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

535: My Computer Supports Math

WWDC expectations, the Callsheet paywall, that Dell monitor, whatever whatever, and three olds trying to figure out what a “vibe check” is.

Episode Description:

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

Chapters

  1. New members-only special!
  2. Kobo Dropbox support
  3. M1/M2 multiple displays
  4. Sponsor: Trade Coffee
  5. iPad Final Cut follow-up
  6. Dell U3224KB: $3200
  7. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  8. WWDC vibe check
  9. Sponsor: Kolide
  10. WWDC rumors, expectations
  11. Ending theme
  12. Callsheet paywall, pricing

New members-only special!

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we should start by pointing out we have done another members special.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I’m an idiot, and I like getting my feelings hurt, I decided

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would roll the dice and see what John and Marco thought about John’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Bleeker Street, which is my beloved preferred pizza institution in Manhattan.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so what we did was we spent a truly absurd amount of money to get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gold Belly to send us two not particularly large pizzas per family,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and do that overnight from Manhattan to our respective households. And then we cooked them

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up much like we did with the, I almost said frozen meals, but don’t call them frozen meals, call them TV dinners. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so they all arrived at our desks at about the same moment. We talked about it on air. I will not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell you if my feelings were hurt or not, but I will tell you that it was an adventure to say the least.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so if you are not a member, you can go to atp.fm slash join. You can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey join for as little as one month, although we’d love for you to stick around, if you, if you join, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get access to all the member stuff that’s ever happened and we’re up to like, I don’t know, six-ish episodes, I think. Something like that now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so you get access to all that you could grab them all and then cancel your membership. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not slimy. We let you do that. You’ll hurt our, our hearts and our feelings, but you can do that. That is allowed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, uh, but I think once you, uh, check out all the perks, you will love it. So please check

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out atp.fm slash join. Marco, John, anything to add?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you could imagine what it would be like for Casey to try to convince

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two New Yorkers with strong opinions on pizza to try his pizza,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can, you can see why this was a good episode. I, I suggest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you, if you’ve been on the fence before about membership, for whatever reason, you aren’t a member yet, but you like when we,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, argue about non-technical things. Or even just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey discuss— It was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco plenty of that. Yeah, even just discuss non-technical things. These kind of member specials, and this one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in particular, it’s a good venue for that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Come for the pizza talk, stay for the bagel talk. And also, I do—I would like to point

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out just one more time, I probably made this point on the special, although I might have forgotten. My birth certificate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey says state of New York, my friend. Two-thirds of your hosts, their birth certificates

⏹️ ▶️ Casey state in New York, and Marco is not one of them. I’m just going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey put that out there. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of us lives

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here? Oh, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair. Oh, that’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re all imposters one way or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco another.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When’s the last time you lived there? You lived in New York, Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lived in New York, uh, 80, late 80s, I think. Right, John? Yeah, something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I go there every year at least. I’m like, Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco did your

⏹️ ▶️ John parents live in New York when you were born, or did they just drive there to give birth to you?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that a thing that people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey do? I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not sure. I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be offended. And to be honest, I started it by throwing you under the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bus earlier. But I’m not sure how offended I should be. No, they were living, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe they were living in Fort Montgomery at the time, which is near Newburgh. And I was born in Newburgh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is probably, I’m now probably giving away some sort of top

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John secret thing. You’re not supposed to tell people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the answers to your security questions. Yes, there you go. Whoopsies. But anyways, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco no, they live in New York.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s nothing in Newburgh for any security question to ask about.

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know where any of those places were, so I assume they’re all upstate, so never mind.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s upstate. They’re not upstate by most standards, but by your-

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Newburgh is- Hold on.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Newburgh is definitely upstate. Oh, come on. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John that far. Marco lived in Brooklyn long enough to adopt the Long Island definition of upstate. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a two-hour drive north. No, it is. Is it really? Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No way. A two-hour drive from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Fire Island? Everything

⏹️ ▶️ John is a two-hour drive when you go upstate.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, we established that freaking Manhattan is two hours from Fire

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Island. That’s what I’m saying.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no. No, no, that doesn’t know. So like, how about this? John’s a bleaker. Let’s just take that as a landmark. Let’s see how far

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are from Newburgh.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Give me a second. Go ahead. Yeah. Is this as the

⏹️ ▶️ John helicopter flies or if you actually have to take roads? No,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no. I’m doing this on Google Maps. It’s under an hour and a half, 70 miles. Wait, hold

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. At what time of day? Right now. Right now. It’s under

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey an hour.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Also, eight o’clock at night, around a Monday. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Try it anytime while the sun’s up. I don’t know, man.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you consider like the lake that we used to go to, you consider that like deeply upstate I assume?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t use the word deeply, but it’s unquestionably upstate.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess to me, I’m not trying to say I’m right, I am not trying to say I’m right, but to me I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything within a couple of hours of the city is barely upstate. No, no.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So where’s the dividing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco line? Harlem? I mean- Philadelphia is within a couple hours of the city. I mean this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John makes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey no sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, okay, okay, that’s fair. So where’s the dividing line? Is it 125th street for Christ’s I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, it depends on the definition, but you know, and different people have different definitions. The one definition every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco New Yorker can agree upon is upstate begins north of them. No one thinks they live upstate.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, if you kind of plot like the bell curve of like, all right, well, where does upstate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really begin to most people’s opinions? It certainly begins

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least above like Westchester or Rockland counties and possibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even lower than that depending on who you ask.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you would, this is going to sound argumentative, I really don’t mean it that way, so you would say Westchester

⏹️ ▶️ Casey County is, you personally Marco, would say is or is not upstate?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I personally would say no, but it’s like, but it’s not the city. Like I would never say it’s the city. It’s definitely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. And it’s not quite upstate, but it’s like, it’s certainly like a boundary. You know, upstate,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of like the, like the way the atmosphere of the earth transitions to space.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like, it’s not like a clear line.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s reasonable, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s where I’m fuzzy, because I don’t get it.

⏹️ ▶️ John When I was a kid, growing up on Long Island, if we visited Marco or Marco’s houses

⏹️ ▶️ John in Westchester, I would say that Marco lives upstate.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Literally,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything is upstate. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John take that for anything. I

⏹️ ▶️ John know. I’m just telling you what the… And I recognize that that’s a very limited perspective, like the classic New Yorker

⏹️ ▶️ John cover that shows the map of the United States with the New Yorker’s view of it. It doesn’t make sense. And today,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would probably say anything that’s above Westchester, but I still feel in my bones

⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of like, going to visit Marco would mean driving upstate.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, and certainly like by the time you get like, once you’re more than, you know, 20 or 30 miles

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the city, I think the argument is yeah, you’re pretty much upstate.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So 20 or 30 miles, you said miles or minutes?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s just a ballpark,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m gonna say yeah, like something, you know, something on the order of like 20 or 30 miles, I’d say you’re upstate.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well so now that we got that argument out of the way, I feel like we’ve accomplished something. more of that. If you want to hear more of that, atp.fm.com. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was an adventure.

Kobo Dropbox support

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, let’s do some follow-up. Apparently this is the follow-up that will not die. I mean the follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that keeps continuing. Tell me about the latest developments with your Kobo and your e-readers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is it. I know I say this every time. You said that the last two weeks! I know I did!

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is it. Alright, so I mentioned last episode I had switched from the Kobo Sage to the slightly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller Kobo Libra 2 device and a couple of people pointed out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Libra 2 doesn’t support Dropbox which I didn’t know at the time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d only used it for like a day, and I hadn’t noticed, oh, this feature that I like, this Dropbox feature

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Sage has, the Libra 2 doesn’t actually have it, and I was a little disappointed by that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I thought-

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so pause. Remind me, what was the draw for Dropbox integration? Because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is not something I feel like I have ever wanted on the Kindle, but I have a feeling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re using it for a purpose that I either am not expecting, or just not something that I do. So remind me, what’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the purpose there?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the main purpose and the reason it’s on the Sage, the Sage supports a stylus where you can like draw or take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on pages.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco main reason I think it’s there is so you can like export your notes that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into something that’s easily accessed elsewhere. But what I use it for is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have eBooks from various sources that, like sometimes if you buy like an,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not pirated, if you buy like an O’Reilly one or something like that, like sometimes you’ll buy an EPUB file

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, you’ll buy something that is downloadable as an EPUB file without DRM. Like, you know, a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, you know, the like tech instructional stuff, a lot of times comes this way. I bought a couple of eBooks recently that came that way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you’ll have an EPUB file. Like, all right, how do I read this easily? And you can, you know, drag it into Apple, or Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Books or whatever. Or I can drop it in this Dropbox folder that I just have a Dropbox folder now for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Kobo and any EPUB files or PDFs, I can stick there and then I can get them on the Kobo and read

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them that way. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey my main use.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there no, and I’m viewing everything through the lens of Kindle, because it’s the only thing I’m familiar with.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey With the Kindle, you get like a bespoke email address, I think at like kindle.com or something like that, and you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can email a PDF for Neapub or what have you to there, and then it will send you an email back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and be like, are you sure you want to do this?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You can cancel your email.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, well, you can like give it like permitted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco email address sources

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to say like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey if I send it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this, and that’s how Instapapers Kindle integration works. A long time ago, I reverse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco engineered the Kindle Mobi format the way they were doing newspaper and magazine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco periodical support. Because they would devise this table of content structure out of it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I reverse engineered that, figured out what they were doing, and then did it with Instapaper. So Instapaper would basically generate,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it still works this way, it would generate a Kindle format periodical file

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and send it to that email address that you would enter in the Instapaper control panel. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a little bit tricky with Kindles because at least back then, I don’t know if this is still the case, I think it might be,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but back then Kindles didn’t support EPUB, they had their own custom format that was based on the ancient

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mobi or Mobipocket format. And you could email documents to their servers and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would actually convert them to Kindle format on Amazon’s end and then send them over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey to Kindle.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Kobo, as far as I know, doesn’t need to do that. It seems like the device just natively opens EPUBs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco without any other effort involved.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But my point in interrupting earlier was that there exists such a thing with Kobo as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s some email you can send things to?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the way Kobo

⏹️ ▶️ Marco normally, as far as I can tell, I looked for that. As far as I can tell, to send stuff to it electronically,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only way to do it is this Dropbox integration on the Sage. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only other way to get stuff on it is to connect it to your computer with a USB cable and it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John shows up as a USB storage device and you can drag files over that way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is fine, but not great, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I posted about this on Mastodon, and a few people, including Stefano Costantini,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were in that there’s actually a hack that, I mean, and I use the term hack very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco loosely, it’s very easy. There’s this third party hack app called Nickel Menu for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kobos. And the way you hack this is, you connect it to your computer as a drive,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you just put this file on the drive, and when you eject it, the Kobo

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sees this file, reboots and like it so it must have some kind of like you know checking for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know plugins kind of system that’s that’s how it feels like a like an OS plugin that’s kind of like unofficial

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the Kobo just loads it and then once you load this plugin then you have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an extra menu on the bottom your Kobo and there’s a few little incantations you could put in its config file

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of which will enable Dropbox support on the Libra 2 and there’s also a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Libra 2 version is super easy there’s apparently a couple other methods you can use for other like older Kobos.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, all this is to say in like five seconds, I had Dropbox support hacked onto my Libra 2

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by basically sticking this file on the USB drive version of it and that was it. Like that’s all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to do. So I’ll put the links in the show notes. Obviously, you know, when you’re when you’re installing like random

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hacks from the Internet onto a device, it is worth considering like what is the security

⏹️ ▶️ Marco service area that I’m exposing here? Like, you know, and so, you know, so what I did for the Dropbox support

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I have a secondary Dropbox account that that only has access to like one folder

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I share it with my primary account so that way because I figure like if this if this third-party thing ends

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up you know being untrustworthy in the future or presently or whatever you know what do they have access to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well they have access to a handful of ebooks and that’s it like you know a Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ Marco account that has access to none of my other stuff so the surface area I I decided was small obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know you can make your own decisions on that it’s still like a device on your network and stuff like that so that’s up to you but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided this hack was worth it and now I have Dropbox and it’s great. There’s a couple of other things that it enables that I don’t really need,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m just really using it for that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s cool. that Marco provided in the show notes.

M1/M2 multiple displays

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John we have all sorts of genuinely interesting news and feedback and whatnot with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey regard to multiple displays on m1 and m2 Max we were talking about I don’t remember

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when in the episode we were talking about it We were talking about how the the MacBook Air doesn’t support more than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one external display and we were You know trying to theorize whether or not that was Apple being jerks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and doing that in software Or is it really a hardware problem or something? So so what does what is the verdict

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this? It was

⏹️ ▶️ John in the context of the 15-inch MacBook Air people were saying right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John saying 15-inch MacBook Air is great except in corporate environments We

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey people really want to displays and

⏹️ ▶️ John the if the M1 M2 only support one. So Mappus bull world says

⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 M2 chips only have two display controllers one for the built-in display and one that can run the external Display,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what the display controllers are not part of the GPU They are separate bits on the SoC on the Mac mini the

⏹️ ▶️ John internal display controller signals piped out to a chip that converts its HDMI So that’s why the the Mac Mini’s got

⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI port on the back The controller that drives the internal display seems not to be able to output display port signals

⏹️ ▶️ John It seems from die shots that Apple is using a lot of die area for the display controllers Richard Stevens

⏹️ ▶️ John continues that Hector Martin who does a side Linux. How do you pronounce that?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Asahi and it’s it’s actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s Hector Marcan,

⏹️ ▶️ John I believe. Oh, yeah Well, this Richard Stevens is Hector Martin, but I think you’re right. Anyway

⏹️ ▶️ John a s a A-H-I Linux.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s the Linux

⏹️ ▶️ John that runs on your M1 and M2 Macs, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been figuring out how to tap into all of the hardware features of M1

⏹️ ▶️ John and M2 SOCs, including the GPUs and display drivers and everything, so they know a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot about these internals. Anyway, Hector had a bunch of tweets that were since deleted, but Richard found

⏹️ ▶️ John them in the internet archive. Here’s what Hector had to say. Why does the M1 slash M2 only

⏹️ ▶️ John support one external display? because Apple’s display controllers are so fancy pants that the M1 Max has

⏹️ ▶️ John more silicon dedicated to display controllers than CPU cores. They can’t fit any more

⏹️ ▶️ John of these on the cheap chips. Compare the display area in the die shot below to

⏹️ ▶️ John the power CPU cores, excluding the L2 cache. One display controller is larger than two

⏹️ ▶️ John power CPU cores combined with enough spare left over to cover the efficiency CPUs as

⏹️ ▶️ John well. M1 Max has four of them, plus the internal one, which is on top of the CPUs, not

⏹️ ▶️ John annotated in the die shot. So I actually additionally annotated the die shot that’s in our

⏹️ ▶️ John little show notes here. We’ll try to put a link to the old Twitter thread and the show notes for you to look at.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can see that the display controllers are pretty large, especially when, again, when you compare them to the power CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John core. Is that performance?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m not reading the power. Performance, power, whatever, like the good ones,

⏹️ ▶️ John the fast ones, the big ones, right? The efficiency CPU cores are really small.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not reading that from the text because in the text it’s PCPU and ECPU as abbreviations.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of cheating because like, oh, just exclude the cache. Well, you can’t really exclude the cache because you’re including

⏹️ ▶️ John the, what looks to be very regular memory region display controls. But anyway, all this is to say is

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a hardware limitations of the SoC and Apple decided

⏹️ ▶️ John to make it this way. And one reasonable theory of why they decided to make this way

⏹️ ▶️ John is that the display controls are surprisingly large. When you’re budgeting out how much space and therefore how much power

⏹️ ▶️ John and how much cost you have to allocate to all different functionality on an SoC,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe for your low-end chip, you decide two display controllers should be enough. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John you burn almost as much area as half of the power CPU cores.

⏹️ ▶️ John I did it again, performance CPU cores as you did in the other thing. Now, doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John mean that Apple can’t change their mind about that. It could be that having the M1 and M2 both

⏹️ ▶️ John be like this, only support two external displays with two display controllers,

⏹️ ▶️ John has garnered enough complaints that the M3 may make a different choice. We’ll see, so stay tuned for that. But

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, on the M1 and M2, the display support is not Apple artificially limiting

⏹️ ▶️ John you to something. It is a decision Apple made when they designed the M1 and M2 SoC in terms

⏹️ ▶️ John of allocating space for drivers. But that doesn’t mean, as we’ve talked about in many past shows, and we will not talk about again,

⏹️ ▶️ John that you can’t actually have two displays attached to your M1 and M2. How can that be?

⏹️ ▶️ John So Edward Munn writes and says, it is possible to get the M1 slash M2 MacBook Air to support multiple external monitors by using

⏹️ ▶️ John a dock that supports DisplayLink with the correct drivers installed. DisplayLink does have its drawbacks, however.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can only watch DRM content in a browser by disabling hardware rendering. You cannot watch content within the TV app

⏹️ ▶️ John and a message displays when logged in saying that the screen is being monitored. Oh, besides

⏹️ ▶️ John that. Yeah, I don’t know. I, a lot of people are in this setup and I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ John these are universal. I think you can use display link stuff and not see some of these, but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t speak for much experience. So Edward continues, despite these drawbacks, it does allow for a one cable solution

⏹️ ▶️ John for multiple monitors and charging. And then Edward says, lastly, I find it amusing that this M2 MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ John Air can natively support a 4K HDR 144 Hertz monitor or even a 6K monitor, but requires workarounds

⏹️ ▶️ John to display two tiny 1080p monitors. I mean, it

⏹️ ▶️ John just goes to show, it’s like, it’s not the resolution or the number of pixels, it’s the fact that, hey, Are you a separate

⏹️ ▶️ John display that I have to deal with? Then I have to have a display controller for you or I have to do something else.

