570: The Local Mooching Situation
18 Jan 2024The imminent launch of Apple Vision Pro, the latest Apple Watch sales ban, and Apple’s graceful and pragmatic response to the latest App Store court decision.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Some Administrivia
- New ATP member’s special!
- ATP episodes are now on YouTube!
- Follow-up:
- Marco’s UPS issue
- Eaton UPS backup (via Jeff Strobel)
- UPSes don’t like “dirty” power
- Yes, y’all, John can be wrong sometimes.
- But maybe he was 🤏🏻 right too? 🤔
- John Gruber on the iPhone launch
- Apple Vision Pro ordering details
- Apple Vision Pro has 10 GPU cores
- More on the Apple Vision Pro demos
- Maybe not all prescriptions work? (via Justin Yost)
- Apple turns off blood oxygen sensor to avoid import ban
- Marco’s UPS issue
- Dear Epic, 🖕. Love, Apple
- Ask ATP:
- How would we set up an iOS device for the elderly? (via Seppe Rutten)
- Why do audio-free apps sometimes stop playback of other apps? (via Wilson Martinez)
- Levis app (App Store link)
- Why doesn’t Apple just make HomePod mini into a mesh router? (via Saif Khan)
- Post-show: What is a truck, anyway?
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
- Notion: Your wiki, docs, & projects. Together.
Become a member for ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- New special: Connector Tier List
- We’re on YouTube, sorta
- Powerwall/UPS follow-up
- iPhone/Vision hype: John was wrong
- Vision Pro tidbits
- Sponsor: Notion
- Apple Watch banned again
- App Store court ruling
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- #askatp: iOS safety for seniors
- #askatp: Apps that stop audio
- #askatp: HomePod as mesh router
- Ending theme
- Neutral: Are SUVs “trucks”?
New special: Connector Tier List
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this most recent member special that, hey, guess what? Just dropped today. I don’t know if we would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make it, y’all. It was touching go for a minute there. We got angry. We have things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say. You guys were, you guys were, well, mostly John, was wrong about a lot on this member special. And so we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a lot of consternation and a lot of, a lot of difficult times. But we made it. We made it because like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a marriage of three of us are strong. Apparently, it’s a polyamorous marriage, but here we are. It’s, we are strong. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are stronger together and we’ve made it. And John, I love you just as much as I did a week ago in a month ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though you drive me absolutely insane.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This member special that Casey’s referring to is this. So this is one of those wonderful specials that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John tells Casey and I, don’t prepare, just show up. I have something for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which I would just just to jump in very, very quickly. You said wonderful. And I don’t think you meant it this way, but it sounded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sarcastic. But just to be clear, not sarcastic. It genuinely is wonderful for Marco and myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just said that because you don’t want to do work. But the the real thing that’s wonderful about it is that it allows you to I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to stop you from doing what you did before, which is like Casey’s like, Oh, I made my own tier
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey list myself before we record. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to be spontaneous. I want to get your legit reactions in the moment. And honestly, since it’s, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John require any sort of pre-work or studying, I think that makes it worse. I’m trying to keep the spontaneity and trying to keep the spark
⏹️ ▶️ John alive. Speaking of marriage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In this, in this 10 plus year marriage. Oh my God. Oh my word. No, but it was a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun. So what did we, what did we talk about John? Since it was your idea, why don’t you introduce the member special?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is another one of our tier list, uh, things. We’ve done a couple of them already. We didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John re-explain it again and we won’t. Just look up what a tier list is. We did connectors, computer-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John connectors. And I thought it would be fun because we talk about connectors a lot on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John We obviously have opinions on them, we have personal experience with them. But as was alluded to before,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was surprisingly contentious in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that I won’t spoil.
⏹️ ▶️ John You probably won’t expect, because if you’ve heard our other tier lists or whatever, this one did not go like the others. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John we just got mad at each other about stuff, because for the most
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey part, if you’ve heard us on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John we agree about connectors a lot. Like when we talk about connectors, we are, there’s not much controversy,
⏹️ ▶️ John but tier listing is a different task than just talking about connectors. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John by the end of the episode, we came to, we uncovered or
⏹️ ▶️ John highlighted a universal truth about connectors. So I think we did important work in this episode. Please check it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco out, ATP Tier List Connectors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and in case you’re having trouble picturing this, you know, what we mean by connectors is like USB, FireWire,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HDMI, like that kind of thing. Like the actual plug, like those standards or those physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugs and sockets, like that’s what we’re talking about. And it’s really quite something to debate, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how would you grade USB-B versus mini HDMI? Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was a lot of fun, even though, as it turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the three of us, I know, brace yourselves, listeners, The three of us tend to have opinions about things, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tend to be relatively strong. And occasionally, those opinions clash. And that’s some of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m probably overselling the drama here, but some of that happened on this episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we mostly agreed and mostly delved into the connectors. We’ve talked about them before on the show. If you’re a long-time listener,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve heard us talk about connectors, and you’ll hear some more of that. But, you know, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John also, as usual, we have a video version of this. It’s on YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ John the link to it is in the show notes for the special. So if you are a member and you open the
⏹️ ▶️ John special in your podcast player or on the web, you will see the show notes, a link to the video.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t have any way to protect these links. Just don’t share the link with people who aren’t members, you know, or do, and maybe they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John encourage them to become members.
⏹️ ▶️ John the video is just me dragging things onto the tier list. It’s not action packed. The only good thing about the video
⏹️ ▶️ John is you could hear when I accidentally inhale some water and then have to talk for a while to get it out of my
⏹️ ▶️ John system. So think of it as kind of the bootleg version of the episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, you can hear Casey swear within the first, like, three seconds of it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s bootleggy style. Anyway, it’s there if you want it.
We’re on YouTube, sorta
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of YouTube we have another ATP YouTube related announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while people have asked us can you put episodes of ATV on YouTube and we looked at it a few times and it seemed like kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a pain for us to do what we really wanted was just to be able to tell YouTube hey YouTube we’re a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s our RSS feed pull it and put the videos on the web for it and now finally YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John has implemented that so we are now currently cautiously attempting to experiment with this we
⏹️ ▶️ John have pointed YouTube at our RSS feed YouTube is in the process of grabbing all of our
⏹️ ▶️ John old shows and processing them into little videos. There’s nothing in the video, it’s just the logo of the show, right? It’s just audio. But
⏹️ ▶️ John some people have told us that they essentially use YouTube like during their workday as an audio player, just
⏹️ ▶️ John in another tab or whatever. So if you want to do that for ATP, now you can subject to however
⏹️ ▶️ John long it takes YouTube to pull all our videos. They did have some problem processing our show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ve had to delve into the Google’s, Google’s YouTube data API to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John fix the show notes that they couldn’t quite handle. We already got a copyright complaint.
⏹️ ▶️ John We included a snippet of a Jimi Hendrix song in like episode 80 or something or whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John was. We got dinged for linking to a porn site because some link that we had in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John of a show like nine years ago, that link doesn’t work anymore and is now some porn spam page.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re working through issues, but if you always wanted to listen to ATP, Audio only
⏹️ ▶️ John on YouTube. You should be able to do so. We will put a link to that in the show notes, but it’s just YouTube dot com
⏹️ ▶️ John slash at ATP FM slash podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And just to reiterate, John’s already said this twice, but just to reiterate, there is no video component.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is literally a static image of our logo. This is not like what Upgrade is doing, where you can watch them and do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little snippets or whatever. We are still, as of right now, not recording any video for any of our shows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is just the audio happened that happens to be on YouTube. just to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely clear. No video, you’re welcome. Yeah. You don’t want to see the three of us. All right. So yeah, please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check out the member special. If you’re not a member, atp.fm slash join, you get access not only to this member special,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but all the member specials before it. We would really love you to try it out. And just to remember, just to reiterate. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can remember there, you can also do gift memberships. Now, if somebody has a birthday coming up, or you just want to say, Hey, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for being awesome. Thanks for being you. Then you can go to, what is it? John, http.fm slash gift. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you can gift someone a membership, which is thanks to a striking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of work and a stunning amount of work from one, Mr. John Syracuse. So thank you again, John. And yeah, so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, the member special is a lot of fun and I, we don’t currently have a plan for the next one other than that. We’ll do another one in about a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ll see what happens. But, uh, I have ideas for some non-dorky things to do since I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we haven’t done a non-dorky one in a while. So I don’t think it’s possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for us. Touché.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s make it different people to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Yeah, fair enough.
Powerwall/UPS follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. First of all, we got a lot of genuinely useful feedback about Marco’s EPS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issues So Marco, can you just give me a brief recap of what the issue was if you don’t mind, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah So I talked briefly about that I have I have solar panels and Tesla Powerwall battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backups for my house because I talked I was talking about a power outage and how Apparently and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the issue I have is that my UPS that powered might that also back to my networking gear Which was powered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the Powerwall like behind it like in its outlet when the Powerwall had engaged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use backup power, the UPS behaved as though it had no power from the wall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and started running off its own battery, beeping, and then eventually shutting down. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was asking people, what is it about running a Powerwall setup in offline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode that freaks out a UPS? And we got a lot of great answers about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So Patrick Warren writes, after we installed our solar in Powerwalls, I discovered the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem with UPS. with UPSs that Marco has. The issue is actually the frequency of the power provided by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system. When running on local power, my system is running at close to 65 Hertz versus the approximately 60
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hertz ground power operates at. Most UPSs see any power above about 63 Hertz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as quote unquote bad power and run off the internal battery. Patrick Niemeyer writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under certain circumstances, Powerwall can signal to the solar inverter to stop production by shifting the line
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frequency to 65 degree, excuse me, 65 Hertz. This is an old school protocol that allows the battery system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, stop, I’m full, stop generating. Which may be necessary if you are off-grid and you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solar that can’t be exported to the grid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which was, by the way, exactly the situation. It was the middle of the day, there was tons of solar being generated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was not drawing much off the power wall, so they were full. And so the solar power had nowhere to go. Indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So most appliances, writes Patrick, and electronics don’t care about the small line frequency shift, but some UPSs are sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to detect it as an abnormal condition and go offline.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jeff Strobel also writes, you’ll note that long outages will make certain plugged-in clocks run fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough that they actually need resetting, which is hilarious.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they’re running off the battery power, and the battery power is 65 hertz, and if you have an old-school analog-style
⏹️ ▶️ John digital clock, it’s running at 65 hertz when expected to run at 60, and now it’s running a little fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So now going back to Patrick Niemeyer, apparently the exact amount of frequency shift is something that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can configure in the PowerWall software, and Tesla has the ability to change it if it’s causing a problem. Marco should contact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his installer or Tesla about this. Then Adam Selby writes, “‘Tesla gets this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call to change power frequency often “‘from us nerds and can adjust it as needed. “‘You can test this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the off-grid switch “‘once they make this change.’” Coming back again to Jeff Strobel, “‘I’ve heard enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey horror stories “‘about dealing with Tesla “‘that I decided not to go this route.’” Wise. Imagine that. “‘The other solution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to get a UPS “‘that’s okay with 65 hertz. “‘This is what I did. “‘For the last couple of years, “‘I’ve been using Eaton UPSs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that can attest that they work great at solving this. This is the one that I use, we’ll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. But Jeff adds, your clocks will still run fast though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and by the way, lots of people wrote in to not only tell us about, you know, this thing about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how Powerwalls use, you know, they generate 65 hertz power for these various reasons, but also many people wrote in specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say that this brand Eaton UPSs are good with that power. And if you look in the Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews for the Eaton UPSs, many of them mention it’s compatible with Powerwalls. So I’d never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard of this brand before, but it seems to be pretty well regarded for this purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then finally on this topic, Joseph Quigley writes, regarding UPSs that are not using outlet power when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Powerwall backup, many UPSs are sensitive to dirty power that doesn’t match the perfect sine wave that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be getting from the grid. My APC and induction stove will not tolerate the power from my whole house generator, but my cyber
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power UPSs work just fine. So it could be a sine wave issue as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I can’t tell if that one’s just a 65 Hertz thing all over again, or if it actually is an issue with sine wave thing, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John just want to throw it in there that is the one alternate theory that was not, hey, it’s not 60 hertz anymore. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is by far the prevailing explanation. Yep. Yeah.
iPhone/Vision hype: John was wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on I’d like to formally establish and confirm that John was indeed wrong in the John V Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey debate of last episode Based on anic data and no other useful information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually one piece of useful information It sounds like it’s somewhere between 60 40 or 70 30 team armless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which would be Marco and me that the iPhone that the iPhone launch was indeed a big deal even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for non nerds Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John just wanted to hear you introduce this thing because I wanted to hear what you you think the issue was by the way
⏹️ ▶️ John It was 60 40 not 70 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you actually kept track.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because Right, well, here’s the thing Casey I wasn’t keeping track
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t keeping track but then Casey wrote 60 40 in the show notes very early on like the day after the episode That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John correct. And I was like, hmm 60 40. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John He just guesstimating that but then he changed it to 70 30 I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John second So then I went back and I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco counted 60 40 I can tolerate 70 30 no
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it doesn’t actually matter for the reasons I’ll get into in a second. But, uh, but it now it was a 60, uh, 60 40. It’s exactly 60 40 as of like
⏹️ ▶️ John a two minutes before we record. That’s incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is literally exactly 60 40. No decimal points.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John John’s John’s, uh, description is 100% accurate. I did put in 60 40
⏹️ ▶️ Casey originally. And then over time, I was like, no, this feels closer to 70 30. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John with power, but You shouldn’t have done that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why. All right, so I genuinely will give you a chance, John. I really mean that. But for what it’s worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of my favorite pieces of feedback was Chris on Mastodon, who wrote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as it pains me to say this, this entire thread largely debunks John’s comparison to iPhone at launch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved that so many of our pieces of feedback from John’s flying monkeys, I mean, from our loyal listeners, was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know what? I cannot believe it, but John actually was indeed wrong this once. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen. Who knew? Another great piece of feedback. I don’t know if you two noticed this, but we got the following
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pieces of feedback. This was two days ago via email. We got a piece of feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from George S. This is the entirety of the feedback. The subject, John’s correct about the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not providing any other justification because he did a good job. That was 11.27 p.m. my time on the 15th of January. 11.44 p.m. my time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same day, MJF writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hello, John was wrong about the iPhone launch in episode 569. Cheers, MJ.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey These two pieces of email, both of which were one line long, sat directly adjacent to each other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my inbox. This was so
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a lot of, and this is what I was getting at with it, because you knew there was going to be, I knew there was going to be extreme
⏹️ ▶️ John opinions about this. And there were people the farthest extremes you could possibly imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, I will say that none of this actually matters because of all, I look at all the feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I don’t think, I’m pretty sure I did not see a single piece of feedback that
⏹️ ▶️ John claimed to disagree with me, that refuted a position that I actually held.
⏹️ ▶️ John They all were complaining about things that I do not have and have not ever believed. Uh, and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John himself, when he introduced this topic,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey uh, you know, was
⏹️ ▶️ John introduced to it in a way that does not match my idea of what it is that we were talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. Right. And I think, I think that is genuinely all kidding and snarky.
