536: I Reboot With Reason
25 May 2023Marathon, first impressions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad, “reporting bugs effectively,” and another take on Callsheet pricing.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Alex Stevenson-Price’s thread on his initial experiences with the Dell 6K monitor
- Hands on with Final Cut Pro & Logic for iPad
- Ferrite
- Dan Moren says Time-based rulers don’t work
Keep Final Cut Pro open until the export is complete- You can make FCP macOS ↔ iPadOS
- Steve Troughton-Smith’s observations: 1 2
- Ben Scheirman points out that Final Cut Pro 10.6.6 for macOS has way better mixed SDR/HDR support
- 9 + 10 = 21
- Reddit on John’s of Bleecker
- Beatings will continue until morale improves
- Bungie’s New Extraction Shooter: Marathon
- PlayStation Q
#askatp:- Which direction is scrolling “down”, asks Jesse Stiller
- Is there really any “re-engineering cost” for Apple Silicon Macs? (via
strays_nod00) - How often do we reboot our Macs, wonders Saurabh
- How can we share a ton of pictures with not-savvy family? (via Brian Coffey)
- Post-show: More Callsheet pricing
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Chapters
- Getting excited
- Dell 6K experiences
- Final Cut & Logic for iPad 🖼️
- Sponsor: Lickability
- Meme explanation for olds
- Pizza follow-up
- “Report bugs effectively” 🖼️
- Sponsor: Rocket Money
- Marathon
- Playstation Q
- #askatp: Scroll “down”
- #askatp: Just drop in new SOC?
- #askatp: Reboot your Mac?
- #askatp: Sharing tons of photos
- Ending theme
- Callsheet pricing redux
Getting excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re getting close, we’re getting close to WBC, I’m so excited, I’m getting excited, I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excited. Like, I’ve come full circle now with the headset, I’ve followed the complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple hype cycle. First I was like, they’re doing what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What? That seems weird, why are they doing that? Then I’m like, what? This can’t possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very good, everything else on the market sucks, why, how is Apple going to make something good?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I’m like, well, if they’re going to release something it’s probably gonna be pretty good and then you know I start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hearing reports and rumors it’s actually really good and now I’m like oh my god it’s gonna be here it’s gonna be really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good oh my god like I it’s happening this is just the cycle you know I go through all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their new rumored launches and I think it’s possible to be really good but I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know quite what that looks like and I like I’m excited again you kind of what I said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last week Like I’m excited because I trust that if they are this excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it, it’s probably for good reason. And I still don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to actually use this, but we’ll see. And then in the mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, and I’m just, I’m excited to see what it is and to see like how it’s going to change our lives forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, or not, you know, like, is it going to be like the iPhone or is it going to be like the Apple TV?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I don’t know. We’ll find out. Or the HomePod. Oh, God, I hope not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I think I am also going through the standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple slash Casey regarding Apple cycle. Right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just kind of confused by it because I don’t feel like it’s filling a hole I have in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But typically, when I say that, I end up buying whatever the thing is and realizing I had a perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shaped hole for exactly that device in my life. I just didn’t realize it at the time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m optimistic though. I mean, I have understood VR to be extremely cool. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only very briefly tried like Oculus stuff, extremely briefly. So I haven’t had enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time with it to really understand what makes it so special. But everyone I know has tried it, says it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing. And certainly the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John rumblings that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re hearing, well, fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But the rumblings that we’re hearing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the Apple stuff is amazing. So yeah, I’m excited to see it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m curious what the story will be around it. But it’ll be neat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see. I wonder, you know, you’d said earlier, Marco, that Apple’s excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And we heard, I think through German, I’m not going to be able to find a link for the show notes, but I thought German had posted something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week or two that said, like, a lot of the Apple executives are kind of pumping the brakes on this internally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is interesting to me. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not great. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see what happens. But I think on the macro level, I think you’re right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple broadly does seem to be excited about it. And it’s certainly interesting. Like, even if it’s a disaster,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’ll be interesting and like selfishly, it’ll give us plenty of stuff to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John talk about, be it a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disaster or a, or a winner. You know, I think it’s, there’s going to be a lot to discuss and I’m super duper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking forward to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m excited about the boring WWC stuff. Like, you know, I setting aside the headset, which I,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s probably not going to be for me, but it’s exciting to talk about,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John new versions of all the OS’s, new versions of frameworks, new version of Xcode, all that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that they always do. All the Swift stuff that I already know because Swift is developed in public. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John just all that good stuff. It’s the sort of the refresh all your things period. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s even in quote unquote boring years, that’s exciting. It’s exciting to me as
⏹️ ▶️ John a user. It provides the dim hope of
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever things that I’m dealing with in my apps or in my usage of these platforms might be fixed because hey, it’s the major
⏹️ ▶️ John next new version. So, you know, as we sit here going through 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 of Mac OS and like things aren’t fixed or in changes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just like, well, it’s too late in the cycle. You got to wait for 14. And so, hope springs eternal.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, the new version of Mac OS, that’s when whatever thing annoys me is going to fix. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John my weird windowing thing will be fixed accidentally in there. Like who knows? And then all the new frameworks,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the new APIs, and maybe I’ll see something that’ll be exciting. I’ll be excited to add some feature to one of my applications
⏹️ ▶️ John because of a new API they added or something like that. And, you know, user facing features, stability,
⏹️ ▶️ John performance improvements, all that good stuff on all their platforms. And, you know, that happens
⏹️ ▶️ John every WWDC. That alone is enough for me personally to be excited about it. And it’s not enough for like
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC to be a smash hit in the major media. For that, you need a headset. But I like I like the boring stuff. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John excited to watch some WWDC sessions where they tell me about new APIs in an obscure framework
⏹️ ▶️ John that no one else cares about.
Dell 6K experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with some follow-up. The Dell 6K monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was a phantom and then got a price just a week or two ago, I think a week, it was last week we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Suddenly it’s already in people’s hands. And so Alex Stevenson Price took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fall for all of us and he bought the, what was it $3,200, something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dell 6K monitor. And because Alex is a gentleman, it works at Plex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if memory serves. So double bonus points there. Anyways, Alex has tweeted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tooted a thread with regard to what it’s like to use this thing with a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I’m going to read most of that thread. There’s not too much here. Alex writes, everything works out of the box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with one Thunderbolt cable in zero software or drivers installed, which is awesome. That means I don’t have to install any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dell software or rely on them keeping it updated. You can’t control brightness or speaker volume with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the system keys out of the box, but I found that there’s a popular open source app for third-party monitors called Monitor Control.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’ll put a link in the show notes, that makes it just work and uses the system GUI and it makes it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely transparent.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if those two things, you know, match up there. You don’t have to install any drivers
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything works. Almost everything, but no, but that’s good to hear that basically like it works as a monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John and the stuff on it seems to work. Like it just acts like a Thunderbolt hub, I guess, or however it’s doing its
⏹️ ▶️ John job. So, and then monitor control thing, I don’t think is a driver. I think it’s just an app or whatever. So this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Alex continues, I freaking love all the ports, ethernet, USB-As, USB-Cs, it’s so flexible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can just plug in everything I had connected to my old Intel iMac without needing a Thunderbolt hub or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. And the pop-out front ports are useful and totally hidden when you don’t need them. I also like having an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI input for versatility. It means I can easily plug in something like a console or an Apple TV for testing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it can do picture-in-picture with the HDMI, which is neat. And then Ben Smith
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chimed in and wrote, I haven’t used this 6K monster yet, about a year ago, Dell released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dell Display Manager or DDM and for Mac, which gives pretty complex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software control of their displays. It worked well in my two 27 inch 4Ks. It feels like a sign Dell is committed to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supporting the Mac. DDM was Windows only for eons before this. So I’ll put a link to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Dell Display Manager as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John The picture in picture in HDMI sounds cool. Like- Yeah, that is super cool. That’s the type of sort of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware feature, you know, the Mac has, doesn’t have to have any idea that it’s there, that it’s existing. something that the
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor does for you and for particular scenarios like maybe someone who works you
⏹️ ▶️ John know for Plex that might be super handy as opposed to trying to do some software solution and funneling it through a
⏹️ ▶️ John window that Mac OS is aware of.
Final Cut & Logic for iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have some Final Cut Pro follow-up. People have used it. I have not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But people have used it, including Jason Snell over at Six Colors. And we’ll put a link to his hands-on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which includes a couple of videos. I didn’t watch the 30-minute one. I didn’t have the time. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a shorter one that he has a screen capture of him doing some editing for the little upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey social media videos that they do. So Jason writes, unlike Final Cut, Logic offers roundtrip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support for Logic projects. Sorry, I should have mentioned we’re also talking about Logic here. roundtrip support for Logic projects between iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Mac. That’s great, but be warned, your Mac project must have saved as a package,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, or have been saved as a package or whatever. If it’s not, you’ll need to use the save as command to make a project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version. I’m assuming Marco, you can translate this because I have no idea what any of this means. Anyway, and must use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the musical grid, not the standard time format. That’s a very strong hint to anyone who is not a musician
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this is not the tool for you. Marco, can you translate that into DumDum for me, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, so the first part is package format versus whatever format. You know, all of these, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Logic and Final Cut, the file formats that they save in are actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I know, in both cases are by default are Mac OS packages, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are basically directories, inside of which could be any number of files, that’s kind of their native format.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that works fine in most cases, it does cause some problems with, like, syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms sometimes, because it’s kind of treated as a whole bunch of files inside of a special directory. But anyway, that’s just at the point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s, I don’t know what they’re doing there with iOS and how that works there. The second part of it though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the changing the measures to time, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Logic is a music composition program. That is primarily what it is designed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. And so by default, Logic projects do not work in timestamps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They work in beats and measures because it’s for music. when you are using Logic to Edit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts, that super gets in the way, because it’ll try to like, you know, snap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any edit you make to the beat grid of whatever you told it the BPM of your project,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash, you know, song was. And so, when you try to use Logic to Edit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts, which again, it’s really not made to do, but it happens to be a really good podcast editor if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convince it to do it, you can change the time scale that it’s using from beats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and measures to just a timestamp, which is what you want when you’re editing podcasts. And then you can drag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff wherever you want, and you’re seeing things represented as time instead of beats, and that’s what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like the iPadOS version of Logic Pro does not support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that time-based measurement at all. It is only beats and measures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff. So maybe they’ll add that down the road, but it’s not there now, and among
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other little issues here and there, that basically makes it very clear that this is really not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for podcasts on the iPad. That being said, as Jason Snell has pointed out, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ferrite on the iPad, which is a really good app that edits podcasts in a Logic style,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s made specifically for podcast editing on the iPad, and that fills that role very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t help you if you’re a Logic person on the Mac and you want to round trip stuff, that’s not very good. But again, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I said last week when these were introduced, I don’t think round tripping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the Mac and the iPad is going to be a very common need for a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people using these programs. I have a feeling you’re going to use it either on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the Mac and I don’t think a lot of people are going to be trying to use this, like edit the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco projects on both platforms back and forth for lots of reasons, mostly practical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and technical, but also I think if you if you’re the kind of person who likes to and has the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edit this kind of stuff on a Mac, you’re probably gonna wanna use the Mac pretty much every time, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad versions are gonna largely appeal to people who either don’t have a Mac at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or have a Mac but don’t have the multi-hundred dollar Mac versions of the software. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re putting too much of a focus on the round-tripping aspect here, but that being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, you know, the limitation of logic on the iPad to not use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time-based measurement is, That’s pretty fatal for podcast editing. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe, but they’ll probably get to it in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially since they said it was round, like the logic is supposed to be the one that is round-trippable, setting aside plugins, which we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about last episode. This is not a plugin issue. This is like, oh, it’s round-trippable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s this thing that we totally didn’t mention and you only see it if you’re doing podcasts, which again is not what this program
⏹️ ▶️ John is designed for, but it is kind of weird that there is these caveats. I feel like a big selling point
⏹️ ▶️ John for both of these apps could have been, This is not a toy version of insert app name here. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the full fledged thing and you can do everything you can do on the Mac version. And that is absolutely not true for
⏹️ ▶️ John these applications, at least in version 1.0. So they couldn’t make that point and they didn’t, but they did kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of say that Logic Pro was round tripable. And as Dan Morin points out, he couldn’t even figure out how to switch like
⏹️ ▶️ John a podcast to be measure based, even though it would surely be annoying, as you just said, Marco, of like snapping
⏹️ ▶️ John to points that have no meaning in your podcast. Like just to get it over there, you know, just to have
⏹️ ▶️ John it, He was probably just gonna try it out to review it or whatever. But yeah, we’ll have to wait for future
⏹️ ▶️ John versions, see where this goes. Like the fact that podcasters, some podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ John use this for as their audio editor makes it seem like kind of, I mean, same thing with GarageBand.
⏹️ ▶️ John GarageBand used to have a podcast template, I believe, and then they ditched that a while back I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not the intended use case of the programs, but it certainly for GarageBand,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was at one time a supported use case and logic you could use it for podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John and it wasn’t awful. It seems kind of weird that Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even consider that case important enough to to support like non measure and beat based
⏹️ ▶️ John timelines which like which they already supported in the max version. So it’s I don’t know if this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a signal this is just prioritization of 1.0 features or whatever but I do feel kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John yes not a big deal because again logic is for musicians, like if you saw the old intro videos, all the musicians, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it kind of feels like Apple should like somehow make it even worse for podcasters so we wouldn’t even try
⏹️ ▶️ John to give more to make more of a market for like ferrite and other apps like that because a lot of those apps
⏹️ ▶️ John have trouble. Like ferrite is kind of amazing. It’s a, you know, a passion project from a small dev team. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John it only one developer? I don’t even know. I think it is like that’s amazing. But like, think of on the
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, the sort of renaissance, I think, of graphics applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, for a longest time it was like Photoshop and Illustrator and then maybe like freehand back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they became old and creaky and new entrants came in, whether it’s, you know, the whole affinity suite or
⏹️ ▶️ John Pixelmator or Photomator, the renamed Pixelmator photo thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, there’s, there’s a lot of stuff going on on the Mac for in a market that seemed to be closed off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has never really participated in this market. with Apple having Logic out there,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it kind of being useful for podcasts, but not really. I don’t know, it seemed like it would be an uncomfortable,
⏹️ ▶️ John weird place. I think Marco will be our canary in the coal mine here, kind of like he was for switching to Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? When does Marco finally give up on Logic Pro and try using something else, slash
⏹️ ▶️ John try writing his own editor?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. I think at that point I would probably, I know FairWrite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has kind of flirted with the idea of a Mac app here and there. I think that’s coming. Yeah, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow it enough, but yeah, I’m pretty sure that is coming in. And I think if logic were to become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely hostile to podcast production, even more so than it is now, I think ferret would just step in and replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for for the, you know, people like like me and Jason Snell, who actually edit this way,
⏹️ ▶️ John or like Adobe audition or like there are other editors out there. I’m just saying it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels weird. I look I have audition. I don’t edit podcast with audition. It’s so what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way Jason and now I edit podcasts, I kind of ripped off his whole style.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It involves having all having the tracks split up into little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocks of non-silent speaking. So, you know, right now, as the two of you are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking, there is nothing on your tracks. And then, you know, right now I’m speaking and there’s there’s a block of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio when when as soon as I stop speaking and one of you jumps in and tells me how wrong I am, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the there will be a second block. Now, right now, Casey just left. That will be its own block
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on his track. Now I can just really quickly, I can drag that left or right and move it forward or back in time, or I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just click it and hit delete. And it is perfectly easy and fast to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of edit. So that’s the kind of edit I’m doing is moving around the blocks, deleting them. If you know if somebody like coughs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can just click it, hit delete that that block is gone. If Casey laughed too too slowly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I want to make my joke sound funnier, I’ll scoot it up half a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John It takes them a little bit longer to get it. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can shrink up that
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a very complicated way of saying that you run strip silence on everybody’s tracks beforehand. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John in case people are wondering, the tracks come as a big, long, continuous strip of audio, and then you do strip silence, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll strip out with some tolerance all the parts in the track where somebody’s not talking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and by the way, and that feature doesn’t exist in Logic for iPad. But that style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of editing, I have found, is much easier and faster and more efficient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do in logic than it is to do in audition or any other program I’ve seen so far.