⏹️ ▶️ John Steve McWhee writes, I have two 24 inch HP monitors running off a base model M1 Air using the

⏹️ ▶️ John WaveLink USB 3.0 to HDMI adapter. And finally, Lior Shaked

⏹️ ▶️ John says, yes, DisplayLink is an external driver. Yes, it uses screen recording to send data out as data

⏹️ ▶️ John packets over Thunderbolts instead of using data display control protocol. Yes, docks that support it are

⏹️ ▶️ John less common and more expensive than comparable alternatives. But at the end of the day, it does the job of connecting multiple external displays

⏹️ ▶️ John to M1 slash M2 Macs. And the reason I think this is relevant is because in my experience in the corporate

⏹️ ▶️ John world, terrible docks like this that support multiple displays were ubiquitous.

⏹️ ▶️ John They were everywhere. Even before ARM on Mac, everyone had one of these third-party

⏹️ ▶️ John docking things that you would connect your laptop to that would let you have multiple displays, whether it’s for your

⏹️ ▶️ John Macs or for your Dell laptops or whatever it was. I don’t know, did they all use this display link

⏹️ ▶️ John tunneling video over USB or was it just a common product? But either way, I think this

⏹️ ▶️ John is the corporate solution to, hey, I’ve got an M1 or M2 and I want more than one monitor. It’s like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John deal with this. It’s a little bit janky, it’s a little bit weird. I bet the video quality

⏹️ ▶️ John probably has some compromises as well, I don’t know all the technical details, but that’s what you have to do. But,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and it seems like for the 15 inch MacBook Air, I assume those limitations will continue

⏹️ ▶️ John to be the case. But maybe for the M3, they’ll do something better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. All right, and then Ryan Maxwell wrote in, Marco dismissed the idea pretty strongly that Apple would intentionally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cripple the MacBook Air to segment the product lines and try to upsell users, which for the record I agreed with.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey My first Mac was an iBook G4, and one of the main differences between an iBook and a PowerBook G4 was that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the PowerBook supported extending your desktop to an external display. The iBook just supported mirroring. The problem

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the iBook G4 was totally capable of supporting extending. It was just a firmware lock. There was a very popular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey utility that many of us used to unlock the feature. It worked great. imagine such hacks are much harder these days. We’ll put a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple links to relevant information in the show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John notes. A

⏹️ ▶️ John couple people have this story. Some people thought it was iBook G3 or G4. This is back in the days when the pro laptops

⏹️ ▶️ John were called Powerbooks. It’s not that Apple has never done this and it’s, you know, they would never do it. It’s just not

⏹️ ▶️ John common practice. I mean, you know, giving this example from the days of the iBook and the Powerbook shows how old it was,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s probably a couple more modern examples, but in general, that’s not how Apple segments. They segment

⏹️ ▶️ John by designing the M1 chip to display controllers. Like it’s baked into the hardware, it makes a chip

⏹️ ▶️ John smaller, cheaper, lower power, so on and so forth. And Apple hopes that they have struck the right balance between

⏹️ ▶️ John costs and power efficiency and features. Maybe they haven’t with the M1 and M2, maybe they’ll change

⏹️ ▶️ John their mind. But like that’s, that’s the that’s the point at which they’re making the decision. It’s not like they’re making a

⏹️ ▶️ John chip capable of driving seven displays and they say, Oh, but seven displays on a MacBook Air, they

⏹️ ▶️ John would never buy our pro products, look, we need to cripple it. They tend not to do that. And if they do do that, it’s a pretty terrible mistake

⏹️ ▶️ John because that means when they were designing the chip they made the wrong choice, right? Like

⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s part of their design that we want to segment the line and give people a reason to upgrade, they would bake that into the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ John because then that would give you a smaller and cheaper chip, the two things that Apple cares about, and yes, also more power

⏹️ ▶️ John efficient, which customers care about. So, you know, sometimes Apple makes the wrong choice

⏹️ ▶️ John with hardware, but the wrong choice for you might be the right choice for somebody else.

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iPad Final Cut follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to Final Cut Pro and the iPad, Chris writes, my 1TB 13-inch M1 iPad Pro has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 16GB of RAM and virtual memory, so the inability to round trip projects is definitely not a hardware issue. For

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it’s worth, not every M1 iPad Pro has 16GB of RAM. They

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can come with as quote-unquote little as 8GB. And then I don’t know what the virtual memory story is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on iPadOS. I know that that’s a relatively new development, but I can’t recall the specifics. John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you happen to remember?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I just want to add that M1, the minimum amount of RAM, I believe, is eight gigs. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has ever sold it with less than eight gigs. So if you’ve got an M1, you’ve got eight gigs, and you may have more.

⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I put the virtual memory node in here is because I said it on the last week’s show, and we talked about it again. It’s become the

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of colloquial way to talk about this topic. But,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this is a tech show, and I’ll hold on to this one as long as I can. iPads have always

⏹️ ▶️ John had virtual memory, forever. What they haven’t had is they didn’t use swap.

⏹️ ▶️ John They wouldn’t take things out of RAM and swap them to flash storage and back. Those

⏹️ ▶️ John are two different things. Virtual memory just means that the addresses that your program is using are not addresses

⏹️ ▶️ John in RAM. They are virtual addresses that are somewhere in a virtual address space, and

⏹️ ▶️ John every process gets its own gigantic virtual address space of a given size. And it’s like, well, how

⏹️ ▶️ John can every single process in the computer have the same address spaces? Aren’t they stomping over each other in memory? No, because those

⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t the real addresses. Those are virtual addresses. And there’s a thing, there’s a bunch of hardware in there

⏹️ ▶️ John that translates from virtual addresses to hardware addresses. And at that point, the hardware and the operating

⏹️ ▶️ John system makes sure that two processes don’t stomp on each other by using the same physical

⏹️ ▶️ John address. So all, basically all systems that run Darwin, the core

⏹️ ▶️ John of what was Mac OS X, have and always have had a virtual memory, but

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS devices and iPadOS for the longest time did not have swap, which meant that when

⏹️ ▶️ John RAM was getting close to being exhausted, they would say, oh, don’t worry about it. This stuff that’s in RAM,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll write it to quote unquote disk in a big giant file. And if someone needs it again,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll go get it from there. And to make room for it, I’ll take something that is in RAM and put it back there. And anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John doing that a lot is called swapping. That is called the swap file. and iPad OS did not have that

⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time, but now does support it on certain hardware configurations. I’m not familiar with details,

⏹️ ▶️ John just like Casey. We talked about when it rolled out, but I only imagine it’ll become more prevalent.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the point is, it’s not a limitation. The big, beefy iPads do support swap.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just wanted to be a little bit careful about saying they support virtual memory because maybe I’ll lose that battle.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe just eventually people will just, oh, when you say virtual memory, you don’t mean virtual memory. Yeah, you’ve lost that battle. I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think so though, because the problem is they’ve always had virtual memory and there’s no other word for virtual memory than virtual

⏹️ ▶️ John memory.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like they’ve always had it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I feel like, you know, okay, virtual memory has been supported since like the 386.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you have to say that modern computers support or don’t support.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every computer supports virtual, like most people’s fridges probably support virtual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco memory at this point. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not- But there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no other name for it though. It’s like saying, yeah, my computer supports, you know, math. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most computers support

⏹️ ▶️ John math. I know, but if you were trying to reuse that term, say my computer can do addition, it’s like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t mean addition. I mean, it’ll take memory and write it out to persistent storage. I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, that’s totally different. Why are you using that term? Anyway, I would say it doesn’t have swap, doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John use swap, virtual memory with swap. I don’t even know how Apple describes this thing, but I just want

⏹️ ▶️ John people. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe they called it virtual memory swap when they had it on like one of those little bubble words

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slide.

⏹️ ▶️ John Some technical person said, you can’t just call it virtual memory, you got to put the word virtual number swap. I think that three

⏹️ ▶️ John word phrase use that one, that one works. But virtual memory. It’s really confusing for me. People say,

⏹️ ▶️ John does your iPad support virtual memory? I’m like, yeah, it does.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And so does yours. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do all of them ever. Exactly. And so does your watch.

⏹️ ▶️ John And your fridge, probably.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right. So bringing you back to Final Cut Pro, I thought this feedback was excellent. And I probably should have known this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey having had a brief window of time when I sort of kind of knew Final Cut Pro, but because my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey usage was so rudimentary, I never really put this together. So Brendan writes, as an occasional Final Cut Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey user for over a decade, I’m extremely confident that the lack of round trip has nothing to do with performance whatsoever and everything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the way Final Cut Pro 10 handles project files. It’s extremely flexible and allows assets, proxies, and cached

⏹️ ▶️ Casey renders to be segmented out on different volumes and storage types. That is extremely useful

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and necessary in and professional video editing environments. So I don’t see a new project format coming along

⏹️ ▶️ Casey soon on the Mac side to replace that if it needs to adhere to the current limitations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of iPadOS. So in other words, like one of the things, and maybe one of you can have a better explanation here,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but one of the things that we needed a lot more years ago was if you’re working

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with these like super high resolution video files, that’s really computationally intensive for the computer to do as you’re,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, scanning through them and so on and so forth. So the Final Cut Pro would make these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote unquote proxy files, which basically means it’ll down sample, you know, your 4k video to like 720p that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll use for the purposes of doing the edits and getting the, you know, everything lined up. And then when you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey finally did the the one true export, it’ll go back to the source material and render it in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4k or what have you. And that was proxy, proxy media or I forget what they call it, proxy something or other.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s all sorts of other things, too. And yeah, Final Cut Pro will often generate this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on its own behind the scenes and you can be explicit if you so choose and tell it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I want the proxy media to go here. You know, I want the regular stuff to go there and so on and so forth. So yeah, I think Brendan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes a good point that it is extremely flexible, which is wonderful, particularly if you’re working on like a two hour video

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. But that might not be so wonderful if you’re trying to work within the extreme

⏹️ ▶️ Casey limitations of iPadOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John See, I don’t buy this as a format difference though, because that’s true between Macs as well. If you have a project

⏹️ ▶️ John file that references assets that are all over the place, and you give that to somebody else on a Mac, and they’re on their

⏹️ ▶️ John laptop across the country, and they try to open that project, it’s not going to work. It’s just not going to

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco be able

⏹️ ▶️ John to find all the media. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John the nature of the beast. I don’t think there’s anything particular in iPad OS that prevents access

⏹️ ▶️ John to network storage or whatever. But again, Apple makes the operating system so they could patch these things.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think if there was a new project format on the Mac, it would, of course, continue to support that flexibility, probably.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then they could also support it on iPad OS, would behave exactly the same way as it does on a Mac, where it says, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John you opened this project. I don’t know where the hell any of this media is. I tried to connect to the server, but it’s not accessible on my network. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know where it is. Sorry. Like that’s, that’s the nature of complicated formats like this.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I, it is another thing to consider that dealing without an iPad OS may be

⏹️ ▶️ John slightly more difficult because of sandboxing and the inability to mount network drives as far as we know.

⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, Apple does make the OS and they can, they can make all that possible. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still a little bit of a mystery. I would love to hear a technical explanation from somebody at Apple why

⏹️ ▶️ John the project format is different. I would hope they wouldn’t say, well, you know, the, the,

⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad is a little less like, like sort of just a vague answer. Doesn’t tell us anything because they can’t, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple can say with a straight face is kind of the point of this fall. I don’t think they can say with a straight face anymore that it’s a power limitation,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially for the people with like a 16 gig iPad pro with an M one and it like, no, there’s There’s no excuse

⏹️ ▶️ John for in terms of horsepower or power. And swap, right? Virtual memory swap, as

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would say. It’s got it all, right? So what’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the problem? I continue to hope, fingers crossed, that it is just an updated project format that will eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John come to the Mac. And if and when it does, to Brendan’s point, it will have to support all of the existing workflows

⏹️ ▶️ John just if they are an essential part of people’s business, which I think they are.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed.

Dell U3224KB: $3200

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, I think it was like right in the beginning of the year, I forget exactly when it was, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dell announced their own kind of knockoff version of the Pro Display XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You might remember this because it had a truly enormous webcam that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuck up above the top forehead of the monitor. If memory serves, it had a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey little dropdown like a connectivity port that would come off the bottom of the monitor, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually think was kind of cool, but I’m not sure many share that opinion with me. But anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is a 32 inch 6K monitor, the oh so eloquently named the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey U3224KB.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, apparently pricing- Ah, Dil.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pricing has been released and it is $3,200, which normally would make me do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a spit take, but remind me how much your ridiculously overpriced monitors were gentlemen?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, are you including the stand?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John forget this comes with a stand. So it’s $3,200, comes with a height adjustable stand.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this thing has, to remind everybody, 140, up to 140 watts of power delivery, a 4K webcam,

⏹️ ▶️ John a huge array of ports, just a ton of ports all over it. Has higher, slightly higher resolution

⏹️ ▶️ John than the XDR. It’s a 6144 by 3456 instead of the XDR is 6016 by 3384.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry about the way I read that number, just deal with it. There also, because this is

⏹️ ▶️ John Dell, we’ll put a link to the product page. They make a whole line of these monitors and you can change

⏹️ ▶️ John tons of things about them. This monitor is available in the following sizes and inches 24, 27, 30, 32, 34, 38, 43, and 49 inches.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but go down though, but that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey doesn’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean 6K and all that. Right, exactly. And it goes up to 8K as well.

⏹️ ▶️ John So those smaller monitors are different resolutions and the bigger monitors can be different. But I’m saying this

⏹️ ▶️ John is the matrix of different features. So you can’t get all the resolutions at all the sizes, obviously, but

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of choices here, Like I said, including up to 8K, I think the 8K version is like $4,000 or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now, this is not really an XDR quote-unquote replacement because I don’t think any of

⏹️ ▶️ John the combinations of sizes and resolutions support HDR up to 1600 nits.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if they have mini LED backlights, but hey, $3,200

⏹️ ▶️ John for XDR resolution, if you don’t care about HDR and you don’t mind

⏹️ ▶️ John looking at what is a very unattractive monitor in my opinion, It’s a good deal.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what we were worrying about, wondering about the whole time. We were talking about this at CES, we were making fun of the looks, we were looking at all the ports, but

⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, how much is this gonna cost? And the question was, how much will it undercut the XDR by? And I think $3,200

⏹️ ▶️ John with adjustable stand is a good price. Like that is a way better deal than the XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I will, I mean, so, you know, you said you have a lot of options available here, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of those options make it super nice as an Apple replacement.

⏹️ ▶️ John There is no option for beauty on this monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, but, you know, so I think this is, this is a very good deal relative to what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else is in the market, which as far as I know is just the XDR, like in this kind of resolution and size class. I don’t think there’s anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else really. Um, I could be wrong, but I’m not aware of any.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m sure there are other makers making monitors with the same panel, but Dell is a reputable brand and you know

⏹️ ▶️ John what I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean? So yeah, but, but I think so for this to be $3,200 and the XDR to be with the stand $6,000.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is a really good deal. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would at least though, I would caution people if it’s been a while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco since you’ve used an Apple computer with a third party monitor, the experience

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not always as seamless as you would hope it should be. It’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the olden days because the olden days things were simpler. We didn’t have things like HDR and all these new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco DRM schemes for movie protection and stuff like that. So, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some level, like, I am not tempted by this. Obviously, I already have the XDR, so that’s a huge difference,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m not tempted by this because my experiences with my ultrafine LG monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been pretty, you know, paper cutty in part because the ultrafine is just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a mediocre monitor, but also in part because Apple does not seem to take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much effort at all in making the experience good for third party monitor users.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And oftentimes, as Apple’s computers move forward, as the hardware and software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco move forward, oftentimes, it seems like the number of paper cuts that you get by using a third party monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is increasing over time. So while you are able to save a good amount of money going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this option, you are giving up a lot of niceness and you’re setting up for possible paper

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut issues that you might not get with with a first party monitor. And that’s not to say that like Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, you know, making the best monitors here, you know, it’s just to say the reality of the situation is you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in an integrated environment if you’re using this for the Mac and you’re going to miss out on some of those integrations and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might not be there might be annoyances or limitations by going with this that we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really know about yet or that you might not be thinking of that are worth considering when you when you’re making a decision.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of the fault is going to lie with the monitor maker. That’s why I was suggesting maybe Dell over somebody

⏹️ ▶️ John else because I think there is like driver software that you might have to install on your Mac to get all the features of this

⏹️ ▶️ John monitor to work. And that’s kind of the responsibility of the third party monitor maker.

⏹️ ▶️ John You would hope Apple would work together with them better. But that is,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s like who’s to blame here? Is it Apple because they don’t care about making stuff work with third party monitors?

