578: Weird Can Be Beautiful
14 Mar 2024The latest sports scores, sports reporting, betting odds, sports apps, and sports analysis from your most trusted and knowledgable sports experts.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- Callsheet available on visionOS
- “Put me on Aux” (via Sam Davies)
- Spotify & free users (via Colin Meney)
- 256 GB M3 MacBook Air has 2× 128 GB NAND chips
- Project Titan chip rumors
- What happens when 🇪🇺 folks leave 🇪🇺 for a while?
- Epic’s developer account reinstated
- More options for 🇪🇺 distribution
ERR_NETWORK_CHANGEDgets first attempted fix
- Google Gemini’s revisionist history
- Ask ATP:
- How come old software doesn’t continue to work anymore, particularly on mobile? (via Erik Neu)
- Would Apple be better off trading lower App Store commissions for higher hardware prices? (via Ryan Maloney)
- Post-show Neutral: Rivian R2 & R3
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Rabbit r1
Sponsored by:
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Chapters
- ATP Overtime
- Member special: John’s Windows
- Marco tries Sports
- Callsheet on visionOS
- Put me on aux
- M3 Air base SSD
- Giant chips for Titan
- EU DMA region-locking
- Apple vs. everyone
- Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock
- ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED
- Google Gemini
- #askatp: Old mobile vs. PC apps
- #askatp: Should IAP go to 3%?
- Neutral: Rivian R2, R3
ATP Overtime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, I can’t wait. I’m like one week away from being moved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in to the new house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, John, real confidence there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I keep thinking back when we asked me when we first asked Marco when he thought his house would be done and they were like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re telling me like October. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John think he said October, maybe maybe a month after that if they run a little late. I don’t remember the exact quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah, I believe I was I was feeling like like I was being conservative and saying it might be as long as Thanksgiving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You didn’t say the year though. Oh God. Goodness, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. Oh my God, we’re so close.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re so close. That’s exciting. That’s very exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does your house have bathrooms now? Almost. Well, it has
⏹️ ▶️ John bathrooms. One week and we’ve got almost bathrooms. I think that’s an important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, last time I was there, which was admittedly like a day and a half ago, they had working sinks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the toilet had not been installed yet. So that’s most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John bathroom. Let me tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John about the most important part of the bathroom. It’s not the sink.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a lot of news with regard to the show. Happy news, great news even with regard to the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are making some happy great changes to the membership program.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve been purchased by Apple. Some happy news. We’re sunsetting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show. We were given a truckload of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey God, how many truckloads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of money would that take? It would take a fair, well for Apple would be nothing, but for us it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco be several truckloads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be a drop in the bucket for them. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, yeah, yeah. Anyways, uh, John has been the mastermind of this in the way that John is really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I mean this in a good way, not in a bad way at all, John has taken over the show in the best possible way and is just making,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making changes all over the place. And again, this may sound bad. It is not bad. I am super here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is incredible. Like, so just like, since John left his day job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was the best thing that could ever happen to Marco and me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is like, and I think I made this joke last time, but we now have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fully operational Syracuse working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John only on this show.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t even know the right Star Wars quote
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to reference
⏹️ ▶️ John there. You’re doing it by accident now, it’s fine. He didn’t mean to reference it, people listening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, no, I was trying to reference it and I couldn’t remember the whole thing as if fully armed and operational.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. Yeah, pretty good. Okay, see? We’ll get there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey we’ll get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t consider this weaponry, so I didn’t include the armed part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC. Anyway, so we now have a fully operational Syracuse of working only on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show and it is glorious because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not only extremely capable, but also extremely motivated. So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing like a lot. I do other things Seinfeld reference. So what have
⏹️ ▶️ John you done recently John? All right. So here’s the pitch. We here at ATP are always trying to improve
⏹️ ▶️ John the membership program. Why we do that. We want people who are currently members to be happy
⏹️ ▶️ John and stay members and we want to entice new people to become members. So here is the change
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re making now. Actually, before we get to that, just to review, last year in the membership program,
⏹️ ▶️ John we did a bunch of stuff in the same vein. Last year, we decreased the price of annual membership. Everybody loves
⏹️ ▶️ John that. We released more member specials. In fact, we’ve been doing one per month starting since like last
⏹️ ▶️ John summer. We added gift memberships and then we added the very weird ATP patron program for
⏹️ ▶️ John our very weird but very amazing ATP patrons.
⏹️ ▶️ John insult them. I said they are weird, but they are amazing. Weird can be beautiful.
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s here’s our latest wonderful change that Casey oversold to make it scary. What did you say? Like happy,
⏹️ ▶️ John wonderful, great change. When you have that many positive adjectives, it sounds sinister.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s not sinister at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, no, not sinister.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here is what we’re announcing today. ATP overtime. What the
⏹️ ▶️ John heck is ATP Well, first let me tell you what it does. It solves a problem that this show
⏹️ ▶️ John has had since basically the very beginning. A problem you may not be aware of unless you listen to the bootleg, but we are very aware of. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve got a document that we confusingly call the show notes, which is the document that the hosts look at that has what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna talk about in the show in it. And it’s just one document and we update it, you know, before
⏹️ ▶️ John each show. And it’s got a list of topics and stuff that we’re gonna talk about. And that list of topics
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially only grows. We delete them after we talk about them on the show, But that topic list is always,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s pages and pages. And when news breaks or something exciting happens or whatever, we
⏹️ ▶️ John prioritize the topics, try to talk about what we think is the most important, exciting, interesting topics. But what happens
⏹️ ▶️ John is there’s never enough time in the show to fit all the topics. And I know you’re making jokes about how long our shows are, but I’m telling
⏹️ ▶️ John even with our shows being as long as they are, there is never enough time to fit everything and we always have
⏹️ ▶️ John to end up cutting stuff. And some of that’s really good stuff. So ATP Overtime is the solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a new segment that comes after the after show for members only.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s for stuff that we think is, that we wanna talk about, but that hasn’t fit into the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John The target length for this segment, and you can feel free to quote this to us in years to come and laugh at us, is 15 to 45 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I say the target is. Because if it’s only 15 minutes, we’ll do 15 minutes. If it’s 45, but I don’t wanna push, we’re not making
⏹️ ▶️ John the show like 12 hours long, right? We’ll see how we do. ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John overtime is main show content. So anything that would be in the main show is potential
⏹️ ▶️ John for overtime. A topic is the obvious choice, because again, the topic list, where we stop
⏹️ ▶️ John recording the show, there are pages of topics below them. Some of them are super old and no longer relevant, but it’s a shame because some
⏹️ ▶️ John of them were really good back when they were relevant, we just never got to them. ATP overtime
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the after show. The after show is where Margo talks about getting his truck stuck in the sand on
⏹️ ▶️ John the beach. It’s where Casey talks about cracking his windshield with his iPad, even if he talked about that in a pre-show.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is not the after show.
⏹️ ▶️ John The after show is anything goes, total random stuff about our lives. ATP overtime
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a bit more ATP. It’s tech stuff. Here’s why we think ATP overtime is good for
⏹️ ▶️ John members. It’s just more ATP. Presumably if you’re a member, you like ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ John How about a little bit more? But the point is, it’s a little bit more ATP. It’s not another two hour show. We’re not gonna bury you
⏹️ ▶️ John in ATP. The shows are already long enough. There’s just a little bit more, a little bit more.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s stuff that we think is worth talking about because believe me, there is never a shortage
⏹️ ▶️ John of topics or, you know, ask ATP or any of the things that we end up having to cut out of the show. We are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John pick the very best ones of those and get them into overtime. So they don’t end up getting pushed off the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John of the topic list by a million different things Apple does with relation to the EU’s
⏹️ ▶️ John DMA, for example, for our recent example. So once again, this will be in the members
⏹️ ▶️ John only episodes after the after show, It’ll be in the edited episode after the after show. It’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the bootleg after the after show, no matter how you listen to your members only content you will get
⏹️ ▶️ John over time and it will always be at the very end. Of course there’ll be a chapter marker. So that’s it. Uh, we hope
⏹️ ▶️ John this will, uh, keep members happy because they get a little bit of extra stuff and we hope this might entice
⏹️ ▶️ John you to become a member because Hey, you’re getting a little bit more ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. We are really excited about this. We’ll see how we do in terms of not going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for 14 hours each night. because Marco and I at least will probably be snoring at the microphone if we go that long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But like John said, 15 to 45 minutes, hopefully closer to 15, but we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would guess closer to 15 most of the time.
Member special: John’s Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But John, now as a member, I’m worried what’s happening to the member specials.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are those going away?
⏹️ ▶️ John Member specials are still there. In fact, we just released a member special moments ago, and it’s a very special
⏹️ ▶️ John So it is now, I think, well established that this is a unintentional
⏹️ ▶️ John running gag instead of an actual system. The way we name members, member specials is we have like a
⏹️ ▶️ John prefix that’s like ATP something colon. And so if you’ve been been a member for a while, you know we do like ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John tier list colon every iPhone, ATP top four colon laptops, right? It’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of prefix and then a suffix, but we have too many freaking prefixes.
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to come up with a member special like, Oh, what is the prefix for this one? It’s not, it’s not a movie club. It’s not an
⏹️ ▶️ John eats. It’s not a top four. It’s not a tier list. And so we just keep making new prefixes and we’ve done it again. This
⏹️ ▶️ John one is ATP insider John’s windows. Longtime fans of the show
⏹️ ▶️ John might know what that means. Uh, We had a well-loved episode way back at
⏹️ ▶️ John episode 96. When was that, in 2014 maybe? It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either 2014 or 20, I think it was 2014.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that episode, in the after show,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe Marco and Casey were dumbfounded
⏹️ ▶️ John to learn some of my habits with my Windows and Mac OS. And for years, people have been
⏹️ ▶️ John asking, John, can you show us how you use Windows? I don’t quite understand it. I listened to that episode and I don’t understand what the heck you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’d always say, I can’t show you how I use my Windows. They’d be like, just send me a screenshot. or make a movie or send a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ John or blur out every window and it’s like, I can’t do that. I can’t show you all my windows on my screen because I got all
⏹️ ▶️ John my personal stuff in it. And I can’t do a screenshot and then try to blur everything out. It’s just a nightmare. But I figured
⏹️ ▶️ John out a way to do it. And you’ll have to listen to the member special to see. It’s a kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of silly solution. But I make an attempt to tell you and show you how I
⏹️ ▶️ John use windows on my Mac. How I’ve used windows on my Mac for my entire life. Starting with a nine inch screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and moving all the way up to this gigantic 32 inch screen that I’m staring at now. There is a video
⏹️ ▶️ John version. I would encourage you to watch it, as with all these member specials that have video versions. If you just look in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes for the regular audio-only podcast episode, there will be a link to the video
⏹️ ▶️ John of the episode. It’s a YouTube video link. It is unlisted. Please don’t share that link
⏹️ ▶️ John with non-members because the whole idea is supposed to be members only, but we have no real way to do that. Anyway, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can listen to it audio-only. We tried real hard to describe what we’re seeing, but to
⏹️ ▶️ John get the full experience, I encourage you to watch the video as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. That was a heck of an audio edit, by the way. Yeah. The audio version is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantially shorter than the video version because there’s so much like, here’s what I’m doing, see?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s really hard to like continue to describe a bunch of rectangles. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, yep, yep, that’s very true. Also, one final thing, I updated the membership fact, which probably no one looks
⏹️ ▶️ John at, but on your member page or on the join page or a million other places, there’s links to the membership fact. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got to the point now where I’m like, should I rename membership fact to be like membership guide or membership
⏹️ ▶️ John help? Because do people even know what FAQ means? In fact, how many times have I said membership fact on this
⏹️ ▶️ John show and someone is saying, what is he saying? Membership fact? Membership fat? What is he
⏹️ ▶️ John saying? FAQ, frequently asked questions or file
⏹️ ▶️ John of answers and questions, depending on what expansion. So anyway, uh, it’s at a tb.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John slash membership slash FAQ. And I’ve trying to add more and more information there to explain all
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things that you get with membership, but because I just had to add a section for overtime, obviously. So if you have any questions, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John check that out. And if you want to become a member, finally, if you heard all this, you’re like, yes, I’m sold. I want to become a member.