⏹️ ▶️ John on both sides. Because I saw emails that were in support of me and gave reasons that had nothing to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John what I was saying, and vice versa. So then, obviously, I listened to every episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I went back and listened to the segment. And that was instructive, because this is one of the rare cases when I go back and listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to a segment with myself, and I’m waiting for myself to say something, and then I never say it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that is a bad sign. So when I listen back to the
⏹️ ▶️ John segment, I’m like, OK. I can understand how
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who listens to the show could come away with the mistaken impression of the point I was trying to make. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on me. I did a bad job communicating and I heard it in myself, which again is rare. That’s why I listened to the episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I heard it in myself. I’m like, wait a second. Did, did I, did something get cut out here? I was like, no, I just, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John say the thing that was in my head or whatever. So that’s on me. What’s on you two.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Listening to what I had to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco say and then
⏹️ ▶️ John taking, taking the least charitable possible interpretation And
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming that I have no brain in my head and running with that assumption. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John listeners I excuse because like you don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey long they’ve been listening to me, but you’ve been on every single episode with
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Why would you think suddenly I would wake up one day and have the opposite opinion of something that we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about for literally 10 years? So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s on YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ John But collectively, I think we did a bad job.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes, we did. We’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, truth be told, as much as I’d love to give you more stick about this, and I kind of am. I think the problem was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each of the three of us, and even though Marco and I were closer aligned than you were with either of us, I think each of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three of us was having a slightly different conversation all at the same time. That is true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, one of the anti-patterns that ended up with us talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John each other was very often I heard myself replying to something you two had said three sentences ago, but you thought
⏹️ ▶️ John I was replying to the very last thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that you said, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable thing to assume. But again, it should have been modified by you saying, but wait a second, that would be idiotic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead, you’re like, oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey God, John’s saying something idiotic. Anyway, to clarify for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey who didn’t hear the last
⏹️ ▶️ John episode. Here’s the thing, I’m gonna say a bunch of things that I think we can all agree with. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John hear me saying this and you’re like, but that’s not what you said last episode, I was trying and failing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I was trying, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I did have a point, which I want to reattempt to make now. I did actually have a point. It’s not a big
⏹️ ▶️ John point. It was just a tangential aside that occurred to me in the moment staring at the show notes and then you guys derailed it
⏹️ ▶️ John with, what are you saying? Anyway, so here, I’ll go through the line items. And this, I believe, will pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ John knock out every single one that’s saying John is wrong, right? Let’s start, okay?
⏹️ ▶️ John People were excited about the iPhone launch. Some of those people were people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John not Apple fans. In other words, it wasn’t just Apple fans that were excited about the iPhone launch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of people were, okay? The iPhone launch had more excitement than the
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro launch. These are all just statements that I feel like I would never need to say in the show, but apparently I need to, okay?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another thing I think we can all agree on, right? Being available on only
⏹️ ▶️ John one carrier was a deterrent to purchasing the original iPhone. The original iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John its price, its high price, was a deterrent to purchasing it. These are all statements that people will write
⏹️ ▶️ John in and say, I disagree with John. I think only being on Singular was a deterrent. Thanks. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone agrees with that. If you came away thinking that I didn’t, I apologize. So why did
⏹️ ▶️ John I say all those things? What was my point? The point that I was trying to get at was that
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone, at launch and before it launched, had not yet convinced
⏹️ ▶️ John the world that it was the iPhone. There were things about it that
⏹️ ▶️ John people who had never used a phone like this, let alone this particular phone, were still skeptical
⏹️ ▶️ John of. And that is the parallel that I saw with the Vision Pro. And other people will say,
⏹️ ▶️ John but cell phones are around for ages and headsets are much newer. That’s, I agree
⏹️ ▶️ John with all of that. But that was the point I was getting. I remember it was about the ads, you know, the parallelism of the
⏹️ ▶️ John ads, right? Because I thought it was interesting. And by the way, this is something a lot of people brought up
⏹️ ▶️ John on support of my thing. Like one of the things people were skeptical about, by the way, was an onscreen software keyboard, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you had never used one of those, you’re like, well, it could be cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, at the time that was a major, like, you know, everyone was worried about that. Is it really gonna work? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep in mind, like what the iPhone launched into was a world obsessed with BlackBerrys. And so everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, well, the iPhone looks really cool, but I don’t know how that keyboard’s gonna work out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there was a lot of skepticism about that. And on the hype front, I’m very disappointed that literally only a
⏹️ ▶️ John single person brought up this term. I thought I was gonna have this thrown to my face a million times after I heard, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what people thought we were saying in the press episode, or what thought I was saying. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys weren’t paying as much attention to the launch. The hype around the iPhone was insane,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just within Apple people, but within mainstream media. So much so that the
⏹️ ▶️ John nickname, do you remember the nickname for the iPhone? You probably saw it on that one person who gave it in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the feedback. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John The Jesus phone. Oh yes, that’s right. Can you get
⏹️ ▶️ John any more hype with it?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The Jesus phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now that was used teasingly too, a little bit. Like, oh, it’s the Jesus phone, everyone’s gonna love it or whatever. But it was a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of hype about that. And so you may be asking yourself, okay, but if that’s true, how come when Marco and Casey said, well, what about
⏹️ ▶️ John it being singular? What about the high price? You said no. What I was saying no to was that Those
⏹️ ▶️ John were not the only things stopping people from getting the iPhone, because the point I was trying to make is that the iPhone was released into
⏹️ ▶️ John a world that was still skeptical about this idea. Hell, the world was skeptical about the idea of smartphones in general, because there were so many
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb phones, and the people who did love smartphones had a hardware keyboard on their BlackBerries. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John was the thing that, you know, this product had not yet convinced the world that it was a thing. And two other
⏹️ ▶️ John points are, if you’re young and don’t remember the iPhone launch, you may assume that it launched and it was a gigantic hit
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the gate and it was gangbusters and everybody loved it and everyone was immediately convinced that all cell phones would be like this. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not what happened. If you weren’t there for it, you might’ve thought that would happen because of how obvious it is to you that
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what cell phones should look like. But when it happened, the world was not convinced and they weren’t convinced right away. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John actually took their competitors a long time to copy them, or not a long time, but a little bit of time to copy them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And even then, it was a slower buildup than you would’ve thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, all right, hold on. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John mostly agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything you’ve said until right
⏹️ ▶️ John Slower than like, you know, and the next day everyone agreed the iPhone was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes, but I will say- You can debate
⏹️ ▶️ John about the time, but for people who weren’t there, they may think, oh, as soon as the iPhone came out, everyone realized every cell phone should be
⏹️ ▶️ John like this. It’s like, okay, maybe they did, but they had to make Android like that, you know, and just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fingers. Still, though, I think the spirit of your point is now fair, or perhaps always has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been. I just didn’t understand it. But I think the spirit of your point is now fair. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way I remember it, and I will concede that I have a truly terrible memory, but the The way I remember it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that at first everyone, to your point, was like, eh, singular, eh, expensive, eh, software keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the moment you put your hands on some friends or some acquaintances or some family member’s iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, that’s it, that’s what I want, I have to have it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that doesn’t make the market like turn around and say, okay, now I’m gonna go buy that phone because all the, you know, it took a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John for there to be phones out there that were like that. And I think the app store was a big thing and you could
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone and think it’s amazing, but you’re like, well, what can I do with this? The time scales are a question. And
⏹️ ▶️ John even for people who were there during it, like all of us, your fuzzy memory could be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, the iPhone, the biggest consumer electronics product ever created. There was
⏹️ ▶️ John still a ramp. It took off slower than you might remember. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this is entirely coincidental, because I’m sure that, and speaking of how long did
⏹️ ▶️ John it take to get going, what was the launch like? But I’m sure that Gruber had not heard our podcast when he recorded this podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John But coincidentally, like at the same time, we were either recording or releasing that episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber was on a podcast making a similar point about how when innovation
⏹️ ▶️ John comes along, people don’t always recognize it immediately. And it takes a while to get going. And his quote
⏹️ ▶️ John again, this is off the cuff, just like mine was. And you could argue about the time scales and I would argue the time scales as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But he said the iPhones was like, quote, a curiosity for the purse
⏹️ ▶️ John for the first four or five years after launch. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that I don’t know about that. Yeah, I don’t know about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But that’s off the cuff. I think what Gruber and I are getting to because I think Gruber and I were professionally paying more attention
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple maybe in 2007 than you two were. When Gruber, what Gruber and I were
⏹️ ▶️ John getting at was that it’s easy in hindsight to think that the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John must have been a smash hit from day one and everyone was knew it was perfect, right? People, as a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote and said that they didn’t even see an iPhone until the 3G. never even seen one or touched one until the 3G.
⏹️ ▶️ John So no matter how great an idea is, he was making the point about the Mac too, like the Mac has a GUI, but how long after
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac and the GUI came out were people like, I don’t know about this GUI thing, right? Until essentially Windows 95
⏹️ ▶️ John convinced the whole world. It’s like, oh, I guess the GUI is fine, right? Not that it was 10 years for the iPhone, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the point I was trying to make. And the reason it’s relevant to the ads is here you have two products being
⏹️ ▶️ John released into a world that is skeptical of them. Again, not to the same degree
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because He was everyone was convinced by cell phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s quite a different degree here,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Right for sure for sure, right? But also it’s not like vision pro is the first VR headset But I think VR headsets
⏹️ ▶️ John in general are not been convinced the world But anyway, they’re both both products that are being released in
⏹️ ▶️ John to a consumer base that has some skepticism about not just this particular product But the whole concept
⏹️ ▶️ John in some regard and you know with the iPhone It was you know, the software keyboard and being all screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and the concept of smartphone and vision pro all the stuff, right? But then both of their launch ads
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t really spend any time trying to convince you. They just said, we assume you’re already excited about the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s a bunch of people picking up phones and movies, iPhone. And then Vision Pro is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, well, what they’re going to do is piggyback on the glory of the iPhone, which now is retroactively the greatest thing ever
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, it’s just like the iPhone ad, but also we’re not going to really spend any time trying to convince you that you should get
⏹️ ▶️ John a Vision Pro. We’re just going to show a bunch of people in movies, putting things in their face, Vision Pro. That was the point I was trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to make. I hope it did a better job on it on the second try. I hope no one has to write into me anymore to tell me that being
⏹️ ▶️ John only on Singular was a deterrent to buying the iPhone and it was expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I will allow it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love how fervently you had to fight being wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, also fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I also think like, I think you are still wrong in the, even with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your defenses, in the sense of, I think the iPhone was more anticipated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bigger earlier than you are saying.
⏹️ ▶️ John more anticipated. I already said it was more anticipated than the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Vision Pro. I already said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. No, but then you were saying, and also I think the Vision Pro is heading into an even more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenging environment.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree with that as well. I do not disagree with that at all. Yes, it is way more challenging. But how many people do you see with
⏹️ ▶️ John VR headsets versus how many people had cell phones in 2007? That’s the thing. 100% agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, like, the iPhone was launching a clearly really great version of something that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already loved. The, you the Vision Pro is going into a market that is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skeptical and doesn’t really necessarily think they even need this product.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the market for VR headsets that’s skeptical, it’s the world that is skeptical of that product, period.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like how many VR headsets have ever sold versus how many cell phones had ever sold in 2007? Like it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John huge difference in degree, obviously. But again, I was just making, trying to make what I thought was an interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ John funny aside about the parallels of the ads and how both products that
⏹️ ▶️ John you would think it would need to do some convincing decided no we’re that’s not our launch ad is not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be about convincing you we’ll just leave that to the product which you’ll see for two seconds at the end of the ad good luck
⏹️ ▶️ John and it worked out really well for the iPhone vision Pro remains to be seen and by the way people keep
⏹️ ▶️ John calling a vision Pro AVP and in short in like slacks and online and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John every single time I see I think alien vs. predator I have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to reread it. I’m like, why
⏹️ ▶️ John is he talking about Alien vs. Predator? AV, Apple, oh, I get it. Okay. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God. it yourself there, big guy.
Vision Pro tidbits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so I understand that we have an answer from somewhere that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Vision Pro, or otherwise known as the APT focal distance is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just wrote Vision Pro in the notes. You notice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m violating the guidelines. I noticed, I almost went in and added Apple all over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You said the a minute ago, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, we’re a mess. We’re a
⏹️ ▶️ John mess. Yeah, well, Apple’s not the boss of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the whenever we want. Unless they want to send us
⏹️ ▶️ John press pass, and then suddenly they’re the boss of us. Yeah, fair enough. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that ship has literally already just sailed. Like all the press release reviews all went out already.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure when we get to our main topic today, they’ll come running back to us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yes, that’s definitely gonna happen. We have no grievances, no further grievances there. Apple Vision Pro focal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distance. John, what do we got here?
⏹️ ▶️ John 1.3 meters. That’s what I am told. Anonymous sources say the
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro focal distance is 1.3 meters or 4.265 feet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, this is the idea is that in these VR headsets, the focal distance is fixed. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter how far something is from you, really close to you in the virtual world, really far from you in
⏹️ ▶️ John the virtual world, there is no refocusing because what it actually is is a bunch of screens
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of your eyeballs and there are no moving lens elements and there’s nothing to bend the light a different amount. So there is a fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John focal distance inside that headset. And I wanted to know what the distance was because I wanted to know which of my
⏹️ ▶️ John many varying eyeglass prescriptions I would have to use. And now the answer is whichever one lets me see 2020 at 1.3 meters.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there you have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you live in a barbaric place like ours that doesn’t believe in meters, that’s four and about four and a third
⏹️ ▶️ John And interestingly, that’s farther away than my monitor is. I mean, I bet for most people, they don’t keep their monitors 1.3 meters away.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my computer glasses are essentially calibrated so I can focus on my monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe like maybe a foot past it or whatever. And my distance glasses are
⏹️ ▶️ John so I can drive. Right. So they’re 20, 20, you know, all the way down the road, hundreds and hundreds of yards or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John or meters, whichever you prefer. So I do wonder if I pick the prescription
⏹️ ▶️ John for Vision Pro at some point, if I should go to my eye doctor and say, give me lenses
⏹️ ▶️ John that let me see 20-20 without eye strain at 1.3 meters. I may do that at Mac, so is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to Apple Vision Pro ordering, Mac Rumors has some ordering details.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently when you order Apple Vision Pro, not the Apple Vision Pro, not the Vision Pro, not AVP, but Apple Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, Hi, this is Casey. You’ll need to scan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John your face with an iPhone or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad with Face ID. This helps us determine the right size light seal and headbands,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which work together to give you a precise fit. MacRumors also adds that you should make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure your Apple Store app is updated as the latest version released on January 11 supports the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey face scanning. When you order, Apple will ask you a few questions to find out if you need optical inserts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you do, you’ll need to upload a valid unexpired prescription from a US eye care professional after checkout.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacRumors also helpfully notes that you can add and store your vision prescription in the health app on your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone. I don’t know specifically where other than in the health app, but hey, there you go. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is what you need to look forward to if you are ordering in two days, right? It’s this coming Friday, is it
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It’s kind of interesting when you’re like rushing to order, you know, the iPhone, you get the order all prepared, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact storage size, everything you want, you just go, go, go. This seems like the procedure might be a little bit slower and given
⏹️ ▶️ John the performance characteristics, say of Apple Store on
⏹️ ▶️ John the moment after launch of a popular product. I do wonder how well this is going to go for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. May the odds be ever in your favor. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, I don’t know how, I mean, look, I think they are definitely going to sell all that they’re making,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s just such a mystery how many they’re making and like how many they’re going to save for retail availability.
