513: Scribble on the Shared Placemat
15 Dec 2022Freeform, convergent encryption, and rumored App Store changes in response to the EU’s Digital Markets Act.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Is moisturizer real?
- The 🐔🧢 is back!!
- Follow-up:
- Recovery keys & backup contacts
- More on StoreKit 2 and Refunds
- The Sharrow is real, John.
- Enabling Advanced Data Protection for “enthusiasts”
- Quitting the Finder
defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool true
- Apple Music Sing, Atmos, and ML
- Tesla adds Apple Music support
- Freeform
- Advanced Data Protection and Convergent Encryption
- Stratechery post (requires login)
- Perceptual hashing
- Apple will allow Third-Party App Stores in the EU
- Post-show: Casey’s [mis]adventures with Docker
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Chapters
- Are moisturizers real
- Chicken Hat restock
- Follow-up: iCloud E2E encryption
- Follow-up: App Store refunds
- Sponsor: Linode
- Follow-up: Sharrow 🖼️
- iCloud E2E OS requirements
- Follow-up: Quitting Finder
- macOS 13.1
- How Apple Music Sing works
- Apple Music in Teslas
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Freeform
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Convergent encryption
- App Store vs. DMA
- Ending theme
- Casey’s Docker adventure
Are moisturizers real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s winter now and the temperature has finally dropped enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our area that I’m using humidifiers again. It’s humidifier season. And I’m wondering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for to present a question to our well-informed and oddly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically placed listener base in certain industries. I want to know, so every winter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get like super cracked like hand skin like around my nails. It just cracks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hurts and does any do any of these like hand cream things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even the even humidifiers does this do anything like to do any of these things
⏹️ ▶️ John question right can I like this is kind of like the question that like many
⏹️ ▶️ John young children and often some adults have it’s another secret weird thing kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco been in records
⏹️ ▶️ John or they’re like sometimes I get headaches but I But I don’t believe that headache
⏹️ ▶️ John medicine does anything. Does it do anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, because a lot, first of all, a lot of medicines don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John anything, so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco question. Right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m saying like the whole, the idea is that the whole rest of the world, including doctors,
⏹️ ▶️ John would tell you, hey, if you have a mild headache, maybe take like aspirin or Tylenol or Advil, right? But you’re living
⏹️ ▶️ John your whole life thinking, that probably doesn’t do anything, right? So here you are, you’ve got cold, you’ve got like dry, cracked
⏹️ ▶️ John hands. Your question is, do moisturizer is moisturized? That’s what it comes. Yes. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Putting moisturizer on your dry hands. It’s like, what kind of question is that? Or you could just
⏹️ ▶️ John not and continue to have dry hands. Now, your humidifier question is better because that’s like, OK, well, I’m humidifying
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole air. Is that helping me as well? But like, but you’d stop. If you have dry hands, use moisturizer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please. No, and I do. I mean, what moisturizer sucks because like, you know, then you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use that hand, those hands for a couple of minutes as it like dries
⏹️ ▶️ John right, well, that’s a better question, which is like, tell me a good moisturizer that doesn’t have that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I have good moisturizers. I have like stupidly good ones that I love, like how they feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after a few minutes at least. I just don’t know if they’re doing anything. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they actually fixing the problem of my hands always crack and get painful in the winter?
⏹️ ▶️ John Moisturizers are not entirely placebos. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that. Most moisturizers,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to say most.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that true? That’s kind of what I’m asking. It’s like, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I think it’s a safe bet that not all moisturizers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it? I think it is a safe bet. I will say that I do not have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything that really resembles a skincare routine. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t say that with pride. Or winter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Or winter. Ah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ha ha ha. Or air that’s ever dry enough for this to be an issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah ha ha ha. Yes, yes, yes. Anyway, I think it’s going to be like the low of 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tomorrow or something like that. So come off it. Anyway, I have tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many a moisturizing lotion in my day for my money, and I’m not trying to say this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey universally correct answer. Just for me, the one that I have had the best experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with by a mile is Cetaphil, C-E-T-A-P-H-I-L, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an uncommon lotion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, I’ve seen that before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s all over the place. I vastly prefer this because with most lotions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like gross and weird on my skin. were kind of alluding to this, but I feel that way for like 20 or 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes. With Cetaphil, it dries in the span of just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of minutes. And then it’s like, other than the fact that your skin has moisture in it now, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was never there. And so I would strongly encourage you to give Cetaphil a try.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will put a link in the show notes, uh, in, in, to, to what I believe is the one that I use as with all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, medicines or dermatological things. There’s, you know, a thousand variations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are all basically identical. But this is what I use and I recommend. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may or may not work for you. But again, the reason I like it so much is because after just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minute, maybe two tops, that icky, like oily feeling goes away. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is there at first, but it goes away super fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How long after you’ve applied it, can you open a doorknob?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a fair question. No, it’s a fair, don’t scoff at him, John. That’s a reasonable question.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say- I think you could always open the doorknob, it’s just that it feels zicky to you to open, or you don’t want to get
⏹️ ▶️ John moisturizer on the doorknob.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, sometimes it’s genuinely hard. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the palms of your hands, it’s genuine. How stiff are your doorknobs here? Oh, stop it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, I would say to answer your question, five minutes or less.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And how long after you apply it, could you touch a glass touch screen and have it not smear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Five days, no, I’m kidding. Again, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable barometer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know off the top of my head, I mean, obviously neither of us, and certainly not John, would be touching a glass screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than maybe a phone. But-
⏹️ ▶️ John my iPad, what are you talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s fair, fair, fair. All right, I take
⏹️ ▶️ John He has touchscreens all day long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d rather just avoid the need for these things because I hate having goop on me. And also, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m always, as I get older, I’m increasingly conservative about like, you know, what kind of chemicals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m allowing to be applied on my body or enter my body. Like, you know, I wanna like not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take unnecessary risks with weird chemicals and stuff. So, you know, I just, I’m trying to figure out like, are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there any other solutions to this problem that don’t involve gooping up my hands all day with crap that I hate?
⏹️ ▶️ John My recommendation is to be 100% Italian and produce so much skin oil
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that you never need to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your entire life. Well, the other thing is, I’m also like, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco division of labor in our house, in broad strokes, There are some exceptions, but in broad strokes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff is in charge of soft things and I’m in charge of wires in the kitchen. Oh, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dog is usually me too. But the kitchen part of my duties mean that my hands are often getting wet and dry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in cycles as I wash dishes or, you know, clean counters or whatever. And then the dog part of my duties mean I’m often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting on gloves, going outside, taking off gloves when I come, like a lot of that. So like my hands just get destroyed in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco winter. But I just, I don’t have a good solution here. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco humidifiers don’t, humidifiers seem to be more for other forms of comfort and for the happiness of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the plants in the house. I’m not entirely sure humidifiers are doing much for
⏹️ ▶️ John Humidifiers will help probably your sinuses and like you’re breathing because you’re breathing that in the moisturizer
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully you’re not breathing it in but yeah for your skin moisturize.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like my annual reminder like nobody understands humidifiers really well I mean our listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do but like you know regular people out in the world they’re like yeah I just you know I put a pot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco water on the radiator and that’s enough for my whole house all day and I’m like, I’m evaporating six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gallons a day into my house with my evaporative humidifiers and that raises the humidity like 15%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like your one pot of water on the radiator not doing anything.
Chicken Hat restock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me tell you though, if you are going to go outside on a dog walk and it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cold, boy do I have an answer for you on what you can do to keep yourself warm. John, can you tell me about
⏹️ ▶️ John The chicken hat. The chicken hat is back. Did you miss out on the chicken hat before? Are you disappointed that you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get one? Are you still wanting a chicken hat? Well, I mean, so here’s the news. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could miss out on the chicken hat again.
⏹️ ▶️ John You may have another chance. Listen, this is on us. We’re bad at estimating how
⏹️ ▶️ John many chicken hats we need to order. And it’s because we have to pay for these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s because there’s not a lot of data to base our decision on how many chicken hats we should
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and so we have to buy them all up front. We’re like, oh, it’s expensive. And you’ve got to outlay this money. And what if we
⏹️ ▶️ John buy all these chicken hats and nobody wants them? Then we’re just stuck with it. So we kept ordering them in increasingly large amounts.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then our sale ended. And we told people, look, we’re going to try to get more as soon as we can.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we got some more chicken hats. This is not part of one of our regular sales. So there’s no member only
⏹️ ▶️ John discount code like it’s not. This is just a one off special things. We felt bad because like even after we sold through
⏹️ ▶️ John all our chicken hats, more people wanted them. So we ordered a bunch more that we thought would satisfy the
⏹️ ▶️ John demand of all the people who signed up and said, hey, tell me when the chicken tell me when the the hat is back so I can order it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We may or may not have done that because I put them on sale earlier today and I I
⏹️ ▶️ John posted about the hats to Mastodon. I posted to Mastodon first and I gave those people first crack at
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So you’re welcome if you’re following me on Mastodon. Then I posted on Twitter. Anyway, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve already sold through half of the hats in this episode. It’s just being recorded now. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John by the time you hear this, they’re not there. But if you go to ATP.FM. Slash store, you may
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to get a chicken hat and you may actually be able to get it in time for Christmas as well because these ship immediately. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no waiting or anything. And if you live in the US, you could probably get one in time for Christmas if you order at the
⏹️ ▶️ John time you hear this. Or you can get there and find out they’re sold out again, in which case we’re sorry. But like we obviously we have no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea what we’re doing with these chicken hats. Is there infinite demand for chicken hat? Should I buy one for every person in the world? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. But anyway, this is this is probably it for the chicken hats for this year, because we will have
⏹️ ▶️ John put them on enough heads for the winter. This is the winter. That’s why we’re doing this now. It’s a winter one off winter
⏹️ ▶️ John sale. So go to a to be 10 FM slash store. If you want a chicken hat, there may be one available. And
⏹️ ▶️ John also, we have like our leftover mugs, like we always keep a bunch of mugs in reserve for
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that like break and transport or whatever. And now that all the mugs have gone out to everybody, and we’ve replaced any
⏹️ ▶️ John that broke or whatever. Now we have like the reserve available for sale. So we do have a few
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP mugs hanging around as well. I think they will also ship as soon as you order one. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to order a mug and you didn’t get one before, take a look now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I can’t stress enough. I know I say this every time. I know I do. But for real, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these hats are going like hotcakes, which selfishly is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t get too strong of a speech because it could be by the time this thing is posted they’ll all be gone already and I’ll feel bad if that
⏹️ ▶️ John happens, but that’s why you should follow us on Mastodon or Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. And really, act now because I know that’s such a cliche,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for real, like, act now because I bet you there’s a 50-50 shot that by the time you hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these words, this, they will already be gone. In fact, there’s even a chance that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco will have to edit this very speech out of the show because by the time he goes to publish it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they may be gone. So atp.fm. Please and thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John for the bootleg people, someone in the chat room just said that they so they ordered a chicken hat last time and they like it and they’re thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of ordering a second one. I endorse this behavior as a person who loves to have backups, but really like this is what you’re up
⏹️ ▶️ John against. People who already have a chicken hat are like, maybe I should get a second one. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re there or probably going to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’ll tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, when I first got mine, like whatever it was, three or four weeks ago, it wasn’t that cold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet and I put it on and I’m like, oh my god, this is ridiculously hot and I couldn’t wear it, it was too hot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, as I’m pulling it over, as I’m pulling it with my dry, cracked hands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over my ears for my morning dog walks and it’s 28 degrees, now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is an appropriately warmthed hat for what I am doing, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John it. One other thing to scare people away from the chicken that we’re also getting a lot of people who got the chicken out to say it doesn’t fit me. My head’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too big. As I said, when we originally talked about this, this hat is modeled on my my hat
⏹️ ▶️ John down to the millimeter. If you lay this hat on top of my original hat, they are exactly the same in every single dimension.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my original hat was from Easter Mountain Sports, and it was listed as one size fits all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, when we talked about that originally, one size, obviously doesn’t fit all but there was no sizing
⏹️ ▶️ John on this hat there was no small medium or large I have the only size this hat was ever made in which
⏹️ ▶️ John is one size fits all is this one size fits all gonna fit your head maybe I mean I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know like it is it is what it is so if you get this hat and it’s too small I don’t know give it
⏹️ ▶️ John to someone with a smaller head sell it to someone there’s some people reselling their hats on Twitter saying hey I got the hat and
⏹️ ▶️ John I like it fine but my head’s too big for it so if you want it you can try it I I think this one is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John looser, and it accommodates a larger head than my original,
⏹️ ▶️ John because my original has stiffened with time, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s thicker than this one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas this one is much, much looser. So this one accommodates larger heads than the original, even though in every dimension it
⏹️ ▶️ John is the same. So be aware, you may get a hat that doesn’t fit on your head, in which case just give it
⏹️ ▶️ John to someone with a smaller head.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, I would like to make a request of John. He genuinely does not know what I’m about to say. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey received my chicken hat just a couple of days back. I went on a walk around the neighborhood, actually it was a dog walk in this particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case. I went on a walk around the neighborhood and it is quite brisk by Virginian standards today. I think it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mid thirties or something like that. And I put my chicken hat on and I was quite happy to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. It was absurdly warm. It genuinely was. I’m not really sure why or how, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was freaking warm. However, The power of fleece. Right? Either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way, I remember us going back and forth about the correct placement of the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logo and which side is supposed to be where and that everyone is doing it wrong. And I think I’m doing it wrong. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can we have like an official FAQ page or can you repost somewhere publicly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the correct place to put the chicken hat?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t want to be too prescriptive because honestly you wear it however the heck you want, but the way it’s supposed to be worn is seam in
⏹️ ▶️ John the back. Like that’s true of most clothing. If clothing has a seam, very often it goes in the back like with a hat, right? So this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s confusing because people want the logo to be in the front so you can see it, but it’s not. The logo is kind of towards the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John The seam goes in the back. But if you want to wear it with the seam in the front, go for it. I’m just saying if you’re asking a question of how is it supposed to be
⏹️ ▶️ John done, it’s seam in the back. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever it’s worth, I have a fish beanie hat that has a little fish tag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it and that is also in the same location near the seam in the back. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you know anything about fish, you know that they know what they’re talking about with fashion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m glad you made that joke before I had to. No, but you had posted a profile view at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I would like that profile view of you, John, to live permanently somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the problem, I mean, it does. It’s on the Studio Neat page, but the problem is that’s my original hat, not the ATP one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see, you gotta do a new one, please and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John thank you. But why don’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John model it? You’ve got the hat. Put
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it on the seam in the back. Because I’m doing it wrong! Because I’m doing it wrong!