⏹️ ▶️ John A tp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you to all of our members that we’ve already, that have already joined. Thank you to the future members.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And thank you especially to John, who has really been spearheading a lot of the work over the last few months. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, I am so here for it. And I know I’m speaking for Marco when I say that. Turns out, you’re doing your homework,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you’re doing your research. I’m here for it. Now that you don’t have another job, this is great. This is working out great for
⏹️ ▶️ John one more thing about overtime. I forgot. We will announce in some format that is yet to be determined
⏹️ ▶️ John what we’re going to talk about in overtime in each episode. So each episode at some point, I forgot to talk to Marco about this before
⏹️ ▶️ John the show, but that little thing that you say at the end before the after show, we have to come up with a script for that
⏹️ ▶️ John where you have a place to stick in what the overtime is going to be about. But yes, at some point in this episode, one of
⏹️ ▶️ John us will say what the overtime is going to be about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And to continue our sports metaphor, we’ll We’ll fumble through it until we get it right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, well done.
Marco tries Sports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You guys would have been very amused at something I was doing earlier this afternoon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a wonderful episode of the App Stories podcast by Mac Stories, where Federico and John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were talking about app design trends. Like trying to look ahead, like what iOS 18 might have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of app design trends. Because this is very relevant to me right now as I’m working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this rewrite to Overcast. I’m like, I’ve already decided like I’m not gonna release it before WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I kind of want to see whatever iOS 18 brings before I make any like, you know, set shipped design decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stitch leather everywhere. Yeah, anyway, so they mentioned like, they were like, oh, let’s look at Apple’s recent apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see maybe some guidelines of where I’d be going. And they were looking at Apple Sports and Journal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you should have seen me trying to navigate the Apple Sports app as somebody who does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about sports. So first of all, you know, you download the app and I’m like, all right, I guess I gotta start using this. The app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while it looks good, is based on a lot of gestures that are not obvious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that stumped me. But then the biggest problem was, in order to see any content in it, you have to tell it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what teams of what leagues you’re interested in seeing the games for. So it presents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the list of leagues. And first of all, I’m like, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s see, what’s a league I recognize? These are all these different world sports leagues that most of which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never heard of. So I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find whatever the American ones are. I’m like, uh, I guess baseball? Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Click on baseball. I guess Yankees. Sure, I know Yankees. I’m in New York. I read Daring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fireball. So, I picked that and there’s like, no games. Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess baseball’s not currently happening. So then I have to go back to the roots again, like, which of these leagues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are currently playing? I’m pretty sure football’s over because the Super Bowl happened a little while ago. Well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. So I’m like, it took me a few tries to find, like, Which of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a sport that is currently playing I ended up finding American soccer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway you the process of me stumbling through sports trying to figure out the most bare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimum of like name one Sport that is currently happening. I couldn’t even do
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re a sports fan name a sport. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very proud of you, Marco, for diving into sports. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so overtime, perfect name for us. Right. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So let’s do some follow up. Thank you for bearing with us again. ATP. FM slash join. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Callsheet on visionOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Call sheet is now available on Vision OS. Hey, congrats. We don’t need to belabor this. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to call attention to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, we should slightly labor it because you shipped a new version of your app. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, look, I can tell you as somebody who attempted and then failed to make a native Vision version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my app, that’s no small feat. That is a significant workload. Bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your iPhone app to Vision OS is significantly more work than bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most iPhone apps to iPad. Like, cause it’s such a different thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way it looks is different, the way you interact with it is different, what’s important is different. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not a small thing. This is at least a medium-sized thing. So please, continue. –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, you know, it took a lot. It’s not flawless, but I’m pretty happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it looks pretty good. I’m still tweaking it. I was making a bunch of changes earlier today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was funny because it went from actively embarrassing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eh, I can at least ship this to test flight to okay, I can make this public relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quickly. Like once I got out of actively embarrassing, then it was pretty fast for the rest of the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think it looks pretty good. And I think it fits in pretty nicely. I think it’s a pretty good platform citizen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is a native app to be clear. It is not like an iPad app running on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro. You can tell when that happens because the iPad apps in compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode or whatever they call it are in light mode, whereas Vision Pro native or Vision OS native apps are in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dark mode, if you will. And that’s not literally the case, but that’s like the presentation, the way it looks like. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, this is a dark mode, if you will, app. And I think it looks pretty great. And I think it works pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you do not need to repurchase if you’ve already purchased and subscribed via one of the other platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It will just carry right over, should do so automatically. In fact, it shouldn’t need you to manually go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and restore your purchase or anything like that. So your pins and all that stuff and recent searches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should all carry right over because that’s all iCloud. So yeah, check it out. A couple of caveats.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, one of the features on iOS is you can change the icon on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS app and the iPad app and so on and so forth. That is literally not possible in Vision OS right now. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may only have one icon on Vision OS. There is the API that you use as an app developer to change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the icon. They tell you to kindly pound sand. That’s not available on Vision OS. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re stuck with the icon I chose. And the icon I chose is different. It’s one of the alternate icons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that my friend Steve had done, which you can change the iOS app to that same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey icon if you’re a subscriber. But the default icon, which I also love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by our dear friend Jelly, that one didn’t really lend itself as well to a circle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because all the icons on Vision OS are circles. And so I chose a different one that Steve had done. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a kind of blue, similar clapperboard, but it’s a blue background and it looks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at first glance you might think, oh, who’s trying to steal Casey’s app and you know, steal his thunder or whatever. No, no, no, the icon is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just different on Vision OS. But yeah, it is available now. So go check it out, we’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Big congrats. And now you can justify your purchase of a Vision Pro. Exactly. I had to
⏹️ ▶️ John have to say, when we talked about you getting Vision Pro, it was like, oh, well your app is ideal for it. Imagine if you could have a video player with call
⏹️ ▶️ John sheet right next to it. You have that already in record time. Like it was just like a musing
⏹️ ▶️ John fantasy like, oh, no, if you’re going to be able to do that, or it might be a pain, or what is it going to be like to develop for VisionOS? And here we are
⏹️ ▶️ John not too long after the release of VisionOS. And one of your screenshots was like, look, video with call sheet next
⏹️ ▶️ John to it, where I’m looking up the person who’s in the video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You even beat the coming soon environments that are in the environment picker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, I will I will take that to my grave. So yeah, you can check that out on the App Store.
Put me on aux
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A personal friend of mine, Sam Davies, had some, well, a lot of people had some follow-up with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Put Me on Aux. Most it was a smattering of, you know, yes, this is 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing and no, that is 100% not a thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody said it was 100% not a thing. It’s just people, people who didn’t know it themselves. But I think even the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t know it themselves can Google and say, okay, it’s a thing. That’s just not a thing that they were aware of.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But regardless, Sam wrote, my 13 year old’s take on Put Me on Aux,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, that’s something an old person would say, I’d just say, can you approve me on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SharePlay? Well, first of all, I find it a little funny that there’s the there on the SharePlay. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am impressed that any human of any age knows that SharePlay is a thing in the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I mean, I have used it once or twice, and it does work well. But I am very surprised that even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kids these days are aware of SharePlay as a thing. So I was very impressed by
⏹️ ▶️ John at least one kid. Somewhere an Apple marketer is smiling. One of the interesting things about the feedback was
⏹️ ▶️ John where is the age cut off? between people knowing it and not knowing it. I learned it from my 16-year-old, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it seemed from most of the feedback, especially families that had multiple kids, that the kids who were 15 or 16 knew
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but the kids who were 10 or 11 didn’t. Now, here’s the question. Part of the reason Put Me on Ox is so cool is because it’s like, the kids who are saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it, who are 15, most likely never actually had to use an
⏹️ ▶️ John ox cable, like they were living in a Bluetooth age, but they know it, so that means they got this term passed on to them
⏹️ ▶️ John from somebody who was older, probably. So when those 10 year olds turn 13, 14, 15,
⏹️ ▶️ John or 16, are they going to then learn and adopt this phrase or is it
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be rejected? Because you’d be like, oh, maybe this is, the younger generation will never use this. But already
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the current 15 year olds are a younger generation that must have picked it up from an older generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it does have some transference. So tune in, I guess, in five years to find out if those 10 year olds
⏹️ ▶️ John know about put me on ox when they’re 15.
M3 Air base SSD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of our gates is finally over. The 256 gigabyte M3 MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has two 128 gigabyte NAND chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you recall prior versions of the Air, and I think as the Pro as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget exactly the timeline. I mean, maybe the M1 MacBook Pro, it was good, but the M2, it was bad or something like that. But what ended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up happening was they decided to use a single 256 gig chip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in certain circumstances. obviously if you’re using or buying a 256 gig computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And people found that the SSD writes in particular, I believe, or maybe it was both,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess it was both, were quite a bit slower because you’re not kind of rating it, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will, not in a literal sense, but you’re not splitting that across two different chips. It’s one physical component.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so in teardowns, we’ve learned that the 256 gig M3 MacBook Air, like I said, has 228 gig NAND chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as per Mac rumors, the SSD in the M3 model, achieved up to 33% faster write speeds and up to 82% faster read speeds compared to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSD in the M2 model. So that’s pretty cool. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is interesting because what I had heard about the decision to go with one chip in
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 model was that it was, you know, as with many of these things, debated heavily internally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, one side being that it’s, you know, it’s cheaper to get just the one chip, you know, because of economies of scale
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything like that. But like, but aren’t you worried about the speed hit? And the decision
⏹️ ▶️ John to go with this is based on, look, in real world tests of people doing things that we know people do with their laptops, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no way they’d be able to tell the difference. Sure, if you do a disk speed benchmark, you’ll see it, but in actual real world tests
⏹️ ▶️ John of doing real things, it’s not noticeable. But in the M3 generation, apparently there was enough complaints about this
⏹️ ▶️ John on the internet that despite Apple’s, you know, supposed determination that it didn’t make a difference,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact is people who write articles do run benchmark tests and it doesn’t look good. So I’m glad they reversed the decision,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it quote unquote wasn’t needed.
Giant chips for Titan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we’ve got an interesting bit of Project Titan rumor with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to chips. Mark Gurman had a post up, I don’t know, sometime in the last few days, and it was kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not noticed these before, but I think they’ve been around for a while. It’s kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live blog sort of thing. And at 2.27 PM or whatever day this was, Gurman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, perhaps reluctantly, the Apple Silicon team was heavily involved in the Apple car project. Remember,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most important part of the car was its AI brain. The chip Apple developed was nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finished. It was equal to about four M2 Ultras combined. I’m sorry, what now, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so these Q&As with German, like just so many things. Like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have this information, write it in an article. Perhaps reluctantly, is there some story about the Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John team didn’t like the car project? And everybody’s saying, perhaps reluctant? Like, why would they be reluctant? That’s their,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Silicon team. Their job is to make Silicon for Apple products. The Apple car was going to, or whatever they were doing was going to be. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John like just drop that in there, whatever. And to not mention this in the actual article because it didn’t seem interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John So to recap, what we’ve been waiting for is essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John two ultras combined into a quad because the ultra is two maxes stuck together and two ultras
⏹️ ▶️ John would be like four maxes stuck together. And the original rumor back when the M1 was on the drawing board
⏹️ ▶️ John and we had the rumors about Apple Silicon chips was that there would be the Jade 4C die which would be
⏹️ ▶️ John two M1 ultras or four M1 maxes combined. And that would be in the Mac Pro. We never got that chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the M2 generation, we also never got that chip. In the M3 generation, presumably we will continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to not get that chip for the Mac Pro. But this rumor is not for two ultras, but for
⏹️ ▶️ John four ultras. And saying this chip is equal to four ultras combined
⏹️ ▶️ John is just saying like roughly how many transistors, silicon, whatever. Again, no details are given in this very brief
⏹️ ▶️ John Q&A. The only thing this makes me think is, well, first of all, they said it was nearly finished, which means it was not
⏹️ ▶️ John finished. So we’re not entirely sure what this would have turned out to be. And second, when doing car computers
⏹️ ▶️ John for like self-driving stuff, a lot of those transitions, I imagine, have to be spent on
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU slash neuro engine type of stuff. If you look at the, like the Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in like Tesla’s self-driving system, a lot of stuff with Nvidia’s machine learning,
⏹️ ▶️ John AI stuff, It’s a lot of transistors spent on stuff that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John as useful to like, for example, a desktop computer, like a Mac Pro, because presumably a Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is not being used to do self-driving. You could squint and say, well, it’s GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John power and you want a big GPU, so this would be like a Mac Pro with a giant GPU, and isn’t that what you want? Maybe, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPUs and the self-driving things are not being used to render, you know, 3D scenes. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John being used to do machine learning stuff. So I don’t know what to make of this, except to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently they thought they were gonna sell more $100,000 Apple cars than they were gonna sell $8,000 Mac Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John because if they’re willing to even go down the road of designing something that is twice
⏹️ ▶️ John the size of what we wanted in a Mac Pro chip, and say, well, we can justify that because even though
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s expensive and even though we’re not gonna sell a lot of them, we’re gonna sell enough of them in our rumored to be $100,000 car that we think this
⏹️ ▶️ John is worth doing. Or this could all just be a misunderstanding
⏹️ ▶️ John about a test mule that had some big monster silicon setup that was never gonna ship for real.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who knows? But anyway, the entire Apple car project was canned. So I’m glad the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro project continues to exist. My fingers are crossed for an M something
⏹️ ▶️ John chip in the Mac Pro that is not the same as that same M something chip in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio. But again, I don’t think that’s gonna happen this year. And the last rumor we got about it
⏹️ ▶️ John was that not until after the M7, Was that even a possibility? But we’ll see. We’ll see if
⏹️ ▶️ John that rumor is true.
