543: 100 Million Tire-Kickers
11 Jul 2023The first week of Threads, Tesla’s NACS connector vs. CCS, the importance of the Mac Pro, and the evolving iPad situation in the Arment household.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco’s butt-crack update
- Follow-up:
- Upgrade #467: The Least Important Mac Follow-out
- Vision Pro eyes
- Listener Occupation Overview
- Statistical analysis and standard error (via Chris Rose)
- Instagram Threads Version One
#askatp:- If 1Password 8 still stinks when the carrot becomes a stick, where should one store software licenses? (via Wes Chamness)
- Ask Neutral:
- How do we feel about darn near everyone adopting NACS over CCS? (via Steve J. Stutz)
- What are some good & bad parts of EV ownership? (via yottalogical)
- Post-show: Casey & John app updates
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Chapters
- Butt-crack update
- Follow-out: Upgrade on Mac Pro
- Sponsor: Rocket Money
- Vision Pro external eye display
- Listeners in interesting places
- Stat mechanics
- Threads
- Sponsor: Memberful
- Threads, cont’d.
- Sponsor: Kolide
- #askatp: Storing app licenses
- #askneutral: NACS vs. CCS 🖼️
- #askneutral: EV pros/cons
- Ending theme
- Callsheet update
Butt-crack update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of my favorite things is to take the listeners on the journey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the show notes And and I feel like I’ve been doing this a lot lately But the the boys have been very clever with their entries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in our internal show notes and for pre-show it reads as follows Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey butt crack Marco how’s your butt
⏹️ ▶️ John of a better way to word this Can you give me a couple seconds to? Think about this though because I just just read
⏹️ ▶️ John this now and I want to before you tell me what it is I’m gonna try to figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Okay, go ahead. Casey, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can help me here. So, as far as I can recall, we haven’t talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John anything involving butt cramp. We have talked about his pants pockets and the weight of the phones in them and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, John. This is like role reversal here. I actually remembered something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m very proud of myself. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco sat on, I think it was Tiff’s iPad. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that right? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John got it right. Yes, the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey iPad. Okay. And then it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cracked by his butt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, hold on, hold on. I never said I was the sitter or Or I or tiff was the city
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume that tiff sat on Adams iPad that was my read of the situation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I genuinely thought that Marco did
⏹️ ▶️ John well This is the mystery now This is what we really need to know because now apparently butt crack crack was just me not remembering the iPad thing so please tell Us
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco name names who sat on one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna name names
⏹️ ▶️ John have to there’s only three people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house Somebody it was hops it could have it will have I don’t think hops could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John damage anything doesn’t weigh enough He weighs 14
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s mostly fluff. They could only shatter Casey’s windshield. They couldn’t break an eye I’m like, you know, my friend shattered his windshield
⏹️ ▶️ John cautionary tale for the world. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m glad I could serve that purpose. That and pouring drinks on Aaron’s laptops. Just basically anything that’s precious that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think people know that that’s possible. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you pour water on your
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop, it’s bad, but people don’t realize if you literally touch your windshield with an iPad. Although now, whenever I tell this to people,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, are you sure he didn’t throw it at the windshield? Because he said he just placed it up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. No, no, I mean I was accelerating in the direction of the windshield, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it remained in my hands the whole time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, to recap, I was just placing it on the dashboard for a
⏹️ ▶️ John few minutes. Yes, placing it. You were placing it. This is why we need dash cams, but facing the other way. Well, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should call Erin up here to tell you her version of the story, because hand to God, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she wasn’t there, and she said this to me herself, if she wasn’t there and didn’t witness it herself, she would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be saying the exact same thing. said to me like if I wasn’t it’s so we are we and especially you Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are so lucky that I was here to witness this because I would never have believed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that just happened anyway I’m sorry we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re still refusing to name names why you think we’re gonna like we don’t care who it was as iPads on couches
⏹️ ▶️ John we understand how things happen this is not a comment that anybody’s weight you know it’s just regardless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad was set upon oh very good passive voice and and And it created,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the event created a large mark on the screen, a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either scratch or crack on the screen. The other members of my family voted and decided that they said it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a crack. I looked at it and I thought it was a scratch, but it was very large,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it was. It went across like…
⏹️ ▶️ John How could it have been a scratch? Do you have like those metal rivets sticking out of the back of any of your things that you would be sitting with?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how that kind of mark would have been made,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but regardless, it looked bad. And so the rest of my family said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s definitely a crack. The owner of the iPad was understandably very upset about this, to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point where, again, this is what created the whole swap, where I swapped this iPad with my iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I reset them, you know, transferred everything over, swapped them, so that, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owner of the iPad could be compensated with a fresh one, and I would use the cracked or scratched or whatever one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the replacement cost of that out of AppleCare, which it was, would be $600.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I thought, you know what, I’ll just use a cracked iPad. It’s still working for me just fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, let me quickly interrupt. Did we ever reach a conclusion with regard to cellular on the iPad? I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a kerfuffle about it, but I don’t remember if you ever actually got it working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll get to that in a minute. The answer to that is no, I did not eventually get it working. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey no, oh gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I even now have a totally separate physical SIM fresh from AT&T in there, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also worked for a couple of days and then got no service. What? So here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what has happened in the meantime.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, so you unquestionably have bought a brand new iPad with brand new cellular service because you will throw money at the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John away. You could have bought refurbished ones. He likes doing that from Amazon lately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s true, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, you’re jumping ahead a little bit. So. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to go to the Apple store for other uninteresting reasons and a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people had written in to say, why don’t you just bring it to an Apple store and have them look at it. Sometimes if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no other signs of obvious damage, like drop damage on the frame, sometimes they’ll just replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of out of goodwill or assuming that maybe it kind of broke too easily. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worth going in there and asking. So I thought, all right, what the heck. I was going to go to the Apple store anyway for something else. So I brought the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with me along with the iPad mini that I got a few months ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I wanted to trade it in because I hate it for reasons. Long story short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that, I bought it to be an e-reader. It’s a terrible e-reader and also I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really miss promotion and also I really hate using iPads without keyboards it turns out. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard options for the iPad mini are terrible. Trust me, I know. I’ve tried them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yes, even, listener, that one that you say is highly rated on Amazon that has five stars, yeah, even that one, terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, and the keyboard for the iPad Pro is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. And I don’t even use the Magic Keyboard with the trackpad, I use the regular flippy Smart Keyboard Folio. I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that better than the Magic Keyboard for my own purposes and my preferences, and I have it in good authority, so does Craig Federighi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that combo, the 11-inch trackpad with that keyboard, the Smart Keyboard Folio, not the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Magic Keyboard. It’s a great combo, it’s relatively small and lightweight, the keys actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel pretty good, especially considering, which is funny, I think they’re butterfly keys, but they have that membrane over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top that makes them actually stay good. Anyway, I hate the iPad Mini. So I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is going terribly for me, I’ve had it for too long, I can’t return it, I don’t want to deal with selling it. So I was like, I’m just going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade it into the Apple Store. I go to the Apple Store with the iPad Mini that I don’t want, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butt crack iPad. I showed the iPad to the, you know, are they still called geniuses?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I showed the iPad to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store representative and he was a very nice guy and he’s looking at the scratch crack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he’s like, I don’t think it’s a crack. And I’m like, well, is there some way? Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I told him, I’m like, look, I don’t, I’m fine working like this, but if it can be easily repaired, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to lose a bunch of money on trade and down the road. So he looked at it and he’s like, he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ran his finger over it and like, I showed him how it works on the touchscreen, and he’s like, nope, I’m pretty sure this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a crack. And so this shouldn’t hurt your trade in value. And so I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, in that case, I’d like to trade this in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a pretty solid pro move.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because I have someone here right now who says it’s not a crack,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this person can accept a trade in. So let me just do this now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not keep it for another two years and then trade it And then for nothing, if by then the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mail-in company says, oh no, that’s a crack. So I’m like, OK. I quickly decided,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, you know what? I’m going to trade both of these iPads. So I traded them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both in, and Adam has a new one. Excuse me, the person whose iPad got sat on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, the truth that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Narrowed it down farther. Although the way you were talking about it before made me think that Marco sat on it. So I don’t know. I can’t decide.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was pretty clear that it was Adam’s iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so regardless, Adam has a new iPad on the way, funded almost entirely by the trade-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these two iPads that I didn’t want for reasons. And then I will take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back my iPad that has the bad cellular. I’ll take that back and deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it some other way.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was totally a crack though. I mean, again, if it’s a scratch, what would have made the scratch? And if it’s so visible,
⏹️ ▶️ John how, why would you not be able to feel it? It’s just an internal crack. It’s like one of the layers below the top layer has cracked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of what I was, what I was assuming was probably the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t need to explain to the guy about internal cracks. Once he says it’s not a crack and it shouldn’t affect trade, then you are wise to say, great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. That wasn’t even my plan going in. I was gonna trade the small one in, but as he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was getting all the logistics in place to trade in the small one, I was like, wait a minute.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What am I gonna hold onto this for? I have it open now, I hope it open out now, take it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You may never find another person who doesn’t understand about internal cracks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly, I’m like, take this chance. So yeah, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the situation hopefully will resolve itself with the butt crack, well that has resolved itself, and then the cellular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll figure, I’m not in a huge rush to solve it if it’s on my own iPad because I don’t use my iPad that much, so we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve that some other time.
⏹️ ▶️ John The adults in the house will look where they’re sitting from now on.
Follow-out: Upgrade on Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d like to start with some follow-up slash follow-outs. I was listening to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beginning of today’s upgrade before we recorded I didn’t get too far into it, but I got far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to discover what the title was referring to the title of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade number 467 is the least important Mac John. Would you like to guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what what Mac that’s that they were referring to?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still thinking about whether there should be a hyphen between least and important I think probably there should be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I did see this episode appear in my podcast feed and I did look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the summary and of course, there’s all these things in the notes and so yes, it all makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So Jason and Mike had a reasonably brief but actually very interesting conversation about, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is the deal with the Mac Pro? And Jason said, you know, hey, I think I can summarize it. So now I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey summarize Jason’s summary. This is getting Inception-like, but here we are. I haven’t seen it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Ah, we should put that on the list for the number special.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Jason was saying, look, Apple wanted to ship, what was it, it was a Jade 4C die, was that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John name? And then we understood. Okay, the-
⏹️ ▶️ John Although technically that was the one with four M1 Maxes, not even four M2 Maxes, but we get the idea. They wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to ship the quad is what we keep calling it on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, so they wanted to ship the quad. They couldn’t make it work. And, you know, German said this months ago that they just can’t make it work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or they abandoned it for one reason or another.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they could make it work. It’s just a question of, do you want to pay as much money as it would take to make it work?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also fair. But one way or another, they shelved the project, at least at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yet, you know, they still wanted, Apple still wanted the Apple Silicon transition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be done. And so that means they had to ship something, so they shipped what they got. And what they got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an M2 Ultra, which I think, you know, as Jason had said, it’s, what is it, Occam’s razor?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, the most obvious answer is probably the correct one. He made a pretty compelling argument that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that could be the case. Is there anyone contesting that that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not necessarily, but I don’t know. I thought it was a pretty good summary that he spelled out in just a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, the only thing I would add is the thing that I mentioned, they didn’t have to ship what they had. They could have said,
⏹️ ▶️ John no Mac Pro, the transition is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complete. Well, but I think that the implication that Jason was saying was that they will probably bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back this quad chip, well not bring back, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know what I mean? They will actually ship the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quad chip at some point. Bring the, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John bring the quad chip. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see, we’ll see. That’s the nature of the Mac Pro. There are many things that they could do and we wonder what they will do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, but I feel like if they if you know, if you know, the foresee doesn’t work out, the quad doesn’t work out for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons, pricing, whatever, they just it was. I think it would have been in keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple’s actual plans to just say, never mind, the transition is complete and they
⏹️ ▶️ John would have had to do. They wouldn’t have had to, but it would have been nice if they did that to say kind of like they did
⏹️ ▶️ John by saying, oh, the Mac Pro is for another day to reassure people. They could have said we’re not shipping one now because we
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t make the Mac Pro that we wanted to make. But rest assured, this product isn’t dead and we’re going to have another one.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be almost unprecedented, except they literally did that with this exact computer back when they had the roundtable.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s precedent. Apple does not talk about future products with one exception,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that is the Mac Pro. They’ve done it twice now. Once the roundtable, which is like, do they ever do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going to make a new computer and we haven’t even started making it, but we’re going to tell you about it, but it’s totally coming. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John second, we haven’t announced something during this keynote presentation, but rather than just not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it, we’re gonna tell you, oh, I know you were expecting us to say it, but don’t worry, it’s coming later. Twice they’ve done it, the
⏹️ ▶️ John least important Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The least important
⏹️ ▶️ John and the one that is the most likely that Apple do to do totally uncharacteristic things like telling you about
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re gonna do in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Both of those things can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John true at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is the least important Mac in terms of, you know, sales volume, but it’s the most important Mac in many other ways. In what ways
⏹️ ▶️ John then? Well, it’s a good thing I wrote about this back before the trash can came
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey out. Oh, are you really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing the halo car thing again?
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just the halo car thing. It’s the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should, the idea that I think, that I espouse, which Apple can agree with or disagree and so can other people,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if I was running Apple, I would say that it would be important for the company to reach for the stars
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to make the world’s fastest personal computer. Not the world’s fastest computer, they’re not selling
⏹️ ▶️ John super computers, but they sell personal computers and they sell a range of them and they sell laptops and they sell desktops.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there is something to be said for shooting for the stars and going for it to make the
⏹️ ▶️ John best, fastest thing you could possibly make. Because it’s cool, primarily,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the argument I made in the thing, you’re not gonna make money on it, it’s not gonna sell any things or whatever. Yes, there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John a trickle down in tech and we’ll get to that in a little bit because apparently they talked about that in upgrade as well. But it’s important
⏹️ ▶️ John for the company, it’s important for the people who work at the company, it’s the reason they make the GR Toyota
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Like it’s like the people who work there, some of them want to make a hot rod too. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it does advance the state of the art and it does attract and retain employees. And there is sometimes a trigger that effect, but all
⏹️ ▶️ John of that aside, it’s also just cool. And if you run a company, you can decide, what
⏹️ ▶️ John do I think is cool? Maybe I don’t think desktops are cool at all. I’m going to do all laptops. Maybe I think what’s cool is headsets
⏹️ ▶️ John and watches. Like everyone can decide what they want for their company. I’m not saying this has to be the way Apple does things, but if I
⏹️ ▶️ John ran Apple, this is what I would do. And I know there are some people at Apple who agree with me and probably
⏹️ ▶️ John more people at Apple who don’t. And so it is a constant struggle against good, that would be me, against
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? So. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s happening inside the company, it happens outside the company. Some people have no interest in the Mac Pro and some people like
⏹️ ▶️ John me have a disproportionate, seemingly inexplicable interest in the Mac Pro. Indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s just the way it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you probably know off the top of your head, which will make this very brief game very unfun, But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case for a true Mac Pro successor, give me a date off the top of your head.