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve told you how to do it now. I’ve told you how to do it now. So get Aaron to take a picture of you, like in a three-quarters view, showing the seam in the
⏹️ ▶️ John back, and you can be the model.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, super. A lot of people have very justifiably asked with regard to merchandise like the chicken hat,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where do I put the discount code? Why isn’t it working? Or how can I get it? We don’t do discount codes for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the anytime sales like this one. We only do them for the time limited sales. Completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonable question. I meant to talk about this a minute ago. I apologize. I completely forgot. Completely reasonable question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we only do the backup or the discount codes for…
⏹️ ▶️ John You need a 28 character backup code for your hat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. You need to send us your 28-character backup code and your Apple ID, and then you can get a discount.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no. Only for the time-limited stuff, so no discounts on this. I am sorry about that. I don’t think we’re gonna do another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time-limited sale until probably springtime, but no discounts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on these ones. our apologies.
Follow-up: iCloud E2E encryption
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow-up. Hey, tell me about recovery keys and backup contacts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please. This is in the context of end-to-end encryption. What is it, advanced data protection? Do I have that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So please tell me more about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a question last time with the whole 28-character code. From the Apple document, they say, creating a
⏹️ ▶️ John recovery key, this 28-character code, turns off account recovery. And then it says, account recovery is a process that would
⏹️ ▶️ John otherwise help you get back your Apple ID when you don’t have enough information to reset your password. So there’s the open question of, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they’re giving you all these warnings about when you generate 28 character code and they say it turns off account
⏹️ ▶️ John recovery but what is account recovery and then they give that vague definition so Oliver Ames wrote in to say I have recovery
⏹️ ▶️ John key and three recovery contacts enabled on my iCloud account I can’t see any indication that a recovery key disables
⏹️ ▶️ John these three recovery contacts the two seem to coexist so I think I have three methods of recovering an encrypted key
⏹️ ▶️ John so that was the question last time can you have backup contacts and also have this 28 character recovery key and apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer is yes or at least you can if you already had them I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John account recovery does not encompass having backup contacts I guess it is a different
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I haven’t actually gone through the process and I’m assuming none of us have at this point
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m setting it
⏹️ ▶️ John up but I believe it prompts you and it says hey you’re about to turn this thing on you should do one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John things and the choices are generate this 28 character code and designate
⏹️ ▶️ John people to be your backup person for you if you lose all your stuff and apparently you can do both.
Follow-up: App Store refunds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Ezekiel Allen was one of many people to write in with some information with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regard to getting a refund and how you can do that and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be explicit about what you want to refund on. The context for this was one of you. Was it Marco buying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of stuff or was it John? I thought it was John and then I could swear it was Marco. It’s always John. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was John looking at, oh, it was for the face thing, wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John The AI image generator thing he said I was messing with, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, so anyways, so John was asking, how do I know what I’m requesting a refund on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and blah, blah, blah. I had said, oh, I’m pretty sure you can do that in StorKit 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can. So I’ll put a link to a tech talk that Apple did. So anyway, on this video, they talk about exactly how you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can show a sheet that I believe is provided by the system, but it lets you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask for a refund on a particular item, asks you how or what the problem is, et cetera. Continuing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with what Ezekiel was telling us, you can look at any of your order receipts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there’s a report a problem link at the kind of the bottom of the order. And there’s also reportaproblem.apple.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And on the website, it shows you all of your purchases ordered by date and group by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order number. You can choose request refund and then see a list of options including in-app purchase not received. After selecting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, you can click in in-app purchase and hit submit. And so there is a list that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are seeking, John, we just didn’t know where to get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the secret, the key for me is that I was looking at these order receipts saying, why is there no place for me to get refund? And
⏹️ ▶️ John also, why can I not see a list of my transactions like in the app? On the receipt,
⏹️ ▶️ John the secret is look for report a problem, which I don’t know, I just was glancing
⏹️ ▶️ John over that of like, oh, I don’t really have a problem, I just want a refund. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John have done the same. But anyway, that encompasses it. And the website, reportaproblem.apple.com
⏹️ ▶️ John is where you can request a refund. The UI is a little bit weird, but that is the place where you can do it. And there you actually do see your transactions.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s actually many places where you can see these transactions, including on your devices, it’s just not straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ John to know where they are as anyone has ever gone digging for something in settings or whatever. So this stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ John available and thanks to people pointing this out, I did actually request a refund for that one thing that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go through and I got it back. And same thing with the StorKit 2 thing. Like that’s presenting
⏹️ ▶️ John a UI but in the end you are still asking Apple for a refund. The developer cannot grant
⏹️ ▶️ John or not grant you the refund. So if you ask for a refund from Apple and Apple says no because like you’re asking for refund
⏹️ ▶️ John on like some subscription that you’ve, you know, used up all but one day of and you want to refund that and maybe the Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ John say no or something. You can’t like the developer isn’t doing that. It’s Apple. The good news is that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple pretty much gives you any refund you ask for as long as it is reasonable. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you are at Apple’s mercy, but they are merciful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. I’m not arguing with what you’re saying. However, in that video that I was talking about earlier, one of the things they say is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you do the in-app refund dance, you can provide Apple with some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information about what the user has done. And this is particularly in the context
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of consumable in-app purchases. So, you know, you buy a packet of credits,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, that you’re using over time. Actually, I guess like this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give me five avatars thing. Well, anyways, what you can do is you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provide, as a developer, you can provide Apple with, oh, they’ve used two of their six credits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what have you. And then Apple puts that in their little algorithm, their black box that decides
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether or not you will actually get the refund. I agree with you. I haven’t heard from users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or even the handful of times I’ve done it myself. I haven’t heard anyone say that they’ve been denied, but there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is some affordance in the flow and in the API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tell Apple exactly what it is that the user has done.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in my case, I remember I made an in-app purchase and the app just failed to give me anything for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there would be no record of that. And there’s no way Apple has any information other than, as far as they can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did an in-app purchase and then I just like regretted it and asked for my money back, right? They’d have no way to verify
⏹️ ▶️ John my story that, hey, I did it and I got nothing for it, which is true. I did get nothing for it. It disappeared into the app, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they just gave me the refund anyway.
Sponsor: Linode
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Follow-up: Sharrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have a definitive answer on the Sharo. This was brought to my attention from Ilya Berman.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like to be that guy in Revels when your friends are wrong and just gets excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when your friends are wrong, but when you’re almost never wrong like John Syracuse, I can’t help but get a little excited. So here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am getting more than a little excited that apparently the Sharo is for real for real a real thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ilya points out WWDC 2017 essential design principles About 25 minutes in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the presenter introduces the box with an arrow coming out of it, and the presenter says the following.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The glyph that we use to represent the concept of an action is an arrow that points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and away from a box. Because the most common action associated with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this glyph is share, we affectionately call this a share-row.
⏹️ ▶️ John is a real thing. Right. But here’s the question. Have they been able to make Sharo happen
⏹️ ▶️ John since 2017? I’m going to say since none of us remembered this session.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mm, I don’t think it’s really happening. Anyway, I talked about this a lot with Merlin on the rectifs
⏹️ ▶️ John that we recorded that will be out sometime in the future so you can hear more about it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John people are, you know, have used inside of Apple in Apple retail,
⏹️ ▶️ John this shortening of the thing. But I feel like it hasn’t really caught on. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why we had all these questions about it. That’s why we end up having two episodes of it. Because it wasn’t like, oh, yeah, of course, share everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John calls it that. And I’m kind of surprised that given these people are inside Apple talking about design, that I can’t go into
⏹️ ▶️ John symbols and type sharrow. I went and did that. I mean, I made
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the last episode, but I’m like, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John think if they call it that, it’s got to be in like the synonyms or no, it’s not. It’s called like upward facing
⏹️ ▶️ John box arrow or some whatever it’s called. So I mean, even if Apple puts it as the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in symbols, I feel like making it catch on in the wider world. You know, I,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I think us talking about it may actually be pushing it in that direction, much to my chagrin. So we should just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will concede as much as I love giving you a hard time, I will concede that the first time I remember having heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was when Merlin brought it up on Rectifs what, like a month or two ago or something like that. I don’t remember having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John before then. We all probably did. Yeah, yeah. Considering it’s from 2017. No, I agree. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t stick because it’s dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It didn’t stick. I’ll leave it at that. All right, so.
iCloud E2E OS requirements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tell me about enabling the aforementioned advanced data protection. If you happen to really like
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a joke I made last episode. I was like, oh, you know, you would think that people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John into Apple and are Apple enthusiasts, they’re gonna turn on advanced data protection right away. And the requirement
⏹️ ▶️ John that all the devices be updated to the latest OS isn’t gonna be a big deal, because all these Apple enthusiasts
⏹️ ▶️ John and these tech nerds, they are updating their devices all the time. They wanna be on the latest and greatest version of everything. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the reality is, if you are an actual Apple nerd, what you end up accumulating is tons
⏹️ ▶️ John and tons of older devices that you just refuse to get rid of, even though you should sell them or give them away because you’re using them as like
⏹️ ▶️ John test devices or you just wanna have them or whatever. And so here is Quinn Nelson posting a video
⏹️ ▶️ John showing his experience of trying to turn it on. And it shows you that screen that says, oh, you wanna turn on
⏹️ ▶️ John advanced data protection? Well, you gotta have the latest version of all the OSs. So here’s a list of the devices you’re gonna need to
⏹️ ▶️ John update and he scrolls for like two pages. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we all have a lot of devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John devices that you’ve forgotten about that are not running the latest OS. They may be turned off, asleep in
⏹️ ▶️ John a drawer somewhere, and now you have to either fish them out or go to the webpage and like eject them from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s not great. I haven’t done this yet. I think we established earlier that none of us have, but I do plan to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if it requires everything on latest and greatest, it might take a minute.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s unavoidable. Like there’s a good reason for them doing that, not doing it to be mean. The whole point is this is a security
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and if you leave the old ones on the old version, that’s a security leak. like you are not protected unless
⏹️ ▶️ John you do this. And it was the same thing with setting backup contacts that you had to update everything. Time heals this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, you will update all your things. Eventually, you’ll get annoyed enough that you’ll dig them out of drawers or remove them from
⏹️ ▶️ John your app ID. So it’s fine, it’s just funny. Yeah, agreed.
Follow-up: Quitting Finder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. It turns out that you can indeed quit the finder. So John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wynn writes in episode 512 of ATP, you were asked about a quit menu
⏹️ ▶️ Casey item for the finder. As expected, it’s a defaults right to the rescue in terminal enter. And we’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this in the show notes, defaults right com dot apple dot finder quit menu item, bool true. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then just restart the finder and suddenly you’ll have a quit menu item, allegedly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it behaves a little bit weirdly. I mean, it’s not as much fun as doing it in ResEdit for sure. But um,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think I put this on my Mac OS X reviews back in the day, but have long since forgotten about it. But when you
⏹️ ▶️ John do quit Finder through that menu item, it can behave a little bit strangely
⏹️ ▶️ John in that sometimes it will hang or sometimes it will hang when it’s trying to relaunch itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or sometimes it won’t relaunch itself and you have to kill it. And then it like I got it to a state
⏹️ ▶️ John where clicking on in the dock wouldn’t relaunch it. So instead I had to go to the terminal, which of course was already open
⏹️ ▶️ John and type the open command on like, you know, open space dot to open like the directory and that that will trigger the
⏹️ ▶️ John finder to open. Just needless to say, this is not a supported configuration from Apple’s perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the finder team did put the quit menu item there and maybe it will work better for you than it worked for me.
macOS 13.1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, Ventura 13.1 is out. It is not in beta. It is for real, for real.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, I upgraded earlier today because I’m a dummy and I do it on the day I record. I don’t know why I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this every time, but I always do. But it worked, so it’s okay. But the point is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m a dummy. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installed Ventura regular just because 13.1 came out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s worse than what Casey did. Yeah, that’s aggressive. Because you’re on to 13. Anyway, I did it because
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to try the freeform app, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, but yeah, I think I updated yesterday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s true. I forgot that it was on the Mac. I was, I was, we will talk about this, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John went to- I forgot that it
⏹️ ▶️ John was any place but the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause I wanted to try it on iPad with my Apple Pencil and all that. I completely forgot it was on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so yeah, so 13.1 brings back a relatively well hidden, but there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network locations GUI, which is pretty cool. I know a lot of people were sad and upset about that, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and where it is, you go to system settings, You go to network in the sidebar, and these are all the way down to the bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’ll be a mysterious little thing that looks like a button with three dots and a V on it. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John will spawn a menu, and then at the bottom of that menu, will spawn another menu, and at the bottom of that menu, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can edit your network locations. It’s a fairly hilarious UI, but at least it’s back.