⏹️ ▶️ John Audacity is another popular one, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, look, audacity is it’s free. It’s this nice open source audio program. That’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish audition could do it because I’m already paying for a ridiculous Adobe Creative Suite thing so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can get access mostly just to audition. And I love audition for lots of audition is like my audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco toolbox. Like I do a lot of other stuff in it, but I just don’t like the way it edits. And so anyway, that style of editing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logic fits that style really well and it fits my brain and fits my workflow and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though it fights me at every single turn if I like slightly veer off if I hit the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button, or like, if I’m typing in a chapter title as a marker. And if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left if I left the podcast playing while I’m typing in a chapter title, occasionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something will grab the keyboard focus back to the track as it’s playing and the word I’m typing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which will contain a bunch of like regular letters not holding command or anything, regular letters in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logic do all sorts of stuff. Like you can just hit you know A and that does something that you know brings up automation. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if you’re typing a word with you know a few regular letters in it and the focus gets out of that text field
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and goes back to the main window, which happens through some kind of weird bugger behavior constantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you finish typing the word the window goes crazy with everything you just accidentally invoked and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my god, what happened? How do I get back? How do I undo this? And a lot of times the answer is I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to undo this, I just close it and reload from my last save. So I save pretty frequently. So anyway, logic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fights you a lot, but it is really good when it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like when you got it, when you’re in it, when you got it and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just getting through it, it’s really good for that style of editing and I haven’t found anything better than that. So I use it for that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, The reason why Ferrite was able to come in as what I believe a single person developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was able to do is because people who use Logic to edit podcasts like me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are using a fraction of the functionality that Logic offers because we’re not doing music production.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you actually focus on that little subset of abilities, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can make a really great editor as a small team. One of my ideas for a very long time has been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, if this podcast app business thing doesn’t work out, maybe I should go make an editor. I would love to make an editor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’ve always thought like I don’t have time or the market’s too small. Well, fortunately, Ferrite already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now exists. And so I probably don’t need to. So that’s great. So anyway, if Logic ever blows up for podcast use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any further, I think we’d all just switch to Ferrite.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Benjamin Mayo writes, quote, keep Final Cut Pro open until the export is complete, quote.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This point alone would put me off using it seriously. Who wants to sit there with a foreground process bar, progress bar, excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, for minutes at a time? It feels like a dated restriction that iPadOS vNext
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could remove in light of vRAM, et cetera. So in other words, apparently the official Apple instruction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is you need to keep the app foregrounded as long as export is happening, which makes sense given the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restrictions within iOS and iPadOS, but it’s kind of janky.
⏹️ ▶️ John They should have put a breakout game in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, so this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John great example of like, what is it like to write pro apps for the iPad? The iPad, again, the M2 iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get it with like 16 gigs of RAM and an M2 SoC, the same thing that’s in the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air. And it’s just like, there’s, it’s incredibly powerful. But of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want this export to complete, keep the app open. Like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and who, if you’re Apple writing a pro app, hey Apple, you’re empowered to make this better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but hold on. I feel like if it would be gross if they cheated and allowed themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to background, like I-
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m saying by adding the OS level features to be able to say, You could do something in the background and you won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John on iPads that have swap, as we discussed in past shows. What separates them from a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John with a single user logged in? They’re a weird Mac with a single user logged in running a slightly different OS
⏹️ ▶️ John with slightly different GUI toolkits that is way less resource constrained than the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Because the Mac has all sorts of random stuff running on it. It has multiple users logged in at the same time. Who knows what’s taking up memory
⏹️ ▶️ John all over the place. The iPad is so locked down, so minimized. Every app on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John has been brought up and existed in an environment of like resource starvation. They’re not allowed to do
⏹️ ▶️ John certain things in the background. They’re not allowed to hog the CPU. It’s like so constrained. It’s the quietest
⏹️ ▶️ John neighborhood of this sort of hardware class in Apple’s product line. And yet, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to export a video from Final Cut, the only choice is just keep this app and make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John it stays running. Just keep staring at it. It’s like going back in time to when you couldn’t switch to another application because the previous
⏹️ ▶️ John one you were using would just disappear. They need to fix this, like the hardware is so powerful.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now they have powerful programs like Final Cut on them, that kind of dialogue boxes kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, the Final Cut Pro team is not empowered to make that change the iPad OS team is empowered to make that change
⏹️ ▶️ John a new set of API’s or different set of restrictions for certain applications in certain situations,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, yada, yada. I have to imagine, like I said, the if you were to, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, hop on to an iPad and a terminal or, you know, at the equivalent of activity monitor. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John such a quiet neighborhood on there. Everybody is well behaved and quiet because they know if they act up the OS is going to kill
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Not so on the Mac and a Mac with the equivalent power.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have any of these restrictions. You can launch Final Cut export, go do something else play a game while
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s exporting. I mean, obviously, it’ll slow down your export or whatever. But you don’t have to worry that you know, the Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to kill Final Cut in the background because you open the game.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it really is unfortunate. And you know, it’s, I know that it snuck up on Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the hardware is more advanced than the software, because none of us have ever mentioned this before. I’m sure they’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought about it before. But what are you
⏹️ ▶️ John going to do? They didn’t know four years ago that they were going to make an M1 based iPad. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, right. Chris Hawking writes that you can go from Final Cut Pro on the Mac to Final Cut Pro on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad. John, tell me about how this is all held together.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is what it gets back to what Marco was referring to, the bundle structure of
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote documents. In macOS, they’re often directories with file name extensions on the directory name,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a bunch of stuff inside them. So apparently, Final Cut Pro on the Mac uses.fcp bundle files,
⏹️ ▶️ John and on the iPad, it’s.fcpproj, short for project. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the.fcpproj bundle, inside that buried in a certain directory structure, is
⏹️ ▶️ John the.fcpbundle directory. So the trick is you make the thing to make an FCP
⏹️ ▶️ John proj, and then you bring that over to the Mac, and then on the Mac, you edit the.fcp bundle
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s inside there, because if you right click in the finder, you can do show package contents and like dig the thing out. So you let
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac version of Final Cut edit the FCP bundle that’s buried inside the bundle for the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad version, and then you bring it back. And, you know, it’s a little bit janky and a bunch of stuff won’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can even go the other direction. You can make this file structure on your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of encase your Mac Final Cut project thing, as long as you make
⏹️ ▶️ John this metadata file with the right data in it and all this other stuff, which is very tricky or whatever. But what it looks like to me
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the iPad, quote unquote, file format for Final Cut Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is just the Mac one wrapped in more crap. And that gives me, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, makes me optimistic that the Mac version will eventually support this because it seems like just a superset
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac format. the Mac file is inside this directory with other stuff. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see how it couldn’t support everything. So I’m hopeful in a year or two, as they revise these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll sync up in a more sane way and maybe be able to go back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Steve Shotton Smith has, I guess, done a little bit of spelunking and has some notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve writes, Spanica Pro looks to be using the SwiftUI app lifecycle. It uses a SwiftUI app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is in the class app, you know, app and app delegate adapter. Logic uses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a traditional UI application main, if not merely an architectural choice, it might suggest that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Final Cut Pro app code base is a lot younger, which could explain why it’s less fully featured than Logic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that means that Final Cut Pro officially counts as Swift UI app using UI kit and not just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a UI kit app using Swift UI. And finally, Steve writes, baffling the first run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen or welcome video that you see for 10 seconds on Final Cut Pro is a whopping 180 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the 750 megabyte install size. That is, that’s a bold choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t know. Once you get the apps to be that size, maybe it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s kind of weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, why do you need a welcome video at all? What year is this? So you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey going back, you
⏹️ ▶️ John remember the welcome videos on Mac OS X? Those were cool and everything, but even those weren’t this big. They weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John this big proportionally to the size of Mac OS X, my memory is. And anyway, you weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John downloading those from the App Store, I suppose, coming on plastic discs. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then tangentially related, Ben Shireman pointed out to me something that I’ve been waiting for in Final Cut Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Mac. So oftentimes, well, I shouldn’t say often, occasionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself and Erin will be at like a school function or something like that. And I will often have my big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera with a zoom lens, sometimes using that for video, because it’ll record 4K video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then she’ll have her iPhone and she’ll be recording video. And one of the perks of having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotten used to Final Cut Pro and doing KC on cars is that I can, I know how to do like multi-cam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recordings and things like that within Final Cut Pro. However, my camera records
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SDR and iPhones record HDR. And in order to get both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them in the same project and not have it look completely weird and oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way dimmer than it should, you had to do like a ton of work. And I forget exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you do it, but it’s a real pain in the hind quarters. And in 10.6.6, Final Cut Pro 10.6.6,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which just came out, I think in the last week or so, one of the headline features on the little welcome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen is automatic color management. Easily edit HDR and SDR clips in the same project with intelligent tone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mapping of video to match your color space. And it is so easy, in fact, that in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the preferences for Final Cut Pro, at the bottom of the general tab, there’s HDR colon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check, automatic color conform. That’s all you have to do. And then magic happens, which is super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now when we are at school functions, recording our kids, doing kid things, and trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to merge these together into one video, it won’t look completely dark and underexposed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hypothetically anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what does this
⏹️ ▶️ John actually do? Practically speaking, you’ve got the HDR ones that have super bright stuff, and then you have the SD ones that don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it take away the HDR from the HDR ones? Does it crank up the brightness in the SDR ones?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand what you’re asking, and I don’t recall the answer. Ben linked to, and we’ll put in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes, a YouTube video where they talk about this. And I can’t remember if they’re pulling up SDR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or bringing down HDR. That’s probably a technically inaccurate way of describing it, but you get the gist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember off the top of my head which way it’s going, but I presume it’s gotta be one or the other, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, televisions do the same thing. Tone mapping isn’t a term used in television settings as well. Televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do it, because as we discussed in the past when talking about TVs, you can master video content
⏹️ ▶️ John for television shows and movies up to a maximum brightness level of like thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John and thousands of nits and there’s no television that you can buy that can achieve those values. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you always have to map from, oh, the signal says this should be 4,000 nits. Well, your TV maxes
⏹️ ▶️ John out at 1600 nits. So we’re gonna have to take these brightness values and map them
⏹️ ▶️ John using tone mapping down to fit on your TV screen. and there’s tone mapping on like
⏹️ ▶️ John a per frame basis, on a per scene, there’s tone mapping information that can come with the content,
⏹️ ▶️ John video game consoles can provide tone mapping information to the television set based on what they know of the content
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re generating, lots of different ways you can do this. Also, SDR is supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to max out at some incredibly low value, like the actual official like NTSC television standard, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, I don’t know, someone’s gonna write and tell me I get it wrong, it’s like 300, 350 nits, it’s way
⏹️ ▶️ John less bright than you would think. most television sets when showing quote unquote SDR will show it
⏹️ ▶️ John brighter than the spec. They will show it at 500 or 600 just
⏹️ ▶️ John because brighter looks better. So already most of the time you see regular SDR
⏹️ ▶️ John on a television set and on a monitor for that matter because the monitors go up to like 500 nits or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the XDR I think is five or 600 nits for non-HDR content. You’re already
⏹️ ▶️ John tone mapping up to make it a little bit brighter even though it’s not technically correct. So it could be that they actually
⏹️ ▶️ John do kind of to meet somewhere in the middle. Because I think if you tone mapped SDR up to HDR levels, it would look
⏹️ ▶️ John weird, but you don’t want to kill all the HDR stuff. This topic is way more complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John than my understanding of it, obviously. I’m just telling you the basics is like what televisions do with picture, but like the whole world
⏹️ ▶️ John of color spaces and lookup tables and color correction and tone mapping is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John way more complicated when you’re an app like Final Cut. But I kind of wish it did, but like iMovie does, which is like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what you’re doing, just throw the video in a big pile and it’ll handle it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s what this is doing now. It just it wasn’t doing that before
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s got a checkbox that said automatic color conform Which mostly does it for you again as long as that checkbox is
⏹️ ▶️ John checked by default But even I movie has some weird stuff like in my in my the tiny bit of video editing do her like
⏹️ ▶️ John for my destiny Videos I had to Google to figure out like I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t you know My PlayStation 5
⏹️ ▶️ John records at 60 frames per second and my PlayStation 4 recorded at 30 It’s like great now I can make 60
⏹️ ▶️ John FPS videos and I could not figure out why no matter what I did in iMovie it was always 30
⏹️ ▶️ John frames per second. And the secret is the first clip that you put in,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that’s documented somewhere and I probably could have guessed it or figured it out, but I had to Google to make sure, like
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t and I couldn’t figure it out. It’s like, just make sure the first clip is 60. And then from that point
⏹️ ▶️ John on, as you chuck clips in, the whole movie will be 60, even the 30s won’t screw it up or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So do what I mean, or magical do everything for me, can also be confusing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe not as confusing as the giant mess of controls this Final Cut Pro.
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Meme explanation for olds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, Marco, you stupid. Okay. What’s what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God, this stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ John you talked about this last show, Marco, I had no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when I saw it, because you got the number slightly wrong. But when I saw the correct numbers, I vaguely recall
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing that somewhere. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously, I don’t think I’d ever seen this. It was mean, but funny. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a handful of people wrote in with the Know Your Meme page, or entry, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For nine plus 10 equals 21, Marco refused to play along with me, I’m very sad, but I’m sure using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the magic of logic, he will clean that up to make both of us sound smart.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s only so much I can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s mostly made for editing music. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco point is- This is far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re interested in the history between 9 plus 10 equals 21, it’s a very short, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was Vine originally, it’s all of like 10 seconds. And maybe Mark will drop it in, who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did not think it was funny. I just thought it was mean, like to the kid. I don’t… Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s me as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t like this meme either. It’s vaguely upsetting to me. First
⏹️ ▶️ John of all, memes of little kids is not great, because
⏹️ ▶️ John No little kid should be in a meme and then it’s like it’s mean spirit on top of that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, not a fan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like yeah I I’m like you know I like memes where it’s you know like like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much everywhere It’s gonna be hot like nice simple. You know dumb, but but like not punching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down. I don’t think at least
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah Dog startled by a stuffed animal that kind of thing yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however However, I am glad that I at least am now aware of what all of the children here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are talking about.