⏹️ ▶️ John 2011, 12, 13? You got it at the end, 2013, March 8th, 2013.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was gonna guess 13.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John What did I say was the anniversary of ATP? That was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like almost to the day when we really and truly embraced,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the two year anniversary, excuse me. No, that wasn’t it, it was 2013, the anniversary.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was confused because that’s the trashcan year. 2013 is the trashcan year. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I was writing this before the trash can had
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah. Golly, 10 years ago. And as I’ve said multiple times before, people said, oh, is the
⏹️ ▶️ John trash can a true Mac Pro successor? I think it is. They tried to make a hot rod. They didn’t do a good job.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, it’s not like they didn’t try, right? It’s not like they said, ah, give them a tall
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac mini. You know, they did something. And so, you know, full credit to Apple for that attempt.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not all gonna be winners.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Golly, so ATP was just a wee little baby in March 8th of 2013, the case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a true Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so here’s a question. If they had released only the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Studio and had called it Mac Pro, what would we think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that as a Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John People would have been super angry because they already had that name and they made a big deal at the round table
⏹️ ▶️ John of it being an expandable modular computer, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is modular, you can attach a monitor, yeah. It’s as modular as a Mac Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, but it has all this Thunderbolt bandwidth, you know. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, yeah, I know. But like the problem is that like, we’ve already been there and done that. And Apple, for
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever reason, decided, no, let’s have a round table. We are gonna make this kind of computer that some people want.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what they said. And we’re gonna call it Mac Pro. If it came out and it was called Mac Studio, then it would be like, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no Mac Pro. And people would be mad, but you know. But if they tried to call that thing the new Mac Pro, it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John the trash can all over again. Because people would be angry that it’s not really a Mac Pro and the people who wanted a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro would not be satisfied by that. You know, it’s a thing that Apple could have done and Apple could have just written it
⏹️ ▶️ John out cause like, who cares? It’s not going to be a big deal, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the funny thing though, is that like only like the Mac Pro they just released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not that much more quote expandable than the Mac Studio. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it fits slightly more PCI cards than the studio does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that, but like RAM isn’t expandable, graphics aren’t expandable. It’s the same process.
⏹️ ▶️ John but it has a lot of room for PCI cards and for people who want to put cards in there that aren’t GPUs, they
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do anything with the Mac Studio. It is not useful to them. I know they have breakout chassis or whatever, but the bandwidth just
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t there for that. So, yeah. And there’s no rack mount version of the studio, and you can put little rack mounts
⏹️ ▶️ John like they do in the Mac minis. It’s just a different kind of computer. I’m not particularly saying that they should have shipped this
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro, especially at the prices they shipped it at. If they had skipped, you know, I would be gnashing my teeth
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, but if they skipped and said, but we couldn’t do the quad, so stay tuned, we’re gonna try to do better next time, I’d be like, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t mind that they ship on this one either. I’m glad people who find it useful, you know, want it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a slam bang winner like the 2019 was. Was it though?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At 90 gazillion thousand dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so Jason and Mike continued on. Jason, you know, as we alluded to, named the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Pro is the least important Mac. And then Mike made a really interesting point very succinctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m paraphrasing, but what he basically said was, look, all the interesting technology is now flowing from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone to Mac, not the other way around. And this was in part his retort to they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need a halo car. Well, it was Mike saying, well, the halo car is the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I disagree with that. I disagree with this assessment that the interesting tech is flowing iPhone to the Mac. I don’t think that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Setting aside the fact that I don’t think the technology trickle down is the main reason you do it, as I think I established before. My opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ John the main reason you do it is because it’s cool, right? But the technology direction is not
⏹️ ▶️ John that way. So look what’s in the Vision Pro. It is not an iPhone chip in there. It’s a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John slash iPad chip in there. And you can say, well, but it’s iPhone cores. They made those cores for the iPhone and they just put a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John them together. The M series chips are not as simple as, oh, just take a bunch of iPhone cores and put them in
⏹️ ▶️ John a bin together and shake them up and you’re done. The M series chips have stuff done to them. First of all, to work out the multi-core
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff so that it is efficient and that has the right balance between the cores and the GPUs. But second of all, there’s more stuff they did to the M series
⏹️ ▶️ John chips. And iPhone chips are not powerful enough to run the Vision Pro. They had to use an M series chip
⏹️ ▶️ John plus whatever the heck is in the R thing, right? That is not a reverse direction flow. If anything, that’s a flow from the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John which they made those chips for, thus the M, down to the iPad and the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Second, when you’re doing advanced stuff like Halo car type stuff, you have to do the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that haven’t been done before, like trying to do the quad or the internet connect with the ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John or really trying to ramp up the GPU to make things possible that are not possible on computers that people
⏹️ ▶️ John actually buy, right? Nobody buys these Halo cars, nobody buys these Mac Pros,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But you never know what’s gonna be possible when you put it all together and put it into a million dollar
⏹️ ▶️ John supercar or a $50,000 Mac Pro? What kind of applications are possible? What kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of frameworks are possible? What kind of new workflows are possible that will eventually trickle down to the slower, crappier things?
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody is working out like, oh, I didn’t think I could work without a proxy, you know, the old days, proxy workflows for video,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? What if you made a computer that was powerful enough that you didn’t have to do proxy workflows? That doesn’t happen first on the
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air. It doesn’t happen first on a Mac Mini. It doesn’t happen first on an iPhone. It happens first on whatever the most
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful computer Apple sells is and then trickles down when eventually all the computers get better. But
⏹️ ▶️ John writing the software to say, hey, I bet on our most powerful computer you can do 4K 60
⏹️ ▶️ John no proxy workflow. The first time that happened, however many years ago that happened, it didn’t happen first on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? So I don’t think all the interesting tech is flowing that direction. And it’s another one of the self fulfilling promises. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you continue to limit what you’re willing to do at the high end, if you’re like, well, we’ll do
⏹️ ▶️ John like what the MacBook Air has but no better than that and that’ll be our high-end chip like if there was no M1 Max, no
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Pro, no M2 Max, M2 Pro, no M2 Ultra and the top of the line was just a plain old M2
⏹️ ▶️ John that is also in the iPads of course you’re limiting the scope of how much is going to flow back
⏹️ ▶️ John down because you only had to do a limited amount to combine the iPhone chips into the plain old
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 but to combine those iPhone cores and all that other stuff and the decoders and
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM and the big honking monster GPU that has everything plum the right way
⏹️ ▶️ John from the quad. Now there’s much more to trickle down. There’s you’re so much farther away,
⏹️ ▶️ John so much bigger, higher, more expensive. There’s more to trickle down. I mean, even stuff like the afterburner card, which eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John got ditched and its functionality incorporated into the Apple’s biggest chips is another example
⏹️ ▶️ John of things trickling down where we have an idea of how we could do something better. Eventually we’ll build that into the chip by
⏹️ ▶️ John putting enough decode into it. Yeah, I don’t think all the interesting tech is flowing iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Mac and not the other way around
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Vision Pro external eye display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about Vision Pro eyes, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John I meant to get an offset for this, but we’re talking last show about whether the eyes that you see
⏹️ ▶️ John on the outside of the Vision Pro are, you know, enhanced video of your eyes
⏹️ ▶️ John or whether they are just CGI is the same way they would do on your persona, like that little fake version
⏹️ ▶️ John of digital version of you. And in the talk show, uh, three 78, the one from WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John various Apple executives are on stage discussing those eyes and their discussion strongly
⏹️ ▶️ John implies, but does not flat out state that the eyes are essentially CG the
⏹️ ▶️ John same way they’re done in the persona. You can listen to it. It starts around 54 minutes into the show. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can, they’re not really talking about that specifically, but if you listen to what they say, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s a persona, but it’s really hard to tell because you can, It’s a good reading comprehension
⏹️ ▶️ John test, because if you look at the transcript and listen to the words, some people will be absolutely convinced that they totally said it’s just like a persona,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then you have to look at it and it’s like, well, they said just like in the persona it does X, or it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the persona, or we don’t fake your blinking. When you blink, the eyes blink, but that’s true of the digital
⏹️ ▶️ John persona too, right? But it also could be true of video. So it seems like it’s a persona.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be nice if this was clarified. No one wrote in from Apple to tell us one way or the other. Obviously we’ll find out if and when we get these
⏹️ ▶️ John headsets, but for now we’ll file it pretty strongly in the it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all fake CG and it’s not your real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyes. Yeah, that’s kind of the impression I got was it is based on the digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco persona. It is fake CG and that like, I kind of don’t see how else they would realistically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. I mean, they are tracking your eyes and they’re using that to render what the CGI’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are doing presumably, but they don’t have a full image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your face regular lighting because there there is no regular lighting projecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco onto your face like a movie space helmet yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I thought I mean that’s why because it’s the image is so dim that’s why I thought it would be like a night-vision thing and obviously they would have to
⏹️ ▶️ John enhance it because they can’t get a picture of like the bridge of your nose because like the nose pieces on there so it would have to be sort of stitched together
⏹️ ▶️ John but there is enough stuff facing your eyeballs that they could get a pretty accurate night-vision view of them
⏹️ ▶️ John and because it’s so dim and weird in there I thought that’s what it was, but maybe not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. I still, we’ve heard a lot of feedback on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this topic. I still think the digital personas and the eyes being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on probably the same thing, I think that’s going to not age well for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this product. And it wouldn’t surprise me to see major changes in those areas for future versions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like maybe getting rid of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Again, I mean, obviously none of the three have tried this, but I don’t think it’s nearly as offensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as so many other people do, but that includes some people who have tried it. So you very well may be right, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might be eating my words in 12 years when I actually get my hands on one.
Listeners in interesting places
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We mentioned, I forget exactly what the context was for this, but we were mentioning last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode that we have a quite impressive list of different professions and histories
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through our listenership. This makes me incredibly happy, it really genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does. We have a tour of a few people that wrote in with their backgrounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was most particularly spurned from going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a developer, to doctor, or occasionally the other way around. So Ellie Ragoni writes, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t know the listener who is a former software engineer turned doctor, now you do. I was a software developer in Manhattan about 10 years ago before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to medical school. I currently work as an emergency physician in Western Massachusetts. Greg Rogalski
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, I was a software developer in the nineties at Oracle prior to leaving the computer field and becoming a physician.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m now a radiologist in private practice. Nick writes, Dr. Nick even writes, I worked in tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for 15 years as a Cisco network engineer and Unix sysadmin. I am now a doctor in an emergency department here in Australia.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By the way, that Dr. Nick thing, that was a reference, John, just FYI. And finally, Fletcher Weld writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after listening to episode 542, I wanted to expand the ATP Listener Universe, TM, a little bit more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a professional ballet dancer and an aspiring iOS developer on the side. I haven’t had an opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to provide insight into the ballet world for the podcast yet, but maybe one day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, not a doctor in that case, but still very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this was just a sub-sampling. Many, many people wrote in to tell us. So we should, we have now,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like thoroughly learned our lesson. There is no way that we can give a fantastical example,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, hyperbolic example of like, imagine if we had a listener that X or Y because we do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, exactly. Which again, I, I, it may sound like I’m not being serious, but truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, this makes me,
⏹️ ▶️ John I probably would have gone for ballet dancer eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John then it got preempted on that. Cause like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco surely no ballet
⏹️ ▶️ John dancers listening to the show, let alone by all dancers who are also iOS developers. Of course there are, of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey course there are. Of course.
Stat mechanics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then we had some statistical analysis feedback with regard to the members
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode poll that John was running. Are you still accepting responses for that,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. I should probably close it down. I mean, no one’s really responding anymore, but yeah, we did get a bunch of more responses.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, nothing has changed about them. And Chris wrote in to explain why.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So Chris Rose writes, John mentioned an interesting statistical phenomenon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when talking about a survey. After a given number of responses, the average, or whatever he was calculating, did not change much as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new responses were submitted. A recent theme of the show has been the broad range of professions your listeners have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let me add another. I’m a statistician. I will probably get that wrong at least five times. Most of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey programming is statistical analysis work, but I grew up on basic C, assembly language, and lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey others. And yes, I’ve written Swift code for iOS. The phenomenon John mentioned is related
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the concept of of standard error. In many statistical analyses, you want to use measurements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to estimate some unknown value. Standard error is the expected difference between your estimate and the true
⏹️ ▶️ Casey value of whatever you are trying to estimate. It is calculated as the standard deviation of whatever you are measuring,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey divided by the square root of your sample size. Obtaining more responses did not change John’s estimate much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of the quote, divide by the square root of your sample size quote part of the calculation. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plot 1 over the square root of n, you’ll see the curve drop toward zero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty quickly as n increases from zero. But then the curve flattens out. That means it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy to drive standard error down towards some value by making small increases to sample size.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to meaningfully decrease the expected error further, you need dramatically more measurements.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A 100 times increase in size only delivers a 10 times improvement in the standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey error. Once you’ve got a reasonable number of measurements, getting more doesn’t help that much. As John collected more data, His
⏹️ ▶️ Casey estimate was just wandering around, whatever value he was trying to estimate, staying on average, one standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey error away from it. It was pretty good. It’s pretty, pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that happened. We got many more responses, and the graphs
⏹️ ▶️ John barely moved. Again, when I paste in new data and look at everything in the big spreadsheet, I’m like, did they move? Did
⏹️ ▶️ John I paste it in correctly? Yeah, it was fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I appreciate that. That was lightly edited by John, but still a very good summary. So thank
Threads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some topics. We had some breaking news last week that Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Threads, their Twitter-like replacement, or whatever you want to call it, their Twitter-like app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had just launched within a couple of hours of us recording last week. As we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sit here tonight, we are a little bit on a weird schedule this week and next. So it is Monday night,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the evening of July 10, as I am speaking to you right now. And we have a little bit of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s not really follow up, a talk to discuss about Threads. First of all, apparently this is Threads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version two, which I was not aware of, and one of you probably, John, put a link to TechCrunch from 2021 in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It says that Instagram will shut down its companion app Threads by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year end. Threads was introduced in 2019 as a companion app to Instagram shortly after the company shut down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its other standalone messaging app, Direct. Instead of focusing solely on the inbox experience, Threads was built
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a camera-first mobile messenger designed to be used for posting status updates and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey staying in touch with those you designated as your close friends on Instagram. The app didn’t gain mainstream
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adoption, however. Today I learned. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John remember that? I had no
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey recollection whatsoever. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco zero, zero. Never heard of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the reason this is interesting is just, oh, look, none of us remember this app that got canned back in 2019, but here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s extra interesting about it, because as we’re gonna talk about the real threads, the current threads in a
⏹️ ▶️ John moment, this was an app put out by Instagram that leveraged your Instagram social
⏹️ ▶️ John graph and it got no traction. I mean, maybe it wasn’t differentiated enough from
⏹️ ▶️ John Instagram because it was kind of like Instagram, but just for certain things. But this is an example,
⏹️ ▶️ John when we talk about the real threads of like, what’s different about threads this time?