How Apple Music Sing works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Apple Music Sing isn’t just for Atmos stuff. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sent to us via Bill Klein. Bill writes, you mentioned the new Apple Music Sing feature this week, I think it was a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two ago, and John posited that this is not machine learning related, but instead using Atmos encoded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music objects to strip out the vocals. However, in my testing of this feature, I found many tracks do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have Atmos versions on the service that function with this feature. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the band Gooses, last two albums, Dripfield and Shenanigans Nightclub, it’s It’s a pretty good name for an album. Do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have Atmos versions on Apple music, but if you try playing this track, which will link or any other track on those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey records on 16.2, you will get the microphone button to strip the vocals. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact, plus the compatibility list for this feature, which cuts off any devices with an A12 or earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leads me, says Bill, to believe that this is in fact ML powered and relies on the more powerful neural engine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the A13 and later chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can we, can we just take a minute to appreciate that a jam band
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I happen to be listening to recently what somebody wrote in about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like referencing music like that I’m not the only person listening to the band goose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which by the way I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say which one is the jam band it’s goose goose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah they’re sure they just did a tour with Trane Stasio like kind of together as a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing and it’s a fantastic tour it both the tab side of it and the goose side of it anyway oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my god there’s they’re so good like if you if If fish is like kind of in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your real house, but like you want something like that’s a little bit more mass market palatable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a little maybe a little more like, you know, a more modern take on something similar. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should listen to goose. It’s really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with all that said, somebody, I think it was John put a link in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m assuming is from someone that worked on all this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. See, the information we got last so about the fact it wasn’t that they’re using at most, But the idea was
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has access to individual tracks in the same way that they have access to those
⏹️ ▶️ John things to do the Atmos mixes, because they have to, anyway. But I think it was from Vatici or somebody was
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, like, this is not using machine learning to do it. It’s actually, they have the individual tracks and the Atmos
⏹️ ▶️ John was an example of why Apple had access to that. But I don’t know for certain. So a lot of people are
⏹️ ▶️ John saying that the reason it’s limited to the Apple TV 4K is because it uses machine learning to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this and we need the A13 or better. and that’s why you can’t use the older Apple TVs to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t know if this tweet from John Druckmann is definitive because it’s someone on the inside who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows. But either way, it seems to me like it would be more straightforward to just get the individual tracks.
⏹️ ▶️ John And certainly Apple through its connections in the music industry could get those. But on the other hand,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many songs could they get them for? Is this something they’ve been doing for a year asking all the music labels to
⏹️ ▶️ John give them individual tracks? Or did they just apply ML to it? It’s kind of weird that Apple wouldn’t brag about it
⏹️ ▶️ John if they use ML, like, hey, look at
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this man thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we’re doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John the power of the neural engine, blah, blah, blah. But still a bit of a mystery. But most of the feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John we got is people saying, it’s definitely machine learning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me ask you two, did either of you try this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John at all? I think we established we both can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey no. Oh, no, no. I can’t either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I do sing. I don’t know if I can, but I do in the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m by myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you’re listening to Phish, you say three words every 30 minutes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music also. But yeah, but the problem is I haven’t had a lot of that time since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve upgraded to 16.2 and stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did try it very briefly on my iPad and I don’t know how I got this impression.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume I just vastly misunderstood. I thought that there was a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this or something more to this on the user side. Clearly there’s a lot to this on the implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side as we were just discussing. But on the user side, it’s basically just another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey volume control for vocals. Maybe everyone knew this but me, but that’s it. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re looking at the lyrics view.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the lyrics already did the things you’re seeing the lyrics to the lyrics already did that. Exactly. They already looked like karaoke. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John highlight the words as they come up in the song and they scroll automatically. That is that existed that way for years
⏹️ ▶️ John and they just added the ability to basically turn down the vocals too. And I think one of the things that will
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe identify, I haven’t tried this, but one of of the things that may be identified is whether it’s machine learning or not. If you have the individual tracks,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could put the vocals to zero and you won’t hear them at all. Whereas if you’re using machine learning and you put the vocals to zero,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you’ll still pick them up a little bit. I’ll have to try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I did try doing exactly that. Now, granted, I was doing this on my iPad, not using AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just the iPad speakers. As far as I could tell, there was zero vocals, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I very well could be wrong about that. And this was in five minutes of playing about. Now, it is very slick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can just get a volume slider for the vocal track. Like that is cool. But for some reason I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was more involved than that and it’s not. Like that’s all it is. I shouldn’t say that’s all it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s all it is. And I was surprised to see that. But with that said, it was extremely well done. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could carry a tune, I could see it being a lot of fun to mess about with, But I cannot.
Apple Music in Teslas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So Marco that Tesla that you’ve probably either sold or about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sell good news You can now use Apple music in your Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great. I Expect that to work super well. I
⏹️ ▶️ John Mean this is not them adding carplay, but it is you know an improvement
⏹️ ▶️ John over not acknowledging that Apple music exists at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Also not acknowledging that people just play music from their phones Like, I mean, like the car has a built-in cell modem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things like traffic routing stuff like that. It was only like one or two years of that for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then after that, like you had to pay per month. And I just never signed up for that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, what do I need this for? Like I, I, you, because they don’t have CarPlay, I never use their media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff anyway. Like I’m, I have my phone, you doing, you know, directions using Waze or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Maps. And then I have, you know, my own my phone also playing music via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or overcast podcasts over the speakers. And so what do I need the vehicles built in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, weird stereo thing for that just playing a streaming service like I can do that on my phone and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better integration and more control and, you know, a more unified experience with the way my phone works and other ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have Bluetooth connected and ready to go. So it was a no brainer for me. I just never used that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this adds yet another capability to that data stream that I don’t have access to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a car I’m trying to sell.
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Freeform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, we had just talked about this kind of obliquely a second ago, but the Freeform app. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new in what is it, 16.2, something like that, whatever just came out in the last 48 hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was teased, I believe, at WWDC. Do I have that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it was actually demoed, wasn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was. They showed the app. It was, it’s, you know, coming soon to all of Apple platforms. It was on the Mac, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad. Is it on the iPhone? I don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s on everything. Yeah, it was one of those features they said in the free form app will be coming, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they said later this year. One of those things that didn’t launch when iOS 16 launched.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So this is now out, it’s everywhere. And I only spent a few minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing with it. I don’t know what in my life needs an infinite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey canvas sketching clip art app, but holy cow, this app is really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I really, really like it. So again, what it is, it’s an infinite canvas, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we were all together, maybe, I don’t know if that was the year that you were there, Marco, but when at least the Syracusas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and us and the Underscores and maybe the Armins were all at the Underscores for New Year’s, this is probably four or five years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago now. We did a text-based adventure game like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they used to do with the Upgrade Cortex crossover. Well, they still do it, but they do it differently now. And anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to have an app on my iPad to draw a map. And it was surprisingly challenging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four or five years ago to come up with an app that you had an infinite canvas, that you could go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as far as you wanted in any direction. And there were some that existed, I think there was a Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, maybe OneNote that was actually pretty good. There were a couple others that I found, but this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one feels very Apple-y, which makes sense because Apple wrote it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a really, really well done infinite canvas, you know, app. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really, really like it. If I was just doodling with no particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, known endpoint, I really, really like Linnea. I think that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were told to pronounce it. Linnea by our friends at the Icon Factory is excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I love it too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I would still choose that probably in most cases, in no small part because of some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tools that they have to like draw shapes very, you know, free form, but auto detect them and turn them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into shapes. And, and I love that they have different like paper, if you will, they have like graph paper and, and they have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, I think they have like iPhone screens so you can draw mock-ups and stuff. And so I really recommend Linnea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I remember, I’ll put a link in the show notes. Um, but this free form thing for when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing free form doodling or whatever is really, really good. And I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really like it. So I played with it on the iPad and there’s like a bunch of things that are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across the top, a bunch of tools across the top that you can play with. Um, there’s like the standard pen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, thing where you can, when you can do it with the Apple pencil, but interestingly, the tools that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can use are a little different than normal. I think they have a pen that has a capital
⏹️ ▶️ Casey letter a on it. And that’s basically to start a text field.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I understand it correctly, then they have like a pen, a marker, a crayon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was a little surprising and kind of cool. They have something, maybe John, you can tell me if you’ve looked at this, what this is. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks like a, like a bottle of paint, but I don’t think that’s actually what it is. The eraser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then the like squiggle blur things tool. They also have a ton of clip art. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know if that’s even what we’re supposed to call it these days, but I’m old, so I call it clip art. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of stuff on here, including like an entire farm’s worth of animals. They have a waffle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is round, which I, I personally believe is the correct shape for waffle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They have a food truck, which I thought was funny. They have John Syracuse’s refrigerator, maybe. I don’t know. Do you have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bottom freezer or a side freezer, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s French doors on top, freezer drawer on the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, then they have your actual refrigerator because it does not have water or ice dispenser on it. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a turntable I was excited to find. So there’s all sorts of fun clip art in here. I also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey liked that when I was noodling about with it, that I was looking to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move a couple of sticky notes near each other and I was just messing about. Sure enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when they got close to each other, they popped up alignment guides. So they would align against text,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they would align against each other, and it was really, really intuitive and it worked really, really well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This whole thing, I really, really dig. Again, I feel like it’s a solution looking for a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my particular case, but I was quite surprised at how great this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for an initial release, and especially for something that I was like, yeah, whatever, I’ll just try it out and see if it’s any good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really like it. And you can sync via iCloud. I think it has affordances for live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collaboration. I didn’t personally try this, and I might be lying to you by accident, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s kind of the whole point of this thing is supposed to be collaboration. By the way, it’s not my fridge. My fridge has French doors on top. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not French doors, that’s just one big door. Geez,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey. Was it? Oh, shoot, I’m sorry. I, the offending party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John has been sacked.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the fact that you used it on the iPad, it’s almost like you’re describing a slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John different app than mine, because I was using it on the Mac and my frustrations were with the
⏹️ ▶️ John tools available. What I wanted to do immediately was, hey, this is Infinite Canvas, I wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John just scribble on it. And I could not for the life of me on the Mac version figure out how to scribble
⏹️ ▶️ John on this thing. I have a pen tool, but the pen tool only lets me make
⏹️ ▶️ John straight lines, Bezier curves, stuff like that. I could not find a scribble thing. And now, obviously, if you have the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Pencil or your finger, it lets you do that, but on the Mac, you just can’t draw with the cursor, I guess, they’re just like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t. I mean, I grew up drawing with the cursor in Mac Paint and Super Paint. Like, it is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can do, but this app is like, no, you need Apple Pencil. Like, you need, or you need a touch device.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand that. All those things you said, the pen with the little A on it, the bucket, the little
⏹️ ▶️ John bottle thing, like the crayon, none of that is here. Or if it’s here, I’m not finding it. Maybe I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to like make my screen bigger, I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the only- Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make your screen bigger, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I was saying, like, how am I not, Is the window not big enough on here? Like when I click on, so the things I see
⏹️ ▶️ John on the top is I see a thing to make a sticky note. I see a thing that looks like a circle and a square.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in the upper right-hand corner of the popover that appears, I see the pen tool. The tool tip says
⏹️ ▶️ John draw with the pen tool. But all I can do with the pen tool is make straight lines and Bezier curves. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a million different clip art things or whatever. Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Then there’s make a text
⏹️ ▶️ John box, right? And you click that and it immediately makes a text box. Then there’s the photo
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where you can add a photo or a movie, and then there’s the choose a file to edit. There’s no scribble
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy, you know, for just like scribbling. I don’t understand it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you’re right. On the Mac, it does not have any of these affordances that I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wish I had, I meant to try the collaboration thing because I feel like that’s where this thing really, where it’s really supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be for us having multiple people do this. But I look at this app and not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s fine, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it boggles my mind that Apple decided to make this because it’s not like they don’t have things to do. Like I can give
⏹️ ▶️ John them a list, we do have to show us about there’s plenty of things that they could do, right? But somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, was this an acquisition? Did they acquire a company that already had this app and they brought it to the Mac? Was this just somebody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good idea? I’m not that I’m saying they shouldn’t do this, but it’s so weird
⏹️ ▶️ John for them to decide to make this specific app. In particular, the challenge
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think most of their users face when it comes to collaboratively working in a sort of multimedia
⏹️ ▶️ John environment involves communication with people, right? So like, that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a collaborative tool, but like the main communication thing that I think people use with Apple devices is
⏹️ ▶️ John one, messages, iMessage, right? And two, probably FaceTime. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not FaceTime or messages. It’s a whole other application. Now it kind of integrates
⏹️ ▶️ John with those other things and you can sort of, you know, fold it into that. But I feel like the entry point should be
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re in one of those existing applications, here’s a new way for you to collaborate versus come through
⏹️ ▶️ John this app and then, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe this is a really important tool and they need to