⏹️ ▶️ John How many are made right now? Like you think, oh, they’ll probably only do a million a year, but is the first batch 10,000?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, yeah, that’s fair. We don’t know anything about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Presumably, I mean, it has seemed from lots of different places. It has seemed that the hardware has been finalized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for quite some time. I would imagine they have been making them in like if they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco truly supply constrained by some critical part, like the screens, as we’ve been hearing from the rumor mill, I would assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have been like banking them for a while. So they probably have a lot of those built up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s the screens themselves or whether they actually have been banking up whole units. They probably have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of them because like they showed it off in what appeared to be pretty much final hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco form seven months ago. So like I think they’ve had a lot of time to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make a big launch quantity. The question is how quickly that launch quantity will sell out and then how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly they’ll be trickling out after that. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Indeed. So yeah, so you can expect all that when you order this coming Friday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you are a crazy person to order this immediately, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco probably two thirds of
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, or you’re gonna try, you may spend a lot of time bouncing off the Apple Store and various
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms until you see the thing that says 12 weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Then with regard to the Vision Pro demos, Mark Gurman has some information about this. If you recall, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be demos apparently only on the first day or first weekend, is that right, of Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know yet, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s as far as we’ve been told anyhow. So Apple’s prepared, this is Gurman, Apple’s prepared its most sophisticated sales
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pitch ever, including a demo lasting up to 25 minutes. The demo begins, excuse me, With
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a retail worker scanning the user’s face with an app, this scan will tell the employee hosting the demo which light seal, foam cushion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and band size the customer will need. The light seal comes in more than 25 shapes and sizes. The cushions come in
⏹️ ▶️ John But what is the band size? I mean, there’s just two bands, but they don’t come in sizes, right? They’re just gonna adjust
⏹️ ▶️ John the straps, I guess?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t think so, but this certainly seems to indicate that there are sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it just might be sloppy writing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A question that I have, just kind of taking a tangent off this for a minute, What’s the exchange situation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look like if you feel like your light seal isn’t right, particularly if you’re ordering online and if they do ship
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to home, which every indication is they are going to ship to people’s homes. How do you exchange that? Like, can you just drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to the Apple store and grab a new one? I wonder, I’m not looking for active answers on this. I’m kind of just, you know, throwing it out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. I wonder what that looks like, especially for people not near a store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I would hope that Apple will be fairly permissive with this first
⏹️ ▶️ John round and not give people a hard time because it’s kind of like bread they bring to the table at a restaurant, it’s not like they can reuse
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It’s been on your sweaty face, it’s basically gotta get recycled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You would be surprised how many restaurants reuse the bread.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I know about restaurants. I’m just saying, they’re not supposed to. What they actually do is a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John story. Yes. Don’t work in the food service industry. No. Or do it, improve it for us all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? So yeah, so I mean, again, I’m not actively expecting answers or seeking answers right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, I’m just kinda wondering out loud. I wonder what that’s gonna look like. So anyway, back to German. If a person’s wearing glasses, The stores
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will have a device to scan the lenses for prescription information. The system will provide those numbers and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stores will have hundreds of lenses on hand for demos. The employee then gathers all those details and another worker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the store’s back room assembles the DemoVision Pro with the correct accessories. Once the unit is in
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, wait, wait, on the lens scanning thing? Mm-hmm. That is, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know they’re not gonna go into super detail here and I’m assuming the training that all the Apple employees have been given to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John demo will include this, but if you were to just take my glasses off my head and scan them to get my prescription, you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be taking off my driving glasses because I probably drove there and that is absolutely the wrong prescription for me to be able to see anything
⏹️ ▶️ John six feet away because my eyes are so screwed up and I’m old. So I hope they will ask the person,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess if you’re only wearing your driving glasses, what choice do they have? But maybe they’ll ask them, hey, do you happen to know what your reading
⏹️ ▶️ John offset is? And for people who don’t have terrible vision and aren’t old and don’t know this, when you get
⏹️ ▶️ John a prescription, what they normally do is give you your prescription, essentially your driving glasses prescription,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, you can see 20, 20 long distances. And then they will have like an offset. I don’t know what it’s called. Some uptimers can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you, but they’ll have like little offsets and like, and by the way, for their up close or reading glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, here are the offsets. Here are the, you know, adjusted prescription by this amount. So you essentially get
⏹️ ▶️ John two prescriptions, your main one and then deltas for your second one. But the second one is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can pick what the second one is. You just talk to your eye doctor and say, hey, I want the second one to, I tell the doctor,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want the second one so that my screen is in focus and here’s how far away it is for me. You can tell them anything for the second
⏹️ ▶️ John one, but in the absence of explicit instructions, I think most eye doctors will prescribe the second prescription for
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially reading, like you’re holding a book in front of you, which is not, to the earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John point, 1.3 meters away. If you’re holding a book 1.3 meters away when you read it, you have very long arms.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is another factor that I’m sure they’re including, but that isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John incorporated into this description of the demo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Righto. So continuing on with German, once the unit is in hand, The employee will explain how the interface
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works. This includes how to control the pointer using a user’s eyes, how to gesture to make selections, and how to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold the headset. The staffer will also show how to adjust the so-called fit dial on the main headband
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how to use the digital crown for moving between virtual and augmented reality. The employee will have an iPad to view what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user is seeing on the Vision Pro. Once the headset is on, customers will need to calibrate the device with various tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and tapping exercises so it can follow their eyes and hands. That includes looking at a circular dot pattern set at different brightness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey levels and a hand scan in the field of vision of the device. After all that, the roughly 20, 25
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minute demo can begin. Parts of the demo are photos or video and video, normal panorama and spatial video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey placing multiple app windows in space, scrolling, 3D and immersive movies, including clips of wild
⏹️ ▶️ Casey animals, the ocean, and sports. There’s also a compelling scene that makes users feel as if they’re on a tightrope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that is apparently what’s going on. A lot of this, having never, and this is genuinely the truth, I’m not being coy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having never experienced the official marketing demo for the Vision Pro, This sounds a lot like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way it has been described that a lot of these same things were demoed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back in June at WWDC to the press that got to see it. I don’t think it’s identical, but it seems very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very similar from what I can gather.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and we don’t have the link for it here. We should probably dig it out, but Apple’s been dropping these press releases
⏹️ ▶️ John to hype up the Vision Pro. And one of them was like, entertainment software that’s available.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look at all these movies and movie experiences and stuff. And I was reminded reading that
⏹️ ▶️ John of something that they said at launch, that I had forgotten about, but now has rekindled my interest. And I’m like, oh, yeah, they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing, which is 3D movies. I’ve never been a big 3D movie watching fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen a lot of movies in the theater in 3D. I used to have a 3D TV and I did some stuff with it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s always weird limitations with that 3D stuff in particular. Both of the technologies
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve used for 3D, both the one in the movie theater and the one on my home television set reduced the light output because
⏹️ ▶️ John it was essentially have half the light going to your left eye and half the light going to your right eye. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John everything would be twice as dim or whatever Same thing with the television one it literally had glasses that
⏹️ ▶️ John would have LCD shutters that would Black out one of your eyes back and forth back and forth really fast and or
⏹️ ▶️ John just make everything half as dim Don’t have the problem inside the vision Pro so they’re hyping a lot of the 3d movies They’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John and those 3d movies. They’ll have full brightness in each eye, and it’ll it’s perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John You know you’ll never have any crosstalk. There’s one screen for your left eye one screen for your right eye eye all at full
⏹️ ▶️ John brightness full color fidelity full frame rate like just everything about it should be amazing so it should essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John be the best 3d movie experience anyone has ever experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John if you haven’t used another VR headset doing the same thing obviously and I’m actually kind of looking forward to that
⏹️ ▶️ John because I would like to see 3d on by the way some of the 3d movies are even gonna be higher frame rate
⏹️ ▶️ John so you so it might not be especially if it’s like a computer animated movie they can do a 60fps or or maybe even a 90
⏹️ ▶️ John FPS version. I’m really interested to see that, to see if 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes more attractive to me when a lot of the downsides have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, that reminds me that someone I was talking to, I wanna say it was Jason, but I might have that wrong, pointed out to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me a very interesting point. Rather than getting the Phantom and forthcoming potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OLED iPad, so you can watch TV in bed, why wouldn’t you wanna get one of these? I mean, leaving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aside that it’s extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John big heavy thing on your face. You’re laying down anyway, who cares? I don’t know, maybe I won’t care, maybe I will. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John never had one on my face. All I can tell you is that one of the things that I enjoy about watching my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John in my bed is that I get to take off my glasses. And so I don’t have my glasses frames on my face. Like it’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ John at the end of the day just to not have glasses on your face anymore, right? Or not have contacts in your eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And wearing a Vision Pro is essentially the opposite. Not having glasses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey face. That’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, maybe it won’t bother me. Maybe I’ll think it’s amazing. Maybe it will be less comfortable, but it’ll be so compelling.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I won’t know until I try it. Again, that is one of the more attractive things to me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the OLED is a proven, or the iPad is a proven solution to me. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John is definitely gonna be my first stop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, so briefly before we get to the next follow-up item I think it’s been established, Marco, you were going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try to buy one on Friday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sitting here now, the family CFO was not in love with this idea, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s happening anyway. I think I’m ordering this coming Friday. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then John, you said you’re not going to order, but out of curiosity, I think you don’t sign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until a couple of weeks from now, but are you going to attempt to get a demo at one of your local Apple stores?
⏹️ ▶️ John I might. I mean, we’ll see. Like, I don’t relish the idea of having
⏹️ ▶️ John it demoed in that environment, but I’ll also check around to see what the
⏹️ ▶️ John local mooching situation is like. Like, do I know someone who has
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one who will let me try it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, again, that won’t be ideal. They won’t have the same prescription, you know, it won’t fit my face
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but you know, we’ll see, I’ll consider it. Like it depends on how everything goes. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, again, I don’t relish waiting in a long line and going through a big demo thing, but if that’s my only chance,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s my only chance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, fair enough. All right, Justin Yeo writes, a note on the high index lenses, Apple notes that not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all prescriptions are covered. Mine certainly isn’t for the meta headsets. And Justin provides a link to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MetaQuest 2 inserts, which I looked at this earlier, and I wanna say it went from like negative eight to positive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight or something like that, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a big range. Which is a big range. The SPH prescription range is zero to negative eight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Total power zero to negative eight in cylinder, perhaps, prescription range, obviously I don’t know what I’m talking about, is zero
⏹️ ▶️ John And you couldn’t say that it would be out of your range if not for your contacts, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget. I think I’m flirting with eight-ish. I don’t remember exactly. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, I think your point is certainly fair, that it would probably be outside of what I could do if I didn’t have my contacts in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, so this is the difficulty in all things. Like, again, iPhones are not made in sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John that are readable by a lot of people with poor vision, which my mother is currently experiencing and she hates voiceover, so
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s that. It’s difficult to make something that is
⏹️ ▶️ John largely a visual output device work for all people with bad
⏹️ ▶️ John vision, but that is part of the challenge, to be able to expand the range. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what does accessibility look like in Vision Pro with just making things inside the lenses bigger? That doesn’t help if
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t see the things inside the lenses because your prescription too thick or whatever.