⏹️ ▶️ John We are going to talk about the fact that it leverages Instagram social graph and the fact that a lot of people use Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ John and Facebook is huge and so on and so forth, but there are other ingredients that made for threads. Threads
⏹️ ▶️ John v2, threads vcurrent being different than threads v1, which wasn’t that long ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John It got shut down in 2021. It went from 2019 to 2021. I mean, that was kind of a bad time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like people traveling and posting photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t a bad time for people to be communicating through their phones though.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You know what I mean? It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re taking pictures of your sourdough starter or whatever. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think before we dig into social graph and stuff like that, I feel like we should spend least a moment talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our experience on Thread so far. Um, since I’m talking, I’ll start. I have not used this very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much. It’s so, I can’t put my finger on how I feel about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it quite yet. In some ways it feels like, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it feels kind of like Twitter in that it seems like everyone is there and, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying that’s factual, but that’s kind of what it feels like to me. But everyone is more enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and less grumpy at the moment, which is a a nice change of pace from the Twitter that we knew a few months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The app, I keep going back and forth. There are parts about it that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think are either pretty or that I like, but there’s a lot that I just, again, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t put my finger on what about it I don’t like, but I don’t love a lot of the choices the app makes. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really dislike not having any sort of experience on the Mac. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was thinking about this earlier, I think, when I saw Marco, you lamenting the fact that there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac app or no Mac, you know, real interface at this point. I never thought of Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a Mac exclusive experience, but certainly most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I spent on Twitter, I spent on my computer. And I’m not saying that, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I wouldn’t use threads if there’s no Mac or iPad app, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it certainly makes me less enthusiastic about it. And, and maybe I’m the only one other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than Marco that feels that way, but I don’t know that, that really does kind of bother me. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the notification scenario for me, it was a mess. Like I was getting blown up constantly by notifications. So I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to turn all those way, way down real, real fast. I apologize if that comes off as a humble brag. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean it that way at all. Like I, it’s just, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco anyone would have had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Because like it was importing all your Instagram people and they were so like, it was, it was an explosion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of notifications that first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep, exactly. I also don’t love that it, that it asked, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, I feel like it asked me, do you want to follow, you know, to like pre follow,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, all of your Instagram contacts. I definitely think that that was a cool idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no joke. Like that was a great idea. I swore I said no though, maybe I didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I could have sworn I said no. And I kind of wish I’d said no, because I feel like the people I follow on Instagram,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I follow them on Instagram for a reason, but just because you put up pretty pictures or what have you, it doesn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean that I want to hear your thoughts about everything under the sun. A silly example of this and judge me if you will, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really enjoy looking at accounts that have really pretty pictures of like Disney world, for example. I really enjoy Disney
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world. It’s a happy place to me. It’s okay if you don’t feel that way, that’s fine. But for me, I enjoy that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t necessarily need to be kept up with the ins and outs of what’s going on in the Disney
⏹️ ▶️ Casey community every day of the week. Like that’s not the level I’m at. And so here it was, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ended up accidentally, ding, following all of the, maybe it was like five or 10 accounts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but following all these accounts were constantly going back and forth about, oh, remember this ride, remember that ride, oh, this is cool, oh, did you hear about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s going on now? Which again, that’s fine, it’s just that’s not something I’m necessarily interested in. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see the pictures, I don’t necessarily want to see the text. And I feel like in a way, I’m kind of crossing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the streams a little bit here, which again is my own doing, and there’s no reason I couldn’t unfollow them on threads.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there is a reason though. You could unfollow them on threads, but does that mean you wouldn’t see posts from them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t think it means anything for Instagram, which is what I want. Like I would want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to follow them on Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, you keep following them on Instagram and you unfollow them on threads, you’re like, now I won’t have to see that discussion about Disney stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not interested in threads. But I think that’s not true. I think threads would still show them to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I misunderstood your point. I’m with you now. And yes, actually, that’s one of the things that is, thank you so much, because that’s one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that has driven me nuts about threads is that I’m seeing, like, I feel like it used to be this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way on Twitter like 10 plus years ago. I’m seeing all these conversations between people that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I follow one of them, and I guess this is just algorithmic timeline like coming to
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you follow none of them, which is much more likely.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That also happens. Yeah, and like that I-
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be clear, Twitter, when used through a third party client, was never like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, and that’s the way I’m used to seeing Twitter. And so I can understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from like a bootstrap perspective, especially if I’m only following like one or two people at the beginning, okay, yeah, sure. Show me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of these other conversations, but I really do not care for what I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it feels kind of like eavesdropping to me, which it isn’t because these are all public conversations, blah, blah, blah. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just kind of feels that way. And I really don’t care for it, especially since a lot of the times this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is content that isn’t particularly relevant to me. And again, some of this is my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own fault. I can unfollow again, to pick on this example, these Disney accounts on threads. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just don’t, I don’t love that. And, and that has not made me very happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, all in all, but I do think I have a positive view of threads in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the broad scheme of things, but it hasn’t. It hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey captured my attention the way that Mastodon has. I think because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a nerd, I think because my nerd friends are all on Mastodon and And because Mastodon feels most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly similar to the pieces of Twitter that I care for. I’m not saying it’s most directly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar to Twitter, because I think that’s probably threads, but it’s the most directly similar to the Twitter that I enjoy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Third party apps, chronological timeline, blocking, filtering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regular expressions, all these sorts of things that I’m not seeing in threads yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If there’s no immediate responses to anything I just said, then Marco, please tell me what what your broad thoughts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are on threads, and then we’ll start picking apart the individual stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think, so first of all, I haven’t used it a ton simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Casey said, there’s no Mac story right now. And they also went through the trouble of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opting out of the compatibility for M1 powered Macs for this app to run.
⏹️ ▶️ John are weirdos within weirdos because it is boggling my mind that your main interface over the years with
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter has been on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is where I am most of the day. You know, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I read on the Mac too, but the vast majority of my reading of Twitter like things has
⏹️ ▶️ John always been on the phone. Like obviously I have the Mac app, I run it all day, I use it, but like to be majority Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s you are a minority of a minority.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and also the majority of my posting is on the Mac as well. Because a lot of times I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco posting, like as part of something I’m doing, whether it’s announcing the show going live or posting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new episode notifications or posting questions about something I’m working on, code wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or posting a screenshot. There’s so much undoing on the Mac. That’s why when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mastodon was first taking off, before we had Ivory on the Mac, I really wasn’t getting that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it because it was very difficult for me to work it into my flow and my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Blue Sky actually worked on the Mac because they didn’t opt out of that compatibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so their iPhone app worked just fine. And I’m talking about Blue Sky in the past tense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the same credit app in both places. Yes, and it worked terribly on the Mac because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when when iPhone only apps run on the Mac, they don’t run in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flexible window and they don’t even run at the largest iPhone size that he would think. Okay, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going to run an iPhone app on the Mac and it’s going to be non resizable, run it at the size of the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro Max. Nope, doesn’t do that. It runs at some like fixed small size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and can’t resize it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s tough. It’s not a good experience, but at least it’s something. And so that’s how I was using BlueSky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while. And I’m talking about BlueSky in the past tense because honestly I’ve forgotten to continue to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it. And I think we’re gonna I’m gonna give it a second here, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for honestly now that Threads is out I don’t see a strong future for BlueSky. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these social networks like this, you know, everyone is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in gamer terms it’s like everyone keeps starting new Minecraft worlds and like starting everything from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scratch and it’s super fun for a little while as everyone’s like you know finding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people and re-following for whoever they were following in other places before and then someone comes in
⏹️ ▶️ John and wrecks everything
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah and the problem is take over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah that’s the problem like eventually it becomes night and it becomes all Nazis and like and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what part of the reason why I I didn’t really get long-term engaged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into blue sky is that every time I would go to Blue Sky all of the conversations going on would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be about Nazi issues. Whether even if it wasn’t the Nazis themselves, everybody was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about what to do about Nazis.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re wringing their hands about how nice we should be to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not even that, just like everybody was basically everybody was mad all the time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I appreciate the reasons they were mad that wasn’t a fun place for me to keep going back to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I have to say that this this this genre of
⏹️ ▶️ John discussion taking the form of I went to social network X and everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John was talking about why has always bothered me because it’s always done
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that that uses that observation to characterize
⏹️ ▶️ John the service and sometimes there’s some truth to it if lots of people have
⏹️ ▶️ John a similar experience that’s why the discussion happens. But with services that are Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it is mostly a function of who you follow with caveats about threads that we’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John to in a second. And so saying, whenever I go to x people are always talking about why it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John no, no, the people you follow are always talking about why or enough of the people
⏹️ ▶️ John you follow are talking about it and it annoys you enough that you makes you feel like that’s all they’re talking about because those
⏹️ ▶️ John things stand out and all the people posting pictures their cats fade into the background because of things that annoy you stand out more.
⏹️ ▶️ John With algorithmic ones, it’s different. But like, but I have to say like, and the way the
⏹️ ▶️ John opposite of that is like, hey, well, what if everybody says and what you just said is totally true. When people are just coming on to a new
⏹️ ▶️ John service, it is natural that most of the people who are talking are talking about the new service because
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, it’s the new Minecraft world. Hey, everybody, here we are. Where are we going to build? I’m going to build over here. What do you think of this? Did you find
⏹️ ▶️ John out where you even I did it? Like, I came on to threads. I was like, how do you find out the list of people that someone else follows? it was hidden
⏹️ ▶️ John in the UI somewhere, right? When you see enough people saying that, it makes sense. But I have to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John for services that have settled down to the point where there’s not a gigantic influx
⏹️ ▶️ John of millions of people, every millions of new people every single day, if you continue to not see the discussions
⏹️ ▶️ John you want, and if you are not subjected to a non optional algorithmic timeline, you can adjust what you
⏹️ ▶️ John see by changing who you follow. And that was true on Twitter with third party clients only. And it’s true
⏹️ ▶️ John of of Mastodon is not so true with threads, unfortunately, which we’ll get to in a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in Blue Sky, it’s mostly true, because Blue Sky did have a timeline that will show you
⏹️ ▶️ John only stuff from the people you follow. So this is to suggest to people that if your experience of
⏹️ ▶️ John a service that gives you control over your experience is not to your liking, and if that service
⏹️ ▶️ John is not in its, you know, September or whatever, like where all the new students come in or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you can do something about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And you should do something about it. Even Casey, like, oh, I don’t want to see all these people, like immediately unfollow. I mean, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John not that it’s going to save you on threads, but yeah, ruthlessly unfollow. I know people don’t like to do it because it feels like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing mean things to their friends or whatever, but that’s how you can hammer these services into a
⏹️ ▶️ John shape that is more pleasing to you. And that’s how eventually, if you see someone complaining for year number 17 on
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter that they hate seeing people discuss whatever topic, I can’t stand any more discussions
⏹️ ▶️ John about sports. I just can’t stand it. Stop following people who talk about sports and that will solve
⏹️ ▶️ John your problem.” And they’re gonna say, yeah, but he’s a first party client. I’m gonna be like, oh, there’s your problem. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and with all these services, look, you’ve been hearing me say a similar thing for years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the service is who you follow. That in your perception- If you’re lucky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right. And you’re not lucky in spreads. Your perception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the service is usually, for most services historically, who you follow. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, the problem is that’s not the case for these new ones that are very algorithmic and trying to promote things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from other people, or they’re so small that you kind of have to go fishing in the pond of random tweets just to like find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. So, you know, or in the case, you know, and also these services tend to allow drive-by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replies. So even if you are not talking about something, someone else can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reply to you or mention you to get you to talk about something or to ask you why you’re not talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something. And so there are some holes in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the seal of like, I just want to talk about X, Y, Z, like in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s where the actual population comes in. For example, if you allow Nazis to be part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John population, it’s not a solution to say, well, don’t worry, you can block them. Because who wants to spend their day
⏹️ ▶️ John blocking Nazis, right? And it’s like, well, we can’t solve that problem. It’s like, yes, you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t let them be there. It’s like going to your favorite restaurant, and it’s like, yeah, the clowns
⏹️ ▶️ John come in with seltzer bottles and squirt everybody. But if any individual clown does that to you, just block them, and we’ll make sure they
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t squirt you anymore. And then the succession of clown squirts you with seltzer, and you’re like, well, I blocked every single one
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, but I’m still soaking wet, and I don’t like this restaurant anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Can’t you just not let the clowns in?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, also, you’re only blocking the bottles, not the clowns. They can just go buy a new bottle and bring it right in, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John squirt you again.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they would say, well, can’t you just not let the clowns in? And they’d be like, well, but it’s a free country. We gotta let the clowns in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco restaurant! Anyway, continue. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so back to threads. So I’ve had a hard time using it, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, you know, in standard Zuckerberg fashion, it really tries to clone a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of the Twitter app experience. Problem is, as previously mentioned, I never had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Twitter app experience. I have the Tweetbot and Ivory experience, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much nicer, and the actual, like, first-party Twitter app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never used that. So, you know, I went to Blue Sky first, and they ripped off the the Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience. Now I’m on threads. They ripped off the Twitter experience. Everyone’s cloning something I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate, it turns out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, but they kind of have to, though. Like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gets into. Agreed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we’re a bunch of weirdos here talking about our particular thing because we’re giving our opinion on it. But just to be clear, we do
⏹️ ▶️ John understand why Twitter is like this, why Instagram is like this, why threads is like this. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you, and maybe people listening to this podcast don’t know because they’re more similar to us. If you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have an established network of people who you want to follow and discuss things with,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you just land in this app, just like, you know, show me something, right? I’m just a regular person.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to be entertained. It’s not as simple as Tick Tock, where you just start swiping and it’ll figure you out, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t have huge followings, people who are going to answer their questions when if you’re not Marco, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you post a question about iOS, and you don’t have you don’t follow anybody from the iOS developing computer, and nobody follows you,
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re going to say, hey, I couldn’t figure out this thing with whatever. No one’s going to answer you. No one’s going to even see that. You
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have something that lets people sort of bootstrap the social engagement. And so that’s where these algorithms come
⏹️ ▶️ John in. They say, we know you don’t have a lot of followers. We know you don’t even know who you’re supposed to follow. So let’s chuck
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stuff in your face that we think you might find interesting, interesting. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do that to be a mass market social network. You have to give that. And it’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ John a way for people to get started and to get going. Some people stay that way the whole time. They don’t want to follow 500
⏹️ ▶️ John people. They’re never going to get a thousand people to follow them. They just want to show me
⏹️ ▶️ John some interesting things and they’ll pick out people they follow and they’ll let you know, find some people they find interesting and maybe interact
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but they need sort of that that foundation of the Apple figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ John it thinks you want to see to make it a pleasurable experience for you. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know Twitter to that with algorithm a timeline and threads does it like crazy. You probably want to see what other people
⏹️ ▶️ John want to see which is celebrities whatever. And presumably if you have a do a good job of the algorithm, like TikTok seems to they’ll figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John what you like based on, you know, creepily watching what you spend more time lingering on in the scroll view or whatever the hell they do,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But that’s that’s their job. And that that is not our three experiences of Twitter. But
⏹️ ▶️ John apps like this have to do that if they want to be mass market. I mean, so blue sky is still invite
⏹️ ▶️ John only and it was like 50,000 people. Mastodon is like 2 million with like 1 million active
⏹️ ▶️ John as of Monday, July 11th, Threads, which came out like last week,
⏹️ ▶️ John is at 100 million people. That’s the point I wanted to make with the Threads V1.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, of course there aren’t 100 million. They leveraged the Instagram social graph. Yeah, the original version
⏹️ ▶️ John of Threads also leveraged the Instagram social graph. Something else must have changed. And we all know
⏹️ ▶️ John what has changed. Number one, Twitter bought by a maniac thrown in the dumpster, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Number two, this trend of, of hey, let’s try different social networks. Blue Sky, Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John all these things. Like, there’s blood in the water, right? Previously, if
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook, Instagram, whatever meta had launched this, when Twitter was at the top of its strength and
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone was on it and the president was posting on it and it was just like the place where everything was happening, this
⏹️ ▶️ John app would have died instantly. No one would have cared. It did die instantly in 2019. It wasn’t the same
⏹️ ▶️ John app, obviously, but like, it’s not just like, oh, we’re Facebook, we automatically win. No, but when
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s blood in the water, people want a new comforting thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That you launch the app, if you have an Instagram app, even if you don’t even use Instagram, it knows that
⏹️ ▶️ John you have one because you launched it on your phone or whatever. It’s like, push the button, boom. And what do you have to do? Nothing, there’s that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, do you wanna follow the Instagram people? Yes, no, it doesn’t even matter what you answer because whatever you answer, it’s gonna throw a bunch of crap in your face
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re gonna look at it. And that is a mass market friendly,
⏹️ ▶️ John 100 million people in a week, 100 million signups. Is it sustainable, this growth? But it doesn’t matter. They
⏹️ ▶️ John are now the big, I mean, Twitter itself only has, they have in the hundreds of millions,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? At their height, the top, the height of Twitter’s power was hundreds of millions of people. This has a single hundred million
⏹️ ▶️ John people after a week. That’s how much people are dissatisfied with Twitter. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s one of the main reasons we’re talking about it. And the fact that it doesn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John what we want it to do yet is kind of a bummer for us, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it shows how if you want to win the social networking game of Twitter-like things,
⏹️ ▶️ John the bar was substantially lowered by Elon Musk.