⏹️ ▶️ John be competitive in this market because if they have a free thing that does this, it’s really important to all their users.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it seems to me that I would much rather have the ability to have us all look at a frigging photo when we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John on a FaceTime call,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco which is a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John can do, but that FaceTime still can’t do in a pleasing way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with you. Do you have your iPad within reach or no? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey just sent a link for a test link for us to collaborate on a free form board.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I open it, it’s my first run experience, I open it up and it gives me an error that the board can’t be opened. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, now I got it, all right. All right, oh I can select things. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I have, this is, I actually haven’t used the app yet, but what I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s two ways to look at, you know, why did Apple make this app and what’s it going to do long term,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know. we can look at something like clips and clips basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has got, you know, it was put out there and then just left to die. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just got no love, no ongoing support, no ongoing features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was itself kind of redundant with their other apps already. Um, you know, you could argue like, why didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just make iMovie better or whatever, you know? And, and so clips, it was put out there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then just left and, and no followup, no follow through.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple’s really, unfortunately, kind of good at putting stuff out there and then never following through with it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there like, you know, 80% of the way and then just letting it die. So that’s, that’s, I think, the, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pessimistic outcome here, like that, that could be what happens here. Or it could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like notes, where Apple Notes came out. I mean, not obviously not the very original, like Mark Ruffelt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, but you know, the modern what the modern app that we know is Apple notes. That came out and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone was like, huh, they put a lot of work into that. And then they just kept iterating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every OS release, notes got a little bit better and got some new capability. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we all just started using it because it was just good. Maybe that will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen here. You know, maybe this will actually, you know, maybe, um, what’s it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called? I already forgot. Freeform. this is just going to become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those Apple system apps that, you know, it doesn’t get a lot of like attention,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but people just slowly start using it. And then it eventually becomes this thing that, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people just use this and they get stuff done on it and it’s fine. And even though, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people don’t often talk about it, it’s just one of those useful utility apps that, you know, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, like us Apple users tend to just enjoy and use as part of our day and not really think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. So that’s I think the ideal outcome here. And I think that’s possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if the collaboration features, which Apple has always done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at best an okay to poor job at, even if those end up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not being as good as something like what we see from the G Suite or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Microsoft or whatever, even if it’s never quite to that level, if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good enough to be like, okay, usable within a small group like us or within a family.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, that’s how we use notes. Like we have shared notes within our family. And we, you know, we have a couple for us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for various various ATP things like, if it ends up being that kind of app, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fine. That’s great. Because, you know, it’s not going to take over. It’s not going to suddenly like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, make businesses stop buying office, it’s not going to make school stop buying Chromebooks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not gonna radically change collaboration forever, but it could just be a really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that Apple users get to enjoy and use for themselves and their families and small groups here and there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if that’s quote all it is, that’s great. For it to be that thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of ending up like Clipse merely requires that it’s useful to some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some certain ways, which I think it probably is on track to that now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if not already there. And then secondly, it requires Apple to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invest in it ongoing to actually care about this app, make sure it has a staff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of more than zero people after this week, and really follow through and make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure like, is this getting love every OS release? Are they are they listening to customer feedback and making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweaks and making adjustments and fixing problems and addressing shortcomings? If they can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that on an anywhere near regular basis, and keep this thing from dying on the fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this could be really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think it could definitely benefit from, it’s not like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John was just complaining about the feature set and I do feel like the Mac is getting the short end of the stick here, but like, it’s not like it needs a tons of features,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for version one, I think its main strength that Apple should leverage is system integration, right? Kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the quick note thing where you can, you know, make a note by going up in the corner, it took a long time for that to arrive, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the type of thing that Apple can do that third party developers have a harder time with. So this is like, you know, across all of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s platforms, Ethereum useful app, but it shouldn’t feel so much like an island, like it should be
⏹️ ▶️ John thoroughly integrated with FaceTime and messages, I feel like. You should be able to sort of seamlessly, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John open doc style transition from like, hey, I’m on a message thread, and now everyone on this message thread is scribbling on this
⏹️ ▶️ John document. Oh, sorry, Mac users, you can’t scribble because everyone knows that’s impossible with a mouse. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need sophisticated tools and, you know, grid snapping, and like it doesn’t need to become Illustrator
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But if it just had integration, I think that would get people using it more. Because right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one’s gonna even know this app is installed. Like it comes in, it came in an update. It comes in 16.2 and 13.1. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t worry, it puts itself on the dock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why people have tons of things in the dock, they have no idea what those icons are. Like it’s not, whereas if it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like well integrated into messages and if the messages team would get their head out of their butts and put the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to add a photo to messages back prominently placed and get rid of the microphone thing, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of things we can do to messages to sort of find the most common things that people do. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when you have that real estate, you could put your new app in that position
⏹️ ▶️ John to say we think that this is a thing people would like to do, even though they hadn’t never realized it before, like because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not used to having this kind of collaboration. But just like how we put the the one tap way to add
⏹️ ▶️ John a photo to a message thread back in a prominent place where you don’t have to dig for it. Likewise, we decided that we
⏹️ ▶️ John think freeform is equally important. And so we put a little icon up on there too. And we put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in place of the microphone or something, you know, anyway, like, put it in people’s faces where they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, huh, maybe we would like to do this. And then people find it useful for like, imagine if you could
⏹️ ▶️ John pull up a map and then scribble on the map and a message thread and real time collaboration on your phones, right? That
⏹️ ▶️ John might be useful. Whereas this is like a curiosity of like, Oh, well, if you if you launch the app, and if other people also know
⏹️ ▶️ John the app exists, and you send them a link, you can both scribble together. It’s like, it’s more of a corporate thing. Like, your co workers
⏹️ ▶️ John will definitely do this and use an app like this. Although your co workers are gonna say, well, that’s great and all, but we can only
⏹️ ▶️ John use the worst version that comes with Microsoft, uh, you know, office suite, which what else is new?
⏹️ ▶️ John But if apple wants to make this thing, I feel like it needs much better system integration. I still question
⏹️ ▶️ John like maybe they know something I don’t about a gaping hole in the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the lineup of sort of default installed stuff that people get apple devices and like what
⏹️ ▶️ John I really wanted an infinite canvas where I can collaborate, right? Uh, because this app, like they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John selling it, it comes free with your devices, which is great. But when Apple does stuff like that, it’s to fill
⏹️ ▶️ John a need that they think is big, like you get a web browser, because everybody needs that you get a mail
⏹️ ▶️ John client, because it’s a really common thing, you get a notes app, it’s not the best notes app in the world. But it’s a pretty good one. And lots of people need notes,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when I need to write long apologies on Twitter or whatever, like it’s an important application, right? But they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to include everything like it doesn’t. I was gonna say it doesn’t include like a multi track audio editor, like
⏹️ ▶️ John logic, but it doesn’t include GarageBand, I suppose. But yeah, the question of which applications is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John going to pay to develop and then give away for free
⏹️ ▶️ John as a way to add value to its devices. And that list really has to be, you know, either
⏹️ ▶️ John things that they already know people wanna do like email and web browse or things they’re pretty sure that a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people are gonna wanna do. And maybe this qualifies, maybe I’m totally off base about it, but right now it seems like a bit of a curiosity. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, I think this is really slick and I saw Marco, you know, doodling in there to a degree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while I was working in there and it didn’t seem to completely fall apart. So I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, after only having used this for a few minutes, I’m pretty impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just so angry that I can’t scribble. I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco unreasonably angry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t understand it. Like, who doesn’t want to scribble on the shared placemat, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the whole fun of it. And you guys are all having fun and doing your little messages with your handwriting
⏹️ ▶️ John with your fingers or your Apple Pencil. And here I am, I can draw like, Look, it’s a box, it’s a square,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can draw. It’s just so terrible. It’s just, I don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why I’m being left out of the scribble party.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because you insist on using a Mac and putting your iPad up near your bed. That’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even currently have an iPad that I’m signed into with my Apple IDs. I can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, like, I guess, like, I always want to be the kind of person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who writes and draws like with pencils or pens or Apple pencils. I always want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be that kind of person. And I’m just not like I want to. I end up wanting to draw something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actually doing it maybe three times a year. And then then I’ll take out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linnea and do it on the iPad with the pencil and everything. The pencil, of course, dead. I have to like wait for it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge a little bit. Like I want so badly to be that kind of person because Apple pencils
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and notebooks and pens are so cool. and I’m just not a good person.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t, I just take it back, it doesn’t even have like a circle and a square tool. It’s just got the pen tool. Like I can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John make, I can draw a circle with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey tool or a square.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, I don’t understand it. Like it just, it seems like the tools here are more limited than
⏹️ ▶️ John they are in the, what do they call it? They call it markup. Like when you do the share sheet and you get the little pen, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that seems to have more extensive tools on the Mac than this does, which is really mind boggling.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other thing is like, you can do little sticky notes. That’s why I’ve been moving these sticky notes around. You can make a little sticky note. Yeah, but they have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John square. Yeah, it has to be square, first of all, which kind of makes sense because it stops reading as a sticky note if it’s not square, although they
⏹️ ▶️ John do make sticky notes that aren’t square. But anyway, you can put stuff on it like text and scribbles, but
⏹️ ▶️ John then when you move the note, text and scribbles don’t go with it. Yeah, I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a bummer. I don’t know. That seems like a decision and not a mistake to me because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, if the stuff went with it, that makes sense, but then what if someone’s writes outside the edges, how does that work?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I kind of see how they arrived at this decision, but it really does break the illusion. Yep, I would agree with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, all told, John gives it a triple F minus and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I give it a B plus, maybe an A minus.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, like I am impressed by the collaboration ability. This is one of the first apps that I’ve ever seen from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John where I can actually see you two doing things in real time and the app isn’t crashing and it seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, I think I’m seeing you do stuff as you do it as opposed to Apple’s previous ever
⏹️ ▶️ John set collaboration which was not like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like when you’re editing notes together with someone else, it’s like, you know, they’re basically sending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it via carrier pigeon. Like, you know, at some point, the person’s gonna see what you wrote, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, well, geez, first of all, your own stuff doesn’t sync that quickly between your own devices. It’s like, ugh.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem with Notes is I think it, especially on iOS and iPadOS, I don’t think it syncs in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think you actually have to launch the Notes app to make it sync, which is, again, mind-boggling to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, to me, that’s my number one feature request for Notes. Like if they just make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes always sync itself in the background. You are Apple, you can do that. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that with Overcast, but that makes sense. You, Apple, should be able to do that. Always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep it up to date in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not gonna kill our batteries because like people shouldn’t be sharing like, you know, 60 megapixel images.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, it’s notes. It’s probably just some text, just send it. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John This collaboration seems pretty good. Although I think notes has also gotten an update 16.2 that I think they mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can now see other people’s cursors in notes, which is kind of a Google Docs style thing. I wonder if that is just a cosmetic
⏹️ ▶️ John change or if they’ve also revamped the syncing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Oh, I mean, I agree with what you’re saying about syncing, but yeah, I believe notes in 16.2 adds real time collaboration,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I have not tried yet, but I’ve understood to be pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m looking at a shared note in 16.2 right now, but no one is editing it and I I don’t know, maybe I’ll experiment
⏹️ ▶️ John with it for next week.
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Convergent encryption
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, John, tell me what convergent encryption is, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John This was something that Ben Thompson noticed in the Apple’s advanced data protection announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John that I thought was interesting and worth surfacing. He talked about it in his Stratechery newsletter. I’ll put a link.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not one of the free things. You have to be a subscriber to read it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it was in the Apple document that we linked last week that’s like an explanation of how this stuff works.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s talking about some things that advanced data protection
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t encrypt. And it gives some details on the little nitty gritty things here. And it says, iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John stores some data without protection of user-specific Cloud Kit service keys, even when the advanced data protection is turned on. Dates
⏹️ ▶️ John and times when a file or object was modified are used to sort a user’s information. And checksums of a file
⏹️ ▶️ John and photo data are used to help Apple deduplicate and optimize the user’s iCloud device storage,
⏹️ ▶️ John all without having access to the files and photos themselves. saying some of your data is not encrypted. And one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that is not encrypted is a checksum of files and photos, right? Like just
⏹️ ▶️ John a hash of the file or photo. They don’t encrypt that hash or whatever. And the reason they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it is for data deduplication. This is, we talked about last time of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, by encrypting everything end to end and by taking the keys away from Apple, in
⏹️ ▶️ John theory, Apple doesn’t have a way to scan things on the server side to look for, you know, child sexual abuse
⏹️ ▶️ John material and other things like that because they can’t see your files, right? But they can see the checksum
⏹️ ▶️ John of your file. Now this doesn’t help with their previous system where they’re like, we have this database
⏹️ ▶️ John of known bad material and we use this procedural or was it perceptual hash or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like a hash that was saying, okay, we’re looking for this photo that we know is bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if you scale the photo, crop it a little bit, rotate it a little bit, make it black and white, we’ll still find
⏹️ ▶️ John it. and that is a fuzzy system that is not 100% accurate, they can’t do that
⏹️ ▶️ John because they don’t have access to your photo’s data. But they do have access to a checksum of your photo.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you have an image, one of those images
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in that database of bad images that is not modified in any way, the checksum
⏹️ ▶️ John will match. Now, the problem with checksums and the reason you use checksums, the beauty of checksums is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you change just one bit in the image, the checksum is totally different. That’s the point of checksums, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not really, they can’t really do what they were proposing to do before because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s trivially easy to defeat this by just changing one pixel in an
⏹️ ▶️ John image and now you have a totally different checksum and no one can find it. But setting all the CSAM stuff aside,
⏹️ ▶️ John the checksums will let them deduplicate because when they’re deduplicating, they’re just trying to save storage and say, okay, look, if we
⏹️ ▶️ John have literally the same file 700 times, let’s just store it once and then just point everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John at that one thing. And even within your own data, if you accidentally have 17 copies of the
⏹️ ▶️ John same photo, there’s that deduplicating function in photos that will say, hey, we found duplics of this photo. It will
⏹️ ▶️ John only, I mean, obviously when you’re doing it with your own photos, you have access to the data, but Apple on its end can
⏹️ ▶️ John deduplicate the storage on, I was gonna say on your behalf, but really it’s on Apple’s behalf because they pay for all that
⏹️ ▶️ John storage, right? This lets them do that. And it’s pretty interesting if you look at the Wikipedia page
⏹️ ▶️ John on convergent encryption, like how do they do that? Uh, it basically they
⏹️ ▶️ John use the hash as the encryption key and then they use your
⏹️ ▶️ John encryption key to encrypt the hash. It’s, it sounds like,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, as Merlin would say, locking your keys inside your keys, read the Wikipedia page. It’s not actually that complicated. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it lets them have an unencrypted version of the checksum or hash
⏹️ ▶️ John of your photo while still not knowing what’s actually in your photo. In theory this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John possible security hole because let’s say there is, you know, somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets out into the world that hey this photo has this checksum. You know, this exact photo
⏹️ ▶️ John has this checksum. Then they could find every single user on iCloud who has that photo in their library.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, considering if you change any aspect of the photo in any way the checksum
⏹️ ▶️ John is entirely different it’s probably not that big of a deal. But that’s why they put it in this document. If you’re wondering do they keep a checksum of your files,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do. that’s for storage to duplication purposes, because you know they can’t be giving you that five gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John of free storage without doing this. Oh man, yeah, I don’t want to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself on a tear about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud storage stuff, so I will just let this go. But yeah, this is clever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t think I have any particular problem with it, but it definitely gets me a little, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m tugging at my collar just a little bit, hoping and wondering if this is exposing data that I don’t want it to. but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we’re in the clear here.
