, that’s the ideal where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything is its own LED. Here’s the big thing about why micro LED is great. Notice the O

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not anywhere in this. There’s no organic elements in it. The organic stuff in OLEDs, that’s the stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that wears out, that causes burn-in, image retention, all that, because the more you run it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you wear it out over time, and if you have something that’s on the screen all the time, that wears out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those pixels faster than everything else, and you get image retention. No organic stuff in a micro LED.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is just plain old inorganic LEDs of the kind we all have, and we all know those things last forever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and maintain their brightness, and do not decay. So, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} gonna be a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John while before micro LED comes down from the $180,000 price, but boy, when it does, those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screens are gonna be amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’m not, I don’t really follow this kind of stuff the way you do. I’m curious, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on an infinite time scale, on what kind of time scale do you think micro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco LED TVs might be accessible? Like, are we talking about a decade from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now? Five years, 20 years? Like, what are we talking about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think a decade is reasonable. If you remember Apple was investing in micro LED, I think the rumor was for the Apple watch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s way easier to do a watch than 89 inch 8K television, right? Because there’s just fewer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pixels. But if you notice, Apple didn’t release a watch that’s micro LED. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everyone wants this technology. I think a decade is a reasonable timeline. Like if you look at QD OLED,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you’ll find all the quantum dot explainer videos from six, seven

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years ago. And just now we’re getting the very first televisions with QD OLED in them. although

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we did get quantum dot LCD before that. So I think a 10 year timeline for micro LED to come down in price

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is very reasonable because every year someone, you know, micro LEDs have been at CES for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the past five years and they used to be 300,000 and 200,000 and 100,000. I think there was a five figure one this year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So they are coming down and like every year they brag about, we’ve made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it like 1500 times less expensive to manufacture but it still costs as much as a car, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re getting there. Like everyone wants to go there because this solves so many problems that they have to deal with with these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other display technologies. But 10-year time horizon seems conservative to me.

Follow-up: Chroma signals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Alright, Mo Rubenzall writes, I was okay with the explanation of chroma subsampling until John Insigne

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey insulted analog TV as quote weird and complicated quote. I am older

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than even John, that’s possible, and worked with analog broadcast video back in the dark

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ages. It is a very clever system. The reason for the signal structure is compatibility. When color came along,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey RCA and CBS had competing systems. CBS’s was simpler but demanded a different broadcast spectrum

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which would obsolete black and white TV sets. RCA’s system was compatible with black black and white bands because it broadcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey color on a chroma subcarrier, which a black and white TV would not see. A color TV would add or subtract

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the different signals to get the color signals. That’s cool, I didn’t know that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I would strongly recommend watching the Technology Connections video series on analog TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The way it works is fascinating. However, I think both

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mo and John are correct. Analog TV is very clever and also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weird and complicated. You are both correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, that’s the, you know, legacy compatibility tech debt, like the standards

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that win often have to do weird stuff and bend over backwards to accommodate existing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John conditions. And you know, whoever set up the first system didn’t have color in mind.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the standard that didn’t obsolete all those TVs was obviously gonna win, even if it’s weirder and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more complex or quote unquote worse.

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South Korea App Store law

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We should at least quickly mention that Apple is apparently going to allow alternate payment systems in the App

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Store in South Korea as per laws there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This was discussed a lot when this was going around of like basically saying, OK, well, even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Apple follows this law, they’re probably going to charge fee anyway, which threw a lot of people for a loop who hadn’t been following

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the trial closely, because Tim Cook said this flat out in the trial and people flipped out about it then, because he was like, well, if we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t go through our payment system, we’ll have to find some other way to collect the money. And everyone’s like, what, what, what? No, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whole point is we use our own payments, we don’t have to pay you. And Apple’s like, Oh, no, you have to pass. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here is finally a concrete version of that, where Apple has proposed to the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, the South Korean lawmakers, here’s how we’re going to comply with your new law, we’re going to do x, we’re going to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever it is, the and part of the how they’re going to going to comply is they say, oh, and of course, we’re going to take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a fee for all of these payments that are made through payment processes that are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not ours. I don’t think they said what the fee is or anything like that, but they said they’re going to do that. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think this is basically confirmation that if you thought Apple was going to allow third party payments and not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also take a fee, no, they’re definitely taking a fee.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and to be clear, this is actually Google had the same law applied to them in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco South Korea. In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re much bigger there, when this law was actually meant really to change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Google’s behavior, not necessarily Apple’s. But Google is doing this exact same thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically. I forget the exact numbers, but it’s something like, instead of charging 15%, we’ll charge you 13%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or something like it’s, and then you can apply the rest of your credit card fees. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, so when people say alternative payment systems, what we’re actually getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in these places where this exception is being made is not a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco monetary savings. It’s the ability to use other systems for other reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Their features, their flexibility, their customer service implications. Yeah, the ability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to give people refunds, like visibility into who’s actually buying your stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, but Apple will. I mean, as they said, and as it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco blew all of our minds with rage, they will presumably devise some kind of system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where in order to comply with their App Store rules, you as the app using an external

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco payment system will have to somehow report your transactions to Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so that they can collect their commission.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Or it’ll go through it, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what Google did is they made you use an API. Like it’ll go through an API that sees the amount

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it doesn’t do anything with it except for note, ah, I see you’re charging someone X amount and then it knows how much the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says you owe them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and you can imagine the massive amounts of edge cases and complexities that this will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bring up. So for instance, what if the rate that you are paying in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something like foreign currency exchange is slightly different than what Apple’s paying? What if you issue

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a refund? What if the customer issues a charge back and you lose that money later? Like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so many weird complexities that will make this pretty much impossible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to for most people to use this ability to run their alternative payment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco system that this is gonna be limited only to the largest of large companies and BS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco game companies. That’s gonna be who uses it and it’s gonna be a mess. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ultimately going to change, probably as far as I can tell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco roughly nothing for the better for almost anybody. I can’t imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is actually going to help pretty much anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It has the potential to make customer support better for big companies that can navigate all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things and also want to have better customer support, they will be able to help you have better, because they have like no ability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to influence customer support whatsoever when they go through Apple’s payment, because they literally can’t issue any refunds, have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no visibility into it, they have nothing, right? So if you are a big company, and you want to give a better customer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John experience that will make your customers like buying from you, you’ll be better about refunds and customer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John support and troubleshooting and being able to contact customers, stuff like that. But really the main

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reason most developers care about this is money. It’s not the customer experience.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not being able to, it’s not even being able to like run metrics on the customers and getting customer data. It’s we want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to not give someone 30%. And so they make this law. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the intention, and a lot of people are looking at this law thinking, this will save us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John money. And it will kind of, because it seems like the fees are going to be less. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not a given. Apple could charge more for this if they wanted. I don’t see anything stopping Apple from saying, yeah, we took a 90% commission on all third-party payments, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like that would follow the letter of the law probably. But they’re not getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they want. It’s like, wait a second. The whole point is we didn’t want to have to pay Apple anything. It’s like, oh, you’re going to pay Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And who controls how much we pay Apple? Apple still controls that. You’re just lucky that they’re, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it seems like they’re going to say we will charge you less than 30%. Because we understand, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, obviously you can’t kill the golden goose here. If Apple did try to charge 90%, that becomes economically unfeasible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John People would lose money in every transaction because these people do have to pay the actual payment process or whatever they’re using,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some amount of money, and then they would have to pay Apple and there has to be something left for them. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s not going to make the fee too high. I think by making it lower, they’re acknowledging that there is another party

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the middle here taking a cut. So again, there has to be enough left for the company to stay in business,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John otherwise everybody loses. But otherwise, yeah, it just seems like this has made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things more complex for a lot of people and has not really made anyone, including Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John particularly happy, because Apple has to implement these stupid APIs and support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them, right? And have some kind of program to go chase people down and get, like, that’s- They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to collect money. Yeah, like, that’s kind of, like, that’s a big operation. And this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is why I don’t think anyone is happy with this, including Apple. I think Apple is reluctantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing this in this way, almost in a way, it’s like when a jerky spouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco loads the dishwasher poorly, so they won’t be asked to load the dishwasher anymore. Like, Apple was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco asked to make something, quote, better that they were doing in a way that angered a lot of regulators

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and things like that. And so they’re like, fine, we told you our system is great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and our system is best and best for everybody, but if you really want to go out there in the wild west,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we will finally comply with your law. And they’re gonna do it in the crappiest way possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that will, you know, just the most like half-assed, poorly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco implemented way so that they can then point to that and say, look, this doesn’t work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like now, everywhere else around the world that tries to pressure them into, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, or tries to force them into doing this, they can point to South Korea and say, look at this huge mess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that we have when this actually happens. Even though it’s a mess that they themselves have created by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco inserting themselves into the process requiring that they somehow deserve this commission over all commerce that happens

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in their platform. But the reality is, it’s gonna suck for all the companies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco involved. It’s gonna suck for Apple. It might be, the only way I can think of that it’s actually going to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better is that a lot of times the primary concern

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why a lot of people want to use their own payment system is usually money, but a secondary concern is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not just customer support, which is no no small thing, but integration. Like I know just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from running my own stuff, like I don’t wanna have two different payment APIs and providers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and platforms to the same product. It’s much easier to run a product if you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one payment system and one user account system and one shared thing, one platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And right now, if you want to offer something through Apple system and on the web

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somewhere, you have to have two different payment systems. And that is complex and causes customer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco support headaches and generally sucks. So I understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the argument of like, well, we want it on our own system, even if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the money difference is not that big or not at all. Because having something on one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shared platform is easier to develop, easier to support, easier to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco customer service and maintenance stuff over time and everything. And there are things that, like I’ve said before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If Overcast ever wanted to do something like the readability thing where you pay Overcast some flat fee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it gets divided up into donating to the podcast you listen to. By the way, I’m not going to do this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t want to do this. I’m not going to do this. I have no plans to do this. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part of the reason why that kind of idea never got off the ground is because I knew that it would suck to have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco give Apple 30%. And another part of the reason that never got off the ground was the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the payment system works with Apple makes it very hard for you to be able to know for sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exactly how much money you got from a particular person. And that difficulty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is one of the reasons why every music streaming service doesn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on that basis. It works on the giant pool of money basis where they pool all the money together

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they get from everybody, count the number of streams and then people get paid by the number of streams

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by, you know, the giant pool divided by number of streams, Not like your $5

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gets divided into 250 each for the two bands you listen to this month. Like that’s not how it works on almost anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so to make that kind of system, which is how I would want to do such a system if I were to do it, which I’m not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but if I were to do it, that’s how I want to do it. But you have to know exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how much money you got from each person every month. And things like failed charges or chargebacks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or refunds, or especially international currency conversion, make that very difficult to know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you had your own system, things like that would become easier or possible that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weren’t easy or possible before. And all the other advantages, customer service, refunds,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shared payment, like having one unified payment system, all of those things are strong advantages, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the reality is both the California lawsuit and the Korean law

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do not say Apple can’t charge a commission. They were very clearly about alternative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco payment systems, not commission-free alternative payment systems. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t follow the Korea law creation that much, but in the California case, the Epic case, the judge specifically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco called out Apple’s ability to still collect a commission. Whatever movement we’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on that front is not touching the 30% or the 15%. That’s not being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco addressed at all with these recent regulation things. All that’s being addressed with those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the alternative payment processing system. Now, I wonder if this is the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing they’re doing for the Japan Trade Commission thing. I don’t know if we’ve heard anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They mentioned with the Japan Trade Commission thing that they were going to be implementing that sometime