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Threads, cont’d.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if any of these Twitter replacements are going to have a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of being mass market, threads is the one, period.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s at a hundred million people. I would say it’s already mass market.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Again, if they
⏹️ ▶️ John can sustain that. But all those people could leave next week, but we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s at a hundred million tire kickers, but these things tend to have massive drop-off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of people will try it out and then see who’s still there in a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it happened with Mastodon even. Mastodon, again, up to like multiple millions and then kind of went down
⏹️ ▶️ John to like the, you know, the one and a half million who are actually willing to stay and it’s creeping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but still like, you know, even if they lose 80% of their people, they’re still 20 times the size of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know, I think this is going to be the replacement for Twitter for
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook doesn’t screw it up because there’s still plenty of room for Facebook to screw up. Not, not, I was going to say not intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John like Elon, but not as incompetently as Elon screwed up Twitter because it would be hard to compete with that. That’s really probably
⏹️ ▶️ John like one for the ages. Like how can you do everything possible wrong over and over again? But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as easy as you think it is. Twitter had the advantage of being the first one to do anything like this. So we defined
⏹️ ▶️ John everything about it and Twitter was fairly incompetent and stupid too, but it was literally the only game in town and invented this entire
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So it got a lot of grace and we were talking about this in Slack channel like do you think
⏹️ ▶️ John threads is going to be like Twitter? Even if threads ends up being 10 times bigger than Twitter, it will never be like Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not singular, right? There’s already other things out there like Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and Blue Sky and Nostr and like it’s a different world where
⏹️ ▶️ John we, you know, when Twitter was just Twitter, it’s kind of like Google is now like there was a bunch of search engines and then there was Google
⏹️ ▶️ John and we still really haven’t entered the post Google age despite Bing and DuckDuckGo existing and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John We are in clearly in the post Twitter age where there was a singular thing Twitter and it will
⏹️ ▶️ John we will never be in a time it’s like you know going to like a streaming video versus cable TV versus you know
⏹️ ▶️ John antenna TV there will never be another time where we’re all watching the same show on TV all the time like we were back when there
⏹️ ▶️ John were limited choices and there will never be a time when there is a singular focus of this kind of network social networking
⏹️ ▶️ John like there was in the Twitter days even if threads becomes 10 times bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But keep in mind too, with threads, a huge part of the 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco million people who are there now were not Twitter users. They were Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users. We’ll see how much this, I do think it’s going to stick, but I think it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different in terms of who’s using it, how, and for how long. And we’ll see. I am optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about its future, and I say this in terms of I think it has good chances sticking around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not in terms of like, I’m super happy about this because I still am not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan of this company at all, and so I don’t love the fact that they are the ones owning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. That being said, I also think that Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be fine. There’s enough people now on Mastodon that seem to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, you know, built a life there and built patterns there and built an audience and have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, apps configured and all set up the way they like and everything. The people who are who have been using mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to date, most of them will continue to use it. That I think we you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, our nerd circles, we formed a community there and all the people who were there before like they have these communities there
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there there is a possibility of a backdoor next style takeover. You know, we’re Apple bought next but essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who were part of next ended up taking over Apple. Facebook doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want this to happen. But depending on how well the two sides of this play it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could work out very much not in Facebook’s favor and very much in our favor
⏹️ ▶️ John as the people who like Mastodon. So in theory, Threads is supposed to be an activity pub app that is
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, according to Facebook, going to federate with the other activity pub things
⏹️ ▶️ John like Mastodon. If that actually happens, and Facebook said it will, if that actually happens, and if that
⏹️ ▶️ John happens in a way that makes sense, what it means is that weird people like us who who are on Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John who like to use the Mastodon apps, in what I would say the vibrant third-party ecosystem of
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that can read Mastodon, which does not exist anywhere else for threads or for Blue Sky or anything like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John will be able to follow people on threads. And people on threads will be able to follow us. And we can sit here and use our
⏹️ ▶️ John app, and they can sit there and use the threads app and see tons of stuff that’s just algorithmically chucked in their face,
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone can have what they want while still communicating together in a decentralized, federated
⏹️ ▶️ John universe that we call the Fediverse. And if that happens, if people are
⏹️ ▶️ John on threads and those people who are dissatisfied with the threads app, with the threads algorithm, with threads
⏹️ ▶️ John moderating choices, with threads anything, they would then have the option to say, you know what, things are not going the way I
⏹️ ▶️ John want over here in Facebook land. Is there somewhere else I can go while still following all the same people
⏹️ ▶️ John but getting my choice of applications and using a better app and not having ads in my face
⏹️ ▶️ John and having fewer Nazis or whatever? They can go to another instance that they like better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? That’s the promise of decentralized social networking. And if that happens, I have to think
⏹️ ▶️ John that people, if this in a friction-free market, which of course all these, you know, the people, these were the big
⏹️ ▶️ John companies, we love market forces and capitalism and friction-free, you know, movement of
⏹️ ▶️ John capital and people. Yeah, they don’t want friction-free. They want all the friction keeping everybody on their thing as prisoners.
⏹️ ▶️ John They want to build a moat. There’s a reason that phrase exists. And it’s not because they want friction-free movement among choices,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? They do not want competition. They want to lock you in. want to, you know, right. But if they actually federate,
⏹️ ▶️ John people will be able to go elsewhere. And there will be a sort of activation energy that is required,
⏹️ ▶️ John because first, you have to know that you can do it. And second, it’s a pain and technical and blah, blah, blah, right. But when everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John was dissatisfied with Twitter, we would have killed for some kind of way to take us and all
⏹️ ▶️ John our social network elsewhere to a place to an instance that had different moderating decisions and different applications
⏹️ ▶️ John and different business models or whatever. But we couldn’t that didn’t exist. We had to start from zero, and we tried with app.net and it didn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then Macedon tried and it didn’t pull people away. It took Twitter going in the toilet to give us enough activation
⏹️ ▶️ John energy to build up our new Minecraft world over in Macedon. And now, if threads
⏹️ ▶️ John come out, and it is the mass market thing, if they actually federate, and if they do it in a way where they don’t take
⏹️ ▶️ John over control of everything and do the embrace extensive extinguish thing, if they don’t successfully pull off that maneuver,
⏹️ ▶️ John we could be in a much better situation. Like I would be much more down on threads if they weren’t even pretending to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. But the fact that they feel like like not pretending, but like, I’m sure the people there who want to do
⏹️ ▶️ John the right thing, but they work for Facebook. So I don’t know how well that’s gonna work out.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it gives me some hope that this could be like a terrible mistake by Facebook to
⏹️ ▶️ John enter into this like why they could have just done threads and not have done activity, probably not promised to federate and they would be just
⏹️ ▶️ John successful at this point one week after launch. But the fact that they did that and promise that means
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have an in we have an ability to slowly but sure kind of the way Linux slowly but surely displaced
⏹️ ▶️ John all the proprietary Unix’s when Linux first came out, it was some college student made some little toy operating system that
⏹️ ▶️ John ran on this PC. Nobody at IBM at sun at HP
⏹️ ▶️ John were like, you know, in 20 years, we’re going to be out of it, we’re not going to be making Unix anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s gonna run Linux, they would have laughed and laughed and laughed Linux is nothing Linux is like the mastodon, not even
⏹️ ▶️ John the mastodon, it was used by 100 people, right. And Linux came through and swept through the entire world. There
⏹️ ▶️ John are different market forces at play but it’s the same type of thing where the small open thing that gives
⏹️ ▶️ John people users more freedom is able to disrupt the worlds of like proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ John Unix where everything was super expensive and everything was locked down and you couldn’t get the source code unless you paid a lot of money. It was just you know
⏹️ ▶️ John I think social networking is also ripe for that kind of disruption. I think that’s what mass data is doing and I think threads
⏹️ ▶️ John is walking into that trap if they do everything they say
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to do in the nicest possible way, which, you know, you can decide
⏹️ ▶️ John what you think the odds of that are. I don’t think, like Margo was saying, I don’t think if Threads does all
⏹️ ▶️ John the super evil stuff they can do, I don’t think they’ll be able to reach out and destroy Mastodon, because that’s the nature
⏹️ ▶️ John of decentralization. Threads can do whatever it wants, but they can’t literally reach out and shut down Mastodon instances.
⏹️ ▶️ John Only the people who run it and the people who use it can, you know, make that happen either by
⏹️ ▶️ John not funding it enough or giving up on developing software or whatever, but Facebook doesn’t control anything having
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with Mastodon. So I am cautiously optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John and if I had to root for something, if I had to root for Blue Sky or Nostr or Threads,
⏹️ ▶️ John I find myself in the awkward position of kind of rooting for Threads because it’s the only one that even claims to be built on ActivityPub.
⏹️ ▶️ John And ActivityPub is what runs the server that I like, which is Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My worry with the federation thing, I mean, so I have two worries with threads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco federating. One of course is that they just won’t do it, or they’ll do it and then undo it. Let’s set that aside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s assume they actually follow through with their word. They could do it in terrible ways
⏹️ ▶️ John too, there’s a third option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, and by the way, whatever their word is worth, it seems like the Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leadership seems to be better people than the Facebook leadership.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So maybe this little subdivision of this company, maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are more trustworthy than Mark Zuckerberg,
⏹️ ▶️ John who- And by the way, if I had to advise them, I would say, Mark, you’re still gonna get like 90%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the population. Just let the other 10% be happy. You know what I mean? Like, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, Mastodon’s gonna take over. Like, I just gave the example of Linux taking over, but again, there were different market forces there. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll get most of the users anyway. can actually be nice but we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mark Zuckerberg has had many opportunities in his life to do the right thing and has seemingly taken
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s thought a lot of, he’s thought really hard about a lot of them though.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco In the end he decided
⏹️ ▶️ John he can’t, he can’t bring himself to make the right decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zuck has proven himself to be really a horrible person and so anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that gets to his level I don’t trust to be done in a good way but the Instagram people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do seem like they have better heads on their shoulders than he does so hopefully you know this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes the right way. The other ways this could go poorly are if they federate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t really do anything because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality of following people from threads on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mastodon or other activity pub sources it is something no one ever does or it’s so clunky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you you can’t get any audience out of threads that way or threads, it does such a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job of promoting its own accounts that you’re better off having only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a threads account and then have it tell the Mastodon people, you know what I’m gonna abandon my Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account, follow me over there because it’s ten times bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah we were just discussing this in Slack too and everyone has been assuming and I also assume that you won’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to like use Ivory as a threads client.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact same thing. Yeah the best we could hope for is that hey you’ll be able to use the Mastodon client of your choice,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ll be able to follow people on threads, and threads people will be able to follow you. But you will not be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John use Mastodon to read threads. You will not be able to use Mastodon client to see the threads algorithmic
⏹️ ▶️ John timeline, because they can’t serve you ads or whatever. So that’s the best case scenario that we’re describing, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. The worst case one is what you’re talking about, where it’s like they make it so technically clunky to have any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John interaction, that the fact that they’re federated is like academic and pointless. Like practically, they might as
⏹️ ▶️ John well not be federated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. or the situation of like, you know, whatever, all their algorithmic stuff is gonna make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mastodon and other activity pub sources posts are not promoted at all. And they like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will just never see your posts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Downgrade them or like, imagine if you tried to follow someone on threads, but rather than seeing the posts of the person you followed on threads,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you hit the API endpoint, it would say, here’s some stuff we suggest for you. Like the endpoint would be like, show
⏹️ ▶️ John me the latest posts by person X. And it would be like, I know you wanna see the posts of person X, but how about these instead?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another way they, oh, well, we’re federating. It’s just that we have a different idea of what it means to see the posts by a single person.
⏹️ ▶️ John We think you should also see a bunch of other crap. Like there’s so many ways they could do this badly, but the possibility
⏹️ ▶️ John of them not doing it badly right now, as of Monday, July 11th, exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This remains to be seen with the federation angle. So I’m gonna set that aside for the moment and then just go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to threads of the service. I stand by what I said last week in the after show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we had had like two seconds to look at it. I trust Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually do a better job of both technical scaling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and of content moderation than either Twitter or most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Masson instances. And that’s not to say they do a good job, they don’t. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it’s, it’s, I think it’s worth the perspective that like I don’t think it’s possible to do a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great job of content moderation if you have a very large social service, because by having a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large service, you’re going to have a whole bunch of crappy people trying to do crappy things. And, you know, it’s, it’s very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make policies that are consistent and enforceable and around that. And, you know, a lot of stuff is going to slip through the cracks no matter what.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that being said, my fear of Macedon, as I said last week, and, and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, last fall when it was getting big, my fear of Macedon has always been, I don’t think this can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale both technically or content moderation wise to a lot of a lot of users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fortunately, I don’t think Macedon is going to have to scale that way. I think Threads is going to be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the scaling job for everyone else. But Twitter is a mess in that area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve been okay at technical stuff, although they were better before the acquisition of the technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. But before the acquisition, Twitter at scale ran surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well for the last decade. The scale they operate at, or operated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at, at Twitter is so impressive. And how responsive and reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything was at Twitter was actually very impressive for their scale. Facebook also manages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Instagram is pretty solid. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty solid,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically. And so far, Threads, obviously it had a rough first day with all the notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and post load failures and everything, but it seems like, I mean, look, they just got 100 million
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users in less than a week, and it’s still up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That says a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know of anyone else who could have done that. Yeah, Google probably. I know. I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s actually a good contrast, by the way. Speaking of social networks, someone pointed out, I forgot who it was on probably
⏹️ ▶️ John on mastodon. You know what other service had 25 million people within its first week?
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Plus. You know, if you leverage an existing social graph or an
⏹️ ▶️ John existing audience, you can get lots of people real fast, but you gotta you gotta keep them. And obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John Threads is already ahead of that by a substantial amount. But we’ll see what the
⏹️ ▶️ John retention is like. Marco, what you were saying about the moderation, it’s interesting to contrast Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John with Facebook, because the thing that Twitter and Facebook both have, obviously, the mass and doesn’t, is millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of dollars and tons of employees. But both of them, pre-Elon, pre-Elon
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter and Facebook, both of those services were brought up in an environment where,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this phrase that we’re now hearing now because of Elon, where they work diligently
⏹️ ▶️ John towards brand safety. Most of the things that Facebook did related to moderation
⏹️ ▶️ John were not out of the goodness of their heart, but because if you wanna run advertisements from Coca-Cola, you can’t have child
⏹️ ▶️ John porn next to it, right? You have, you’re like, there’s some, and yes, child porn is illegal too. Like you can’t have as many
⏹️ ▶️ John Nazis as you might wanna have. Because you’re not gonna work with them. It’s intellectually honest for you to
⏹️ ▶️ John allow them to post what they want, right? And so there were companies run by adults, again, pre-Elon, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John companies run by adults that knew that their bread was buttered by doing advertising. So they did what it took
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to keep the advertising happy in the typical way that, yes, of course, people still yelled
⏹️ ▶️ John about their decisions, but they were trying to sort of thread that needle. Like, we need to satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ John our billionaire, right-wing CEO, but also we need to make Coca-Cola happy
⏹️ ▶️ John and we don’t want too many people yelling at us. So how can we figure that out? Should we really ban people who say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re being tracked by 5g with the code vaccine or should we just let them say it and it’s probably fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing bad could possibly come of that. I don’t know we get enough pushback will change the rules, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s that’s the type of company it’s like run by somebody who first and foremost wants to make money and understands the need
⏹️ ▶️ John advertisers, but also has some pseudo intellectual stuff about like letting everybody post whatever the hell they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they would try to walk that line right? Post Elon Twitter doesn’t care about that. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just like, whatever, I’m just gonna make random decisions about my whim, but that’s the advantage that Facebook has
⏹️ ▶️ John now with threads is already some popular accounts that are popular on Twitter and are accustomed
⏹️ ▶️ John now in the post dealing world, accustomed to be able to say whatever they want on Twitter, we’re getting dinged
⏹️ ▶️ John and getting stuff pulled down on threads because threads starts off with the Facebook slash Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ John ethos of no, you can’t be super terrible. And in fact, we have tons of employees whose job
⏹️ ▶️ John it is to make sure you’re not super terrible. You’re not on Twitter anymore. Not to say that Facebook are the amazing good
⏹️ ▶️ John guys and they’re going to make everything clean up this town or whatever, but there is a baseline level of non-Nazism
⏹️ ▶️ John that even Facebook over decades has established. This is the Nazi line for Facebook and it’s not where
⏹️ ▶️ John we want the line to be, but a line exists at least. Whereas Twitter, it’s like, I don’t know, how does Elon feel today?