App Store vs. DMA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me what’s going on in Europe these days. Or soon, I guess I should say. It’s not these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but allegedly it will be happening soon. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John a confusing story, because we started seeing these stories earlier this week that, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a Bloomberg, German rumor, things like Apple is preparing to allow third party
⏹️ ▶️ John app store or whatever things, because they’re doing this, they’re going to have to do it to comply with this
⏹️ ▶️ John new EU regulation. What is it called?
⏹️ ▶️ John DMA, the Digital Markets Act, right? Yeah, Digital Markets Act, right? And the story was
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is working on this and it’s gonna be in iOS 17, right? And as Apple has said in past interviews,
⏹️ ▶️ John like obviously they will comply with the laws that they have to comply with, right? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where the confusion begins. Okay, what does Apple have to do to
⏹️ ▶️ John comply with this law? And the more I read about this, the more
⏹️ ▶️ John it seemed to me that either I don’t understand this law at all, or this
⏹️ ▶️ John law is really dumb and it’s not gonna have the intended effect. It might be both.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a little column A, little column B, I reckon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So digging into this, Ben Thompson’s
⏹️ ▶️ John analysis was that one of the important things in this law is that it
⏹️ ▶️ John says Apple has to allow third-party applications to be installed
⏹️ ▶️ John or to allow third-party stores. So it has to either allow side loading or third-party app stores. And his interpretation
⏹️ ▶️ John was that you can do one or the other. So for Apple to comply, they can either allow you to sideload, which means allow you to
⏹️ ▶️ John install applications without going through the App Store or allow third party
⏹️ ▶️ John app stores. So like Epic could have their own app store where they sell their games. Right. But then other people read
⏹️ ▶️ John that same text and say, no, this is saying you need to allow both of them. Like people can either do A or B, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to allow both of them. But even setting that aside and you can keep reading the text
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, OK, but what does this actually mean? Does that mean that Apple has to allow this, but then they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John charge money? Well, no, it seems like they can charge money. OK, does it mean that Apple has to allow this, but then they have to?
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have any control of what’s in those stores. Well, no, Apple can ask to see everything that’s in the store and be able to approve. OK, but
⏹️ ▶️ John does this mean that Apple can’t stop someone from having a third party store? No, maybe it means that Apple is allowed to tell you whether
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re allowed to have a third party store or not. Like it’s like all pass leave through Apple. And there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to avoid, you know, getting Apple’s permission to do something and also paying them probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the same amount of money you’re already paying them, all so they can comply with the law. So that in the end, this doesn’t increase
⏹️ ▶️ John competition or make anybody’s lives better. All it does is let Apple say, yes, we are compliant with the
⏹️ ▶️ John law. And yes, we understand that nobody likes it and it hasn’t improved anything for anybody, but it’s because you made a dumb law.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I think we have not seen anything yet with like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Apple’s going to do in response to the DMA. Is anything else like this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the DMA going to be the way it is now? Is it going to be changing over time? Is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco US or other places going to do similar laws and how will they be similar and how will they not
⏹️ ▶️ John Will this just be in Europe and it’s totally irrelevant to anybody who doesn’t live in the EU?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And there’s so many angles of this. This was actually very, very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco covered by Ben Thompson in today’s Strategory Daily Update. If you are a Strategory subscriber, definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check that out. If you are not, you should honestly really consider it. It’s a very good buy and And there’s a lot of good stuff there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so there’s multiple angles to the DMA, and we probably can’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about all of them today. One of them is basically message and FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interoperability requirements. And that’s, I think, a whole can of worms that is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco practically impossible. But anyway. I thought they backed off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one. No, I think it’s still in it. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it into the thing. I think it did. Anyway, so we’re gonna set that aside. Let’s just talk about the App Store stuff today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I agree with Ben’s take that the wording certainly says that they can allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side loading or alternative app stores. But, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s assume that they won’t have to do both. As a user of this platform and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a developer on this platform, I would greatly prefer if they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do one or the other, I would greatly prefer them to do side loading and not alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app stores. But you know, they could easily technically do that. They could just say, all right, We will allow third-party apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be side-loaded like from links or whatever similar to enterprise provisioning, how that works now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But third-party apps can’t themselves install other third-party apps. That would be greatly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preferable to me as a user and a developer. I don’t want to have to deal with other app stores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Side-loading itself brings enough gotchas and possibilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for weirdness without as many downsides as third-party app stores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do not want to deal with third party app stores. I don’t want to have to list my app in third party app stores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to have to install third party app stores because, you know, who’s going to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app stores? It’s going to be big companies to leverage big apps they already own to get people to install
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their store so they can have more control over more apps and more of the economy. So think Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Say, you know, you’re going to be required to install Instagram and the Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and WhatsApp from the Facebook app store. excuse me, the meta app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store. And these things will require the meta. And then once you have the meta app store installed, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, actually, you can get all these wonderful, great deals here in exchange for selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your soul. And then if that becomes popular, am I going to have to list Overcast there? Are developers going to have to list our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps in these other stores? So that’s a whole thing that both as a user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a developer, I don’t want any of that. That to me is not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side loading I think takes care of the competitive or any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the anti-competitive angles here apple has refused to self regulate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they they have acted extremely anti-competitively they continue to act extremely anti-competitively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so this is being forced upon them and it’s entirely a thousand percent their own fault
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but side loading I think takes care of a lot of that anti-competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, it removes a lot of that pressure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it take care of any of it, though? Like, that’s my question about all those requirements. I look at all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And kind of like Gruber’s most recently posted thing, I look at them, and I look at what I’ve seen of the
⏹️ ▶️ John regulation they’re trying to comply with. And it’s like, the things the things that we’re trying to solve,
⏹️ ▶️ John are there some competitive problems don’t appear to be solved at all by allowing the side loading according
⏹️ ▶️ John to this requirement because like, okay, so side loading allows, you know, say there’s some app that Apple can’t put on the one I always think of
⏹️ ▶️ John and the one that Jason also thought of and it’s a six colors thing is like emulators like we all love emulators
⏹️ ▶️ John for like like you were playing with that palm emulator recently why can’t there be a cool palm emulator on the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John or like an old Atari emulator whatever like Apple just doesn’t allow emulators and Nintendo emulators all sorts of emulators
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could get for the Mac and the PC but Apple tends not to allow them on the App Store either for you know
⏹️ ▶️ John intellectual property reasons or just because they don’t want you to have you know JIT compiled code or all sorts of stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So great, side loading will allow those things to be on the store, right? But then you get into the details and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, well, so side loading. How are things gonna get side loaded? Well, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John probably won’t allow things to be side loading unless they’re notarized. Okay, well, who notarizes them? Well, Apple notarizes them. And who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to notarize an app? Well, someone who has an Apple developer account. And so it’s like 17 different places where Apple can prevent something
⏹️ ▶️ John from being side loaded, not by saying you’re not allowed to side load it, by saying, oh, you can’t be a developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I’m not going to notarize that app. And they would still be complying with the letter of the law. And the other thing is like, Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want I want to be able to buy Kindle books from the Kindle app. I don’t want to you know, I don’t Apple doesn’t let me do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I have to pay 30%. Well, now, I’ll be able to sideload the Kindle app and get around that. Well, no, you won’t, because Apple still
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to want 29.9% of the in app purchase that you make.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple will still control whether you’re even allowed to, you know, load that application by
⏹️ ▶️ John deleting your developer account or denying you notarization services. Like, it’s almost like the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who wrote this law didn’t understand how Apple was going to react to it didn’t see all the ways
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple could technically comply with this without giving any of the things that it’s supposed to be providing
⏹️ ▶️ John more competition, you know, cheaper payment processing, more kinds of app that Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John allow. Like, I don’t know if Apple is going to do this and be this particularly evil. But looking at it, it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like if they wanted to, they could have all the same control. And the only thing this
⏹️ ▶️ John law would do to Marco’s point is make it worse for users because now there’s confusion and people are going to try to make alternate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’ll be worse security, you know, in the sense that like, you know, and obviously some of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is OS level security. But, but like, you know, that the version of the Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps from the from the meta store, they’re going to be a lot creepier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to, you know, stay running in the background all the time, they’re going to take more of your data, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that brings up the notarization thing again, right? So lots of things you can’t do on iOS is because Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let you use private APIs. There’s all sorts of cool things that your phone and iPad can do that are like, you know, APIs that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t published yet. And so you technically shouldn’t be using them and the next OS update could break them. But if you really, really want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do, you could do it. But you can’t because Apple scans your app for the use of these private APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even my stupid switch glass app, I wanted to know on what edge
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen the dock is, even if it’s hidden. there’s no API
⏹️ ▶️ John for that in the public API in Mac OS, but there’s a private API for it. And so I tried submitting
⏹️ ▶️ John a version of Switch Glass that used private API and sure enough, the automatic scanner said, uh-uh, you can’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John that framework for knowing where the dock is. That’s not public, naughty app, sorry. So you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, well now with side loading or with third party app stores, I can just use that API.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t stop me to do it, right? And I could do that on the Mac, I would just have to be outside the Mac app store, right? But let’s say on iOS where
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have that option. Now I have that option. but the notarization service that Apple runs may scan
⏹️ ▶️ John your app for private API usage to prevent security problems. And they won’t notarize your app,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that will make your app harder to sideload or more scary warnings, or maybe you won’t be able to do it at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. Yeah, and I think that we as both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tech press and as enthusiasts of this platform, we see a law like this coming through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the reporting that Apple’s gonna do something maybe to comply with it. We see this as,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh great, They’re gonna do what is most obvious to us, which is, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we give up, you win, here’s side loading on alternative app stores. But what’s much more likely to happen, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at what Apple has actually done in relation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to various laws that have been passed around the world in recent years, you look at the Korean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, you look at the Japan Fair Trade Commission, you look at the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what was the dating app one? Was that Norway, where was that? Netherlands. Yeah, right. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at these at how they’ve complied with these and it has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like first of all like fighting them tooth and nail and then when they do finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote comply they do it in the most narrow and extraordinarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco middle finger way possible because look Apple does not think they’re doing anything wrong here. They don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they deserve any less than what they’re getting. They don’t think they should be forced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to compete in the areas that these are trying to force them to compete in. They believe they are entitled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a third of everyone’s money that goes through a phone no matter what it’s doing. The only reason they don’t collect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, like they don’t you know they don’t collect 30% of your bank transfers because they can’t, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise like whatever they can… They want to! I know! Whatever they can, they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they are so far up their own butts about this stuff, they really don’t think they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything wrong. And so they feel fully entitled to extract every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing they can. So here’s what they’re actually probably going to do. They’re not going to just do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say, alright, we give up, you know, hands up, you win, everyone here, you can sideload your emulators if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. No. What’s actually much more likely to happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, first of all, anything they loosen here will most likely only apply in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EU. So that’s big step number one. Like all of us here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the US and everyone else, like tough luck, it’s not, you’re not going to have it on your phones. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to say, okay, if you actually want a developer account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can create and sign apps that will run this way, you’re going to have to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other way to pay us the 27% that you owe us. And the law might say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, they can’t, they aren’t allowed to, you know, pull it from in-app purchases or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the law doesn’t say that Apple has to charge $99 for a developer certificate. So Apple can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go right back and say, okay, actually, we now have enterprise pricing for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these certificates, and that means that we’re gonna look into your pockets and see how much money you have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re gonna take 27% of it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they can just ask you to do that auditing yourself. Like, isn’t that what they did with the dating app? They would just say, basically, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to tell us how many people went through your in-app purchase system that’s not ours and give us 27%
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. Exactly, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly what they do with the dating apps. And part of the contract is they reserve the right to come audit your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finances themselves and or have their auditors do it. Like, so, you know, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no way Apple’s gonna just do the right thing here because Apple doesn’t believe it’s in the wrong. Apple believes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is 1000% in the right. And therefore, they are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fight this tooth and nail and they’re gonna be massive wads about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. because that’s what they do with the App Store money stuff. They’re massive dickwads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, they are so self-righteous, they think they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right thing here because the reality is, you know, Apple as a company largely does pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things a lot of the time in a lot of areas. They feel a lot of self-righteousness because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are often righteous. And that bleeds unfortunately into areas where they’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, this is probably the biggest one those areas where we see their worst behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is not going to be some easy thing where we just kind of get what some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us want. And that’s the end of it. This is going to be fighting tooth and nail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for outcomes that nobody is really going to get what they think they’re going to get. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to again, look at the dating thing, the dating apps thing in the Netherlands. Did that did anybody actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefit from that besides Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m saying. When they write these laws, like, it’s almost like they don’t understand how they
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell when they’ve succeeded. Like they should write it on a light board. How will we tell when we have succeeded? And the answer is
⏹️ ▶️ John not, people don’t have to use apples in-app purchase. Like that’s not the thing people are complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about. People were complaining that they have to pay Apple 30%, right? And there’s no way apparently with any of these regulations
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can stop that from happening. So they make it difficult for everybody. And they say, yay, you don’t need to use apples
⏹️ ▶️ John in-app purchase, but you still need to pay Apple the same amount, only now you have extra bookkeeping to do. Are you happy? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody’s happy. Apple’s not happy because they had to do a thing they didn’t want to do. And the developers aren’t really happy. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we still have to pay. Like, so, you know, the whole thing of like, there’s not, I’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John this ages ago when I wrote about eBooks, when I worked for the eBook company, there’s not another 30% in eBooks
⏹️ ▶️ John available to pay Apple. You have to pay, of the amount that people pay for eBooks, a portion
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to the publisher and a portion goes to the seller. There is not an additional 30% to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to the platform owner. There’s just not. Which is why you don’t see eBooks being sold through the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Kindle app and paying Apple 30%. It’s not financially viable, right? So what is the
⏹️ ▶️ John solution to that? The solution to allow the Kindle app to be sold someplace else where they don’t have to pay Apple 30%?