⏹️ ▶️ John Or is it the third party monitor maker because they stopped caring about the drivers for Mac OS after a few years because they’ve already made

⏹️ ▶️ John their money on that monitor. They don’t care already bought it. To give one I don’t I don’t know if this This is an example

⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, puts Apple in a good light, but it is something that

⏹️ ▶️ John happened before Apple sold monitors besides the XDR, or even before

⏹️ ▶️ John the XDR. The M1 and M2, for example, even though they can only drive one monitor, they can

⏹️ ▶️ John drive the LG 5K, I believe, right? Yeah, I believe so. And so the LG

⏹️ ▶️ John 5K is a third-party monitor. It was the only, you know, Apple Retina resolution

⏹️ ▶️ John third-party monitor for a long time while we were asking for Apple to make one again, other than the XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there was the 4K for a while, then they changed it, which made it slightly less

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Retina-y, but it was the LGs, the two LGs, the 4K and the 5K.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the 4K 24 inch was the closest. But anyway, the 5K was the big one, right? Until Apple, you know, Apple had

⏹️ ▶️ John the XDR, but until Apple came up with the studio display. And the LG 5K is weird and requires

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to do some stuff to support that Apple did. Like as far as I’m aware, you didn’t have to install

⏹️ ▶️ John any LG drivers, right? For the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey LG 5K?

⏹️ ▶️ John Correct. That’s correct. So, part of that, you could say, okay, well, that’s not Apple doing it out of the goodness of their

⏹️ ▶️ John heart. It’s because the LG 5K is basically the same monitor that it was in a 5K iMac, and they had already done the work for

⏹️ ▶️ John that. But the fact is that the M1, when it first came out, could drive

⏹️ ▶️ John a third-party monitor, and Apple had to do some work to make that happen. Because for people who don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about it when the 5K iMac first came out, which was ages ago. The 5K iMac, in fact, Apple bragged

⏹️ ▶️ John about it. That’s why we knew about it. The 5K iMac had its special, you know, Apple custom timing controller, cause it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ John like two internal logical displays with like two parallel display stream

⏹️ ▶️ John things going in there and then a controller that synchronizes them. That’s how you get 5K resolution over

⏹️ ▶️ John one cable internal to the 5K iMac. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was true at the time. It is a little bit different now, but carry

⏹️ ▶️ John on. Yes. But I think even the LG 5K today, if you connect it to

⏹️ ▶️ John an M1 over a single cable, it’s doing the display stream multiplexing. It’s more commonplace

⏹️ ▶️ John now, but Apple had to support that. My point is with the m1 they could have chose not to support it because none of their monitors

⏹️ ▶️ John Do stuff like that or maybe just the XDR or whatever? So I don’t know again I don’t know if that

⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple making an effort to say Oh, well, since we don’t sell any monitors like this We should make sure the LG 5k

⏹️ ▶️ John works because it’s the only game in town or just saying well We already basically did that work for the vibe guy max, so we get

⏹️ ▶️ John it for free So we might as well do it But it is a thing that happened the Dell ones on the other hand Especially

⏹️ ▶️ John the 6k thing with the camera and all the ports. I imagine you’re going to be relying on

⏹️ ▶️ John on Dell keeping its drivers and software up to date to have all the features of that monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John working. How good is Dell at doing that? Probably better than some random no-name brand

⏹️ ▶️ John that you just found online, right? But maybe not as good as you want it to be, to Marco’s point, especially

⏹️ ▶️ John years down the line.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s still Dell at the end of the day. And Dell also, you know, they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna care nearly as much about how it works on a Mac than they are how it works on their PCs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they sell, or other PCs.

⏹️ ▶️ John I thought I saw the word Mac mentioned on the product page. Let me search for it again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, they’ll take our money, but you better believe they’re not going to have amazing driver support

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they don’t have to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, I’m just happy to see the word mentioned. This monitor is compatible with multiple operating systems, including Windows

⏹️ ▶️ John and Mac OS. They’ll are in a circle. I guess, what are the other ones? Linux? But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John they are at least mentioning it. So I think they understand who would want a monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John with this kind of pixel density at this size. there is some possibility that it might be a Mac user.

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WWDC vibe check

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do we have to talk about tonight?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, first we can talk about whether I use this phrase correctly and I don’t I shouldn’t be asking you to maybe we can get some young people

⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat to weigh in what I wrote as the top topic here is

⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC vibe check. My use of that term is in the sense

⏹️ ▶️ John that we are seeing how we all kind of feel about WWDC being two weeks out

⏹️ ▶️ John from it. Is that the correct use of the term vibe check? We don’t have any, who are we kidding? There are no

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco young people

⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat room.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know why I’m thinking this. All that matters is like, does our audience, is our audience

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old enough to think that we are using it correctly?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Whether or not we actually are or not. Well put, well put.

⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the thing, I know young people listening to the podcast, hello out there, we love that you listen to it, tell your friends. Tell your nerdy friends, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is what I always say, because if you tell your regular friends, they’re gonna listen and think it’s super weird, but tell your nerdy friends. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but people

⏹️ ▶️ John who listen live, there’s a very tiny number of dedicated people who are in

⏹️ ▶️ John our chat room right now, who listen to the live stream of this as we record it. And we love it. And I have to imagine,

⏹️ ▶️ John because the number is so small, the percentage that might be young people

⏹️ ▶️ John there is probably very low.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. That is probably accurate. But I will say, as an official old, I do believe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are using the term correctly. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yes. Again, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know how much stock I put in any of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey our opinions of whether I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using it correctly. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John agreed. Agreed. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ John Totally, totally agree with you. I can just learn through osmosis by hearing them

⏹️ ▶️ John say things but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well who’s less likely to know about cool slang like a random

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know 40 whatever year old or a 40 whatever old with teenage children I almost think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people without the teenage children are more likely to get it right because the teenagers will try harder to hide

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it from you when they’re your kids

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John oh

⏹️ ▶️ John no no you can’t help it when you’ll see when you have a teenager you can’t help but hear them speak

⏹️ ▶️ John all the time and them talk to their friends and they will say things to you Using the

⏹️ ▶️ John same language they talk to their friends whether they mean it or not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I mean look we we get some of that now, but like it’s funny like like so going around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know my kid and his friends going around that group is this I don’t know I’m sure it came

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a youtuber but some kind of joke where they are like, you know, what’s you know, nine plus ten?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like, 27 or whatever, and everyone laughs. It’s like, okay, and I don’t get it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. And I’m like, okay, well I’m already at the point where the kids are doing stuff that I don’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, that every generation goes through this. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m thinking like, when we start saying things like vibe check, I’m already so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco disconnected from what the young kids are saying and what they think is funny and whatever references they’re making from their YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ Marco celebrities they follow. There is no way in hell that we’re using this term correctly. Like, we’re just,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re too old. We should avoid anything that even seems like modern slang.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We should just stick with the phrases that are licensed for old people use.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, someone in the chat room says that it’s, well, the idea is that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John checking to see how somebody’s doing. It’s more like checking in with them. I don’t know. I’ll ask my

⏹️ ▶️ John kids after. Anyway, I’ve defined the term as we’re using it here. if we’re using it wrong, at least you know what I mean, because

⏹️ ▶️ John the goal is communication. Although I will say, I remember on a recent episode, I heard Casey say something

⏹️ ▶️ John that I actually talked to my daughter about, that I’m wondering where Casey heard it. He probably heard it from pop the same place my

⏹️ ▶️ John daughter did with some kind of popular media or like a sitcom

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or something that nobody watched. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ John no, I’m getting so scared. You did the, you used the term, you were, I don’t know, one of my

⏹️ ▶️ John phrases that I would use for it is, so on and so forth, et cetera. sort of one of those

⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re trying to say, and other things like this, I’m not going to list them all, you know what I’m talking about,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? And the phrase you

⏹️ ▶️ John use is whatever, whatever. You say whatever twice. Whatever, obviously, was from our generation. We all know about whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John my generation anyway. Whatever, Gen X, it’s totally a thing, right? Whatever, whatever, saying it in that particular way. Whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, whatever, I can’t, you know, I heard my daughter say it, and I talked to her, and I said,

⏹️ ▶️ John is whatever, whatever, is that a you thing, or is that a common

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey among people your age? Oh, I have no idea. Your age.

⏹️ ▶️ John And she said, no, it’s not a me thing. It’s just a thing that people my age say. And so, you know, took her word for it. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then I heard Casey say it a few times, like, hmm. Did I? Yeah. Where did Casey pick up whatever, whatever?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So it must be somewhere. Now

⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna know. I don’t think you picked up from your kids. Do either one of your kids say

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever, whatever when relaying a story about

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey something? I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John so, no. So it’s probably from like, you know, some television show or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And people keep comparing it to Yada Yada and saying, Yada Yada, like that Seinfeld that made up that thing, yada yada. Seinfeld

⏹️ ▶️ John did not make up yada yada people. Seinfeld popularized it for the rest of the world. It’s not the Metro New York area,

⏹️ ▶️ John but rest assured yada yada existed long before Seinfeld.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, this has been a language corner, but yeah. So let’s talk about how we feel about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC, however you want to phrase that. How we feeling? Since I’m talking, I guess I’ll just start.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am excited. You know, I never get any concrete

⏹️ ▶️ Casey information about anything in any regard from any of the people I know inside Apple. But I can tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you that the, now I don’t want to say vibe, but I was going to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John say vibe, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey impression I get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John from the people inside.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think we can use vibe. I think we all understand and know how to use vibe. I don’t think, I think that’s the thing that predates a lot of teenagers who are live

⏹️ ▶️ John today.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, fair enough. The vibe from people inside Apple is that they are like vibrating,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like they are real excited. At least that’s the impression I’ve gotten. I wish

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could tell you that I’m being coy and I know exactly what’s happening and when it’s happening, so on and so forth. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely know nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But- Our

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sources

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco aren’t that good.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exactly. Here’s the thing, the people you know and like the vibe you’re getting from people at

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, they probably don’t know anything either, right? That’s the thing that a lot of people who are new

⏹️ ▶️ John to the world of Apple might not understand. When we’re watching some kind of presentation and

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s presenting something, the vast majority of the Apple employees they’re just as surprised as we

⏹️ ▶️ John are because they compartmentalize everything. If you don’t need to know about Project XYZ, you don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John about it. And so it’s not like we’re watching and they’re like, well, every Apple employee already knows this. No,

⏹️ ▶️ John every Apple employee does not know this. So if Apple employees are vibrating, they could be coming off the same thing that we

⏹️ ▶️ John are, which is like, we feel like there’s something big coming. And they literally don’t know what it is because they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John disclosed, as they say, on the headset or on the car or on the whatever the hell. Like they don’t, they just,

⏹️ ▶️ John they literally don’t know. But because they are employees and work there, you can kind of get a feel from, because

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they know someone who does work on that team, or they know someone who knows someone, and those people seem happy all the time, or they seem frantic all the

⏹️ ▶️ John time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or yeah, they’ve been working nonstop for the last two months.

⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly, like that’s the vibe that they’re getting that we’re not getting, and that is being transferred to us.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, my favorite example of this is, you know, after the Swift announcement, in like 14 or whenever it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, I was talking to a handful of internal Apple people, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the, I don’t know, five or 10 people I spoke to, I think maybe one or two of them was aware that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple was working on a new language to release at some point, but I don’t think a single one of them knew that the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift announcement was happening that day. So they’re sitting there in their office or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching the keynote and saying, oh, that’s cool. At the same time that I’m looking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over at John saying, oh, that’s cool. They all found out at the exact same moment for something as big as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift. So I mean, not literally all of them, but you know what I’m saying. So whatever, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll answer for the Swift example specifically. That’s another example of how

⏹️ ▶️ John tricky it is to read the tea leaves at Apple. Way back in

⏹️ ▶️ John the day, I’d written a bunch of blog posts at Ars Technica, which have since been moved to my own website,

⏹️ ▶️ John talking about Apple’s needs for a new programming language. And in response to those

⏹️ ▶️ John posts, lots of people from Apple either reached out to me, back channel, I talked to them at WWDC,

⏹️ ▶️ John and we would have discussions on the topic that I wrote about. Obviously, almost all of them didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know anything about what Apple would eventually do in this area, but some of them did, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John we would have discussions about it. And in hindsight, I can see that a lot of those discussions, you could

⏹️ ▶️ John tell which one of these people that I was talking about this four years before Swift was announced, knew Swift existed or whatever, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, or like two years, one year leading up to it. That’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John way that you can get a vibe from Apple people. The problem is though, tons of stuff is happening

⏹️ ▶️ John inside Apple that never sees the light of day. And so you can have a discussion with somebody that makes you, I

⏹️ ▶️ John totally think from all these discussions I’ve been having with Apple people, they seem really excited about whatever, smell-o-vision,

⏹️ ▶️ John right, and I really think Apple’s working on a smell-based product, and it just never sees the light of day, and you’re like, oh, I guess I

⏹️ ▶️ John was wrong about that, and then you have to learn 15 years later that there was a big smell-o-vision project and it got canned

⏹️ ▶️ John because of some internal political turf war or they decided they weren’t gonna do smell-o-vision

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or, you know, like. Or it was

⏹️ ▶️ John catching on fire. Right, exactly. So this so the vibe inside Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John reflects a feeling about what might be happening inside Apple. But then there’s the question, OK, but

⏹️ ▶️ John what of the things that happens inside Apple comes out of Apple and in what form and when? Another example

⏹️ ▶️ John is the TV stuff. Apple’s going to make a television set. From what we understand

⏹️ ▶️ John from current rumors and people revealing stuff, some of the technology that

⏹️ ▶️ John was originally made for the project where Apple was going to make a television set. I keep

⏹️ ▶️ John saying television set because I don’t know how to explain this to young people, but like a TV, a big screen that you look at that

⏹️ ▶️ John plays, anyway, ended up in the HomePod of all places because they were working

⏹️ ▶️ John on audio for the HomePod. So the HomePod comes out of some work that was done in the television. There was

⏹️ ▶️ John so much smoke around TV back in the day of just like Apple’s gonna make a television set, they’re gonna do it, it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be, and what we ended up getting was the HomePod and the Apple TV and Apple never did make a television set. And we’ll see where

⏹️ ▶️ John the car stuff goes. So it’s difficult to read, but sometimes like

⏹️ ▶️ John the vibe you’re getting, it’s a legit vibe, even if Apple never ships any of that stuff in the form you think

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to, but in this case, I feel like the vibe about the headset is

⏹️ ▶️ John so strong and so lightning focused and so detailed with the rumors that,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, where there’s smoke, there’s surely going to be fire eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, again, I I’m not playing coy. I wish I, I wish I knew when I was playing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey coy, but I’m not. But I don’t know, I just feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on no facts and just a gut feeling, I feel like there’s gonna be a lot this year, even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it isn’t the headset. I still feel like it’s gonna be a busy keynote. Obviously the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey drop of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro just last week, that could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lead Len Creedence to the idea that it’s gonna be busy. But I don’t know, I just feel like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna be a lot here.

⏹️ ▶️ John If there’s no headset, how can it be busy? Explain

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I’m not sure. I really don’t know. But I mean, as a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey examples off the top of my head, it sounds like we’re getting an all new watchOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for some loose definition of all new, which we may or may not talk about this episode. Yeah, we should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be getting widget support on iPadOS. Trying to think of other things. Presumably there’ll be a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of improvements to SwiftUI. I mean, this is a developer conference, strictly speaking. So hopefully we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see a lot of SwiftUI improvements. I’m not sure. I feel like they could fill an hour to an hour and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a half with just normal software stuff. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hell, as Chris Fonaso says in the chat, a no new features in Mac OS, that would need an hour and a half just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for applause, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That would be a crowd

⏹️ ▶️ John pleaser, but I don’t know if it would count as a big key. I kind of feel like headset is the obvious

⏹️ ▶️ John one that would make this big. And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco honestly, if they have

⏹️ ▶️ John the headset, nothing else matters, essentially. Like, not that they’re not, of course they’re gonna have new

⏹️ ▶️ John versions of all their OSs and the new version will have nice features, but if they have the headset, that alone makes it

⏹️ ▶️ John this an extremely, like these come rarely. When does Apple introduce new platforms?

⏹️ ▶️ John Not that often. WatchOS, tvOS, like they, you know, sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re small, but this is so

⏹️ ▶️ John hyped, so long-run, it’s as if they were coming out with the car, right? All you need is that.

⏹️ ▶️ John If that exists in the keynote, it is a big keynote. If that doesn’t, isn’t released in this

⏹️ ▶️ John keynote, I think to make it a big keynote, you need a lot of things that currently seem unlikely.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you would need the 15-inch MacBook Air to be announced. You need all new versions of the OSs with

⏹️ ▶️ John some significant features that people care about. And I think you’d have to probably throw in the Mac Pro. That’s what it would take to match the headset.