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Apple Watch banned again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Breaking news. Apparently, well, as we record this, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey evening of the 17th, Apple is going to be denied
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Apple Watch sales tomorrow, I believe is accurate. But certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems as of a couple of days ago, as we record, they were planning to drop the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software portions of the blood oxygen sensor in order to avoid the ban that seems to be coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 18th regardless. And by the time you listen to this, the story will probably be different again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I think there was a new story that just came out. We didn’t quite get into the notes, but like basically the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Watch ban is in effect again. And the only way they’re gonna get past the ban is by disabling this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John in software. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or licensing the patent, which they apparently just refused to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe that’s not gonna happen by tomorrow, but like that, and we talked about this before, that they had a software fix.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’ve had some warning. Yeah, and the theory was that the software fix was not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be simply disabling the feature, but rather working around the patent somehow. But apparently they either that was not true
⏹️ ▶️ John or they could not figure out how to do it. So the easy solution is disable it in software.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s not great for a product that was, you know, partially sold based on this feature. I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John how they’re gonna handle that in terms of advertising and, you know, like the text on apple.com,
⏹️ ▶️ John buy the Apple watch because it does blood oxygen. This is only in the US, by the way, it is not in other countries. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another complication. So this is a tricky situation for Apple to be in. And as
⏹️ ▶️ John usual, they are exhausting every possible avenue. But it seems like this watch is
⏹️ ▶️ John going back to being not for sale, but then coming back immediately because they disabled the problematic
⏹️ ▶️ John feature. And then the negotiation that we assume is happening will continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is such a mess like they should never have let it get to this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, we all know we’re not fans of the patent system on this show. But the reality is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still the law, it’s still a system Apple has to work with. Apple takes full advantage of it themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has lots of their own patents that they wield against other companies. So the fact is, this is a system that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have to work in and they gladly participate in. This company got them on one and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s too bad, but here’s the reality, Apple is so stubborn about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they are going to actually remove a feature of the watch that they’ve had for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a number of years now. Now, you know, the details of this, I mean, who knows how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is going to end up because it’s changing minute by minute. But, you know, what appears to be the case is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess they’re going to somehow know, I guess by serial number, like which ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are sold from tomorrow forward. Because I would sure as heck hope they wouldn’t have a software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that disabled all of the existing ones. So I assume it’s like only the watches that are sold in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the U.S. In this date range would have this disabled. And I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna try to work it out and then hopefully be able to re-enable it later. But- I thought they were gonna disable it on all watches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was my assumption too. But I don’t remember having read that. That was just my assumption.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would certainly be pretty upset. And I think a lot of people would because this is part of the reason that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the watch. And when I purchased it, this was not a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re all problems that Apple should have kept in mind when considering the negotiation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would assume that’s not what, I would be very surprised if they disabled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Everyone well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean to keep an eye on your watch. I guess I know maybe don’t run the update No, like yeah, I would be very surprised if they disabled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all existing ones But I’m guessing they have some kind of like you know Registration database of like which your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers are sold by their stores or manufactured after this date in the US market and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever else But that’s just such a mess like I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t deactivate it on an existing watches unless people run an off software update Of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco course yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but just like I mean look Apple you tried I admire the fight you tried to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have to license this patent or work with this company You put up a really good fight. Good job. Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pat on the back now. Just do what you have to do Like just freaking buy the patent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already just you tried your best Just throw money at this problem make it go away
⏹️ ▶️ John not that I should tell Apple how to negotiate things, but you’re you’re negotiating leverage is higher
⏹️ ▶️ John when the outcome of the Legal situation is still in question Right? So because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you exhaust every possible avenue, and Mossimo knows that nothing is left and they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John won in every legal forum that exists, they’re gonna name a higher price
⏹️ ▶️ John than if Apple said, well, we can go to courts with this, but we don’t know how it’s gonna turn out. How certain are you that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna win Mossimo? That gives you more negotiating power for the price. And I feel like their price negotiating
⏹️ ▶️ John power is rapidly disappearing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like just buy the patent or license, like just throw money at the problem, make this go away. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you fought the good fight. Good job, pat on the back. It’s over, you lost. Keep this from affecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your customers. That’s it, you tried your best. It is now going to affect your customers. Stop
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think the precedents I was thinking about with this was the, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John probably vaguely remember this. Forgive me for mangling it, but like the lawsuit over Rumble and
⏹️ ▶️ John console controllers. Do you remember that? Vaguely. I think, I forget who had the patent. Some company
⏹️ ▶️ John had it, but anyway, The upshot was that I think Rumble was like removed from a popular console’s
⏹️ ▶️ John controller until the patent situation had been brought back and then the next gen had it back. I’m sorry, I don’t remember the details,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s another patent customer impact thing that it was like, look, Rumble has
⏹️ ▶️ John been around long enough that it’s obvious to everybody and patents are stupid. And, but they literally
⏹️ ▶️ John took it out of the controller. And it was like, now this, for this generation of controller for this, you know, people who bought this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have Rumble. Why? Because patents.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yes i agree apple you’ve got the money fix it
App Store court ruling
⏹️ ▶️ John where does Apple get the money from?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s, you know, thank you, John. That’s a perfect segue. Where does Apple get their money from us?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, for, from, from, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John from Google, that search deal. Well, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the 25% of it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They get it from Google and they get it from the Apple tax and it’s not the one you’re thinking of. It’s the Apple tax
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that all developers are paying whether we want to or not. So we were talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before we started recording, even before the bootleg about how we were going to handle this subject. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m torn because John very, very rightly pointed out when we were talking privately that we’ve, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tread this water before. You know, we’ve been through this before. Most of this is not new and I’ll explain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a moment, but I don’t know. I’m real frigging fired up again about it because it makes me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so angry. So what’s going on? And we’ll see how we’ll see how much of a tear the three of us get on. So what’s going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, if you recall, Epic games, uh, who are the makers of Fortnite among many other games, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a very, uh, powerful CEO because it’s a private company, Tim Sweeney and Tim Sweeney has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotten a burrup, his, uh, be in his bonnet, burrup his butt to take on Apple and take on their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regulations and rules and developer licensing agreement with regard to the app store. So like a year ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe two years ago, uh, Epic just decided to up and add payments into Fortnite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is their own system that did not go through an app purchase, which is clearly an unequivocally against
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s rules, whether or not You think that’s right. It is clearly against the rules. They did this and Apple booted them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the store, which is exactly what we all expected. So then this became a legal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, Epic sued Apple or something like that. It doesn’t really matter the details. And that got run all the way up the flagpole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as high as it could go. And apparently in the last few days, the US Supreme court
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has said, yes, we hear you. We see it’s, this is a thing and we don’t care. It’s already been settled. Buzz off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what does that mean? That means that the one thing that Apple was told they really had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do was loosen up on their anti-steering thing. What that means
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, as developers, Marco and I cannot, or John even,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget that John, you are a developer as well, in your apps, John, you cannot say, hey, go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hypercritical.co.uk, pay me directly, and pay me directly, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will give you the same apps for less money. Same thing with Overcast, with Call Sheet, etc. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot point people to your own payment system, even if it’s on the web.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are exceptions for what they call reader apps, so like Netflix, for example, and other things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. But generally speaking, you cannot say, hey, you can get this cheaper on my website, here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey URL. The courts have said, no, you should be able to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You should be able to, as a developer, point your users to your website and you should be able to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money through that website. And that was about all the legal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jargon said, as far as I understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was, it was surprisingly and probably intentionally limited in what, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what the decision was actually stating. Right. Like it didn’t, it didn’t seem to place a lot of specifics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like how this should be allowed, whether Apple is, you know, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how much Apple’s allowed to charge as a commission or what kind of restrictions are to place on it. Like, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty light on the wording, presumably to leave further interpretation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down to the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So that was what was stated. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it had run up the flagpole. The US Supreme Court said it’s already been solved in lower courts. So that means the decision in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lower courts is the decision. And I think Apple has until like the end of the week or something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to make this happen. So Apple today, I believe it was, as we record, announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they’re going to do. And what they’re going to do is to be clear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what we all expected. We are going to go on a tear about this in all likelihood. That doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean that the three of us didn’t expect this. Anyone who has been paying attention to Apple, who has been paying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention to Apple, even the littlest bit, knew exactly what was coming. And yet, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speak for myself because I’m a frigging idiot. I hoped maybe it would be a little better than this, but oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, it’s not. So here’s the deal. So, Apple has basically said, we will do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bare minimum that we can possibly do in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make us legally compliant with United States law. And to be clear, all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco this… I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even say, maybe legally compliant. Fair,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair. And this is only applicable in the US. This is not applicable anywhere else except kind of sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Netherlands for dating apps. And this is where this all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Japan, right? Isn’t it? Wasn’t the Japan rule similar to
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they might have done something similar in multiple jurisdictions to make their lives easier. But I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to say that when you said they’re doing the bare minimum, what you mean is the bare minimum of
⏹️ ▶️ John nice things for developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But what Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John actually did is a ton of extra work to ensure that the aperture through
⏹️ ▶️ John which developers must travel is as narrow as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, and as treacherous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s a treacherous and narrow aperture through which we must pass if we so choose. So what they’ve said is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right, fine. You want to do your payments on your own? Fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here’s what we’ll do. We’re going to say that you can do payments on your own. You can put in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one and only one link. And it may not be in your purchase flow. It can only happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on one screen. Can’t be the IAP purchase flow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you forgot the first part, which is you have to apply to get an entitlement. Sorry. An
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey entitlement. It’s a special entitlement
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who aren’t developers. If you want your app to do certain things, to sort of register for an entitlement. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna use the camera. I wanna access the file system, which it sounds ridiculous. But anyway, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s an entitlement. So they have to have a technical mechanism through which
⏹️ ▶️ John you must pass before you get to the point where you’re linking anywhere. Just say, yeah, I want this entitlement
⏹️ ▶️ John so I can do this. And I’m not sure of the details, but I think they also have an API around this as well. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, because they are going to track the clicks. Because like, look, there’s anybody from like, from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very early iOS SDK, I think maybe even the first iOS SDK, it’s been very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to open URLs from your app to external things like the browser. It’s one API calls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like UI application, open URL, and you give it URL and it kicks you out of the app and goes to that URL. So this is not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical, you know, that they had to build an API to launch a URL.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve had that for over a decade. What they had to build was this special entitlement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will basically tell Apple, take a look at this app. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, so Apple is requiring only by policy that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna do this type of link from your app, where you’re looking out to an actual purchase, you must
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get this entitlement for your app, which kind of marks it for us to know that it’s looking at this. And then you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco must follow all these different rules about it. But again, like there is no technical need for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does seem like from what people have reported, it does seem like Apple is basically going to track
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clicks through the link, and that way they probably, that will probably inform what we’ll get to in a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is their auditing arm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, so let’s, hold on, so let’s get there. So Apple has said that yes, as you two have pointed out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to apply for an entitlement. I presume getting that entitlement will not be terribly difficult, but you need to apply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the entitlement and you need to set up your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey project. You said that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but applying for entitlements is the same black box as everything else is. You’re like, well, there’s no approval process,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I just apply for it and get it. Yeah, pretty much that always happens, except when you apply for entitlement and never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for months. Well, that’s true. Now, that being said, I actually have a special entitlement for CallSheet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I need to do a local network requests over broadcast and that is something,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, for UDP broadcast, that’s something that requires an entitlement. And that did turn around in the span of just a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days. I don’t remember how long it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John They usually do. Like we’re saying, it’s not, but because of things like app review, you always hear about the one developer who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, yeah, I applied for this
⏹️ ▶️ John routine entitlement. I just haven’t heard back. And they don’t know how to escalate it because they don’t have a podcast. It’s just like, the system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you’re exactly right. So yeah, so you apply for this entitlement. Hopefully you get it. Then you have to put a bunch of stuff in your project, which fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever. And then, yes, actually you are right, John, that you need to be able to call a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey API that puts up a scary, scary warning when the person clicks on the link and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, oh my gosh, this developer’s probably going to steal all your money and all your data. But you do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. If this is how you want to pay for this, have at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s insufficient, by the way. Like that’s Apple’s code running. Apple’s code knows where you want to send them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but before it sends them there, it shows this dialogue. And that means Apple has the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John track how many times people click on a thing and where they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going. And to try to scare them away before they get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re about to go to an external website. Apple is not responsible for the privacy or security of purchases made on the web.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is in like 40 point font. The rest is in a normal font. Any accounts or purchases made outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this app will be managed by the developer, you know, what developer name, your App Store account, stored payment method,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and related features such as subscription management, refund requests will not be available. Apple can’t verify any pricing or promotions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offered by the developer. Learn more, continue or cancel. That is the scare sheet that they use in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example on their documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the term scare sheet, by the way, that’s perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so you can go through this, you click continue and then you get to the vendor’s website
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can do what you wanna do. So Apple said, fine, you wanna do this, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the deal. you can do this but whatever purchases that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that your users make on your own website well baby we get a cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how much of a cut you ask we get 27 percent cuz you you can save
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the payment processing fee which is three percent but you’re using our interview we’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our intellectual property baby so if you think you’re getting away scott free uh…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not only that double you because any purchase that this person makes in the next week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we get a cut of that to baby 27%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which by the way means what you have to track them for a week to it’s like that’s my favorite part is like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so like anti tracking of it. Oh, by the way, if you do this, you are required to track the person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that if they follow this link, you got to track them for a week afterwards and any purchases they make from you for that entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, Apple gets 30% like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a great parallel with the like app tracking transparency thing, because it was actually like almost exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing that Facebook was doing is Facebook had links where Facebook would provide a link to an app. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you follow that link and bought the app, because Facebook had all this tracking stuff, Facebook would know, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know this user click this link. And I know this user then bought the thing at the end of that link, because I have tracking
⏹️ ▶️ John and I could see that chain of events. So I’m going to charge you for that per click and purchase or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some larger rate than I could otherwise, because I can prove that someone and click this link and bought it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple’s like, we don’t like you tracking users like that because they started out in an app and then they clicked and then they went to the web
⏹️ ▶️ John and Facebook is so invasive that they track you no matter where you go and they can connect those dots. We don’t like that. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John got to change the rules about tracking. But when it comes time to track that exact
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this person click this link
⏹️ ▶️ John and then buy it? Apple’s like, well, when you have to track it for the purposes of paying us 27% of the purchase, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve got to track all these people, then you’ve got a report into apple every month what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people have bought what and pay them pay apple twenty seven percent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of anyone’s made a purchase and to be clear even if nobody makes a purchase well you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i want to see a report anyway says apple i want to see you say none of your users made a purchase because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i might want to come in the audit your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and i might want to come and see and make sure that you’re paying us the money you’re supposed to pay us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is completely expected. I’m gonna say this again because I bet you some of you already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fired off email saying how did you not expect this? We did. We 100% did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, it is so gross and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unnecessary. It’s so gross that this is the approach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is taking. So much, to your point, John, so much extra work has been done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to say, F*** you. And it’s so unnecessary. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so unnecessary. Why can’t Apple just compete? If your product is so good, be that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the App Store, be that the iPhone, whatever, then friggin compete. Then compete.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why are… I understand. I do get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, because they won’t. They don’t have to. I mean, this…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple… I hate to make light of of something as serious as addiction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in real life and outside of corporate discussions. But it’s hard to not make that analogy of like, Apple is addicted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this revenue in such a way that it damages their goals and strategic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priorities and the health of the company in other areas. But when you look at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a company, like as the corporation, the finance, the growth, the stock,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that stuff, it’s very clear that Apple is very dependent on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that services category of their revenue to basically keep themselves looking like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of growth potential ahead of them. You know, we’ve seen over the last many years, the devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while they sell well, you know, there’s decreasing amounts of growth available because they’re just, they’re mature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product categories and in mature markets. And you know, it’s hard to get hardware growth forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re that big and that successful. So they’ve been beefing off services. And services is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this wonderful euphemism for what the revenue actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes from. Because Apple has a bunch of services that face the public. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Apple says we’re growing our services revenue, I think what most people would assume that means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is things like iCloud, and Apple TV+, and Apple Arcade, and the public-facing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services. And so when Apple says every quarter, we got services revenue, it’s going great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounds like Apple’s really building these amazing things that are just going like gangbusters. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sad truth is that Apple services are actually pretty good on the whole and actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do pretty well, but that’s not what most of that money is. Most of that money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is from two things Apple really doesn’t want to talk about because it doesn’t look very good for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One is that Google search deal that makes Google the default search engine, which Apple makes a huge chunk of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that services revenue
⏹️ ▶️ John from. I think it’s 25% of 25% of the service revenue is that search deal, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s just Google paying Apple to be, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just one big fat deal. That just comes in the form of cash. Apple does nothing for
⏹️ ▶️ John it except for not change a string somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the other part of services revenue, that’s not what people think of as services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s another huge part of it. I don’t know if we have good numbers on how huge of a part this is, but it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s games because games are 85% of that. So it’s games essentially app game games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so like that Apple’s services revenue the one of the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most important public facing drivers of growth for this company when people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analyze their finances and look for You know soccer with and stuff that it’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chunk of that is The Google search deal and the 30% cut mostly from games in the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s where Apple’s making very large amounts of money in a category that is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important for them to appear to keep growing. So that’s the stakes on the line here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What that makes Apple do is bend over backwards and twist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves in these ridiculous contortions to justify keeping that money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flowing at any cost and I do mean any cost. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store, which is largely like abusive casino games preying on children and dumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, like it’s like making money off of casinos. Like it’s yeah you can make a lot of money but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of asterisks on that that you probably don’t feel good about. That’s where Apple’s making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much of their money and watching them do these ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things I see exactly why they’re doing it and the company just keeps bending over backwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to defend that and try to rationalize the continuation of it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to even examine it for a second they would get pretty uncomfortable so they
⏹️ ▶️ John there are a couple other angles to it that is definitely one of them especially the growth one because there are people in high positions
⏹️ ▶️ John in the company that are motivated to show growth that’s kind of part of their job like you know you run a public company
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t want to stagnate you know like you have to look for the next growth opportunity like that is definitely in there
⏹️ ▶️ John uh and if you want to call that greed you can But back when Apple was selling the iPhone and that
⏹️ ▶️ John was the growth thing They were funneling all their energy into making sure the iPhone grew right, right? So like they’re always going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that just now that they’re using to grow something that we find distasteful but when I
⏹️ ▶️ John look at this, I think the There’s two other big motivators in addition to that
⏹️ ▶️ John One of them is one you just alluded to which is like the pride thing. We deserve this money We made this amazing platform. You should
⏹️ ▶️ John be grateful to be on it, which sounds like such a petty and such a human thing you’re like, well, that’s something an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John human might say on the stand at a trial, for instance. But individual humans aren’t the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but there are a small number of individuals who do run the company, and that is in their heads.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not so much that they think, greed, money at all costs, we need growth. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there are people, again, who have testified in court, basically, that we
⏹️ ▶️ John deserve this money because we made this platform, right? And that sense of pride, and that sense of, who are you to tell us how to
⏹️ ▶️ John run our business? It’s our thing, we can charge for access to it. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s that pride angle. And the other one is, again, related to the small number of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who tend to be older who run the company, is the recollection
⏹️ ▶️ John of what has happened to other companies that have lost essentially a linchpin of control. And
⏹️ ▶️ John having control over the iPhone platform, this platform they sold billions and billions of iPhones, it’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John platform, they control it. Giving up any part of that control, letting someone else
⏹️ ▶️ John make anything close to as much money as you make on that platform, they’ve seen technology companies
⏹️ ▶️ John make that mistake. Think of IBM, Microsoft, and Intel. If you don’t know the history of those three companies and how
⏹️ ▶️ John power shifted among them at the dawn of the personal computing age and how it progressed, there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of power shifts mostly having to do with one company not realizing or realizing
⏹️ ▶️ John but thinking it wasn’t a big deal that they were giving up control, giving up a particular linchpin of
⏹️ ▶️ John control over their own future not realizing they just opened the door for their competitor to come and suck
⏹️ ▶️ John all the value out of the platform that quote unquote, they made, right? And I think that a lot of people in
⏹️ ▶️ John a position of power at Apple think, not so much, you know, like that, you know, those other factors
⏹️ ▶️ John are there, but another thing in their mind is, if we ever open the store or even a crack and
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially in their mind, lose control of our platform, in other words, now anyone can accept payments
⏹️ ▶️ John from anything and now people can load apps from places other than our app store, we are giving up a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of this value we created because we created this platform, we sold billions of phones. We want to
⏹️ ▶️ John leverage that to our benefit. We don’t want to distribute billions of phones and let some other
⏹️ ▶️ John company make higher profit per iPhone sold than we make. Because again,
⏹️ ▶️ John those people who are running the company have seen that happen to companies in our industry who have not been
⏹️ ▶️ John careful about retaining control. And I’ve seen the success when people do retain control. The person who ends up having
⏹️ ▶️ John the control in the end makes most of the profit while everyone else kills themselves for smaller and
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller margins, right? And I have to think that is also one of the factors. And so this is a stew,
⏹️ ▶️ John pride, wise history informed strategic attitude
⏹️ ▶️ John of like we need to retain this control and we have to show growth and this is the area that’s growing because we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John the different part of the S curve and all our other product lines. And those all combine to
⏹️ ▶️ John make them downgrade the severity of the things that are happening
⏹️ ▶️ John negatively. I don’t think they are totally like oblivious to them. I think they do see the strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John tax, the cost. I think they don’t like the scamming games. They see all of that, but they feel like they
⏹️ ▶️ John can mitigate those. If we just have a better app store policies, if we try to keep the worst of the games out of there,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we pursue other avenues, if we make new products like the Vision Pro, like we just have to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John hold the line, mitigate the bad stuff and deal with any of the fallout. Oh, Epic’s not our thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not such a big deal. We’ll just have Unity be the 3D engine of choice for Vision Pro, what did you say
⏹️ ▶️ John about Unity? How are they doing? What did they do? What? Maybe we should talk to, oh, we can’t really talk to Epic
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey videos of the GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, like, there are lots of things that they did that sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John were strategically, like, in service of maintaining
⏹️ ▶️ John their control over the platform and the negatives that happened, like, that’s not that big a deal. They see the negative.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t see that it’s, you know, they know it’s there. Like, they would rather have Fortnite on their platform than not.