⏹️ ▶️ John But none of these regulations make that happen because they don’t give enough freedom.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t say, hey, like on the Mac, you could sell an app that sold Kindle books through it and you wouldn’t have to pay Apple 30%
⏹️ ▶️ John because the Mac is a platform that allows you to do that. Apple does not extract 30% of every transaction that
⏹️ ▶️ John happens on the Mac, right? nor do they do it through a web browser. Hey, if you use Safari to buy something in Amazon, Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John take 30%, right? But on iOS and iPadOS, they do. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem. And they keep making these laws to try to say, can we make iPad and iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and these other platforms like the web, like the Mac? And all
⏹️ ▶️ John these laws they write fail to do that in every way. They don’t give the technical freedom, they don’t give
⏹️ ▶️ John the financial freedom, they just make everything more complicated for everybody. and they’re failing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do what they’re setting out to do and I don’t quite understand why they keep screwing up in that way. Just to clarify something
⏹️ ▶️ John I said earlier, notarization for Mac apps does not scan for private APIs. That’s App Store submission
⏹️ ▶️ John that does that, but there’s no reason it couldn’t. Like there’s nothing in this law that says, oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, you have to notarize everything. Or by the way, that doesn’t say anything about notarization. It doesn’t get into that level of detail. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like these, I don’t know how to write laws, but it almost seems like the law should be written to say, hey, the end
⏹️ ▶️ John goal is you should be able to sell things that people can run on their
⏹️ ▶️ John phones without paying Apple any money. And that’s, you know, obviously that would be the most extreme version of this. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, not what they asked for, right? Or that you’d have to pay a nominal fee, a nominal flat
⏹️ ▶️ John fee to be a developer. And then you would be allowed to sell things and not pay Apple any money. But like all these things are written such
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple can continue to extract all the money and all the power it wants just in
⏹️ ▶️ John different, more annoying ways. So again, Apple’s not happy about it. And I don’t think any of the developers are gonna be,
⏹️ ▶️ John even the ones that make a go of it, Epic makes their game store, right? Valve makes the Steam store, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, Meta makes their store. Even if they all try to do it, I think it’s just gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John unsatisfactory for everybody involved, including the customers, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And developers who are like, oh, do I have to put something in the Epic store? Do I have to put my game in the Steam store?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do I have to, you know, it’s just worse for everybody. And it’s not because I, like, I’m for
⏹️ ▶️ John like third-party stores and side-loading and all that other stuff. but only if it’s done in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ John actually delivers the benefits. Because what I want to happen is I want Apple to feel competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John pressure to do better. If there was competitive pressure, say, okay, well, I could put
⏹️ ▶️ John my app on the App Store and I have to pay Apple 30%, or I can put my app on this store
⏹️ ▶️ John and pay 10%. That’s competitive pressure. Now I have a place where I can get more of my money
⏹️ ▶️ John from the customers and the store takes less. How annoying is it to deal with payments? Does this store
⏹️ ▶️ John let me issue refunds directly to customers myself, that’s better than Apple. Like they need competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John pressure. But every time they write a law to try to do this, they don’t actually provide any competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John pressure because in all situations, Apple finds a way to say, I’m gonna make sure that your
⏹️ ▶️ John store cannot possibly be better than mine. It can’t be better for developers, it can’t be better for
⏹️ ▶️ John users, it’s just a question of how much worse it’s gonna be. That’s not competition. That is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the whole point of these things is, we feel like Apple has too much power. If there was more competition, things would be better.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re written in such a way that Apple ensures that there will be no competition,
⏹️ ▶️ John as in something that is preferable to the Apple store in some way for
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody involved. And that is extremely depressing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the thing that I find most frustrating and to some degree depressing about all this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that Marco had said earlier and that we have all touched on many times over the years is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple could, I think, have gotten in front of this and could have avoided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey government intervention in a lot of this. But because they’re so petulantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey convinced that they are owed, and this is exactly what Marco said earlier, that they are owed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of this money, that they refuse to take what I think are common sense and reasonable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like half measures in order to prevent this sort of thing from happening. As an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example, if you were allowed as the Kindle app, for example, to link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a specific buy page, you know, on the Amazon website,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that would have made a lot of people in the companies in the situation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would have probably been enough. Like of course, they still would have wanted to use like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use native UIs in order to do this sort of thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you could have used Apple Pay, which does not charge 30%. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, that’s a good point. But you know what I’m driving at, right? Like, they could have let you do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as simple as link to your own website. And I didn’t actually realize this, but obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until semi-recently, you weren’t even allowed to mention that something else existed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in other places or goodness, if it was cheaper off of the App Store, that was absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forbidden. And I believe they’ve relaxed on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John How did you not realize that until recently? We’ve talked about it for years on the podcast, this one, the one that you’re on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, but I forget everything that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John do ever and always.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You did know. Past Casey knew. Past Casey knew, current Casey had forgotten. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, so there are things that they could have done to make this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less egregious and to make themselves seem less obnoxious. And that’s the thing is for a company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I really enjoy, despite all my complaining about it, I don’t like it when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re bullies, which is probably more off and then I give them credit for it. But certainly when it comes to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app store, they are freaking bullies. And I don’t like it when they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obnoxious and that’s exactly what this is. It is just obnoxious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s so wild to me that the same company that does something as delightful as Freeform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be just such jerks. And I know it’s different parts of the company. I know it’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company, like conceptually, I can understand it, but But it just, it kind of blows my mind that they can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey build these amazing products and this amazing software, sometimes, and yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they can be such turds about the App Store. And it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to come to this. It didn’t have to come to this. And yet, they looked at the governments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of every country on the planet and basically said, f*** you, try me. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just not going to work, you guys. It’s not going to work. are not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey win this battle, but here we are. They think that because they did this genuinely incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff back in 2007, they think, what is it, 15 years, 18 years later, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are still entitled to all this money? Like, oh my word. And I could not agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you both more. Like, they will get their money. They will find a way.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I said it’s not going to work by challenging the government, but apparently it is because the government can’t and write laws that achieve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey effect. Fair, fair, fair. The
⏹️ ▶️ John desired effect is increased competition because when there’s competition, Apple feels pressure to make
⏹️ ▶️ John their stuff better. And right now, when they don’t have that competition, they don’t feel pressure. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the pressure to do all, like the pressure from developers. Like, oh, you take a lot of my money, you give me poor tools,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t let me refund my customers, you don’t let me even know who my customers are,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t reward me for being a good developer, app review is capricious. Like all the things that the developers
⏹️ ▶️ John complaints about. The reason those complaints just go so poorly addressed over years and years is
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s like the developers are captive audience. Where else are you going to go? The app store is the only thing competition
⏹️ ▶️ John will make Apple’s products better competition from Android has made the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John phenomenally better. Android didn’t exist and it was just the iPhone. Who knows if we’d have copy and paste now.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, that’s an exaggeration. But like, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s competition. And obviously, it’s hard, like when you’re a company, why would I invite competition,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that makes my life more miserable. It makes me make less money. It puts more pressure on me.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, if you’re a company, you don’t like competition. So that’s why when Apple’s presented with the laws, is there a way
⏹️ ▶️ John we can comply with this law without increasing competition in the market at all? The answer is yes. Okay, we’re going to do that. And that’s what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John both characterizing as being a big jerk. But it’s really just like any company that saw this. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to comply with this law. Should we do so in a way that gives our competitors advantages against
⏹️ ▶️ John us? No, of course not. They’re gonna they’re gonna you know, and I agree with
⏹️ ▶️ John you Casey that they could have avoided this regulation by by you know, giving earlier or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think they have correctly calculated that no one knows how to write a law that will actually increase competition in
⏹️ ▶️ John the market. So like that just let them write the law and then when they’re done, we’ll be able to comply with it in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that it just proves our case that is this was a see this was a bad idea to begin with you have an increased competition
⏹️ ▶️ John and everybody’s sadder, Right. And then they’re going to use that say, well, we have to comply with the law. Talk to your lawmakers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know everything is worse in the EU now on your iPhone, but it’s not our fault. And we told them this wouldn’t do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John because there was a way to comply with it without increasing competition. And I’m a big proponent
⏹️ ▶️ John of increased competition because there’s lots of places where Apple needs competition to drive them to
⏹️ ▶️ John be better. If they’re so confident that they are so amazing, if the app store is so great,
⏹️ ▶️ John if their developer experience is so great, if they’re in-app purchase system is so wonderful, then
⏹️ ▶️ John it should stand up to competition. We all know that it won’t because it charges a lot of money and doesn’t have a lot of features
⏹️ ▶️ John and annoys people. Same thing with AppReview. What we’re hoping for is that if there was another
⏹️ ▶️ John store that could compete against Apple, they could just do everything a little bit better than Apple in the areas
⏹️ ▶️ John that developers care about and that would be competition. But it doesn’t seem like this law is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to make that happen. It’s just gonna make things more difficult for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to comply with it, but mostly it’ll make things more difficult confusing for customers and possibly more difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John and confusing for developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it just, it bums me out so much that, that there, I, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entitlement just is gross in that they just wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listen and just get ahead of it. Give us, give us an inch, you know, where it were in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in hell and the drop of cold water would have been amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John yet they have given several inches. They, they release the in-app purchase. They did the subscriptions, they do
⏹️ ▶️ John improve things. But the thing is, like, those are like concessions. They were trying to stave off like dissatisfaction
⏹️ ▶️ John and trying a little bit to stave off regulation. But they were never go. They wouldn’t go far enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to actually stay off regulation. Again, like I said, perhaps correctly calculating that
⏹️ ▶️ John the regulators will not understand the problem well enough to write regulations
⏹️ ▶️ John that actually increase competition. And so far, that’s been true. Regulators have done a bunch of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and none of them have had what I think should have been the desired effect, which is increased competition that drives Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to, uh, to improve, to compete, to improve their products in the ways that
⏹️ ▶️ John they are bad, right? They haven’t had to do that. They have improved things. They have reduced the cut. They
⏹️ ▶️ John have made the app store better in small ways over the many years,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not to the satisfaction of developers. So developers are still dissatisfied that they, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John longstanding complaints have not been addressed to their satisfaction. Right. And Apple would say, well, users
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t care because they don’t see any of this. And so it’s just kind of like this infighting behind the scenes. But users are,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like the fact that there’s just one app store or whatever, because you just have no idea how it works anyway, right. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is really just, you know, a battle between, you know, the the competitors, developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and other people who would want to do similar things to the app store, whether it’s payment processing, or actually having
⏹️ ▶️ John a full fledged app store, or even just side loading apps. And users mostly are collateral damage in this battle,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it does affect them. It It affects them because of all the apps that users never got to see because
⏹️ ▶️ John they did not fit into Apple’s design because Apple didn’t allow them because, you know, even just something
⏹️ ▶️ John as simple as for all these years you could have been buying ebooks in the Kindle app and you haven’t been able to. Maybe users don’t know or care about that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you went an alternate timeline and took someone from that timeline where you’ve always been able to buy Kindle books on
⏹️ ▶️ John your iPhone and said, okay, well in this timeline, the iPhone’s been out since 2007 and you still can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. And they’d be like, what? That sucks. I buy them all the time. I go on vacation. I’m on the plane.