Pizza follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness. And then in the defense of John of Bleeker Street, there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a comment on Reddit. The Ex Lurker writes, I went here during my last trip to New York on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey’s recommendation. It was incredible. The white pizza was probably the best I’ve ever had. And apparently that was no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey secret. There was a lineup down the street, even at 8pm. Quick side note, I find an 8pm dinner to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hilariously late, but I don’t think that’s really true of Manhattan. But nevertheless, the Ex Lurker continues as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey party of two. We got patio seats within a few minutes. Thanks thanks to the wonderful service and staff, I’d say they made the experience just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as the food itself. I also got a, I got tooted at, which is, hmm,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I got tooted at, and some, I couldn’t put my hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. I couldn’t, it was weird to sing Mastodon on Ivory and on the website
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Memory Serves, but definitely on Ivory. I could go back about a week in my mentions, and then it jumped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like two months ago. I don’t know what the deal was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but. It’s fine, it’s Federation, we’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s all fine. I apologize, I can’t cite the toot, and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know who tooted, but whoever smelted Delta to my right, hey-o!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, somebody wrote to me and said, I went to John’s years ago with my wife,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we are still talking about it to this day. So, maybe not gold belly, maybe a little exceedingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive, maybe it doesn’t travel the best, but if you happen to be in Manhattan, check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the follow-up to smelted Delta? Is it supplied, denied it, supplied it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, whoever smelted Delta, Whoever made the rhyme committed the crime is the one I’m used
⏹️ ▶️ John I think whoever denied it supplied it. It’s a slant rhyme, but you know. There may be
⏹️ ▶️ John some regional variations here.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s more. There’s probably a Wikipedia page that lists them all. I guarantee you there are more.
“Report bugs effectively”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so we were talking earlier about how Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey likes to edit podcasts and he likes to make it easy to just clip out an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that somebody said. Marco, I’m going to make it easy on you. You’re just, you’re going to have to cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next five minutes of me saying, what the f*** Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ John What the f***? Why are you angry, Casey? Let me save you from yourself. Why are you angry?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I don’t need to be told how to report bugs effectively. I need them to respond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to bugs effectively.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, this was bad. No, no, but so they’re not mutually exclusive. So this, what he’s talking about is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John posted this document that contains a bunch of information about how to report
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs effectively. It’s making Casey angry for reasons that are explicable if you understand
⏹️ ▶️ John human nature and or know Casey, but,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, but looking at the documentation, like of how to file bugs effectively.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s well-written documentation that’s mostly good advice. Now, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John frustrating when there is another problem with the bug reporting system that we’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John many times on here, but like, but this part of like, hey, if you, for people who want to report a bug,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s our sort of best practices. These will help people get their bugs fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John better because the more information you can supply, the better you can supply it or whatever, if you were round trips,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, this is all good. Even if it’s not the part of the system
⏹️ ▶️ John that we think needs the most work, it is a good thing. Apple should have this. This documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John should exist. And the things it says, I mean, I just mostly just skimmed it but the things it says are sensible
⏹️ ▶️ John and straightforward and well-written. So I’m not gonna fault Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John for making this documentation. If anything, if you wanna complain about something, Casey, you can say, why didn’t this documentation already
⏹️ ▶️ John exist? Because it seems like a basic essential thing that a big company like Apple should have, and who knows, maybe they had an old version
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, and this is the new version. It’s just frustrating because we think the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is not on our end. The problem is not that we’re not good at reporting bugs, Apple, you’re not good at responding to
⏹️ ▶️ John our bugs. But I think they are two separate things. So I pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ John applaud the creation of this documentation. It doesn’t really do much to help
⏹️ ▶️ John with the other side of the equation, is once we’ve given you a beautiful bug report that follows all
⏹️ ▶️ John your best practices, happens after that. And that’s why we’re still mad about, but I don’t think you should transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John the anger over that process to this documentation, because this documentation should
⏹️ ▶️ John exist and should be good. And it does exist. And I think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand everything you just said. I hear you and feet all of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right in the ear, right in the ear, because this is so obnoxious. Are you kidding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me with this? Like, yes, John, I do understand. And I genuinely, I do agree with with what you’re saying. I honestly do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this is so tone deaf and so obnoxious. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put it in the show notes when I work, so in the mornings, Wednesday mornings, I work on the show notes and I try to get most of it squared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away then so I don’t get distracted while we record. And what I put in the show notes is, beatings will continue until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morale improves. Because that’s basically what they’re saying here. Like, no, no, no, we are flawless, perfect people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that have no issues on our side. But all you frickin idiots over there, let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me help teach you how to make my job easier. Like, come on. Like, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I agree with you. I get what you’re saying. You are right. I’m not, as much as I joke.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even organizationally, the people who are empowered to write this documentation probably have no power over
⏹️ ▶️ John when and if bugs are responded to, you know what I mean? Like, the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John team is not the same team that, like, triages feedbacks, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean? Totally. But it’s just so tone deaf. Like, even though everything you said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is true, and as much as I’m giving you a hard time, Like it is true and I do agree with you. And this is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey useful documentation. It’s not too long, it’s not too wordy. It’s pretty good. And it’s aesthetically nice to look at.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has a pretty easy URL. I forget what it is off the top of my head, but it’s not a bad URL. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like so unfair and so obnoxious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that first of all, of all the things Apple’s documenting, this is what you’re choosing to document. How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about you document any of the 8,000 f***ing APIs that just say-
⏹️ ▶️ John Other documentation does appear. What was the recently they redid a bunch of documentation and did a really good job on it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s fair. And they’re getting better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are getting better. I should give them credit in the sense that they are getting
⏹️ ▶️ John better. I mean, I don’t know if they’re getting better, but all I’m saying is they are doing other documentation. This is not the only
⏹️ ▶️ John documentation that they’ve done recently. They have done
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a bunch of other documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s not. But it’s just read the room, people. Read the room. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much more you could have done here. Cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco because I’m gonna keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going. No, like Apple has a profound inability to read the room so often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is this is one of those times and and look I think both sides of this are true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am sure Apple gets thousands and thousands of bug reports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are totally you know non-actionable because they’re badly written because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re incomplete because they don’t have required information. There are definitely people in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who who have a problem in their hands of these bug reports that are coming in many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them are not good enough that we can actually act upon them or give a useful response and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco therefore we should tell people hey maybe try to do it this way so that is totally valid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but when good people file good reports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are so often either ignored or dismissed in a hurry without respect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the person who wrote them or the time they took that it’s a slap in the face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to those of us who have ever done that because it seems like they are failing to read the room. You know, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they get tons and tons of bug reports that need improvement. Also, when you file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correct bug reports, you constantly are reminded by Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either via inaction, and in most cases that’s the, you know, you can file an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug report. Give your cyst diagnosed, give your sample project that demonstrates the issue every single time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give all the information you need. And as far as you can tell, no one has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever even looked at it. No one has ever even run your sample project. No one, no one ever responds. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stays open forever. The vast majority of the bugs I file stay open forever with no commentary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or response ever coming back my way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am fully aware, Apple people, before you set me on fire, I am fully aware that there can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be internal discussion on the bug that I will never see. And for various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons involving, you know, security concerns, but mostly just Apple’s culture. For various reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the barriers are set up in place such that I will, as the bug filer, typically not see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that’s being discussed behind the scenes about my bug. The problem is, the processes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have in place, dear Apple bug people, have two massive problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number one, your secrecy dial is set too conservatively, and rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than ever tell us that even you’re looking into it, we see status
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open response none forever that’s problem number one so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so we can’t tell if you’re looking at our bugs and frankly it seems most the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re not problem number two I’m sure dear Apple person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that your team deals well with bugs your team takes them in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and you know go they go through whatever the screener processes and when they get to your team
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am sure your team runs those sample projects and actually reads the bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actually tries to act on them and doesn’t just have an auto responder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that says every time there’s a new beta please verify this is still the case in the beta and if you don’t do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within like you know two days it automatically closes the bug I’m sure your team doesn’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately many other teams do and so that’s the experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get the vast majority of the time is either we get no response or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get a response that suggests that the person who is making this response if it’s even a person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just a script their goal is to close as many bugs as quickly as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible doing as little work as possible and so they’re trying it’s almost like look I have a child
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that child sometimes does not want to do something say you know eat a new food
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or do homework you know whatever the case you know something kids don’t want to do kids that don’t want to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will often try to find some little tiny technicality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they think will cancel their ability to have to do the big thing they don’t want to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if it’s not really relevant or even if it barely is relevant it can be easily fixed. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, this piece of, you know, broccoli tucks this lentil over here, therefore this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invalidates my need to eat any of the rest of the things on the plate. I’m going going back to video games. Like, that kind of logic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And And of course, that’s not valid. And this is why, like, you know, contracts that are written by lawyers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to have clauses that basically say something along the lines of, like, if some part of this contract is invalid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or unenforceable, it doesn’t make the rest of it invalid. Apple bug reporting does not seem to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a clause. And Apple bug reporting, it seems to be, if we can find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any reason to close this bug report, we are going to do that immediately and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with prejudice, if we’ve looked at it. Now, if we haven’t looked at it, as I said, most of my bug reports just stay open forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you do look at it, it seems like the most common response I get is those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of auto-responders, like, please verify this is still the case in the newest beta of whatever, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then if I happen to be doing something else that week, and I happen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss the usually unspecified deadline of like, hey, you know what, I don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run the macOS beta, so I don’t actually know if this is still happening Mac OS or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I happen to miss that few day period that they said that they seem to give you my bug is gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closed that’s it. It seems like they are constantly rushing through large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco batches of bug reports to close them. That’s different from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fix the bugs. See that’s the problem here. Whatever the incentives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are and the processes in Apple around bug reporting and bug filtering and bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing or whatever. The process seems to encourage mass closure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and invalidation over actually reading them and fixing the problem. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes, the very very very few times I’ve actually gotten like a real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco response to a bug, it sometimes, frequently rather, seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the person does not want to fix anything. They really just want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find a reason why they can ignore my bug report or why the thing I’m asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, which seems very reasonable to me, like, hey, this API should behave the way it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should by its name. Oftentimes the response is basically you’re holding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wrong or we don’t think it should behave that way because that would be difficult or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, they it’s like, oh, you don’t use this API, go use this old deprecated one instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well that’s that’s not really a response that I can really use because it’s deprecated. There’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so often that’s that’s been the kind of responses I get. Usually nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but when I do get responses it’s either been seemingly automated or somewhat dismissive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and trying to look for an excuse to not do work and to close the bug as quickly as possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can totally see how a large engineering organization can create
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a system that has this dysfunction. Because of course, you optimize for the metrics that you have to work with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is somebody’s job to go through bug reports. They develop an incentive, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco implied or not, that they should go through as many as possible and try to close as many as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is an engineering team’s job that when bugs get assigned to them, they should probably look at them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and verify them and if they’re real bugs, schedule them for some kind of priority to get fixed and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually fix them. However, it sure is a lot easier, especially when you’re under crunch time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is all the time, it seems a lot easier if you can just find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason why you don’t have to fix them, then we can just close that report and move on with the things we actually need to do to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this crunch time or the feature we actually thought was cool or whatever feature our boss is telling us has to be done by the end of the week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s not that our bug reports are all badly written. I’m sure many of them are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not that Apple never responds well to bug reports, because they occasionally do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s that giant fat middle where the well-written, well-supported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug reports are so often, as far as we can tell, either ignored or dismissed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for reasons that seem like crappy engineering management to us.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s some text that Casey pulled out of the thing here that is actually vaguely relevant to that. It says,
⏹️ ▶️ John please note, as an issue is being worked on, we can’t provide status updates until a fix is
⏹️ ▶️ John available in beta software, in a beta software update for everyone, or a different resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John has been identified after completing the investigation of the issue. So they’re basically saying, we’re, we
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t tell you anything about it. Don’t ask us when it’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, no, no, no, no, no. That’s what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, but that’s not the reality. And the thing that it says it can’t be until basically until we,
⏹️ ▶️ John we think we have until So basically we have think we have fixed it. We put that fix in a beta release and that beta release
⏹️ ▶️ John is released to everybody who is on the beta program. And only at that point can they provide
⏹️ ▶️ John an update to the feedback, which seems extremely, extremely bad. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve all noted that happening. Like the only thing you hear from them most of the time is like, oh, check if this is fixed in the
⏹️ ▶️ John beta. And Marco always thinks that means that someone’s going through and just closing all the bugs and asking if they’re fixed. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it could also be that this process that they’ve just described in this document is happening, which is, well, they were working
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, and they did implement a fix, and they did put that fix in the beta. And now the only thing they’re allowed to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is push whatever button that causes a boot to kick over a fishbowl that pours water onto a cat
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey over a wire. It eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John causes someone to hit a text expander macro that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John check if this is fixed in B287657432, which you just have to know is Mac OS Venture 13.4.1,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they won’t say that. They’ll just give you a bill number as if you have them all
⏹️ ▶️ John memorized. And as if you’re running MacOS, beta’s all the time. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John this is useful because it is official Apple process documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John of a bad process. And the bad process is we can’t provide status updates. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you could say that means like we can’t tell you how it’s going. But it also kind of reads as what we experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John is you just won’t hear anything. And what you would like to happen is a back and forth with a human being who
⏹️ ▶️ John is working on this problem clarifying, you sure X, Y, Z, and did you think about blah, blah, blah? And so you said
⏹️ ▶️ John you did that, but in your sample project, we do this, but does it work when you do that? And what are you actually trying to do? And why do you need this feature? And why do
⏹️ ▶️ John you think it should work that way? Back and forth, back and forth, you know, like how bugs work in functioning software
⏹️ ▶️ John projects, right? And that process can be the special public facing,
⏹️ ▶️ John totally separate from the internal discussion, blah, blah, blah thing, because of Apple’s weird secrecy thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple wants to have the weird secrecy thing and the division between radar and feedback and all that, fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s on them, but it doesn’t mean, okay, but now we can never communicate with you. No, now you have to have two
⏹️ ▶️ John separate areas of communication, the private one that’s for all the Apple people, and the public one with,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the person who reported and experiences the bug, because it’s important to communicate with them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s important to, you know, like talk about the bug maybe before you even
⏹️ ▶️ John try to fix it, because maybe like you’re thinking about a way that you think it should be fixed, or you think it might be fixed by this
⏹️ ▶️ John other change or whatever, but that’s the time to communicate with the reporter. And I have seen that happen occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John where they will communicate and say, well, why is it that you wanna do this or whatever? But this document makes it seem
⏹️ ▶️ John like, actually, that should never happen. You just report a beautifully formatted bug report, and then you hear nothing until we