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this, I believe this spring, like sometime in the next few months, and that they had to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work required to support that one link to a payment system that they would allow,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or to an account creation system that they would allow. And I wonder if this is the same system. I wonder if they’re developing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like one API that they can use for both of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Regulations in both of these regions or the Japan thing I think was everywhere, but I don’t know it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This whole thing as long as Apple is still able to demand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Attacks on all transactions that happen on their platform of the types they can enforce it on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re going to keep doing that and so I don’t think we’re much better off here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is not a win for the little guy. This is not a win for consumers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or most developers. This is a small number of big companies getting things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be a little bit more convenient for them. That’s about it. And a huge pain in the butt to anybody else who tries to go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anywhere near it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think Apple’s gonna do a bad job on this though. I think they’ll make the API as good

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} as they- Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do a terrible job. Like not intentionally, you know, like the things that’ll be bad about-

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in-app purchase APIs are terrible. Like even their official system is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} horrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The things that will be bad about it are the things that are already bad about Apple’s current system. And those are things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple doesn’t want to be bad, but they just are. Like, you know, Apple’s own in-app purchase and its own system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of handling money and accounts and all that is creaky in a bunch of ways due to its heritage as the iTunes music

⏹️ ▶️ ^John store. And that I don’t expect to improve. But the rest of it, I think they’ll try to make as good as they can.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it’s like the DMV. It’s like the reason why you go to get your driver’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco license renewed and you have really mediocre service most of the time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that the government has a monopoly on that service and you have no choice and they have very little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco incentive to make that really good. That’s Apple and their payment system. Apple’s payment system has always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been really mediocre, really weird at certain supporting things, totally doesn’t support a lot of common requests

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at all, and that’s how it has always worked because they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no competition. I mean, this might change things in a very small way, but not in a big way. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have no competition and they have no incentive to make that really great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I agree with the broad strokes of what you’re saying, but you clearly have not touched StorKit 2,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is a brand new API this year that is actually pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. And it uses async await, it uses, it’s all, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Swifty and all the best and sometimes not the best ways, but all in all, it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pretty good. And I have no idea why they did this, other than the fact that StorKit 1

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was a pile of garbage. But I can’t help but wonder if, what is it, Revenue

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Cat that has the real good front end in front of all this stuff, so you can basically just use the Revenue Cat API,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which was designed by humans, rather than the weirdos that designed StorKit 1.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nobody designed StorKit 1.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, fair enough. Fair play. But you know what I’m saying. Here’s a bunch of humans who have learned lessons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey StorKit 1 and said, oh, what should this API look like? And that’s what I believe RevenueCat’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey API is. I haven’t actually used it. And I believe they’re a past sponsor. But I’m saying this to you not because they’ve sponsored,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but because this is what I’ve genuinely heard. But anyway, StorKit 2, which I’m using in my forthcoming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing, is pretty good. Again, it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good and fixes most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the problems I had with StorKit 1, which is to say, all of StorKit 1.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s hard to tuck StorKit and make it, you know, not better than than StorKit 1.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But no, I mean, to be fair, I haven’t used StorKit 2 yet, but I’m talking not only about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app-level API, but also the entire backend system, the capabilities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it offers at all, how it offers certain capabilities, how certain things that are possible versus not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possible, the limitations that it has. Like famously, how Amazon couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use Apple payment system if it wanted to for eBooks because they have too many SKUs and they literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t put that many in Apple system. There’s There’s problems like that. The system is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very old and creaky. There’s lots of weird gotchas and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bugs. And a new API on the client side helps some of that, but it doesn’t fix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the core problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think there’s two aspects to Apple putting this API in front of it. The second

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one is kind of getting to what you’re talking about, is that essentially, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sabotaging third party APIs by giving them the best that Apple has to offer. Right. As you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John noted, like the best that Apple has to offer is not competitive in the grand scheme of things with APIs like Stripe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or things that actually have competition that are developed like in a meaningful way without tons of tech debt. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so by putting an API in front of third party ones, that API best

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case is going to be as good as Apple’s current offerings and Apple’s current offerings are a little bit feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^John poor and creaky and old and weird. Right. So that necessarily drags down the competing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones. But the first reason they’re doing this, and we just mentioned before, is because they want to get a cut

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they’re not gonna use the honor system. Right? They need to, like, the rule is gonna be, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use third party payments, you must use whatever API Apple’s gonna come up with. And that lets us see all of your transactions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So we drag your interface down to sort of the level that we’re at, because you have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go through us anyway. And when you go through us, you use our API that has our limits and our weird bugs and behaviors,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. And also we get to see everything that goes by because we want to charge you. If Apple wanted to comply with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this law, they could say, the way we’re going to comply with this law is we’re going to add a new sentence to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our App Store guidelines. It says you can use third party payment processes if you want. And then Apple’s done. They don’t need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do anything. If they didn’t want to collect any money, they could say, oh, we’re not going to collect any of this. Just go do whatever you want. Right. And then every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John individual developer would be able to use whatever payment system they wanted to use. And, you know, some of them would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be way better than Apple. Some of them will be way worse. But Apple wouldn’t be involved at all because they didn’t have to take a cut.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That would have been the least work for Apple and the most benefit for developers, but they didn’t do it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then you don’t get any money and Apple likes money, right? So I really wonder how Apple’s going to spin this, what their like safety

⏹️ ▶️ ^John argument’s gonna be, because they’re gonna have to say like, you know, we added this great new API

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for third parties, but third parties don’t want that. Like the whole reason they’re adding the API, it’s not primarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to drag them down to their world. The whole reason they’re adding is because they wanna cut. And whenever Apple says anything about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John App Store and the way they run it, they never say, we’re doing this because it makes us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the most money. Even though we all know it’s the elephant in the room, why are you doing this? Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it makes us money, right? So, hey, Apple, why didn’t you just say, okay, you can use whatever payment process you want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re gonna have to come up with a reason that doesn’t say, because we wanted your money. They’re gonna have to say like, oh, we felt it was the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John safest, because if we use this as a gateway and there’s a malicious actor, we can shut them down by turning off their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John API access, or they’re gonna come up with some reason like that. Or maybe they just won’t say anything at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The little quote we have from Apple here is fun. I thought it because…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, so this is the Apple PR statement. We look forward to working with the KCC,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is Korean something or other, and our developer community on a solution that benefits our Korean users.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then Apple goes on to say, Apple has a great deal of respect for Korea’s laws. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right. Great

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} deal of respect for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Korea’s long and strong history of collaboration with Apple, with the country’s talented app developers, blah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blah, blah, but like- Maybe Korea’s other laws. Yeah, when a company has to say, we have a great respect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for your laws, they say that as if it’s optional, as if, well, we know we don’t have to necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John follow your laws, but Apple has always had a great deal of respect for Korea’s laws in particular. Other countries’ laws,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t care, we do whatever we want, we don’t even look at the laws, we just do what we want, but we’ve always had a great

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deal of respect for Korea’s laws, so we’ve decided that we’re going to follow your laws. It’s like, it’s an open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple has, like Apple’s going to do this in the most begrudging

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way possible because they, not only are they cheap, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are offended that they even have to do this. They are offended that anybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would think that A, they don’t deserve every penny they can extract from everything happening on iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and B, that somehow other companies are going to do a better job in any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way, that there’s any possible benefit to this. Both of those things are deeply offensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Apple from every level, top to bottom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, Apple knows its payment APIs suck. I guarantee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you they don’t. No, they don’t. I’m telling you they don’t. In the same way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the money angle really corrupts all the crypto discussion,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the same way, the amount of money Apple is able to skim off the top of the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco corrupts their thinking so much and their culture. They really, I mean, we saw this in the trial, we’ve heard this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from their executives. Apple really thinks, honestly, I don’t think they’re, I don’t think they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just putting on this show for lawyers. They really truly believe, from everyone, executives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco top to bottom, that they deserve a cut of all commerce that happens

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this computing platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But they don’t think they have the best payment APIs. In

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} those same

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} emails- No, they really do! No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in those same emails- They really truly do! In those same emails, they were always very honest when a competitor had a better thing. what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they would say is we can’t let this happen because competitor X has a better Y than we do. Therefore, we must change the rules to make sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we don’t have to compete with them. I think they’re clear-eyed about when they have worse things like our payment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system is not as good as Stripe’s, our API is not as good as Stripe’s. Therefore, we have to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something else to make sure to negate that advantage. So I think-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I think the story they tell themselves with that is our payment system is best for our users.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Therefore, nothing else matters as much. Like that’s the way they sit, what they tell the public,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I think they tell themselves the exact same thing, is like any other payment system is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to be worse for privacy, for user control, for scams, even though the app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco store is full of scams and is still exploding with scams to this day somehow. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, that’s what they’re gonna tell themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I see a lot less of that. And in the trial emails, did you see that? Like what you just said is what they say in public, but in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John private, I don’t see them saying to each other, we have to do this because it will protect our customers’ privacy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} All the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John emails we saw, maybe it was just because the selection of like, the juicy ones are all about, you know, dealing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with competitors, but it was all about how can we protect revenue streams? How can we find new revenue streams?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There was the one I just saw today, someone was sent around, it was in that letters of note Twitter account of saying the email where Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was saying, hey, you know, Uber and Lyft have these memberships. We should try to get 30% of those. We’re not currently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John collecting that money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There was no mention of user privacy and how it would be better for users to be able to go through Apple API to take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a cut of, no, they’re just saying like, there’s money out there and we’re not getting any of it. Can we get some of that? They’re so gross.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like Apple is a company, they just do so much gross stuff now in the name of relatively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco small amounts of money, like relative to their whole company. It’s just, it’s so unfortunate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, the people in those emails, that’s their job is to increase revenue from the app store. Like it’s not the whole company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s typing those things. Then they’re gross people. Well, they’re called sales people, Marco. Lots of companies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have them. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but look, no, I think this goes, this goes to the top, I really do. Like, I think there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, again, this prominent culture in the company of entitlement to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone else’s money. And, you know, I think Apple has been well rewarded for the platform, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they still can collect a tax on every, a large

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tax on everything that happens on their platform financially, you know, their brains get infected with money. It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a drug addiction. Like, they can’t see any other possibility than we deserve this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because it’s so easy to think that when you’re profiting from something that you’re in the right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you’re so easily rationalizing every part of it. Of course, this is ours. We have to go out and find this money that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco belongs to us in everyone else’s pockets. And it’s so gross,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it’s so unnecessary. They keep making these missteps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in recent times that they do something that really lands like a lead balloon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or that is really gross in some way that doesn’t actually really affect their bottom line

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that much and they don’t necessarily need to be doing as much or at all. See ya!