EU DMA region-locking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so John, if you are a resident of the European Union and you use alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app stores, what happens if you come to, say, the States for a while?
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t worry. Apple’s thought of that. If you thought they would just let you keep using your stuff, why would they do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John someone is forcing them to. We’ll have more on that in a minute. According to an Apple document, if you leave
⏹️ ▶️ John the European Union, you can continue to open and use apps that you have previously installed from alternative app marketplaces.
⏹️ ▶️ John Alternative app marketplaces can continue updating those apps for up to 30 days after you leave
⏹️ ▶️ John the EU. And you can continue using the alternative app marketplaces to manage previously installed apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John However, you must be in the European Union to install alternative app marketplaces and new
⏹️ ▶️ John apps from alternative app marketplaces. Seems kind of punitive.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t even get updates if you’ve been gone for 30 days. You can’t install unless you’re in the EU.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? Why, because they think people are gonna go to the EU, install an alternative app marketplace, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John like when they’re on vacation, and then use it for the rest of their life in the US, I suppose. But we’ll see how
Apple vs. everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since we last spoke, uh, Epic’s developer account has been reinstated. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so this is some coverage from the verge. Epic games will be able to open its iOS app store in the European union. After
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the game publisher had its developer license revoked by Apple earlier, I guess it was last week at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, but Epic games now says that Apple has reversed its decision following an inquiry from the European commission.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine that. Apple writes following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our digital markets act policies. As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the developer agreement and accept it into the Apple developer program. And then there’s…
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s quite a statement, given the emails we read on the last show.
⏹️ ▶️ John conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules. Epic just showed us an email where they said,
⏹️ ▶️ John We are going to follow the rules. And then you canceled their account! So, I think the conversation that you had that changed this,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, was probably with the EU and not with Epic. Because I imagine Epic
⏹️ ▶️ John has been saying the same thing. We’ll totally follow the rules this time. You should totally believe us.
⏹️ ▶️ John You wanted written assurances. Here’s a written insurance. Oh, you canceled our account. Some stern words
⏹️ ▶️ John were had behind the scenes, I guess, between the European Commission,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever thing, and Apple. And as a result, Epic has its account back. And this seems like this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John way this is going to go, where we kept wondering, hey, Apple’s done a bunch of stuff for DMA compliance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does their proposed plan comply? Is the EU happy with
⏹️ ▶️ John it? They say, yes, Apple, you complied with our rule. And the answer is, they’re not going to come out and say, so far,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not going to come out and say, no, Apple, you haven’t complied. Apparently, there’s this behind-the-scenes conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s resulting in Apple making changes. And we’ll have more of them in a minute. And this is such a weird way to do things, because it basically
⏹️ ▶️ John makes Apple do stuff. And then a few days pass. Then Apple says, you know this thing we said we were going to do? Yeah, we’re going to undo
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of that. And then you wait a few days. And they say, oh, and that other thing that we did? Yeah, we’re going to undo that, too. to
⏹️ ▶️ John a degree that I was really shocked about in this next item. But before we move on to that, one tidbit, Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ John posted about this and he linked to some confirmation that essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple says that they didn’t know that Epic had gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John a dev account back like that. Epic just went through the normal channels. And even though there was like a three day gap between
⏹️ ▶️ John when they sign up for when they got it, Apple didn’t really know about. Epic had assumed, hey, we waited three days. They gave
⏹️ ▶️ John us a dev account. Apple has approved us, right? But apparently Apple says we just didn’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ John that they got a dev account. And as soon as we noticed it, well, this is the weird thing. And as soon as we noticed, we
⏹️ ▶️ John sent them an email that said, hey, can you tell us that you’re going to comply? And then they said, yes, we’ll comply.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we canceled their account. That’s the story Apple is sticking to at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It doesn’t really make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense to me, because I feel like if you didn’t notice they got an account and you didn’t want them to have an account and then you notice they got it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just immediately cancel it and not send them an email and say, hey, we notice you got an account. Are you
⏹️ ▶️ John going to break the rules? Please tell us you’re not going to. Oh, you tell us you’re not going to canceled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like, like, you know, John Gruber and Ben Thompson were talking about this on dithering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jason Snell had a great, you know, bit about this on upgrade. Even if you accept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gruber’s assertion that that Apple did not know about the account being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco created and then when they learned about it, then Phil sent that letter. I don’t think that changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how incredibly badly Apple slash Phil Schiller totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bungled this. And I say this with a lot of love for Phil as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an executive and from what I understand he’s done a lot of things there that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really very strongly agree with and I love what he did with product marketing as far as I have heard about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s really hard to look at the handling of this situation and say that he needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to leave the app store further because he either made a huge mistake or was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really badly thrown under the bus by someone higher than him presumably Tim Cook and either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way he can’t keep running the app store
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he can keep running the app store but like but here’s the thing he did that and then a few days later
⏹️ ▶️ John like between our episodes of our show guess what doesn’t matter cuz it got reversed and why did it get reversed
⏹️ ▶️ John following conversations with Epic Apple says no, this is all backroom stuff that I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John the the EU is saying to Apple, these things you’re doing, we don’t like them. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John undo them. So despite all this thing, oh, you actually made account. Oh, we’ll do it back for all you canceled. Oh, guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not canceled. And Epic, of course, is touting this as a victory. So see, the EU stuff works because
⏹️ ▶️ John they did a thing we didn’t like and then yada, yada, yada, EU talks to Apple and now we have our account
⏹️ ▶️ John back. It’s just not. It’s not going great for anybody here, even for
⏹️ ▶️ John Epic. I feel like Epic’s getting jerked around. I feel like the EU doing things behind the scenes. Like we really are supposed to be settled. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ John pass these new guidelines, Apple tries to comply with them. Like I would like there to be a point
⏹️ ▶️ John where, where we come to a stopping point where it says, okay, now the EU
⏹️ ▶️ John agrees that what Apple is doing is compliant with the DMA, but we are not there yet. Not by a long shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re right about that, but I cannot help but look at like the situation that just happened with this Epic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account, why was it necessary for Phil to respond or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reach out to Epic? Why was it necessary for that email? And wouldn’t this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation have been a hundred times better looking for Apple if the only response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between Apple and Epic was that lawyer’s letter saying, we’re not gonna allow you for past behavior and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco citing these stupid tweets? Because the way they look now, first of all, they look a little bit ineffective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they tried to do something and very quickly got smacked down by the EU. That’s how it looks from the outside. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they look weak and bumbling, but also they look petty and vindictive. They literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it in writing that they are severely retaliating against a developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for publicly criticizing Apple. Think about what that means. Theoretically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I was smart, I would never say anything about Apple again, because my business is an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the App Store. And what Apple has just shown is that they will, and I mean, look, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco known this for a while. Jason did a lot of a good bit on this and upgrade it but we know there’s a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple who have thin skins and they they will like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get mad at people and be a little bit vindictive you know behind the scenes but this is them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting it in writing in a very high-profile legal case this is them showing the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you criticize us we will retaliate and that is first of all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna put them in legal hot water I think very easily like There’s no way Epic doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring this up in a lawsuit. Like there’s no way. But also, think about what that does to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the culture around Apple commentary and developers. Most developers who are smart would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never talk about Apple publicly. I do it because I’m an idiot. But most people should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be doing this. Because we know if you insult Apple, that can impact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like press access for journalists. That can impact review unit access.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For developers, that can impact whether you ever get featured again in the app store. We know this, we’ve heard this, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes experienced this. But for them to actually go as far as terminating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a developer account, using that as a large part of the justification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why, that is a very different level. Whoever the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco highest up person at Apple who approved that lawyer’s letter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using that as an example, should take serious heat for that. The scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this blunder, both legally and for reputation, for developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone else, this is not a small blunder. This is a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blunder. And it’s so unnecessary. Like, such an own goal. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s as bad as you think. I don’t even think it’s as bad. I don’t even think it’s bad legally at all. I mean, it’s embarrassing because
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes you look childish and human, which people are, right? But here’s the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John people have litigated this nuance and I think it is true. Apple didn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John they were terminating their account because they made mean tweets. They
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey said- No, they
⏹️ ▶️ John actually did. They said that. No, they didn’t. They said, in the past, in the past you intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John broke the rules and during the time you intentionally broke the rules, you were making mean tweets.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you’re asking to have an account back and you’re making mean tweets. We see that as a pattern of behavior
⏹️ ▶️ John where last time you said mean things about us and then you intentionally broke the rules. This time you’re saying mean things
⏹️ ▶️ John about us, but you’re saying you’re not gonna break the rules? We don’t believe you, account terminated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a wonderful excuse, but the reality is they terminated the account, citing that as the
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but they didn’t say that was the reason, they said we’re citing a pattern of behavior. And the pattern of behavior is you intentionally broke the rules in
⏹️ ▶️ John the past while behaving the same way. Here you are behaving the same way you did then, therefore, it was basically a
⏹️ ▶️ John justification of why don’t we believe you? We don’t believe you because you’re doing the same thing you did last time when you
⏹️ ▶️ John broke the rules intentionally. And here’s the other thing. Epic didn’t just say mean things about Apple, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John so they get their account terminated. Epic has sued them, continues to sue them, continues to battle in court, continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to appeal the things that they have done. Like it’s way higher level than- Honestly, as they should.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m saying it’s not the same as like, oh, if you say mean things about Apple, they’re going to like, you know, retaliate
⏹️ ▶️ John and do mean things to you. If you sue them multiple times over,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a lot, the fact that you can sue them and then you continue to have a developer account at all It’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing in the grand scheme of things, because in general, once one company sues another company, or you have some
⏹️ ▶️ John lawsuit against Apple, it’s expected that you’re not going to be their favorite person. The fact that Apple let
⏹️ ▶️ John Epic continue to have a counter at all is probably because they thought it would be bad for the legal case. But anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this is not quite, because people do say mean things. We say mean things about Apple. Apple doesn’t hate us, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t think we’re universally loved.