⏹️ ▶️ John say, test this in the latest beta. And that’s not a good process because skipping that whole middle
⏹️ ▶️ John portion where you discuss the bug may mean that you, like, maybe, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the bug wasn’t written clearly enough. Maybe you wrote it with some context that is that was in your brain, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not in their brain. And maybe even though you had a sample project, they think they understood how you wanted it to work, but you weren’t entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John clear how you wanted it to work in the sample project. So they quote unquote fixed it according to what they thought the bug
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying that can happen even in really well written bug reports with really well
⏹️ ▶️ John created sample projects that are very clear. So sometimes, you know, software is complicated and sometimes it’s just a misunderstanding.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why you have to have communication. Ideally, before you dive in and say, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know how I’m going to fix this typey typey typey, like before you do that, make sure you understand the bug. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John only way you can do that is talk to the person who’s reporting it or the multiple people who are reporting it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are these people all reporting the same bug? Maybe this person thinks API should behave this way. This person thinks it should behave that
⏹️ ▶️ John way. And then internally you think it should behave a different way. Like, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John exhausting and how much more difficult it makes everybody’s lives. Obviously it makes our lives difficult or frustrating because bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t fix, But I think it makes lives more difficult for the people writing the software as well, because they are
⏹️ ▶️ John cut off from us just as we are cut off from them. They can’t reply to us. Apparently, they’re not empowered
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that they can reply on the internal thread and they can all discuss it. But it’s like they’re all discussing, you know, a thing a bug
⏹️ ▶️ John that you reported, but you’re not allowed to be in the room. And it’s I wonder if they talked to each other. I was like, man, if
⏹️ ▶️ John only the person who reported this bug could tell us what they meant instead of arguing back and forth about it. I think they meant this
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think they’re in that. But why do you think they want this? Do they have discussion threads internally where they’re like debating? It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John debating what the founding fathers thought or something when
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like George Washington is standing just
⏹️ ▶️ John outside a glass window saying, I’m out here, but you can’t hear him because it’s soundproof glass. I’m out here. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John ask me. I’m right here. Nevermind. That doesn’t freaking matter what the founding fathers thought because that’s stupid. Anyway, that’s the analogy
⏹️ ▶️ John I came up with. I’m sorry. Like we’re here. You’re there. Like we should
⏹️ ▶️ John communicate. And if it has to be in some weird, you know, regimented secrecy preserving
⏹️ ▶️ John way, so be it. that just means you need more staff and more people to do that type of thing. Oh, that’s too cumbersome
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. Well, then get rid of that and just trust your engineers to be able to hold their tongues when
⏹️ ▶️ John discussing things. I don’t know, like whatever the solutions, this isn’t it. But like but this documentation like this is good
⏹️ ▶️ John because. If you ever, you know, encounter
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple person and discuss this, it’s difficult to pin this down because we don’t know what’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John going on and they always think they know what’s really going on, but they really don’t because we’ve talked about in the past, people within
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple don’t have a full view of Apple either. They have a bigger view than we do on the outside for sure, but they can only
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of see their portion of the company, their portion of their
⏹️ ▶️ John project or whatever. And we can only see the tiny portion of the bugs that we throw over the wall. But something like
⏹️ ▶️ John this, where some group is empowered to write documentation that describes
⏹️ ▶️ John some part of the bug process for the whole company, like this document is not just for like one framework for
⏹️ ▶️ John SwiftUI, for you know, this is this is not API platform, anything
⏹️ ▶️ John specific, this whole company. So whoever wrote this, the responsibility was described what
⏹️ ▶️ John good feedback is supposed to be like for developers. And in that documentation, they said, we can’t provide status update until
⏹️ ▶️ John fixes available in a beta software update. Right? So now you’ve got sort of like hard evidence proof,
⏹️ ▶️ John it says, well, and the official Apple documentation on the process that they follow, this is what it says. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John think this is bad. And it’s harder for them to say, Oh, that’s not how it works in my group. I’m like, look, I’m just going by what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s own documentation said. It’s easier to argue against this because otherwise, we’re just saying, well, I tried
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing and he was my personal experience. And I was like, that’s just an anecdote. On average, we do a really good job or
⏹️ ▶️ John in my group. It’s good. And by the way, on the whole, like within my group, we do good on feedback. The
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is, obviously, we don’t get to pick as developers which bugs we encounter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like we don’t get to say, I want to make sure I encounter bugs in the group that’s really responsive. We don’t we don’t get to pick.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I’m not even using that framework. Maybe that framework doesn’t have any bugs. Maybe I don’t encounter any, oh, that has bugs. It doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco any bugs that I encounter,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? When you’re a developer, you can’t choose
⏹️ ▶️ John which API will do something unexpected based on how responsive you think
⏹️ ▶️ John the group is inside Apple. So, and again, when you’re inside Apple, all you can do is be responsive in your group.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t, as a rank and file developer, somehow fix this feedback system internally. But
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere in Apple’s org chart, there are people who do have the power and
⏹️ ▶️ John responsibility to oversee this process. And if I met one of those people, I would have a little note card
⏹️ ▶️ John with this thing on it and say, see this highlighted passage here? This doesn’t work for me for the following reasons. And if they
⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh, that highlighted passage is not actually how it works, I’ll say, well, maybe you should find the person who wrote this documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s supposed to apply to the whole company because apparently it’s not true. Something is wrong here. Either this documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John is incorrect or you are incorrect about the policy that your company follows. Or the third thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is you can say, this is how it works and we think this is the best way it works and then we’ll just kind of, you know, we
⏹️ ▶️ John had an impasse there because they really think this is the best way it should work. I think they should talk to more developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what Marco keeps saying when he does read the room. He’s basically like, you know, have you
⏹️ ▶️ John talked to enough developers to understand how we feel about the process? Is it working for
⏹️ ▶️ John us as developers? So separate from, is it working for you, Apple as a company and as, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the individual engineers, I think if you read the quote unquote room at
⏹️ ▶️ John WWC, if you had as many developers as possible in the room at the same time, and you actually talked to them about how
⏹️ ▶️ John the feedback process is working, I think what you would get is a net negative sentiment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And again, the thing is they’re choosing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. You know, what is it? We can’t provide status updates. Bullshit!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You choose not to, but you could. That is something you are capable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of doing. And the other thing that drives me nuts is I know a lot of people at Apple that have been third-party developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they justifiably for a moment anyway, really, truly understood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it was like to be on the outside, but then they get inside and they see how the sausage is made and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suddenly excuses are made for this. I don’t care. I am not on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand. And I think it was Marco going on about this earlier and he’s, he’s exactly right. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they get an unfathomable amount of feedback. More than I could possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imagine. And I understand that that is a very big burden.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s not on us. That’s on them. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, jeez, it’s so hard to make all this money all the time selling all these iPhones. Like, yeah, I’m sure there are challenges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. That’s not our problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. And part of being a platform vendor is vending the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey platform, including making a platform, not a pile of sh**. And if you want us to help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you not make it a pile of garbage, then we need to be able to do that. And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so obnoxious for them to say, oh, excuse me, we would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it if you did your free labor in a way that was better for us, please and thank you. We’re not paying you for this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the last time we spoke about this, just a few weeks ago, a couple months ago, I feel like I should bill Apple at whatever the going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rate for an iOS contractor is, which years ago was like $150 an hour. I have no idea what it is now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should bill them for the time I write, filling out actually decent feedbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then… That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey works. No, it
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you’re frustrated, but that makes no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense! No, but like, I think it’s frustrating that, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you read this document and even if you give it the most charitable interpretation of of like, okay, sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple insists that they can’t tell me what’s going on with my bug until a beta version’s been released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might fix it, that’s totally understandable. It’s not, and they can change that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at any time to a large degree if they choose not to. But let’s set that aside for now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even that process does not happen consistently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have so many bugs that go back years that actually were eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed, that actually did, eventually, the problem I was reporting did get fixed. Status,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open, no response. So, yes, some bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it into the system and do get those, like, please verify if it’s fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this version of whatever. Some bugs do get that. Most of them still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t. Most of them still just stay open forever. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, part of the process works that way, But there are still substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken parts of the process that make it so that our view from the outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so often that filing bugs is a waste of our time. And it’s not because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re trying to be lazy, and it’s not because we’re trying to be negative, and it’s not because we’re attacking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your work personally, dear Apple engineer hearing me say this right now, we’ll get to that in a second. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the process has shown us, actions speak louder than words, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s actions as a whole, towards developers in this area, have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco largely failing us, largely dismissing us, and largely telling us that we are wasting our time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I know, you, you individual Apple engineer listening to this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you probably are very angry hearing this. Now some of you will be like, yeah, you know, yeah they’re right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish we could fix it, I’m trying to fix it or whatever. But many of you Apple engineers listening to this right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to be angry at us. Now, I’ve been feeling for a while, actually, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a larger cultural problem. Us podcasters and the commentary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the public versus you, the individual Apple engineer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You get mad at us a lot because you feel like we’re attacking your work. And I wanna be very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very clear. First of all, you don’t work independently of the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You, when we attack something that you work on, we are attacking the output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the company. And that is maybe partially your responsibility, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the whole that’s not on you and we’re not attacking you. Because your work is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being shown through the context of a giant multinational corporation that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t have, you know, good access into. We’re not talking to you, you’re not talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to us. There’s all this context around this. So I want to be very clear that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to attack individual engineers. You’re working within a system, and that system occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fails you and it occasionally fails me. Our job on the outside is to comment on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the work as a whole as we see it, as it gets out of the company,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the context of the company. You, dear engineer or bug screener at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who’s hearing this show, this isn’t your problem. This is the problem of the system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is much larger than you within the company that you work for and the processes and incentives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and realities of that system. So you, dear engineer, please don’t be mad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at us. We’re not attacking you directly. Rather, we’re trying to empower you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When we criticize the work of Apple or something about Apple, we are trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to empower the individual people inside the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to do their best work and get their best work out to us. And we’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that by making a stink in public. So the higher ups might feel some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat on this issue and that might help them decide, Hey, this is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking into or changing some policy or making some decision differently or allocating resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differently. Like that’s what we’re doing here on the outside. So again, I want you individual engineers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just on this topic, but on lots of topics. We hear about this here and there. We hear some really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hurt feelings. And I understand it hurts when people tell me my software sucks, I get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I really wanna be clear here that we’re talking about the company’s processes and the company in general. The way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use us is to let our arguments speak in ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t. Maybe you, for the good of your job, Maybe you shouldn’t be raising
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these concerns internally. I get that. You probably, you know, there’s a reason why I don’t work in big companies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t last very long, but there, you know, chances are we, we can say things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t, we can reach people that you can’t. So use us, use these arguments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to help make your department or your division or your project better and help convince
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the higher ups with all of our rage. And especially Casey’s rage, which there is much use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. use this to make things better for everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than taking it as a personal attack. Because I swear we don’t mean it as a personal attack on any individual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people or department there. Anytime we criticize anything about Apple, it’s not meant to be like, oh my God, that was my project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re directly insulting me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are trying to make things better that are the output of a giant company. And sometimes the best way to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for podcasters on the outside to make a big stink.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why you should wear your Mac Pro Believe shirts too. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know. Oh, here it is. There it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John One day a week maybe or like on special occasions or at certain times, especially if you work anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John near the Pro Mac hardware division, just put
⏹️ ▶️ John into your wardrobe rotation. I’m just saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you know, because you presumably have like shipment information forthcoming for the Ternus shirt, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You haven’t seen if that’s shipped, have you?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming that I just got my son’s Mac Pro Believe shirt came today. I know a bunch of people who’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten them. I didn’t actually look at the shipping. I mean, like, because I sent it to Apple Park,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it ever gonna actually make it to him? Who knows? Oh, of course not.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Of course not.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I was actually going to WWDC, I might deliver it in person, but you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of a large building. Like, do you think it’s kind of like, are they gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place it in the middle of the ring? Just like, here, Apple Park,
⏹️ ▶️ John boop. I mean, like executives. I’m assuming executives have people screening their mail, so people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John send them anthrax and stuff. So I’m assuming some, when they see like a big name, like, oh, mail
⏹️ ▶️ John to Tim Cook. If you have a picture on the leadership page, I’m assuming someone is going through the mail. And so it’s like sending
⏹️ ▶️ John something to just like the president White House. It’ll get to him. Will it? I mean, in a functioning
⏹️ ▶️ John mail, here is it, not that we care at all about this, but hey, if you know how the mail process
⏹️ ▶️ John works inside Apple, feel free to send us some anonymous email. Like when people send you mail, can you just send
⏹️ ▶️ John it to Tim Cook Apple Park? I’m almost certain if you sent an actual piece of snail mail Tim Cook at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Park, the main Apple Park address, it would make its way into the giant hopper that
⏹️ ▶️ John contains Tim Cook stuff. Would Tim Cook ever look at it? I don’t know. But it’s not like they’d be like, Tim Cook, I don’t know who this is. Throw
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the garbage. It doesn’t have an office number on it. We can’t deliver this. Return to sender. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to figure it out. And so I figured John Turner is similar. Oh, my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, I would like to—I think we need to move on because it just makes me ragey. I don’t know if you noticed, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do want to echo what Marco said. This is, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I’m using the word wrong, but I think it’s a political problem. I think both Marco and John have pointed out that clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is not incentivized to fix this in a way that’s compatible with third parties.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that doesn’t mean it’s any one individual contributor’s fault. While I take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of fault, or I have a lot of complaints with this whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t mean to complain about any one individual person. And I know, because I’ve exchanged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emails with people on the inside that are desperately trying to change this and make it better. But unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rank and file can’t really turn a ship this big. And arguably, even the Federighis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the world, it’s hard for them to turn a ship this big. So I get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s hard. I also get that I don’t get how hard it is. But golly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just so infuriating from the outside. It just hurts. It hurts because without third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers, this platform is not what it is. I mean, yes, it is an amazing platform. iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPadOS, macOS are amazing platforms, but without third-party software,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they ain’t that great. And so I feel like, you know, it’s just, we keep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turning another cheek. And at one point, I would love to not have to do that.
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Marathon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, turn my frown upside down, even though I really don’t care about video games very much. Tell me about the new developments
⏹️ ▶️ John Ah, so, Vidja Games. This was an announcement that probably
⏹️ ▶️ John came as a surprise to people who aren’t obsessively following the company Bungie, but I am obsessively
⏹️ ▶️ John following the company Bungie because they’re the makers of Destiny, that game I play all the time, except for now when I’m playing Tears of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Kingdom. But yeah, so they have announced a
⏹️ ▶️ John new game. The new game is Marathon, which is a name that may be vaguely familiar to you if you
⏹️ ▶️ John are an old school Mac gamer. I guess I have to start by explaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, was that that was the game, like the Mac game that was available.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I have I have a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John book full of games. That was a classic, you know, that big book about like shareware Mac stuff. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of surprising number, but it’s a very small community. So Why was marathon important way back in the day?
⏹️ ▶️ John Max that thing that marker just did that happened all the time PC users That wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually true. There was a lot of really cool games on max It was a very small and weird community
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing that was true was hey You know that big new game that you heard of Almost all the time that
⏹️ ▶️ John big new game that everyone is talking about would not be available on the Mac There were exceptions and marathon was one of them and so
⏹️ ▶️ John was missed for example Which is you know made on the Mac for the Mac, but also shipped on other platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John But most of the time you couldn’t play the big new game. And nowhere was that felt more than in the early
⏹️ ▶️ John days of PC first person gaming when Doom came out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wolfenstein and then Doom. And you know, if you were the right age of, you know, a teen, preteen
⏹️ ▶️ John around the time that Doom was coming out and you were a Mac user, you knew that Doom existed.