App Store/AirTag PR

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And also, by the way, a lot of the controversy with AirTags recently. They keep having these stories of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad PR with AirTags being used for stalking and carjacking or whatever. And there’s so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many of these stories building up now. And a lot of people are starting to ask the question, should Apple have even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco made AirTags? Should they keep making AirTags? Is the whole FindMy network actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worth it for them to be doing? Or is it bringing on too much negative attention and too much liability?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I think that’s a good question because you can look at that and you can look at what portion of the business

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is for them and be like, you know, really is this worth like dragging them through the mud constantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and expose them to all sorts of possible, you know, problems in the public or legal areas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for something that’s like this little $30 accessory that they’re probably not selling in massive quantities.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I think the App Store, their incredibly like money grabbing attitude

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the App Store is, and believe me, I don’t use the term money grabbing lightly because I’m an app store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco developer and we get that term used against us all the time in customer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reviews. Believe me, I’m not using this term lightly, but no other word can possibly describe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s tightening of the fists over the last couple of years, scrounging around, trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco extract even more money from companies’ activities that happen to have an app on the app store or need to have an app on the app store.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, Like it’s just been so gross and it has cost them so dearly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in so many areas that are not money that I wonder like who is deciding that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this little amount of money that the difference here is making them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is worth all of this. Paul

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sherman I mean you mentioned that like Tim Cook in his statements it’s made it clear that he actually seems to believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they deserve the money that they deserve a cut of everything including third party payments. If you’re wondering like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where does this go? It’s Tim Cook, but I feel like if you trace the-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I think it’s Phil Schiller. And I think it’s a lot of the people down below as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe Phil Schiller, but I think that if you trace this, I was talking about the part of the organization like where people whose job

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is to increase revenue with the App Store. It’s their job to do this, right? But you need to have a counterbalance to that. Like, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s your job to maximize revenue, but there’s someone else’s job to be like the product manager to make the user experience good. And it’s someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else’s job to look over the whole company and make sure we’re going the right direction, blah, blah. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t fault like salespeople for selling, like it is literally their job. You don’t want them to be too slimy, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their job is to sell. But if the top person in the company subscribes to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the belief that we really deserve to take whatever cut of revenue we want from this entire thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s where you end up getting in situations where Apple makes bad decisions, because it’s coming from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the top. So it doesn’t really matter what everybody between Tim Cook and the salespeople believes. If Tim Cook believes it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s going to trickle down to everyone below who are just trying to do their job, which is to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John implement the will of the CEO and the corporate plan for doing things. So that’s definitely a problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that starts at the top for the air tax, because you brought them up. I feel like Apple is trying to do the right thing there. And your point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is like, OK, well, you tried, you screwed it up. Let’s reconsider, because in the end,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe it’s not worth taking the hit for what is probably a piddling amount of revenue as far as Apple’s concerned.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not totally signed up to the belief that air tags are making are making this worse and not better compared to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their competitors that don’t notify you about this, but it’s worth considering for Apple. Is this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, how much are we really making off air tags? Do we really think we can defeat this or do we wanna like take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a reset and think more about it, right? But that’s not from a place of like, you know, greedy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John motivation. Like they didn’t make air tags because they’re just like, ah, now we’re gonna be in the money. They’re trying to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a genuinely good and useful product. And they knew that there were going to be problems with stalking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and everything like that. And they tried to make features to mitigate that. Maybe they weren’t successful, But like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s all coming from a place of we’re trying, you know, as best we can to do a good thing. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coming from the place of Tim Cook saying, you know what? Anything that happens in the platform, we deserve take whatever we want. And don’t tell us otherwise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No. And no, that that’s a whole separate like the air tax is not one of these like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, crazy money grabs the air tax is more like this. This thing that we’re doing is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco causing us problems in these other areas. Is it really worth what we’re getting out of it to to expose ourselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to those problems?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, or do we think we can figure it out? Like, you know, we thought we had a good handle on it. We made a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John try. Like no one else has solved this. It’s not like Apple’s doing something that everyone else has figured out how to do. No one else has even come as close

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Apple to solving this problem. Like when, you know, with tile trackers or whatever, they don’t tell you anything. The reason you don’t hear about it is because nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John knows they have a tile in their car because it doesn’t notify you that it’s there. So that’s kind of, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a problem of Apple’s own creation. But I mean, tiles also suck.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah, there’s that. And it’s a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different amount. Like the scale that we’re operating at between these things can be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco found if somebody happens to launch the Tile app, which nobody does, relatively speaking, compared to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every iPhone out there is automatically finding the AirTags. It’s a massive difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in what that thing actually is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, they’re victims of their own success. For their positive use case of people doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the right things, they’re great. But for the negative use case, all the positive aspects work against

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple. But yeah, it’s definitely worth Apple considering, Like, do we think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we have a way to fix this? Or should we like take a break and let’s say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, they have to, the problem is they have a bunch of product out there. So they have to do something about it. They can’t just say, oh, nevermind. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not selling those anymore. Kind of like the big home pod, just nevermind. Like they can’t actually do that. They do have to at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John figure out a way to make these safer than they are or to improve the safety of them. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sure they’re working towards that. I believe it is possible for Apple to fix air tags to the point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they are net good. But obviously,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John smartphones themselves are always going to be, the tools of bad people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lots of things that are out there, can be used badly. And there’s no reason, we shouldn’t carry cell phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because they can be used by bad people and the government can eavesdrop on us. And that’s true, you just need mitigations,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And I feel like air tags can get there. But I see your point of like, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you do things and they start causing problems And in the grand scheme of things, is this really important enough to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be worrying about? Unfortunately for us, the App Store is big enough for Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be worrying about. They make a lot of money from that. So I don’t think they’re gonna cut their losses there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but the thing is, whenever anybody looks at how much money Apple makes from the App Store, the thing is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they loosened up some of these rules and changed some of these rules that would alleviate the vast majority of the problems,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it wouldn’t actually drop that revenue they’re making to zero. it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco create the ability for it to be reduced, but it wouldn’t be 100% reduced.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Suppose they allowed all apps, including games, to offer whatever payment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco system they wanted and Apple wasn’t involved, so Apple got no commission. I think enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people would still be paying with in-app purchase because it is easy. And suppose,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for instance, Apple also required them to offer both, you know, in-app purchase or your own system, if you’re gonna have your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco own at all, which I don’t think would be that unreasonable. I don’t think their numbers would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually go down that much in practice. Now, if you did, I think what is probably a smarter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing, which I know Ben Thompson talked about this a lot on Stratechery, of like, treat apps and games differently,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which by the way, the Epic lawsuit, the judge was clearly on board with that ability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of like a possible way Apple could do this, is like just treat apps and games differently and apply

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the mandatory in-app purchase only to games and let non-game apps have their own business models

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they want to, that I think would have an even smaller impact on Apple’s actual numbers because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco such a massive majority of App Store revenue is from in-app purchases and games.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The numbers came out in the trial, I think it was something like 80% of their in-app purchase revenue is games. And even that, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not that many games. It’s like the top, the big top winners. And so if they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco let games, or if they make games keep using their system and let other apps like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Spotify, whatever, Netflix, if they let other apps use their own payment systems,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I feel like that’s both much more defensible of a position for Apple to maintain over time for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco regulators, and also, that alleviates so many other problems,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I think ultimately that would cost Apple a very tiny percentage of their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco App Store revenue. And so that’s what I’m saying, The balance here of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco risk versus reward of continuing on the path they’re going down versus making a change like that, it doesn’t seem to make sense

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to me. They would still have most of their app store revenue and it would still be growing like crazy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they would relieve all this regulatory pressure and eliminate so many problems and dramatically improve developer goodwill and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many other things. And I don’t understand why they keep shooting themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the foot for like two cents.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, I’m going to try to speak with authority about something I don’t really have authority

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to speak about, but—

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Welcome to the show, Casey. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} all of us. Yeah, I know, right? That’s everybody in life.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Go ahead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, so, I agree with what you’re saying in principle, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something I’ve had to wrestle with over the last couple of years is, even though I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey been riding the Apple cart—I’m already hating this analogy, but here we are—even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey though I haven’t on the Apple cart since, you know, 82 or whatever that John has been.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I still am a big fan of the company and I still have been paying attention since, you know, right around the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time of the first iPhone, which at this point is what, 15 years ago as of a few days ago. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve been, I have a fair part of my life invested in Apple. And I think of them, and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can’t imagine how John feels, but I think of them still as like a plucky upstart. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really just not reality. It’s just not. And Apple is, if not the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey biggest, and I know it goes back and forth, but is one of the top, like four biggest companies in the world. I think they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the biggest right now. And even though the plucky upstart

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple that I like and care about and think about a lot, probably agrees

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with you, Marco, and probably thinks, why are we nickel and diming developers? Why are we being such

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stingy jerks? To be honest, the plucky upstart might also believe that they’re entitled to all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey money that’s ever generated on any iPhone ever, but that’s neither here nor there. But the problem is that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey isn’t the plucky upstart and Apple isn’t the little company anymore. They are by value the biggest company in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey world. And if they said to a bunch of app developers, hey, we’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to make your lives better and you decide how, maybe it’s alternate payments, maybe they take less money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whatever the case may be, then the hundreds of thousands of app developers start cheering.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But the millions, question mark, of shareholders aren’t going to be too happy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about that, potentially. If the cost of making us happy, the app developers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is making shareholders upset, if I’m Tim, my duty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is not to app developers. It’s not really to anyone but shareholders, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And this is where I’m a little fuzzy because I…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s, I mean, his duty is whatever he decides to think it is. There’s no legal thing making him

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do crap like that within reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mean it in a legal sense. What I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is- It’s a question of attitude, but the thing you described has happened though. Apple has reduced it, as they said many times

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the trial, Apple has reduced the cut for developers. And each time Apple has done that, they have not been punished

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by people driving their stock price down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because the way they did it affected almost nothing. Again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} That’s exactly right. I’m just saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a thing that they’ve done and surely they did leave revenue on the table by implementing all the plans they did for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the 8515 and everything or whatever. And, uh, you know, aside from any one or two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John day volatility, like their stock prices continue to go up since then.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, yeah. And their services revenue has stayed exactly the same. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} that’s exactly what I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} to say. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again, this is like, look at how many people that affected. I got the, I got a raise last year. Like, cause it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was great. Like I’m so happy that that affected almost every developer I know. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet it costs Apple effectively nothing like relative to everything else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they’re making all their money from a handful of giant games and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by changing App Store policy in ways that don’t affect giant games,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it basically costs them nothing and yet even that, even the App Store small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco business program that we’re talking about, they did that in the most half-ass

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hostile way they could have possibly done it. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} are not wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Even that, they clearly did extremely reluctantly and I think for cynical reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because of all the regulatory thing like they wanted something they can point to say look how good we are like and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s if you can see you can see how they did it and you can see okay they have this convoluted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco system it’s not automatic it has this weird revenue cliff thing that you have a strong

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco incentive to not make between like 1 million and 1.2 million or whatever it is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they did it in a pretty bad way and it affects

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so many developers, but nobody that makes them tons of money, really, relative to the tons of money they’re making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from the handful of big games. And so that just shows their attitude right there. They have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m sure there are some people in the company, I’m sure there are many people in the company who have good intentions at heart and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are trying to give developers the best chances of success

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and give us the most money they can and everything, but that’s clearly not the priority up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco top. Now Casey, you’re right. That doesn’t necessarily need to be Tim Cook’s priority,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco both professionally or legally, but there are knock-on effects.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If all of this pressure from them squeezing the pennies out of all of us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco results in more regulation, then Apple could lose control of critical parts of their infrastructure and critical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco parts of their product line. And that’s what I’m saying, what they’re risking by continuing to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really money-grabbing jerks in a lot of these ways, what they’re risking is something like governments force