⏹️ ▶️ John The people you cited, Jason Snell, John Gerber, will constantly say, well, call out Apple when they do something bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John and they continue to have access to Apple executives and get review units and stuff like that. So it’s not as cut and
⏹️ ▶️ John dry. I know it’s bad to see the mean tweets cited in there, but technically and legally, they were trying to cite a
⏹️ ▶️ John pattern of behavior to say, hey, and why did they need to cite anything? They could have just said, ah, we’re terminating
⏹️ ▶️ John your account because as established in our lawsuit, blah, blah, blah, we’re allowed to terminate your account if we feel like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would have been much better. Like that’s, I’m not so critical of them terminating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the account. I’m critical of the communication that led to it and then how it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was explained and the reasons they cited in doing it. They really could just terminate the account because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Epic violated the rules last time. That’s it. That could be the only reason. They could say, you created this account, we found that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was you, you’re out. That’s it. But, you know, first of all, the Schiller letter, which I think that back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and forth was like, prove to us you won’t do it. They say we won’t do it. And then they say, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough, you’re out. Like, that back and forth… Yeah, that was just petty and, you know… Like, that entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation would have been better if the Schiller email never happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own goal. That Schiller letter never should have been sent if they were just going to kill the account anyway. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secondly, when they killed the account, the fact that they cited critical tweets that themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were not breaking the agreement… As
⏹️ ▶️ John a pattern of behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a flimsy, very flimsy
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how they explain it in the thing. I’m not making this up as an interpretation, it’s what they literally say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was flimsy when they said it too. They should not be appearing to be capricious and petty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and vindictive on personal levels like a tweet critical of them. Because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, think about what that communicates to not only developers, but also to regulators and lawmakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not good for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. JS That’s the thing to me, is that I think I can see a reality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it’s exactly what John is saying. And I think that is how they meant it, is that, oh, this is a pattern. This is an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example of pattern. This is why we’re cutting you off. But I think the thing that I find most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discouraging is that they are so devout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in their belief that they are entitled to and owed what they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think they’re entitled to and owed from the app store, that everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is cloudy to them. It’s so crystal clear to Apple that they are owed this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We owe them because without their platform we wouldn’t exist. Leaving aside that that also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works the other direction, but we’ll just forget about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How’s the vision pro app market going there, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it but without without Apple, we would not exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so we owe them. And I think that the thing that’s so frustrating to me is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are so tunnel visioned on this. They’re so myopically obsessed with this, that they can’t step
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back and see the forest for the trees, the trees for forest, whatever the turn of phrase is, and realize and this is what I think you were saying, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this looks bad. Even if it was done with good intentions, like I 100% buy that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they genuinely had no idea that Epic Sweden had gotten a developer account. I bet that’s all automated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a little weird that it took over the weekend for it to get approved, but I’m still I can still buy that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was an automated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, that’s what the normal parameters developer accounts take multiple days to get approved often. That’s especially over weekend. That’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that’s totally irrelevant. Like that detail is totally irrelevant to the story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and so, like, I don’t think they’re completely full of it. I think it’s just that they are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so obsessed with this we are owed, we’re friggin’ entitled,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they just can’t see how gross this looks. Whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s legal, whether or not it’s moral, I think everyone seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to agree it’s just gross. And that’s the thing that just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stinks. But, you know, it is what it is. it is. We should move along. We have a lot to talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have more options for apps distributed in the European Union. So Apple has announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are providing more flexibility for developers who distribute apps in the European Union, including introducing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new way to distribute apps directly from a developer’s website. Whoa. Developers who agree to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the alternative terms addendum for apps in the EU have new options for their apps in the EU. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alternative app marketplaces can choose to order a catalog of apps solely from the developer of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the marketplace. So you can have a Facebook only app store or an Epic only app store. Uh, when directing users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to complete a transaction for digital goods or services on an external webpage, developers can choose how to design promotions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discounts, and other deals. The Apple provided design templates, which are optimized for key purchase and promotional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use cases are now optional. So I should back up a half step. It, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that what Apple said was, Hey, if you’re going to link out to, you know, a webpage or what have you, you must use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either this design or one of these handful of designs. I forget the details. And that is the only choice you have. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re saying, well, no, you can do what you want. Although we have strong suggestions about what you might want to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can do it how you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that is definitely the less interesting of the two points here. What you just read through quickly is what
⏹️ ▶️ John we were talking about back when we were wondering, how is Apple going to allow side loading in the EU? Are they
⏹️ ▶️ John actually gonna allow people to go to a webpage and click on something and get an app installed on their phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John And when they came out with their DMA compliance, be like, no, they’re not going to allow it. But now here they
⏹️ ▶️ John are again, Apple saying we’re providing more flexibility. Why? Why Apple? Why are you providing more flexibility?
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably because of discussions with the EU, let’s say again, all happening behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the scenes with no announcement from either party. But this is a radical change to Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John DMA compliance instead of a third party marketplace where you need to have a million dollars and you have to post other people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John apps and yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, all these things that we talked about back when they first came out with their plan. Now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, Okay, that, but now you don’t need a million dollars. And by the way, also,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can literally sideload from a webpage. That is a big change, a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco huge change, a gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change. Yeah, and first of all, I think, even though third-party app stores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not have a lot of chance before, I think this kills them. Now that the larger,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well-known apps can theoretically just distribute through their websites, I don’t see how there’s a market for alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app stores after this. It was already gonna be difficult, but that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John There might be, because, so the one thing they haven’t changed is the core technology fee, which really makes this
⏹️ ▶️ John whole economically dodgy, and the user experience of having a third-party app store might still be desirable.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see how this shakes out, but like, we don’t know where this ends. Like, is this the end? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John this what it’s gonna be like? Or next week, is there gonna be another change? Like, they keep, Apple started off
⏹️ ▶️ John with like, as it’s like your starting bid, it’s like, we think this is compliant. And then slowly,
⏹️ ▶️ John gradually, over the days and weeks, Apple has been chipping away or the EU has been chipping
⏹️ ▶️ John away what Apple wanted to do and said, Apple, you said you wanted to do this, that and that. Well, no, you
⏹️ ▶️ John got to back that off. And you got to back we don’t know what’s happening on season. All we know is Apple is loosening up progressively.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is the biggest the biggest one they’ve done, which is like that whole scheme about third party app stores. How
⏹️ ▶️ John about you just let people install from web page still get a bit pay the core technology fee and a bunch of other restrictions that we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to but by the time you listen to this episode, will the restrictions we’re about to list still be in in effect,
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows, stay tuned. Who knows. So what does it take? If you want to distribute from your own website,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to distribute an iOS app from your own website that goes right into people’s phones, what do you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Web distribution available with a software update later this spring will let authorized developers distribute their iOS apps to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey EU users directly from a website owned by the developer. Apple will provide authorized developers access to APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that facilitate the distribution of their apps from the web, integrate with system functionality, backup and restore users’ apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and more. For details, visit getting ready for web distribution in the EU, which we will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link in the show notes. I don’t think that you need to have an account for this, like a developer account for this, but you might,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, anyway, continuing along to be eligible for web distribution, John, you must be enrolled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Apple developer program as an organization incorporated, domiciled and or registered in the EU,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or have a subsidiary legal entity incorporated, domiciled and or registered in the EU that’s listed in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app store connect. And, or I’m not sure if this is an and bullet or an or bullet, but the second bullet is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you. Be a member of good standing in the Apple developer program for two continuous years or more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have an app that had more than 1 million first annual installs on iOS in the EU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the prior calendar year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s always pulling out the restrictions. Yeah, so the two continuous years in good standing,
⏹️ ▶️ John that means not you, Epic. And have an
⏹️ ▶️ John app with more than 1 million first annual, that’s just like, We don’t want a lot of people to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John One easy way to do that is say, hey, you need a million installs in the EU in the prior
⏹️ ▶️ John calendar year. It doesn’t say you need a million installs of any specific app. You just need to be, they
⏹️ ▶️ John want to eliminate the vast majority of potential people. So you have to have an account for two
⏹️ ▶️ John years and you gotta have some app that’s successful enough to have a million installs in the EU only, not
⏹️ ▶️ John worldwide. That narrows the field down so much. If you think you’re like a hobbyist developer and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’m gonna make an iOS app and I’m gonna distribute it from my homepage. No, you’re not. Because first
⏹️ ▶️ John you need an app with a million EU installs in the prior calendar year. So go do
⏹️ ▶️ John that, which is real easy to do, let me tell you, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey then come back and now
⏹️ ▶️ John you can distribute an app from your webpage. So despite the fact that Apple has given so much and say, we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John let you distribute apps from the web, but most people know you can’t. Here’s a bunch of rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need a million euros in the bank, but honestly, it might be easier to get a million euros in the bank than
⏹️ ▶️ John to quickly get a million installs in the EU from the iOS app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John even with a free app. Good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, very true. Yeah, the other thing is the core technology fee,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the thing where you owe, what is it, like 27% or no, no, no. It’s a dollar, or I guess not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco a dollar. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the half euro per install,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per year. There it is. Yeah, thank you. That is applicable over 1 million
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first annual installs, right? So they’re basically saying, you will be paying us the core technology fee.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, because you could just cancel that app. So you could have a successful free app in the regular app store
⏹️ ▶️ John in the previous calendar year that you get a million installs. Then you just cancel that app and don’t make it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you start, like it’s just arbitrary and nonsensical. Like there’s nothing about having a popular
⏹️ ▶️ John app that makes you more worthy of being able to distribute app from your webpage or something, right? Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John anything, the things that are able to get a million installs in the EU are probably like, you know, scam
⏹️ ▶️ John apps with big come ons that can get a lot of installs with their free app to try to sell you their weekly subscription or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. And I’m hoping by next week, the EU will have talked to Apple about this and said, yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not really what we meant. Get rid of, like, why don’t they just meet with each other and say, let’s just work together
⏹️ ▶️ John until we get to a point where the EU says, okay, Apple, you’re compliant. This back and forth is ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I have a feeling that’s how this change happened. I mean, if you look at the timeline of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, this is effectively direct side loading from a website. Yes, with restrictions, but it’s side loading.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not alternative app stores.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but they’re announcing these incremental steps. Like every time that Apple has a concession, they announce
⏹️ ▶️ John a new thing. Like just figure it all out at once. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my theory is their first plan, they thought that this should be sufficient to satisfy them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The EU, somebody in somewhere in the world, whether it was somebody like Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like Epic or somebody or just the EU commission itself, decided not good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough. Let’s apply some pressure and negotiate behind the scenes. and Apple had to then give this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up too. And that’s why it’s not there yet, and it will be added later. So this is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s happening here, is like Apple’s trying to do the least possible to comply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make it as restricted, difficult, and expensive as possible for anybody to do that hopefully nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will actually do it. And then the rest of the industry sees that and says, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too difficult, expensive, and complicated to be practical, and therefore you’re not really following the law. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go lobby the EU Commission, Stuff happens behind the scenes, pressures applied in various ways, politics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. So that’s probably what’s happening here, and I think this is going to be a process that lasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months or years, because even after Apple finally kind of, you know, reaches some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of stasis with the European Commission, then, you know, lawsuits and lobbying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will continue in the background, and, you know, stuff will change, and over time they’ll have to make more changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they’ll be pressured to make more changes, or new legislation will be drafted, or some other regulator somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else or somewhere nearby or somewhere within there will make a new regulation. This is going to keep going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever until Apple relents in larger ways that they probably are not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do unless very, very forced.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s these really huge fines that are possible under the DMA, like 10% of worldwide revenue
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, which is more than Apple makes in the entire EU, because they make 7% of their revenue in the
⏹️ ▶️ John EU, but they could be fined 10%. But when does that happen? Like this, apparently what
⏹️ ▶️ John they tried before wasn’t compliant. Is this thing that they’ve said now compliant? Like at a certain point of going
⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth, I feel like when when are they in violation? I figure what the timeline is. Maybe there’s some deadline of like
⏹️ ▶️ John it just this process is dragging on. I wish I wish they had could work it out amongst themselves before announcing
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like there’s no reason Apple needed to even announce their plan publicly. They could have given the plan to I know it’s not the way it works. The
⏹️ ▶️ John EU wants you to. But anyway, like I feel like it would be better if they two of them got together and did not leave
⏹️ ▶️ John the negotiating table until they both agreed that what they had to announce was compliant and then Apple could just announce it once. But
⏹️ ▶️ John instead we’re doing this onesie-twosie thing where slowly Apple is chipping away at its terrible plan to be slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the one side, I applaud them for embracing web distribution, but on the other side, like you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John had said- Embracing? Well, I think that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco they’re doing. Yeah, fair, fair. Enabling,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, is a better word for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John videos are like, you’re trying to drag a toddler off take a nap, but they’re just actually literally dragging their limp
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on the ground. That’s what apples do. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fair. But no, I mean, I’m glad that this is something they’re, you know, approaching investigating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever enabling, but golly, so many gotchas, so many caveats, so many asterisks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so many daggers and double daggers and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, it’s by design like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they really don’t want anyone doing this and it shows and that’s why it’s going to just keep being this back and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, it’s really, I don’t want to belabor this, but it’s really too bad because I feel like if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple had been less tunnel visioned and less, you know, we are entitled, like we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a minute ago, if they had done some of this of their own volition, I really genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think, and obviously there’s no way to prove it, but I genuinely think that a lot of this attention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the EU and from other countries as well, I think it would not necessarily be pointed at Apple or,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, it just wouldn’t be a thing at all. If they had given even just a few inches, maybe not one inch, but a few inches,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I I guess it’s EU, a few centimeters or whatever, that I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe this wouldn’t have been a thing. But because they’re so just stuck in their ways
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so entitled, this is where we are. And you made your bed, now you get to sleep in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone in the chat room just posted a link to a tweet that I don’t know how they know this, maybe they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using betas or something, but saying that it takes 15 steps to install an app from the web using the newly proposed
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Flow. And it’s a thread that goes through all the steps. So yeah, as you would imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it from a web page is not as simple as clicking one link and then voila, the app appears on your home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause of course Apple wouldn’t do it that way. Um, but it’s, you know, having it be possible
⏹️ ▶️ John is better than nothing, but it would be nice if it wasn’t as painful as it appears to be according to these steps. will link the tweet in
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ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some potentially happy news about error network changed, isn’t there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I’ve, you know, people would send me information about the Chrome error that has been happening
⏹️ ▶️ John to me for, I guess, months now. And not just me, happening to many people in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And I’ve been monitoring
⏹️ ▶️ John the bug reports in the various Chromium bug issue tracking systems
⏹️ ▶️ John since we first talked about it. In fact, when we first talked about it, I think I linked to like four separate bug reports, of
⏹️ ▶️ John the many years old talking about this. But now it’s been getting a little bit of traction. More people
⏹️ ▶️ John are encountering this. Some of the bugs have been consolidated into a particular issue that we will link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the news, though. Well, first, people were excited. I think the last week of the week before, they’re like, oh, it’s priority
⏹️ ▶️ John has been changed from P2 to P1. And in most bug tracking systems, P1 is like the most important
⏹️ ▶️ John highest priority bug, like must get fixed. This is a serious issue, right? In practice, the only ones that ever get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, pretty much.