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re not willing to pay that price. So like we can weather that storm. After all, how big a
⏹️ ▶️ John deal could it be if we anger Epic? And it could be that 10 years from now, someone looks
⏹️ ▶️ John back and says, oh, in hindsight, them severing their relationship with Epic was an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ John strategic mistake because of X, Y, and Z, right? Or not, maybe it’ll be fine. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re out here seeing that they’re making mistakes and justifying them
⏹️ ▶️ John to themselves. And I don’t think it’s entirely clear who will end up being right. But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John once again, you know, since this is the same situation as when I wrote this originally, it’s the same situation I have again.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a hypercritical post about the art of the possible. We’re out here
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, you know, developers, users, everybody saying, we find certain aspects of this arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ John not to our liking, right? There is dissatisfaction. There’s dissatisfaction in Apple’s customer
⏹️ ▶️ John base. There’s dissatisfaction in Apple’s developer base. Even as we said before, even customers
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t know, you know, why they can’t buy Kindle books inside the Kindle app. I don’t even know if that’s still a deal. I
⏹️ ▶️ John just always use it as my go-to example that things change so much, maybe that’s possible now. But anyway, people who don’t realize that
⏹️ ▶️ John something that is needlessly frustrating and obtuse in an app is that way because of an Apple rule, they
⏹️ ▶️ John are dissatisfied with Apple devices, even though they don’t know why, right? And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the most difficult things to measure, right, because they don’t know why the app is more annoying than it has to be. They don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John why they have some scary payment screen or they don’t know what to do when they see a sign in post and they don’t know where they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to sign in because this is before they’re allowed to link out to the things, right? All those negatives are taking place
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s this game of chicken. There’s dissatisfaction, but Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks net net, we’re still gonna come out ahead and it’s better to retain that control. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve just been gliding along in this state of Apple assuming that
⏹️ ▶️ John the world will bend itself to the rules they make because they sell billions of phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And thus far the world has tried to bend itself to fit into that mold, but they’re annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. So it is sowing dissent and displeasure. Like it is making people grumbly
⏹️ ▶️ John and annoyed a little bit at a time. And Casey gets all upset about it because it’s like, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not death by a thousand cuts. It’s a, you know, it’s a thousand cuts and you’re still alive, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like we keep going, we keep using this platform. The good outweighs the bad, but there’s this
⏹️ ▶️ John constant low level annoyance about this stuff and does it build
⏹️ ▶️ John up? Is it cumulative or does it just essentially make an environment that is like not
⏹️ ▶️ John as friendly as it used to be? There’s the part in Jason Stelz’s like annual like Apple report card that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think will be coming out soon. And every year when I fill it out, there’s a section about like, how do you feel Apple’s developer relations
⏹️ ▶️ John are going? And for the past few years, I always look at what I wrote last year and I’m like, yep, it’s the same as that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what I wrote, I have like the snippet that basically says like that Apple and developers don’t feel good about each
⏹️ ▶️ John other and don’t trust each other. And it’s an adversarial relationship and there’s bad blood and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, it’s not healthy. And every year that’s the same. I’m not sure if it’s getting worse or better or staying
⏹️ ▶️ John the same, but it’s just not, it just doesn’t seem tenable to be long-term. There’s this all sort of, it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John culturally accepted that there’s this, there’s this upset
⏹️ ▶️ John between, in particular developers and Apple, that both parties are willing to tolerate,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the developers feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick on. And it’s not so much that they’re fleeing the platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s enough that they’re mildly annoyed. And that just doesn’t seem sustainable to me. And I feel like those chickens are eventually gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John come home to roost.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s exactly the thing. And I think part of the reason I’m so worked up about this, I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey desire to take payments outside the app store. Like selfishly for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not care, but it’s the principle of it. And it’s so striking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that here it is, the landscape I feel like from where I’m sitting has changed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fairly considerably in the last couple of years. I think legislation is coming from many different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey angles. I mean, that’s literally why we’re talking about this in the first place. It’s happening locally. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening in the EU. It’s happened in Japan. It’s happening in lots of different places.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I feel like the specter of more legislation is right around the corner. And yet Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is saying, eh, we don’t care. We’re too big to be pushed around, even by governments.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, thus far, they’ve been able to, in their opinion, comply with it in such a way that it is a moot point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because why would anyone, there’s no one who would want to do this. You end up paying the same amount and it’s more a hassle
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. And Apple’s like, see, don’t you just want to use our payment method? It’s like, yeah, you have essentially not allowed any form
⏹️ ▶️ John of competition because you get to control the terms of the competition and you set those
⏹️ ▶️ John terms such that there is no reason for anyone to use a third-party payment. It’s just like the Dutch dating app, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ John exact analogy you used the last time we talked about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and Gruber handled this really well in a post I think from earlier today. So Gruber writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple should have been looking for ways to lessen regulatory and legislative pressure over the past few years and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in today’s climate, that’s more true than ever. But instead their stance has seemingly been bring it on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Confrontational, not conciliatory, conceding not an inch. Rather than take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sure win with most of what they could want, Apple is seemingly hell-bent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on trying to keep everything. To win in chess, all you need is to capture your opponent’s king.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple seemingly wants to capture every last piece on the board, even while playing in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tournament where the referees, in this case regulators, are known to look askance, askance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give side eye, at blatant, at blatant poor sportsmanship, which in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case is greed. I think he absolutely nailed it. This whole piece is very good, but that one paragraph
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely nails. It’s so true. And it’s just, it leaves such a gross feeling in my mouth. So here it is, they’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this legislative and regulatory pressure from all different angles and they’re saying, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, we don’t care. Come at us. Catch me outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they’re literally like inflaming the fight. I mean, and honestly, like, if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was working at any department in Apple except AppReview
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I guess the app, whoever, whatever department is like App Store Revenue Collection, if I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally in any other part of the company, I would be pissed at that part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the company for this. Because here is Apple. on the eve of launching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive, hugely influential product. Now, I mean, yes, it’s gonna have limited market, et
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cetera, et cetera, but like the Vision Pro, it has been so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much effort over so many years, bringing it together,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the other parts of the company in so many ways, they have poured so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into this. And here we are on the eve of the launch of this revolutionary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product, And we’re talking about the App Store’s BS again. Yep. Again, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not saying that Apple shouldn’t make money. I’m not saying that they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, shouldn’t try to keep some of this money or most of this money. And like Casey, I also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a developer, have zero plans to try to use my own payment processing, even if they removed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of these restrictions. And even if I could literally just link out and not pay them anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not have any restrictions, I still wouldn’t do it just because that doesn’t make sense for my app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s almost, you know, it’s kind of like, you know, I will defend to the death, you’re right to say it. Like, I don’t want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. I don’t have any need for this in my current app with its current business model, but maybe someday I’ll need it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I certainly would want it to be allowed and available for all developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and so let me jump in right here because I think what you’re saying is important. You personally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who now at this point in your career have written against the Stripe API,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the thing that probably most of us would turn to order to collect money, you have done this. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have enough knowledge. You have already been down this road. If there was any indie app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer that I can think of that would be best equipped to start to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not compete with, but you know what I mean, like go on your own and take money on your own for overcast. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name me someone at this level, you know, I’m not talking about a huge corporation. I’m saying name me an indie that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better equipped to do this than Marco Arment. And you’re saying, and I agree with you for the record, you’re saying, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I would bother, at least not for overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing, like compete, Apple, just compete and you’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Well, and speaking of competition, though, like what Apple’s I mean, the thing that would make
⏹️ ▶️ John both of you switch if Apple actually did open up payments to third party payments in a non dickish
⏹️ ▶️ John way is that third parties would pop up and say, hey, we have an in-app purchase flow that looks just
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple’s. There’s an SDK for it. We have a website. We’ll run it all. And we just take less of a cut than Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s called competition, Because it’s not it’s not Apple’s making Marco right his own thing himself. Yeah, that’s onerous.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then on top of all these restrictions, but if it was actually open, it was actually a competitive marketplace and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t maintaining control over the linchpin of its like future, which by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John control over this platform is not just for this stuff, but for the stuff you haven’t even thought of, like maintaining control of a platform
⏹️ ▶️ John is like we don’t even know what’s going to be the big thing 20 years now. So we better maintain that control. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was open, third parties would pop up and they would be third party payment processors with an SDK
⏹️ ▶️ John for iOS apps that have an in-app purchase flow and features like they’d have to compete on features. All the features that you use
⏹️ ▶️ John in an app purchase like free trials and upgrade pricing, you know, like third parties
⏹️ ▶️ John would make something like that. And then you’d be like, huh, I don’t wanna do this. But insert name of third party here
⏹️ ▶️ John has a way for me to do it that is actually easier than Apple’s and a better experience for my users. And I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do anything. And they take a slightly smaller cut. That’s competition. And that’s what Apple doesn’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think we can see it already if you look at purchases on like in web browsers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using Apple Pay. You know what’s a better experience than Apple Pay for me most of the time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Shop Pay. And I bet Apple doesn’t like that, that that’s a thing that can exist, but like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s much harder to control in the web browser. But the reality is like Apple Pay is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less reliable and slower and generally a little bit worse for me on when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making web purchases than Shop Pay. and has
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer features, fewer features in their UI, for example. That’s another thing that shop pay has, you know, the it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a complicated form, but it has more buttons and knobs and multiple shipping addresses and this and that. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John makes that a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And so I think I think, John, you’re right. Like if this was allowed to just happen in app and, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, not kick out to a browser or whatever, like absolutely. They were somebody would come along
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make like the SDK drop in replacement that that could be big enough, theoretically, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually compete with the convenience and speed and everything about Apple’s payments.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it would be pretty easy to compete because you just have to beat 30%, right? It’s not, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s the 15% and so on, but the percentages are big, right? And the infrastructure that you need
⏹️ ▶️ John is not that much more than the infrastructure than let’s say Stripe already runs, right? There’s the SDA component or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I mean, that’s part of Apple’s point is like, hey, we had to pay to develop iOS. These people didn’t have to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John to develop iOS, they’re just mooching off our platform with their payment processing. That’s their view of it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the competition on percentage cut would be more than enough to fund a bunch of good competitors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. And also, to be clear, going back to what we’re doing, our plans with our apps, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer relations department is not this department. The developer relations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco team is not the team that decides the cut and is making these decisions. This is happening, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above their heads. The developer relations team cares
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about developers like three of us. The people making these decisions above the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relations team, I don’t even think developers like us even enter the conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are deciding this for people like you know Amazon, Netflix, Google, like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deciding this for big companies, Facebook, you know that’s what they’re focused on because that’s there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much more money there than there is from developers like us and so when they’re when they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deciding like you know should you know is is Casey’s Listless app you know gonna to have a different payment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sheet or whatever, that’s never into the conversation. They’re trying to figure out how can we get 30%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of HBO Max or whatever the hell it’s called now. That’s the scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re operating at. We don’t even register with this decision. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality of that too is all those big companies, they either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never adopted in-app purchase or adopted it a long time ago and then have since dropped it.