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them to allow side-loading, or governments force them to allow alternate app stores, and other governmental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interventions into iOS that we probably don’t want, that probably would result in worse outcomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for everybody, including them. But by continuing on the path they’re continuing on,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they just keep inviting this over and over again, because they don’t think they’re ever gonna lose. But at some point they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will, and then we all will, And I really don’t want that to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think of what Tim Cook’s actual motivation is, is he’s not trying to make shareholders happy or anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think his motivation is what Marcus said before, that he believes we built this platform and we deserve to take a cut of it. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the principle of it. And as a CEO, he’s one of the few peoples in the company who is allowed to have principles.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because if you’re below that, it’s like, yeah, you can have your principles. But in the end, your boss kind of dictates a lot about what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re going to be doing. And we should have a few more. But his principles may not be the ones that are the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as yours. But he has his principles. And one of them is we built this, we deserve to take cut of it. And we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and he doesn’t want to be regulated. He wants to make decisions for himself because he wants to. It’s like we built the thing. We should be able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to steer it. And then that I feel like comes from the top. And every time he makes a statement, the more honest he becomes, the more it becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so clear that Tim Cook really believes that. Why are you messing with us? Like, this is a thing we made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and we’re trying to make it the best we can, according to our principles. And that means we should get to decide how it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John runs. Don’t tell me how to run it. And of course, he also wants to make money. and you know, he’s a businessman and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that. But it’s it’s sort of intrinsic motivation. He’s not running scared of like, oh, I have to do things to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make the shareholders happy. No, it is all sort of is internal motivation. Right. And part

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that motivation is if if we have the most control, that means this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another businessman type thing and not driven by shareholders, but just being a good business person. Just because we make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all our money from games today doesn’t mean it’s going to be like that in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the best thing for the company is not to hem ourselves in by narrowly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John carving out like the rule such that we’re okay for now but if suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the next big thing turns out to be selling like hollow skins that technically aren’t games or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or like I don’t know whatever the next big thing is it’s not necessarily true that app store revenue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will be 80% games forever and ever and ever and ever and ever, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we shouldn’t hem ourselves in by making that carve out, even though it seems OK today, because it’s just future-proofing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s just like a good idea. I’m running the company. I don’t want to do anything that puts us in a bad position in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Again, not because he’s like, oh, I have to make the shareholders happier. I want to make more money because I need that 17th house or whatever. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not his motivation at all. But he is motivated to do what’s best for Apple. And it is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good for Apple to, quote unquote, unnecessarily constrain itself by narrowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its rules. But as we’ve said, every time we discuss it, and Mark just said it again, yeah, but those aren’t the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only two possibilities. There’s a third one, which is government comes in and screws you over big time. And you should be doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever you can to avoid that. And we kept having this debate when the trial was going on. I was like, does Apple really believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that there’s still the possibility that they’re just not gonna get regulated at all? Like that they’re gonna win

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it all? And so far, that bet has mostly, at least in the US, mostly paid off for Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like they’re playing chicken saying, we know, like they have to know There are lots of really bad scenarios

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where Apple regulates them to the point and it makes them do terrible things that they would never do in a million years. And it’s like, avoid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them by giving concessions. And Apple’s just like being steely-eyed and saying, nope, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re gonna make it. I think we’re gonna come out of this scot-free. And so far,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ve seemed like they’ve mostly been right. So it would definitely be the safer bet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make more concessions to avoid regulation. I think the other possibility, I think I mentioned this on a past show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that Apple has been convinced through their internal conversations with lawmakers that there is no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amount of concessions that they can provide that would be satisfactory. Like what we’re proposing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, if you do some of these small changes, they’ll lay off and they won’t do the big changes. That’s not actually true. And there’s nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple can give up to stop these people from trying this. And then, of course, in our country, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John usually safe to bet that no actually functional good laws will ever come out of our lawmaking bodies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because they’re just so dysfunctional that they can’t literally anything. So that may be a safe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bet is like, no matter how much and how many people want to do this, it is impossible to make happen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because our system no longer functions. There was some paper someone put out recently showing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is no connection whatsoever, no statistically significant connection between things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the American people want and the laws that get passed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I should find that for sure, thanks. But like things that have like a 90% favorability rating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and across the entire country cannot get passed as laws. Like there is no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John longer a connection between what people want and what laws are made. Laws that get made are made because some rich person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wants it somewhere and has nothing to do with what people in the country actually want, which is depressing, but true

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to our experience and someone did an actual study on it and has some numbers behind it. I wish I could find that link, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think I saw it somewhere on Twitter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In related news, I paid $1,000 for the last 11 days of not having health insurance because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the health insurance company just messed up. And so I’m just out that $1,000 for that part of the policy that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just didn’t have coverage. And if I happened to have gotten an injury or sick or anyone in my family did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the last 11 days, we would have had no coverage. We would have had to pay 100% of the pocket and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be totally liable for everything. Not because I failed to book an insurance policy, but because they failed to activate it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then took 11 days to do it. Oh, and am I getting my discount on a half of my $2,400 a month of premium? No, of course not. Oh God, I’m so sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} And that’s because we can’t pass

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco laws everybody wants.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, but Republicans like small business, so surely they’re going to come and save the day, right?

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John’s gross printer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, so moving right along, John, tell us about your gross printer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I got a gross printer. I bet a lot of people have gross printers. What makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your printer gross? I have a crappy printer. I wouldn’t say it’s gross.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, exactly. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so here, I’ll tell you why. I have a printer that we had for a long time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it stopped printing recently. You never want to hear about printing problems. Why can’t I print? It’s been a little flaky

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lately for a bunch of reasons, mostly related to software and drivers, but when someone can’t print, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John call goes out, why can’t I print? And that’s my signal to come and fix the printer because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s my life. But this time it was different. This time it was like a hardware error on the machine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like you go up to it and there’s a little screen on it and it said error code, you know, whatever, one, two, three, four, five,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, contact support, blah, blah, blah. So of course I Googled for the error and it was, you know, it was not, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wasn’t a- I am supporting. It wasn’t a driver problem. It wasn’t, it was like a mechanical issue with the printer, right? and I very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quickly found that what it wants you to do is clean some stuff out in there, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is an inkjet printer, okay?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Oh, well. Well, that’s your first problem. We’ve had it for many, many years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, if you ever look inside an inkjet printer that someone has had for many years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like what I imagine the inside of one of those Theranos machines is like, right? With just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blood splattered everywhere, but it’s not blood, it’s printer ink. Like, if you think of the printer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as like, oh, I put these little ink cartridges in, and then the little bits of ink go, and they squirt out onto the page in these microscopic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little dots. And that’s how you think the printer works. But then you look inside and you’re like, why is the inside of this printer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John covered with ink? Like it’s like there was an ink murder inside there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So that’s bothersome just from the perspective of like, how does anything ever work when ink

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is just leaking and spraying and going everywhere? But yeah, eventually after many years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this, it just gunks up the printhead, right? So I took the printhead out and I cleaned it carefully and got all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gunk off. and like the gunk was just like solidified, sticky,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thick, disgusting, caked on ink from years and years of use. I cleaned all that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out, put everything back together, and it worked again, right? But as per my usual policy of once

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a device starts to betray me, it’s gonna get replaced. Like I can’t afford

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the printer to just not work and stop working permanently, right? When some kid has to print something out, I’m gonna be driving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Kinko’s in the middle of the night to get something printed before school or some crap, although that doesn’t happen. do it all online and now, but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when we need the printer to work, we need it to work. So I’m like, all right, printer, now that I’ve seen what you look like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the inside, you know, it’s served its time. I don’t know how long we’ve had this printer, many, many years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s done what it had to do, but I’d like, I should get a replacement. I’ve looked at a replacement in the past as well, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, this time I was like, well, okay, well now you’re actually breaking. I think it’s time to get a replacement. So I did,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, everyone including Mark was gonna say you should have got a color laser or something like that. I wanted one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the problem is I don’t have a place in my house for, well, I don’t have a place in this room,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the quote unquote, the computer room for a printer that big. And so I asked my wife, what’s more important to you?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A better, faster, more problem free printer that you have to walk someplace to? And that place

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would probably be the basement or just get another crappy inkjet that fits in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the space we have in this room. And she

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} said-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey How big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do you think a color laser is? I know how big they are because I read the dimensions. I know how much room

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we have. I know how big things are. I have a tape measure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco To be fair, yeah, to be fair, like modern inkjets, especially the kind that like fold up when you’re not using them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can be very, very small. And color lasers, while they have gotten very small relative to where they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used to be, they are still, like you still can’t get a color laser anywhere near the size of a small inkjet. But,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, they do get pretty small these days. Like I’m kind of surprised you couldn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you know, like the low-end models, I’m kind of surprised you couldn’t fit one of those in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the use case here is, my wife demands, and I kind of agree with her,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not just a printer, but a printer, scanner, copier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Ah, okay. That’s what I’ve got. There we go. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got one. You can get combination color, laser, printer, scanner, copiers, but they are- I’m looking at one right now. Same.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But they are bigger still. And my space is very constrained. It could technically maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fit, but it would like dominate the room in kind of a gross way. And it’s on

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} the- Wait, so how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey much space

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do you have? Just ballpark. About enough space for the printer I have there. It’s a bay window.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My room has a bay window on it, right? And so you know the little shelf that is like the floor of the bay window?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s where the printer is. So think of a typical bay window and that little floor. And by the way, there’s other stuff there, not just the printer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? That’s where the printer goes. And so if you can imagine taking Marco, your color laser, and putting it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the little floor area of a bay window, it would be blocking your window, it would be ugly. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just, no. So, I mean, so those are the options. Color laser,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything, blah, blah, blah, but you have to go someplace else, probably the basement for it or another printer in this room. And honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the inkjet multifunction that we got, it’s done its job. We’ve used the scanner, we use the copier. I don’t think we ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use the fax. We print things pretty rarely, but we do print them and it’s fine, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And so I figured

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, it’s not like we use color lasers and they were terrible and they broke all the time. We had this one for years and years. I can’t remember when we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bought it. So I was just looking to replace it. And I did, and I got another color laser that is smaller than the previous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one. The color inkjet? Yeah, sorry, yeah. inkjet that is smaller than the previous one, which is nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And apparently, I don’t entirely understand this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s like the half-sheet paper towel thing that I always bring up, that someone came up with an idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that makes consumers think they’re saving money, but in the end they end up spending more money or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, the new trend in the new fad, whatever, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new way they sell you inkjet printers is what they call ink ink tank printers, have either one of you heard of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that? Yep,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I actually, I had one briefly, I think I returned it, or it broke, yeah, I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like one of the Epson ink tank ones where the idea was, you know, to save money in ink,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you could, instead of spending $100 on a cheap printer that had very expensive cartridges, you could spend like $300

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a printer that had these giant ink tanks and that you would have a lower

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cost per page than as a result.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and they don’t sell you, I mean, back in the day they used to sell you the entire printhead plus the ink, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then eventually they stopped doing that and the printhead would just be in the printer and they would just sell you these little ink cartridges