⏹️ ▶️ John You wanted to play it. You couldn’t play it because you had a Mac and your friends had Doom on their PC
⏹️ ▶️ John and first person shooters were the popular genre because there was like a genre defining set of games
⏹️ ▶️ John from id software. And there’s a reason that that genre still exists. Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John is a first person shooter, so it’s still going strong. It is a very appealing popular genre for
⏹️ ▶️ John a reason. And that was the beginning of it. And you felt left out of it as a Mac user, because all your friends had doom.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you didn’t. Part of that was like, oh, color on the Macs was not as common as color on
⏹️ ▶️ John PCs because they could have, you know, disgusting EGA screens with rectangular pixels and well cga
⏹️ ▶️ John had rectangular pixels i forget which
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one anyway the pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John are really big and they were i don’t know i joined at vga yeah cga was all purple and green
⏹️ ▶️ John ega looked a little better vga had a reasonable number of colors but still anyway um so
⏹️ ▶️ John there was the the lack of color was one problem but the other one is that you know the mac was an entirely different api
⏹️ ▶️ John for doing stuff and there were very few max and very few people had them they were really expensive so no there was no doom
⏹️ ▶️ John for the mac until much much later and it was a bad port. Um, but what
⏹️ ▶️ John the Macs did have a little bit later was a game called Marathon, which is a first-person
⏹️ ▶️ John shooter that was only available on the Mac made by a company called
⏹️ ▶️ John Bungie that was filled with Mac nerds that made games for the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and they were not very well known. They had made a couple of games before that. They were also kind of first-person eba
⏹️ ▶️ John with a bunch of other stuff around there. Even Marathon was not really the full Doom experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember one of the things that Marathon did is because it had to run on a Mac, which had pixels that were not
⏹️ ▶️ John the size of boulders, if you just made like, what was Doom’s resolution? It was like 300 by, whatever the name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably 320 by 240.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, 640 by 480 divided by two basically. No Mac screen ran at that resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you tried to make something fill like the smallest color screen available for the average
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, which is probably around 640 by 480, although there was a little bit smaller one for the LC.
⏹️ ▶️ John You would be slinging more pixels than Doom was, and of course that would destroy your performance. This is before, you know, GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John acceleration, it was all CPU stuff. So what Marathon did was shoved the
⏹️ ▶️ John viewport of the first person game into a sub-window surrounded by a bunch of Chrome and
⏹️ ▶️ John crap that was cool and gamey looking Chrome, but the bottom line was like, look, we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do 30 frames per second at 640 by 480. We don’t have the computing power, neither can Doom on
⏹️ ▶️ John most machines when the game first came out. So we’re just gonna make a smaller window.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the things that had it going for it was, did have small pixels, you know, ran it in
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote full color. It had really cool, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John artwork and enemy design and gun design. All the things that Bungie is known for today for all of its games, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Halo series, Destiny, all that stuff, that started back then. So it was a cool game.
⏹️ ▶️ John It had an interesting and deep story which Doom did not have. and you’d run around and shoot
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Oh, and it also had a physics engine, which was incredible fun for the PVE experience
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re playing on a land against other people. It had rockets and other things with physics that could
⏹️ ▶️ John shoot and explosions would push things around. The PC didn’t get that until Quake when you could do rocket jumping and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. So Marathon was ahead of its time. People will say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it was a better game than Doom. Doom was more visceral. Doom had higher frame rates.
⏹️ ▶️ John It had that whole moving and shooting thing was better than Doom. Oh, and by the way, you could look up and down at Marathon
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. And of course, every Mac had a mouse, so you could use what they called mouse look, which also
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t become particularly popular until Quake, right? Marathon way ahead of its time, Mac exclusive.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why Marathon is loomed so large in the memory of Mac users, because it was a time when
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac was really getting it rubbed in its face that it didn’t have a lot of good games. All your friends are playing
⏹️ ▶️ John Doom, you can’t play it. You had to say, yeah, but we have Marathon. Eventually, we have Marathon.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even though you had that time in the sun with Doom, now Marathon is the best first-person shooter. It is better than Doom
⏹️ ▶️ John in all the possible ways, and even better than Quake, because Quake still has no story, and it’s all brown, and you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just trying to, like, at the time, like, I was in the PC side of that gaming space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s kind of like, you know, the Mad Men, like, I don’t think about you at all. Like, if there was this big perceived
⏹️ ▶️ Marco war going on by the Mac people with this game, As a PC person, I don’t think I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all because we just had all the other games and we were fine. We had games come out of our butts.
⏹️ ▶️ John We had too many. But that’s why Mac users love this game all the more because they could
⏹️ ▶️ John know their secret little treasure. It’s like, well, you may not know. You may think we have no games or whatever, but actually we have Marathon
⏹️ ▶️ John and actually Marathon is amazing. And actually Bungie is amazing. And they made a sequel and then a third one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Bungie was the first one to do this. So the second one was called Marathon 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the third one was called Marathon Infinity, which was the company’s way of saying we’re not making any more
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We’re just gonna increment the number to infinity to say, can we be any more clear? This is the last
⏹️ ▶️ John marathon game. Yeah, like it didn’t, it’s not as if that changed
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about the gaming market but it was a great thing. It was kind of in line with the whole thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac had always had. The Mac had always had, the games that were exclusive to the Mac were always weird and special
⏹️ ▶️ John in a particular way. Marathon was sort of the second generation of those. The first generation of those was way more
⏹️ ▶️ John numerous and that’s what that book I was talking about. I can’t remember the title of it, but it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John this guy who writes a bunch of books by interviewing authors of old classic software in
⏹️ ▶️ John narrow genres. And so he did a whole book on classic Mac games. They were amazing. I would always, whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John someone came over to my house and they were a console gamer or a PC gamer, I would show them my weird black
⏹️ ▶️ John and white Mac games and they would be blown away because they had never seen games like this they were so weird
⏹️ ▶️ John and so distinctive and so interesting in the way that like Apple stuff is the whole surprise and delight and
⏹️ ▶️ John the Type of person who makes games for the Mac type of person who is a Mac programmer is just
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit different or weird And so were the games It’s not like they were saying I’m gonna give up my PC.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t believe how many colors you remove from this
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, but like even even the fact that they were black and white They were just you know They couldn’t believe how finely detailed
⏹️ ▶️ John that everything was and very often back in the DOS days, like how good the sound was, because if they didn’t have a sound
⏹️ ▶️ John card on their PC, they just had the bleeps and boops or the big staticky text in that Lynx game where they tried to make people
⏹️ ▶️ John talk. It was, you know, it was impressive, but it was also a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John little sub-genre. So that’s why Marathon looms large in the minds of Mac users. And of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John Bungie would eventually go on to McHalo, which was debuted at Macworld, and then Microsoft bought Bungie,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was a terrible blow to Mac gamers everywhere. and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John history going on through that. Eventually Bungie broke away from Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Halo IP stayed with Microsoft and then another developer, was it
⏹️ ▶️ John three, four, three industries? I’m sorry, I’m not remembering off the top of my head. Some other company
⏹️ ▶️ John developed the next two Halo games and then Bungie of course went on to make Destiny, which I love, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Bungie retained the Marathon IP and a bunch of other IP, I believe. I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t keep track of where all of it is. I don’t think they have Myth anymore. I think take two has that. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John they have Oni or maybe they do. Anyway, they had the marathon IP. And Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John actually has references to marathon stuff buried in it as like Easter eggs and a little bit of the story continuity
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So today as part of the PlayStation showcase, oh, by the way, Bungie split
⏹️ ▶️ John from Microsoft, but then Sony bought them more recently. So Bungie’s been passed around. So far Apple has never bought them and I hope they never
⏹️ ▶️ John do because Apple has no idea what to do with Bungie. But Microsoft was a pretty good steward to Bungie and Sony I think
⏹️ ▶️ John will be a pretty good steward to Bungie because they’re good with their game developers as well. Anyway, Bungie
⏹️ ▶️ John just announced Marathon. No, not the original Marathon game remade or
⏹️ ▶️ John something like that. They are making a new game. Destiny fans have known that Bungie has been
⏹️ ▶️ John making this new game for years. And in fact, what kind of game it was was also known. And
⏹️ ▶️ John also the rumor was that they were going to reuse the Marathon IP. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the same as the first Marathon game. The first Marathon game was a first-person shooter with a story, it was a single player had a
⏹️ ▶️ John multiplayer component, um, and it’s set in a particular universe. Halo, by the way, also connects in
⏹️ ▶️ John that universe and has tons of references to marathon inside it or whatever. Um, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is what’s called known as an extraction shooter, which I think is a phrase that both of you have probably never heard before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, never. I have never played one. Uh, the most popular one, I sort of the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the standard bear for the genre is escape from Tarkov, which I have never played cause it’s a military style shooter. I’m not into those.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s kind of you’ve played Fortnite. Both of you, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope. Nope. I know of it, but I’ve never played it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s some kind of dancing game, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Fortnite is what they call a battle royale thing. Neither one of you seen battle royale, so that doesn’t help you. Correct. But it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John open world multiplayer game where you have a big map, you chuck a bunch of human players into it and they have some kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and the battle royale ones, they all fight each other. There’s one person left in an extraction type game.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have a goal to get to some point for extraction, there’s other players there,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you kill someone they drop their stuff, if you die you drop your stuff and lose it potentially permanently.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s, you know, it’s just twists on that type of genre. That does not sound like a
⏹️ ▶️ John first person game where there’s a story where you go through this sci-fi story and like that’s not like that at all. Halo was like that. Halo
⏹️ ▶️ John and Marathon were very similar. If you don’t know what I’m talking about with Marathon, have you played Halo? The first person campaign?
⏹️ ▶️ John Marathon was like that. was the first Halo essentially. Same developer,
⏹️ ▶️ John very similar storyline, lots of crossover there. So they’re taking the Marathon IP
⏹️ ▶️ John and the whole, you know, the universe, the enemies, if you look at the teaser trailer that we’ll link in the thing, if you know Marathon,
⏹️ ▶️ John you see some enemies, you see some text that you’ll recognize from Marathon. Like they’re taking that world and
⏹️ ▶️ John that universe and putting it into an extraction shooter. They said they’re going to have a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John more of a story type of experience to it than the average one and I’m sure they’ll have the bungee twist on it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but yeah, that’s the, the, when will it be ready? There’s no date. There’s just a teaser. The teaser doesn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John show any gameplay. The rumor was 2025, maybe they’ll hit 2024. Uh, the game
⏹️ ▶️ John is coming out for PS5, the Xbox series X and S and for PC. No Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John version. Uh, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are you serious? The, this thing that was the king of Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gaming isn’t going to be on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, after Microsoft bought them, the door kind of closed on
⏹️ ▶️ John Bungie really being a Mac game developer in any way, shape or form.
⏹️ ▶️ John Halo was eventually released for the Mac, but it was a port by a third party company,
⏹️ ▶️ John not by Bungie, and it wasn’t a particularly good port. Doom also came to the Mac, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it was not by id Software and it wasn’t a particularly good port. They’re not,
⏹️ ▶️ John they haven’t been a Mac gaming company ages, despite the fact that some of the people including one of the founder,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least one of the founders who like were there making marathon when it was four people
⏹️ ▶️ John in a little room on a bunch of Macs are still at Bungie and are still essentially running the company. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the world moves on. I think you know, when they were owned by Microsoft, them
⏹️ ▶️ John not making Mac games kind of makes perfect sense when they’re independent. Still makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ John because nobody plays games on Macs when they’re owned by Sony still makes sense because they’re owned by Sony. And why Why would you make a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John version? The only reason they’re making this on Xbox and PC or whatever is the same reason everybody does,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you want to hit most of the market. And if you hit those platforms, that’s most of the market.
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple was in any way competent at understanding the gaming market,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would be spending money, throwing money at companies like Bungie, at companies
⏹️ ▶️ John like Sony, at whoever to say, hey, you’re going to make a game that
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s going to hear about and everyone’s going to be playing. I know we don’t have a lot of Macs, but we do
⏹️ ▶️ John have reasonable GPUs. Could you make that game for the Mac? And they’re going to say no.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you say, well, what if we give you this many millions of dollars? And then they’ll say yes. Like, yes, that’s what it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. But of course, Apple doesn’t care about that. So that’s not going to happen. But that was the announcement today.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m excited by it. I don’t particularly care about extraction shooters. But I do
⏹️ ▶️ John trust Bungie to make a good one. And I do like Marathon. I’ll absolutely try this game.
⏹️ ▶️ John Destiny is not dead. Destiny is continuing. I Continue to play destiny. I’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John back to it when I’m done with Zelda, I suppose But I will give
⏹️ ▶️ John Bungie the benefit of the doubt and try this game. The trailer itself is pretty cool. It looks very different from
⏹️ ▶️ John Destiny it looks very different from the original marathon, but There is enough goodwill
⏹️ ▶️ John and memories of the old folks in the Mac community to make us us interested enough to fire up
⏹️ ▶️ John our Xboxes or Playstations or gaming PCs that we might have and try this game out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think any of us are going to be particularly surprised or disappointed that it’s not available on the Mac because
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, most people’s Macs don’t have enough GPU grunt. Mine does. Don’t have enough GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John grunt to play this game in even the lowest settings. But you know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just the way the world has gone in recent years with the Mac. So I’m excited
⏹️ ▶️ John by this. I’m ready to play the game, but I’m also excited for the next Destiny expansion. And I’m also excited to continue playing Zelda.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess I should finish Breath of the Wild at some point, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you don’t have to finish
⏹️ ▶️ John but you could, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I really enjoyed Breath of the Wild, but, uh, but I just put it down at some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, I think Michaela was a baby at this point. And so I was just completely overwhelmed and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just never really picked it back up. And, and I, I would like to finish it at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I guess I really enjoyed it.
⏹️ ▶️ John have Declan eventually pick it up and then you can play together with him. That’s true. Once he gets old enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to be interested and coordinated enough to do it, then you can be, you know, and if he’s not interested,
⏹️ ▶️ John away from Michaela to get old enough and coordinated
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey enough to, you know. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, he is interested, but we try to, you know, not park them in front of screens for hours a day. We’re still in that stage
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit, and it’s also a little bit of a complicated game for younger kids to
⏹️ ▶️ John not just play with it as a sandbox, but to actually like do things in it. But it’s fine to play with just a sandbox as well.
Playstation Q
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony had one more announcement. This is like some Sony, a bunch of Sony news and because Bungie
⏹️ ▶️ John is a Sony company, that’s why I was tied up in it. They kind of pre-announced, which is weird, this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re calling PlayStation Q, which is not gonna be the real name, which is a handheld device
⏹️ ▶️ John for streaming PS5 games. Everyone’s into like the Steam Deck. No, Steam Deck.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I got it right, Steam
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Deck. I just thought I got it
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. Yeah, not the Stream Deck, the Steam Deck. There’s one from Asus as well. They’re basically like handheld
⏹️ ▶️ John PCs for playing PC games on the go. And they’re really cool and interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony said, hey, we went in on that. But what they’re putting out is basically like a PlayStation 5
⏹️ ▶️ John controller, cracked in half with a screen wedged in the middle, which ergonomically I think is good because I like the PS5 controller.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not a game player. All it is is a way to stream games from your PS5.
⏹️ ▶️ John I occasionally do this from my bed on my phone or my iPad when I forgot to get something in Destiny. I’ll just do the remote play
⏹️ ▶️ John thing because it’s like a PS app on an iOS. And you can just, it will turn on your PS5 remotely, start
⏹️ ▶️ John it up, and then you’ve got little on-screen controls. And I just, you know, swipe a little on-screen controls and go do some chore I
⏹️ ▶️ John forgot to do in Destiny and then shut the thing down. This is like that, but it’s not an iPad or a phone. It has
⏹️ ▶️ John no smarts in it, like other than the networking and stuff like that. And you can only do it, you can’t do it, stream it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it streams over the internet or anything, but we wouldn’t actually know because it’s not a real product yet. But I think it’s really interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Switch and the Steam Deck and whatever that Asus thing are,
⏹️ ▶️ John so have made this a big enough market that Sony says we should have something in that space. And you know what? Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John did lay all the groundwork for it with the streaming stuff, and they should have something in this market. And I’m vaguely
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in this if it works over the internet. If it doesn’t, I probably am not interested in it. But I just thought it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, curious that Sony feels so much pressure in this area that they pre-announced a product that they don’t even have a name
⏹️ ▶️ John for, let alone a price or a date, just to say, hey, we’re doing this too, so don’t spend all your time
⏹️ ▶️ John on your Switch, play in Zelda, because we’re gonna have a way to play stuff in your bed too.