⏹️ ▶️ John buy myself an ebook in the Kindle app and I’m ready. It’s like, well, this one, you have to know to go to the Amazon app
⏹️ ▶️ John or and have it delivered to your Kindle then relaunch the Kindle app and it syncs with your library. And like, why do you have to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, different timeline. It’s depressing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think Apple also, I mean, we’ve said it many times before, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app store in general really brings out the worst in Apple. Like it represents the worst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they are. It brings out the worst characteristics of them. they introduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the worst justifications and anger the most people with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of their policies and comments on the App Store. Anytime they have to testify in front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Congress or a court about the App Store, they always just have the maximum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of BS and the most inflammatory comments that just anger all of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think they largely are blind to the problems here because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re making so much money. and again, aforementioned, because they feel so entitled to demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever they want out of the commerce that they have quote, created on quote, their platform. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is actually, you know, in many ways that John was just saying, and in a couple of others, I think it’s actually better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple and their products to have more competition, and it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them to break this addiction they have to the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue. And I’m not sure that they ever will. But we’ve talked recently about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of garbage in the App Store, but because Apple makes so much money from it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they turn the other way. You can do all sorts of manipulation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and scams and just overall toxic behavior that makes worse experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your customers, but as long as Apple’s making 30% of that, they are okay with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And that’s very corrosive and has a lot of negative effects on
⏹️ ▶️ John And even not like, for that thing with the garbage in the App Store, some of it, they make a lot of money off of it. But the other problem
⏹️ ▶️ John that they have is there’s just so much on the App Store that they can’t actually police it all. So there’s this whole sort of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, long tail of apps that don’t actually make Apple a lot of money, but there’s just so many of them that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has not invested enough to police them. And Apple is stuck in this place that we talked about on past shows,
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like, they want the App Store to be a high quality experience, but
⏹️ ▶️ John also since they are literally the only app store, they can’t be as restrictive
⏹️ ▶️ John as would be required to make sure all the apps are good. And so they have to say, well, we don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John be like the arbiters of what is it, what is a good app, what is not a good app? We’ll basically allow anything subject to these rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that results in this huge long tail of garbage apps that are kind of scammy, that don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really make Apple a lot of money, but Apple doesn’t get rid of, not because they’re like, oh, we need the money from those scam
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, because the scams to give the money, they can probably put on one sheet of paper, right? Apple does want those to be clear, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But all the rest of those apps, the ones that most people are going to run across the thousands and thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of garbagey scam apps that don’t make much money for Apple, but are still there. Apple can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John snap their finger and get rid of those and be like, but like, there’s just too many of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we don’t want to be so restrictive. So because again, another thing that they’ve done to themselves by not allowing
⏹️ ▶️ John any other distribution technique for their platform, they are stuck between a rock and a hard
⏹️ ▶️ John place of we would like it to be high quality, but also we don’t want to be so restrictive because when we’re restrictive,
⏹️ ▶️ John developers don’t like that either. Which one is it? Do you want me to allow every app to be in the app store? Or do you want
⏹️ ▶️ John the app store to be nice? And developers are like, well, we just want you to let the good apps like mine on there. But every developer
⏹️ ▶️ John says that. This is why when you’re the only app store, you’re kind of screwed. Because there’s no solution
⏹️ ▶️ John to this problem other than, hey, imagine if there was competition, then Apple could be super
⏹️ ▶️ John restricted and you didn’t like it, go to the one of the other app stores. But that’s That’s not the world we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live in. I think the other angle to consider here too is that, you know, again, Apple seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally a thousand percent blind to any problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with their current approach to the App Store and to developer relations largely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they make so much money off of it and they think they’re gods and their farts smell amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they also rely on developers to make their platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful and marketable and popular. And that works really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well on the iPhone because there are a lot of iPhones. That has not worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nearly as well on all of their other platforms. That really has hampered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad in particular. The Mac is a deteriorating wasteland
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of software. The Apple Watch has some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third-party apps, but fairly minimally now, and many of them have been abandoned, even by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big companies who have the resources to do it, because it’s not worth them dealing with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it doesn’t work as well as they want, or whatever. Apple TV never took off as a third-party platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for anything but video-watching stuff. They have all these different ways in the system that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hook into the system and make richer experiences.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Things like iMessage apps, ShareTime, SharePlay, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these different ways they can hook in their different extension points that most big apps by big companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people are actually using, they just don’t use those features. And let me remind them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are apparently about to launch a completely new class of device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the alleged AR or mixed reality headset family,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will presumably depend to some level on people writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software for it. And if they continue to run the App Store with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the attitude they have been running it, the amount of developer goodwill they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have torpedoed from indies over the years is massive and always going up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve also angered all the big companies now so much that the big companies, for various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons, some of which are because of the way they’re treated or because of the rules or because of the economics and some of which are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because big companies suck at this
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And because the big companies, they want to be the rent seekers, not Apple, to be clear. They just want to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly the same thing. Largely, yes, but also more so just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because big companies don’t like being told what to do, which Apple is one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they’re about to launch this new family of hardware at a time when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really see a lot of developers that will be super interested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in making new apps for it because so many of us are just tired of Apple’s BS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know we can see it coming a mile away and so it’s not to say there won’t be any software for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same way that there are lots of iPad and Apple watch apps well there’s lots of iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps but how many really great ones will there be Will the next big thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be made there? Apple is so restrictive. That could really cost them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in big ways that they will never know when they go to launch a new hardware platform that doesn’t start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out with a huge installed base. Maybe they don’t care. I mean, chances are… Chances are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re telling themselves two big delusions. Number one, they’re telling themselves, our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software is going to be so great for this thing, we won’t even need that much third-party software. Then number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two, they’re telling themselves, but the third parties will line up to make software for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. It’ll be great. There’ll be so many people just dying to make software for this that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll put up with, you know, all the crap that makes people put up with. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t always happen with their platforms. That happened occasionally. Mainly that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened with the iPhone because there were so many of them and we all use them and love them. And if they launch something new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an AR headset, that might happen there, But it would be much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances of that happening if Apple was better to developers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to companies developing for them. And I think they’re too delusional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about their own grandiosity and generosity to see that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they’re ever gonna see that. They’re never gonna see that, hey, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we should look at companies, like how Microsoft treats its developers, like way better. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s something we can learn from the way other people treat developers that might result in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our current and future hardware platforms having bigger and healthier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software ecosystems than they have now. Because you look at, again, look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. The iPad has amazing hardware that has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculously, tragically held back by software for its entire life. with application
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software and Apple’s own OS for it. Just hugely held back by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software. And then you look at, again, the Mac is really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the Mac hardware is in an amazing place. They’re making these ridiculously awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac hardware devices, and the software ecosystem is really iffy on the Mac. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, it’s getting, you know, worrisome.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the Mac example is a counter example to what you were just saying, though, because the Mac is the platform where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make a living selling software without involving Apple at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is the most free platform that Apple has, and still it suffers from
⏹️ ▶️ John a lack of developer interest. I mean, part, and I think this is not a, the Mac is suffering for different reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John than the iPad, which is suffering from different reasons than the AR headset will suffer. So the iPad suffers because
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS is so limited and you have to go through Apple’s distribution. There’s lots of really cool killer apps that could have been made
⏹️ ▶️ John for the iPad. if developers were allowed to sort of use the full power of the device
⏹️ ▶️ John without going through Apple. But they haven’t been, so they haven’t, right? And even Apple hasn’t imported its pro apps. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is to blame for that one for sure. The AR headset, if, you know, the first thing Apple would have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do is sell a lot of them, because you need to have the market out there for developers
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell them to. But if they sold a lot of them, I think there would be a little bit of a gold rush there. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was a hit product, developers will come. You can’t, no matter how mean Apple is, if they have a hit product.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s Apple’s job on the AR headset. That’s why we’re all on the iPhone. Even if the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t a hit, when the iPhone was announced, all of the sort of diehard Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John developers were dying to make apps for the phone. Even before Apple allowed you to make apps for the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John even before the, certainly before the phone was a success, the phone wasn’t even out yet and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco early ones were dying to
⏹️ ▶️ John That could also be the case with the AR headset because it’s really cool. But then after that, you have to actually make
⏹️ ▶️ John the headset a success. And then the Mac, the Mac is having problems with software, not because Apple restricts things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are on it, but because Apple hasn’t paid enough attention to it as a platform to make sure that its APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John are sort of up to snuff. Like it seems to, it has always been like the third place child
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of the stuff. And SwiftUI is helping with the unification of that or whatever, but that’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SwiftUI is not helping anything on the Mac, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It is because the
⏹️ ▶️ John alternative was that they were just, well, we’re just not gonna develop AppKit anymore. And also there’s no way for you to write an application that
⏹️ ▶️ John runs on the Mac, the iPad, and the phone. So SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. Yeah, but SwiftUI is totally broken on the Mac. I don’t know anybody who uses SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac who comes away not regretting that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it is, but like, speculatively, that is what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John so that you can use a one familiar API to more or less make apps on all their different
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms. Whereas before, you could make an app for the iPhone and iPad and the Mac have this entirely different
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that had been neglected for a while. So it’s it’s it’s three different problems that have
⏹️ ▶️ John to address on its three different platforms. The sort of the this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three different problems. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, no, it is. It is three. This is one problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s called the
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store. No, the one problem is the App Store. Again, the App Store doesn’t limit stuff on the Mac. The one problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is sort of developers being cranked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although, well, I think the Mac App Store did a lot to damage the relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Mac developers on Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It did, but it also allowed Mac developers like me who otherwise wouldn’t be able to sell anything on the Mac because our
⏹️ ▶️ John apps are just too, you know, like there’s tons of apps on the apps on the Mac App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John that are made by developers who wouldn’t it wouldn’t have been worth their while to even just hook up to Stripe and do all
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff. Right. You know, I mean, that’s like that. That’s why I’m on the Mac App Store and not elsewhere, because my
⏹️ ▶️ John apps don’t sell enough. It’s not worth my time. So I do have to be freeware, which is not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I can make a little bit of money on the Mac App Store. But that’s not the show, like, clearly,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That you know, Photoshop and all these big apps and you know, BB edit going in and out of the Mac App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But you know, again, on the Mac, the reason there’s been that pressure and the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has done anything is because BB edit could just leave the Mac App Store and say, ah, we tried it, it was too annoying, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going back at it. And that forced Apple to come back to the table and say, hey, we want we would like you to
⏹️ ▶️ John come back to the Mac App Store, what do we got to do to get you back into the Mac App Store at this time, right? They still have the problem of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what do we do against web apps? All the apps people use every day, either web browsers or electron
⏹️ ▶️ John apps or web views, like we’re losing the battle for the desktop. But still, if you wanna use Final
⏹️ ▶️ John Cut Pro or whatever the hell it’s called now, it’s just called Final Cut, I think, no more Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I believe. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t use that on your iPad because iPad Pro doesn’t have any Pro apps like Logic Pro or Final
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, now the tax across all of this is general dissatisfaction with Apple being
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, right? And that hurts them across all the platforms. That is the one unifying thing. And you feel that
⏹️ ▶️ John it has different strength. Mac users, like someone who’s a user or developer on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John may also have sour feelings because they can’t get an NES emulator on the app store. Right? It’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac thing. We’re talking about iOS, right? Why are they mad about that? Well, your iOS customers probably also have
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac, you know, or are likely to also have a Mac. And so, yeah, they’re a little bit sore. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true of a large portion of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and certainly all your developers do, because it’s the only way to make apps because you can’t make apps in Xcode on your iPad yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have a lot of problems here, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And meanwhile, all these regulations
⏹️ ▶️ John and laws and things that they’re skirting are not helping. They’re not helping Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John get better and they’re not helping the market to become more competitive to force Apple to get
⏹️ ▶️ John better. Instead, it’s forcing Apple to do things that they’re mad about and the things they do will make us mad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and Apple’s continued refusal who behave in a more reasonable way in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these areas is going to make governments keep trying to make even more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous laws. And every time a government tries to make a law, that runs the risk of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really messing stuff up. And that, you know, long term with Apple, I think that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge risk to them. Like, look, as part of this DMA law, that was, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly theoretically about app stores and in-app purchase, they tacked on this messaging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that is a huge problem for Apple and for all their stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe if Apple was less anti-competitive in the money areas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe this whole thing wouldn’t have happened and they didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now this huge messaging and FaceTime interop thing to deal with. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the longer Apple goes not addressing their worst anti-competitive behavior,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the more loopholes they pull when these laws are passed, the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laws they’re going to try to make. And, again, we really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve been lucky in tech. Most of the time we’re allowed to kind of do what we want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lawmakers and regulators don’t really keep up. And therefore, they don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interfere that much. That has been largely a good thing overall, not 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time, but I think overall it’s been a net win. Now that tech is such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big part of the world and controls so much of all of commerce and business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are inviting regulation whenever we behave uncompetitively. We have to really be careful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we invite regulation as an industry. That doesn’t always work very well, and governments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so bad at understanding tech, and regulators and lawmakers are so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so bad at understanding tech that we really don’t want them doing this more than necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t want them to be making laws that are gonna issue these blanket regulations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and requirements that actually could do a lot of damage because they don’t think them through they don’t understand stuff well enough or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so it is in our best interest as an industry to self-regulate as much as possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid the need for governments to do it for us and Apple is just rolling that dice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single time that for any every given day that they keep going, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, being the way they’re being and then if they react to the DMA the way that we’re all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fearing that they probably will in this weird like, you know, piecemeal F you kind of way where they still make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all their all their tax in some way, you know, that’s gonna it’s gonna just keep happening. We’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get more laws and and they’re gonna roll the dice that that they don’t get ruined too badly by them. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, meanwhile, we the users, we’re the ones who are going to pay the price for all this. Thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode and collide and thanks to our members who support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash And we will talk to
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ Oh, accidental, accidental ♪ Tech podcasts so
Casey’s Docker adventure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I went on a self-created useless adventure over the last week and a half to two weeks and I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d tell the tale. I have on my Synology…
⏹️ ▶️ John I never had to do this with FileSystem. I would just rely on him. He’d be there, he would catch it. But poor Casey, every
⏹️ ▶️ John time he says Synology, Marco has to go into another room and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco get his Viber slap and come back to the seat.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you did this to yourself, Marco. No one made you decide that Viber slap was going to be Synology. decided to do that but you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the bell is one-handed operation it’s right next to my mute switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I can know what we do this it’s a new shows this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bell I think I can hit the bell with one hand so fast it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it could have been the Synology bongo so many other things that could be easier to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Viber slap it’s it’s like across the desk I got like you know we lean over reach out reach over again and it’s it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to pick it up and then hit it with the other hand it’s a two-handed operation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand. But you again, this was a choice you made. I feel like you didn’t think it through.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got one of those desktop gongs.