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that just were basically containers with ink,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right? Well, and that varied per brand, by the way. Like, I know, like Epson, I think, always had permanent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heads and then little, you know, slot cartridges. HP for a while, I don’t know if they still do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but their HP’s ink cartridges contained the head on the bottom of each one, which is actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very nice in the sense that, you know, over time, as the head would get all permanently clogged up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but eventually, you could just replace the ink cartridge and you would also get a new head every time. So that was actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I preferred that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it’s more expensive for those cartridges because they had the heads on them. Right, that’s the downside then. And it was harder to get third-party

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones that were cheaper because they have the heads built into them and stuff like that. But yeah, the ink tank one, the idea is that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t sell you the head, they don’t sell you cartridges, they sell you a bottle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you essentially pour into a tank. And the theory is, oh, these bottles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cost less per ounce of ink than the cartridges did. And that’s true if you do the math,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you say the cartridge holds this piddling amount of ink and this whole bottle that looks like a soda can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John holds this amount of ink and do the division and you can see that it’s way cheaper, right? And also the capacity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is larger. You know, the capacity of my old one was like a couple hundred pages in color before it ran

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out and this new one is like 6,000 pages before it runs out. They just hold more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ink, which I worry about because we print so little. I’m like, are we ever gonna run through this ink? Is it gonna dry

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside the tank just from age? We’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco find out. By the way, my experience with ink tank printers, yes. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why I got rid of mine, because I remember now, I had an Epson ink tank probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco five, six years ago, something like that. It eventually just got permaclogged

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because I wasn’t using it on a regular basis. Like I would print something. So just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quick aside. My printer philosophy is I have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco small, cheap color laser for most printing needs, but we also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep an inkjet printer, not usually a very good inkjet printer, but we keep an inkjet printer in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco house for occasional photo prints, whether that’s to make somebody a quick card

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or just print out some photos to stick in something else that we’re doing or some craft project, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco color lasers are amazing in almost every way, except they suck at photos.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s not anything they can really ever overcome because toner is just not as good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as ink on paper to really make a really nice photo. So inkjet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is always gonna be better for photos than laser. And I’ve even tried some of the other weird ones. I used to have a Xerox

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Phaser wax printer. That was interesting. But yeah, inkjet is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great for photos. Like it’s ridiculous. If you get like a nice new Epson printer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you don’t even have to get a very high-end one. Get one around the $150 to $200 range.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Usually it’s the kind that has like six ink cartridges, but not eight,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but not four. You know, something like that, like a mid-range photo printer. And give it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice, glossy photo paper, usually from the same brand as the printer, and you can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco amazing photo prints out of that. It looks so much better than anything a laser

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can produce. But it’s an inkjet and they don’t last forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And in particular, the ones that have permanent heads, like Epson’s, if you don’t use them very often, you will get clogs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Eventually those clogs will not be able to be blasted out by the cleaning process, and you’ll have to replace the whole printer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it’s not great for infrequent use, but I always keep one around anyway because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s relatively inexpensive. And we end up printing, I don’t know, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like 20 or 30 photos a year on it. And I know that like, if we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco planned ahead, we could like have those photos printed by somebody that would just mail

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them to us, like, or, you know, go to a drug store and have them print stuff or anything, but we don’t do that. That’s not the kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of life we have. And we know that about ourselves. That’s, you know, we have the stuff in-house literally. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anyway, inkjets are great for photos, but you have to understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they’re probably not going to last many, many years. I’m surprised your previous one did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or maybe you just don’t have a high tolerance for or have a low tolerance for like you know gaps in the printhead

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and stuff like that. But lasers last forever and are perfectly happy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be used very occasionally and are way less gross because toner is just plastic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco powder with dye not liquid ink so you know you might have to like vacuum up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some toner if something really bad happens but I’ve never even seen that happen. So lasers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are great in every other way, they just kind of suck for photos.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, we don’t really print photos. I would worry about an inkjet printed photo, like the longevity of that ink, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with exposure to UV light and everything versus the dye sublimation printers that you hope, like the actual photo processor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John place uses. But either way, like the printer we’re replacing did have permanent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John heads, like the heads weren’t on the ink cartridges and it lasted for years and years with its own use. Now granted,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was gunking up right now, but I did clean it out and restore it to health enough. So like I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John debating what we want to do with that old printer because it works and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and we have tons of ink for it because the good thing about you know, The ball the lawsuits with like the DRM ink

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cartridges is the printer manufacturers lost those so you can go to Costco and get like Really cheap ink for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not really cheap But cheaper than the official ink for sure like half less than half the price of the official still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the most expensive substance On earth right but it is half the price of the you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the official ink So we have all this ink and we have the printer and it still works,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like I think the main feature of the new one that I care about is one, that it actually is smaller. And two, the DPI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the scanner is way up since like the crappy one that I had before. Like I think that’s the scanner we had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was like 600 DPI max and this one goes up to like 2,400 max optical and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like 9,800 interpolated or something. And I do scan things probably more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John often than I print them. Often when I’m scanning are old photo prints, surprisingly, and then I’m trying to clean them up and stuff, so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And of course this one has a fax, just like the old one I think did, but I don’t think we’re ever gonna use that. The only downside of the one I got is it doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a rear paper feeder. It just has a top paper feeder, and it’s kind of, or a bottom, like has a cassette,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then it has a paper feeder on top for doing copies, but for prints it only has the cassette.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you can put photo paper in the cassette and it’s fine, but it’s more convenient to have a rear feeder as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I don’t know, maybe we’ll keep the old printer around just for the hell of it as a backup printer, or if we ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wanna do something that requires the rear feeder or something like that. Oh, and then the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interface of this printer. It’s got a touchscreen, and I was like, they still make, it’s a pressure-sensitive touchscreen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, when’s the last time you saw a pressure-sensitive touchscreen? I had to bring back my old Palm skills of using my fingernail

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to hit small buttons and everything. It’s like, wow, that’s, it’s terrible. But it’s a printer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It supports AirPrint out of the box. You don’t have to install any drivers to use it from a Mac. Like, it’s all, you know, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just, everything just works on it, so. We’ll see how it goes. I am worried about the EcoTank thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the ink running out, but live and learn. And it wasn’t that expensive, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not gonna be too big of a mistake. As opposed to the lasers where I bought this big, heavy thing and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put it in the basement, and then we made trips up and down and decided we can’t do this anymore. Especially for scans. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t wanna be walking up and down if you’re scanning stuff to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} computer. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s true. I was like, oh, you could bring a laptop down, and it’s like, nah, but I wanna use my big screen when I do scans, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so we’ll see how it goes. But I just thought I’d bring it up for the reason of like my shock about the inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of my printer looks like after all these years, like you don’t think of computer, you think of computer devices as being exacting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially since the job of the printer is to put very precisely aligned tiny dots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of ink on a paper carefully. But then the whole inside of the printer is like, you know, like there’s, like I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said, like there’s been a murder in it. It’s kind of amazing that the paper comes into, goes into that machine and comes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out and isn’t splattered with ink.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So which actual printer did you get? Because we’re going to get asked a thousand

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} times.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I put the link already in the area that you don’t look at. I guess what? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} didn’t look at it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A place where you cannot look, as said in the David Lynch version of Doom, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} better. Yeah, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. Well, I will put a link to EpsonEcotankET-4850 in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do you have dimensions on this handy, or can I vamp for a minute while you figure that out?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s on the website, but it is smaller than my previous one. One

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the problems with the dimensions they give you for a lot of these is they extend to all the flappy things, you know, like they extend the big paper

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tray that comes out, they extend the back thing. And those dimensions are bigger than the actual like dimensions of the box

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and everything. And you don’t need to extend anything on this one. You can print with everything retracted and it works fine. Like the page comes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out and it kind of sticks out halfway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey take your point about this maybe including things extended. I understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what you’re saying. I take your point. So your printer is about 20 by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about 16 by about 10 My color laser, which has, I don’t know if it has a fax, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it definitely has a scanner, in print duplex, mind you, is 16 by 16 by 13.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 16 by 16 by 13 would probably mostly fit, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the- It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey smaller, it’s three inches taller. That’s the only difference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Otherwise- But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m saying, like you’re reading, like that tray extends a lot. Like the actual size of this thing is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much smaller than, I can go get a tape measure and measure the thing, but it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just measured my little laser with the scanner on top is about Casey’s size. It’s like 16 by 15 by 12 or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so. It’s not very good. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have here, I have my smaller setup and this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a HP Color LaserJet M182

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it is an incredibly mediocre printer. I feel only mild

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hostility towards it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, that’s an accomplishment if it’s only mild.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s HP, I don’t know what they were thinking with this printer. It is otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty good, except that there’s something wrong with the network stack that it just, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco print something to it and the network stack seems to just go to sleep randomly. Oh, cool. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about every fourth print that you try to print, it’ll just not do anything and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sit there eventually. And you basically have to reboot it. And there’s been no firmware updates,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like nothing that would possibly fix this. Meanwhile, like, last time I visited my giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco printer back home, which is, let me see, that’s an M553,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is almost a computer lab sized printer. And I’ve talked before, I love that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco printer so much because it has the most delightful feature a printer could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ever have, which is you hit print, you get up, you walk over to the printer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and your print is sitting in the tray done when you get there, because it’s so fast and so trouble-free,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it’s basically made for small computer labs or small offices. So it’s a big printer to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have in your house, and I got it on some weird clearance deal, so it cost as much as a house printer, and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is just so unbelievably fast, and you just hit print. But I had a weird issue when I was there over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Christmas. The SSL certificate of its built-in interface

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco expired. And so it was throwing weird errors, weird air print

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco errors and stuff. And I eventually traced to that and it was, I had to go and do something weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to fix it. But I remember that was a very strange thing to happen that would never have happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the past. But now modern technology, like, yeah, the SSL certificate of the built-in web

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco server of your printer that was probably self-signed, expired because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s now five or six years old. But man, I love that printer. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have tried, I kind of, I understand where John’s coming from because that printer is only a few

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco inches bigger in each dimension than my crappy M182 that I have here. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love the big printer so much more, but that extra few inches in each dimension means that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I really don’t have a good place for it here, anywhere in this house. And every time I look around my office, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, I wonder if I could rearrange this maybe, maybe I could put the printer over there. Like I keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying to find ways that I can get that printer here, and it just doesn’t fit in the room.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Here’s the dimensions, by the way, Casey, of everything retracted, which by the way, you can just leave it this way, it works fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s 14 by nine by 13. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I will concede

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} that is very tiny. That’s much smaller. I will allow it. That’s a bit the size. That’s why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the extended trays really screw things up. It does a neat thing, I mean, maybe it’s just because it’s new, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you don’t have the tray like that’s supposed to catch the paper, it sticks the paper out like seemingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more than halfway from the printer, but it cups it. So a single sheet of paper stays perfectly straight,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know what I mean? Like you just go over to it and it doesn’t flop down, It’s pretty neat. And speaking of printers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that print things faster than you have them, so working in offices for many years, we have the printers that are the size of a golf

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cart. And those things are terrifying, but amazing. First of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all, there’s no way to get to the printer before it prints out, because it prints instantly. I don’t know if it has seven print engines

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside there, but it prints 48 pages double-sided in the blink of an eye. And there’s 17 drawers