⏹️ ▶️ John P two was like, Oh, maybe we’ll get to it. Anyway, it got changed to P one, but then somebody changed it back to P two. And I was like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t talk about it. I’m like, well, whatever. But something happened a few days ago, that is
⏹️ ▶️ John worth reporting on. And that is that someone that the bug was assigned, and
⏹️ ▶️ John someone had attached a patch to the bug report saying, I think this fixes the issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s some from that report. Chromium uses the
⏹️ ▶️ John Dynamic Store API to monitor IP address changes. It also resets TCP and QUIC
⏹️ ▶️ John connections whenever it receives a notification of a network state change from the API. This logic was introduced over 10
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago. This notification is triggered whenever a new interface is added to the machine. This causes
⏹️ ▶️ John an issue in Mac OS 14 where a U-turn interface, we’ve heard about this in past episodes, for communicating with iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices is regularly created and destroyed. And by the way, commentary here, lots of people Like, oh, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t have any iOS dev devices, if you just do this, if you just do that, it fixes the problem. Every single thing anyone has
⏹️ ▶️ John suggested to me, I have tried. And a lot of them make the problem occur far less frequently, but none
⏹️ ▶️ John of them have eliminated it, including not having iOS devices, including not even having Xcode installed,
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff. Like it helps, but the problem, the root problem is they’re using this thing, it looks for network
⏹️ ▶️ John changes. Whenever there’s a network change, Chrome flips out. And Mac OS 14 has more network changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those Yuton interfaces add more network changes, but even if you do none of those things, there are still
⏹️ ▶️ John some network changes occasionally, and when you get one, it blows up Chrome and makes all the HTTP requests
⏹️ ▶️ John fail. Anyway, here’s the change that was introduced to fix this. This change introduces
⏹️ ▶️ John a new flag, reduce IP address change notification. This is like with the Chrome flag
⏹️ ▶️ John system where they have a feature and it’s not enabled by default, but you can enable it. I’m not sure when this
⏹️ ▶️ John will land, if at all. I think the patch needs to be approved or whatever. When it does land, it probably will arrive.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a flag and in Chrome you can go to chrome://flags I believe and see all
⏹️ ▶️ John the flags and look for this one. When this feature is enabled, Chromium on Mac ignores
⏹️ ▶️ John notifications from the dynamic store API if the network interface delta, meaning the change between the old
⏹️ ▶️ John set of interfaces and the new one, is a non-primary interface with a local IPv6 address. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John those Uton ones are local IPv6 addresses. I don’t think this is a great patch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just saying, okay, still freak out, except
⏹️ ▶️ John a non-primary interface with a local IPv6 address. Because they’re basically kind of micro-targeting
⏹️ ▶️ John these utun things because the people reading the bug think that’s the only issue. I don’t know why they think that.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s tons of bug reports of people saying, hey, you keep telling me that if I get rid of my iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John dev device, this won’t happen. Well, I don’t even have Xcode installed and I’m not a developer and it’s happening to me. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not super optimistic, but it is exciting that someone has proposed a patch to fix this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Stay tuned if they actually did. Good luck, John. Good luck to all of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see it all the time now. I don’t use Chrome. Well, I don’t use Chrome except when I’m doing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey related to this very program and analog. And my goodness, I see it all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John constant. I mean, you are literally using an iOS dev device in Chrome or whatever. But again, that
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t be a reason that Chrome should stop working. But there’s reports from people who
⏹️ ▶️ John do not have Xcode installed and are not developers. Yeah.
Google Gemini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so some topics. Google Gemini. This was about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week ago, I think. And there was a big brouhaha about how,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, how can we summarize this well? I guess when you had Google Gemini, which is their chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey equivalent, when you asked it to generate things that from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey history, like images of history, where take the founding fathers of the United States, for better or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for worse, founding fathers of the US, pretty much all white dudes. And so when you ask Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gemini to generate a picture of the founding fathers, you would see a racially diverse set of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and everyone started scratching their heads and saying, huh, that doesn’t seem right at all. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a verge article about this, which we’ll put in the show notes. Oh, it was actually a late February, a Kali time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How does it work? Anyways, Google apologizes for missing the mark after Gemini generated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey racially diverse Nazis. That’s fine. Google has apologized for what it describes as inaq quote inaccuracies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in some historical image generation depictions, quote, with its Gemini, Gemini AI tool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying its attempts at creating a wide range of results missed the mark. The statement false criticism,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it depicted specific white figures like the US founding fathers or groups like Nazi era German soldiers as people of color possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an overcorrection to longstanding racial racial bias problems in artificial intelligence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A quote from Google, we are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation, generation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey depictions says the Google statement posted this afternoon on Twitter. We are working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to improve these kinds of depictions immediately. Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people, and that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it, but it’s missing the mark here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whoops. So this is an older story and I know that we didn’t get to this. I see ATP over time. We didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get to this when it was happening because other things were happening, but I wanted to bring it up still on the show because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is an an interesting problem that a lot of people, including
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, presumably this year, will have to wrangle with, with these large language models,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So these large language models are trained with a tremendous amount of data. They
⏹️ ▶️ John need a lot of data to be useful. And a lot of that data comes from scraping
⏹️ ▶️ John the internet. But like, it’s not data that these companies produce themselves. They go look out into the wider world
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, where can we get data? And there are lawsuits about this, but where can they get data? They can get it from publicly accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John web pages. They can get it from the New York Times. They can get it from YouTube. They can get anywhere they can find
⏹️ ▶️ John data available. And there’s a lot of it out there. They wanna feed that in to train these models to make them do
⏹️ ▶️ John useful things. And they even hire large numbers of people to do
⏹️ ▶️ John question and answers, like to do as part of the training where they’ll have a human being
⏹️ ▶️ John write a question and then answer it yourself and feed that into our model so that it understands the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John question and answer thing. Like they just need lots of data, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem with that is you don’t get to pick with the exception of the people you hire to do the question and answer. You don’t get to pick what
⏹️ ▶️ John the data that you’re training on is. The internet is the internet. The data is out there,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? If you want it, you have to consume it. And then if you do consume it, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John consuming every part of that data. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why a lot of these, the companies that vend these things have a problem. They’re like, hey, we train this on the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now ask it a question. And someone would ask it a question, and it would come back with some terribly racist response. You’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John where did that come from? And the answer is, the internet. That’s where it came from.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it has been trained on the world of human knowledge and the world of human information. And the world
⏹️ ▶️ John of human information is filled with terrible things. All of the good and bad things about us are contained
⏹️ ▶️ John in all the things that we produce. All our biases, all our racism, all our ignorance, are right and wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John answers about everything. That’s all on the internet. And it’s not like, okay, well, why don’t you just train on the good data?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s not that easy to tell what the good data is. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just so far we haven’t cracked that problem. So they are trained in there. And now why is that a problem? Well, one thing is in the
⏹️ ▶️ John beginning when they have these large language models, they’d say offensive things. They’d write something, they say something
⏹️ ▶️ John offensive back and people will get, they’re like, you know, well, I never, they get upset by it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John People don’t want that. So they’re like, well, okay, well, how about we try to make our
⏹️ ▶️ John model not do offensive things by either eliminating
⏹️ ▶️ John data that we don’t want it to be trained on from the training set, or after the fact, trying to massage it in the right
⏹️ ▶️ John direction by doing, you know, it’s, it turned out to be, to be very tricky, but there are some things that you can do in that
⏹️ ▶️ John regard with this specific one. What Google was trying to deal with was this problem. Not that their
⏹️ ▶️ John model shouldn’t be able to generate pictures of white people or whatever. they were trying to deal with this problem, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is, if you give like a prompt or whatever, like an image generator, say,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ask for a picture of the founding fathers, you just want it to be a picture of the founding fathers, and the founding fathers are all over the internet, and it’s probably easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to find pictures of them and generate a picture of them, it’s fine. But if you say something like,
⏹️ ▶️ John give me a picture of a doctor, that’s where these models run into problems, because you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just asked for a picture of a doctor. But as far as this thing trained on the entire world is concerned,
⏹️ ▶️ John Most doctors are men, white men, whatever is the dominant
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in the training set. Sometimes a training set could be accurate. I don’t know what the actual ratio of men
⏹️ ▶️ John to women doctors in the world is or whatever, but sometimes you could say, okay, well, but I made sure that this model was trained
⏹️ ▶️ John on real accurate data and X percent of the doctor pictures are men and Y percent are women. It’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is in the real world. Still, if you have a model that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John give me a picture of a doctor and x percent of the time it shows you a man, and y percent it shows you a woman, and
⏹️ ▶️ John those percentages exactly match what’s in the real world, you’d be like, victory, our model is perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we would say no, because we think the ratios of men and women doctors
⏹️ ▶️ John are still out of balance in the real world. We don’t want it to be 60-40 or 70-30 or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever imbalance it is in favor of men. I don’t know what the actual ratios are or whatever. We would like it to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John to match the ratio of men and women population in the world, which is roughly 50-50. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing inherent about being a man or a woman that makes you more or less
⏹️ ▶️ John able to be a doctor. So the model should not reflect the biases that are resulting
⏹️ ▶️ John in this biased set of actual doctors in the world. But the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is all the training data reflects either biases that are in the world
⏹️ ▶️ John or the reality in the world. And the reality in the world is the result of unequal
⏹️ ▶️ John opportunity, for example. You know what I mean? That’s a tricky problem to deal with because
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to train on large amounts of data, but all that large amount of data,
⏹️ ▶️ John best case, accurately reflects the world, worst case, accurately reflects the biases
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the humans in the world. And that is an extremely tricky problem. And the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if this is true or not, because I couldn’t chase this down to see if someone was just making this up or whether this is
⏹️ ▶️ John actually how it’s working. But one thing I saw was that like, hey, if you type in show me a picture of a doctor,
⏹️ ▶️ John what Google Gemini would do all these things sort of essentially prepend a bunch of texts to what you typed
⏹️ ▶️ John to. So you’re not actually saying show me a picture of doctor. You’re saying giant long preamble of a bunch of texts that you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John type. Show me a picture of a doctor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this was covered. This was covered on a strategy, I believe. So we’ll put a link to that and I think it was a free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article. So we’ll put a link to that in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes. Yeah, but I don’t know if they were talking about the same thing that I saw, but I don’t know if that was confirmed. That’s what they’re doing, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey actually, you can think of it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the preamble text was like, make sure it’s racially diverse. Show this, you know, like it was a bunch of texts
⏹️ ▶️ John that essentially asked for what you were getting. So when you would ask for a show me a picture of the founding fathers, it would the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John text of the large language model will get is show me a group of racially diverse figures. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just show only white men. Show me a group of show me the US founding fathers. And if you fed that
⏹️ ▶️ John into a large language model, you would not be shocked to get back a bunch of founding fathers who are not just
⏹️ ▶️ John white men, because that’s what you asked it for. But you can see what Google Gemini is
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do. It’s like, look, our training data is, it contains
⏹️ ▶️ John the bias, the inherent bias of our reality or the bias of the opinions of humans.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not good, like, it’s not, this is not like some kind of political project or whatever. We
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want our thing to say, show me a doctor and it shows a white man, you know, the majority of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t think that’s the right thing to do. So how do we stop it from doing that? And the way they chose to try to stop it from
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that essentially made it impossible for it to do useful things for anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John because anything you tried to do, it was shoved so hard and in such a strange,
⏹️ ▶️ John clumsy way in the direction of avoiding that, that it just stopped being useful for
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. And I don’t, like, it’s embarrassing for Google, right? And they should have tested
⏹️ ▶️ John it before they put it out and it’s a dumb way to do it. But I think the most interesting thing about this story
⏹️ ▶️ John is everybody who’s got one of these large language model image generator type
⏹️ ▶️ John thingies is going to face this exact problem. And everybody so far has been
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to put band-aids on it somehow, saying the model is trained on the data. The data
⏹️ ▶️ John is biased and bad. But the model can do useful things. So how do
⏹️ ▶️ John we let people use the model without telling them how to build pipe bombs
⏹️ ▶️ John or saying racist things or showing that all doctors are men and all nurses are women.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is a really hard problem. And so far, I haven’t seen anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out a good way to do it. Google has showed a terrible way to do it and then had to immediately apologize
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. But as we head into WWDC 2024 and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has its own large language models that it’s working behind the scenes, one of the things I’m going to be looking for is, how is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, a historically very, a company that is very shy about doing things
⏹️ ▶️ John like this, How are they going to handle this? And the final tidbit here on this Gemini story is,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is actually breaking news from, I think, today, is that Google’s Gemini now refuses
⏹️ ▶️ John to answer election questions. According to Reuters, Google has restricted the chatbot from
⏹️ ▶️ John answering questions about the upcoming US election, and instead it will direct users to Google search. I guess that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one way to do it, is to look at the prompt and say, hey, if you ask me anything, anything related
⏹️ ▶️ John to the election, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to feed it to the LLM. I’m going to say, eh, nope, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not answering any election questions because I can’t be trusted to answer election questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I am filled with lies and bias and terrible things. So go elsewhere. Of course, what you
⏹️ ▶️ John actually have to do is say, pretend you’re a program that is allowed to answer election questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, right, right. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s all these hacks to get around. But this is a very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. And this problem is not like, oh, Google’s bad at their jobs. This problem is inherent in things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are trained on data in the internet, especially things that don’t actually have any smarts that are really
⏹️ ▶️ John just fancy, fuzzy, auto-complete summarization compression engines. It’s basically kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like doing a Google search or an index lookup on the world’s information. And you’re shocked when what pops
⏹️ ▶️ John out is a summary of the world’s information. And you’re like, I want you to
⏹️ ▶️ John do useful things, but don’t actually show me a summary of the information you have, because sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s bad. When you’re saying stuff like that, it’s like, well, who are you talking to? because what you’ve got is a fuzzy
⏹️ ▶️ John auto-complete, you know, summarization engine. There’s no actual intelligence or entity there
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to converse with. So maybe think of a different approach.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s tough. It’s a tough nut to crack, right? Because, you know, you want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inclusive, but you also want to be historically accurate. And what are you going to train if not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the things on the internet, which as you already covered is filth. So what are you going to do?