⏹️ ▶️ John or they’re powerful enough like Netflix to essentially wait it out and force Apple to allow them
⏹️ ▶️ John to do something that no other apps are allowed to do, which is to tell you to go sign up on their website or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s a bunch of companies that have just, opted out of the entire system,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re so big and important that Apple had to make concessions to them with weird provisions like the reader
⏹️ ▶️ John app clause and all that other stuff. And it’s still not great. It’s still worse than it could be. It’s still not satisfactory
⏹️ ▶️ John for users. It’s still not satisfactory for Netflix and Apple is probably annoyed too, so great. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, and this is, it’s so hard for me to try to balance my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feelings about what this company does and makes, because again, it’s a big company, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of different people, lots of different departments, and again, I have to imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people who work there either are really pissed, or I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think should be really pissed, that the people making these decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep dragging the company through so much mud, generating so much negativity in press,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the eyes of regulators and lawmakers, certainly among developers, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a pretty substantial strategy tax on the rest of the company. Yes, they are making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good money on this growth area of quote services slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taxes. They’re making good money with that. Great. Okay. Everyone’s stock options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be a little bit healthier. Okay. How do the effects of that negatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impact the rest of the company and its products and the other things they care about and are trying to do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the executives making these decisions are not fully considering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that long-term and short-term cost of that. So for instance, right now, they are launching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey platform. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what I was gonna say, Marco. You took the words right out of my mouth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re literally launching it in like two weeks. It’s coming out, and I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer story on that platform is pretty shaky. So what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really need is a lot of enthusiasm. What they need right at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this moment is for developers to be really happy with Apple, both small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and large. Now, Apple’s actions over the past decades,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially decade, have really alienated lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the big companies, to the point where the big companies are basically saying, F you, why should I develop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you? And it’s kind of hard to make an argument against that. And small developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already, like this is already a tough sell for us because the thing is pretty expensive and it’s gonna have a small market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the reasons we talked about. But if you have enthusiasm among that crowd,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the reason we all developed for the iPhone up front was a mix of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sheer numbers. Yes, there were a lot of iPhones when it first started. But also we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all just were so enthusiastic. We loved the platform, we loved the idea of developing for it. There was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge, enthusiastic, and highly qualified Mac developer community before that that kind of helped jumpstart the iPhone developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco community. It was a huge enthusiasm effort. That’s why,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even still to this day, Android apps, even though Android has massive volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the number of devices out there, Android apps tend not to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the level of awesome apps that iPhones get, and also like the early adopter apps. Like the early
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adopter apps usually are iPhone first and they come to Android later or not at all. And like, and there’s a reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. It’s not, you know, developers, yeah, we need numbers of an install base to make it work for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us, but enthusiasm for the platform and making things for platforms that we want to use ourselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really important. And that actually really drives the market. That drives what kind of apps come out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That drives where new cutting edge work is being done. It’s a huge important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factor. And there’s all sorts of factors like that, that Apple is just throwing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away and, you know, violating in many disgusting ways by their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actions in this one area. And again, yes, like that’s why this is a hard thing. When you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much money they make and how important that money is for their financial performance, you can see, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a reason why this is, you know, kind of a tense debate, but I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of the company is not rebelling against this. Like, you know, in back channel, just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why are these people at the top shitting all over everyone else’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work to save this one factor? And by the way, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gave a little on this rule, they wouldn’t lose all of their App Store money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They would just potentially make a little bit less. And even that I think is unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I think, in my personal opinion, is that the control part is the most important aspect of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John but that apparently is not Apple’s opinion because if it was, they can maintain that control
⏹️ ▶️ John by giving concessions, right? Because what you don’t want is to lose control. You don’t want to lose this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this linchpin, this lever that you have, especially as I said, because you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how important it’s gonna be in the future. Right now it’s about, you know, 85% of it is selling games. Who knows what it will be 20
⏹️ ▶️ John years from now? Or just like making it sort of accepted that, hey, we control all our
⏹️ ▶️ John app stores. So like they’ll control the Vision Pro app store or whatever, like, that control is what’s important. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not so much important that they get this exact percent and allow this to happen. So like giving concessions
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t give up control, like essentially, you know, doing things on your own terms that
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like they’re favorable to developers, but really you don’t give up a bit of your control. And one
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do that, if you make voluntary changes, you can always change them back later. But if a court tells you
⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to do X, you can’t just later and say, oh, we changed our mind, we’re not gonna do that anymore, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple really believed that control was the most important aspect and not the growth stuff, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John and not just like the money, right, if they, not the pride aspect, if they really believed,
⏹️ ▶️ John as I do, that the control over the app store is the most important thing to maintain, they should be bending over
⏹️ ▶️ John backwards to maintain that control by doing anything they can to prevent things like governments
⏹️ ▶️ John and lawsuits from making them do anything. And that’s where I think they’re really losing on this
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I don’t even think they would lose any money. In fact, I think they’d be making more money because of more developer enthusiasm
⏹️ ▶️ John in the medium to long term. They should be is like saying, what do we have to do to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially being told what to do with the app store? And they should give concessions like crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John They should give too many concessions, give till it hurts. But the whole time you’d be like, but we voluntarily
⏹️ ▶️ John gave that. And that means we can take it back, right? Especially with new platforms. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we keep talking about the iPhone is such a big platform. And some people are like giving scare stories, Like they can do the same thing on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac. It’s like, no, they can’t, because there just aren’t enough Macs, right? They can do it on the iPhone because the upside
⏹️ ▶️ John is big enough that developers aren’t fleeing, right? Billions of iPhone users, they spend a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s irresistible, not true on the Mac. So I think they literally can’t do what they
⏹️ ▶️ John did on the iPhone, on the Mac and say, okay, well, you can’t buy a Mac app unless it’s through the Mac App Store, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they would destroy their platform. They don’t have that leverage. They don’t have that power. Vision Pro has no users
⏹️ ▶️ John yet because it hasn’t shipped. When you have a brand new platform, I don’t think you can start with
⏹️ ▶️ John the set of rules that’s on the iOS app store. You’ve sold zero of them, right? Wait
⏹️ ▶️ John until you get a few billion, then turn the screws. Look at Amazon, you give it all away in the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you turn the knobs and start making the money after 20 or 30 years, right? I mean, maybe don’t do it like Amazon did.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, like that type of view, but instead they launch everything with default with the same restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ John as iOS. Like maintain the control of the Vision OS app store. Make sure everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in there is because you decided and not because somebody made you, but start off with better terms
⏹️ ▶️ John than the platform that has a billion users, right? But they don’t do that. They’re just like, VisionOS, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John like the iOS app store. Everybody knows and loves it. It’s great. It’s like, yeah, but you haven’t sold a billion of them yet or 10
⏹️ ▶️ John billion, I don’t even know how many iPhones. So like, you can’t start from that, right? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, we talk about game consoles all the time, but like, people like don’t understand what the difference is like
⏹️ ▶️ John game consoles do exactly the same thing. The difference, as I said, in the art of the possible thing is like
⏹️ ▶️ John game consoles, the people who run those and the people who buy them, they figured out
⏹️ ▶️ John an arrangement between the consoles, the developers and the customers, such that if you were
⏹️ ▶️ John asked the average console user, like what their opinion is of their console maker or whatever, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they accept the way it works. They accept the way, and maybe Apple’s like, we just got to hold out for this generation to die or I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just accept that as app stores work. But like, developers, console developers
⏹️ ▶️ John and console makers, are incredibly contentious acrimonies with each other and often sue each other and do terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John things or whatever, but users are out there going like, oh, I wish that game was available for my platform. Oh, well, this is cross-platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I like this. And people buy two consoles sometimes. And it’s like gamers in general don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like there’s so little competition in the game console market or that like one particular console owner
⏹️ ▶️ John is keeping, you know, is doing anything unjust as what Apple’s doing. But they are, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing exactly the same thing. And it’s Apple must be looking at that and saying, but why are their customers and developers
⏹️ ▶️ John able to tolerate this in a way that ours aren’t? Why does it? Why does the ecosystem of game consoles
⏹️ ▶️ John look overall happier than our ecosystem? And it’s not fair. I feel for Apple. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not fair. It’s exactly the same thing. Game console developers are worse, right? But you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, okay, Apple, do you want if you want it to be like the consoles, figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out a way to make it like that. And they’ve been trying, but they’ve been failing. Is it because Apple’s platforms are based on like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John came from the PC market where the culture was different? Maybe. Is it because phones are less like game
⏹️ ▶️ John consoles than Apple likes to think they are? Maybe, but whatever the reason, Apple hasn’t been able to turn it around and
⏹️ ▶️ John they just feel like if we just keep doing this, eventually everyone will be convinced and eventually our customers and
⏹️ ▶️ John our developers and everybody will have the type of harmony that we have in the game console market.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it seems like that’s just never gonna happen. So I just, I wish they would
⏹️ ▶️ John try something different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. It’s just, you know, Marco, you had said this a few minutes ago, but I just want to reiterate what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said. You know, here it is. Apple is in a position that they could really use developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and probably not the Indies, although obviously I’m going to think about Indies as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that’s where we are, but they need developers to be enthusiastic about the Vision Pro. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I got to tell you, it’s been super easy for me to build a version of call sheet for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Vision Pro because I definitely got a dev kit just like you did, right, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t hear of any, like, I know I heard like that they went out to like big companies. I didn’t hear of any indie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers getting one.
⏹️ ▶️ John same. And I mean, to be fair, that’s probably mostly a wise allocation of limited resources.
⏹️ ▶️ John they should have given one of the dev kits to Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes, there’s that as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s, I don’t know, it, it, it still strikes me that, uh, and maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess I’m probably, if I’m trying to take the emotion out of it and trying to be more logical now, I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overselling the influence of Indies. I’m not just talking about me. Cause I mean, I’m whatever I have little to no influence, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Indies broadly. I feel like the way I reflect on the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iOS app store, particularly early on was that it was the Indies that really bootstrapped it and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the people like, I think it was Marco that said it, but one of you said, you know, it was the Mac developers that were enthusiastic about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then already knew Objective-C. Yep. That bootstrapped the App Store way back in 2008
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever it was. And I feel like there’s not a lot of that for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro. So Apple is saying, well, you can’t have a dev kit. And whether or not that’s reasonable, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not really saying it’s unreasonable, but it’s a fact that it makes it more challenging for someone like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or me or Underscore to build these apps. So you can’t have a dev kit. kit, you can at considerable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expense go to a lab once or twice, which is good. That is good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will say that my lab experience was very good. And I’m probably not even supposed to say that. But here we are. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s it. You’re out of the program.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, I’m out of the program now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But like, so that was good. But you can’t have a dev kit, you can go at considerable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expense and oftentimes considerable distance to a lab. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re gonna get your radars filed and fixed immediately. Oh, never mind, we talk about radar. And don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worry, the app store is your friend, right? Because look at all the nice things we do for you. Like, this is just in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s such an unbelievable amount of hubris to be thumbing your nose at all of these third party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers that you really need right now. And then also the regulators, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also, you know, all the legislators, like, it’s just, I cannot believe that they’re thumbing their nose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all of these people. So there was a really good, very short post by Tyler Hall, called modern day Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tyler concluded it, and yet as I move on to reading, this was about two posts from Gruber back to back,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so, and yet as I move on to reading John’s post about the new App Store guidelines, all I can think of is how modern day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is one giant corporate contradiction. The same company that builds the technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to watch a movie in front of a Tatooine sunset is the same company removing all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the joy and fun out of the process of building that sunset. Modern day Apple is its own binary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey star, one fueled by creativity and another fueled by arrogance.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s another one person. Everyone likes to attach those three things I listed. Everyone latches onto one of them. Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to mostly attach to the greed angle, the addiction. This is attaching to the pride angle, arrogance, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, what do you see? What’s the Rorschach test of Apple? You see them making decisions that you
⏹️ ▶️ John think are not good for you personally, not cover the developer community. And many people
⏹️ ▶️ John think they’re not good for the future of Apple. If you care about the platform, they should be making smarter moves. Why are they doing that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? And you personify the company and you say it’s because they’re greedy, it’s because they’re arrogant, it’s because they have this need
⏹️ ▶️ John for control. Right? I think it’s all three of them, but depending on which one annoys you more, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one you will listen to. This one, this person is clearly more annoyed by the pride slash arrogance angle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And then finally, uh, Bretton Simmons writes just like the sixth figure, a finger,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me, and an AI rendered hand Apple’s policies for distributing apps in the U S that provide an external purchase link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are startlingly, startlingly graceless and jarring, but not surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A reminder that Apple is not a real person and not worthy of your love.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, again, like, you know, and I think the, you know, the indie developer angle that you were talking about a second ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is particularly relevant here because like, when you’re looking at, you know, what Division Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heading into here with the market, the big companies, I think are gonna be the hardest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to convince to develop for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t even get them to make an iPad app. I’ve had about $3,500. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a way bigger install base has been around for a very long time and way less custom work compared to your iPhone app. Well, they’re not $3,500
⏹️ ▶️ John to wait for the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But yeah, you know, you look at again, that’s a great market. You look at that market, for example, the big companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to instantly uncheck that box that says, make my app available on vision pro and they’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it because it’s going to be not worth it because they don’t want to have something custom just for this with a small install base or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know who doesn’t care about all that stuff? Indie enthusiast developers. Like, we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ones, like, we are the ones that Apple needs to make apps for this platform. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco granted, yes, it would be more impactful to them if they could get somebody like Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work with them because the Vision Pro, I think, is going to definitely start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out as mostly an entertainment device, like, you know, movie watching, an experience-based device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it’s very wise, we’re kind of seeing Apple’s initial PR at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch for Vision Pro is really focusing on entertainment. I think that is very wise because the productivity story is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not gonna be there for a while, if ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even Apple, it’s not like Apple even ported all of its apps. So they have Keynote and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Freehand, I believe, or no, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the? Freeform. Freeform, yeah. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be really adopted, like you’re not gonna see Google porting over Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Docs and Google Sheets to it, that’s not gonna happen. All the big companies are going to…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, imagine… The iPad, again, a great example. All the, you know, hoopla around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to get big companies to try to port their apps to the iPad, for God’s sake, take away the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire install base. How hard is that argument now? Like, it’s indies who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to be the only ones making apps for this for a while. And indies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are willing to put in more work than the numbers justify.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they have a… The upside to them is potentially, It’s not large upside for Netflix. This
⏹️ ▶️ John means it’s a rounding error to Netflix, but to an indie developer or a small developer group, that
⏹️ ▶️ John number that Netflix doesn’t care about is life-changing to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like if your entire install base is 500 people and you’re trying to get it to be 1,000 people, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this could be your path there. Because you know people, again, people are gonna buy these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The first year allocation will definitely be sold out, but there will come a time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Apple has to try a little bit to get people to buy this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe that time isn’t this year because of just shortages, but like there will come a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and I think it will be pretty soon after these shortages get a little bit lifted. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it’s kind of a hard sell to a lot of people. So there will be a time when Apple has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually attempt to get sales. And at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to want a software ecosystem to have been built to try to give people more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco justifications to buy it. no big company is going to be there. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might as well try to embrace the enthusiast developer community that is there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to build a library of good software. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone else in the company, besides the very small handful of people deciding this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, app store tax BS, everyone else in the company probably wants this kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing too, because it benefits them. Like, obviously, of course, Developer Relations wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indie developers to have, you know, a healthy relationship with the company and to be building great software for their platforms. The hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makers at Apple who have made these great platforms, they want great software to take advantage of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hardware. They want people to be buying the hardware. Like, they want this too. The software organization,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, do you think Craig Federighi really wants to be making the software to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dumb link scare box? Like, do you think, like, is that a good use of his time?
⏹️ ▶️ John He was also the one who said that they shouldn’t port iMessage to Android because it might be
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer be a motivating factor for iPhone sales. So I think when you reach that level of the corporate hierarchy, you’re kind of thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, maybe that was a bad example, but like there’s all these people putting all this work into making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is almost entirely really great stuff. Like that’s why we’re all here. We love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this company’s product so much. They’re so good. Most of the time. Like, the hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate’s pretty damn high, and then you have this one tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asterisk of the company doing all of this damage. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it worth it? Is it worth it for the entire rest of the company’s efforts to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly have crap rained down upon them from legislators and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco press and users and developers, for whatever tiny amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re keeping by doing things exactly the way you’re doing them. Like, that’s, again, like, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not great long-term thinking. And it really does a disservice to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the people in the company who are doing really great work on stuff that’s really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, couldn’t agree more.