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} where you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put paper of all different sizes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the interface in it is this giant screen and it’s just, it’s terrifying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But they are the most amazing devices. I just remember going up to them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and trying to figure out, if I was to use this without a computer, but just like, here I am, I’m here, I wanna make copies, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you start going through the interface and it’s like this whole world. It reminded me of the SGI screen from Jurassic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Park where you fly through this 3D type interface. What is this? I was like, what operating system? Is this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a custom, like, Canon operating system? I don’t, and the machines, The other thing about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those golf cart size ones, they’re constantly making this low level humming noise. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if it’s the fans or like lasers or something is, I would never want to have a desk near

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one because they’re just, so that was another thing I was worried about with lasers, like any kind of idle noise where the inkjets are totally silent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on their own.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, modern lasers are, you know, they go into a sleep mode. Even my giant one goes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into a sleep mode after a few minutes of not being used. What makes them fast is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they can heat up the fuser really quickly because that’s like when a laser printer is like warming up, what it’s doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, like the way it works, you know, dropping plastic beads of ink on the page and then melting them onto

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the page with the fuser. And I’m pretty sure what it’s mostly waiting for, for a startup is like the fuser

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has to get hot enough to melt plastic before they can put a piece of paper through it. And they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really, the nice high-end laser printers, this is why like, if you ever had a laser printer on like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco home circuit and you hit print and all the lights flicker for a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because they draw a huge amount of power up front to try to heat up that fuser as fast as possible so they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can be ready to print that first page out. And generally the higher end printers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will have a faster heating fuser and they can respond more quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or just keep it hot all the time like these giant golf cart sized things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and that’s, I’m guessing the noise you’re hearing on like your giant copier basically is it’s just keeping it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco running all the time and there’s a fan blowing to keep it cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Please, copier. I think these things can produce bound books. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} they’re just ridiculous devices.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, they do that little paper binding, and it just, they are terrifying. I kind of miss messing with,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I also miss, like, we had so many of them, like, you’d have to try to add a printer to your computer, and it would be, like, a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John challenge to find out, like, you know, they would be not well-labeled, like, so how do I print to this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John printer? Like, you’d print a test page, and then you’d be wandering around the office going, where did that come out? And you’d just look through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the stacks of paper that are sitting there from past months in the printer. It’s a mess.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will say though, one joy of modern inkjets, you know, I keep saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most people should not even have an inkjet, but they are great for photos, as I said.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They also are fantastic for if you have some kind of media

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you’re trying to print on that is either not rectilinear, like it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rectangular, or it’s something that you can’t bend very much, or might have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem going through, you know, a laser print path usually has to wrap around, it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make a 180 with the paper to wrap around and come out the little slot on top. Whereas an inkjet print path is just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco straight line if it has one of those rear input flaps. And so you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco put stuff through an inkjet that, like Tiff had me print the other day, she was making a pattern

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a glass piece and she had this sticky contact paper that could be printed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on on one side, but she only had one sheet left and she’d already cut part of it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off so it wasn’t a rectangle anymore. And we tried feeding it through the laser and it was just like, no. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not gonna happen. But we fed it through the inkjet and sure enough, it took a little bit of doing, but it got through there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it printed on it just fine. Inkjets will print on anything. They had the ones back in the day that would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco print on CDRs, like they couldn’t print labels

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} on them. Like, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} print

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on anything. But what’s also nice about inkjets today, even though they are largely garbage technology,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they are garbage technology that is very cheap that can somehow still do a lot for the short period of time in which it actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco works. Like, the reason I got my last inkjet was, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had, I forget exactly what it was, we had some kind of like family, like old family pictures

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and something like that, where we wanted to scan them, and they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too big for a regular like eight by 10 scanner. And the cheapest 11

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by 17 scanner that we could find was part of an Epson all-in-one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco printer. Like, it just happened, like, I challenge you, go try to find a standalone 11

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by 17 flatbed scanner. They exist, but not many of them, and they’re very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco expensive. And this Epson all-in-one was an 11 by 17 scanner

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and 11 by 17 printer, which we occasionally made use of. All of that was, I think, like 250 bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, it was like ridiculously cheap for what it was compared to the rest of the market, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because printers are so insanely cheap because they kind of have to be for various reasons. But like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is kind of delightful. Like most people don’t need this stuff, but when you do need it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it costs nothing and can do incredible things for how little it costs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Trying to look up how old my previous printer was. I can’t believe I can’t find the order, like order receipt from it in my email,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I did find an email where I’m conversing, or I was conversing with someone about, someone about something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I referenced my model of printer and this is from 2010. So that printer was at least 11

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years old, at least. That’s bananas. Yeah, for an inkjet, that’s incredible. And for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multifunction, like scanner, printer, copier, again, we’re extremely light use, but it took 11 years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for it to clog with ink with its permanent head. So hopefully this ink tank one will last as well. And this one does actually have a three-year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John warranty. So if it craps out in the first three years, we’ll just get it replaced or whatever, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here’s hoping. Well, good luck. And for all those people out there who are like, I don’t even know why anybody needs a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco printer. I don’t have a printer. Just, I don’t care. Please keep that to yourself. We use our printers occasionally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we like them I’m very glad we have them.

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#askatp: React/React Native

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And Asajj writes, opinions on React or React Native.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve been working in React Native for the last year and enjoying it more than I expected to and was curious if you all had ever used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey either variant. I have not used any third

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey party front ends on top of iOS or Android

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for that matter. I did very briefly dabble with mono forever and a day

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ago. And it was very good, but this was easily 10 years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s a Twitter account that I occasionally pay attention to, iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey underscore memes, who posted just a week or two ago an image that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a person being dragged in each direction in the caption, which is slightly uncouth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I apologize, but you’ll see where I’m going with this. Divorce leads children to the worst places.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And this kid is being torn between their mom and dad going opposite directions and about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to land on a book. Learning React Native. So divorce leads children to the worst places,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like Learning React Native. I am not in favor of any sort of right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey once run anywhere thing unless it’s right once run anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on that platform’s or on that vendor’s various platforms. Like SwiftUI has many problems,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it least Apple is in control of it everywhere. I don’t particularly care

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for having some third party standing between me and the platform vendor. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for me. I don’t like it. I don’t like that it requires somebody else’s code

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and a mountain of somebody else’s code. This is where Marco jumps in and says, you know, don’t believe other people’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} code. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s just, I don’t personally feel like that juice is worth the squeeze. Now I have dabbled in, in react

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a teeny bit, particularly on the web. I think there might still be a React-based version

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the show bot that we use to track titles or at least the front end to the show bot. And I did like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it in the brief window of time that I used it. I was able to put something together together pretty quickly. And if I remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, it had vague SwiftUI style feeling to it. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I guess I should say SwiftUI has React style feeling to it. So in principle, yeah, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s fine, I guess. But I would never ship something based on on React Native, not me personally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I think you nailed the problems of like, you’re putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a large amount of other people’s code between you and the platform you’re writing on, and that has multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco costs to you. You know, one of them, obviously, it’s bloat to your app. But also,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you are not using the APIs directly, so you might be only able to access things in a limited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way. You might be accessing them in a worse way. And you are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possibly inviting problems from the platform vendor in the future. Like if Apple decides

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that something’s going to change the way it works, then the frameworks have to modify to catch up before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can even do it at all. They might cause problems for you, including things like policy problems. If Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco decides, hey, this thing uses an interpreter in a certain way, you can’t do that anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so there’s all these potential costs and real costs to doing something. So you have to look at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what’s the upside here. And generally speaking, the upside is something like React,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which I’ve admittedly I’ve never used these things. But the upside to frameworks like this or alternative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app frameworks for a platform usually is either cross-platformness,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which as Casey said, has its ups and downs, or it just allows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you to make apps in a different language or paradigm that you might be more comfortable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with or wanting to use for some reason, or both. That’s usually the appeal of these platforms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The downsides though are pretty large. And so you have to say, all right, well, are you actually making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something that’s gonna be running on like Android and Windows and everything else, where the cross-platform nature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of one of these things would make sense? And for me, the answer is no. I’m running an app for iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t need to run or want to run on Android and Windows and,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, WebOS and BOS and like that’s fine. I don’t need to run anything else. I’m fine just running

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on iOS. And by writing against this other set

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of APIs, basically, like this whole other platform that you’re putting on top of the platform, you are tying yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to that platform. You are beholden to them, you are reliant on them, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are taking all of their good with the bad. And for me, I’d rather just write

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the platform I’m writing on. I’d rather write native code, native to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the APIs on the platform I’m running on directly from their vendor, because those are going to always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be the best supported for the longest time, which is another thing, like are you writing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this app to last for six months? Are you writing this app to last for 10 years? If you’re writing it more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the 10 year time span, or if you think that might be a possibility that you want to account for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and allow to happen, you’re probably gonna be writing, wanting to write into the native stuff, and like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco literal native stuff, not React Native, because whatever like the cool framework is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you might wanna write today might not exist in 10 years, might not be supported anymore

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in 10 years, and might not be what is cool anymore in 10 years. So instead, you might as well like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stick to the platform, API’s directly, that are going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be supported probably way longer and way better than anything else out there. And we’ll have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way more resources for help and example code and everything else. If you have problems that would involve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something like Apple’s DTS ticket system where they could like look at your code to solve a problem, that’s gonna be way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more likely to help you and be able to help you in native code. You know, there’s all these upsides

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to using the native frameworks that are, you know, kind of my style, old and boring. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those are massive upsides. Not to mention, again, all the bloat and everything. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so these other platforms have never shown that they’ve had enough value

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to me and my priorities and my needs to be worth all of their downsides. Now, obviously, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re working for a big company, and you have a giant team, and you’re sharing a bunch of code with various

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other platforms and maybe your server side stuff might share some JavaScript. Who knows? I don’t know how any of this stuff works anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can kind of see the appeal there, but a lot of this stuff just seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reinventing for the sake of reinventing. And in the same way, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a bad nerd because I don’t like Star Trek or anime, fantasy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff. I’ve never seen Lord of the Rings. Oh, you’re not missing anything. I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I’m a bad nerd because I don’t follow a lot of the common things that nerds like. I’m also,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in that way, a bad programmer. I don’t like the idea that we have as programmers that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to constantly be reinventing the foundations on which we are trying to build stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I like the foundations to be foundations, to be foundational, to mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not change very often, only change when there’s a really good reason, and to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be very well supported for for a long time and in deep ways. And that’s why I like building