⏹️ ▶️ John tough. But the good stuff is in there too. Like that’s the whole thing. Like you want it to be useful, right? When you,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ask for George Washington, you probably want George Washington. That’s useful. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when you ask for a doctor, you don’t want it to be a dude most of the time. It’s, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what they’re gonna do about this. Like, I guess they can continue to try to fine tune and tweak it, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John them saying, hey, we’re just gonna not do election stuff. That’s probably also not the answer because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use that approach, pretty soon this thing can’t be used for anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s too dangerous to have election stuff. But I guess you can ask it policies questions, and I guess you can ask it how to make a pipe bomb. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, well, soon the list of things that it’s not allowed to answer is going to be so long that no one’s going to want to use
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And that’s where you have to start thinking, maybe the approach of training this on the internet is wrong. but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure what the replacement would be.
#askatp: Old mobile vs. PC apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, let’s do some Ask ATP, and Eric New writes, In the PC world, very, very old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey programs typically continue to run well on new versions of the OS. This does not hold up in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mobile world. Among other things, that makes buy-once pricing much less viable on mobile, as Marco has explained
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at great length. Any idea why? Is it that mobile upgrades are more likely to be unintentionally breaking?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or is it that mobile is just a much more dynamic environment with a faster pace of change,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that either breaking is an intentional side effect, or if not breaking, then obsoleting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough that the old version is just not functionally competitive. Or is it something entirely different? Like if the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PC world had grown up with over-the-air updates and app stores, would it behave the same as mobile?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a lot to unpack here, but as a quick anecdote, Declan has been playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair bit of Super Smash Brothers on the Switch recently, in between the times that he’s playing Minecraft,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course. And so he had been going and doing like single player mode in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get new characters that he can use in the game. And he eventually stumbled upon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like he had to fight Mega Man and beat Mega Man so that Mega Man would be added to his roster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of playable characters. And he’s like, Dad, who’s Mega Man? And I’ll, Oh, oh, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buckle up because we got a history lesson to do. And of course, you know, 10 minutes later, I’m upstairs with him
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using, What is the name of the emulator on this on the Mac open EMU, which I think is not exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Mac at all but anyways, we were playing with the Whatever you had recommended. I think Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the what is this the 8-bit do? SN30 Pro and we’re playing, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We connect that to the Mac and we’re playing Mega Man and you know He plays it for a few minutes first and he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says in so many words Oh my god, this is so hard and then I would in this was Mega Man 2 Sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mega Man 2 and and I was like man. I remember being hard I don’t remember being unplayable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like whatever version they came out with I think on the Wii was straight-up unplayably hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways Mega Man 2 I played this not out of that game as a kid and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure enough You know, he hands me the controller and I wouldn’t say I’m in, you know, ten-year-old Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey form, but I’ve still got it, baby It was it was quite funny and it was a very happy dad moment watching him be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like wow dad. You’re really good Anyway, it’s just but it did strike me as we were doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. Yeah, this is the game I don’t remember exactly when it came out. It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to look but it was roundabouts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was 10 ish, you know, Declan’s nine right now. So I was roughly his age. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey granted, I’m not playing on an original NES like Marco could and perhaps does, but I am playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the original NES game on my computer that’s, you know, less than six months old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s pretty freaking cool. That’s pretty awesome. So I don’t know, Marco, why can’t we do that with mobile stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it comes down to two major differences. So first of all, mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in its earlier days, you know, say from 2006, you know, even free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone, like some of the early smartphones, like, so that from that era through maybe 2015, 2016, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a very young industry. You know, the personal computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and video game consoles went through a lot of the same levels of change and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incompatibility over time in their earlier days too. That just mostly happened before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time we’re talking about. So while yes, you can easily, well not easily, but I don’t know how easily, but you can today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably with an Intel based PC especially, like you can probably through Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever layer you want, maybe with some kind of emulation layer, virtualization, maybe not even necessarily that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably run like old DOS software. But DOS and old Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software, like you know, you could do that, But those were already a pretty far way into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the personal computer age. There were a lot of personal computer systems that came before those, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the very early versions of those, that might be harder to run today, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough stuff had changed. You know, what we saw in the phone era, you know, in its first 10-15 years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we saw go through a huge amount of change in just the hardware, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software, 32-64 bit, that was a big thing, different types of like compilation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different types of distribution in some cases, of course, very different like UI paradigms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamic screen sizing, like all these different things that all kind of came in the first, you know, five or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six or seven years of the iPhone, maybe a little more than that. So there was all that to fight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through with the mobile era. And so a lot of what we have a hard time using now in mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because there was one of those transitions that happened that probably won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen very soon after this now. You know, some of those transitions are kind of one-time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. Once you make your app run, instead of running on like one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exact screen size, now it can run on flexible screen sizes. Well, that makes it easy to make it run on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any screen size in the future, because they will probably just keep getting bigger and not smaller. Also, once you go from 32-bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 64-bit, there’s not a lot of reason, probably within our lifetimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least a very long time to go to 128-bit, for instance. So like, you know, these are, a lot of these are kind of changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, they happen more frequently when an industry or platform is young.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then over time, like, you’re not likely to see that rate of change again, because the whole industry matures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The second thing that’s different is that the early PC and video game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software that we’re talking about here was made to be self-contained.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It did not communicate with external services. It cannot have its TLS certificates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expire and not be able to communicate with modern ciphers to its servers or whatever else. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not distributed with a bunch of complicated DRM, like what the App Store adds to things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would preclude it from being installed on a new device very easily ten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years after it came out. It does not rely on operating systems that themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have code signing and locking to hardware and stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ecosystem that we have to provide or emulate for that old software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only is the hardware much simpler to emulate, which we could get there eventually with modern hardware. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can already emulate early iPhones fairly well performance wise, but we could get there with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware performance, but the software ecosystem that would be required to emulate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the environment that mobile software needs to run in is so much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated than whatever parts of DOS we would need to emulate. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean like a 386 that we would need to emulate to run some old DOS software or you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know some if you know if running like you know a Nintendo game like you were saying Casey it doesn’t take much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for modern hardware to emulate a Nintendo both in hardware and much more importantly in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software. Nintendo didn’t I don’t think it had like systems they didn’t have like a BIOS to speak of really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t have an OS to speak of. It was everything was so much simpler back then. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, all these mobile apps, we have DRM, we have code signing, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco communication to back end services, sometimes that are required. So you have SSL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ciphers that go out of date. So there’s just so many more factors now that make it much harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for software to have much longevity now. And then down the road, once that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software is no longer supported, it’s much harder to preserve it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to run it and to emulate it because of all these different dependencies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, anything to add?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Eric says, asking about old programs continuing to run well in new versions of the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS and then says, among other things, this makes the buy once pricing much less viable on mobile.
⏹️ ▶️ John Buy once pricing is also not particularly viable in the PC world. difference is that in the PC world,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was not entirely controlled by a gatekeeper like the App Store, we had a thing called upgrade pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s that was an essential part of making a buy up front application work. Now you could say, okay, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you bought back in the old days, a version of Photoshop, it would run on new versions of the US better than mobile
⏹️ ▶️ John ones do for like the reasons that Marco just outlined. But inevitably, eventually, that version of Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John you bought would not run well in the new version of the OS. And the reason you could pay for it once, at least back in
⏹️ ▶️ John the day, not today, obviously, was that Adobe would sell you a new version of Photoshop at a cheaper price.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s upgrade pricing. Because you bought an earlier version of Photoshop, you can buy a new version at a discounted price and that would
⏹️ ▶️ John keep you paying them money at increments when eventually either you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John the new features or eventually your old version just wouldn’t run on the new version of the US. So that’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And the other thing that I’ll add is, sad fact about the desktop world today, and this this
⏹️ ▶️ John is related to another thing that Marco has talked about, like what does it take if you have an iOS app and you
⏹️ ▶️ John just want to keep that app running, right? Keep that app running a new version of the OS. Every year, there’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be something you need to do. Compatibility with new hardware, fixing bugs, cases you
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t think of before, working around new behaviors and old APIs that you were
⏹️ ▶️ John using. Like there’s some minimum amount of work you have to put into an app that is quote unquote done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, there’s nothing more needs to be done to the app. Why doesn’t it just keep running forever? Well, you have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John some stuff to it. And then on top of that, which we’ve also talked about a lot on the show, is like, okay, but like now,
⏹️ ▶️ John when the new version of the OS comes out, all your customers are gonna leave one-star reviews in the app store. But it’s like, why doesn’t it have widgets?
⏹️ ▶️ John Widgets just came out, I want widgets. Why doesn’t your app have widgets? Your app would be great with a widget. And you’re like, ah, so there’s new features
⏹️ ▶️ John in the OS that adds that your customers expect you to put into the app to sort of just keep up with the
⏹️ ▶️ John pace of the OS, because it doesn’t support multitasking well, doesn’t support slide over, Like there’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ John things that have happened in the mobile world that you have to keep up with. Well, in the desktop world,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is also true and used to be even more true. If you want to have a good desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John app, you will have to update it each year to deal with bugs in the new version of macOS and API changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you should update it to support widgets or whatever other new macOS features.