⏹️ ▶️ John Who freaking cares? It’s not, they have stopped being a, they’ve stopped being a company and
⏹️ ▶️ John stopped being just like, you know, the, the, uh, disembodied id of one very
⏹️ ▶️ John not well person. So that is an advantage because like you said, they have the
⏹️ ▶️ John scale to do it and they have a bunch of existing rules that make it a pleasant
⏹️ ▶️ John enough place for, you know, regular people to be. It’s the same thing with Facebook. Why is everybody on
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook? They, Facebook tries to be pleasant enough. Yes, there are all sorts of dark corners of Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John where people are just, you know, doing and saying terrible things. But in general, I believe that still
⏹️ ▶️ John the majority of this country, although you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t know it by looking at the presidential votes, but that’s a second issue. majority of this country
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want a bunch of Nazis yelling at them constantly. And Facebook makes sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s friendly enough for the majority of the people in this country to say, oh, Facebook, whatever, it’s there, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine, or whatever. If they can do that with threads, they’re already way ahead of Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like you said, they’re probably also ahead of Mastodon, not because Mastodon doesn’t want to do those right
⏹️ ▶️ John things, depending on your instance or whatever, but because most MassDot instances are not equipped
⏹️ ▶️ John to manifest the desires of the people who run them as efficiently
⏹️ ▶️ John as Facebook is. I would say that the good instances have better desires that they would like to manifest,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s difficult to bring that to reality. And I keep coming back to it. MassDot hasn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John figured out a financial model, a sustainable financial model, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it through donations of people who on the servers you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s working so far for some instances in some cases, but I feel like that needs to be worked out. Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John has figured out a financial model. They don’t have to worry about that. They got that covered, right? The financial
⏹️ ▶️ John models, they’re going to show you ads. So it’s kind of weird where Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John has pulled itself out of the game by being ridiculous. Mastodon is trying to do all the right things depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on your instance and trying to provide a choice choice of third party apps choice of instances
⏹️ ▶️ John choice of experience choice of finance model choice of moderation choice choice choice choice choice and
⏹️ ▶️ John hope we’re hoping that that will all work out great over there because there’s lots of choices and if one of them doesn’t work out we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not dead and then threads is like we are baseline competent facebook level
⏹️ ▶️ John of nazi removal and we’re trying to make a fun instance and if you like instagram maybe you like this
⏹️ ▶️ John and it may sound like damning with faint praise but that makes thread like threads like head and and shoulders above
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody else for the average person and, you know, therefore 100 million people unawake.
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#askatp: Storing app licenses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. And let’s start tonight with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a technology topic, then we’re going to do a little bit of Ask Neutral, actually. We’re going to start with Wes Chamness,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who writes, On the Mac, one of the main reasons I continue to use 1Password is that it’s where I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been storing my software license keys. I do the same, by the way. If I am forced to move on from 1Password,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you all have any recommendations for a place to keep these? Or does John just have them all saved in a text file somewhere? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel this pain. I don’t want to get on a rant again about this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of months ago, it was very recently, I downgraded,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I changed the version of 1Password I had installed from version 8 to version 7.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And suddenly the 8 trillion paper cuts that 1Password 8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is giving me all went away. But there’s hints and indications that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1Password7 is not long for this world. So I have a feeling that right now, they’re taking the carrot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approach. But soon, they’re going to be taking the stick approach and saying, no, you’ve got to upgrade if you want to continue to have a usable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey product. At which point, especially now that we’ve got some sharing coming in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud keychain or whatever it’s called, and pass, what is the new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that Ricky’s done?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Passkey, thank you. to say passcode and I knew that wasn’t right. Anyways, between passkeys and the shared stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in iOS and macOS, that’s probably where I’m going to end up. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do I do about my software licenses? So Wes and Casey would like to know, John, what should we do?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have them in a big text file. I’m not my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey parents. Although my parents don’t pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John software. Who am I kidding?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. They do have big text files. Well, of things supposed to remember it. So my suggestion is
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not what you want to do, but it’s what I do. I use a product from Barebones Software,
⏹️ ▶️ John makers of BB Edit, my favorite text editor for these 30-some years. It’s called
⏹️ ▶️ John Yojimbo. It was originally called Sidekick, but that name was taken. I don’t know if it was taken by the same company.
⏹️ ▶️ John You two might know from the PC days. Did you know Sidekick? I think for DOS even?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I knew the little texting phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exactly. Okay, it was before your time. Anyway, there have been software products called Sidekick. I forget I get why they couldn’t use the name Sidekick,
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway, they renamed it Yojimbo. Yojimbo is, what is the name for it? Kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ John lunchbox app, what are they called? Like an app where you just chuck a bunch of stuff. A shoebox. Shoebox app, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can save text files there, you can save downloaded versions of webpages, notes
⏹️ ▶️ John with and without passwords, and they have a separate item for saving serial numbers for software, because hey, they make software, and
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the day before the app stores were pervasive, you bought software and you got a license code for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a lot of license codes and they’re all in Yojimbo. Every time I get a new software product that has license code, I add a
⏹️ ▶️ John new serial number, they call it, because they use the old style language. I add it in Yojimbo.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yojimbo syncs with iCloud. I just use it on my Mac. I don’t remember if there’s an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John version. They used to have a version that would sync it to the web and stuff. Like, it’s had a long history and I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John one of their more popular apps, certainly not as popular as BBEdit, but it 100% does the job. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if it ever goes down the tubes, I’m not sure what I’ll do. I guess I’ll just dump and export all of them. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I will put them in a text file. But Bare Bones is great about software support. I kind of can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John believe they’ve supported Yojimbo over so many years, but they continue to do so. So if you are a Mailsmith
⏹️ ▶️ John fan, I feel bad because Bare Bones did can that one. But if you’re a Yojimbo fan, it’s still out there for you to get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would do a simpler solution. My solution to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, it is 1Password right now, But before 1Password managed this for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just had an email folder called Software Registrations. And every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I would get an email confirmation that included the registration number, which usually happens with purchase,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would just move it to that folder. I have since moved to 1Password, but in the intervening years, I’ve kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that folder going in the email. So I would leave it there. I would keep that, I would still have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folder there in my email as a backup, but my primary would become a secure note
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in notes. So you are keeping them in a text file. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s the difference between one password and a secure note locked by face ID? Is there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that many differences?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they’re not all in one text document. And they have to search for the document. By the way, it’s worth noting that the keychain allows you
⏹️ ▶️ John to make secure notes within it as well. So you can go to keychain access and do a new secure note. It doesn’t have a dedicated item
⏹️ ▶️ John for serial numbers. But you can add these things individually to keychain. The difference between the big text file and the
⏹️ ▶️ John individual ones is, are you opening up a single document and searching within it versus are you looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at a collection of things and filtering them based on some criteria? That’s the only real difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but anyway, I think whenever whenever anybody is looking for alternatives to one password
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for for some of the things that are not just passwords, like you know, for passwords, if you’re in the Apple ecosystem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably just using the Apple built in password management stuff is probably fine for a lot of that stuff. For anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not supported by that system. Honestly, a secure note like a locked note and Apple Notes locked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by face ID, that’s probably a more secure and more realistically usable solution that a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people out there would recommend or would try. So that I think would be
⏹️ ▶️ John totally fine. I’m still afraid of some of some sinking disaster nuking all my stuff and notes. I have nightmares about
⏹️ ▶️ John it now. I don’t I really wish I wish that they would let you export everything. It’s like a big,
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, but they still don’t. I mean, just like, don’t worry, you need to export it. I mean, it’s been fine. Nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John bad has happened. But that’s why people what things in text files, because a text file, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it is easier to be sure that you have it as secure as you think you have it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it gonna be all my backups on my time machine backups on the hard drives of computers that are in my attic, like it’s a text
⏹️ ▶️ John file, I know I’ll always be able to read it versus notes where if there’s a syncing disaster, it’s like, okay, well, so where are all your backups of notes?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you pull out an old Mac and see them? No, because it’ll sync and it’ll destroy everything. Can you get it any other way? Is it backed
⏹️ ▶️ John up in your time machine backups? Well, maybe kind of, could I dig it out of there? Like it’s different. And I know your
⏹️ ▶️ John Jimbo seems like it’s the same way, but it has a local database file that is backed up. So if your Jimbo’s thinking, goes, hey, why
⏹️ ▶️ John are you can’t actually restore from backup?
#askneutral: NACS vs. CCS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, now let’s do some Ask Neutral. Steve Stutz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, how do you feel about just about every car company that wants to make an EV, even Rivian,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now adopting Tesla’s charging standard? This is the North American charging standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as compared to, what does CCS stand for? I forget. Shoot, it doesn’t really matter. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when this was written, it was just Rivian and like Ford and GM, I think at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time that was that had pledged to switch to NACS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But now it’s for GM, Volvo, Rivian, Polestar, Mercedes, and potentially more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know. By the
⏹️ ▶️ John time you hear this episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s usually more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s probably true. My initial reaction to this, particularly when Ford, I think, was the first shoe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to drop when Ford said it, I was angry. And the reason I was angry is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because, look, we had everyone on the same page except petulant Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who wouldn’t just, you know, get in line like everyone else. And I was really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upset because it seems silly to me to continue to allow Tesla, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouldn’t say allow, but you know what I mean, to continue to have Tesla doing their own thing because we’re better than you because we’re Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then everyone else is all in CCS land, all consistent. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like everyone’s going to be all in NACS land and all consistent. And truth be told,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not used either of these connectors. I’ve driven cars with both of them. I’ve not used the connectors. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything I’ve understood is that the NACS connector is pretty much universally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey considered to be a better connector than CCS. So I don’t actually mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where this has ended up. There was the uncanny valley, if you will, where some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the companies have committed. I guess we’re still strictly speaking there, but I think the writing’s on the wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was the uncanny valley when some of the companies had committed, but very few of them had. And I thought, oh gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here we go again. We’re going to have two standards forever. But it seems pretty, pretty clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’re going to end up on NACS here in North America, and that’s just going to be the end of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You keep saying NACS like it’s a thing, by the way. This is one of the best magic tricks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember when this first announcement was made, it was I was like, oh, Ford’s gonna use Tesla’s connector. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, they must have done a deal. They get access to superchargers, you know, whatever. And then they said, yeah, Ford’s gonna use
⏹️ ▶️ John the North American Charging Standard connector, and I said, what? What
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco American Charging Standard? Brilliant
⏹️ ▶️ John marketing. Right, there’s the Tesla connector, and there’s CCS, which is like an international standard,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there was Chaddemo, whatever, which
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is a company
⏹️ ▶️ John Nissan used. Chaddemo, yeah. Right, right. But I’m like, what the hell is NACS? And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, is this some, you know, these people were writing about it As if this is a thing. I’m like, that’s not a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like saying, you can declare whatever you want to be the standard, but standards are
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing. You can’t just declare yourself to be the standard. Well, it turns out that A, they did just declare
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves to be the standard, but B, Tesla submitted their,
⏹️ ▶️ John gave their connector design, the thing that plugs into your car to charge it, to SAE International.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the, what is SAE? It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Society of Automotive Engineers. We’ll put a link
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes. So this is June 27th, they did this. So Tesla no longer controls this
⏹️ ▶️ John standard. It has been given to an international standards body. And then they called it North American Charging
⏹️ ▶️ John Standard, which now that it’s owned by a standards body, and let’s be honest,
⏹️ ▶️ John in North America, the most best chargers have that connector. So I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s the North American Charging Standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because Tesla does, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why, that’s why all the other companies are lined up behind it, is they’re like, they’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John adopt a connector that Tesla controls. Tesla is a competitor. They would rather, you know, set themselves on fire
⏹️ ▶️ John than do that. But now that the connector is not under the control of Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John and they want access to Tesla’s charging network, now they’ll sign themselves up to do it. So it’s not just like some magic renaming
⏹️ ▶️ John they did. Tesla had to give up some control of this and give it over to a standards body.
⏹️ ▶️ John The second thing, and Casey was talking about being angry about this. I don’t know if you’ve never seen or used any of these
⏹️ ▶️ John connectors. You may think this is just like six of one, half a dozen of the other, I don’t care. I just wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John know that I can charge my thing. But the Tesla connector
⏹️ ▶️ John is a better connector. It’s just better. So CCS, I don’t know if this is true, but it looks like a connector
⏹️ ▶️ John that was originally designed. I think this actually is true. Originally designed to be a connector. And then they said,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, and by the way, you designed that so long ago that you didn’t know about DC fast charging.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we wanna do that. Can you do that with your existing connector? and they were like, oh damn, no, we can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we’re gonna have a solution. What if we put basically another connector, like two inches below
⏹️ ▶️ John the existing connector and that will be the one you use for DC fast charging. So it made a connector that was basically like two
⏹️ ▶️ John connectors stacked vertically and not particularly compactly. It’s huge.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s huge, it’s ugly, it’s weird. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly what happened by the way. It was like the J1722 or whatever connector first.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s huge, ugly and weird to insert. And the Tesla one, because it was designed from the start
⏹️ ▶️ John to work with DC fast charging, is small, simple, delicate, doesn’t take up a lot of room. And
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the thing about Tesla. I know you’re like, oh, but Tesla, they don’t know how to design anything. Elon’s in that job, he’s, you know, destroyed.