#askatp: Scroll “down”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. It has been a while. I am sorry for that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jesse Stiller writes, if someone was looking over your shoulder and says to you, scroll down, what direction do you assume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the person means? Are they asking to continue further down the page, perhaps reaching the bottom if you were to keep going? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do they mean they want the contents of the page to move downward, meaning you’re now seeing content that lies closer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the top of the page? I don’t think this is up for grabs. This is 100% move the contents of what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re looking at upward. So you are approaching the bottom of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. I think that’s the common answer, but the problem is context, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because this thing, if someone is looking over your shoulder and says to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John what if you’re on an iPad? And what if something is barely visible on the top of the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John but part of it is cut off by the top of the screen, and they reach their hand out and point at the screen a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit, and they say, scroll down, then they want you to pull down on the screen. It’s and what makes the context
⏹️ ▶️ John different there? Because it’s a touch device, because there is something that is kind of cut off at the top of the screen, because you know
⏹️ ▶️ John in the context of the conversation that that’s probably the thing they wanna see because whatever you said before that makes you understand, oh, they
⏹️ ▶️ John probably wanna see the thing that they can’t see all of, right? And because they reached out to the screen, maybe with their
⏹️ ▶️ John finger extended, all that would combine to let you as a regular human know without thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John what they mean is put your finger on the screen and slide it downwards revealing more of the top of the document. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in the absence of all that context, yeah, when someone says scroll down and you’re not on a touch device and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not, if all those things aren’t true or some combination of things aren’t true, they mean I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John see more of the document that’s lowered down, eventually getting to the bottom of it.
#askatp: Just drop in new SOC?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey StraysNod00 writes, why is it received wisdom in the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opinion space that it makes sense for Apple to skip a generation of Apple Silicon in desktop Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to save on the cost of re-engineering the internals on lower volume products? Why is putting an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M2 where the M1 used to be on an iMac any more complicated than a teenager slotting in a different CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a PC tower? What re-engineering do they need to do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ah, see this is, this question I think presupposes a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality of the old slotting a new CPU into a PC tower game, that was never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really actually the case. See? All right, tell me more. You could swap CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a self-built PC, you still can. However, at least in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the days that I was doing this, the socket would change. And what a motherboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what processors a motherboard could support would change every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so often. And so generally speaking, you could generally swap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any processor you wanted from a given family that was available at one time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for instance, like when the Pentium 7 comes out and it has four different clock speeds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can put any of those four clock speeds generally into most motherboards that would support the Pentium 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. But, when the Pentium 8 or the Pentium 9 would come out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes those same motherboards would not support those new chips. And there were lots of reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this. You know, simple physical stuff like the socket would change, or the thermal requirements or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power needs would change. But, one of the key things that would change, oftentimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what used to be called the North Bridge. The North Bridge was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip on the motherboard back forever ago. I know things are different now, but they’re not that different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The North Bridge was the chip on the motherboard forever ago that would include a lot of the high-speed interconnect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco components. So things like the AGP or graphics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slot interface, oftentimes the memory controller, any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high bandwidth stuff, stuff that was faster than USB or old slow ports, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster stuff than that. And over time, the way computer design went was we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started more and more integrating that kind of functionality into the chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the chip started including things like the memory controllers. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the high-speed interconnects like Thunderbolt interfaces, you know, stuff like that, PCI Express.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You put more and more of that stuff on the chip over time. So, what ends up happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, as, you know, back then, even a motherboard would only last maybe one or two generations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of processors. Now, so much of that stuff is on the chip itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’ve gone even further in that direction. So, when you talk about, like, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 or M2, whatever chips, So much is on that chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you update the chip, you do actually often need to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decent amount of reengineering of the surrounding board, the surrounding I.O. ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the components, maybe the display driver if it’s a laptop. Like, there are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant differences that come along with whatever new generation of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, memory controller, I.O. controllers, display controllers, like whatever new combination of all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exists, that actually changes a decent amount. The thermal characteristics will change, the power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco characteristics will change, maybe the number of ports it can support will change, or the abilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those ports will change, the displays it can support, you know, how fast it can drive those displays,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over what interfaces that can drive those displays. So much of that actually does change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they do a new SoC. So there actually is a surprising amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of re-engineering that has to happen to take advantage of all that. Now if you want, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could just slow down a lot of those advancements. They could just say, alright, you know what? We’re going to have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the M1 supports X displays and X amount of RAM and all that stuff, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M2 is going to support the exact same thing and it’ll just be 5% faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We could do that, but stuff moves faster these days and people’s expectations are high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whenever there’s a new version of HDMI, you know, 17 point whatever, NQ,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you will never use and that will only support half of what it claims to support anyway, whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a new version of all these standards, we expect Apple to be there on day one with support or to be competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least with the market as soon as they can be. So all that stuff, like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building on quicksand here, just like software. Like everything around them is changing. All the requirements are changing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They always want to try to just try to deliver the highest end stuff they can. Meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the both physical reality and largely the market for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgradable components and more modular stuff like motherboards that you could just drop in a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip in, that market is mostly gone. You know, there is still some of it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, a little bit of server, not even barely even there, a little bit in like the desktop enthusiast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and gamer spaces. But like most computers sold these days are phones, tablets, and laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of which are upgradable, none of which the market really demands to be very upgradable. So, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of is, it’s largely a thing of the past where you could update just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the processor and change nothing else around it. And it’s we’re better off this way overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because things move a lot faster now. Things are a lot faster now and our hardware is generally better
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s actually pretty awful about doing the things you described. Not so awful that they don’t do it at all, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John what ideally what you hope is if you’re going from M1 to M2, even if everything about the SoC
⏹️ ▶️ John was identical, would be like, well, but the M1 had supported this standard
⏹️ ▶️ John of Wi-Fi of Wi-Fi and that was a new version. So whatever machine we put the M2 in should support the new version of Wi-Fi, which
⏹️ ▶️ John means a new chip from Broadcom, which means new antenna, which means blah, blah, blah, whatever, you know. The new version of USB,
⏹️ ▶️ John a new version of Thunderbolt, like you said, new version of HDMI. When we say new version, Apple was shipping
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI 2.0 for years and years and years after 2.1 was out. So every time they put out a new Mac, we’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you’re updating the SOC, don’t you wanna update all the ports to be the newer version of the stuff on Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, nope, we’re gonna ship HDMI 2.0 again. So Apple is slow about doing that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but eventually they do it. They’re not still shipping USB 1.0. Like even
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has always lagged. Like how soon do they get USB 2.0? How soon do they get USB 3.3,
⏹️ ▶️ John super speed, whatever. But you know, we do want, we wish Apple would be even better about that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they do upgrade those components eventually. So every time there’s a new one, we want them to upgrade. The reason it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John we talk about it on a desktop Mac so much, as Mark said, they’re such a small market.
⏹️ ▶️ John when it comes time to do this, again, if the M2 was a drop-in replacement and they didn’t wanna change anything else, the first
⏹️ ▶️ John question you have is, okay, it’s drop-in replacement, but we’re not changing anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we can do it real quick, like anytime you put out any new product, there is a minimum amount of
⏹️ ▶️ John overhead that you have to do with like certifying with the FCC, certifying
⏹️ ▶️ John that your cooling solution still works for it because the M2 probably has different thermal characteristics than the M1, even if it
⏹️ ▶️ John is exactly the same quote unquote drop-in replacement, you know, making the new product,
⏹️ ▶️ John new skew, all the things that support it, any new parts you might need, you know, like just, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a minimum amount of that that goes with every product. And then you have to say, okay, if we just
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t only change the SOC, don’t change anything else. How compelling of a product is this versus the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 one that we’re selling? All right, so it’s five to 10% faster and has like, you know, a different
⏹️ ▶️ John video decode unit. Is this differentiated enough in the market such that we’re ever going to make
⏹️ ▶️ John back the money that we spend this like the minimum overhead it requires to make a sort of a no op new
⏹️ ▶️ John product that has no changes in it, right? Like say you just wanted to make the M1 and change
⏹️ ▶️ John literally nothing about it, but you change the name and it’s an all new product and you need to get it recertified with the FCC or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like, can we make that money back? Is someone gonna see this and say, oh, now I want
⏹️ ▶️ John that one. Either I skipped the M1 and now the M2 comes out a real one or is it gonna make M1 people
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade? An upgrade like that is so minimal, it’s not particularly compelling. it
⏹️ ▶️ John may not be able to make out a make back enough profit for Apple to pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John the overhead required to make the new product, which is why Apple tends not to do things like that. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John they do, especially if a product has been like languishing on the M one for ages and ages and ages and like, oh, we should eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John make an M two version of this. But the reason we think they’re not in a big hurry to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John with like, say the Mac Studio or something is it’s if it’s a newish machine and it has a processor in it that is currently
⏹️ ▶️ John actually pretty good. And there isn’t like, you know, we look at the the new one that would replace
⏹️ ▶️ John it just came out, you can squint and say, What would it be like to have, you know, m two max,
⏹️ ▶️ John max studio? Would it be that compelling of a product over this one? And would it be compelling enough to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John enough units to make up for its cost? And we on the outside look at that and say, I can understand why financially
⏹️ ▶️ John within Apple, they may do the math and say, this doesn’t actually make financial
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. And the customers for this product can wait for the the M3 version or
⏹️ ▶️ John something like that. We don’t like it, we wish they would, you know, essentially, even if it loses money,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just gotta do it because when you, my argument has always been, if you’re gonna make pro products, you just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to keep up with the times. You have to actually update to the new version of HDMI. You actually have to put a faster SD card
⏹️ ▶️ John slot in there. You can’t just keep using the old standards forever and ever and ever, especially on the pro lines because the pros care about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple does the math on that and says, I’m sorry, but the market is just so small, so,
⏹️ ▶️ John so small compared to our other products that we cannot justify the expenses. Even on the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about it. Why didn’t the iPads get updated to have like the camera in the new place and stuff like that? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the pencil’s in the way. Why didn’t they re-engineer the iPad Pro? Even the iPad Pro, the volumes are not
⏹️ ▶️ John enough for them to do a quote unquote total redesign of internals. And you know, this really would be a redesign because
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to move the stuff all around and do all like, even that product could not justify the redesign
⏹️ ▶️ John cost. And so the lesser iPad got a bunch of new stuff that the iPad Pros didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio sells way fewer units, I imagine, than the iPad Pros do.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, that’s why, that’s why we think that it is, why
⏹️ ▶️ John we understand why Apple does it, even if we disagree with it, and even if it was a drop-in replacement, which
⏹️ ▶️ John it almost certainly isn’t, because getting back to reality here, the M2 is not the same as the M1. It does not
⏹️ ▶️ John have the same thermal characteristics, and we do want them to fix all the stuff. Fix the stupid fan that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John noisy, do a better cooling system, update all of the ports and components and Wi-Fi things, And then we wait to see what they
⏹️ ▶️ John actually do. And they do like 50% of that. Well, you know, we didn’t change the cooling but it does have the better
⏹️ ▶️ John wifi. The USB is the same. The SD card is the same. The SSD is a little bit faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you think? I’m like, yeah, we’ll take it.
#askatp: Reboot your Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Soreb writes, how often do you reboot your Macs? Also given John’s exotic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey window arrangement, how does he maintain window arrangement continuity after a reboot?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would guess I reboot mine every two to four weeks, generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s no hard and fast rule. We’ll come back to John to talk about his window arrangements. Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how often do you reboot your stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whenever either there’s a software update that requires it or if Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really gets wedged in a really weird way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are some problems with launching stuff in the simulator or just debugging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just source kit or whatever in the background. There are some problems that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to require a reboot. So typically it’ll be maybe every few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, what’s your story? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not rebooting without any reason. and the reason usually doesn’t have anything to do with stability,
⏹️ ▶️ John to give an example of a time when I’m rebooting a lot frequently is when I was trying to debug that weird bug I have with the window
⏹️ ▶️ John moving around and stuff. Every time I would hunt down a piece of third-party software and reboot, I would reboot for
⏹️ ▶️ John good measure. If I’m about to reproduce it and do another sample or spin dump or assist diagnose,
⏹️ ▶️ John like when I made two test accounts that are just fresh accounts to try to reproduce the bug, I would reboot after I did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want it to be fresh. That’s obviously not a normal scenario. I’m rebooting there
⏹️ ▶️ John for the purpose of rebooting. Like, cause I want to say I made a change to the system that only take effect on reboots, so time
⏹️ ▶️ John to reboot. And I want a clean slate and I want to just, you know, reboot, reboot, like tons and tons of reboots
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to reproduce this bug that Apple’s never gonna fix. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that is an anomaly, but that’s an example of like, I reboot with a reason. I don’t reboot on a regular schedule.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t reboot for the hell of it. It’s only software updates or things that
⏹️ ▶️ John require reboot. Like, hey, I just removed some third-party extensions I don’t think I want to be sure they’re not loaded. I want to reboot
⏹️ ▶️ John and have a clean system. I can’t remember the last time I rebooted for
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of software problem. Back when I didn’t know what caused my weird window thing, I would reboot to get rid of
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And of course that would work because when I log back in, there’d be only one user logged in. I didn’t know that at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that was the last example I can think of when I would reboot to avoid a situation that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a bug that I was encountering that I found annoying. And I knew rebooting would quote unquote fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John As for Windows, any well-behaved Mac app should respect your window
⏹️ ▶️ John arrangement. Most of the apps I use on a daily basis do that. Some of them, by
⏹️ ▶️ John using the official Apple APIs, all of Apple’s frameworks on the Mac have some way for you to restore state.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when someone selects shutdown or restart
⏹️ ▶️ John and the app is told to quit, it can save the state of all the windows and where they are, and when you log back in, Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS itself, there’s even a checkbox you can check this Hey, when I log back in, I want you to
⏹️ ▶️ John reopen all the applications I had running before. And then each of those applications, the responsibility
⏹️ ▶️ John for restoring state is delegated to them. So macOS just said, Okay, I know you’re running apps, ABC and D,
⏹️ ▶️ John and launches apps, ABC and D. And then each of those apps, when it’s launched, is responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for restoring its state, such that you can restart and come back to your computer and
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen should look exactly the same, everything goes well. Obviously that can’t always be the case because say you had a web page
⏹️ ▶️ John loaded like the you know The front page of the New York Times when you come back in the new front page of the New York Times will be there
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t remember the old front page because it reloaded the page, right? Even apps like Chrome, which I’m assuming do not
⏹️ ▶️ John use Apple’s API to do this have a thing that says hey Chrome on startup What do you want me to do? And my
⏹️ ▶️ John answer is I want you to restore all the windows the same way they were before So if any app has an option to do that That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the option I pick and that’s how I do my window ranging and if an app doesn’t do that I tend
⏹️ ▶️ John not to use it or not to like it or seek out an alternative that does support it You know my text editor
⏹️ ▶️ John supports it text edit the default text editor supports that BB edit supports that All the
⏹️ ▶️ John other apps like the the IRC app that I’m in to be in the chat room It remembers its window position it remembers
⏹️ ▶️ John what channel I’m in when I launch the app It goes back to right where it was and you know I don’t actually have the checkbox check to relaunch
⏹️ ▶️ John all the apps because if I reboot I don’t want it to do that I just I can launch them myself when I rather have a clean slate but that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a choice. If I had that checkbox check and I rebooted right now, everything would come back to
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly where it is, except for audio hijack would not be recording. Uh, and I think zoom would
⏹️ ▶️ John not restore state. I think every other album running would.