⏹️ ▶️ John And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey from all the rumors- Of course, it always comes back to the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John Honestly, no one cares about the Mac Pro but me. But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco trying to make a

⏹️ ▶️ John big keynote, you need the things people do care about. 15-inch MacBook Air, all new versions of all the operating systems

⏹️ ▶️ John that people love, Swift with the new features, new version of Xcode, and then you throw in the Mac Pro as a

⏹️ ▶️ John fun kicker. If you remember, the Mac Pro was announced at WWDC, we were all there, I believe. The 2019 Mac Pro, that is.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think that was the star of the show in terms of, didn’t they leave that to the

⏹️ ▶️ John end? Despite the fact that nobody buys them or whatever, it is a glamor product

⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to roll out because it’s big, it’s powerful, it’s shiny, it’s expensive, it’s good looking if you like

⏹️ ▶️ John holes. And so I even, I know

⏹️ ▶️ John people think like, oh, nobody cares about the Mac Pro. That doesn’t make a big keynote. It does. It would add to

⏹️ ▶️ John the bigness of it, but you need all that stuff that I described. And on the other side of the scale, just the headset

⏹️ ▶️ John by itself.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s fair. But I don’t know, I’ve been talking a long time, but suffice to say, I get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the feeling that whatever it is, it’s gonna be a big year, which is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I really hope that the three of us get to be there. So Apple, call us. We’d love to hear from you. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I think it’s gonna be big. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would be excellent because I don’t feel like the last couple of years have been bad by any means, but I think just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really firing on all cylinders kind of year would be pretty, pretty awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m excited. I’m a little bit nervous as a developer that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m about to have my summer ruined in the best way. The same way it’s like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Jonathan Colton song about, you know, you ruined everything the nicest way. Like when you have a kid, it’s like, oh, you ruined everything in the nicest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way because you, you know, you disrupt my life in a huge way. But, you know, you’re my kid and I love you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forgive the horrendous summarizing of this, you know, art form.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like this is this might be like that for developers in the sense that like whatever plans we had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this year are probably about to be derailed in a pretty big way by the headset.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it seems by all accounts, it seems like the headset is being announced at this event.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s going to be a developer story to it, because obviously why else would they announce it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’d be quite a move at a developer conference to be like, here’s a brand new brand new platform.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sweet solution. You can make web apps for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, yeah, you can you can program it only with Siri. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gosh. I would quit the business. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think our plans are going to be disrupted if our plans weren’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, wait for the headset. It’s going to be disruptive. And I think it’s going to be in a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exciting way. I don’t know what the headset will be. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the headsets chances are on the market. But you know, when I use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the existing VR headset hardware that exists, you know, on the market today, the limited amount

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have used with it, with the exception of the Oculus whatever 2 that we have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco upstairs, I’m super uninterested in it. And it kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gives me motion sickness a little bit, it doesn’t work optically well with my eyes for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever reasons, there’s a lot of minor paper cuts or major paper cuts with it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t find the games that interesting. But Apple is full of really smart

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerds and many of them have apparently decided that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they have is something special and worth shipping for Apple in a pretty high profile way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m optimistic, I’m tentatively optimistic that whatever they have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably pretty good because I trust them to make that call and they call

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it right most of the time. So whatever they have, we can look around the market

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we can be super unexcited about all the other VR headsets out there, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also trust Apple to say, you know what, if they’re this excited about something like this and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco releasing it now, there’s probably something there. It’s probably really good in at least some ways

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for at least some uses and possibly more. Otherwise they wouldn’t be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco releasing it. Apple holds back on a lot of stuff. So we can be fairly sure that what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does get out there, especially a new platform in a high profile release like this is bound to be,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve done their homework. They’ve probably built something really cool. And it’s probably going to be really exciting when we see it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s why I’m very interested, not in the VR or AR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or XR space in general, I’m very interested in what the heck did Apple do here?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I trust them to, if they’ve gotten to this point, it’s probably something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really exciting and really good. Now, how many other people will think so and will be willing to spend $3,000 and deal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the whole butt-mounted battery situation? Who knows? We’ll see when we get there. But again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I trust them to have gotten this right. If they do that, I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John that’ll be a thing to deal with, by the way. I think that’ll be a feature that everyone will say, oh, of course they did it. I mean, we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John all discussed all the reasons. It’s just that once the product comes out, all the reasons we’ve discussed suddenly become

⏹️ ▶️ John concrete. And people say, I always thought it was a good idea because the headset weighs less and you can swap batteries

⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so but right now everyone thinks it’s dumb.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and then the whole rest of the industry will change to butt batteries, and they’ll be like, well of course, this is the obvious design. We didn’t copy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Apple. Exactly, right. Yeah, it was obvious we didn’t copy Apple at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, Apple’s not gonna be the first one to use a battery pack, external battery pack, a bunch of other people, not in any way.

⏹️ ▶️ John I do feel like for the headset, again, I get the vibe that it’s coming this year. If it’s not, I

⏹️ ▶️ John think a lot of people will be disappointed. I think it’s, you know, whatever, like it would, quote unquote, justifiable.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, Apple never announced anything. That was all on you, it was just rumors. but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John the good thing that I hope the headset will do is provide cover for

⏹️ ▶️ John every other product. And I know this is not the way it works inside Apple, but like it’s plausible

⏹️ ▶️ John that there could be enough internal communication to let

⏹️ ▶️ John the other products that are announced every day, every W2C, all the new versions of the new OS, the new version

⏹️ ▶️ John of Swift, updates and frameworks, the new version of Xcode, gives them some cover to not

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like they have to press, press, press to get their exciting feature out the door ASAP,

⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s buggy, because the headset is just gonna block out the sun at WWDC, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And so a lot of times at WWDC, I feel like some groups are pressing. They’re like, we

⏹️ ▶️ John really need to wow them in the keynote, and they show something, and we are wowed, but then we realize, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John this isn’t even in the build, the beta build at WWDC. It’ll be coming in a later

⏹️ ▶️ John build, that when it does come, it’s buggy and unfinished and it just ends up being frustrating and disappointing. And it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need to try that hard. Ship what you’re actually ready to ship. Like I don’t wanna see anything in

⏹️ ▶️ John any of the other sort of platform stuff that isn’t in the WWDC beta

⏹️ ▶️ John because I feel like the headset provides them cover to be more relaxed with their

⏹️ ▶️ John choice of what to include and what to save for a future release. In the ideal world,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would have liked, you know, Apple to have the forethought to say, hey, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John back in 2022, hey, WWDC 2023, we’re gonna ship the headset. So everybody else, when you’re planning

⏹️ ▶️ John your new releases for the new versions of all the different OSs, everybody take a snow leopard,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? That didn’t happen. Like that’s, you know, they don’t have that kind of coordination. They can’t tell the future

⏹️ ▶️ John that far in advance. It’s foolhardy to try to make plans like that. I do think it would be wise for them to give

⏹️ ▶️ John each platform a snow leopard once in a while. We’ve talked a lot about macOS not being annual if they could get

⏹️ ▶️ John the bugs out of it, but it’s just too big of a company to be that coordinated

⏹️ ▶️ John and making plans that far in advance about software releases and releases and headset. Most of,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, part of the reason you can’t make that plan is that all the other groups aren’t even probably disclosed on the headset

⏹️ ▶️ John if they don’t have to be, or subsets of them are, because only some people who work on tvOS now

⏹️ ▶️ John have to know about the headset, not all the people, certainly the people who work on tvOS hardware probably don’t need to know about

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. It’s very compartmentalized to the detriment of Apple internally I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes and this is kind of one of those cases that we just assume that despite the fact

⏹️ ▶️ John that if the headset does launch WWDC it will provide cover for lots of other OS’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the only thing that helps them with is what I just described which is okay now maybe they don’t have to press

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the higher levels of the org chart can cannot press to have the Xcode team

⏹️ ▶️ John you you know, push out some feature of Xcode that is buggy and going to cause the app to crash

⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. They’ll say, we’ll just save that to next year. It’s fine that you don’t have it. And they won’t know that it’s because the headset

⏹️ ▶️ John is coming, but only like the people seven levels up the org chart who are disclosed in the headset do know that. And

⏹️ ▶️ John they let those things travel downhill. This I know this sounds Byzantine and complicated, but

⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, this is the way it works in big companies, especially ones like Apple that have everything compartmentalized. This is whole.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why reading the tea leaves is a thing. This whole kind of game of telephone of like what gets prioritized,

⏹️ ▶️ John what gets given money and why by people who at various points in the chain don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know have all the information available. They just know what the people above them tell them and what the people below them send back and

⏹️ ▶️ John feedback, but they don’t. Nobody has the whole picture until you get pretty high the org chart and it makes it very difficult to

⏹️ ▶️ John act in a coherent manner. It’s Apple is an amazing job of it. To be clear, as a company, they speak with one

⏹️ ▶️ John voice, their marketing, their PR makes it seem like they are a coherent mass, but

⏹️ ▶️ John internally it’s lots of little kingdoms moving in all sorts of different directions, pushed and pulled by forces they

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t see and don’t understand for the most part. Yeah. Yeah. Apple can put that slogan in their, in

⏹️ ▶️ John in their recruiting material.

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WWDC rumors, expectations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, in terms of the overall, what I expect from the other platforms,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard when in a new platform year, like what we have most likely here with the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco headset launching, this is a year, as John mentioned, this doesn’t happen often, this is a year of a new platform.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What tends to happen with Apple when a new platform is being developed is a bunch of talent is pulled from other teams

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work on that new thing. And obviously that doesn’t, it doesn’t all just happen in one year. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what has probably happened here is probably a bunch of people from, from other OSs and other, other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco projects in the company have probably been spending a lot of time recently working on the headset.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I would expect based on that for not only this year, but also last year to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been somewhat slow. And I would say that’s kind of the case, you know, that being said, Apple’s a bigger company now than they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be, and they are able to maintain things on multiple fronts better than they used to be. They’re still not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great at it, but they’re way better than they used to be. But anyway, so I would expect this to be a somewhat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow year for the other platforms. But that being said, in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is actionable for developers to do with the headset right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re going to see version 1.0 of this OS. We’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see version 1.0 of the SDK, and version 1.0 of all the frameworks, and the UI,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else. On some level, it’s very exciting and very disruptive to our summer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I was saying earlier. But also, there might just not be that much for us to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet on it. First of all, I don’t know when they plan to actually ship this thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to us, but that’s going to itself be a pretty big limitation. There’s going to be a lot of things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where we want to develop something for this, but we kind of can’t until we have one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or we can only do preliminary work, maybe in some kind of simulator or something, until we get one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe Apple will use the new Developer Center that they built, they opened up last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco year, to invite developers out by invitation only, come out to the Developer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Center in July and August, and you can sign up for a one day

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slot to use the hardware and test your app on it. They did that with the Watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they had the whole dev kit situation with the transition to Apple Silicon. They’ve done stuff kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of in this ballpark before. So I’m guessing that kind of thing will happen, whether

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will be open to many developers is a different question. I’m sure some developers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will get invited. I don’t know if it will be like anybody can sign up kind of thing. I think it’ll be more likely,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t call us, we’ll call you. That’s much more likely just for scale. But anyway, so I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect there to be a ton for developers to do on the headset yet this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer, because presumably we won’t have them yet. We won’t have access to them yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we probably will have a very early SDK. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s gonna depend a lot on what you do. Like if you make an app or choose to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make an app that is really a great thing in AR, VR,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you’re gonna have maybe a busier time. If you make, say, a podcast player,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might not be that important. Like it might just be, all right, find a way to show a UI,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but otherwise everything else is the same. And if the stories are accurate about like, you know, them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being able to run iPad apps and little windows, it might not be that much work at all for developers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get their apps to at least run on the thing. And then, you know, once we have physical access to them, then we can maybe worry about,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, making it good in the thing. Secondly, if we don’t have physical access to them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco neither do our customers. And so again, it’s like, there’s only gonna be so much we can really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do until this thing is out in the market or at least widely available to developers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s gonna hold back some of that. So I would also hope that there is some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice to haves on the other platforms. This is what we’re gonna get to in a second. And I think based

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the rumors and everything so far, that seems fairly plausible. And also just based on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Apple has done, even when their teams have been busy doing other stuff on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new platforms or whatever, they do tend to have decent iOS releases.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacOS oftentimes is last priority and doesn’t get much. And frankly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s often a good thing because when they touch macOS, without a ton of effort

⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind it, they tend to break things and make them worse. So, you know, it’s good for macOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not have a lot of updates when they’re busy. So, but iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, is likely to have some decent quality of life stuff there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That, you know, even if there isn’t some kind of massive, you know, SDK overhaul, some kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of massive new language or framework or anything else, even in the absence of those really big updates,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there tends to be a bunch of nice small stuff with new iOS upgrades, both as customer-facing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco features and on the developer SDK end. A lot of little quality of life improvements, little new APIs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco single little modifiers for SwiftUI, or hey, here’s a new view container that makes things easier for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stuff like that, that tends to get there in every release. So I’m expecting that for iOS. And then,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what we’re about to get to is, I’m actually very excited and interested to hear that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s pretty strong rumors that watchOS is getting substantial updates. So do we want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to talk about that now?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, this is reported in Bloomberg. What was this last month, I believe in late April,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe it was a Mark Gurman piece that talked about how Apple is to upgrade its watch operating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey system with a new focus on widgets. And so Mark writes as part of watchOS 10, Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey planning to bring back widgets and make them a central part of the interface. The new widget system on the Apple Watch will be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a combination of the old watchOS Glances system and the style of widgets that were introduced in iOS 14

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iPhone. The plan is to let users scroll through a series of different widgets for activity tracking, weather, stock,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tickers, calendar appointments, and more, rather than having them launch apps. The new interface will be reminiscent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Siri watch face, which was introduced in watchOS 4, but it will be available as an overlay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for any watch face. It’s also similar to widget stacks, a feature in iOS and iPadOS that lets users pile many widgets

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into one and scroll through them. As part of the overhaul, Apple is testing the idea of changing the functions of some of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch’s buttons. Currently, a press of the digital crown launches the home screen. For the next version of watchOS, Apple may

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have that open up widgets instead. And it is worth noting that apparently the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app store has fewer than a million monthly users in whatever region they were going to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey through some court proceedings. Apple disclosed versus 101 million on the iPhone. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally a hundred times more people using the iOS app store than the watchOS app store. I can’t say I’m surprised.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I mean, I think the idea of widgets

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the watch is appealing. I don’t know if I’m quite as enthusiastic as you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, Marco, but I will say that even as someone who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has only dabbled in watch development, one of the things that makes watch development very tough, particularly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for things like complications, is that you have extraordinarily little time as a developer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to run code that will update information on a complication and other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things like that. And so if widgets were given more flexibility

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and more time to update themselves, such that they’re getting updated more than what feels

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like three times a day. I know that’s not literally the case, but that’s what it feels like sometimes. That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would be more enthusiastic about. When I look down at my carrot weather widget, and it’s not, excuse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, complication, and it’s not carrot’s fault. Oftentimes, it is clearly behind,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially on spring or fall days where the temperature can vary

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty dramatically from morning to afternoon. A lot of times I’ll look and my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch will say, oh, it’s like 40 degrees outside, but I can tell it’s easily 20 degrees

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than that. And so I think what I’m most potentially interested

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in is if there is either a better API, which presumably there would be,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m gonna give you a chance here, Marco, in a second, a better API to make this work a little better

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or be easier to do on the developer side. But more, I guess more importantly, just to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a little bit more ability to make the watch feel alive rather than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that occasionally wakes up and then goes immediately back to sleep again. I don’t know, Marco, does

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of that make sense?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, and I think you’ve identified a couple of like, of the key parts of, you know, both

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I’m excited for this and also why, you know, some of the issues I’ve had with watchOS in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco past and present. So, Apple has a long history, going back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, I believe, the first major version of this that we saw in modern day was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dashboard for macOS. A long history of these views that you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get where you have to like, go to the view, or you look at a view of something,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and at that point, when you’re looking at it, the app is asked, hey, update this data. And in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco meantime, maybe it shows a placeholder or stale data, and then the new data pops in, like a second or two later.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, from a user point of view, that sucks. Like, it’s terrible, like when you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at something on your watch, or in the old dashboard interface on the Mac, or at different places like that, or, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the old Today screen, or the Today widgets on iOS, like, you would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seek out this information, you would go to it, or you would look at it, and then, at that point, the system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would ask the app, Oh, hey, update this. And the reason why it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco built that way was that the systems for various reasons over time, there weren’t the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco system resources, or they were chosen not to be spent this way, to have those apps constantly running

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the background, being able to update their data whenever they wanted. You know, in the case on the watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch has always been extremely power constrained. And that dictates everything about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’s a very small battery and a very small device. And they really can’t make the battery any bigger. it’s already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the device. So it’s like, you gotta deal with what you got here, and that dictates everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That dictates the slow processor the watch has relative to the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything is about space and power and minimizing drain on that battery.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Speaking of

⏹️ ▶️ John that, there are rumors that they’re gonna actually change the SOC, not just change the number on

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it, but actually change.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t see, the rumors around 3 nanometer are really confusing because I know TSMC is

⏹️ ▶️ John ramping up on three nanometer, but the lead times are such that I can’t figure out when Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John will ship a product fabbed on TSMC’s three nanometer process.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I also can’t imagine the watch SoC being substantially better without

⏹️ ▶️ John going to a new process. The problem, I don’t know what the current process is. Is it actually the same process

⏹️ ▶️ John size as the good five nanometer that the phones are? Or is it on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco another one? be seven. I mean, because the watch SOC, like the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the watch, I don’t know, but the whole SOC, the CPU cores in the watch have not changed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in three years. I think the

⏹️ ▶️ John whole SOC hasn’t. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re right. The die

⏹️ ▶️ John shots that like not much has changed for a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So it’s it’s using a three year old processor. And so that’s that’s not funny. I think the series

⏹️ ▶️ Marco six, seven and eight, they’re all the same chip.