⏹️ ▶️ John This connector has been around long enough that if there were some fatal flaw with it, we would have found it by now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Like, so I think this connector has shown that it does not blow up, does not
⏹️ ▶️ John melt, seems mostly idiot proof. Like there’s enough Tesla sold that we can say,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the better connector. And it sucks that we were so close to having a standard, even though it
⏹️ ▶️ John was a crappy standard. But if there’s going to be one standard and I get to pick which one it’s going to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want it to be the good connector. So I’m kind of glad that the quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla connector, which we can now call the North American Charger Standard is winning because the other connector sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so bad. Yeah, it’s very similar. So first of all, I have owned both of these connectors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve used both of these connectors. So, because we have TIPS I3 that has the CCS plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we had, of course, my two Teslas over the years that had the Tesla plug. And so I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of experience with the Tesla plug and a little bit of experience with the CCS plug. First of all, it’s as John said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the CCS connector, it’s basically the car version of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB 3.0 B connector. I think it’s worse than that. Well, yeah, because it’s like 20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times bigger, but- It’s like the B connector
⏹️ ▶️ John stacked on top of an A connector.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the USB 3.0 B connector looks like the USB B plug. The B is like the one that you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on printers, like on the printer end. So it’s like the 3.0 version of that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same, like, you know, little trapezoid or whatever, but then like it has like a little secondary group of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff above it. It’s so it looks actually comically similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a tiny version of the CCS plug. Anyway, the Tesla plug, like John said, if you’re gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these two plugs, that’s the one you want. You want the Tesla one. It is just nicer in use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are a few advantages and disadvantages between the two in terms of capabilities or little implementation details.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But overall, they’re both fine and usable, but if you’re gonna pick one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Tesla one is nicer to use in practice for a lot of reasons. So in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like the standardization, look, I’m no fan of Elon Musk. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really care who invented this plug. If it’s the better plug, it deserves to win.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And standards-wise, look, we’ve had a number of years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here years here now having electric cars be mainstream and widespread in large part thanks to Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for a long time, Teslas were the best electric cars in the market. They’ve earned a lot of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco success and they’ve earned a lot of accolade and to some degree gratitude from the industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and from people because they really did achieve advancing electric cars in a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. Like, they really did achieve that mission and they deserve a lot of credit for that. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we’ve had all these new entrants into the market that are gaining ground, and I think have promising futures,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had this annoying, like, you know, format war going on in North American charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between CCS and the Tesla connector. The uncomfortable reality of the situation is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while most cars on, like, most models of car in the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used CCS, by volume, There were a ton of Teslas, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think more Teslas than all the other ones combined, at least for the first few years of these other competitors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco existing. I don’t know if that’s still the case today, but it at least was the case, and it might still be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla just sells a whole bunch of cars. So there’s more Teslas on the road for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if not still. And then also, way more Tesla superchargers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to comparable DC fast charge stations that had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CCS. Now, you can go onto PlugShare or ChargePoint or whatever, all these apps, you can say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh look, no, that’s not true. Look how many more CCS stations, or look how many more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level one, level two charging stations are for this other one. And you look, and it’s like, yeah, that’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dryer outlet kind of voltage there. But if you want DC fast charging, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options for CCS were usually not more numerous than the Tesla Supercharger network. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d actually go to them, and they’d be broken half the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was part of the motivation of these companies, by the way. You know, being willing to go to it was that they they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John selling electric cars now, and I think they probably have overwhelmed the combined all the Model threes,
⏹️ ▶️ John although it might be close. But anyway, they would sell these cars and all of them had some kind of way
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to make chart. You know, they didn’t have supercharger notes, but they had some kind of deal with somebody. It’s a deal with Electrify
⏹️ ▶️ John America. Ford had a thing where you it would have it would, you know, do the searching for you across multiple vendors
⏹️ ▶️ John of charging stuff or whatever and try to find the best charging for you. and their customers were having poor experiences
⏹️ ▶️ John for that specific reason. That they could find chargers, but either they were slow, because, you know, they’re not all
⏹️ ▶️ John superchargers, they’re not all level 3, or they’d get to them and they would either not work at all or they would
⏹️ ▶️ John only work at the slower speed. Which is not a good experience and that reflects poorly on Ford
⏹️ ▶️ John or General Motors or whatever, and it could motivate someone to buy a Tesla. So these people are changing
⏹️ ▶️ John to the better connector, which they don’t want to do, but practically speaking will make their cars better and more desirable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, and this is the part where Elon does win a little bit, gaining access to the Tesla supercharger network,
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla still does control. They don’t control the connector anymore. That’s an SAE. But those supercharger
⏹️ ▶️ John stations are still 100% owned by Tesla. And so deals are made for these people
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t have their own charging networks to get access to the good charging network
⏹️ ▶️ John with the good chargers. And therein lies most of the complications of this story,
⏹️ ▶️ John because Marco surely knows that if you go to a supercharger, it’s made to charge a Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was like, well, I just got done saying they’re all gonna use the connector, so no problem, right? No, there’s still a problem. The problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is, even if you’re not Casey List and don’t back into every single spot, those cords on those Tesla superchargers
⏹️ ▶️ John are not very long. You know how long they are? They’re long enough to reach a Tesla. It’s because Teslas all have the outlets
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same exact spot, and it’s near the back of the car. And they make the cords that, If you’ve seen the design
⏹️ ▶️ John of the superchargers, they have the place where the cord rests, so it rests like inside the little U shape of the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s something like six feet or eight feet long. It’s not long.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like when you buy an Apple product and it comes with a cord that’s way too short, right? It’s exactly the right length for a Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ John but pull up there in some stupid gigantic GM thing where the charging port is like 17 feet up
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s a huge vehicle or it’s like a Rivian or whatever, and it’s not at the very front or the very back of the vehicle,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now you have to park like a jerk to even be able to get the cord to reach, and you’re stretching it, and it doesn’t quite reach, The connector
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t stay in and this is before you get into the real technical problem, which is presumably Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John will address But it’s still a big deal Tesla was Not super early in the market
⏹️ ▶️ John because the CCS charger was like before DC fast charging existed They were the first DC fast charger. So they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John ahead of the game. They have a technically better connector It supports DC fast charging out of the gate But since the advent
⏹️ ▶️ John of Tesla the fancy fancy electric cars have been going to an 800 or 900 volt architecture I don’t know if anyone is not sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John but 800 volt architecture, which allows them to charge faster, allows them to put less current through the wire, allows them to use less
⏹️ ▶️ John wire, which uses less copper, which uses less current. Anyway, there’s lots of reasons to go to 800 volt. Superchargers do not do 800
⏹️ ▶️ John volt at all right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if one of these car companies has an 800 volt architecture car and they get
⏹️ ▶️ John the Tesla supercharger thing, they can’t charge at the rates that their car
⏹️ ▶️ John is supposed to charge at. It will be slower to charge an 800 volt architecture car on a Tesla supercharger
⏹️ ▶️ John than a 400 volt one. So something needs to be done there because the number of people
⏹️ ▶️ John doing 800 volt architectures is just increasing over time. I’m just presumably Tesla will switch to that eventually too.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think we don’t know what the deal is in the back rooms involving this, but this is something that
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be addressed. Cause if this is going to be the North American charging standard, and if you’re going to buy a Porsche Taycan
⏹️ ▶️ John with 800 volt architecture with a Tesla connector, they’re not going to sell that until there literally
⏹️ ▶️ John is someplace you can plug it in charge at the rate it’s supposed to be able to charge at because who wants to buy a Porsche
⏹️ ▶️ John EV that can only charge at speeds of like you know yesteryear like slower than 400 volts so
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the cord length and the 800 volt thing need to be addressed
⏹️ ▶️ John and could be things that are lurking out there for the very first people who get the very first
⏹️ ▶️ John Ford GM Volvo or whatever with these connectors I don’t know if I think maybe Polestar does the interval I don’t know if any of these people
⏹️ ▶️ John do the 100 volt but either way they’re going to pull into to one of these things, they’re going to reach for the cord, they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John go, wait, and they’re going to have to repark and reposition. And it’s not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty. And that’s part of being standard. Like the cords at gas stations
⏹️ ▶️ John are made to fit most vehicles that are going to pull up in front of the pump. They’re not as short
⏹️ ▶️ John as Tesla Superchargers. If a gas station knew that only like Fords would ever pull in there, right, or
⏹️ ▶️ John even just the side that things are on, like on Hondas, the gas thing is always on the driver’s side, but in other cars, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes on the passenger side. Gas stations have to account for all of that. And up until right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John supercharger stations didn’t. So they will have to be retrofit and they’ll have to figure something out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, and I think overall though, like that’s probably the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case outcome here because, you know, the reason why we are generally, like we being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like electric car owners here in the US, I think most of us are happy to see this change and to see Tesla’s connected to take over because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Tesla supercharger network is the best charging infrastructure out there right now. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most, first of all, it has all the best locations, because it was there first. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CCS chargers are like kind of in weird spots. It’s like, oh, you gotta get off the highway and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive a few miles to this mall and go in the very outside edge of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John parking lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John The superchargers have the best locations for rich people, let’s be honest though, because
⏹️ ▶️ John was an early adopter, rich person car, and so they have the best locations and the rich person locations, but CCS
⏹️ ▶️ John has the best location.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have rest stops on highways and stuff. It matters.
⏹️ ▶️ John well that counts, interstates count, rich people travel interstate too, but I feel like the perception
⏹️ ▶️ John that Tesla has all the best real estate is based on the best real estate as being the most expensive, highest trafficked real estate,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that is not the best real estate if you live someplace rural.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, but for the most part, you need supercharging on highways and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on high traffic highways. So Tesla is everywhere with their stations, And the supercharger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stations tend to be very well maintained. They tend to work. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will drive up to it, and not only will there be enough bays that I personally, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it’s probably different on the West Coast. I’ve never pulled up to a supercharger and had it be full, ever. Get ready for
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. That’s the problem. It’s not a problem. It’s just this nature of like, sometimes the gas station is busy, too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like, I’ve never had there not be capacity. I’ve never pulled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to a supercharger be broken ever. I’ve done a lot of miles in Tesla’s. I’ve done a lot of supercharging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never had a supercharger not work for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, that’s not just like, Oh, because Tesla is so much better. Tesla is motivated to make sure their chargers
⏹️ ▶️ John work because they own them and it’s part of the value proposition of the car. And you’d be like, well, aren’t the other charging station
⏹️ ▶️ John people also motivated? The answer is no, they’re not. So if one of the big ones, electrify America is owned by Volkswagen
⏹️ ▶️ John and there was because of the diesel gate scam where they committed fraud to try to make the emissions of their vehicles
⏹️ ▶️ John look better. They were required by court order to invest $2 billion into like EV infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So you know, Dr. Fry America is essentially a compliance network we are complying with the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey settlement of a some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of criminal case or lawsuit. They’re not particularly motivated to make that awesome. The second thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are other companies that are out there for you know, trying to do a good job at charging or whatever. But their competition are
⏹️ ▶️ John other their competition is not Tesla because if you if you have a car with CCS, you can’t go to Tesla superchargers
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you have weird adapter or whatever that’s changed very recently. But anyway, historically, that hasn’t been the case. So they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John competing amongst each other. And the level it’s like grading on a curve. It’s like, well, you’ve got you got electrify
⏹️ ▶️ John America, where Volkswagen is not particularly motivated to do a good job. And you have
⏹️ ▶️ John other people who are like, I don’t know, we’re kind of on the verge of bankruptcy, and we don’t have a lot of money to put into this. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John right now, this is another reason these car companies did this. Ford and GM and everything are doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because what they’re basically saying to all the non-supercharger networks is guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you are competing with superchargers because the people who used to go to you can make a different choice
⏹️ ▶️ John and go to the superchargers. So if you don’t wanna immediately go out of business because you suck, you better start competing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the incentives have suddenly changed. Now will they get better or will they go out of business? But honestly, either one
⏹️ ▶️ John of them is better than it was before, which is like they can continue to suck and there’s no repercussions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so going back, So I’m really happy that the format
⏹️ ▶️ Marco war in the US for charging plugs is going to clearly have a resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within a few years. Everyone’s gonna be on any CS slash Tesla and that’ll be it. Like CCS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be around for a while as the vehicles that are made with it now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly age out. It’ll be around for a while, but you’re gonna have your CCS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vehicles charging via adapters probably at
⏹️ ▶️ John superchargers. They need to work out the 100 volt thing, though, because there are there are enough 800 volt car sold
⏹️ ▶️ John in the US that Tesla needs to at least have a plan for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And you can’t get rid of CCS until they know. Well, people want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They will. But the point is, like, a format war is worse than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever choice you might make for the for the connector. So the only way to end this format war,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, because like you can think, you know, why didn’t Tesla just adopt CCS? And that’s a good question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the answer is they had no motivation to do it because of everything we’ve just said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They already had infrastructure in place. Like it’s not like Tesla came out with their own thing after CCS existed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla had to make their own connector because there wasn’t a good one. They had they made their own. And then later,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it wasn’t there. The J the J17 thing didn’t predate Tesla’s thing. It might have,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that connector sucked. Yeah, no, I agree. They needed to come up with something with DC fast charging. Like that’s the problem. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John these, these connectors might’ve existed in their non DC fast charging form, but that’s not what they wanted. So they made their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So basically the only outcomes here were either everyone switched to Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connector, which seemed unlikely and impossible, you know, two months ago, or we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue to format war, you know, which sucks or Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow switched to CCS and the, and what motivation would they have had to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And think of like, when you, you know, If you just look at raw numbers, like how many Teslas are on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the road in North America? And I know Teslas have CCS connectors in Europe, I know that, but just talking North America
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, how many Teslas are already on the road? How many superchargers are already out there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The idea that they would somehow, out of the goodness of their heart, give up their better connector and switch to CCS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which every Tesla owner would see as a downgrade next time they got a new car, I don’t see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I didn’t see that happening. And so I thought we were just gonna live with this format war forever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so to see the format war have a pretty clear likely end in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near future, even though Elon has to win this one, fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he earned it with this one. Like, as much of a jerk as he is, he’s made a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of really good cars for a long time and he made a really good connector and he has a really good charging network.
⏹️ ▶️ John He didn’t make that connector, let’s be clear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People who worked for him made that connector. That might have existed before he bought the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever, yeah, however it happened, Tesla deserves the success of that connector, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks that we have to give this jerk a win, but in this case, he did legitimately win, and the alternative
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s a win for us, because we get to use the better connector, and it’s owned by a standards body, which means that he can’t do something
⏹️ ▶️ John jerky and pull the rug out from under the other car makers, because he doesn’t control the connector
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore. Exactly, and where we will end up with this after, you know, again, there’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a transition period here. We’re gonna have CCS kind of lingering around for the next 10 years, probably, but where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will end up in the long run is one standard with a lot of charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco networks that are really good, and a lot of charging stations that are really good that support this standard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can pull off lots of different highway exits when you’re on a long trip and charge up really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast. You can be pretty sure it’ll work. And almost every car in the road will have the same connector.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a really good place to land. And for electric vehicles to continue to grow and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reach more places in the market, that’s necessary. We can’t, you can’t have a format war and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect this market to keep expanding and maturing because even the pain and the buttery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the format war turn a lot of people off, or the questions about the format war turn a lot of people off, or if you buy a CCS car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you realize you can’t charge it anywhere good, that’s gonna turn you off. So we’re gonna be in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better place in the long run with this decision. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can set aside all the personalities involved and just say, you know what, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one standard is better than two no matter what the standard is, And of the two they had to pick from here, this actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is better in a lot of ways. So I’m happy
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. I bet an alien is listening to this conversation and saying, you guys can’t all agree what side of
⏹️ ▶️ John the road to drive on.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And you’re like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John now we have one charging stand. That’s the thing about automotive stuff. Like, not only can we not agree
⏹️ ▶️ John on standards for anything, we can’t even agree on what side of the road to travel on. Like where the steering wheel should be
⏹️ ▶️ John in the car. But we have worked out that there are these bubbles of agreement
⏹️ ▶️ John and they tend not to touch by roads that much. So like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it would be kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of ridiculous if the side of the road changed in every country in Europe, right? But the UK could have
⏹️ ▶️ John made a different choice, you know? And like, anyway, it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of silly. You know, obviously this is NACS, North America. If you go to South America, forget
⏹️ ▶️ John it. If you go to Europe, forget it. If you’re in China, I think a couple of people live in China, things are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey totally different there. Who knows what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing in China with their connector. Australia, they could have their own connector. You can’t drive off Australia. It’s fine, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re, obviously this is an America-centric podcast, we recognize the rest of the world. What the rest of the world wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John do, like I would suggest they adopt the North American charging standard because it’s a really good connector
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s owned by a standards body. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but no, I mean like the reality is like most other countries, CCS is the norm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s it. And Tesla uses it in other places too because they have to sometimes by law, like I think in the EU. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CCS sucks though. It does suck, but again, but one standard’s better than two. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you already had Tesla on board with CCS in your continent, good, leave it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One standard is better than two, and we just got the better one, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m saying like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, it’s like one standard. It’s one standard for each little fiefdom of driving rules
⏹️ ▶️ John and car design. Like it is kind of, I mean, blame the British Empire, I guess, but it is kind of amazing that we
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t agreed on the side of the road, but we’re almost there. Isn’t that side of the road, isn’t there like a vast majority? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what the world, if you went by population, what side of the road is in the lead. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that seems like not a minor thing when it comes to driving. Because you can’t really connect those roads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, it’s a lot easier to use an adapter to charge your DC fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John charge car than it is to switch the
⏹️ ▶️ John car you’re driving from. Yeah. If you want to live in the Republican slave-owning utopia of the United
⏹️ ▶️ John States, every state would be able to make that decision differently.