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on stable ground because, you know, Casey, you’re writing a new app right now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is any customer going to care at all what framework you use to make it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nope, not a bit. Will they even know? Will they even be able to tell? Eh, maybe, but probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not. It doesn’t matter. For the purposes of creating something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for use and for shipping and getting it out there and making a thing. A lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of these implementation details don’t matter nearly as much as we like to think they do. Like, you know, we are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always attracted to like the new and shiny in our languages and frameworks and everything. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all that does is distract us and keep us busy and add complexity that keeps us busy. And a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of times it doesn’t lead to the ability to ship good products faster or better or whatever else. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these things need to convince me, not why am I not using them, but why should I use them?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like what, what, what massive benefits are there going to be to make it worth me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tolerating all of these massive costs that they definitely do have, no matter what people say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And most of the time, whatever new thing people are talking about doesn’t pass that test.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Usually the upside is not worth the massive downside. And that’s, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, react and react native. I’ve just, I’ve never looked at my current situation, which is the default, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is develop against the platform’s native APIs, and said, I want to solve problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that can only be solved by jumping to some totally different thing. That’s not a problem I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ever had.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and I think it’s worth noting, I think you said this a minute ago, that sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you would turn to React because you’re like really good with JavaScript and HTML, and you’re not very good with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Swift or Kotlin or what have you, and you just want to write something native with what you got. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that makes sense, But if you have the time and energy to learn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the native thing, and sometimes because of jobs, you don’t have the time or perhaps don’t have the energy. But if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you do have the time and energy, I’ve said many times and I stand by it that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even if you don’t care for Swift, learning Swift will help you think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about JavaScript and HTML and all the other things you might already know differently in a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way. It doesn’t necessarily make you better at the things you already know, but I would argue it does Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Swift has, Swift is many things, and if it’s anything, it’s opinionated. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it has opinions about how you should do things, and maybe those are translatable to other languages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and platforms and paradigms, or maybe they’re not. But it gets your brain to be mushier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the happy sense, and to think of things differently. And any time I’ve learned a different language,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even ones that I don’t particularly care for, I found it useful as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey different way to approach problems, even in the stuff I already knew. Now again, I can’t stress enough. Sometimes your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey job says, tough noogies, we gotta do this yesterday and you gotta do it with stuff you know. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a lot of times, if you have the flexibility, it will ultimately pay off, even if you only write this one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey single serving app and never look back at Swift ever again. John, thoughts?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I agree with what you said about React Native. There are limited

⏹️ ▶️ ^John circumstances under which it makes any kind of sense, very limited. As for React itself, the only thing I actually have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John experience with, It’s fine, it’s neat, it’s got some questionable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ideas in its design that nevertheless were the right ideas at the right time for the hamster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheel that is JavaScript frameworks. Arguably it has already been replaced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by newer fancier JavaScript frameworks. That seems to be the way of the world for front-end frameworks, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they just go in cycles. But it doesn’t mean that any of these front-end frameworks that we had are necessarily bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or even necessarily worse than the things that eventually quote unquote replace them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s got the support of big companies. I think Facebook does react, right? Like I think they’re the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} current owners

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maintainers. So it has some chance of lasting a little bit more, but the hamster wheel of front end JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frameworks is continues to be a little bit annoying. There seems to be much less respect for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keeping things going just because lots of people have software written in them. So lots of sites end up either stuck

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on an old framework that is no longer in favor slash being actively developed or they’re constantly changing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frameworks, or the most common in my experience, sites use seven different frameworks, which is kind of defeating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the purpose of frameworks because now you’re paying the cost of each one of them. And it’s a little bit of a mess, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just the way the web works. It’s a fast paced environment, as they say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think in the grand scheme of things of all the front end JavaScript frameworks I’ve seen, React is fine. Like, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I disagree with parts of it philosophically, but I understand why the decisions were made. It rubs me the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wrong way in some aspects, but you can make apps with it easier than you could without

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, which is kind of the job of JavaScript frameworks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do you know what the JavaScript framework du jour is today? Because I am so out of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey world. I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no idea. Vue is one of the ones that was competing with React.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} There’s, what was the other one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Chatroom, what is the non-Vue one that’s in the mix with the top three these days?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This stuff just makes me so sad. Like how many just frameworks?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Angular, there you go. Sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just typed React Vue into Google and it auto-completed to React Vue Angular. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those are the ones that are currently in the mix. And I’m sure they’ll wait a couple of years. There’ll be a few more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to come and be the next batch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. All right.

#askatp: Photos Library disk usage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, some guy called Todd Vizieri writes, noticing this huge discrepancy between how much data is in my photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey library, as in, you know, in photos, and the photos library as in the stuff in Finder. Should I be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey concerned? So, dear friend of the show, Todd sent a couple screenshots. One of them is, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, getting info on the photos library within the photos app, and it shows 504.11 gigs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Then Todd went to Finder, looked at the photos library, looked at information on that, 734.65 gigs. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, is that something that Todd should be worried about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I bring this up partly because of when Marco had a similar experience, I think, when we were looking at the size of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and did you do get info? Or maybe it was you, Casey. Which one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did you do? I had the opposite. My photo library on disk was like 60 gigs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then I had all of this mystery space on my main hard drive where it wasn’t even supposed to be that was exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the size of my photo library.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so setting aside that, whatever that was that Marco had,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For Todd’s case, where the numbers are closer and the photos library

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is bigger than photos reports, there are some things that might make that make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some semblance of sense or at least explain why it is that way. And I thought of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I’ve been messing with my photo library. Photos, it’s doing a thing, my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John giant photo library where it thought it had one file to upload. It’s like uploading one file and it would just never,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it was never uploading that whatever one file. I had all the files, like I wasn’t missing anything. It was the same on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all my computers as it was on my wife’s phone. You know, it’s like, but it was always like, oh, uploading one file.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Me being me, I dove into the SQLite database to try to find

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} out is there some- Oh my gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is there somewhere in the SQLite database where there’s like a row and a table where it thinks it has to upload a file that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t exist and I could just delete that row and decide. And I couldn’t, I could not make heads or tails

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the schema, it’s such a mess in there. Like, and there’s no good recent articles to explaining the schema because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they change the schema all the time. So, you know, I came up with nothing there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John although I did vacuum the database for them, which I felt like was a nice thing to do. While I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in there, right? But-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco SQLite jokes, wow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s just the day. It’s just the nice thing to do when you’re in there. But, and then I remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, well, why am I bothering this? But I just do repair library. If people don’t know, if you’ve launched photos and hold down command and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John option at the same time, it’ll offer to repair your library, which will basically rebuild it and sort of reconcile

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the SQL like I’m assuming it’s reconciling the SQL database with what’s on disk or whatever. And I did that and it rebuilt it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it no longer said it had one file left to upload, right. But while I was in there, while I was like searching around, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dove into the actual photo library. Like it’s just a directory like the package

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever, if you do show package contents or you just go there in the terminal, right. And because my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John photo library has just been passed from iPhoto to all these versions of photos, There’s tons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of cruft in there, right? There’s just leftover crap, mostly leftover empty directories,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sometimes directories with files on them, like especially since they did the big renaming where they renamed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all your photos to have UUID names. Things used to be organized inside photo libraries

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by year folders and that hasn’t been true in many years now but those year folders are still there. So I did a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit of house cleaning in there. Do not do this. If you’re listening to this program, do not go into your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John photo library folder and say, I don’t think I need that directory recursive delete. I do not recommend

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this, but I did this very carefully because I’m willing to take that risk. And I feel like I know I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have some semblance of knowing what I’m doing and I have 100 backups of this elsewhere. So do not do this. But it reminded

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me that there is it is possible that there is lots of cruft in your photo library folder. But setting the cruft

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aside, what there definitely is in your photo library folder are multiple versions of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John images because there’s like the original, but then you have the modified version that sometimes bakes in. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thumbnails, there’s all the databases for all the photo analysis, face

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recognition, all that stuff, and then of course, the main metadata databases. So there is more in your photo library

⏹️ ▶️ ^John folder than just the photos. And it is plausible, although kind of dumb, but plausible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the photos application is just summing up the sizes of all the photos, like by running a query

⏹️ ▶️ ^John against the SQLite database, right? But that is not how big the photo library is because the photo library

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has multiple copies of the photos and has a bunch of giant data dictionaries for all that other stuff that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I, would that be 200 gigs worth of stuff? Probably not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I think the photo library on disk, like the actual package thing, is always going to be bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the sum of the size of the originals that are in the photo library. Should it be that much bigger? Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not. If you use iCloud Photo Library and you have good backups, you always have the option of just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chuck that whole library in the garbage, delete it, make a new system library, hook it up to iCloud,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and tell it to redownload everything. And then you’ll have a, in theory, a fresh new, and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John set the thing that says it’s downloaded everything, a fresh new library with the minimum amount of stuff in it. But it does,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the whole point of photos is that it builds databases and indexes and all sorts of other crap on your photos, and it does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make multiple copies of your photos so it can quickly show the thumbnails and all that other crap. So it’s always gonna be bigger on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disk than just the size of your photos. So should you worry about this? Probably not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just have lots of good backups. Make sure, it’s actually good to have your photo library on multiple computers, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you wanna see the same thing on both of them all the time, right? If you do something on one, you should see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it on the other. If you say, import 100 pictures, you better see the 100 pictures elsewhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because if you see them elsewhere, that shows that it’s getting up to iCloud and back down to the other computer and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you want. And then of course, you want that to go into your backups from there, right? So as long as that’s all working

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you think you have everything and the sizes are reasonable, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. But if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John concerned a little bit and you use iCloud Photo Library and you’re sure everything is all uploaded, right? So another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing you can do, you can make a smart album that says, show me all of the photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we were unable to upload to iCloud. You should just always have that in your sidebar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it should always show zero items. That’s, you know, if you have some problem uploading something because it’s a weird format or it’s complaining

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it or whatever. If you’re sure everything’s fine, and or even if you don’t wanna delete it, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can like set it aside or copy, because it’s just a folder full of files. If you can copy that photo library to a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disk, disconnect that disk from your computer, then delete it and re-download it and make it fresh, then maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see if your library on disk gets a little bit smaller or something. But maybe not, maybe it comes down on disk and it’s still 700

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gigs or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Memberful, and Trade Coffee. And thanks to our members

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join. We will talk to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Auntie Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse, oh it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental, check podcast so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco long

Follow-up: Animal products

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right, do we want to do the animal products follow up?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, let me do

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} a, I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do my opening statement and then Mark can do his prepared statement. Okay. But maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my opening statement is that we talked about like diet and animals and veganism and leather

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and agriculture and all sorts of stuff in the last show. The main,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is one of those topics when we talk about it, we get lots of feedback. It’s mostly good feedback,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the feedback basically says this, whatever thing you talked about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is both worse than you said, but also not as bad as you said. And you should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not do it or do it a lot more. Every single item, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} name it, name

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an angle on it, pick a random thing like, oh, leather, that’s a by-product of meat production,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so you don’t have to worry about it. Oh, leather, did you know that leather is not a by-product of meat production

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} and they raise animals just for leather?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You should eat lots of vegetables. You should eat less vegetables. Actually, meat is great for the environment.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did you know meat is worse for the environment than you even said? Did you know that leather is actually good for the environment? Did you know leather is worse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the environment than even you said in your program? Pretty much evenly split on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every single topic we talked about. There is one group of people telling us that it’s worse than we said, and one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John group of people telling us that it’s better. And depending on what the sort of prevailing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the popular opinion is, one side of it gets to say that they’re the turns outside.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, despite what you may suspect, it turns out that unexpected thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is true. And it wasn’t always on the, you know, sometimes the unexpected thing is like the current consensus is that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is actually really bad, but turns out it actually is good, right? And anyway, so it’s not to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say that, you know, the truth must be somewhere in the middle, because that’s not true. The truth is not in the middle of those two things. The truth is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John closer to one side than the other, but this is to say we got a lot of good feedback and a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things to think about, but it’s very difficult to draw conclusions without actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John studying it more. I felt like overall, we didn’t get lots of angry people because our handling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this topic was sort of middle of the road, where we’re just kind of saying, here’s what I’ve heard, and here’s my thinking of it, and here’s what I’m doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And we did get the strain of feedback, which I think is true, which is like, in the end, nobody’s going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to lead a perfect life. And we’re all doing the best we can with the information we have. And I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fall back to my statement during the show, which is your individual behavior