⏹️ ▶️ John So so the so the The rumor is this might be a new chip. And I think if it uses a lower, a smaller

⏹️ ▶️ John process size than the previous one, that could give Apple a little bit of headroom to change some of the things

⏹️ ▶️ John you just described.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, because that’s the thing, like with watchOS, like since its beginning, it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all about like conserving, extremely aggressively conserving the resources on the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s not much to go around. So that impacts the way apps have been built from the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco beginning in various ways. but the gist of it is what Casey said, that your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, you don’t always run, like if you’re not being actively used on screen,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with very few exceptions, you’re not running. And so if you rely on a third party app that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has say a complication that you’re looking at, say, you know, caret weather, you know, a good weather app, you know, you’re looking at,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever the complication is on the screen, like that app is only being woken up in the background every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so often to, you know, fetch new data from the internet, update the data in the app and,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, update the complication data, and it tells the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch, hey, over these next six hours, here’s the hourly forecasted display.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco From this time to this time, show this. From this time to this time, show this, et cetera. It gives us this timeline of updates.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And during that entire time, the watch may not and probably won’t ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask the app, hey, refresh, give me new data here. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re looking at when you look at watch complications, you are looking at a timeline

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of pre-rendered data that the app has provided during some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like three second long window it was allowed to run in the background a few hours ago possibly. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a certain limit on how many times per day it can do that. The app’s servers can send push notifications

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to request an update, but those aren’t always obeyed. It’s more, it’s like, it’s a request, not a guarantee. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco please give me some time. I have some new stuff. I would like to show it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch can say, okay, or the watch can say, I don’t know what you’re talking about and just walk away. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s all these limitations and the widget system on the iPhone was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco built the same way. If you were making watch complications, you know, a couple of years ago, then when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco WidgetKit came out, it was like, oh, this is ClockKit, just, you know, slightly different and with SwiftUI, which made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a lot better. But that idea of when you swipe over,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you view a widget on the iPhone, that app is not running. And this is why, again, like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also some rumors with iOS 17 of possible interactive widgets. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of flies in the face of this because it’s kind of questioning like, well, what would that mean? And I think it would be very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited if that is a thing. But anyway, because again, widgets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS work that same way. And then they actually, they later then brought that widget system back to the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and replaced ClockKit, which was based on, WidgetKit was based on the ideas of ClockKit, but did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it better with SwiftUI. Then they redid the new complication system using WidgetKit because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was better. Anyway, so they brought it back full circle. Anyway, so on iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have widgets. Those apps aren’t running. It’s the same thing where they are periodically asked for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates and the app gives iOS a timeline to say, all right, show this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this time to this time, et cetera. And again, same thing applies. That app’s servers can send a push

⏹️ ▶️ Marco notification requesting an update. It may or may not be obeyed. there are there’s there’s limits there’s throttling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco etc on iOS there’s you know once it limits on the watch it’s way more aggressively

⏹️ ▶️ Marco throttled and there’s way less opportunity for apps to update their complications on the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so anything they do first of all it makes perfect sense to bring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that system more to the watch because it does what the watch needs it gives a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco timeline of updates without having to have all these apps running in the background draining getting the very very tiny

⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery in the Apple Watch. So it makes sense to have this be more built into the system.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, if there’s no other major advances like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more frequent background updates, a more robust system to request updates,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher limits on how much CPU time or memory those processes or extensions can use when they’re updating,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco without other changes like that, it’s going to be a fairly limited system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not going to enable a lot of what people would expect or want. So I hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they bring this over, assuming they have done, I mean I’m sure it’s too late now, whatever they’ve decided to do,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it, but I hope they have when they have presumably brought this over, I hope it has come

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some increases in those limits or some, you know, less aggressive throttling,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some more frequent updates being permitted or something and and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that i think will be a great thing once they establish it because when you look at the way the watch works

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now apps on the watch still suck they just suck less than they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to way less i mean they used to be horrendous with with you know watch kit one that was that was rough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know they’re still very limited they’re still way more limited than ios

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps and it makes it very hard as a developer to make a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great watch app experience that will match what our users expect. As a result,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of unfair. You know, like, like I, I don’t use a third party weather widget

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my, as a complication on my watch because third party apps, even the best written

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones like carrot, carrot’s a great app. It is even the, even the best written weather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps on the Apple watch cannot update their complications as often or as reliably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Apple lets theirs update. So I use Apple weather complications on my watch, even though they’re less

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, because they work better and more consistently. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to say anything against the developer of other apps, they can’t do anything about it. It’s out of their hands.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, and I know this, because I have my own custom little complications that don’t do anything useful, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just kind of use them for cosmetic things on my own face, and I know that occasionally they just stop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting asked to update, and I can’t do anything about it. So the whole system is pretty,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, it’s pretty limiting for third-party developers. So what I’m hoping, if they’re moving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this to the system from a developer point of view, I hope those limits get raised

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a big way. And maybe they don’t need the new processor, maybe not. I hope not, because I would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like them to be available on all the existing install base, but hey, we’ll see what happens. And then as a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco user of watchOS, the honeycomb screen has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always been a huge failure. Anytime you have to go to that screen,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve lost. And going to that screen, it’s like trying to plug in a micro USB cable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, I know I’m going to spend way too long staring at these tiny icons, trying to find the app that I want,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever I tap on, whatever I guess, is this alarm or timer? Whatever I guess is going to be wrong the first time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe the second. And so, that screen is terrible. You can change it to a list if you want,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a long pressing, but the list is terrible in different ways. First of all, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just too long. There’s all these different built-in features, many of which you can’t turn off, that you need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some way to access. So that whole system could use a rethink.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a hard problem. I get, you know, they’re trying to cram 40 apps onto a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2-inch screen. Like, yeah, that’s a tough problem. there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is room for improvement in the way they’ve done it now. So if the rumor is correct that they are actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco re-implementing or rethinking large parts of how users interact with apps on the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, that’s a very good thing too. And then finally I would say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rate of adoption of third-party apps among non-nerd

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people on the watch is really low. And I mean

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just anecdotal, but you know, look around people in your life who have Apple watches. We’ve talked about that on the show before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco How many of them even know that you can change the complications?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ask around, look around, see how many people in your life use an Apple watch face that even has complications,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then see how many of those are on the defaults. And it’s a lot. It’s most of them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So. The watch has a lot of functionality that is just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people just don’t know about. And you can’t blame them because the way to access this functionality is often really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hidden or convoluted.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone. Yeah, or on the phone. Which, I mean, fortunately they have been moving a lot of that off. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently I tried to edit what metrics were shown in different workout modes. And that used

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be phone only. And now it’s watch only. Now you have to hit the little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot menu on the workout and go in there and edit stuff there. It took me a while to figure out. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first I was looking all over the phone app for it. couldn’t find it anywhere there. I’m like, well, crap, did they just remove customization

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of workout faces? And then eventually I found it in the watch app, but it took me a while. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was like, I know this feature is probably still here somewhere, and I know roughly where to look at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and I’m a computer professional. And it took me a long time to figure it out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s a lot of stuff like that on the watch. There’s a lot of functionality on the watch, much of which people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would really enjoy if they knew it was there or if they knew how to do it. And it has a massive discoverability

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. And a lot of stuff is super clunky about it once you do figure it out. So there’s a lot of room for improvement

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. I’m really excited that they’re tackling this because for most of the last,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, three to five years, it has seemed like the watch is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well-staffed. Like it has seemed like when WBC comes and goes every year for the watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has seemed a lot like, man, do they have like more than four people working on this entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS, like, cause they, you know, they do good work, but it’s just really bits and pieces come out every year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s not, it not a lot comes out from the watch, from watchOS every year. It’s a very, it’s kind of like tvOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, you get a couple of things here and there, but it’s, it’s a very, very small set of new features every year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it has seemed under invested in, in the last, you know, X years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This suggests that they have actually put a lot of effort into it this year. So that’s exciting to me as well. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really looking forward to hopefully the watch having like major updates in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usability or in app capabilities or app structure or whatever it is. I hope they actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco deliver on that. I hope it’s really good. And I would also hope still, maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more you put a widget-like architecture into the watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the easier that makes it for them to offer third-party watch faces

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an option.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Now whether, I know, I know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Whether

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are doing it, whether they will choose to do it, whether they will permit it, these are all very different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions. But from a technical point of view, using a widget kit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a widget kit-like system with some pre-built parts makes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of sense for the structure to enable third-party watch faces because then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have to have a third-party process running constantly on the watch. wake it up periodically.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can define certain pieces that you have to use. Like, alright, well, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to use this digital face of this size and it has to be in this location. Or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can choose to use these specific analog watch hands and they have to be in this location.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, whatever it is, if they wanted to dictate certain parts of it and certain requirements, say all watch faces

⏹️ ▶️ Marco must be able to do XYZ or must use pieces XYZ in this way, they could do that really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well with WidgetKit, technically speaking, and practically speaking. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like the most apparent and obvious way to enable third-party watch faces based on the tech stack

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know of today is with WidgetKit. So bringing WidgetKit to watchOS in a bigger way, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes a lot of sense for maybe enabling this either now or in the future. I hope it’s now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it isn’t now, and I know it probably isn’t, I hope it’s in the near future, because I still want third party watch faces.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is just such a such a clear, like, I wouldn’t necessarily call anything easy. But this is actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a straightforward and, and dare I say, obvious way to offer them, you know, using this kind of architecture.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, I’m looking forward to this. And I hope I hope it’s an exciting year for watch OS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So imagine this, it’s WWDC, we’re, you know, we’re watching the video. Since it’s a fantasy,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re all sitting next to each other for the first time since 2019. We’re watching the video together

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Kevin Lynch comes on the video and says, I only have one thing to tell you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the watch. Communication between the watch and the phone is reliable now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then walks away. That’s not going to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is that enough?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’ll never happen. But Marco, is that enough to make this a classic, just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey favorite WWDC of all time?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, because I would, first of all, I don’t think it’s possible. Second

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey of all, I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John believe them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think the way to fix phone to watch communication is to get rid of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey The way to fix

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is to give me the same controls that I have on URL background download

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sessions and URL communication, which you have most of it already. Give me the same background download

⏹️ ▶️ Marco abilities and APIs on the watch that I have on the phone. Let it download, like let background download

⏹️ ▶️ Marco start immediately and let them run over Wi-Fi and not over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth to the phone. That’s what like, there’s a number of points in that communication

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stack that are either unreliable or ungodly slow. And again, this is all in the name of saving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco power. Like you can see why they did it, but I think a lot of those decisions,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they might’ve made sense seven years ago. Maybe they make less sense now, or maybe they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as necessary now as they used to be. And those decisions really hold back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. And so again, I hope they, like, just let my app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco initiate a backgroundable download that will run over Wi-Fi and start

⏹️ ▶️ Marco immediately. That’s it, I can do it on iOS. I can do it on all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other Apple OSs. Well, I don’t think macOS supports background downloads. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can do it on most other Apple OSs. I can’t do it on the watch, and that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really holds stuff back. To the point where I had to make a breakout game in my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app so that you would keep the screen on. Like the whole reason I had to make a game in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my watch app, in my podcast app, while you download a file, is so that you have something to do that will keep the screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, so I don’t have to rely on the background downloads when you wanna download something right now before you go out for a run

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something, and you don’t want it to be canceled for no reason, or to never start for no reason. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco please Apple, make that stuff better. But anyway, I will complain a lot less about that if I have custom

⏹️ ▶️ Marco third party watch faces.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fair. So john pulling on this thread a moment. What is your I don’t care about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything else that happened. This was a great WWDC I assume new Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, yeah, well, I’m not really expecting that because of the rumors. Although I do have a brief aside

⏹️ ▶️ John about something that Marco talked about how people don’t know, don’t customize their

⏹️ ▶️ John complications on their watches, they don’t know they can do it. And the interface of doing it is clunky. And it’s lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of things on on the watch are non-discoverable. And when you were describing that, I thought this is

⏹️ ▶️ John another place where it seems like Apple is, I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, we don’t know, because we don’t know what they’re doing, but it seems like they’re behind where everyone else is zooming forward with their large language models.

⏹️ ▶️ John One of the things that current large language models that are out there right now are really good at doing is

⏹️ ▶️ John exactly this task, which is a voice interface to describing what you want your,

⏹️ ▶️ John the complications in your phone screen to be like. you can go to one of these large language models right now and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John make me a web page in the lower left corner, put a picture of a sun in the lower right corner, put a counter that counts up every second.

⏹️ ▶️ John And like, you could actually describe the functionality of the widgets and it will do it. Like how easy would it be for

⏹️ ▶️ John a well-trained large language model to say, I want the weather in the upper left, the

⏹️ ▶️ John date in the lower left. And then to continue a conversation, said, no, I want the date to be

⏹️ ▶️ John the day of the week, plus the month and the year, or I don’t want the year. Like those types of conversations,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can have them with large language models right now. And the canvas that they’re painting on is like

⏹️ ▶️ John anything you can ask for, more or less. It’ll try to do it with varying degrees. The problem space of

⏹️ ▶️ John picking which widgets you want to, picking from a fixed set of widgets to appear in a fixed set of location

⏹️ ▶️ John with a fixed set of options, large language models would eat that for breakfast. Problems are, one,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple seems not to be on that train with everyone else as far as we know, because they haven’t announced

⏹️ ▶️ John anything in that area. Two, their existing thing that you can talk to, Siri sucks balls and we know that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then, you know, three, I don’t think this is the type of thing that Apple can,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, say, oh, well, they’re popular. We’re rolling out this year. You know, like it’s, again, as hard to

⏹️ ▶️ John know because we don’t know what’s going on, but like, it seems like Apple is behind everyone else on

⏹️ ▶️ John this. So you can’t expect them to, surprise, watchOS 10 is out

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s got a large language model that you can talk to. And I guess this ties into what Marco was saying to us. Even if you could, like, you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John run the large language model on the watch, right? So now it has to do network communication. Oh no, the sky is falling,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco battery

⏹️ ▶️ John is being destroyed. And I get that, like, like it’s true of what Marco was asking for. I want my downloads to start now

⏹️ ▶️ John and on wifi. It’ll kill people’s watch batteries. But it’s like, but they want that to happen when they’re down, they, you know, it’s the balance

⏹️ ▶️ John between which would you rather have, your podcast literally never downloads and it frustrates you to no end, or we burn part of your battery

⏹️ ▶️ John downloading your podcast. Like you have to pick one. You can’t, like, there’s no way to get the podcast on your watch without burning battery.

⏹️ ▶️ John So either you want it and you’re willing to sacrifice the battery for it and you don’t. And the same deal, I think, with talking to your watch

⏹️ ▶️ John and setting up with a large language model and setting up your complications. Maybe as a one-time tutorial

⏹️ ▶️ John that you guide people through when they’re setting up their watch and they have a conversation with it, and during the course of the conversation,

⏹️ ▶️ John the watch face forms in front of their eyes, is a great way to A, show people that that’s possible,

⏹️ ▶️ John and B, let them know that they can do it in a way that doesn’t involve them poking their fingers at the screen trying to find the interface.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I have the same frustration. I’m not familiar with watchOS because I don’t wear an Apple watch, and anytime I want to do anything in watchOS,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know where it is, I don’t know how it works, I can’t figure out what things I’m supposed to be touching or even what the vocabulary

⏹️ ▶️ John of gestures is to do stuff. Large language models would destroy this test, they’re so

⏹️ ▶️ John good at it, it’s such a narrow problem space and you can talk in a free form manner. And Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John speech to text actually works pretty well. So once you get over that hurdle and you can throw that text

⏹️ ▶️ John to a large language model running somewhere on an Apple server that it can communicate with, That is,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think, a really good use of current technology for talking

⏹️ ▶️ John to things and the problem space of dealing with any kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of UI on a two-inch screen that’s on your wrist.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and on the point of large language models, by the way, this is obviously a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge question. It’s like, we’re in this boom time of this new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation of AI capabilities. What’s Apple going to do at WBC with them? And I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately, the answer is probably nothing. There

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is nothing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they like that’s not what Apple does. Like Apple does stuff, you know, more slowly than that in a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, they could if they were on the ball on this and were were sort of ahead of the curve or even, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John even with everyone else, they could have stuff to announce the WBC. But that whole part of the arc seems dysfunctional

⏹️ ▶️ John now, again, because we don’t know what’s going on. For all we know, they’ve been working on large line going on stuff for seven years and they’re about to roll

⏹️ ▶️ John it out and wow us. but it certainly seems like that’s not the case.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think what’s more likely is, look, Apple knows that, again, these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are smart people. They know that the eyes of the world are going to be upon them and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expecting AI announcements. And so I think what they’re going to most likely do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is brand some things as AI that are not actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using this new generation of technique, and it’s just using the previous generation,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we used to call machine learning. You know, these terms, and I know these terms are, you know, oftentimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco vague and shifting around over time, but I think they might just, you know, show off

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that is using that kind of technique and say, this is AI powered, you know, just because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are the buzzwords that people expect to the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John day.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the rumors surrounding the, like Siri and the headset, I seem to recall reading

⏹️ ▶️ John something somewhere that was like supposedly inside dirt on like, the headset team

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t really want to use Siri, but like that’s what’s available to them. They’re kind of like wanted to go

⏹️ ▶️ John their own direction because Siri sucks so bad. They just like, well, we, you know, I don’t know if they want to use large language models. Maybe that predates

⏹️ ▶️ John that, but like they know they have a problem here because the headset is similar. Like the interface

⏹️ ▶️ John to it is more limited than it is on a phone, iPad, or Mac. So you have to figure out how do I manipulate

⏹️ ▶️ John things? I don’t know the whole camera’s looking at your fingertips and so on and so forth, but it’s a harder problem, right? It’s harder than just using a pointer

⏹️ ▶️ John or a cursor, you know, or touching the screen with your fingers. You can’t do that with a headset. So let’s use the voice assistant

⏹️ ▶️ John that our company already has. Oh, but that voice assistant is bad. So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey bad.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you don’t want the headset to be bad. People working on the headset is that we want the headset to be good and we do need something

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gonna listen to us. And so I kind of agree that they’re like, as they promote Siri and the headset,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’ll have a new suffix, Siri AI, Siri, I mean, I don’t know how they’ll go

⏹️ ▶️ John that far, but like, maybe they’ll just say, hey, Siri’s in your headset too and everybody loves

⏹️ ▶️ John Siri and look how amazing it is. You can talk to it and make little VR apps as the rumor was or whatever. but like,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is another one of the benefits of the headset. The fact that it blots out the sun, I think it can blot out the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t really have anything to show for it regarding large language models, WVC.