⏹️ ▶️ John You mentioned the leveraging the Mac developers to bootstrap the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John app ecosystem. I know people probably have already written in this feedback, so I’ll just add it in now, and you can hear it later when
⏹️ ▶️ John you unpause the show. Obviously, Apple is leveraging, trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John leverage, its entire developer user base of, you know, the entire developer community
⏹️ ▶️ John who make apps for iOS and the iPad, and to a lesser extent, the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John to bootstrap the Vision Pro, because it uses similar APIs, uses SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ John uses the same language. Like we’ve got this ready-made developer base of literally millions of developers
⏹️ ▶️ John who already have apps, and we’ve made it pretty easy to port them over as easy as possible. And they already know the language, they’re familiar
⏹️ ▶️ John with the tools, they’re familiar with the platform, right? So they should have a massive advantage over trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to bootstrap the iOS app store. But that’s not how it feels to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John even again, even big companies are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, not into it. Like, you know, Netflix not making an app. They can use the web browser, it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And why not? Like, what’s changed? What’s different now is there was huge enthusiasm
⏹️ ▶️ John for the iPhone among developers, because it was a platform they’d never been able to develop for, they were excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. And the iPhone in the beginning, I mean, first didn’t have an app store at all, but once it did have an app
⏹️ ▶️ John store, the app store did not start off having a reputation for being developer
⏹️ ▶️ John unfriendly. It was restrictive, but in the beginning, those restrictions were like, well, these are the limitations, it’s a very young platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a very new API. So people were just excited to have their apps on the platform, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that changed over time. that it’s the same app store it’s ever been,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the attitude about it changed. And again, that may seem unfair to Apple. It’s like, everyone’s so excited about it, the app store in the beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the app store now is not that different than it was. So what changed? And it’s like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John relationships evolve, right? You have to constantly maintain them and see, you know, it’s not just all
⏹️ ▶️ John about the exertion of power, right? And maybe after many years
⏹️ ▶️ John and the iPhone getting bigger and bigger, maybe Apple thinks it’s unfair
⏹️ ▶️ John that developers feel more entitled to more value out of that platform, just as Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks it’s unfair. They say, Apple thinks we made the platform. You should be grateful we’re allowing you
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. And developers are saying, well, you should be grateful we make apps to your platform. And obviously the truth is somewhere in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John and where that balance is maybe unsatisfactory to everybody involved, but you have to find a meeting place. You have to find
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere in the middle where you get a win-win and everybody’s happy. And Apple is getting
⏹️ ▶️ John farther and farther away from that. And on Vision Pro, like despite so many advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t have with the phone, these, you know, the unity of their APIs and their languages
⏹️ ▶️ John and their tools is so much better now than it was then. Like the developer story for Vision Pro, like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John people aren’t not making things, Vision aren’t, you know, saying, I’m not gonna make that for Vision Pro because it’s a weird new language
⏹️ ▶️ John or they can’t figure out the API or just they don’t have the skills or, oh, that’s all, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John ready, waiting for them. But what’s, you know, the reason they’re not doing it is A, Apple hasn’t sold a lot of them, which
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, fine, that’s a chicken egg thing, Apple has to deal with that. And B, they’re like, we’ve been on Apple’s other
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms, we know what it’s like. And maybe we have a contentious relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple and we just feel like we have to be on iOS because they sold billions of them, but they haven’t sold billions
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Vision Pro. And I mean, this is the gets to the point where, like Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John making deals with music companies and everything, at a certain point, the bigger the company is, the more they think
⏹️ ▶️ John is, Do we want to give Apple another platform like iOS? Do we want to help
⏹️ ▶️ John them? Do we want to help Apple make another platform that would give them as much power
⏹️ ▶️ John as they have for the iPhone platform? Like, no, because we see what they do with that power and we don’t like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So why would I help you, Apple, get another one over on us in a new platform?
⏹️ ▶️ John We already have to deal with you with the iPhone. Like, we can’t, we have to do it. It’s just, we have to be on the iPhone. You
⏹️ ▶️ John won that one, you sold billions of them, fine. But I’m not really enthusiastic about helping you do that
⏹️ ▶️ John again, especially if there’s some other competitor or some other alternative that I think would be better.
⏹️ ▶️ John And whether, who’s right, who’s wrong, will Apple be successful, will the company be successful? That’s, like when I look at Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John not having an app at launch, like honestly, if you had asked me when the Vision Pro was introduced, do you think there’s a possibility
⏹️ ▶️ John there won’t be a Netflix app for that at launch? I would say, no, Apple would never let that happen. They have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has let it happen. And I put this at Apple because like, look, Apple, if you can’t convince Netflix to make an app
⏹️ ▶️ John for Vision Pro, like what hope is there for you? Like, throw money at them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I’m not saying you have to give Casey and Marco dev kits, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John talk to Netflix and get them to, it’s just a video player. It’s so easy for them to port. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John already got it. If you can’t get Netflix to do it, man, like what must be going wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John in these, you know, in the big back rooms between these corporate, it’s not like Netflix’s relationship with Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, but Netflix is like, eh, wake me up when you sell a few hundred million.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like ultimately what this runs the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high risk of is this brand new platform that’s super, you know, has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive potential for coolness and amazing new things. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software ecosystem is probably going to end up being like the Apple TV, which is not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t do this platform justice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t. done such amazing work, it can do some really cool stuff. And because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all of this that they’ve done over the years with these terrible developer relations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the relationship with big companies especially, as John was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, the big companies don’t want to enable Apple to push them around even more on a new platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they’re like, F it, I’m out. And the small developers, we’ve just been squeezed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many times. There’s a lot of us who are also having a similar attitude, the result is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, it’s very risky. It runs the risk of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ending up just like the Apple TV, which the Apple TV is a great product. I use mine almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day. I love mine. Yeah, but it’s hardly a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software success story. Nope, it sure isn’t. And if that’s all this ends up being,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to be a tough sell for such a high-end product and it certainly does not do justice to its capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV has a Netflix app though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true, John. The good news though is, Marco, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, and I don’t know if you’re right, but I think there’s definitely a universe in which you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. But if you’re right, and the third-party software ecosystem is lacking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the good news is I’m sure Apple will come back to all of us with hat in hand, humble,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and with incredible humility and say, hey, what can we do to make this experience better for you? Surely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what Apple will do. There’s no question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there’s not a chance of that. But I just, I hope that, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing is, like, as much as all these people writing on these blog posts are correct that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we shouldn’t care about this corporation, the fact is I do care about this corporation. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want them to succeed. I’m rooting for them. I like, I want, you know, the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we complain about when they do stuff that we think is bad or harmful to them is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we like this company and we like their products and we care and we, you know, it hurts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see some of you care about making mistakes or failing or being harmful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to itself. And that’s how a lot of this stuff looks, that if they would just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give a little on some of these things, you could avoid 90% of these problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they won’t even give a little. And it’s much to their detriment whether they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it or not. And it’s a shame because it really does do a lot of harm to them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think they’d be better off without.
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#askatp: iOS safety for seniors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so let’s try to turn that frown upside down. Let’s do some Ask ATP. And Seppy Rutten writes, my parents are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using iPads and iPhones. I do struggle sometimes to make their devices as easy to use and safe as in prevent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phishing as I possibly can. How would you set up a device for elderly people so that it is safe for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them to use it? I’m not talking about the standard accessibility features. I need them to use the devices in the most simple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or easy ways and prevent them from getting scammed. I don’t have a good answer for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, Marco, you’ve done this from time to time, and John, you just recently mentioned talking to your mom about voiceover.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So maybe let’s start with Marco and end with John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have a lot here because what I found over the years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like trying to set up iPads for my grandparents, it’s been a while, they’re no longer with us, but earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the iPads life, tried it for a while, and it was always a bit of a struggle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what happened is that they just got more complicated over time. And I would set it up, it would work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, then some weird problem would happen, and I didn’t live nearby, so it was a little hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco troubleshoot. It was complicated. I’m hardly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an expert in this area, but I found that there really weren’t many good options. Whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re looking at different software toggles or restrictions on the iPad itself to different products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entirely. As my grandfather got dementia, we tried to get him a phone that was simpler,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that he could just use to call the handful of us. And there have been a couple of these products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years that are targeted at elderly people who need limited controls and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to help use things. And even, I mean, this was only, I think like five or six years ago, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that long ago. And even then there was almost nothing on the market left. So it seems like a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco underserved market. The products that are there tend to be not good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of ways. I don’t really have a great answer for this. I mean, you could do some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the screen time restrictions. Some of that stuff could help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit. But ultimately, if you’re worried about elderly people trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep them from being scammed, you’re gonna have to be a lot more vigilant than software settings on iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iPhones because there are so many scams targeting elderly people, it’s disgusting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they come in through every possible venue, the mail, phone calls, they come in through everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s gonna take more vigilance than any software setting you can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my advice is to first try to make a clear-eyed call as to whether
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a thing that everyone involved is up for. Does
⏹️ ▶️ John the person actually want this or do you just wish that they wanted it?
⏹️ ▶️ John capable? Is it gonna be successful? Because at a certain point, it’s not. Whether the person’s, you know, the older person’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just not into technology or they’re not as with it as they used to be or they just don’t, they
⏹️ ▶️ John could do it, but they just don’t want to. You won’t be successful if you don’t meet that minimum
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. If you think you’ve met that minimum bar, everyone involved is willing and able to do it. You’re still worried
⏹️ ▶️ John about them being scanned, worry about the complexity. My best advice of what to do with a device is to just
⏹️ ▶️ John remove everything. Like I kind of wish you could just leave like three icons on the home screen of an iPad and
⏹️ ▶️ John make them huge. Unfortunately you can’t, but you can get rid of everything else. Like pare it down to almost nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ John rehearse with them. The most important thing that you can do, again, if you have a person who’s willing and able to do this, is
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure that you have some way to help them, or somebody has some way to help them,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So, because I feel like anybody who’s dealing with a weird technology thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they know that there’s someone who they are very comfortable with, who they can contact whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John they have a problem, who will help them out of it, it removes a huge amount of stress, right? Because they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John something’s not working, or it’s broken, or I can’t figure it out, I’ll just call Timmy tomorrow and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get it sorted out. And you need to have some way, I mean, and I would say a telephone call is not probably going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be that, because if you ever tried to coach someone through fixing a problem on their iPad when you can’t see the screen and you’re doing it over a telephone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not good, right? So do you live close to them? Can you go over there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they willing and able to do some kind of FaceTime or screen sharing thing? This is one of the legs
⏹️ ▶️ John up that the Mac has is, if you have a relative, for example, somehow they have a Mac and they
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna use it, and that they are having problems. Being able to use screen sharing through iMessage is a godsend.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s a great equivalent for that for iPad. I know from helping my own parents with their iPad, and very often they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John have them holding their phone and doing FaceTime to the iPad. And let me tell you, that does not work well. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Goodness. Been there, done that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They live many states away from me, so I can’t be there in person, but I would say making things safe for them is essentially the most
⏹️ ▶️ John important thing is make sure they know someone they can contact. And I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John the secondary thing is, and make sure they know when they should. So you have to basically rehearse with them. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John see an email and you think it’s weird, call me. If you, you know, or, you know, call me and I’ll come over.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you, something’s broken, call me and I’ll come over. If you can’t figure out how to do something, call me and I’ll come over. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John this is sounding like a lot of work to you, yeah, but this is the most important thing. Having a
⏹️ ▶️ John human being who they trust, accessible to them at all times, so that if they have any question, any
⏹️ ▶️ John doubt, any frustration, they can call on you and you can come help them. And that is really the only
⏹️ ▶️ John way to make this work. Because if you think this is a software setting that’s gonna prevent phishing, I’m sure IT departments all over the world would love
⏹️ ▶️ John to know what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I was thinking about it when I think it was Marco said, you know, you can’t have, or one of you said, I can’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey huge phone icon on the home screen. Maybe it was John, I’m sorry, John. But anyways, I was thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wait a second, that is possible now. What the hell was that called? And thank you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Abilops20 in the chat who pointed out it’s assistive, what is it, assistive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access, I believe that’s called, something along those lines. And so there is a mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can choose to turn on. I think it’s already out where you can do a lot of this stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just remove other apps and make the home screen basically like a table view of different
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s no longer a springboard, and it is a separate thing. So it’s kind of like at ease for the old Mac users. I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John like when a springboard only has three icons that you should be able to just like make them bigger, but you can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh man, this would have been great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, this would be super helpful. So check that out.
#askatp: Apps that stop audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Wilson Martinez writes, could you explain why some apps that have no audio or video stop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a playing podcast or music when opened? For example, the Levi’s Denim Shop app, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not the right name, but we’ll put a link in the show notes. I don’t know, other than maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, can’t you ask it to be ducked?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, okay, so here’s the reason. So the way iOS apps work with audio, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell the audio framework, like, all right, here’s the kind of audio I’m gonna play. and you can say, all right, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing long form talk, or I’m playing brief sounds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I’m playing sound for a video. Like you can give it, like there’s a few different categories,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and each of those categories has different behavior, and you can set certain flags. You can say, for instance, like what you were just about to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch on, Casey, you can say like, hey, if some other app plays a sound while I’m playing my music,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can duck my music down, like reduce the volume, let that sound play over it, and then bring my volume back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. That’s what ducking is. Or you can say like in the case of a podcast app, you don’t want to be ducked because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want like, you know, your ways direction to be like turn left ahead, talking over a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want the podcast to pause, let it say turn left ahead, then resume the podcast. There’s all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different options you set, but the reason why certain apps will stop background audio dead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their tracks is if they just use these APIs wrong. So when you are about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play audio, you can set all those flags on the audio session whenever you want. You can say, all right, the types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of audio I play are this, this, and this. Here’s how I wanna be treated. But then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you are about to play audio, you have to activate the session. Activating the session can occasionally block
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main thread. It can occasionally fail in weird ways, depending on conditions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It can occasionally cause weird little snags. So some lazily written apps and frameworks, and especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad frameworks, some of them will, upon launch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just activate the session, which the system doesn’t know yet that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not playing audio. All the system knows is you activated the session and therefore anything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was playing audio that said don’t duck me or don’t mix me with other apps, those all get paused.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The answer to the question is why certain apps that don’t appear to be playing audio will stop other playing audio in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their tracks is they programmed their audio session calls wrong and they’re activating their session before they’re actually needing to
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re telling me the Levi’s app isn’t well-written? That’s shocking.