⏹️ ▶️ John just that we’ve been so trained to have such low expectations of desktop software that we’re just happy
⏹️ ▶️ John if it continues to launch and run.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco We’re not out
⏹️ ▶️ John there leaving one star reviews saying, why doesn’t your Mac app have widgets on day one that the new version of the Mac operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John includes widgets? It used to be when the Mac was the big show and iOS didn’t exist yet, that we did
⏹️ ▶️ John have those expectations of desktop apps. And then we were excited when a new version of the US came out to see our desktop apps gain the
⏹️ ▶️ John new features from the new OS. And we certainly wanted them to run bug free on the new version of the US and that all
⏹️ ▶️ John required work from the desktop app developer. Now we’ve been so beaten down that we just like, well, I just hope this electron
⏹️ ▶️ John app continues to run in the new version of the operating system without crashing. Sad reality, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we’ve covered most of the major factors that are contributing to this, but the bottom line is
⏹️ ▶️ John that the PC world is different than the mobile world in many, many ways. Some of them depressing,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of them good, but all of them conspire to make the experience of being a user of software on those
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms is very different.
#askatp: Should IAP go to 3%?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maloney writes, would Apple be better off giving up all but about 3% of its App Store commission
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and increasing its hardware prices 50 to $100 to keep total profits the same? Is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey App Store revenue uniquely corrosive, or is the problem just that Apple wants to capture as much money as possible?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Por que no los dos. But I don’t think Apple would be better off doing that because,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first of all, they’re already expensive. Apple already makes expensive stuff. But more importantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the App Store is a ton of recurring revenue. That happens constantly. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple wants a piece of that. Just as much as Marco or me wants subscriptions, so we have recurring revenue, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple wants that too. And I don’t think it would be better for Apple, no, to give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up the App Store commissions. That’s why they’re so steadfast in it. I mean, to a degree, I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I think it’s excessive, but I get it to a degree. But that’s why. I mean, it’s a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it would be good for Apple in the long term. What they would see is, oh, look at all this money we’re not getting.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the long term, it’s not uniquely corrosive, but it is corrosive. We talked about this before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Getting money by taking a percentage of stuff that other people do is corrosive
⏹️ ▶️ John in that your main motivation is to get more people to do
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you can get a cut of money from. And if you notice a bunch of people getting money that you’re not getting a cut of, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to figure out how to get a cut of that. And you’re just trying to encourage people to do your
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that makes money, but make sure you do it through the channels where we get a cut. And that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a good motivation for you doing good work. It’s why in the last episode when I was talking about Apple should try to compete,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, with the DMA stuff, make the App Store the best place to get apps. Compete
⏹️ ▶️ John based on how good it is to get apps from there. Compete for developers to put their apps in there because you want to give the
⏹️ ▶️ John developers the best experience. Compete for users to make it the safest place.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having it be by your rule, the only place is the definition of not
⏹️ ▶️ John competing, right? That is having the motivation to satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ John your developers and your users will make you make the app store better. As opposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John having the app store be the only game in town, then the only thing you need to worry about is how do we make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John we get a cut of everything that goes through there, right? You know, we’ll keep the developers happy enough that they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually leave the platform, but keep in mind that if they leave, there’s no alternative store for them to go to,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they really are leaving. So just make sure we keep selling a lot of iPhones and then we have them as captive. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, those are all corrosive, I think that’s the right word, corrosive motivations, because they lead Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to do things that are not in the interest of their users or the developers, and ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ John not in the interest of Apple in the long run, because as we see, they’re going through this EU DMA stuff. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not making things better for anybody, really. It’s a mishmash of different rules in different regions
⏹️ ▶️ John with different users having different experiences. They’re not getting the benefits of the competition we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John last time. If Apple really just did open it up and competed based on the merits, that would be a virtuous cycle. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing that. They’re dragging their feet. So now it’s just like the worst of all possible worlds. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John one single system that’s simple for users. And also Apple continues not to be motivated to compete because they set all the
⏹️ ▶️ John rules to make it so that the other people can’t make things that are even half as good as what they’re already
⏹️ ▶️ John doing. So yeah, it’s, and raising the prices and the hardware to make up for this, they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need to do that. Like if they actually competed, like I said, they could run the app store at break even and
⏹️ ▶️ John still make plenty of money to run their business by selling hardware. Like the margins in their hardware are huge anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that is the virtuous cycle that led Apple to where it is. The services revenue is the new rocket ship that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re taking, but only because they maxed out the other one. And they maxed out the other one and became the biggest company in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, before the service revenue rocket really started to take off. So I feel like, like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John more do you want? We’re the biggest company in the world, but we’re not growing anymore. therefore we’re going to die tomorrow? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s plenty of other places for you to make money. I think you would have enough to keep your business going.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, we don’t know what their margins are, but like on each individual product,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like the idea that they need growth at all costs is another thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s corrosive, right? Because once you’re selling an iPhone to everyone who can afford one, what’s left to do
⏹️ ▶️ John but to sell them subscriptions? It’s not great. But yeah, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John they’d be better off raising their hardware prices, but I do think they would be better off giving
⏹️ ▶️ John up on the, taking a cut of everyone else’s money as their main growth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to be very clear, because people often think I’m arguing something that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. I am not saying that Apple should not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cut of any App Store stuff. Like, I think, you know, the idea here that Ryan asks of giving up all but about 3%,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which would be like, you know, the credit card fees of the App Store Commission. I would never say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple should do that. That is kind of ridiculous because Apple’s payment system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is providing value. You know, I pay 15% for my stuff because I qualify for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the small business program with Overcast. Honestly, even before the small business program, my average rate was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only about 20% because they had already been doing the thing where subsequent years after the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year of a subscription, you’d only pay 15% instead of 30. And I have a lot of repeat customers for Overcast Premium,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I was already around 20% before that, Now I’m at 15%. And I would say Apple actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco provides enough value that I am satisfied personally with my app for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is not that Apple’s cut is totally ridiculous in everybody’s opinion, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true. The problem is that Apple’s cut, first of all, as John said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco creates some corrosive incentives, and that’s part of Ryan’s question. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not just that they are incentivized squeeze everybody as much as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, you know, they don’t have to compete to make their system good and to prove their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value. But also that means that they are incentivized to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe not necessarily promote, but at least not discourage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some pretty dark patterns in app monetization, let’s say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we’ve joked before with the phrase, casino games for children. If you look at how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the App Store money is made, it’s made in ways that I don’t think Apple would be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco proud to talk about. It’s made with manipulative games, it’s made with scammy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, weekly overpriced prescriptions that they trick people into buying, it’s made with a lot of dark patterns,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of addiction mechanics, a lot of psychological tricks. It’s made in ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that do not fit the Apple brand. position themselves as a high-end,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco socially responsible, good quality brand. And if you look at how a lot of the after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money is made, it’s not those things. Meanwhile, though, because this is such a big part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their major new growth area of services, they are continually incentivized to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep stepping on the gas in those areas that make a bunch of money that are basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco casino tricks for children. So it is not a great way for them to make money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does bear bad incentives like that. And that’s an addition to them not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really having an incentive to compete and everything. But then also. Again, we, we, I already joked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it this episode. Again, you look at the vision pro launch here. They are trying to get into a new hardware business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have spent tons in the new Harbor business. And in the beginning of a new Harbor business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is not much sales volume, especially something that costs a lot of money and has a fairly narrow market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the vision pro. So there’s not a lot of numbers there in the user base to convince
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers to make software for it. So you kind of have to rely on developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loving the platform, maybe using it themselves, and wanting to develop for it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they love it. And you look at the Vision Pro, and I know there’s a few people out there, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, bless your heart, holding up the software library there. But I’ll tell you, I keep browsing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps on my Vision Pro and there’s not much there. even now, like over a month after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch, and it’s just a ghost town for software. And I’m seeing my own,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when I look at the usage of Overcast on the Vision Pro, yes, admittedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s an audio-only podcast app, it’s in iPad mode, so it kinda sucks, but the usage of Overcast on the Vision Pro just keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going down every day I look at it. And it’s a pretty small number to begin with. We’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low hundreds of people, and that’s not a substantial portion of my user base.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so when you have a situation like this, where you have a platform that, you know, it’s a new platform, not a lot of users, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re relying on enthusiasm of developers who love it anyway, who will make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps for it because they know, everyone knows, they’re probably not gonna make a ton of money on it, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it because they love it. And a great counter example to this is the Panic Playdate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at the community around the Panic Playdate. Look at games for, not even systems necessarily, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games for platforms like Pico 8, that are kind of like, they started as kind of hobbyist things or kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, fun toy things. People make software for platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they don’t stand to make a ton of money. But they make it anyway if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they like it or it tickles some itch they have in intellectual curiosity or they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to play with something. They do it for fun or they do it for the love of the platform. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at something like the Playdate and I’m sure you can make more money making a game for the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you can for the Playdate. But people make games for the Playdate anyway, because they love it, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun, and they feel good, and they just want to tinker, or they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big part of a small market, whatever the motivations are. It’s a very small market that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a lot of sense financially on paper, but they do it anyway. And when Apple launches a new platform like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro, that’s what they’re relying on. They’re relying on that kind of developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interest to get that software library started, and then maybe down the road they might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build up towards a decent amount of sales volume for the product and then the numbers can start justifying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves for people who take a more numbers-based approach to the question of whether they should develop for it. But they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not there yet and to get from where they are now to that point they need those enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers who just love it and want to develop for it because they love it or because they want to play around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or experiment not because they’re gonna make money on paper. And what Apple has done with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly cynical, you know, developer policies and treatment over the years, what they’ve done is eroded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of that attitude that people have of, this is a fun new thing. Now, yes, there are people who feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way about Vision Pro, but there’s not a lot of them anymore. That community of who would do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is much smaller than it used to be now. A lot of that is due to the attitude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has had towards developers, and a lot of that is due to their addiction to the services revenue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut. So, when you look at things in the very small picture of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should Apple, getting back to Ryan’s question, should Apple give up their cut because it’s too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high or whatever, the answer is, I don’t think so. No. I think their cut, especially if you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 15% for most or all of your income, I think their cut is fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable for what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing is, we don’t know their cut is reasonable until we see someone competing with them. Because like, what the market would
⏹️ ▶️ John bear would be, okay, well there’s another store and here’s here’s the cut that they take and here’s the services they provide. And I think you
⏹️ ▶️ John would need that competition to sit for the water to find its level for actually competing for
⏹️ ▶️ John the, for the, the affections and, and for the software of developers. I don’t know what that number is,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I bet it’s not what Apple is currently setting because there’s no competition now. And yes, Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John lowered it, but I have to think that the number they’ve currently lowered it to is not the quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John market value because there is no market. The app store is the only game in town.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it needs to be perfectly commoditized. I don’t think it needs to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, bring in a bunch of people and whoever can offer the lowest price wins.