⏹️ ▶️ John have just been a Synology clap. Your hands are right there. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco two handed operation.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could just smack yourself in the face.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, all of you slap face palm. This analogy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey face palm. Congratulations. You played yourself. Anyway, so I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a series of containers, Docker containers running on the Synology. And I’m not going to talk about what specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are, but there are four of them. Well, there’s actually more than just the four of them, but four of them in particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco to me. Wait, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of them are involved in your garage door automation situation?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of them. Because one of them is Homebridge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which does the interaction between HomeKit and the garage door apparatus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, so I have these four containers that are working in unison in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do something. And we’re not gonna talk about what that something is, don’t worry about it. But those of you who know, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, I realized that my 10 year old Synology, which I love, I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love this thing, it’s an 1813 plus. This was given to us for free 10 years ago, or just shy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 10 years ago at this point. And it’s getting old. Like I love it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I plan to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of it probably in the next couple of months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this one was free and I adore it as we well know. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that said, it’s getting old and it’s getting a little slow. And I think running all of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey containers on the Synology was not helping things. And sometimes they would seem to fail to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey respond to network requests. And I don’t think it was because like the containers were falling down or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just that the Synology was overwhelmed. And I decide, all right, I really feel like I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to move these containers off of the Synology and put them somewhere else. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my initial thought was, okay, perfect. I’m gonna move them to the Mac mini. The Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mini currently hosts my media empire, which is to say it hosts channels and Plex.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it does very little else to be honest. And yes, it is overkill to have an M1 Mac mini to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically two things, But this is my system. There are many like it, but this one is mine. That’s referenced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. So anyway, so I decide, all right, I’m gonna install Docker Desktop, the free community
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever edition on my Mac mini, and I’m gonna move all of these containers, these four particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey containers over to the Mac mini. And by moving them, I mean, I’m just going to basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the export features on the software that these containers are running to export all my settings and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatnot. And then I will make new instances of these containers. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that on the Mac mini, then I will import the settings and data and whatnot that I had generated off the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of the containers and I’ll import them onto the Mac mini. And then I should be right as rain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I did all of this and my exposure to Docker and my use of Docker is very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very limited. I’m pretty ignorant about most things Docker related. And with the Synology, they have their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own Docker like front end, which is now I know is kind of sort of similar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a crummy version of Portainer, But it gets the job done, even though it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not stupendous. And I’ve occasionally dabbled with using Docker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the command line, but I’ve done it very, very rarely, and I’m very bad at it. I am aware of Docker Compose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a thing. Fast forwarding, I actually now am using it, but at this point, I’m aware of Docker Compose as a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, since you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s basically, you use YAML, which I don’t particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care for, but whatever, you use YAML to specify, okay, I want these containers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and here’s how each of these containers are gonna be set up. It’s kind of like writing an INI file, but in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a more modern format.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate YAML, for the record. It’s-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As it’s like as picky as things are that are made for programmers, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with none of the mechanics that programmers would expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well put. I don’t love it. But that’s not the point. That’s neither here nor there. So at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, I’m not using Docker Compose. I’m just running things either via the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UI, or now I’m getting to the point that I’m doing it via the command line. I get everything set up on the Mac Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things are going great. I am loving life. The Synology seems like it’s working better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it’s a placebo, who knows. But the Synology seems a little bit faster, a little bit more peppy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Mac Mini is looking at these four containers and laughing, like, that’s nothing, I got this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Things are going well for a few hours. Then all of a sudden, I go to look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of these containers, and what these containers are doing is, again, don’t worry about it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you interact with these containers via websites hosted one per container.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I go to go to one of the containers via the web on my MacBook Pro and it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hangs, there’s no response. It’s clear, it doesn’t hang up on you, so to speak, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, nope, there’s nothing here, it just hangs. It’s just waiting for a response for the web server, It doesn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything. So, huh, that’s weird. So I restart Docker on the Mac mini, everything comes right back,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m right as rain. Then I go to do something with one of these containers that involves a lot of network access,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all of a sudden it hangs. Okay, that’s weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Restart the Docker, you know, restart Docker desktop, restart all these containers, everything’s right as rain again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I go through this cycle more times than I care to admit, and I come to realize, just something ain’t right here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And after doing a whole bunch of digging, it appears that running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Docker desktop on a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s something you’re supposed to be able to do, but is really unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess they’re on version like 4.16 or something like that. And around version 4.12,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they introduced a different way of interacting with the network stack on Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And apparently everything got real bad at that point. I tried to roll back all the way to 4.11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it didn’t make anything better. I am commenting on a couple of GitHub issues with regards to this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to this, and I’m not really getting anywhere. So it occurs to me, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously I can’t do this on the Mac mini. I’d rather not do this on the Synology, even though by and large,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything was working, it was just not as peppy as I wanted it to be. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I can’t do it on the Mac mini, I can’t do it on the Synology. and I don’t think I want to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like go to Linode and host it there. What else do I have left? Can either of you guess? Lyle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Troxell Raspberry Pi? Jay Haynes I can look in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John notes and know the answer. Preston Pysh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, the answer is the Raspberry Pi. I have a Raspberry Pi 4, I think with 2 gigs of RAM. I bought it so long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, I don’t even remember. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 sitting here. Why don’t I try that? Great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, okay, I decide to install I call Docker on the Raspberry Pi. I load
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up one of my containers, and the container says, and I forget the exact error message,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but something along the lines of, hey, this is the 32-bit version of me, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is like not supported anymore. You really should be running the 64-bit version. Huh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. Well, do a little bit of digging and come to find out, oh, I’m running the 32-bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of Raspbian, which is the Raspberry Pi OS, you know, their flavor of Linux, And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there doesn’t seem to be, understandably, any real upgrade path to the 64-bit version, or at least I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn’t find one at the time. So now I’ve got to reload my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Raspberry Pi. So what started as, huh, I wonder if I could make this technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faster, has gone through the Mac mini into the Raspberry Pi, and now I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am reloading my Raspberry Pi. Now, Raspberry Pi already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a fairly integral part integral part in my networking life. It hosts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my, Marco, my pie hole, and it also hosts my WireGuard VPN.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so those are the two primary things it does. It does a couple of other things that are less important. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anytime I leave the house, I tend to want to be, if I’m on a Wi-Fi connection, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bother when I’m on cellular, but if anytime I leave the house on Wi-Fi, I really, really, really, really feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey safer and better if I I am connected to my own VPN here at the house. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really, really, really don’t like the state of web advertising these days. So I prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have my pie hole in the house. And when I’m on the VPN, I get it for free anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point I realized, okay, I’m gonna take this thing that second to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Synology, I would even potentially say it’s more critical than the Mac mini, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like my entire computing life is wrong and upside down without the Raspberry Pi, where it’s just my media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey empire that’s wrong and upside down without the Mac mini. So I decided, all right, we’re gonna give it a shot. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey luckily I had a spare SD card, because remember the Raspberry Pi’s hard drive is an SD card. I have a spare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SD card, so I’m gonna try, and I’m gonna leave the existing one alone. I’m not gonna like format
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that I’ve already got. I’m just gonna put it aside. And I’m gonna start a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new on this new SD card. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reinstall everything. I install a 64-bit version of Raspbian, which by the way is only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few months old, I think, or maybe a couple of years old. This is a relatively recent development. I install
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, I install PyVPN for WireGuard, I install PyHole, I install
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all my things, I install Docker. At this point, I think to myself, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should probably figure out what the hell Docker Compose is, and I teach myself how to use Docker Compose. About
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five minutes later, I decide I really hate YAML, so there’s that. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I now have everything running on the Raspberry Pi. I have my four containers on the Raspberry Pi. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later, I came back and decided, you know what, I got to figure out what this Portainer thing is all about. I’ve never really understood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what that’s about. I should give this a shot. Short version, it’s basically like a front-end to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey managing all your Docker containers. I got that installed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now, I have my four, don’t worry about it, look over there, containers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that were really critical and portainer all running on the Raspberry Pi. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought this would now move the sluggishness from the Synology into the Raspberry Pi. But as far as I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can tell, knock on wood, the Raspberry Pi also is laughing at the load from these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four containers. So baby I’m back and better than ever. And I am very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy with this, but I bring all this up just because it’s so funny when you’re a super nerd, how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one small thing, it’s like that Malcolm in the middle clip, do you remember that? Where he like comes home and decides he wants to change the oil
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in his car. next thing you know, he’s like rebuilding his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John bathroom or something like that. I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have that wrong, but you get the idea. Yeah, I’ve seen that clip. Yeah. So I started with,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, wouldn’t it be nice if I could move this stuff off of the Synology to somehow reloading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Raspberry Pi from scratch, which ended up being not that big a deal, but when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I started that portion of the project, I was like, I don’t know if this is going to go, this might not be a good idea at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The only problem that I have lingering at this point, other than everything I’ve I’ve just said is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really want to get myself a new Pi, a new Raspberry Pi 4, because they have an 8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gig of RAM version now. But I don’t know if you two have happened to glance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco at all. Yeah. Are they,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are they acquirable yet? No. Oh no. Not unless you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way more money than you should. They actually, Raspberry Pi, just the foundation or whatever, just had a post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last like week or two talking about supply chain and how supposedly it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get way, way, way better starting really soon after the new year. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really would love a 8GB Pi 4 and I can’t get my hands on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one at the moment. But with that said, my 2GB one, or it might be 4,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, it might be 4, I don’t recall, but whatever it is, it’s actually working really well. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am really, really impressed that this little teeny tiny computer that I think was like 40
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 50 bucks a couple of years ago is so happy with these containers. Now, granted, these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey containers happen to be fairly straightforward. There’s not a lot to them, but it’s working really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well and I’m really happy with it. And then yesterday, maybe the day before, I went back and thought, you know what, I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could connect Portainer to the Docker instance running on the Synology because there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were, like I said, like Homebridge is still there. There’s a couple other small ones that are unrelated to these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four important ones that are still there. And so I thought, man, I should be able to get Portainer connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this analogy. And it took a little bit of time because I made a bunch of dumb mistakes because I’m ignorant. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey learned and I got it working. And man, I am happy. Everything has clicked into place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m very happy about it. In a perfect world, I would have preferred to have all this on the Mac Mini because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much spare power that it’s not using. But I am really happy with where this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m glad that I spent all this time doing all this. I wish I didn’t have to, but I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did. And I’ve learned from my mistakes. The key thing is, when it was all done,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wrote notes for myself. So when I eventually have to, for some reason or another, go back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and do all this again, I’ll have notes on what the hell I did. So I don’t have to go spelunking in the Raspberry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pi file system realizing, oh, crap, I forgot this way off in the ether. Oh, crap, I forgot I made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some changes to Etsy or ETC, or however you pronounce it, John. Etsy, such and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such and such and such. I need to go grab that file from the old hard drive. So I hopefully have pretty copious notes at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But when you get Docker working and when Docker is on a host
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it actually wants to be on, Docker is pretty, pretty cool. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is really impressive how quick you can go from nothing on a device to having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this entire stack or swarm, I don’t even know the right terminology, but this entire group
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of four containers up and running lickety split. It is very good
⏹️ ▶️ John You ever hear the description, the joke description of what Docker is? It was like a solution to the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John of a developer making software and saying, oh, it works on my computer. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what the problem is. And the solution was,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, we’re gonna ship your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. What if every computer was your computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, a little heavyweight. To that end though, is your Mac mini Intel?
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say, if your Mac mini was Intel, you just got to run a Linux VM and then run Docker inside the Linux VM because you because you do have
⏹️ ▶️ John the power to spare.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. And it’s funny because a lot of people recommended doing exactly that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Like, I mean, you can still do that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you can you still do that on on ARM base max with Rosetta? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think you can. And it probably would be fast enough for the purposes I needed. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a license like VMware Fusion anymore. I’ve never used parallels and I bet I could probably work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this up with the
⏹️ ▶️ John boxes. Another free one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I I never liked VirtualBox. I just felt it was kind of gross.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I’m sorry, because you do have the power to spare. If you just run Linux on your Mac in a container, in
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of virtualized container, you could do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then I’m, you know, putting a hat on a hat to use a Merlinism and it’s just, you know, there’s a container in a container and it just seemed like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it would still be fine. Like what you’re doing is working on a Raspberry Pi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. You’re right, you’re right. But anyway, I just thought it was interesting. And even if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey none of that was interesting to you, I will say as someone who doesn’t really do web development anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, the whole idea of Docker and having entire environments, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, installable as an app, I’m dramatically oversimplifying, but that’s kind of sort of what Docker does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is really, really slick. And once you wrap your mind around it, it is really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. And if you’ve never dabbled with it, and I’m not at the point that I’m like creating my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own Docker containers or anything like that, but it is good stuff. You were using this a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bunch before you left your job, he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a right-hand man.
⏹️ ▶️ John My website, hypercritical.co, I’ve got a Docker container with it. Not that it really, I just did it because I
⏹️ ▶️ John just got paranoid because I don’t like running it in a Docker container. I don’t really like the Docker desktop app, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know what? I should probably have a containerized version of my website. So now I do,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t really mess with it. Yeah, I never be, you probably
⏹️ ▶️ John know more about it than I do at this point because I’ve forgotten so much, but I did use Docker Compose and plain old Docker and
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked into Docker Swarm and,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a fruitful area of investigation, but I never got to the point where I felt like I was comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John with sort of running a production service off of Docker. So doing hobbyist things is about my level
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, like I wouldn’t advocate necessarily, you know, running overcasts through Docker, although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume there’s no reason why hypothetically one couldn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but what is really- I probably
⏹️ ▶️ John Not the database though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but what’s really neat about it is, especially for development purposes, and I’m not saying that this is a problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needs solving, Marco, but just for the sake of discussion, you could have like a Docker-composed YAML
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file, and once you stop vomiting over YAML, and I’m right there with you, you know, you could have this one file and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say to Docker, okay, look at this file and stand up all the stuff you need to stand up in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make an entire overcast system on this computer, which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, I don’t know that that’s a need you really have. I would argue it’s probably not. But just the fact that it can be done,