#askatp: HomePod as mesh router
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally Saif Khan writes, Apple is so close to making a HomePod mini Wi-Fi router. Why don’t they just make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomePod mini into a mesh router network? I mean, I get you, but they’re just out of the router game, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is the problem with the router business and the idea of combining it with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either HomePods or Apple TVs. Like this is always what people are saying. Why don’t they turn the Apple TV into a router
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or turn the HomePods into meshes? Like there’s two big problems with this. Number one is that to make good routers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days, it’s kind of a bigger play now. Like, to make good mesh routers, you need the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meshing technology, that’s a whole thing. Routers now have all these services you can add on, like for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad blocking and stuff, and it’s kind of a big deal. So like, they would, to be competitive in that market, they would have to like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, spin up a decent amount of like a business unit to really do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not saying they can’t or shouldn’t, but it would be kind of a big deal to do anything that would matter in the market. And then the second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big problem is, where people place HomePods or Apple TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often is not where you would place a router. Now, the idea of a mesh network is better than the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideas that people would come up with of like turn your Apple TV into a router because like at least then you can kind of place them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere and they can kind of act as a big network of repeaters. But like most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not be so lucky that the ideal placement of their WiFi access points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens to be where they would also want a HomePod. So finally, the HomePods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are already expensive enough compared to their peers and adding more hardware into them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple to keep their same margins, and we know they’re gonna do that, to add more hardware into it to do another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco function would probably bring that cost up even further and that would not be good for that market.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it would be way bigger. Like people don’t realize that like, oh, why don’t you just make it a router? Like you’ve already got a little
⏹️ ▶️ John computer in there. That’s enough, right? Like, no, you need, first of all, you need all the analog electronics, antenna
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff or whatever, but then the whole rest of the thing, like if you look at the size of like an era router and they’re among the smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that are good mesh things, they’re already bigger than a HomePod mini. And there’s no HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. There’s no speaker. And you would think like most of the HomePod mini is taken up with the speaker and it is, but now
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to take, you’ve got the speaker and the magnets and everything, and now you need wifi antennas and all the other
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. It would make it bigger and more expensive. I think Apple should make a mesh router
⏹️ ▶️ John system, period. No need to combine it with your Apple TV or your HomePod or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they wanted to incorporate it into the big HomePod, they could, but honestly that’s really kind of like a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Turducken situation where it’s like, but like, why are you making, like what if someone just wants a big
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod? Are you making them pay for, in space and cost, the wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John router, right? Like you have to, it narrows your market. So you now need someone, now you need someone who’s willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay the extra money and the extra size for this thing that they might not want. So it seems like it’s a good idea, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like you’re gonna, oh, we just get it for free and all these HomePod minis that we sell. Like how many HomePod minis do you think people are buying
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway? Like they’re not scattering them throughout their house. And if they were, it’s probably because they’re small and cute and they wouldn’t be if they had a wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John router in there. So it’s sad that Apple no longer makes wifi routers for youngsters who don’t remember Apple used
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. And they were pretty good, but that was way before the mesh network time. It was a simpler time,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And they did combine, you know, the time capsule thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And if there were a whole hard drive in
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Yeah, exactly, right? But, and even that I think was probably not a great
⏹️ ▶️ John selling product for the reason that I just stated, because what if you didn’t want both of those things, but they sold one without it. They sold a separate one as well. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it is harder now. I think it’s something Apple should do, especially with their focus on security. I think ceding that entire
⏹️ ▶️ John market to companies like Euro was foolish, especially now that they’ve been purchased by Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ John But instead Apple’s trying to make a car. Yay. Are they still doing that? I can’t imagine. I mean, it’s not dead.
⏹️ ▶️ John Believe me, if they cancel Project Titan and lay off all those people, we’ll hear about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, but didn’t they cancel it like every two months? Like it just, it seemed like they were always reorganizing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John changing. Kind of like the Vision Pro project. Like, oh, Apple’s making AR glasses, right? It was
⏹️ ▶️ John like the rumor, you know, eight years ago or whatever. And if they’re still making them, this is not glasses. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, what does the product actually become? What is the original idea? Hey, we should do something with AR, VR, XR, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John What actually ships this? The car, Project Titan, who knows what it’s been in
⏹️ ▶️ John the past, but I don’t think it’s currently dead. Because again, when you lay off that many people,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of hard not to notice. But anyway, they’ve invested a lot of time and money in that. And in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Notion and Squarespace. And thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. and we’ll talk
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John 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-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, accidental, tech podcast
Neutral: Are SUVs “trucks”?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So last week, I think it was, I don’t know when it was, it was sometime, we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about trucks. So it was about your Rivian, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we were talking about trucks. And you had said, oh, I think you at some point had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made mention that your Rivian is a truck. And I did not blink an eye. Now, to be clear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your Rivian is not the R1T, which has a bed like a pickup truck. Yours is the R1S.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is an SUV. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, it is an SUV. And my local friend Brad, who is born and raised in Virginia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think Erin would have said the same thing if she listened to the program, but nonetheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he was getting all worked up about how wrong John was. I think it was John was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, you know, or one of you was saying, oh, if you put gas in Marco’s truck, it’s going to stink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up the truck. And Brad drives a pickup truck and was like, what are you talking about? You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely will not stink up the truck If you put gas in the bed and we were going back and forth via text message
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this for a minute and I’ll say, why are you so worried about this? Right? And then it occurred to me, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brad heard truck and he heard pickup truck. Now, maybe it was me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said it, maybe it was Marco, but one, I thought it was Marco that said it and I didn’t blink an eye because to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a truck is anything that rides higher than a sedan, right? It’s anything that rides
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up in the sky, you know, and I understand that Strictly speaking, there’s a difference between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pickup truck and Aaron’s, you know, Volvo SUV. I get that. But colloquially,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just think of a truck as anything that’s taller than my Volkswagen Golf.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so is an El Camino not a truck?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s a very good question that I was not prepared for. But I don’t think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actually I think it’s just a truck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Neither a Subaru
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brat. A fair, deep cut and I’m here for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also bet the El Camino is definitely not a car though. Like what? I mean, no one, no one ever knows what it is. It’s an ugly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Isn’t it a Ute? Isn’t that what the Aussies call it? But anyways, but yeah, it got me thinking, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was curious what you’re, what in, you know, channel Robot or Not here. I was wondering, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a truck anyway? And I’d like to start with Marco and then John as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the official, you know, Robot or Not historian slash participant slash host, you can give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us the actual answer. But Marco, So do you agree with me that a truck is just anything tall, or where do you sit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I agree with is different from how I use it, and I’ll tell you why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Okay, okay, fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am with the truck purists that SUVs are not trucks. In my opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the modern SUV, including the R1S that I drive, that is an SUV, that is a different thing. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, like, oh, I got a truck, I think most people would reasonably assume that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you got a pickup truck. The problem is, I don’t know how universal this is across the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco country, but where I live, first of all, where I live on the beach, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drives either SUVs or trucks, because you have to, because regular cars can’t make it out here. So it’s like it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the vehicle that everyone has, is one of these two things. But also, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here calls them both trucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so I’m glad you said that, because my theory, which I don’t have anything but and it’s an anecdote to prove.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My theory is that it’s a Northeastern thing. And I’m sure John is bursting, so I’ll give you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a chance here in a second, John. But my theory is that it’s a Northeastern thing, that anything that rides
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tall is a truck. Now, I’ve already gotten some feedback on Mastodon because I put a poll up on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asking this very question. And some people said, you know, maybe not so much like Zach Katz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said that they’re from Vermont and they think it’s exclusively a pickup. But then again, I mean, Vermont
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is basically Canada, so who knows? But, um, but, and, and, and, and so maybe my theory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is wrong, but I feel like anyone that I talked to around here vehemently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, a truck has a bed or, you know, there’s semi trucks and things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, you know, amongst civilian, regular people, cars, it, a truck has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bed. And SUV is not a truck. And I get that like from the strictest definition that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is accurate, but I use truck colloquially to mean anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s tall. Yeah, and the problem is, like, I agree with those people, but no one around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me does. And so, like, you know, when, like, and everyone here, everyone here is always talking about each other’s vehicles. It’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news when someone on the beach gets a new vehicle, and everyone wants to talk about it, and they will constantly, hey, how’s the new truck?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s, that’s how they refer to it. So, like, there’s only so many times that I can try to steer it, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, the, yeah, the Rivian, it’s great. Yeah, it’s a, it’s a great new SUV. Like, you know, there’s only so hard you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can steer that conversation when everyone around you is using this word this one way, it’s out of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control, really. So, I don’t even remember if I actually said that because I don’t think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that by default, but if I did, that’s why. Because I’ve had to start talking that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so people around here, like, so like they know, like, I fit in with the language here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the language that people speak here. They call them all trucks. And I disagree with it, too. I think it’s wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that I’ve had to start speaking that way around here because everyone does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So John, is it a truck or is it not?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So as with a lot of these things, a lot of these robot or not style things, context really matters.
⏹️ ▶️ John The context of discussing a neighbor’s purchase is very different from the context of if I give
⏹️ ▶️ John you a card sorting thing, like here’s a bunch of vehicles, sort them and decide what headings you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John For example, in a car magazine, a car and driver, they might divide things up into
⏹️ ▶️ John cars, trucks, and SUVs, like sections of like a review or talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And the SUVs are going to go SUVs and the trucks are going to go under trucks, right? So you may look at that
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, well, you know, that’s problem solved. Like we have our answer, the trucks are under trucks and the SUVs are not
⏹️ ▶️ John under there. They’re under the SUV section. But the context of a car magazine is very different from the context
⏹️ ▶️ John of just talking about things. So that’s what you’re talking about colloquially, which I don’t think is the correct use of that term, but maybe it is. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, the context Marco’s talking about where neighbors are talking about their cars, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think a lot of the truck stuff comes out there. I was trying to think of like, Oh, is this a Northeast thing? I don’t think it is because
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t, I would have called these things SUVs for my whole life growing up in New York. Right. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I do know that, Oh, first of all, when I say it in this program, I usually say, usually saying it dry in a derogatory way
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk about Marco’s big truck, you know, or it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey big taco truck thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think about things like extremely truck-like SUVs, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John say. So things with very flat, upright
⏹️ ▶️ John fronts on them. Like you think of like older Toyota 4Runners, that’s an SUV, right? But if you
⏹️ ▶️ John saw a Toyota 4Runner pull up or whatever, you might casually refer to it as a truck,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Or you might not, right? But it might be just like a truck-like car. But like in those contexts, people aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same mindset as sort these things into categories, make a hierarchy, make a taxonomy,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? When you’re in that mindset, I think even the people, Marco’s neighbors, would,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they were given, especially if they were given categories that said car, truck, SUV, they would sort out most of their neighbor’s
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff under SUV. And think about Jeep, for example. Are Jeeps trucks? Well, they’re not cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re Jeeps. Do I need to put a new heading that says Jeep? Well, if you sort them under cars, trucks, or SUVs, maybe there’d be some
⏹️ ▶️ John debate, but it’s not clear cut, right? And I’m kind of surprised to
⏹️ ▶️ John hear that I referred to the R1S as a truck, but when I think about it, I probably did it either A, in the derogatory way, or B,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the kind of, if that’s not a truck-like SUV, I don’t know what is. It’s got straight sides, it’s a front,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s just like, it is a big rectangle, and it’s very truck-like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the differences between the R1T and the R1S are not, like, they’re not massive differences.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re the same car under the cover. It’s not like, oh, it has to be body-on-frame to be a truck. It’s like, no way.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Which, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what Greg Pierce said, And I thought that that was a very interesting distinction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outdated. Yeah, I mean, aren’t there a lot of pickup trucks that are not body on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John frame anymore?
⏹️ ▶️ John They all, a huge amount of them are.
⏹️ ▶️ John of pickup trucks, that’s the big factor here. I don’t think this is a Northeast thing necessarily, but here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the parts of the country where the pickup truck reigns, which is not the Northeast, although it’s more than it was when
⏹️ ▶️ John I was a kid, but it’s still not the Northeast. It is Long Island. No, not like, think about like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long Island is the south of the north. Oh man, shots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I reject this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John entirely. We still have way too many Mustangs
⏹️ ▶️ John and really old Oldsmobiles to account for that. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That proves Marco’s point, for goodness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sake. No, no, that’s a northeast
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing. It’s totally different. No, it is not, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the parts of the country where the pickup truck rains, it is very important for the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who buy pickup trucks for the world to know that they have a truck. They refer to it as their truck.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to get my truck. They’re never gonna get in their car. They’re gonna get in their truck. Have you seen it? And they buy trucks
⏹️ ▶️ John and they own trucks and they are truck people and that’s a pickup truck. And it is, and I’ve seen this because my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife’s family’s from the Midwest. The truck car distinction in the land
⏹️ ▶️ John where the pickup truck is like seemingly more than half the vehicles on their own is extremely important
⏹️ ▶️ John and extremely specific. That’s why I think your friend in Virginia is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John part of that culture of like, Truck means a truck. Manly men buy trucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey even though they’re stupid and
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t need them and they’re most idiotic vehicles on the world. Oh, shots fired. They buy them
⏹️ ▶️ John and the bed shrinks and shrinks and the rest of the car gets, it’s just, it’s the world. It’s like before SUVs became less
⏹️ ▶️ John convenient cars, trucks were the less convenient cars and they still
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey are, right? I’m gonna spend $100,000
⏹️ ▶️ John world’s worst four-door sedan with a tiny little bed in the back, right? But it is so
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know that they have a truck and you will hear them use the word truck exclusively when
⏹️ ▶️ John referring to their vehicle. Whereas I feel like Marco will interchangeably say he’s never going to say
⏹️ ▶️ John SUV, but he might say, I left I left my iPhone in the car and go get it out of his R1S.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does. And for the record, it does feel weird whenever I refer to it as my car, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not what I think of as a car. But you do,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re like, it’s not important for you to say to somebody, Oh, I left it out in the truck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I’m not going to say I left it in the Rivian because it makes me sound like
⏹️ ▶️ John a douche. If you were, if you were in the land of the pickup truck, it would be really important for you and the world to know that you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a truck and not a car, because that would be part of your identity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, there is a lot of that on Long Island, a lot more than I think you realize, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it was probably worse than it was when I was there, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in Brad’s defense, I don’t think he’s one of those people that defines his existence around his pickup, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a, what is it, a Ford Ranger? I don’t know pickups for nothing, but it’s, it’s the biggest Ford that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the F-150, which I think it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John Ranger. And by the way, lest you think that, I mean, I think trucks are dumb, but lest you think that I’m being derogatory towards
⏹️ ▶️ John people who have part of their identity wrapped in their truck, when I refer to my computer, you can be sure that I
⏹️ ▶️ John say it’s on my Mac. I never say it’s on my PC. I never say it’s on my personal computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always say it’s on my Mac. It is important to me to make that distinction in the same way that
⏹️ ▶️ John it is important to pick up truck people to say that they own a truck and something is on their truck, I
⏹️ ▶️ John always say my Mac. So like, it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, you know, everyone has parts of their identity wrapped up in different things. Mine is a lot wrapped up in the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that I have a Mac and not a PC and not a personal computer and not just a plain computer. It’s a Mac. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we all have our thing. A pickup trucks are not mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In retrospect, I should have gone back and listened to the segment to see if either one of you actually did refer to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the R1S this way. And maybe it was only me and maybe I’m the one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can, I can totally see myself doing it because I mean it does, it’s it looks like a taco truck. It’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yellow, you know, It looks very
⏹️ ▶️ John much like a Tonka truck, if Tonka trucks were SUV-ish. And it is a very trucky SUV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really, it’s a failure of language that SUV is this clumsy three-syllable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey thing. That’s also fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t really have a good word for them. Is it Australia that says
⏹️ ▶️ John We should just be calling them cars at this point because they’re the majority of vehicles sold and have been for so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John Discounting pickup trucks, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I just exclude
⏹️ ▶️ John them from the entire category. For things that aren’t pickup trucks, they’re all SUVs.