⏹️ ▶️ John you cross the border, you’d switch over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God. I don’t even want to think about it. Oh god. It’s worth noting before moving on that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it Alec? is that right, over at Technology Connections, did like a 45 minute reaction video to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when, I think it was after GM said they were gonna adopt NACS, something like that. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is long, as all his videos tend to be, but I was fascinated by it, as I typically am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by his videos, and so I’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No spoilers, I’m still on the fridge video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, I skipped the fridge video, but I have a feeling I’m gonna eventually go back and watch it. It’s good. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and did we mention, by the way, Speaking of Kentucky, they mandated Tesla, or the NACS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the charging plug.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they did the wise thing in the way is the government exert power in private industry, which is that if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to be part of this government program that subsidizes charging stations, whatever, you must support Tesla’s connector.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, which makes sense, because that’s going to be the new default. So yeah, if you’re getting government funds for what’s supposed to be a universal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network, it should support the universal connector, or at least both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s another example of what’s going to change the incentives of these not so good charging companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John things have to change their incentives. And one of them is government mandates. I mean, it explains why Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John uses CCS in other countries, because the governments there require them to. If you want to sell cars in our country, this is what you got to do. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad to see some states forcing that as well. Quote unquote, forcing it. They’re not forcing it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, if you want our money, you got to do what we say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So yeah, the only thing that bums me out about this, because again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was briefly not happy about it, but now that it seems like pretty much everywhere is going to land on any,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, pretty much all the manufacturers here in the States are going to land on NACS. I’m happy with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. Like Marco particularly was saying, you know, the one standard is much better than two and hopefully we’ll all end up on NACS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here in the States. The only thing is though, it kind of bums me out for the next year or two, you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, although I don’t expect to buy a car in the next year or two, I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible that I would, and I think it is extremely likely I would get an electric car if I were to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Volkswagen. And at this point, I don’t want a CCS car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d rather not. And I’m not buying a Tesla. So that means I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to have to wait for a couple of years.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be like getting an Intel Mac just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey before they replace it with Apple Silicon. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just not the best
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t want to buy a car with a CCS, especially an expensive car with a CCS connector. That’s rough, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So anyway, we’ll see how this turns out. We’ll see how quickly it happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the car makers are doing this, like 2024 models is the earliest you should expect this, because
⏹️ ▶️ John things move slow in the auto industry. So I do wonder, I mean, I guess most normal people don’t know about this, but I was wondering if
⏹️ ▶️ John there would be like a dip in EV sales for the people who do know to say, eh, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll wait a little bit. Like, I don’t know if people can wait a full year, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ll tell you what, like, I’m not feeling good about my Rivian pre-order right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John late for you, Mark. You literally already ordered the car. Just take your car. But with you, Mark, by the time
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Tesla connector is pervasive, you’ll be on two cars from then. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not that difficult. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John Although your Tesla’s did last a long time, but I feel like you’ll be rotating through cars a little bit faster than that. Some real-time feedback from the
⏹️ ▶️ John chat room. First, there’s the map of right-hand drive versus not right-hand
⏹️ ▶️ John drive, because that’s confusing. I know right-hand drive is where the steering wheel’s on the right.
⏹️ ▶️ John people who drive on the right side of the road, which is also the correct side of the road, versus everyone else. And it is
⏹️ ▶️ John the British Empire, like I said. the map is heavily in favor of driving on the right side of the road. And apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ John France and the Netherlands switched in the 60s. Can you imagine that 60s was a tumultuous time, just one day? I’m sure there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a story about this, but like one day in the 60s, it said, everybody, everybody switch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, there is. There was a 99 P. I about this. I don’t I’ll try to find a link for the show notes. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doubt I’ll be able to come up with it, but it was fascinating. And they talked about on this podcast episode about how there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this big, you know, PR push to get everyone ready for it and so on and so forth. It was very,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. For countries with with functional governments where they can rally the people to all do a change that will
⏹️ ▶️ John be beneficial for them in the long term. Can you imagine that? Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think about it. That would be amazing. functional government, wow, that would be cool.
#askneutral: EV pros/cons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then finally, wrapping up our Ask Neutral, Yotological writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are some unexpected things, good and bad, about using an electric vehicle? Well, one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things is you don’t get a transmission. That’s sad. But Marco, I think that you are obviously the most well-qualified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to answer this question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John There’s still a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transmission. Not in anything but a Porsche.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not. Yes, there is.
⏹️ ▶️ John A transmission is just a series of gears that change ratios that connect to your wheels. That’s what a transmission is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, all right. Thank you for well-actuallying us. Thank you so much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Geez, no people think is that the cars run by magic I mean the only the only car where you could say you don’t have one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that have the motors in the hubs Have you seen those I think sob whoever owns the whoever
⏹️ ▶️ John Chinese company currently owns the remains of sob Made an EV with hub motors. So the motors
⏹️ ▶️ John are literally in the wheels So there really is no transition there, but that’s a terrible idea, but the unsprung weight is horrendous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so anyway Besides there being No gears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John there are gears. Yeah, I know Besides not having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shift gear in any way or have the car try to shift for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best thing about driving electric is It just feels better in every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible way like the drive train itself feels great because it is direct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Driving a gas car. There’s a whole bunch of hacks going on to make that happen There’s a lot of mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity, a lot of abstractions and hacks and weird balancing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco acts that are being done between gear shifting options and of course how the torque
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curve is all weird and tipped up the top and everything. Driving a gas car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a very irregular and oftentimes disconnected experience from the reality of what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. Electric drive trains are mechanically so much simpler. You feel that simplicity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is immediate and direct. So it just it feels better to drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, some of the unexpected things I could talk forever on this and I won’t right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll name two right now. Number one, dog mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting on electric electric cars because you’re not running a gasoline engine to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the climate control happen. It is safe to run the climate control remotely no matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the car is parked. If it’s parked inside a sealed up garage doesn’t matter. You know, you’re not going to cause carbon monoxide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems. And so they all have, or many electric vehicles, including all Teslas and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all Rivians, they have options to remotely, like from their phone app, turn on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the climate control and you can just leave it running for hours if you need to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they all have a Tesla and Rivian at least have this wonderful feature called dog mode, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose you’re on a road trip with a pet in the car and you want to go into a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest stop to go to the bathroom or you’re going to have some lunch inside a restaurant or whatever you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to leave the car somewhere where you can’t bring the dog inside. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave the car with the AC or heat running at regular temperature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kind of indefinitely like as long as your battery maintains and usually they like Tesla’s will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop at 20% if you have if your battery dips below 20% it’ll stop this feature but on a regular road trip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can leave this this on for hours and it’s fine. And we, many times, I got used to this feature, many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times I’ve done this where like, we’ll be on a road trip, I want to go inside for, you know, for a meal with the family or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll have to leave the dog in the car for half hour, 40 minutes, whatever it is. My current gas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monstrosity has sort of a feature like this except you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only launch it from the app, which doesn’t work all the time, especially if the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t have cellular coverage for its internal like radio thing. It’s unreliable from the app, it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time to launch, and it caps its length at 30 minutes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you happen to take longer than 30 minutes, too bad, you can’t restart it until you go out and physically restart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car once. Oh, bummer. Similarly, my gas monstrosity does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not allow the remote climate control feature or remote start feature to run if the car has not been turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on for more than three days. With a Tesla, I know I can just open the phone app, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the car has been turned off and sitting there for a month and before I get there I can turn on the air conditioning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so when I get to my car it’s not a thousand degrees inside. I can’t do that with my gas monstrosity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that the whole like the remote climate control being so flexible and being able to be triggered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either from the app or two buttons before you leave the car if you’re parked somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fantastic and I’ve never seen anything as good as that on a gas car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know Tesla does those things I think Rivian does most or all those things I don’t know about everybody else. Second thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is more of kind of an everyday convenience thing that you don’t realize what you have until it’s gone. When you are driving a gas car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to, on some kind of regular interval, stop your everyday life to go fill it up with gas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, this is not a long process, maybe 10 minutes, but it is an annoyance that you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, at some point in your regular everyday life, maybe it’s once a week, maybe it’s every two weeks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, however often you get gas, you have to like stop what you’re doing and go to gas and by the way gas stations are stinky and gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With electric cars, if you are not taking long road trips very often, if you’re just doing your everyday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving everyday life and you’re charging at a reasonable rate at home, you never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to stop and get gas. That’s really important. Every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you leave your house, you have quote a full tank. So in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular errands and your regular commute and everything, you never have to stop to get gas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You only ever have to think about charging if you assuming you have a place that you can park it at home where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can charge it you know like a garage or whatever but you only ever have to worry about charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you are on a long trip. People think like oh you when you go electric it’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less convenient you got to worry about you know range and yes you do have to worry about range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on long trips but for the entire rest of of your everyday life, it’s way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convenient because you’re never having to stop and get gas, ever, ever, ever. But now every time you get out of your car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in. Not every time. I mean, I would plug in the Tesla whenever it dropped below 50%, which was… It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a new habit. Like, it’s a good trade-off. It’s a net win for sure, but there is, it is only
⏹️ ▶️ John a net win. It’s not like there’s no negatives. The negative is there’s a new thing you have to do at home that you didn’t have to do before. It takes two seconds
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have it set up. Although I will say that like the sort of suburban privilege
⏹️ ▶️ John of the expectation of, of course, I have a place where I can park the car and plug it into my house. Electricity is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not true for a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John Urban situations, like, again, the rest of the world has this more figured out than we do. Good cities
⏹️ ▶️ John would provide places along street parking where you can plug in your electric car through some sort of system
⏹️ ▶️ John where either you pay for it or the government pays for it or whatever. Somehow, like, that’s, it is to the advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of cities to figure out how to do that. And I hope they do someday somewhere in the US, probably in California.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the meantime, if you do have a place where you can plug into your house, that is a new habit you have to adopt. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John the return for it is worth that investment, which is like you said, you always you wake up in the morning and your car is full.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s an agree. Like, you know, we do need this infrastructure. It is a big challenge. The good thing is, if you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overnight charging and you don’t need to charge a car from zero percent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can even be like, in fact, technology connections did a video on this like two years ago. It can even be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a regular 110 volt plug. You don’t even need high power for that. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your car only charges 10% every night, well, if you can charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it every time you park in front of your house, you’re probably not using that many miles per day where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wouldn’t be able to keep up that way. So, any kind of, they call it destination charging, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s at your workplace, whatever, if you go to the mall for the afternoon, you can plug in there, that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become more and more common, it already is becoming more and more common, because you don’t need like massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high amperage, high voltage charging, if there’s more charging everywhere people go.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another point we didn’t make in the Tesla connector thing is that, I don’t know if this is true
⏹️ ▶️ John of the CCS connectors, although it seems like it might be because they have the double connector thing, but in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ John the wires for CCS chargers are thicker and heavier. They’re also longer,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s another, like Tesla didn’t make their thing short just for no reason. The shorter the cord is, the less it weighs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Tesla’s cable, by the way, is hefty. Like so and there’s we’re talking about two different cables.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The cable that you have in your house, like that’s not a DC fast charge cable. That is that is a 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amp at most cable. And those cables, they’re a little thinner and lighter than garden hoses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas the ones that superchargers that are doing DC fast charging, those are heavy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inflexible, thick cables. That’s and I believe they’re liquid cooled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. When you’re pumping that much current in like through through a wire cooling of that wire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco becomes fairly important and somewhat challenging. So I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know one of them is, I think Tesla’s are liquid cooled. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, the CCS ones are even worse. The CCS cables are even thicker and even heavier. And because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re also longer, they’re heavier still to the point where people will have difficulty maneuvering.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’ve ever seen anyone struggle at a gas station and maneuvering the comparatively, incredibly lightweight
⏹️ ▶️ John rubber hoses that the gasoline goes through, It is a much more significant challenge to wrangle
⏹️ ▶️ John a full length, full wattage CCS connector. The Tesla ones are comparatively
⏹️ ▶️ John easier to maneuver, both because they’re shorter, but also because I think they’re actually thinner as well. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another challenge we’ll have to face. But for the home ones, yeah, you can go from,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’ve seen people do it in the neighborhood. I don’t recommend this, but people take what looks like, you really hope
⏹️ ▶️ John is an indoor outdoor extension cord and just run it from like a
⏹️ ▶️ John outlet in their garage, snaking down their driveway to the thing and plugging into their little, you know, charging,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, right, all the way up to fancy people like Marco who get like the actual proper, you know, charger
⏹️ ▶️ John and connector or whatever, right? And this is an example of infrastructure and we can
⏹️ ▶️ John make infrastructure that makes all this easier for all of us and I hope we do, but in the meantime, you can get by
⏹️ ▶️ John with the existing infrastructure. Most homes in America have at least one, what we call a dryer outlet,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the higher voltage, you know, higher power thing to power your electric dryer, that
⏹️ ▶️ John will charge your car faster. But even if you don’t have that, as long as you’re not taking really long commutes, a plain
⏹️ ▶️ John old outlet with a reasonable good extension cord that can reach your car will work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, those are fine. Or like, you know, if you happen to have like a table saw outlet in your garage or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like some people have that or, you know, any kind of 220 volt outlet is way better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 110 for this purpose. So if you have a 220 volt outlet in your garage, even if it’s only like 20 amps or 15 amps, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. That’s all you will need. And yeah, and if you wanna have a regular like 110 volt, 15 amp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco circuit, you can do it on that. It’s slow. I think charging a full Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from empty on 110, I think takes something like a week, but you’re never usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging it from empty at your house. Like you’re just topping it off from your daily usage. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you have a very long commute, even a 110 outlet keeps up with most people’s needs just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then again, any 220 outlet, you have a dryer outlet or a circular saw outlet or if you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go nuts and install an RV out in your garage like I did the NEMA 1450 outlet for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good chargers. Like you can like you’re set like any any of those options you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re you’re totally fine anyway. So that’s that’s a short list of the unexpected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things good and bad about using electric vehicle. The bad thing honestly, I think the only bad thing I can really say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they tend to be heavy. You know, they’re expensive of course and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s a problem as well. That’s slowly getting better. I mean, that’s what they’re just heavy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re so fast and responsive in their throttle and drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco train that it makes up for it. And the weight being all down low in the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pack also really helps a lot with like handling and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. But it slaughters your braking though, like the weight really. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple downsides to the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco weight. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re doing a lot of braking, you’re doing it wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know what I mean, like the like in an emergency when you want to bring this car to a stop if they put the brake,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, especially early EV makers who are not quite sure how to do this, if you put brakes on it that seem correctly sized for the equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John gas car, it’s gonna take longer to stop. And every part of the car, this is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John good EV makers know this and build into the cars, but every part of the car takes more abuse from having more weight.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the suspension has to be beefier, although the wheels, bearings and bushings have to be beefier, because this thing’s
⏹️ ▶️ John way a ton, especially the quote unquote good ones that have the big batteries in them, they just weigh so
⏹️ ▶️ John much and it really requires scaling everything up. And then the final thing that you can’t really avoid is because they weigh so much,
⏹️ ▶️ John it damages the road more. Like it’s like a bunch of massive trucks. If the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John world was filled with like a hundred kilowatt hour battery packed EVs now instead of all
⏹️ ▶️ John the regular cars, we would be even in this country, we’d be even worse off in our inability to find ways to funds
⏹️ ▶️ John our roads because no one wants to pay taxes. Because they will destroy your roads. having 6,000
⏹️ ▶️ John pound cars driving over them damages your roads more than having 3,000 pound car. That just makes
⏹️ ▶️ John perfect sense, right? And that goes to every part of the car wears out faster, it has to be beefed
⏹️ ▶️ John up, and the road wears out faster and has to be redone more often. And I think that, again, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a net trade-off that we should make in exchange to not choking ourselves and our planet with
⏹️ ▶️ John CO2 emissions, so thumbs up. But it is something to keep in mind. If you’re used to
⏹️ ▶️ John a light, nimble car, flitting around, changing direction quickly, and stopping quickly with drum brakes in
⏹️ ▶️ John the rear, that’s not going to happen with an EV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One other thing I think is worth mentioning is a lot of times when I talk to people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the idea of an electric car, because even though I’ve not owned one, you know, I’m a car nerd. I’m a car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enthusiast. So people will often ask me, what’s my opinion about these sorts of things? And one thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is not a unique idea that I have come up with, but one thing that I think is worth remembering is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for most people, most of their trips are five, 10 miles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a day. Like that’s not always true. And I’m sure there’s plenty of cases where it isn’t true, but for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people, it is unusual to drive more than 10, 20, 30 miles in a day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even TIFF’s ridiculous I3, well, I mean, what’s the range on that? Like 30, 40
⏹️ ▶️ Casey miles on an electric charge, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like 150. Oh no, it’s way more. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco considerably less than that. So even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. It’s got the range extender. Yeah, well, the electric only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 120. That seems optimistic for that car. No, we’ve done it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That car, I mean, obviously, if it’s freezing cold outside, you’re not going to get that. But in most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conditions, you can easily get over 100. I’m telling you, the i3, the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we own that car, and the more we’ve used it, and the more I’ve driven it, the more I really appreciate how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good of a car that was. It’s really a shame they stopped making it, and the market really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went a different direction. because it is so compact and nimble for being electric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they have that whole carbon fiber frame and the battery’s not too huge, so it’s not that heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re getting at why they didn’t sell them. Carbon fiber frame, what? Yes, it’s weird. A
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco little expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. A little bit expensive. It is such an odd vehicle, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good. And there’s nothing on the market like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Car and Driver on the back page this month, they have like, hey, so you’re thinking buying a used car, here’s what you should
⏹️ ▶️ John the one on your car, the i3, was this month. And they said, maybe ask the owner when the last
⏹️ ▶️ John time they changed the oil on the range extender was. Because people buy them, and yeah, it’s got a range extender, but you never
⏹️ ▶️ John need to use it. Because as Casey was saying, you don’t take a lot of long trips, and this thing’s got plenty of juice, and then you forget the gas
⏹️ ▶️ John engine is there. And you kind of can’t drive a car 15 years and not do anything to the gasoline
⏹️ ▶️ John engine, because it gets super angry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you it’s gone through one gallon of gas in the three years of
⏹️ ▶️ John ownership. That’s not great for the engine either. When’s the last time you changed the oil on it? Never.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s not good either, Marco. It’s not good. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t forget, the car, so every time you get into the car, first of all, if the engine hasn’t run in a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll alert you on the display. And then the moment you dip below 75% battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll run the engine for a little while, just to run it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I know, but you have to change the oil on internal combustion engines,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t run them. Why? You can’t just leave it there for 15 years. It’s not good. Well, it’s only been three. Oh, all
⏹️ ▶️ John right, right. You have a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco relatively new one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this a new one or do you buy it? Because I know she had one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was like the second to last year they made them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, anyway, I feel like an oil change every three years is not, you know, excessive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Consider changing the oil on your range extender.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know where that would be.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to go and find that dipstick and take a picture of what it looks like in there. There isn’t a dipstick,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a BMW. I couldn’t even find the gas hole for a while. Like, I don’t even, God knows where the
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have, they have a way to check the oil. I mean, I’m looking at all these 90s BMWs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My 2011 BMW did not have a dipstick. It had a place in the iDrive where you would go when the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was running and ask it, would you please tell me what the oil level was like?