#askatp: Sharing tons of photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally for tonight, Brian Coffey writes, I just went on a Disney cruise and took hundreds of pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many videos and want to share with my tech lazy family. I was shared albums are too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many steps for them to do. How can I send hundreds of photos to them privately over iCloud where all they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to do is click one link in an iMessage create iCloud link appears to have a limit?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea what the answer to this question is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always shared albums are the easiest. But it seems like the problem is not that they have a bunch of Android users. If
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone has iPhones, iOS share albums are the easiest way for people to see pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John that you wanna share with them. They don’t have to do anything. They just magically appear on their
⏹️ ▶️ John phones. Usually there’s a notification, they tap the notification and they can see the pictures. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the best way for tech lazy people to just deal with photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re trying to send them photos, how can I send hundreds of photos to them privately,
⏹️ ▶️ John so on and so forth? It sounds kind of like you want them to have the photos and not just like the reduced resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS shared albums thing. And by the way, iOS shared albums do have a limit. And I think it’s like 5,000 photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you’d have to make a new shared album every once in a while. But if your family
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t like iOS shared albums because it’s too complicated, I don’t know what to say. That’s the simplest solution I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John ever found. If the problem is that iOS shared albums don’t work because you want to give
⏹️ ▶️ John them the photos, like they have copies of the files, I’m like, well, how tech lazy could they be that they’re willing to accept 500 full
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution photos from you. But the answer to that is look outside of Apple. There
⏹️ ▶️ John are tons of services that do this in a cross-platform way. I don’t use any of them, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John have relatives who do. What are some of them like? SmugMug or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not Shutterfly. I don’t know, there’s a bunch of services like websites essentially, where you upload your pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John to the website and then you can click a button and it’ll send out an email to a bunch of people. And no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John what platform they’re on, they’ll be able to click that link in the email. that’ll open a web browser where they’ll be able to see
⏹️ ▶️ John all your photos and download the full resolution ones if they want to in a web browser on any platform, on any device,
⏹️ ▶️ John on a phone, on a tablet, on a PC, on a Mac. Most of those services you have to pay for,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that will solve your problem. But within the Apple ecosystem, if you’re just trying to let people see
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, get them signed up for our shared albums. And if the problem is they can’t figure out how to sort of subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John to your shared album, because that can be weird, just grab their devices. Like send the invitation, then grab their devices and say, accept, accept,
⏹️ ▶️ John accept, accept, accept, and then you’re done. This is the ultimate side of parent, grandparent type thing for like pictures of kids
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. You just chuck them in the album and then grandma gets a notification on her phone and she taps
⏹️ ▶️ John it and she sees baby pictures. It’s the best system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorted. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Rocket Money and Lickability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco begin, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, accidental They didn’t mean to,
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, accidental Tech Podcasts So
Callsheet pricing redux
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, what’s going on with your pricing? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t know. Um, you have, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have analysis paralysis. You have too many, too many different people with too many different opinions and you just can’t decide.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Honestly, that is 100% accurate. My current theory, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I don’t want to go on for another 20 minutes. Discussing this. We can talk about it next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. If we’re still interested, my current theory, which I would like you guys to comment on, but I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to, I don’t want to go on forever about it. But my current theory is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I spend money on things, be that media, be that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experiences, be that whatever, when I spend money on things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am most happy to do that when I am being met
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I am. So if I wanted to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, get takeout, it is easy to do so. It is easy and not hilariously overpriced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do so. You know, like DoorDash makes it reasonably easy to have food magically appear at my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house, but the app is okay. If there’s markups, which are understandable, like I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here to debate the, the, you know, whether or not DoorDash is good or bad, but. You know, it’s, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s all right. If I want to buy a piece of media, I don’t want to have to think about how I get it. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do I watch it? Where does it arrive? How you do, is it, am I renting it? Am I buying it? You know, I just, I want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey met where I am. And with that in mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are people who would have no problem paying a subscription and would like to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And certainly, selfishly, I would like people to pay for a subscription to CallSheet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there are people that maybe don’t want a subscription, are quote-unquote allergic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to subscriptions, or understandably have fatigue with subscriptions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, as we discussed last week, you know, there’s an argument to be made, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t jump on me yet, just hold on. There’s an argument to be made for something that’s a one-time purchase. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I can phrase it as, this is not a lifetime unlock. There’s no guarantee here. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offering this to you only because you might want it, but there’s no implied guarantee, there’s no explicit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or implied guarantee that this will last for any amount of time. But if you’re really that allergic to subscriptions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine, power to you. But the other thing I got thinking about was, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m going to offer that one-time thing, which I’m not sure I will, but let’s suppose for the sake of conversation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will offer subscription for probably monthly and yearly. Let’s suppose for the sake of discussion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I offer a hilariously expensive one-time thing. Would it make sense,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and my current thinking is yes, but this is a weak opinion held loosely. Would it make sense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do consumables as well? So you can buy a 10-pack of searches or maybe a 100-pack, I don’t know what the number is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much it would cost.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gradually approaching the casino games for children business model and I know how you’re getting there
⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like every time you go up people are used to it and they understand it but it’s like really consumables
⏹️ ▶️ John for an app like what what kind of app do you want to be vending out there in the world do you want
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey people to feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re putting quarters into your thing to look up where an actor is from I I give that a big thumbs down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with you I I agree with you wholeheartedly, but if you are not the kind of person that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watches stuff often, but you want to be able to use a nicely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made app to occasionally do that, do you really want a subscription or are you going to want to pay? And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely don’t know what I
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not going to get all the customers. You’re not going to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a business model that is going to appeal to everybody who sees your app and finds it useful. That’s just impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t cover all the base. So you have to just decide which are the customers that you want to get. Hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John you pick the group that has the most people in it. But I don’t think you can get all of
⏹️ ▶️ John them. So if you’re fretting over what people are allergic to subscriptions, if you think you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a subscription app because you’re using a third party API with unknown financial things, which as we’ve discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John is the best thing, then anyone who doesn’t like subscription is out of your market. And I don’t think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John anything you can do for those people. You wanna revisit that decision and say, well, really, do I really need a subscription? because right
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s free and I want to take the risk, then you can revisit, but that changes everything. But if you’re deciding you want
⏹️ ▶️ John a subscription, don’t spend a second worrying about the people who don’t want to pay for subscriptions because they’re not in your market anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would even go further than that. I don’t want to pay a subscription is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code for I don’t want to pay. That’s interesting, well, yeah. Now, yes, you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you listener out there who are screaming, but, but, but, I will pay money, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like subscriptions. In today’s modern software world, that really just means I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pay. It’s simple as that because, look, there is an alternative here. You’re not going to like it. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an alternative here. However, software that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on modern platforms that is expected and required to have some kind of regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maintenance updates at least, needs recurring revenue to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why most apps are moving to this kind of model. There’s other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factors too, like the app store’s non-existent handling of upgrade pricing and stuff like that if you were doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that way, but really, subscription pricing is a very clean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear, mostly consumer-friendly option of pricing software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, there are apps that do it badly, there are apps that charge significantly more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with subscription pricing than what might be warranted for what they’re doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are apps that use deceptive techniques to trick people into paying more than they might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they’re paying, or more than they might expect to pay, or take advantage of the fact that they’re going to forget to cancel or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. But the concept of a subscription payment for an app that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ongoing use, that will require ongoing maintenance, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only sound, but is fair. And it’s actually consumer-friendly when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done right. and you think about all the dysfunction of the old model of like, well, I’m gonna pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one time chunk and then it turns out next week I don’t use this app anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I buy it and it’s not really what I wanted it to be. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of times customers just get screwed or you buy some giant app and then like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three months later they unveil the next big version and you gotta pay an upgrade fee that was way bigger than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you would have been paying like five bucks a month for the whole time. So the old model has its dysfunctions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new model has its potential abuses. However, this model of subscription priced software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just paid software. This is just how paid software is paid these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the entire ecosystem of software development has shifted over time to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A, make this easier and actually make this the easiest option. But B,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I mentioned before, like customer expectations and the ecosystem and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environments are moving so much. Customers expect so much ongoing now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can’t blame them, that you need a way to fund it. You need ongoing revenue for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each customer. So, there’s two options for that. You can either have subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some form, and the details we can talk about, but subscriptions in some form,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or ads. Those are your options. Yeah, so if you really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want there to if you really want to satisfy the I don’t want to pay a subscription But I would pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you for a lifetime unlock okay, first of all those people are hilarious because whenever whenever they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer like I get emails like this and You know it’ll be like I don’t want to pay your $10 a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month or 10. Sorry $10 a year Subscription which is comically cheap for what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offering, but fine. I don’t want to pay your $10 a year I want a lifetime unlock. How about I give you $15? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you actually, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the prices they have in mind when they say, I don’t want to pay your subscription, it’s not, it’s never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that long of a time span worth of the subscription price. It’s maybe two years at most.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s never a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So if you actually listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to the model, the third model that you didn’t mention, speaking of the lifetime not being that long, uh, the third
⏹️ ▶️ John model is the one that people hate even more but it all adds up to the same thing which is
⏹️ ▶️ John okay I’ll give you a lifetime unlock for $15 but every 18 months I come out with a
⏹️ ▶️ John new version of my program and I abandon the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right. Right. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And then you can lifetime unlock that one for $15. Right. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just go every 18 months. And by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way and next time you update your iPhone and you’re required to update the OS and with the new phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that old version of the app might break and then you’re out of luck. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John No you totally abandoned it. Pull it from the store and just like when that breaks it’s like well there’s no and every 18 months you come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John a brand new version. There’s no upgrade pricing in the app store and that’s on Apple, but every, use a brand new version and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John get to pay for it and own it for the lifetime of that program. But every 18 months you come up with version two, version three, version four.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is also a model that works and it is not subscription and you won’t get recurring bills that you don’t understand where
⏹️ ▶️ John they come from, but you’re still paying $15 every 18 months, right? It doesn’t matter how we break it
⏹️ ▶️ John up. Like it’s the same amount of money. And by the way, the people like, well, in the good old days, there was no subscription. In the good old days,
⏹️ ▶️ John would cost an inflation adjusted $80. And it would only work for three years before we came
⏹️ ▶️ John out with the next major version that you’d have to charge a $40 upgrade fee for. Like people don’t understand how expensive software
⏹️ ▶️ John was. Like go look at how much like the original version of like, you know, Mac right
⏹️ ▶️ John version 2.0 costs, like and inflation and do the inflation adjustment calculation, it will
⏹️ ▶️ John make your eyes bleed. Software used to be so expensive. You’d buy some weird thing like now menus or something
⏹️ ▶️ John that would make like an icon in your menu bar and like inflation adjusted, it’s like $120, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John For a little utility that appears in your menu bar. I’m not charging $120 for my little utilities that appear
⏹️ ▶️ John in your menu bar, by the way. And they would have major new versions every 18 months to two years.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the major new versions, maybe you would have upgraded pricing, but maybe they’d want another $120 from you. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more expensive. So in like absolute real dollars, like inflation adjusted
⏹️ ▶️ John dollars, it was so much more expensive to do that thing. So it’s like, if you do you want to just be
⏹️ ▶️ John a, you know, a now utilities user for the entire life of that product, you’re going to pay way more than if they
⏹️ ▶️ John were somehow transported to modern times and charged you $10 a year. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I mean, to be clear, I haven’t come up with an answer if I do offer not a like a single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlock. Again, I would never praise it as lifetime. But first of all, like if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I were to offer it, it would be like a lot of money. I’m thinking like somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the order of 50-ish dollars. To really make it like, look, I don’t want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, and you probably don’t want to do this, but if you are really that allergic to subscriptions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure. Yeah, but see, then you have a problem. Anybody who actually does buy that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have 50 of their dollars, asterisk, apples cut, but whatever, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In their mind, I gave you $50, and then you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the nerve in three years to discontinue the product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because the API got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shut down, you don’t want someone to have 50 of their, like your dot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you don’t want that. You don’t want anyone to have that over you because they will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abuse it. It’s, you’re much better off, let’s keep this very, very simple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This app exists now, it, for the time period it exists, you pay me X dollars per
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month or year to use it. And at some point in the future, this arrangement may change in some way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s cool, because you didn’t pay for the future, you paid for now. That’s the model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the healthiest model for everyone involved. There is nothing wrong with that model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you ship with that model, and only that model, you will have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good business, as long as you don’t screw up the pricing, but you won’t, because we’ll guide you, you know. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have a good business, and yes, there will be people who say, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just don’t like subscriptions on principle. But you know what, there’s also way more people who say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t like paying for any apps on principle. It’s the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It is, it is. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same, it’s like, it’s like when we, it’s like, you know, like it’s the same flag, when you see that flag that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has like the police blue stripe, and it’s like, it’s the same flag from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few flags we’ve had before. Yeah, it’s the same argument. What they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying is, I don’t wanna pay. That’s what they’re saying. Or, hey, could I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe pay a lot less? I don’t wanna pay you over and over again for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing I’m gonna use all the time. Like, that’s what they’re saying. You gotta translate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything that says I don’t wanna pay you your 10 bucks a year is really saying I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay you. And that’s fine if you had something like ads where you could monetize non-paying users,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you don’t, and you don’t want that. So you have to be okay losing those people. you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never gonna satisfy them with any purchase option you create that is fair to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So don’t even bother, have a subscription app, and that’s it. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are hardly alone in the marketplace if you make that choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so with that in mind, and I’m still kicking all this around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, I think it was Marco that said earlier, you know, I am getting feedback from everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and while I do appreciate and enjoy that, every single person is 100% devoutly convinced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they are the most correct and not a single one of them agrees with anyone else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So ultimately I’m gonna have to make a, I’m just gonna have to put a line in the sand and say this is the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And additionally, a lot of people are saying, including in the chat room earlier, well, you can change it. And that’s true,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, asterisk. Well, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s the thing, like I’m really worried. So I think if I were to start with just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one approach, it would be what you’re describing, what both of you are describing, which is subscription. Probably monthly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and yearly. That is my approach. That I think that’s my bare minimum. I’m going to do that no matter what.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The thing I worry about is, OK, so somebody downloads the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They really enjoy it. But they see the subscription, and they don’t want to pay it. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bounce. How can I get to them again if I change the model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if I lower the price or whatever? You’re discovering the world of marketing. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco how do you find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers? How about a push notification for marketing spam?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I could do push notification marketing spam. But you know what I mean? I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yes, I can. Oh, no, they will have
⏹️ ▶️ John deleted your app. You’re not even going to send a push. You actually have to acquire customers, Casey. And how much do you pay
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to acquire them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps is hard now, because now they go directly to the app library. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they will abandon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your app very quickly and easily. Even if they like it, they’ll abandon it, because they just lose it. But they won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John that the default? Is that the default?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it gives you a prompt that says go to the library, which is considered to be the default or they give the destructive, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or delete it. That’s in red or what have you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no, no, no. I know when you delete, I get it. Yeah, yeah, I was saying like, if you don’t, if you get a fresh iPhone out of the box and
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy an app from the app store, it doesn’t go to the library, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, I don’t think so. No, no, no. I don’t believe I got more in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. Keep talking. I’ll tell you in a minute.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in any case, so I, I think I will do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, a trickle. I will probably do a trickle out, like we have discussed last week, a trickle out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of free searches. A lot of people, or I shouldn’t say a lot, a handful of people have written me on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being like, no, no, no, no, no, just do the free trial. Screw the trickle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of searches, just do a free trial, which I get. I really do. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel like it’s a good first run experience to say, hi, here’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. You must sign up for a free trial. That will obligate you to, I mean, yes, you can cancel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. will obligate you to pay me soon before you can really do anything. You know what I mean? Like it just seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very off putting to me for basically the onboarding screen to be, Hey, screw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you pay me. Like, yo, I don’t even know what this thing does. This might be garbage. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not in a position that I want to pay you. I don’t even want to sign up for the possibility of paying you yet. And that’s why I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that’s not the right approach. Um, but I understand like in a perfect world. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would do that, but I just don’t think that that’s realistic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, real-time follow-up, it does not go directly to the app library by default. I just tested it on my test phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I thought. I looked up what MacWrite, and MacWrite shipped free with the Mac for a while, but eventually Claris
⏹️ ▶️ John got it and it became a commercial product. That’s why I was thinking of it, because my parents did buy a boxed copy of MacWrite from
⏹️ ▶️ John Claris or whatever. In this MacWorld 1994 review,
⏹️ ▶️ John the inflation-adjusted price of MacWrite Pro 1.5, if you bought it as a separate product from Claris
⏹️ ▶️ John was drum roll. Anybody? 1000 bucks. 150 bucks. Remember, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is this is not like Microsoft Word. It’s not a it’s Mac, right? It’s fairly simple text errors from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, maybe maybe Marco’s more right than I gave him credit for. I would say between one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and $300. But I’m worried that Marco is much closer to correct than I realized.