⏹️ ▶️ John Which is fine, they got a whole headset and a new platform, isn’t that exciting? I think they can get away with

⏹️ ▶️ John it this year. Next year, when we come to WVC next year, regardless of how the headset turns out,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe next year it’s finally just shipping to people or something, next year Apple needs to start having some kind of answers

⏹️ ▶️ John with large language models. because I think they’ve proven they’re useful in enough contexts.

⏹️ ▶️ John And like the reason I gave the, you know, setting up the complications on your watch, you know, watch screen

⏹️ ▶️ John problem space, that is a limited domain where large language models can excel

⏹️ ▶️ John in ways that Siri absolutely has not because you have to know how to talk to Siri and in the special way that Siri

⏹️ ▶️ John understands. And even when you know, sometimes it does ridiculous things that don’t make any sense.

⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas large language models don’t work that way. Again, if you’ve never tried one, go to one right

⏹️ ▶️ John now and ask it to do something with a limited problem domain, or even with a not particularly limited

⏹️ ▶️ John one, like I said, asking it to make a web page for you or something. It’s really good about having a conversation with you

⏹️ ▶️ John and understanding what it is you want, as long as you’re talking to it about something that was able to train itself

⏹️ ▶️ John on that’s out there in the world. And Apple can absolutely find a large language model and

⏹️ ▶️ John train it on enough data to understand watch OS complications.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. One thing, by the way, in terms of WWDC hopes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and dreams here, one thing I would love to see, I don’t know if it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be this year. It’ll more likely be next year. But I would love to see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple make available to developers through APIs on the phone some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco large language model capabilities that they have optimized like crazy to run on their hardware. So for instance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stable diffusion algorithm for image generation. Apple actually, I believe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was that one, Apple actually contributed to the open source project or whatever to optimize it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for running on Apple Silicon Macs or Apple Silicon in general. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of enabled people to make iPhone apps with it. I would love them to do more of that, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing and build it into the OS so that we don’t have to download each app. A

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good example of this right now is if you want to transcribe sound

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into speech, into text. Apple has actually shipped an API to do this for a number of years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. It’s called something like SFSpeakSynthesizer, or Speech Recognizer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. There were a number of problems with it. Number one, because I’ve been trying to do features like this in Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for years. One of the biggest, clearest examples of where I could use this is like when you do clip

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharing in Overcast, to be able to show as part of the video clip, the text.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, many apps like TikTok, you know, they do this, they have this built in now. This is a common

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing and I need to do it at some point. And in the past, this was limited by a number of factors. Number one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was in the past, I don’t know if this is still the case, that API to use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s built in speech to text API, your app had to request and get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to the microphone, even if you were feeding it audio that was not from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the microphone. So I could not, as a podcast app, feed the pre-recorded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio that I downloaded to my podcast app through their text-to-speech system, or their speech-to-text system,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco until I prompted the user for microphone access. And that alone was enough for me to say, I’m not using this feature.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I’m not gonna ask my users, who are all educated nerds,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for permission to access their microphone in a podcast app. Because there’s no reason I would need that, except to be creepy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and spy on them with ads and stuff. So I don’t even want the appearance that I might be doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I don’t even want the ability to access their microphone. I don’t even want that to be possible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my app. So that alone ruled it out. But also, it was using older

⏹️ ▶️ Marco style models and things to do the speech to text conversion.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it wasn’t very good in my testing. Like I made a couple of test prototypes, granted myself

⏹️ ▶️ Marco microphone access, just to see like, how good is this? And it was bad. it was it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was too bad to ship so I didn’t ship it. Well, however many months ago,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OpenAI released their Whisper model. And Whisper is really massively

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. It’s not a small difference. It is way more accurate. And there is a project called

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whisper.cpp where some guy has done amazing work in transforming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing that you would otherwise need a whole bunch of Python to run into a very simple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C++ wrapper that you could make iOS and other apps with and it runs fine on Apple stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I tried that and I built a prototype with that and it was super easy to use and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the downside of using whisper, there’s two main downsides. Number one, if you use the large models

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have like larger vocabularies and more accuracy, it’s just too slow to run on an iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number two, these models are huge to download. Like the base model that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco provides like okay accuracy, decent speed, is something, I think it’s something like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 70 megs, and then if you want something more accurate, it goes into like multiple gigs very quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is just, it’s untenable to run that. The way I would want to run that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be, you know, stuff like transcription of what you’re listening to. You know, there’s lots of things I could do with that if it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was fast and inexpensive computationally to run that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if I had to download a two gig model as part of the app to do those features

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, that’s not gonna fly. And if it’s gonna be super slow, it’s not gonna fly. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could build in some medium-sized model into the OS if they wanted to, and they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could use it themselves for their own speech-to-text stuff and then make that available to developers. They could also, for instance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco optimize that model. The reason why the Whisper.cpp doesn’t run very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly on iPhones, one of the reasons is because Apple has not done their work to optimize that one, the way they did with the stable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco diffusion. Also, the way these models usually work,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re running in the background, you don’t have access to the GPU or the neural engine as far as I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, but you definitely can’t run ML models on the GPU if your app is in the background.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can only it makes your app only use CPU based computation.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that makes them way slower to run in many cases. And this is the case for whisper and whisper cpp only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever uses the CPU, it doesn’t have any access to the hardware acceleration, besides, you know, CPU

⏹️ ▶️ Marco raw stuff. And so this makes it slower than it than it could be. So if Apple actually wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer a really great dictation to speech API, or to speak speech-to-text

⏹️ ▶️ Marco API, they could massively improve the API they’ve already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offered for years by using this new kind of technique, a new kind of model like this, optimize it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let it run on the acceleration hardware, ship a base model with the OS, and all of a sudden

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every app could have really easy access to speech-to-text. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of thing that I think is more likely for Apple to offer with these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new AI techniques sooner than having them offer some kind of like full blown customer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco facing, you know, quote AI powered feature. I think it’s too soon for that. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s kind of less Appley to do that kind of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John The customizing watch faces is a great example of how Apple would do it. It’s not like you can have arbitrary conversations with

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing like they would be very narrowly constrained. And I know the large numbers of models out there now are supposedly

⏹️ ▶️ John constrained, but they’re it’s more like everything except for these five or six things they try to keep them away

⏹️ ▶️ John from. Whereas this would be you can discuss nothing except for watch faces. And I feel like that is easier,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially if they train the model themselves, right? Which again, costs money. And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John regarding the, the, the speech, text thing and the size of them and everything, there’s a reason large language models are called

⏹️ ▶️ John large language models. They use tremendous amounts of storage and tremendous amounts of memory and tremendous

⏹️ ▶️ John amounts of compute, not just for the training, which is itself huge is obviously you’re grinding through tons

⏹️ ▶️ John and tons of data. But even just for the part of it where it runs, the inference part of it where it does its thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John even that takes a substantial amount of power and resources, which is why

⏹️ ▶️ John I was saying the watch would have to be communicating with the server, obviously. And then even just communicating with a server would be taxing

⏹️ ▶️ John for the watch and drain the battery and so on.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But not to mention the

⏹️ ▶️ John servers. Yeah, well, I mean, the servers. Yeah. But again, to be that incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ John constrained to just be doing watch faces. It’s what we talked about a while ago and the people have actually implemented.

⏹️ ▶️ John Large language model sitting in front of essentially the functionality exposed by Siri. Or like functionality that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John already on the watch. The watch can already pick complications and configure them and put them in places on the faces. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John a question of translating from speech to text and from text to what is this text telling

⏹️ ▶️ John me to do? And then, oh, actually I, the watch, have APIs for doing all the things you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John asking for. It’s a very constrained problem space, which is miles from like what Microsoft did was like,

⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s Bing, you can talk to it about stuff, good luck.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but ultimately, what I want to see from Apple in the AI age,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, is make a lot of this cool tech available

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on device, for on device use by apps that are not communicating with their own servers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can just run everything locally. And Apple has, with the exception of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having what seems like organizational

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or cultural trouble with AI machine learning techniques and people in general.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a large issue they need to figure out if they haven’t yet, and so far it seems like they haven’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what they have resource-wise is they have all these supercomputers in everybody’s pockets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have amazing hardware and software capabilities. And they care a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot about privacy and things running on device whenever possible and everything. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a level of sophistication and an amount of resources that their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco competitors don’t have. So I hope Apple leans into that. And I think this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is how they’re going to ultimately tackle, you know, quote AI, leaning into on-device stuff as much as possible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they do that themselves, they will most likely do it in a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way where there is an API for developers to hook into or use those same capabilities

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our apps. That’s what I’m hoping to see from Apple in this new age of these new styles of AI,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is cool on-device capabilities that run quickly and locally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t need us to, as a developer of one app, we don’t need to go train

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our own models, we don’t need to go run a huge server farm or have our own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco open AI tokens that we have to use and figure out how the heck to pay for.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to see what Apple can deliver us on device that they will maintain,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will train, they will update it over time, they will make it faster over time, and let

⏹️ ▶️ Marco us build on top of it. And they have a very strong history of doing that in other areas.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think this is what they will ultimately do whenever they get their act together on AI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we don’t know when that will be, and it probably won’t be all at once. I’m hoping to see little hints of it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year. Even that I think is optimistic, but we’ll see. And then maybe next year

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the year after, maybe we’ll see big stuff. And that’ll be exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re already doing all of that. It’s just a question of what letters they put on it. They used to put the letters M and L on it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And now we’re saying the letters A and I. What we mean is exactly what Apple has been doing, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John they do provide you a bunch of models that you can use like that text-to-speech one that you were saying. And they do improve it over years. They

⏹️ ▶️ John do make it run fast and hard, but they’ve done all of that. But like, yeah, but no, but the stuff that you have now, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John better stuff Apple that uses not the M and the L, but it uses the A and the I and it’s all this, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ John We obviously, there are different techniques to doing this and the current technique that lots of other companies are experimenting

⏹️ ▶️ John with is better than what Apple is doing. So what we want is Apple, do what you’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ John doing with all the things you used to call ML, keep doing that. We love frameworks, we love you making

⏹️ ▶️ John it fast on your hardware, it’s just that there’s a new thing that does everything that you’ve been trying to do but better, not everything,

⏹️ ▶️ John but certain things it does better. So please give us access to that in a way that makes us not have to worry about

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And I do think that they will do that. And I just got done saying the larger models are too big. You know, they’re just way too big

⏹️ ▶️ John to even run at all. And even like phones are even big Macs sometimes. That’s why you have to communicate over the network. But that’s today.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like those things change. Like part of what makes that tractable is just the march of progress. But part of it is also companies like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple deciding that it is important for their SOCs to be good at doing this.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that can really knock down these things. it’s the reason the SOCs we have today are so good at doing the things they do.

⏹️ ▶️ John So good at image processing, so good at, you know, doing the kinds of computations that has to be done

⏹️ ▶️ John on a phone, on a Mac or whatever. Those special processes for video encoding

⏹️ ▶️ John and decoding and, you know, the neural engine, all that stuff was developed because

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple said these types of functions are useful to do on a phone or on a Mac or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John and we want to do them in low power. I think that will come for or large language models as well. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna, you know, models that currently run that require hundreds of gigs of RAM to do inference are gonna run on your phone

⏹️ ▶️ John anytime soon. But I think there will be a meeting in the middle of like you were saying, Marco, cut down versions

⏹️ ▶️ John of these things, limited problem space. And to be clear with the limited problem space, you’re like, oh, there’s no way they can ever limit

⏹️ ▶️ John a large language model enough. It’ll always be scary. I’m thinking of the scenario when you were talking about configuring the complications.

⏹️ ▶️ John It never answers back. The only thing it does in response to you talking to it is show you

⏹️ ▶️ John what it thinks you’re asking for as you’re screening your complications and basically says, you know, is this

⏹️ ▶️ John okay? You know, press okay or say okay, or like it never talks back to you. It just does

⏹️ ▶️ John what you, and there’s no way for you to accidentally have your watch insult you

⏹️ ▶️ John or something, or there’s very few ways for have the watch insult you by arranging complications. I guess each

⏹️ ▶️ John of each complication was a letter it could spell out a naughty word or something and someone would figure out how to do it, but like it’s really limited

⏹️ ▶️ John problem space. We just, but basically what we’re just asking for is, you know, the promise of Siri? Well, large

⏹️ ▶️ John language models are currently delivering on a lot of that promise. I can have a conversation in text

⏹️ ▶️ John with a large language model and get it to do useful things that reflect what I’m asking it. No,

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t know anything about facts. No, it has no understanding of anything. No, I can’t ask it questions and trust its answers, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I can ask it to arrange a bunch of complications on a watch screen. And the good thing about that is

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m the one who gets to say, you did it correctly or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, I could say, no, the upper left should be

⏹️ ▶️ John carrot weather and not apples weather widget. And maybe it still fails to understand me or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, but the result is, okay, well, fine, I’ll do that one manually or whatever. But the point is, like trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to do that through Siri now is laughable, like you can’t, you know, people would never try to do

⏹️ ▶️ John that. They’re lucky when they can talk to their watch to reply to a text or something, and that’s only like nerds who have practiced

⏹️ ▶️ John that whole thing, whereas large volume models seem so much more flexible about understanding the foibles of our language

⏹️ ▶️ John and eventually doing what we want. And so I really do hope that again, not this year, probably, but that eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John becomes one of the things they start rolling out, if not as a as a way

⏹️ ▶️ John to interface with tiny screens or headsets, then at least as something

⏹️ ▶️ John that we can expect our powerful Macs to be able to do. Right. Because I would love to be able to say things to my Mac to

⏹️ ▶️ John do drudgery without having to open up a web browser, go to one of these large language models, type a bunch of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John in and all that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Collide, Squarespace and trade coffee.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP that FM slash join. You get that awesome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new pizza special and everything we’ve ever done before that plus all the membership perks. You’ll see a TV that FM

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. Thank you, everybody. We will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so

⏹️ ▶️ John long.

Callsheet paywall, pricing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I wanted to talk to the two of you. I wanted to kind of invoke the brain trust,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps call the diamond dogs together, and see what you two thought about pricing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for CallSheet. We talked about this, I don’t know when it was, maybe it was, I think it was a little bit last week, I think it was a little bit,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few weeks before that, but I’m getting, knock on wood, getting really close

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sending this to the App Store, which means I really need to lock down my pricing schedule, for lack of a better word.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you need to lock down your initial pricing. Sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You can always

⏹️ ▶️ Casey change. That is true. And so I think what I’ve landed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on as a general scheme, and then we’ll talk about the different options therein, I think what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to do is you get to use the main

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen, which shows you like popular stuff in your country or really your language, popular stuff in your language, new stuff in your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey language. So that would generally be new stuff in English for me and popular things in English.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And sort of kind of American-based when it’s English, but not always. It’s complicated. It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter. But anyways, you can do all that. That you can do. You can tap through

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that whenever you want. And there’s no real limit there. So hypothetically, if you can six

⏹️ ▶️ Casey degrees of Kevin Bacon yourself to the information you want, that’ll take a while.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you can do that for free always. But to search, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to have a daily limit of something to the order of five,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe 10 searches at most. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco currently going

⏹️ ▶️ John with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey five.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s so many. What do you do? That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey too many.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is it? Okay. Have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco one or two. Okay, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold on. Let’s shelve that for a second. Put it in the market. We’ll come back to that. Because, no, that is something I want to discuss. I didn’t realize that that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was too many. So I want to discuss that, but hold on a second. So some number of searches per day. And then after that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s tough noogies. You know, subscribe or get out of here, wait until tomorrow. And I feel like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in general, that is the right approach. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I think I want to go with. But if you disagree, either of you, we can talk about that in a second. Then the second question

⏹️ ▶️ Casey becomes, assuming we have this some amount of free searches per day, and then you have to subscribe, all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, well, what does subscribing mean? And I think when we first talked about this, we had concluded kind of as a threesome

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that somewhere to the order of $8 a year seems like a reasonable price

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this sort of thing. And I think I feel pretty good about that. But there’s two other options on the table

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think would be additive, not a replacement. One of them is, do I offer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a monthly option? And if so, how expensive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that? And currently I’m leaning toward offering a monthly option for either $1 or $1.50.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not really sure what feels right there. Now that would be kind of considerably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than the yearly option. So I wanna know your thoughts when we get there, when I stop talking in just a second.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I think for sure I want a yearly option. The question is, do I do a monthly option? And if so, how much? And then the other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey question is, do I do a something like a lifetime unlock?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think using the word lifetime is a dire mistake and I wouldn’t phrase it that way, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe a one-time unlock if I go this route at all. And I’m currently, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m against it because I just think that it sets me up for failure. And even if I’m leading