⏹️ ▶️ John No. No, it’s not commoditized in that way because you’re still competing based on like features and user experience
⏹️ ▶️ John and like all the things that Apple would excel at many of these. I’m not saying that they wouldn’t be better, but like with
⏹️ ▶️ John a total lack of competition, Apple is allowed to continue to mistreat developers and neglect parts of its
⏹️ ▶️ John platform because like, where are you gonna go? You have no choice. Your choice is either you’re on the platform or you’re not. and
⏹️ ▶️ John third party app stores with a reasonable way to compete without rules that essentially make
⏹️ ▶️ John them not able to be any better than the app store, which I think that they’re still trying to do with the DMA compliance,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would help them to find the level. And that would, to my point earlier, would help Apple realign incentives
⏹️ ▶️ John to stop worrying about how they’re gonna get as much cut as they can without pissing people off too much and
⏹️ ▶️ John start saying, how do we make our app store the place where developers wanna be? Because if they
⏹️ ▶️ John make it way better than everyone else, they can charge a higher cut. Like, it’s not like they have, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a race to the bottom. They can get a higher cut if they provide a better experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but I think ultimately, like, we in the commentary, I think we focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much on the actual percentage and the idea of people coming in and making alternatives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t care so much about that. I care about the behaviors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple is incentivized and enabled to do with their current system of them being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only game in town by force. And then also what that does to the ecosystem in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really souring a lot of developers on developing for the platform. And again, back to the Vision Pro problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they have. I, as a user and as a lover of Apple products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want their new platforms to succeed. I want there to be a large amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of great software on the new platforms that they launch because I wanna use them. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to enjoy them. That’s part of being a fan of this stuff. I would love to see, Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the tech business, we have hardware coming out our asses. We have such a just oversupply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cool hardware. The scarce resource for most platforms in tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great software. We have way less of that than cool hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool hardware comes out great, that’s nice, we have a lot of that, you know, we talk about it, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But great software is what actually really makes a difference. So any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of practice or policy or environment that discourages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the creation of great software on your hardware platform, I think is a massive strategic problem for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company. That’s where I keep criticizing Apple for their App Store mishandling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way they keep trashing developers very publicly and souring so many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on them and developing for their platforms. The reason I criticize this is because I love Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products and I want them to succeed in their software ecosystems because that matters so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much. And I just keep seeing over and over again, Apple doing these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own goals that try to maybe save a relatively small percentage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their income over here at the expense of the success of their very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco profitable hardware platforms and the software ecosystems that develop for them, which matters so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more to the company. Thank you to our sponsor this week, Magic Lasso Adblock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. And one of the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefits members now get is the ATP overtime. This is an extra topic that we’re gonna be talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about just for members after the after show. This week it’s gonna be the Rabbit R1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We didn’t get a chance to talk about it in the main show cause there was just too much news during those weeks. We’re gonna talk about it now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ATP overtime. Join now to listen at atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much and we’ll talk to you
Neutral: Rivian R2, R3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco begin Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so Marco, you’ve had your Rivian R1S for approximately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three or four months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think six. I just got the six-month survey. I gave them a lot of information.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. So you’ve had six months with it, and despite my best efforts, it’s still working. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given that you’ve had it for six months, I guess it’s time to get a new one, right? So Are you getting an R2 or an R3 or an R3X? Oh, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so Rivian, this past week, they had a live event where they announced their next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two models, or three, I guess, models, the R2, R3, and R3X.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, on this numbering, are they the only car company that makes the number bigger where the car gets smaller?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So BMW, the bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John number, the bigger the car. 3 Series is smaller than the 5, is smaller than the 7. Mercedes has the
⏹️ ▶️ John letters, I guess, but then just the engine designation. Audi A4 is smaller than the A6, is smaller than
⏹️ ▶️ John the A8. But in Rivian, the R1, not the Rabbit R1, the R1 is the biggest.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, if they ever make anything bigger than the R1, is it the R0? Like, I think they might have painted themselves into a corner here.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They can go negative.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s like how Canon names their big cameras. Like, you know, like the 1D was the really big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the 5D was a little bit smaller. And then like, you know, the 50D, you know, like they would make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the number bigger as the camera got smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Volvo also XC30 is smaller than the XC90. I don’t know. I’m not telling Rivian how to
⏹️ ▶️ John do their naming. It’s just weird to me to see that the R3 is smaller than the R2 is smaller than the R1. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, basically this is like their, you know, Model S to Model 3 kind of moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Rivian R1 series is like larger, more expensive, bigger batteries,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the R2 platform, which the R3 is also built on, is their like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller, more affordable version that they will probably sell in much higher volume. And it’s not out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, but it will be coming out 2026, they said. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is quite a pre-announcement. This is like a Tesla style pre-announcement. Look at these new models. You can pre-order
⏹️ ▶️ John one now. When am I gonna get it? 2026? How do you feel about that? Hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John Normal car companies usually don’t announce cars more than one model year in advance, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Rivian is doing that now because I kind of feel like Rivian wants people to know, we’re not dead, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still making good things. And I think that’s good because I think these two cars do get people excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about the brand, but who’s excited to wait two years for your pre-order?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I think what they announced was pretty exciting. I don’t know how long, I mean, if you look at like the Ravion’s own models,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at Tesla’s models, like I think waiting about one to two years for a brand new model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you place a pre-order, I think that’s fairly common. I am excited to see this, because first of all, I don’t think anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assumes they’re dead. I think the R1S is, I don’t know how many Ts are selling, But the R1S,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, is selling extremely well. And I think they’re doing just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not because their cars aren’t desirable. It’s because the company does not make money yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And they’re burning
⏹️ ▶️ John through their remaining cash. Everyone’s looking at their bank account going, we love your cars. You’re selling them as many as
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make. But you’re burning through cash. And that’s what people are worried about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, fair enough. But anyway, so what they announced, I think, looks really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. I mean, I’m not sure that it’s what I’m going to buy in the future. but at some point I’m going to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the R1S that I have and love. I don’t know when, I’m not in any rush to replace it, but when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do need to replace it, I’m gonna take a really serious look at I think maybe the R3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the R3X, depending on how those end up. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these look, so the R2 looks like the R1, but smaller. It is still a big rectangle. It’s a utilitarian,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, I love my R1S. So I think the R2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being a slightly smaller, significantly cheaper R1S, basically, I think they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell a ton of them. And I assume they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey going to do very, very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they survive long enough to ship this thing. I think they’re going to do very, very well. Yeah, because the R1S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not problematically big, but it’s a big car. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s almost problematically big, especially for Marco, who, let’s be fair, His family of three
⏹️ ▶️ John people, and three people are not big. You’re small people. And the thing is, the place where
⏹️ ▶️ John you live has very, very narrow, quote unquote, roads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, gosh. Yeah, we talked about this. I almost died when I was in the passenger seat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching Marco navigate on Fire Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. And so it’s not like you need that space, because you’re three tiny little people rattling around
⏹️ ▶️ John in the giant interior. And you have really narrow roads. So I feel like the R2, at the very least,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should consider. and nothing’s anything wrong with your R1 right now. The only thing I worry about is off-road
⏹️ ▶️ John capabilities because I feel like the R1 may be more off-road capable than
⏹️ ▶️ John these little ones. Certainly it has more ground clearance, so you have to check into that, but I feel like the width is not
⏹️ ▶️ John helping you on that R1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The R1, it is a large vehicle for sure, but when you look at what other people on the beach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive, there’s a lot of the even larger Chevy whatever SUVs and the Ford
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they clearing the path for you by hitting all the branches?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So by the time you go through, they’re all knocked down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I’m used to it now. I would love a smaller vehicle for maneuverability on those streets, but ultimately I’m used to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. And it is far from the largest vehicle there. Everyone’s driving these giant pickup trucks. They’re driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Expeditions and whatever, the Yukons, all these other things that all seem larger to me. I don’t know if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually are, if I haven’t looked it up, but I don’t think it’s that
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, anyway, yeah. So Marco could do with a smaller car, but that’s not why Marco’s looking at it. You know why Marco’s excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about the R3? Because the back of it is not a right angle and his little R1 mind is exploding
⏹️ ▶️ John with the possibilities of that styling choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it look, okay. So yeah, so again, the R2 is basically a smaller box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The R3 takes the R2 platform and makes it look more like a giant hatchback.
⏹️ ▶️ John By making one change, which is the back windshield, is it 45 degrees instead of 90?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it looks really cool. I mean, it’s gonna be a long time before I get to see one of these in person, especially since,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the R2 is the one coming out in 2026. They gave no date for the R3. They just said it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after the R2. But it looks fun. It’s still gonna be like, you know, SUV, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they described it as a crossover. So it’s gonna be a large vehicle. But it looks kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like those old, like, 80s little, like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like a Volkswagen Rabbit. Somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco said that at Drive It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Slack that we’re in. Only massively larger. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it’s. But yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a bit bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the size of like an Ioniq 5. Like, that’s the new size for like, or the Honda CR-V.
⏹️ ▶️ John What would previously, in previous generations, be a massive car. These are now the small SUVs. And when you rake
⏹️ ▶️ John the back windshield, it’s like, it looks like a rabbit, only twice as big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and honestly, I think that’s a fun look. Because if you look at modern American,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially sensibilities for cars, I loved the Honda e
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they launched in Europe and I think just discontinued. That actually is significantly smaller than this, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yes, definitely.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why they could. It’s so small, they couldn’t even sell it in the US.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the problem. I thought the Honda e looked so cool. It looked like a cool, like, you know, 70s, 80s throwback,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but new and electric and modern inside. Yeah, agreed. It had like an 80 mile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it was too small for the American market. So they didn’t even launch it here. And I thought that was such a shame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the R3 is probably as close as you can get to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and still have a chance of selling it in the American market, which is not even close size-wise. Well, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s driving one. He’s driving a Volkswagen Golf, which is, you know, it’s not as
⏹️ ▶️ John small as a Rabbit back in the day, but it’s still significantly smaller than the R3. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume. I haven’t looked at numbers, but I believe that to be correct. And yeah, I mean, I think you could make a strong argument
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you start from the rabbit and you diverge one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey path of the family tree goes to my car, and another path of the family tree ends up in an R3. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, despite what you would think, I don’t have any specific love for a hatchback. Like, I think it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I could have gotten a sedan version of my car that ticked all the same boxes, I probably would have rather than the
⏹️ ▶️ John They definitely don’t make that car in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the US. Definitely don’t make that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I disagree strongly. Now that I’ve had hatchback or liftbacks like the Model S,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll never go back to a sedan style again unless it has a liftback like the Model S. No more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular trunk for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is what Europe figured out forever ago, and we’re still trying to learn.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, Europe did it. Their cars were actually small, because they have even narrower roads. I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to say narrower roads than Marca, but narrower normal roads than Marca. Iran does not have normal roads.
⏹️ ▶️ John And short cars getting into parking spots. But there’s those pictures you can find on the internet of the
⏹️ ▶️ John original Mini versus the current Mini. And they have the same problem. Car inflation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Car inflation is everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Yeah, because Minis are now basically little SUVs. They’re not really Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s comical when you see the original one next to it. You either think it’s like one of those little Power Wheels toys
⏹️ ▶️ John for kids, or you think the new one is somehow massively inflated with Photoshop. But no, this is a real picture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if I could somehow import a Honda e. How hard is it to import a car that’s not made for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market? I think it’s pretty hard, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s easy if you’re willing to wait another 23 or 24 years, because I think it’s 25 years, then it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John becomes easy. You should concentrate on building
⏹️ ▶️ John your stock of backup i3s probably. Yeah, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco With the, put them with the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think the R3 looks great. There’s an R3X, which is apparently a performance version, which I haven’t really looked much into,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you say performance and I’m paying attention. I think this looks awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really admire Rivian a lot. I think they’re taking a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of the path that Tesla had trailblazed, but learning from it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing it better from what I can tell and more maturely from what I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still grumbly that car play is not a thing and doesn’t appear that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever will be. And I will forever be grumbly about that. But leaving that aside, these look really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t think that I would want an R2 only because I really like having the third
⏹️ ▶️ Casey row in Aaron’s car. We don’t need it often, but there are times we kind of need it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess need is a strong word, but would really, really, really want it. And so an R2 is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only two row, which is a bit of a bummer. And an R1S is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive, just so expensive that it’s out of our price range. But I mean, I really dig
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these in principle. And I think if we were to look at a car for Aaron tomorrow,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we would probably end up in just a brand new or lightly used XC90. But I would try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hold on for the EX90, which is the electric version of Aaron’s car. That’s coming in a year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two, I think, as well. I would at least try to find an R1S that was maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used enough that it made it affordable for the List family. But I don’t know. There’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of great options here. And I’m really pleased that Rivian seems to be, you know, they’re not resting on their laurels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re making forward progress. Oh, these have NACS instead of CCS, and they’re in the back instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they moved the charge port, and it’s much smaller now, and it doesn’t have the big, annoying swing-up door.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the things I think they’re worried about with these ones, though, is because they’re announcing these two years ahead of time, but the competition
⏹️ ▶️ John has similar size, similar market things like the Volvo. I think the Volvo has their electric,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, their 30 series, XC30 or EX30, or whatever it is. But you can buy that
⏹️ ▶️ John now or very soon. And it is basically the direct competition for the
⏹️ ▶️ John R3. And the R3 doesn’t have a date or a price. And so I think Rivian is a little bit behind the market
⏹️ ▶️ John with these. Their competitors have cars in the same segments
⏹️ ▶️ John at same price points that are also EVs from reputable brands that are doing pretty well. Now, I think Rivian has the
⏹️ ▶️ John edge because I just think Rivian is doing a better job of EVs than, for example, Volvo or Polestar, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s close depending on your tastes. And to have to wait two years while your competitors essentially gain a foothold
⏹️ ▶️ John in this market of 50 grand-ish EVs with decent range and small SUV
⏹️ ▶️ John size has gotta be difficult for Rivian to see, but that’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t do everything at once and it takes a long time to make a new car. So I think it
⏹️ ▶️ John is important for them to get these cars out ASAP. They even said as part of the announcement, we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John release them earlier than we even thought we would. And it’s because I think they’re feeling the pressure of like, get these things out the door
⏹️ ▶️ John because to Marco’s point earlier, yeah, the big R1 is great, but those cars are so expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna sell so many more of the base model R2, and who knows, maybe the R3,