⏹️ ▶️ John $498.67. For a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John simple, not particularly full-featured, not leader in its market, word
⏹️ ▶️ John processor. TextEdit, that comes free with your Mac, does substantially
⏹️ ▶️ John more on this program. Substantially more and way faster. And it’s free with your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Software used to go a lot more. I want a subscription. Great. OK. And by the way, when the next
⏹️ ▶️ John version of the MacWrite comes out, there may be upgrade pricing, but you’re not going to get it
⏹️ ▶️ John for free. You’re going to have to pay some amount of money, probably some substantial portion of that
⏹️ ▶️ John $498 for the next version software used to be way more expensive. And like Marco said,
⏹️ ▶️ John people never talk about the the the bad sides of pay up front where you you
⏹️ ▶️ John buy it, and it turns out you don’t like the program or, you know, whatever, like you, you spent
⏹️ ▶️ John all that money, and now you basically have to use it for some period of time to make it worthwhile, because if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can’t return it, then you’re stuck with it. Or if you buy it and a new version comes out and the upgrade pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John is $200 for upgrading users, you’re like, oh. There’s downsides
⏹️ ▶️ John to every pricing model. The current pricing model is actually pretty good for consumers, minus the part
⏹️ ▶️ John where they don’t realize money is slowly draining out of their bank account, which is why most of the people who hate subscriptions say they hate them. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t want to forget about it. It’s a way for you to just sneakily drain money out of my bank account like a little leech, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to have a thing that I have to remember to do. And to those people I say, I know this is annoying, but you can get into
⏹️ ▶️ John the habit of every single time you subscribe, immediately unsubscribe. Because the way that Apple does subscriptions is, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get the app for the full month or year that you used it, but when it’s over, it just basically won’t renew. It’s annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple doesn’t make that easier. And you can complain to Apple and try to make that easier. You could, you know, it would be nice if Apple said,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, by default, when I subscribe, like basically never do auto renewing, always immediately cancel the subscription.
⏹️ ▶️ John But people do do that manually, but it’s kind of annoying that Apple doesn’t let you do that. But that would save you the mental
⏹️ ▶️ John anguish I’m not understanding. That’s why people keep suggesting, can I buy buckets of things? Can I buy a one-time thing for 100
⏹️ ▶️ John searches or whatever? They just don’t wanna have to remember, oh, there’s something I have to remember to do, otherwise money
⏹️ ▶️ John will slowly drain from me. That’s what they want, and Apple could help fix that. And so that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like a lot of time, they’re not saying I don’t wanna pay, they’re saying is I don’t want, some people are saying, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to have to remember to unsubscribe from a thing, because I know I’ll forget, and then you’ll be secretly getting money from me, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and this is, and first of all, by the way, we do have literally a sponsor of this episode that addresses this rocket money. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, this is part of the niceness of being in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s in-app purchase system, is that the customers know how easy it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to cancel an in-app purchase subscription, and we know how they work. So there are some services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there. The developers know, you mean? No, no, the
⏹️ ▶️ John customers know. Well, I’m not sure how many do know, because I think most customers feel menaced by the subscription
⏹️ ▶️ John system, and they can’t find the place where they look at their subscriptions on their phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yes, that is true, and Apple has, that used to be horrendous, now it is a little bit less horrendous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It should be way easier and it should be, you know, more user surfaced. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people learn pretty quickly about that trick of canceling immediately and that you still get your free month or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. Like, people learn that and, you know, not everything on the web and everything works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way, but every in-app purchase subscription works that way. Now, developers do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a, like, server-side callback if you turn off auto-renewing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So apps can tell if they want to, and maybe they’ll do annoying things if you do that. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not sure, it’s probably against Apple’s policies, but I’m sure people do it anyway, just like the push notifications, where they just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of create new categories of notifications that have you automatically subscribed to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you definitely did not opt into. Even Apple does this with their own stuff, because their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services team just throws away any possible goodwill that people have with user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience on their platforms. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. So number two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one thing that I think the feedback has convinced me of is that I do think a free trial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a good idea, because it does seem like they do convert a lot better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to real purchases than something without a free trial. So here’s what I’m going to propose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Last week, we didn’t really come to a consensus, but where we kind of stopped talking
⏹️ ▶️ John Well now that you’ve come around on free trials, you know, we’re close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, hold on, hold on. So it was some, you know, some generously sized bucket of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco searches, say 20, that you would get, and then after that you would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only get like one per day unless you subscribe. Right. Now I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, based on the feedback and kind of a week of thinking about it, I’m gonna suggest something even simpler.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You get your bucket of 20 searches or whatever, And then you have to start a free trial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to proceed after that. No more one a day. No, you got your 20 searches. After
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you got to start a free trial to continue. And just leave it at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just implement that. And then you can just ship this goddamn app and get it out there in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store and stop spending so much time on the business model. Because while the business model is important,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the product is more important. And getting it out the door before our audience is tired of hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it is even more important. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, figure out something, stop the waffling. And I think that’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, pretty simple system that pleases me and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, probably to whatever extent possible a little bit of John and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think overall that’s a pretty decent system.
⏹️ ▶️ John My thinking on pricing when I’ve been thinking about it since is yes, I still think free trials are the way to go. But I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John about the total opposite end of this rectum. I talked last time about pricing it for listeners of the show
⏹️ ▶️ John versus pricing it for people who have no idea who you are. If you really wanted to go totally on the pricing it for like the
⏹️ ▶️ John mass market and people have no idea who you are, A, you might have to do a little bit of marketing to sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of get traction going. But the pricing, the business model that would work best,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, if we told you, hey, guess what, Casey, you’re going to have lots of of people who are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to at least give this app a shot, which is hard to do. But if you could somehow make that happen, the pricing model
⏹️ ▶️ John that would convert those people the most is the pricing model you see everybody else has. And it’s gonna make you cry. And it’s, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, probably not the right pricing model for you specifically, Casey Liss, because you are not the average
⏹️ ▶️ John consumer, average developer that nobody has any idea who they are. But if you were,
⏹️ ▶️ John free trial for seven days, annual subscription for three bucks, and you’re like, what, that’s not enough
⏹️ ▶️ John money. That’s not enough money to cover my API costs. It’ll never work, blah, blah, blah, and a free trial on top of that, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Stuff like that is what you see on the app store, and that converts like crazy. Why? Because it seems cheap, it seems like a cup of coffee,
⏹️ ▶️ John for a whole year, $3, and it has a free trial, that converts people. But to actually make money
⏹️ ▶️ John with that kind of model, you need a lot of people to download your app, and that’s the tricky part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen a yearly subscription that low. I’ve seen like $3 a week. No, I see it all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time. I get lowballed all the time on these apps. They’re like, and you’re like, ah, sure, why not? Five bucks for a year, why not? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, think of what’s the, what’s the, what’s Jelly’s app called?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that? 350 if memory serves.
⏹️ ▶️ John A year. A year. That’s way too cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but it converts like crazy. I don’t even use that app when I pay for it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just why? Because like, ah, three bucks a year, I’ll try it. And I see when it renews, I’m like, ah, three bucks for another
⏹️ ▶️ John year, I’ll try it. I mean, granted, I know Jelly and I’m paying for his app to, because, whatever, but it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, apps like that, that it seemed like they’re underpriced, you can make it up in volume,
⏹️ ▶️ John if your volumes are really big. The trick is you don’t know if your volumes are gonna be really big. So
⏹️ ▶️ John to be clear, I don’t think that’s the model for you, but if you were looking for a simple pricing model that everybody understands
⏹️ ▶️ John that converts like crazy and is vaguely sustainable, that’s it. Like single
⏹️ ▶️ John annual, there’s just annual, it’s such a low price that it’s not a barrier and there’s a free trial. So people
⏹️ ▶️ John are like, ah, I can always cancel if I forget the free trial. And then they forget and they pay $3 a year it renews, they
⏹️ ▶️ John see the $3 like, Oh, three bucks, whatever, I’ll remember to cancel it next year. That is the mass market
⏹️ ▶️ John model for an app with a single developer that is sustainable with
⏹️ ▶️ John a large number of customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but that’s that’s predicated on a large number of customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey If you want to go all
⏹️ ▶️ John the direction is like, you know, $100 a
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, $100 universal unlock and you abandon the app after two years that probably
⏹️ ▶️ John maximize your money, but people. of these.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let me ask one. I know I told you I didn’t want to go on long, but here we are. Now I’m prolonging it, story of my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have an opinion about this, but I’d be curious to revisit if, even if only briefly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I will start with Marco, since John was the most recent to talk. Should I just hold my nose and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first of all, the question would be, what ads? Like, are you just going to throw like a Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad box in there? Because that’s garbage. Those are garbage ads. They pay garbage prices and they make your app look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No argument, which is why I don’t want to do it, because I agree with everything you just said. I don’t think I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, I don’t know what the word I’m looking for, but I don’t think I, I think the overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ads are just fine for Marco and I don’t mean that to be a turd. I would love to do that sort of thing, but I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll, I don’t think that would work for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s not like an easily replicable system to any problem domain. Like, you know, it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey in a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app for an app that has a good size audience. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, Those are two very big ifs. No, here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your competitor is IMDb. Your competitor is already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an ad-filled experience. People come to you to have not fewer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads, they come to you to have no ads. And so obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re going for big mass market, there has to be a free plan to use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way. And so that will probably be ads. But you see in the app store what that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means. You can try to have like a little tasteful ad banner. I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve done that. It pays nothing. You will make nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a tasteful ad implementation. The way to make money with generic like Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever ads on iOS is you load in as many ad SDKs as you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can into the app, which by the way, say goodbye to your nice privacy label. So you have tons of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad SDKs because you have to bundle multiple SDKs so that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one ad network doesn’t have a good fill for you for that inventory, some other one will fill in. And you gotta like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you gotta bundle a bunch of SDKs, you gotta take the worst privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approach you can because you won’t make any money if you keep things private.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then what you end up getting is a crapped up app that pays you surprisingly little money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for each use. But also keep in mind the usage pattern of your app really matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In this case, your app is not something people are spending tons of time in. It’s something they’re consulting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly and then leaving. So again, you’re not going to make a ton of money from ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you really crap up the experience. Then, if you can make it so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are constantly having to view interstitial video ads or if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can arrange them in such a way that you generate a lot of accidental input and make people click on them. You’re basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco committing fraud, but you will make a few more pennies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a terrible way to make a living. And ideally, you don’t do any of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ideally, you can be comfortable with the fact that you’re gonna have a subscription-priced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app only, with a generous free trial situation, but it will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a subscription-priced app only after that. And you’re gonna get the people who are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna pay. There will be lots of them. And yes, if you had a totally free usage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pattern, you could get way more people, but you also would make way less money. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think it’s fine to be in this category of I’m just basically paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only, because the alternative would be pretty crappy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, any other thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, your whole selling proposition is supposed to be like IMD, but not sucky and filled with ads. So like what the hell’s the point of
⏹️ ▶️ John throwing ads in there?
⏹️ ▶️ John The only way you could actually make money on ads and not crap it up entirely is step one, get
⏹️ ▶️ John VC money and fund the development of this app to make the best movie look up app that is
⏹️ ▶️ John for free and has no business plan whatsoever that is free to everybody and develop it so it is amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John and do that for two years. And when you have literally millions of users and everybody knows the name of this app
⏹️ ▶️ John and every celebrity mentions it when they’re on their, you know, talk show if they even still do that, talking
⏹️ ▶️ John to people and they say, Oh, I was looking up and call sheet and blah, blah, blah. one tasteful little ad and you
⏹️ ▶️ John hire a company to sell that one tasteful ad slot to your millions of people and now you have an app that is funded by one tasteful
⏹️ ▶️ John ad. But that is a long road to go with a lot of things that can happen in between. It’s probably not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to happen for you. So I would say stick to your original plan, which is let’s make a version of IMDB that doesn’t suck
⏹️ ▶️ John and doesn’t have ads all over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, and you’re going to be offering a premium experience in other ways. So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do things that most apps can’t or won’t do because they are less less motivated, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t know the platform as well, or they don’t have the discipline, or they hire consultants to make the app and they don’t want to bring them back because it’s too expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when there’s a new iOS 17 feature that your app could take advantage of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can be there with it. You can be there at release in September with support for that feature. If they launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new Siri abilities, God help them. If they launch a series of Siri abilities, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be there integrating with it on day one. They launch some kind of cool widget thing that might make sense for you, some kind of search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration maybe, you can be there on day one. Those are things that your premium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app can do because you’re an enthusiast in this area and you care about stuff that power users care about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people will pay for that. That’s a premium thing. Whereas the rest of the market, like the mass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market, they’re just gonna use IMDB and have their wall of ads. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you provide your own wall of ads, trying to attract them, not only does it dilute the value of your app to the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who want the premium experience, but it also largely, like you’re gonna lose that battle. They’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find your app. You don’t have the brand recognition of IMDb. Yeah, they’re not gonna find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, and if they do, they’re gonna be like, why am I doing this instead of IMDb? So your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app should be only premium. It should be like, this is a premium experience for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are aware that IMDb exists and want something better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the way you serve them is with a premium experience with a subscription price.