⏹️ ▶️ John BMWs used to have dipsticks. I’m watching these old car rebuild channels where there are older BMWs. But anyway, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John love to see what the oil, if you want, drop the oil pan, like, to pull out the plug, what does this
⏹️ ▶️ John oil look like after three years
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of sitting there in the car? What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it, Vantablack or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, right? Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we got to finish up. Let me finish my thought. And let me finish my thought, and then, Marco, you need to leave a message for the BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dealer and ask them to change the oil on this thing. But anyways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You think they even know where it is? Like, how many of these did they really sell?
⏹️ ▶️ John Three. They know, and they’ll charge you $400 to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change it. Also true, actually. But anyways, but the point I was trying to drive at, and then we got sidetracked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was if you’re a suburban homeowner here in America, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is likely that you will once or twice a year want to go get like a bunch of mulch to put around your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey landscaping at your house if you’re a better homeowner than I am. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people get hung up on range and they say, well, we take a summer trip to the beach every year. What are we going to do then?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, first of all, then I’ll give Marco a chance to corroborate this, but I would argue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that once you’re past the age of 25, stopping for half an hour and getting out of the car, even on a four or five,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six, seven, eight hour road trip, that ain’t so bad, that’s actually kind of nice. But Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have to drive very far to get to the beach just FYI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s true. But but nevertheless, the other thing is I don’t buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a car specifically for hauling mulch once a year. I don’t buy a pickup truck just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I need to haul mulch occasionally. If I really need to do that sort of thing, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either make do with what I’ve got or I’ll rent a pickup for a day or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John If only we weren’t broadcasting the show to Americans, Casey, because what is the best selling vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in America? Yeah, I know. I know. Pickup truck. Yeah, I know. And I don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but that’s neither here nor there. My point is just that, you know, again, I have these conversations often, and I had basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this exact conversation with a friend of mine, and he was saying, well, we go to the beach in South Carolina every year, and that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an eight-hour drive or something like that, and we go to Blacksburg, our mutual alma mater, every year, and that’s a three-and-a-half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour drive. And I get that. I really do. And I’m not the kind of person who generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rents cars for road trips, so I don’t put wear and tear on my own car. Like that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if 98% of your trips are 10 miles or less, or whatever the case may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be, don’t buy a car for two trips a year. Buy a car for the 98%. Don’t buy it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the 1%. That’s my final advice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People who think electric won’t work for them because of their two trips a year they take, it will work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just fine for them. Like you will have to do a tiny amount of planning in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of look how long it it is. And if that’s larger than the range of your car, find a supercharger on the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s and most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John cars will do this for you. Cars will do that for you. Like, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John just put in the destination, it will tell you where to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And if not, like use any of a million different apps that will all do it for you as well. Like, and I thought before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had electric car, I had the same range anxiety, this is gonna work for me. I drive upstate a lot, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. Like you think it’s going to be this really big deal. And in practice, it just isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fine. It’s really totally fine. And then everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it is better. Thank you to our sponsors this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, member full rocket money and collide. And thanks to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join us at ATP that FM slash join and we will talk to you Next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John to Accidental, tech podcast
Callsheet update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of your big Swift UI challenges when making Call Sheet, which by the way I’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Call Sheet a lot like we’ve been re-watching some TV finally and I keep seeing like, oh it’s that guy!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who’s that? Like we decided to re-watch the first season at Party Down. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t seen it in a long time and they have a new one so I wanted to like catch up with the old one. And I was looking and I didn’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until I’m like, where there’s this like, you know, this one guy in one episode playing some, you know, side character
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I thought for sure like I’m never going to find this. But I looked up and I was pleased to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that call sheet not only has, you know, TV show info, but it has per episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco info on the people who were in each episode. So I was able to say, all right, season one, episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. And it was right there. It was, it was awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, thanks. No, that’s, that’s, that’s the idea. And, uh, yeah, I’m, uh, I’m not going to say out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loud cause I don’t want to jinx anything. But the plan for tomorrow morning is to send it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple as a, you know, as the sacrificial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release, you know what I mean? Like the I’m sure there will be an issue. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the one to reject. I have a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the one to reject.
⏹️ ▶️ John You think you’re just gonna reject it for an app purchase flow? Or do you think there’s something else?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea, to be honest with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most likely an app purchase, they look very closely at that. And almost no one gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it right the first time. It could be something as simple as like you don’t have like you have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a privacy policy but you don’t have a terms of use like it’s stuff like that. There’s all these little requirements they have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, you need a terms of use. Jim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Collison I do have one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I didn’t earlier, but I do have one now. Trey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lockerbie You can just copy and paste. Everyone else does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Jim Collison Yep, yep. I’m pretty sure I stole underscores and lightly edited it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make it, you know, more relevant to my particular use case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, so I hope to, no promises, but I hope to send to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tomorrow because the idea is I’m going to be traveling very soon and I don’t want to be thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this while I’m gone. So, in a perfect world, which won’t happen, but in a perfect world, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a release or two, you know, I go back and forth with Apple once or twice this week and then hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is queued up and ready to go for after
⏹️ ▶️ John Make sure you have it set not to be released as soon as it’s approved. That’s very true. forget that
⏹️ ▶️ John setting. And if you’re on vacation is the wrong time.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Inevitably, what will end up happening is I won’t get it done in through Apple before I leave. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll end up having to happen, you know, late this month.
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same situation as you because I’m about to go on vacation as well. I was like, you know what, I really want to push out because I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John working my my Sonoma release, but I can’t they won’t accept builds made with Sonoma Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m in the weird situation that if you’ve watched the WDC sessions about the tools that Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John has as now for backporting APIs while Apple is using them. So there’s a new API introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John in Sonoma, but they backported it to Ventura. So like, this is awesome. People on Ventura can have it too,
⏹️ ▶️ John but guess what? I can’t submit that build until I can build on Sonoma and submit it and they’re not accepting stuff that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey until Sonoma
⏹️ ▶️ John gets closer to release. So I have to go back to my mainline branch and I was like, well, I should just cut
⏹️ ▶️ John a release of this and just take out the Sonoma specific features, which aren’t really Sonoma specific and will
⏹️ ▶️ John actually work on Ventura, but you know, anyway. But then I said, no, don’t put a release before
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you go on vacation. What are you thinking? Just
⏹️ ▶️ John let it ride, don’t worry about it, and you come back from vacation and you can address it. So that’s what I’m doing. And I would advise
⏹️ ▶️ John you to do the same thing. You can submit it as a sacrificial one, but just like configure it not to get
⏹️ ▶️ John accepted, go on vacation and don’t worry about it until you get back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, most of that is the plan. The sacrificial release is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of the plan. The question is, will I have the self-control, assuming that there’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back and forth between me and AppReview, will I have the self-control to really put it aside while I’m on vacation? We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually write the code to address the issues while you’re on vacation, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, no promises. But hopefully, again, in a perfect world, which won’t be the case, I will get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it through App Store review before I leave, and then I’ll sit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on releasing it until I’m back. Or maybe even once I’m back, if I do another submission or two to Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fine too. But at least I know I’ve gotten one through, you know what I mean? And my understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my own experience and from those like Marco that have done subscription stuff before is that the first release,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they really do take a pretty fine tooth comb, which makes sense. I don’t begrudge them that at all. And then after that, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey depends on who you get and what your luck is. But generally speaking, it’s not quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so ruinous after you get one through, but getting that first one through can be ugly. And this is my first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rodeo when it comes to subscriptions. I’m sure I’ve screwed something up. I’m sure something’s not right. So I got to, I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try. So we’ll see if I do that tomorrow morning, no promises. But that’s the idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we were going somewhere with this and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I feel like we got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally sidetracked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco The reason I brought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, so the reason I thought of you today is that, well, first of all, have you run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current build on iOS 17? Because you should, because I think you have a search box problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and that is something that Apple changed in this beta seed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I need to give that a shot and start filing bug reports because a few people have brought it to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention. But yeah, apparently you can’t actually see the search box anymore as you’re typing, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and this has been a theme of iOS 17 beta so far. There have been a decent amount of keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco placement bugs. So obviously, they’re messing around in that area. So I would expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick fixes here in future betas. But the reason I thought of this is because today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I’m rebuilding my UI, I finally got to the.searchable modifier as I’m trying to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey fields. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Putting some stuff together. man, I really could use the information of when the search field is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco active. Which you can get in iOS 17, by the way. Yeah, well, you can get it in iOS 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so when it’s active, I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to know that. And I instantly found a little modifier, like text, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco placeholder, placement, and then the is active binding to the bool, as you’d expect, or is presented,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is. And then as soon as I hit Enter on that, said, you know, this requires iOS 17. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got to put an available thing around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it, which by the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is super clunky in SwiftUI. That is the worst to do in SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I was like, oh, wait a minute. Isn’t this the problem you were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco facing? Like, didn’t you before 17, like, didn’t you have to jump through a million stupid hoops to try to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? I’m still jumping through because I’m releasing before 17. And this was in concert with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a friend of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show, Guy Rambeau, who did a lot a lot of the heavy lifting on how do you snoop and spelunk within UIKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and expose that in a reasonably pretty way. And so that’s what we’re doing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can share that code with you, Marco, if you’re interested. But anyways, it’s a total pain in the butt in 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually, what ended up happening was when I moved from the standard search interface
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the searchable interface to the bottom-mounted search interface, I actually just canned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t use searchable anymore. I forget why, but it’s really not designed to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anywhere but where Apple wants it. And when I tried to put it in that bottom panel, it was just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mess. It was just-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much has to be in a navigation bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And so I just gave up on it and I’m not using the system searchable or the system search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey affordance, which I would prefer to be able to use it, but it’s just not possible where I have my search box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s true. Anyway, yeah. And I did think of you today. I’m like, wait a minute, I just fixed in like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 20 minutes what you fought for a very long time on because- So how did you fix it then? Through various,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Stack Overflow searching, I found that there’s an environment variable that’s set. It’s called like isSearching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. What? It’s weird because it only applies to like subviews.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I made like a quick little wrapper. I’ll send you the code. I’ll post the gist.
⏹️ ▶️ John Plumbing state information from where you have it to where you want it is a fun pastime in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco SwiftUI. Yes, that’s exactly it. That is seriously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll send you a quick screenshot so you can see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’d be fascinated to see this because this is news to me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, I don’t need it anymore, but I would have loved to have known about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s the environment is searching is what you’re looking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that little utility view. But yeah, so I basically made a wrapper to do what John said, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey plumb this value. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had no idea. Bind it from here to here. And now you have an isPresentedBinding for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, that’s very cool. I really wish I had realized that. I don’t think I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aware of that because I don’t have any recollection of this being a thing that I was like, oh, I would use that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t think I even knew about it. You know, this is, it’s too bad. I’ve been,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is going to sound like a rant and I don’t mean it to. The documentation that Apple’s been putting out lately has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually been surprisingly good. I probably should put up a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post, a blog post saying, look, you know, I stand by everything. Did I already say this on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show? I might have. everything I said a couple of years ago, maybe it was a year or two ago, about how their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey documentation was piss poor. And there are still a lot of areas where it is piss poor, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently it has gotten way better, way, way, way better. And I, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I genuinely so happy to see it. I am so here for it, but there are times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, and maybe it’s, maybe it’s my own Google foo failing me, but like I, why did I not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know that this existed, you know what I mean? Like I really wish in the commentary and documentation about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey searchable, this should have been called out more explicitly, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there should have been some sort of sample code that shows this and demonstrates this. It
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be more findable. I find very
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey often when I’m searching
⏹️ ▶️ John for stuff in SwiftUI, I’m searching for things that I know how to use, but I just want to double check something, and there’s just too many hits
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re just all simple words. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no, narrow it down to SwiftUI, but I’ll narrow it down to this. No, I don’t want to see the ones for this. No, that’s not what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s just, it was the advantage of the old school, like single
⏹️ ▶️ John big namespace, NS whatever API. So they had distinct names that you could search for. But
⏹️ ▶️ John search for frame, man. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mean, search for a certain, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just what? You know, search for anything that’s common on multiple kinds of elements. And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna find the part that Casey’s talking about where someone explains, oh, by the way, here’s how the box model
⏹️ ▶️ John in CSS parlance works in SwiftUI. And I figured that would be somewhere adjacent to the thing where they’re talking about how you can set
⏹️ ▶️ John frame and what it does and what the different alignments mean and blah, blah, blah, nope. That’s it, the documentation probably
⏹️ ▶️ John exists, but it is not easy to find the way people mostly find things, which is let me
⏹️ ▶️ John type some words into the search box. And that’s kind of frustrating with SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the next level of what they have to do is if they have great documentation, they need to find a
⏹️ ▶️ John way to, and I know it’s a hard problem, but they need to find a way to let you find it by
⏹️ ▶️ John typing in the string that you wanna type in, which is going to probably be a single very short word that is very common