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here, uh, is worth thinking about, but in the end you still are only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one person, right? Like, you know, I made the point that your individual behavior on, on what you choose to do with your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John diet can actually affect demand and that demand affects what’s produced much more so than things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like electricity, other systemic problems. But there are also systemic problems in agriculture. As you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mentioned in the show, there are subsidies for lots of good and bad things. But there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no there’s no way to lead the perfect life or you’re doing the the perfect thing. And certainly there is no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way to lead the perfect life or be the perfect company or whatever, to the point where everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is happy with your decision. Because as I mentioned at the top, we got feedback in both directions of extreme.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So no matter what we do, no matter what you do, and including no matter what Apple does, someone is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to be upset about it. And that’s just you know, you just got to do what you think is best and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John adjust that opinion as new information comes to light.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I’m going to make you more upset. All right. So just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for Marco to inflame your anger once more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did want to so that we got two good links to share. One is actually today

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Matthew Yglesias’s column Slow Boring had a whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing referencing our show and basically evaluating like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the the argument that more nutritious or non-animal-based food is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more expensive and therefore inaccessible to people. And he breaks down a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of data and citations and numbers showing some pretty good stuff to think about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Basically, healthy food is not as expensive as people think it is. So that’s good. Read that for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then also, let me dig this up here, listener Renfred wrote in linking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to this article in the BBC citing a scientific study about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco water emissions and land use, comparing different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco milks, like all the dairy, rice milk, soy milk, oat milk, almond milk. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part of the discussion that we were having about how cows especially, but in general animal products

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tend to be significantly worse for the environment and less efficient and and everything else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And John kind of breezed by also like, you know, yeah, almonds, we know almonds, you know, take a lot of water to grow and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But actually, you know, it turns out that almonds do take a lot of water to grow compared

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to most of their alternatives, but not compared to dairy milk, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cows drink water and eat food that was grown using water. And,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, so like, I feel like we oftentimes, people start, whenever we present like an alternative,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, hey, maybe you should drink oat milk instead of dairy milk for your coffee or whatever. A lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will get defensive, and I’ll have more on that in a second, but will get defensive and will jump and say, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almonds use too much water, they’re bad for the environment. But it’s very often when you’re making that kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco argument or reaction to not properly account for the status quo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you’re implicitly arguing for. If you’re saying like, yeah, almonds use tons of water, well, how much water do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cows use? And it turns out the answer is a lot. And that’s just, that’s water. They’re also,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you look at this study, it’s kind of ridiculous, the differences in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco emissions and land use as well. That basically, like, yeah, animal stuff is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really bad for the environment so much more than you might think. And, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco individual choices here matter a lot, I think, you know, in the sense that, you know, the collective

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco action in a lot of things that we do, as John was saying, can’t make like large differences

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the world. But the food choices that we make are one area

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where many of us can make that kind of difference. We can make that choice, and often in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco situations where we don’t have a lot of other choices that we can do that would make big effects. But like animal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco consumption basically uses so much more environmental resources

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco compared to plant-based stuff of similar nutritional value that it’s not even close.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so we actually can make a difference there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I should just point out that we did get feedback that said the exact opposite of what Marco was saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} just to prove my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John point. That some people said, actually, cows are way better for the environment than they seem like, and they’re actually beneficial,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and here are the reasons why.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I didn’t find a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco data to back that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up. Well, if you’ll find a study, but just like you cited the thing about how almonds aren’t that bad, it was probably funded by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the almond industry, and the beef industry funds their own studies to say that beef isn’t that bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, well, and almonds aren’t great, but they’re way better than cows, because it’s not hard to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way better than cows. And we also, the other main thing that we got as feedback was basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco saying like, yeah, you know, veggie burgers or meat alternatives, they’re unhealthy too. And yeah, I covered this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I think it’s worth covering this a little bit more. If you’re replacing meat with a meat alternative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco directly, then what it’s probably made of is some kind of plant protein and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whole bunch of vegetable oil. And yeah, vegetable oils are unhealthy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco eating large amounts of oils is unhealthy. So is eating lots of meat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for many of the same reasons. Although meat also introduces some bonus like inflammatory issues,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco carcinogens, lots of fun stuff. But, and believe me, I say this as a meat eater, I still eat meat,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just eat less of it. But reducing meat consumption does not mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just replacing all of your meat meals with meat substitutes and making no other changes. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, like, but we need a bridge. Like imagine, I’ll go to another much safer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco less heated topic, gun control. Imagine if we were, oh God. Imagine if we were trying to take

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco away everybody’s guns. Gun people wouldn’t be ready for a radical change all at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once. So we’d say like, you can’t have your gun anymore. And their question would be, well, what am I supposed to shoot people with?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s obviously the wrong question, but to get them to start down a better path, maybe we would address that need with some kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of bridge solution. Maybe we would like replace their guns with rubber band guns and give them little targets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to shoot. Because it’s a sport, right? It’s not about fantasies about killing people. It’s definitely a sport, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s what they’re all about, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, it’s also about killing animals, just to be fair.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The rubber bands don’t work on them. We go right back to the meat question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, but anyway, we don’t need these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bridge solutions to be for people to use rubber band guns forever. That’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a bridge to help them wean off guns long-term, right? Fake meat burgers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are, they’re the rubber band gun of the meat world basically. They are typically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco healthier than meat, although not by as much of a margin in many ways as you might think. They are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually far better for the environment. But a much healthier diet would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reduce the total frequency of burger style meals altogether. Because if you think about what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a burger is, it’s basically a very heavily salted circle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fatty protein covered in fatty squares of cheese real or fake either way it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco similar nutritional profiles garnished with sugary condiments sandwiched between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two big pillows of refined white flour and then next to the burger on the plate is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a side of deep-fried salty carbohydrates that usually have enough calories by themselves to be a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco second dinner for an adult okay so so just leave the burger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and just eat fries for dinner is what we’re saying yeah no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a burger and fries the way we think about that that’s unhealthy for lots of of reasons, not just whether it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has an animal or vegetable oil in the middle. The problem is the ratio

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of these rich, fatty, salty, carby foods to nutritional vegetables.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco On that typical platter, I think you’re lucky if there’s like a leaf of lettuce on the burger. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if there’s a tomato slice, that’s probably the healthiest thing on the plate. And so what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needs to change for lots of reasons is that the ratio of how we eat these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things in general. We need to elevate healthy vegetables from garnishes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or small side dishes to be a much larger portion of the meal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like this is like this morning, like today, I had a vegan breakfast. I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a mostly vegetable lunch and dinner, but lunch had a bit of cheese and dinner had a bit of chicken, but the bulk of it was vegetable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about because we don’t need everyone to eat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco zero meat and dairy forever and ever again. Like that’s not what anybody’s arguing. What needs to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco change, like you know meat and dairy are mostly fine just in smaller, way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco smaller quantities than the typical American diet is eating these days. So have a big pile of vegetables

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and if you want to put some meat or cheese on top, cool, that’s fine. The idea is to greatly reduce

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco animal products with vegetables as the main sources of bulk in your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco diet. And this idea sets people on fire. They are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so defensive about this concept. And I understand why. If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think, food is so deeply tied to family, culture,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco identity. We learn what to eat from our parents and our grandparents. So when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something is presented to you that presents like, hey, you might wanna change the way you eat, it feels like an attack

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on your family. And you know, just like the worst,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hardest hitting insults are the ones that you kind of know are a bit true. The defensiveness around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco food is made so much worse when the idea that you’re being presented with is something that you know is kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of true. This is why everybody hates vegans. Vegans get an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unbelievable amount of crap from the world. Every vegan I know avoids

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bringing up that they’re vegan if they don’t have to. Because this is why they even invented

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the wonderful euphemism plant-based, because they had to say plant-based

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now, because the term vegan makes people so angry, just the term, that they needed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a new word. And the reason why veganism makes people so angry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that deep down we all know that the vegans are kind of right about some stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, what we do to animals is reprehensible. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the animals do to the environment at the scale that we cultivate them is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco obscene and horrendous. What eating all of this stuff does to our bodies in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the amounts that we typically eat them is pretty unhealthy. And veganism

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of reminds us of all this and it makes us face that really uncomfortable fact that the growing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco number of vegetarians and vegans demonstrates that for an ever increasing number of us meat eaters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our lifestyle is optional, it’s not a necessity. We don’t have to be doing this and they make good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco points on the other side. And this feels like an attack to so many people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a choice you can make. It’s like choosing to recycle aluminum cans. We know that’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty effective recycling method. Choosing to walk and use mass transit instead of driving somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Choosing to get vaccinated during a global pandemic to help us out. You know, these are things that you can do, choices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can make because it’s better either for you or the world or both. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco choosing this just because it’s better, not because there’s like a cop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco breaking down your door to come in and take your hamburgers away. Like no one’s coming for your guns and no one’s coming for your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hamburgers. You can keep your meat, no one’s gonna make you stop eating meat. But the food

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you choose to eat doesn’t need to be this deep-rooted part of your identity. If you switch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out your beef meatball dinner for chicken meatballs or turkey meatballs or vegetable meatballs, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not like an insult to your grandmother any more than she was insulting her grandmother by not wearing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fur coats anymore. You know, times change and we stopped wearing fur coats because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our standards moved on over time. We developed different standards for things like animal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cruelty and animal use over time. And also plenty of good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco alternatives to fur coats became available, as we were talking about last week. So we are now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in, I think, a transitional period, a similar traditional period for just the amount

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of animal products that we consume. And the difference here though is that nobody’s expecting you to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco suddenly become 100% vegan or ever become 100% vegan. You don’t need to, no one is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco asking for that. I can’t be more clear about this. No one is asking for you to totally stop eating meat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and using leather, no one’s asking for that. What would make a huge difference is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco large reduction of animal consumption. And it’s so much more accessible than you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think. I would never have guessed, two years ago I was eating barbecue like three times a week. I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco never have guessed it was possible to change in this direction. And it turns out it was way easier than I thought and way healthier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Everything about this is better for my health and for my mental conscience as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And again, you don’t have to go all the way, just reduce. Go like, start with one meal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a day. Have one meal a day be totally plants, totally vegan. Whatever word you wanna choose,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you wanna say plant-based, fine. have one meal a day be totally vegan, and then just try to make conscious

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco efforts to cut back as you go. That makes a huge difference. If you look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at what we actually need for things like carbon emissions, and global warming, and climate change,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and water usage, land usage, our food supply is such a massive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco footprint due extremely heavily to meat and dairy, but mostly meat,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and especially cows. Just reducing those things in a big way, just cut your beef consumption

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in half. That’s a huge difference even. That’s not even saying never eat a burger again, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just saying eat half as many burgers. Like that’s such a huge difference and change your mindset

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to start looking at meals not as a giant block of meat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with some cheese on top or some butter and you know dairy and carbs everywhere but like hey how can I work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a lot more vegetables and reduce the amount of meat that’s on the plate or reduce the number

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of meals I have that have to include meat at all. That’s what I’m saying is a really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good idea that many more of us need to start doing, and that can make a really, really big difference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Without making you never have X, Y, or Z again, like no one’s asking for that, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make a big difference with what is actually not that big of a change to your life, and it will be fine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can do it, and we’ll all be better off.