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, leaving a little money on the table, I just, it makes me nervous promising anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that far out, like that, that just makes me feel a little uncomfortable. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of where, where things sit right now. And I am curious what your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thoughts are now, Marco, you jumped all over me justifiably. You know, I’m not, I’m not upset. You jumped all over me a second ago. both of you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, about five free searches per day. So talk me down from five, what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey should the number be, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d say one or two. I mean, that’s tricky, though. It is. Look, again, it’s tricky. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a question of like, what defines a search? That’s a big question.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you search and you mistype it and get no results, does that count as a search?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So the way it’s currently implemented, it’s not in the test plate yet. But the way it’s currently implemented in a branch that I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have going right now is that you can, strictly speaking, type however many searches

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you want during the day, but the moment you click—or click—the moment you tap on a result,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then that counts as a search, and now you’ve lost one of your searches.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, that sounds good. I would also—you know, the branding of this, I would say, you know, you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like—you call it something like free searches. So like, you’ve—you have one free search

⏹️ ▶️ Marco left today, and then when you hit the end, you’ve used up all—you’ve used all your free free searches today. You can buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the subscription and get unlimited searches. You know, that’s how I would phrase this. You have free searches,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you have this paywall that gets you more searches.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of free, you’re doing a free trial, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that was my initial thought, but now that I have this whole free search thing, I feel like it’s kind of redundant.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know that you necessarily need a free, if you have

⏹️ ▶️ John this. Here’s what you need. You need to have, what you need to have, the goal is someone

⏹️ ▶️ John needs to use the app enough to like it. And that is the tricky part. So,

⏹️ ▶️ John use it enough to like it, like just a single use instance, like I was watching one TV show

⏹️ ▶️ John and we had a question on the couch about what was this person in. That one instance of use,

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that one instance of use has to be successful and enjoyable without any pay

⏹️ ▶️ John crap in their face. And you’re like, okay, but how many searches is that? And that’s why I think that the picking

⏹️ ▶️ John the searches is tricky, 10 is too many, right? Because no one’s gonna burn through 10 a day. 10 is enough for a single

⏹️ ▶️ John couch instance and maybe you’d use the app once every few days. But one is

⏹️ ▶️ John too few because for a single couch instance, like no one will ever get the point to like the app because they’ll be like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I used it for two seconds and then it threw a paywall on my face and I hate it. That’s why the free trial is good because the free

⏹️ ▶️ John trial period is unlimited and that allows the free trial period to be, this is the time when you

⏹️ ▶️ John get to like the app because it’s unlimited. It’s a free trial, everything’s open, full access to everything,

⏹️ ▶️ John but that door closes And that takes the pressure off your number of searches

⏹️ ▶️ John per day to allow people to get to like the app. They’re supposed to get to like it during the free trial.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then the paywall sole purpose is to gently remind people that they can pay to

⏹️ ▶️ John get that experience that they previously had. If you don’t do a free trial, you have to somehow thread the

⏹️ ▶️ John needle of like, how much will let people use it enough so they’ll like it?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think some people will never go above one search per couch incident or whatever. You know, like they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John just use the app forever for free to say, I don’t do this often. When I do do it,

⏹️ ▶️ John I look it up. And again, what you just described, I can do as many searches as I want until I find the result that I want. And then I tap on it

⏹️ ▶️ John and I get my answer. I put the phone down, never look at it again. They might not even know you have a paywall with your limit of one.

⏹️ ▶️ John And other people in a single couch incident go through 75 searches. Cause they’re like, what was this person?

⏹️ ▶️ John What was that? Search for this person. I think the person’s name was this. And they’re tapping through results and they’re doing all sorts of things. And they will

⏹️ ▶️ John be incredibly frustrated by a limit it’s like one or two. But if you have the free trial, you’d

⏹️ ▶️ John be like, look, you had the, you had your salad days, you got to use the app, you got to see all the features

⏹️ ▶️ John you got to, you know, and then it’s just a question of how long is the free trial, it would kind of be nice if the free trial only started,

⏹️ ▶️ John like when they, you know, when they had their first big usage scenario.

⏹️ ▶️ John But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a free trial would hypothetically start upon subscribing. So you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John subscribe, you get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your one week or whatever, and then you’re charged. I don’t know. I hear what you’re saying. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey disagree with it, but I feel like, especially if I were to crank the limit from five to two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or three, then I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like at that point

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have gotten at least a vague enough notion to know, okay, no, no, no, this is all right. And if you want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try again tomorrow, try it again tomorrow. I don’t love the idea of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey both a free trial and the search limit, but that is a weak opinion and held loosely.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See this is getting very complicated. Like I almost think like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John’s right, like you know, you wanna give people a chance to like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the app. Of course.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s making me now revisit like, what if instead of just, instead of having anything per unit of time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco per day, per month, what if it was a higher limit that was single use? So for instance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get 10 free searches. After that you gotta pay, that’s it. Like, cause then you could make the number higher

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can give people more chance to get to know the app, you could display it more easily in the UI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s much clearer to people what the limit is.

⏹️ ▶️ John Some people take a while to come around to pay for stuff though. Like some people need to be convinced that there is actual utility. They

⏹️ ▶️ John may like the app and they may say, oh, I found that app useful, but they haven’t come around to the idea that

⏹️ ▶️ John I like it enough to pay for it. And that’s where the doling out a small amount periodically

⏹️ ▶️ John is better than the big buck. Even if it was a big bucket of 100, once they burned through that 100 and they like the app, they

⏹️ ▶️ John may not be ready to pay still. But if there’s one doled out each day after that,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’d be like, you know what, I do keep coming back. This is the same reason so many people, including me, eventually paid for the New York Times, because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, they have a bunch of free ones, and I don’t think I want to pay for the whole thing, but you know what, over the course of

⏹️ ▶️ John months, weeks, years, you realize I’m more sick of running out of my free articles

⏹️ ▶️ John of the New Yorker or whatever, than I am sick of paying for the New Yorker, and then eventually you do it. And obviously the numbers

⏹️ ▶️ John here are way smaller than the New Yorker or the New York Times subscription, or anything like that. but it

⏹️ ▶️ John does take people time to come around. If you slam that door closed, you used your 150 free searches and that’s it forever

⏹️ ▶️ John and ever and ever, they’re, you’re giving up the opportunity for them to eventually come

⏹️ ▶️ John around because they’re just gonna delete the app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I guess, yeah, because it’s just, it’s tricky because like you don’t, you don’t wanna make this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco too complicated. You wanna keep it so that people know that there is a limit, they know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they’re gonna hit it, and then when they hit it, they’re not, They don’t say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screw you and delete the app. And so I get what you’re saying, John. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just think once we get into, you have X per day, they recharge per day, and then you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco start a free trial that lasts X amount of time, then you’re paying me eventually after

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And by the way, you have an annual or a monthly, like that’s a lot of complexity for this pricing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco model for a very simple app.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, a lot of the apps I see on the App Store are exactly like that. Like I know

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been subjected to prompts and screens described in this exact scenario. And as a customer, I

⏹️ ▶️ John tend not to get hung up with understanding what it is that’s saying. Customer, all I know is,

⏹️ ▶️ John can I use the app when I want to? And if I can’t, how much money would I have to pay to make it happen?

⏹️ ▶️ John And then the final thing is, will I be able to use the app in the future or should I just delete it now?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t actually understand or know or try to parse the text about what their scheme is and what the limits are and what the whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John all I know is, I can’t do what I want now. Why is that? And how can I make it go away? And is this a permanent

⏹️ ▶️ John situation? And I feel like that’s how most people interact with this. Like they don’t have to actually understand your business

⏹️ ▶️ John model.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but that’s even more reason to me to say, Look, it’s either you pay or you don’t, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is what Marco was saying a moment ago, like, if you don’t want to pay, I’ll give you a little sip, you just make it a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey paid up front

⏹️ ▶️ John app like an old person.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, but if you don’t, if you don’t pay, I’ll give you a little sip of it each each day. And if you pay,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then that’s that. And then we’re good here. As long as you keep paying, you get as much as you want. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Marco was saying, I don’t disagree with you in principle, but I couldn’t put my finger on what felt gross

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. And I think it’s what Marco said, is that just feels too complicated. Like either you’re paying me or you’re not, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the middle. You know, there’s no free trial. It’s either you’re paying me or you’re not. You really want to use this app? Marc Thiessen Free

⏹️ ▶️ John trials are insanely popular for a reason, though. David Wollin That’s true. And you can’t overlook that.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re everywhere. They’re everywhere. I think they do really work. And I know

⏹️ ▶️ John it does complicate things. It does, especially for an app. Your app is different in that it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John like it is very situational. You’re probably not going to use this app while you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John commuting on the subway, right? It’s when you’re on the couch, it’s when you’re watching the show or when you’re discussing

⏹️ ▶️ John a show. Like it’s not a general purpose app. So you don’t have that many opportunities

⏹️ ▶️ John for engagement. And when you do have the engagement, the value of your app is it’s there when people need

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And if it’s like, oh, they go to look it up and your app gives them the Heisman, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna come back. It needs to, like I said, it needs to prove value. It needs to say, I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ John an answer, I got an answer, and the app was pleasant to use. And this is a thing I find myself doing frequently.

⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll see. Now, here’s the other thing that I’m sure people listening are probably thinking and we’ve discussed as well.

⏹️ ▶️ John The audience for your app, at least initially, is not the same as the general public. It’s gonna be able to listen to your

⏹️ ▶️ John podcast know about the app. No one knows about this app except for people who read your blog and listen to your podcast or are

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey related to them,

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not out yet. But that is a ready made customer base. And that customer base has

⏹️ ▶️ John totally different values has a totally different idea of the of the exchange going

⏹️ ▶️ John on here that they might be buying it because they’re a fan of yours, because they’ve heard us talk about it so much. The

⏹️ ▶️ John general public is coming from a totally different perspective. So you know, I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think it’s reasonable to like this app has nothing to do with ATP. It is a general purpose app that anybody who watches television

⏹️ ▶️ John and movies can use. The question is, do you want to design this app

⏹️ ▶️ John to be optimal for the people listening to ATP, or to be optimal for the people who have no idea what ATP is or

⏹️ ▶️ John who you are. And those are two very different designs, unfortunately,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what

⏹️ ▶️ John makes you say that, like, what’s different? Because the people who are listening to ATP, they have different desires

⏹️ ▶️ John out of the app, their, their impetus to buy their, their motivation to buy

⏹️ ▶️ John is so incredibly different for people who have no idea who you are, you know what I mean? Like, it’s just, they’re totally

⏹️ ▶️ John different, but they’re limited, they’re small in number. And so, like, you could

⏹️ ▶️ John just say, I’m just gonna set them aside, and I’m gonna build this app for the general public. Because,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, practically speaking, the people who just wanna buy the app because they’re curious about the app that Casey made, or because

⏹️ ▶️ John they wanna have more context for the next episode of ATP they listen to, that’s not a market that’s gonna sustain

⏹️ ▶️ John as long as that, you know what I mean? Everyone else is. And the everyone else,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, The design for them often involves the gross stuff that you find unappealing and complicated. And I base

⏹️ ▶️ John that on all of the apps that I download in the app store that have those types of models that they’re, you know, complicated,

⏹️ ▶️ John unappealing and gross feeling.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, I, I, I’m not sure I see a free trial is this make or break thing that you seem to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because, and maybe it’s because I’m too myopic in the way I operate, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think a free trial is useful if it’s the sort of thing where that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey only way I can try the app, but this kind of homegrown alternate approach,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, gives me kind of what a free trial does. Like, I view them as equivalent,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though they’re not literally equivalent. I view them as equivalent, spiritually equivalent, where I either need

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a free trial to prove its worth, or I need to distribute little sips of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app to prove its worth. And it seems redundant to have both to me. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, maybe I’ve got this all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, if you give them the SIP, like I think the main thing when you give them the SIP is to make sure

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s clear to them this is not the end, that you should not delete this app, because even though I’m not letting you do this search now,

⏹️ ▶️ John at some point in the future that I’m gonna tell you about tomorrow, next week, in an hour, whatever, you will be able

⏹️ ▶️ John to use the app again. And by the way, if you don’t wanna see this nag screen, here’s the subscription or whatever, because that’s what you’re trying to stop

⏹️ ▶️ John is, I’ve hit a paywall, delete this app. That is, you know, because you never get that person back,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not gonna redownload it or whatever. have no, you know, and so that’s, that’s what you’re trying to avoid in free trial.

⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s the idea of the free trial is they get to try it with

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey full

⏹️ ▶️ John functionality and hopefully fall in love with it. And then when that door closes, eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John they, you know, they say, Oh, I really did like this app, or I did find myself using it a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I, again, I hear you, but I feel like that’s the whole point of this. I’m going to say five

⏹️ ▶️ Casey searches a day. Maybe that number’s wrong, But I feel like that’s the whole point. And so I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I, it, it feels currently like it’s, like I said, like it’s redundant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t love it. And, and, you know, for what it’s worth, when you tap on, um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you tap on like a search, I’m going to send you to, I’m just going to put this in Slack. Um, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think we’re going to put an image in the show notes. Um, but when you, when you tap on the like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey search area, what, what you’re seeing that I’m putting in Slack right now, that’s not in the context of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey search. it’s just the one view in and of itself. But this would be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where the search results and stuff would be. It’s like a mini paywall that says, hey, you got to keep

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going or wait another few hours in order to get whatever more searches.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would show. Then what I haven’t mentioned to you guys is, the way I currently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have it is, if you think about the main screen,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how there’s a little magnifying glass that slides in from off-screen on the right as you’re drilling into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. When you’re in free mode, to the left of that magnifying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey glass, I’m trying to generate an image real quick, so give me a second, I’m stalling for time, but to the left of that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey magnifying glass, there’s a really obnoxious red banner at the bottom that says,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have one search left today. I think Marco made a good point earlier. It should say one free search left today.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, it’s written right now. You have one search left today, subscribe now to, you know, remove limits or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can wordsmith that however I want. But what I’m driving at is, there’s this big

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ass banner right at the bottom saying, hey, this is your situation, you’ve got, you know, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey however many searches left, and then you’re gonna have to subscribe in order to, you know, get more.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think, I mean, this all makes sense. I think the UI, you are conveying all the information you need, you might,

⏹️ ▶️ John you could actually do a fun kind of, I don’t know if this is an underscore esque thing, but it makes me think of him. Kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of like where, you know, you have, you know, whatever you have one free search remaining, and then you use

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And then someone goes to try to do another search, and you’re going to show up the paywall on the paywall screen, have a button

⏹️ ▶️ John that says, Can I just have one more search and you press it and then your app says, Okay, it’ll let you do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Again, this is a lot of complexity,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one just the one time extra that I get I come down with Marco, I don’t want it this complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not complicated. That’s fun, that’s surprise and delight. What I’m basically saying is the thing that I do, don’t tell anybody, but the thing I do with

⏹️ ▶️ John the ATP sales that we have when we sell merchandise, I always tell the

⏹️ ▶️ John listeners that the end date is one day before it actually is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and that helps resolve things like what time zone does it end in? Like that’s the real reason.

⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly, I avoid all those issues. The reason people don’t say, oh, I thought the sale was supposed to end today,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t have to deal with time zones. The end date is always one day later. and

⏹️ ▶️ John having the limit be one, having one extra in reserve that you give people one time,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like you can always ask for one more forever and ever, but just having the one time extra, that’s another

⏹️ ▶️ John enticement to eventually buy, because oh, this app was nice to me. I was thinking about buying, but can I just do this one last

⏹️ ▶️ John search? Oh yeah, you can. Then the paywall is really down and no, you don’t get to ask for one more forever and ever, like

⏹️ ▶️ John a two year old, right? That’s the type of thing that you can do to soften this, to make it more, to make

⏹️ ▶️ John it less likely delete the app immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, here’s I’ve been thinking about it. I played with the app. I saw your paywall screen in Slack. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is where I’m landing. You get five or ten

⏹️ ▶️ Marco free searches, single time use, and then one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco per day after that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting. Then when they hit that one, you show your screen. I will workshop the hell out of the screen for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Don’t ship it the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey way I know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey As soon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John as I said Unlimited searches

⏹️ ▶️ John every day? What is the every day phrase there, bro?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it works off the screen, but.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is by no means the final screen. This is very. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get five or 10 searches up front for free, then one a day,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco free searches, then you hit the screen, subscribe to continue, after that one a day.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I like how you said, you know, or wait X hours to get your next free search. Like, that’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you have your two options. I’m killing, you’re kind of killing me even offering two options,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco monthly and yearly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey But okay, we’ll get there. We’ll get there. We can talk about that, yeah. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you offer your subscription option, parenthesis S, and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s no free trial. You get your one per day after you’ve used your five single use ones.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it, your one per day, that’s it. You hit this and you go forward if you want. That, I think, that gives people enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to get to know the app with their five or 10 stock free ones that aren’t timed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then it gives them that little out to keep them in the door, on the way, if they wanna keep going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that. But I think any more than one per day, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will have the limit that like, which I was saying earlier with like, how many incidents per couch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco event are we gonna even be using this app every day? So I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably your best balance.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that if you went with that model, I think the initial bucket should be more generous.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Just because that’s the falling off.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think a little bit more than 10 would be,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because

⏹️ ▶️ John you really, you wanna give people more time to fall in love with the app. And some people hit it

⏹️ ▶️ John after 10, some people it will take them three months to go through 10. Some people will go through 10 and one counters in it. So,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and it’s because it is finite and one time, it’s not like you have to worry about it recurring. No one’s going to live forever

⏹️ ▶️ John off of your free bucket of 20 instead of 10. It’s just giving people more time to use

⏹️ ▶️ John the app enough that they are convinced that it’s the type of thing they wanna pay for, or at least not delete.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So for the sake of discussion, I’m not sure this is the right answer, but you get 20 searches

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for free. Then once that bucket is up, be that in an hour or in a year,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey after that you get one freebie a day. And if you use that one freebie, tough nuts,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey either wait another day or pay me. Yeah. I actually, I kind of like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I still think you should have a free trial, but whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’m team Marco on that one. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco disagree.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John also thinks we need to offer our t-shirts in 17 different options every time, and I’m the one pushing for like, can we just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do like two or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John three? People love it. People

⏹️ ▶️ John love it. And it even works with Cotton Bureau’s new model now, so we’re not even penalized for doing it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Well, I’ll think about the free trial, although my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John current

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking is Marco’s right. All right. So I actually didn’t think about this hybrid—well, it’s not really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hybrid, but I’m going to call it the hybrid approach. I actually think this makes a lot of sense, and I think it’s reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy to digest. That’s the thing I’m worried about, and that’s That’s what I keep coming back to with the free trial is I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey adding a layer of complexity that just isn’t helpful. And so I like this because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems pretty straightforward. You got your bucket. Once you use it, you get one a day after that tough nuts.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I think it was just as complicated as all the schemes you were describing as complicated. But again, I say that the people

⏹️ ▶️ John who are using this app do not need a mental model of this system. They just need to know how do they feel

⏹️ ▶️ John about what the app is putting in front of their face and doesn’t make them want to pay money. Like that’s the level people are operating at when they’re poking

⏹️ ▶️ John at their phone. are not trying to suss out your monetization model and how you’ve structured

⏹️ ▶️ John things. So I don’t think that’s a concern at all. But if that was a concern, the thing you just described is just as

⏹️ ▶️ John complicated as everything else we’ve described.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, maybe. Well, and also, some people will suss it out. Some people will complain.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some people will be bounced off, and they won’t go through with it because they’ll think it’s too ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ John Those are only going to be the listeners of our podcast, though. The regular people just do not know who they would complain to,

⏹️ ▶️ John assume Casey doesn’t exist and is just a giant application mill somewhere. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John they think Apple made all the apps. Like, that’s not, the people who complain are so much more, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say sophisticated, but so much more in tune with how the world actually works than

⏹️ ▶️ John most of the people who are just poking at their phone screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, fair enough. But all this is to say, like, you know, you’re not gonna please everyone no matter what you do. Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell yourself short. Like, don’t rip yourself off trying to please everyone. Like, if you hear from people who are like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, 20 free searches is really not enough for my needs. Like, you know, fine. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John pay you.

⏹️ ▶️ John If they say, that’s what I’m saying. If they say, I used that up in one couch incident, A, you know they listened to the show because they said couch

⏹️ ▶️ John incident. And B, it’s like, okay, but like, fine. You

⏹️ ▶️ John are outside the bell curve. 20 for one couch incident is way higher than,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so I’m sorry, but you can’t configure the app for the outliers. That’s what you’re just trying to run

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them over. No, and if anybody uses it that heavily, they should be paying for it. That is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, that is the kind of user that like, okay, then that makes sense. You have heavier needs for this, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be paying for it. Simple as that. You know, cause this is not a free app. This is a, this is an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that has limited free functionality that is really a subscription priced app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s nothing wrong with that. And people will, there will be people who will try to make you feel bad about that, but don’t because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco life. This is what modern software is. You have, you know, you have to keep it up. It’s yeah, modern software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ongoing revenue in some form because people expect ongoing updates.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just use IMDB one star. All right, good luck with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so tell me if I’m bananas to say that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey monthly should be an option.

⏹️ ▶️ John I like it. I think it’s good. I think it’s a lower number on the screen. I think Marco was saying should yearly

⏹️ ▶️ John be an option.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, no. Well, no. I think if there’s only gonna be one, it should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be yearly. But I think I’m okay with two, but I think what you want, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, cynically speaking, not everyone who signs up for a year will use it for a year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you kinda wanna push more people towards the yearly if you wanna maximize money.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s that to consider. I would suggest, if you’re gonna offer both

⏹️ ▶️ Marco monthly and yearly, which I think I’m okay with, price them in such a way that people who do math

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go for the yearly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And that argues for not making it 150 because that makes the math harder for people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Like, you know, so if you made it, you know, a dollar a month, eight dollars a year,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s pretty good. Like in terms of that will drive people, people can do that math in their head real fast.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right. Or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or make it two dollars a month and make it ten dollars a year. You know, something like that, whatever whatever it is, like make it so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people can clearly tell, oh, I should really go for the year. And because really what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want

⏹️ ▶️ John if I care about that, but I think the smaller number for monthly is is a smoother on ramp

⏹️ ▶️ John for people who say I don’t know if I want this $8 worth correct. And after three months of paying monthly,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll be like, Oh, this is dumb. I should just pay for annual.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe Yeah, but ultimately, like you want this screen, you want most people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who choose to subscribe to go for the longer term one for lots of reasons. Number one, you’ll make more money from people who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco abandoned early. Number two, those people will be reminded only once a year

⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of 12 times a year that they are subscribing to your app. And every time someone’s reminded they’re subscribing to your app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by one of those emails from Apple saying these are about to renew, that’s a chance for them to cancel it. So you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to have to bother people with that every single month if they’re willing to pay for a year at whatever price that is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So ideally you want yearly customers more than monthly customers. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, because you’ll both make more from them, you know, in terms of the abandonment and then the ones that that don’t abandon

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, you’ll keep them longer probably. So yearly is probably better for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I would price it, I think if your yearly price is gonna be eight bucks,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a dollar a month is a good price for the monthly. I would maybe push yearly to be 10

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks, but that’s, it’s not that big of a difference. I know that you’re gonna have trouble asking for 10

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks because it’s you and you keep thinking, you keep talking yourself down and giving yourself

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey pay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cuts.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s just, I mean, I honestly, if it were,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is up to me, but if it were up to me and I felt like I could get away with whatever I wanted, then I think $10

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year is reasonable, and like $10 a year and like one or maybe $2 a month.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I think that a regular person would look at this and be like, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s way too much money. And that’s what gives me pause.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those people are gonna say that no matter what these prices are. It could be 10 cents a month they would say that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I feel like keeping it under 10,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it feels like I can just, it can be an impulse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy it under $10 even on a yearly basis, which is bananas because if you go out to eat

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and get a soda, it’s like $2.50 and that literally is pissed away in the span

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of six hours. But I mean, I do this. On the consumer side, I do the same thing And I’ll look at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a $10 a year app and I’ll be like, eh, do I really need this? So I feel like the most

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can get away with per year is $9. When I see those $10 apps,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know what I do? I usually go for the free trial and see if I like it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, Jesus. No, okay. So look, if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to go with eight or nine bucks, then yeah, I would say in order to maximize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best ratio of monthly to yearly, I’d say $1 a month, $8 a year. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t think that $1.50 is—because I mean, the only reason to do more than $1 and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than $2 is just to eke out a little bit more from the monthly people, which maybe that’s dumb anyway, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d be—strictly speaking, if they stay for a year, which is a big if, then I’m making more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with $1 a month than I am $8 a year. But I don’t know. It just—does it make

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense to make it $1.50 or $2 or something? I mean, you could try.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look, and this is the kind—you can play with this over time. You can actually— change

⏹️ ▶️ John prices all the time. Like people don’t need to have a comprehensive history of the pricing of your app in their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey head. Well, I thought for subscriptions, so it got a little dodgy, cause then you have to like get the permission

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. You know better than me Mark.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if you can change, you can actually increase the subscription of existence, but I’m just thinking of like for

⏹️ ▶️ John going forward for new customers, for setting aside

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what existing customers deal with. You can just like retire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and start another subscription

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep it going, but not have it be purchasable in the app. So like, there’s ways to do it. Like, yeah, you just have multiple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscriptions at different price points. Like you can change, like recently, the whole Disney Plus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanic they added, you can increase the price of an existing subscription and bring those users

⏹️ ▶️ Marco along, but I believe they have to, you have to give them some amount of, like the system gives them some kind of notice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think they, I don’t think they have to opt in, but they have a chance to opt out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that kind of runs a risk of loss there. So, you know, ideally you don’t need to change these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco prices, but you can change these prices. But yeah, I mean, look, $1.50 a month is not bad. I just think $1 a month is an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier, it’s a more obvious sell, it lets the screen look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicer. Like you have more design options in terms of your biggest markets like the US where it’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nice even number. You can not even show the decimal points. So you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have options there. Actually, no, you can’t. Because it’s gonna say, do the new tiers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have even like $1 exactly or is it still 99 cents?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought so. I thought they do. That’s why I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco have it currently. I got to double check. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right. Yeah. Yeah, because that’s why I have it currently is literally 8.00 and either 1.50 or 1.00.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s because I was thinking about it and I was listening to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shooter, Thoroughly Considered earlier today, and they were talking a lot about, you know, the 99 cent thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I feel like, you know, having the round number, I feel like that just feels nicer. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s partly why I don’t want to go all the way to 10. I could be convinced to go 9, but I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to go all the way to 10 because that just, even 9.99, I mean that’s effectively the same damn

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco thing. 9

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels like 10. Like I think that’s why I keep going back to 8 as instead of, like if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be below 10, 8’s a really good number.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, and that’s kind of where I am. I think people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey perceive that well. That’s kind of where I am too. So, all right, so I think we all then, I’m asking, not telling, We all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree that about $8 a year sounds about right. And Marco, you were pretty perturbed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the monthly idea, but have you come around on that or are we still not loving it? Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zapata I think I mean, look, I obviously, I don’t have a lot of data here. I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my app that is yearly only. But that’s a little bit different in the sense that my subscription is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not getting access to core features of the app. So it’s a very different mechanic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, in your case, this is like you need to convert as as many people as possible because anybody you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco convert with this paywall, as John said, is likely to abandon usage of the app completely.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you make nothing from it. In my case, if they don’t like my premium subscription, they can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just keep using the app for free and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I make money from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ads from them. So it’s a very, very different scenario. In your scenario,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it does probably make sense to have monthly and yearly, especially because the monthly is a cheaper way in the door.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think you need free trials, but I could be wrong. I haven’t used them in the app store,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like as a developer, so I’m not sure how the conversion rate would be different. It does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco introduce a level of conceptual complexity for the customer. It introduces complexity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the screen. That being said, I don’t think it introduces meaningful complexity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your implementation. You know, that’s a flag you set on the in-app purchase, and then, and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever validation you’re doing, server side or whatever, like it makes that a little more complicated to account for,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for your purposes, it almost doesn’t matter if somebody’s in a trial or not. Like you’re just trying to make money from them long-term. You don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really care if this search came from a trial user versus this one came from a paying user.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s not. I already have support for it in my kind of facade in front of StorKit too.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s generally fairly straightforward unless you’re trying to figure out how much time is left in the trial and or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the trial expired, then it becomes a little bit interesting. But I think I could support the trial

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I wanted to. I just don’t think I want to. And because again, I just feel like it’s more complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it is.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But John, where do you come down on both monthly and yearly?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you should definitely have both.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other thing that’s interesting about monthly, which I thought I’ve been thinking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about if I should message this in app at all, but certainly I’ll talk about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on the show, is that if you’re a Casey List super fan, you could do monthly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you stick with it, then you’re giving me an extra, you know, what, $4 a year. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I don’t think that that’s necessarily going to be what anyone would choose to do except like five of you whom I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey love dearly, but it is another way to kind of have an implicit tip

⏹️ ▶️ Casey jar without actually putting in a tip jar, which I kind of like.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, there will be some amount of that for sure. I don’t know if it’ll be enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make that have to dictate any choices you make about the pricing of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the monthly. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fair. That’s probably not a massive factor in determining the price.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. All right. So it sounds like the brain trust

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has concluded a batch of, of non-renewable tokens

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up front or I shouldn’t say tokens of searches up front somewhere in the order of 20 ish.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d still go 10 frankly, but go ahead. I don’t I’d still go

⏹️ ▶️ John with free trial. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there’s no consensus here. This is not this is not decision making by committee.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have opinions. Marco has opinions, but Casey, you get to decide you can do whatever you want. Yeah, yeah. No, I hear

⏹️ ▶️ John you. If you’re trying to get me and Marco to come to a consensus, it’s not going to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, no, no. Not necessarily.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just trying to, for as much my own benefit as the listeners, I’m trying to get kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the brass tacks. Where did we all individually land? And if there is something that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey vaguely smells like a consensus, what does that look like? And it sounds to me like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, something to the order of 10 to 20 free searches, and then one a day after

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I think it sounds like we all agree that monthly and yearly is not such a terrible idea.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A little bit of disagreement as to whether it should be a dollar, a dollar fifty, or two dollars. Do you think I could go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the way to two on monthly?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could try it. I mean, I’m not sure. I mean, having something begin with a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, like one dollar a month sounds like nothing to a lot of people. That is a really good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounding and looking thing. A dollar fifty is a little more complicated. As John said, it makes the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco math a little bit less likely to end up with the yearly purchase, but ultimately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that still looks really cheap. Two dollars is really cheap, but it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look as cheap as a dollar fifty. So I think there is a lot of benefit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco psychologically, visually, in getting that one point something a month

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, I think, very attractive.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then yearly, eight, maybe nine dollars. I don’t know. I feel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the delta between twelve monthly installments and one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight dollar installment, you know, I feel like that’s quite a lot of savings for the yearly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey subscription.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco More than I think I want to give. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what you want. You want people to be going to the yearly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know. But I feel like what I want to do is make it like nine dollars a year, but I still think that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with what you were saying earlier. I feel like there’s some weird divide between eight and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nine that you would expect to see between nine and 10, but I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco eight

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels cheap in a, in a, in a happy way, whereas nine does not feel cheap in a happy way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It feels like it’s getting, it doesn’t feel cheap at all. Really. It feels like it’s getting expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the thing, what you have to consider here is, you know, it’s, it’s easy to look at these numbers and be like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, geez, I’m, I’m setting this up so early. And if I make this nine instead of eight, I’m going to make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco X percent more money. But if the conversion rate is affected even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit by these pricing differences, you can quickly erase that margin. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you convert a decent number more people at eight than you would at nine,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will make more money total at eight. And it doesn’t take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that many more people to make up that kind of difference. And the same thing is true of the monthly level.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever it is, if you’re setting it at $1.50 a month versus $2 a month,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’ll get way more people in at $1.50 than you would at two, and therefore, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you’d make up that difference in volume. But this is the kind of stuff that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing to have these kind of gut feelings, this is how we think it is. It’s really hard to know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in advance, and it’s even harder to be able to make this kind of decision without

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just testing it, and then being willing to change the pricing in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cumbersome ways that we have to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. One final thing we didn’t talk about much, but I’m curious both of your opinions.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe we’ll start with John. Do I do some sort of one-time only, you know, like standard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey style in-app purchase? I’m gonna call it a lifetime unlock during this conversation, but I would not refer to it that way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I would refer to it as like a one-time purchase or something. Do I do a lifetime unlock?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. No.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, I agree.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I’ve landed too, but tell me why.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, because you can always roll it out later And you can roll it out to people who have already

⏹️ ▶️ John paid you a bunch of money, but just don’t want to deal with it anymore, but really love the app and are willing to pay a lot and have had time

⏹️ ▶️ John to fall in love with it. But I don’t see how anyone is going to see this

⏹️ ▶️ John app, use it enough without doing one of the subscriptions to decide they want to pay a price. It’s going

⏹️ ▶️ John to be worth your while for a one time unlock. Keep it in your back pocket. Save it for

⏹️ ▶️ John three years from now from this app when it’s that was wildly successful. But all the power users are so pissed about paying subscriptions

⏹️ ▶️ John that you can charge them $100, then we can talk about it again. But now, absolutely not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for many reasons, even if you didn’t call it lifetime

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlock, that’s how people will perceive it. They will perceive this as, I buy this and now I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote, own it. And they’re going to A, expect that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will work forever, which B, involves you updating it over time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because when we build modern software, we’re building it on quicksand. There is no such thing as software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that stays working forever without updates anymore. Especially iOS software accessing a web service.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s so many moving factors here. So you’re building on QuickSand. This is gonna require

⏹️ ▶️ Marco constant updates. Not like every day, but at least every couple of years. Suppose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you worked on this, decided this app’s kinda done, and abandoned it. And you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted people to still be able to use it. You would have to put in a certain amount of time every couple of years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to keep it working on the latest versions of iOS and the latest devices. So, you know, there’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be some degree of maintenance over time. So you need ongoing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue from people. It’s simple as that. You need some way to make money from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ongoing use of your app to fund ongoing updates of your app, which is what everybody expects you to have.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, ongoing revenue, simple as that. If you don’t have ads, then it’s, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it, like those are two options that we know about. or creepy user data, which you don’t wanna do,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t blame you. So that’s it. You have to make ongoing revenue from your app somehow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to justify continuing to update it. Any kind of lifetime or flat rate, or however

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would brand it, it gives users the impression

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the expectation that, and the entitlement that they will feel, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they deserve access to this app for an indefinite period into the future because they paid to unlock it. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid to own it. But that’s not the reality of the modern software environment. They can’t own it. They can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it forever without ongoing work from you. So it’s better to not even try to sell that to people. Don’t even sell them on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of that anymore because that doesn’t exist for an iOS app.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey brain trust has spoken. I appreciate it, fellas. Beep, beep, beep.