580: Socks in the Knob-Hole
28 Mar 2024John is not a fan of cars, screens, software, or… fans.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco’s recording situation
- Follow-up:
- Image captioning in iOS (via Jim Buell)
- DMA compliance feedback session is live
- Kara Swisher interviews Margrethe Vestager (Overcast link)
- Apple/Meta/Google targeted by EU in DMA non-compliance investigations
- Regarding third-party messaging apps and the DOJ suit
- Artificial tooth monopoly led the DOJ to… Jersey‽
- DOJ lawsuit thoughts from Gavin Laing
- WWDC announced
- People are fed up with useless tech in their cars
- EuroNCAP is doing the Lord’s work
- New CarPlay is Apple’s last hope to crack cars?
- Ask ATP:
- How soon after waking up do we engage with a device? (via Nick)
- What would cause us to go to 128 bit? (via Brian)
- Post-show: John’s battles with Affinity Designer
- Members-only ATP Overtime: The future of Apple ID
Sponsored by:
- Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off with code atp50.
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Chapters
- John’s not a fan
- iOS AI image captioning
- DMA updates
- DOJ updates
- WWDC announced
- Sponsor: Factor (code atp50)
- Car tech is getting worse
- New CarPlay vs. Android Automotive
- #askcortex: Morning screens
- #askatp: From 64 to 128-bit?
- Ending theme
- John vs. vector apps
John’s not a fan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were talking in the pre-show, like the pre-pre-pre-show before we went live, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was asking Marco how things were going, and I noted that he seems to have been out of pocket a lot recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Marco didn’t take offense at that, and he said, well, we got to talk about that. Not in the, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m in trouble, come to the principal’s office way, in the, oh, do I have a story for you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. So how’s it going, bud?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The story’s not that interesting. Uh oh, okay. I’ve been very slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco renovating a new house, moving into the new house. All of the stuff from the old house has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a giant pile of boxes that consumes the entire garage of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new house. Because we sold the old house months ago, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time ago, like in the fall. It’s been a journey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, as of this week, I have spent the first night in the new house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good. Which is a huge step. I’m currently recording from the new house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The first podcast recorded in this house was Under the Radar earlier, I think yesterday.
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t we get the first one when you were in the driveway in a car?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That wasn’t in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was on the property.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It was, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was on the Wi-Fi. It was on the property, but it was not in the house. But no, I’m now coming to you from the new house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the new office, that is not nearly sound dampened enough yet because there’s almost nothing in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ll be doing some isotope processing on the file.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should have taken some of those boxes from the garage, the ones with clothes in them, just dumped them out all over the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have like a moving blanket, a dog, a foldable mattress. Like I have a bunch of other stuff, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soft things absorbing the sound.
⏹️ ▶️ John No offense to Hops, but I don’t think he’s really doing a lot of work there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, he’s, we don’t have doorknobs yet. Um, and so normally there would be a giant hole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the door that would let sound in from outside. So I’ve stuffed a pair of socks
⏹️ ▶️ John If you see socks stuffed in the knob hole, don’t disturb Margo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s, there’s a lot going on here. Um, oh, and most importantly, of course, I wasn’t able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to complete the network wiring, uh, jack installations until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all the painting and stuff was done, which i’m not even sure if it’s done yet. So i haven’t done it yet. So instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i’m running a network cable in the classic way out the window
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the garden, if across the front
⏹️ ▶️ John yard, we know how you love taking it indoor things and putting them outdoors.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Is your king? We know it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outdoors. Oh my God, oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John God, john i’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this your wow so anyway that’s that’s what i’m recording right now i’m recording through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 140th minute cable, going out my window, across my yard, into my garage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to reach the router. With socks in the door hole.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t sound bad actually. That sounds like everything is mostly copacetic. Am I wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, we’re getting there. There’s, I mean, there’s, God, there’s so much to do. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above me in the ceiling, in the middle of the room is just a hole because the fans are like, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re just ordering fans now. So those haven’t gotten installed yet. Like we don’t have any, Like our silverware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is somewhere in the middle of the giant cube of boxes in the garage. So I went to a dollar store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and got like some little flimsy dollar store silverware to eat dinner with. We have no chairs to sit on while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eating dinner, so we’re all just like standing at the counter. It’s very much a kind of an ad hoc situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on here. But we’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve talked about this before, but when did you become, we’ve talked about it in the context of Casey’s thing, but when did you become a
⏹️ ▶️ John fan person, Marco? When did this happen?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ceiling fans, I’ve always been a ceiling fan person. I love ceiling fans.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your past house did not have ceiling fans in every room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it didn’t. And that was, um.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That was a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes. Ceiling fans are awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John And your beach house doesn’t have ceiling fans in every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room, does it? It has them in every bedroom in my office.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, well, you were a secret fan person. I didn’t know it. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ceiling fans are amazing. Because first of all, Casey, they’re quiet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, that’s if you buy ones that aren’t crap and install them less than 10 years ago. And I did both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those things. crap and they were installed 10 by actually like 15 years ago now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to try I mean unless it is actually like rocking which I believe that is not the problem with yours like it rocks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the chain hits the hits the dome and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think so would you like me to go turn it on I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco happy to know please don’t it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John impossible to filter out
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s oscillating enough that the chain is hitting the thing I’m afraid to fall off and hit you in the head
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no that’s more than the family room one or the living room depending on what you want to call it that’s the one that’s oscillating enough that it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to fall down at some point that this one I think it’s just oscillating You need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some new fans, Casey. You can probably just tighten that one. Like, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it should be balanced. Like, is there dust buildup on one of the propeller
⏹️ ▶️ John blades or something? Like, it should be stable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here’s the thing, John. When you live down here in the South, it’s hard to find people that are good at what they do when they work on your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That doesn’t seem like it is. That’s everywhere. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even do it yourself, you just buy one and install it. It’s not rocket science.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me tell you, listeners out there, if for some reason you are tired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of constantly being afraid that you might get laid off, that you might not be able to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a job. Let me tell you, tech is not the right place for you. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to be sure that you will always have a job no matter what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become a plumber. There are no plumbers. Try to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any plumber to come to your house, let alone a good one. Become a plumber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some other similar trade, electrician, like any kind of like locally working trade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will have infinite work I guarantee you you’ll be able to command whatever price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want that job can never be outsourced and will never become AI and will never go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away on the downside poop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah well yeah electricians have a little bit easier job in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that in that way yes but but yeah I’m like it is so hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find trades like to find trades people to come to your house to do work even big jobs were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they stand to make a lot of money Like but they just did you can’t find enough of them like there’s infinite demand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, can can confirm and what’s wrong with ceiling fans John? What is your ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey angst against them?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not a stamp. I don’t say anything wrong I just didn’t know Marco was a fan person fan people are people who need to have fans Blowing
⏹️ ▶️ John on them in most of the rooms in their house I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say need to but I would say need to what a fan does is it it buys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you some headroom From needing like the air conditioning to be colder So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking of headroom fan people tend to be shorter. No offense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How low are your ceilings that you’re gonna hit your head on a fan? My
⏹️ ▶️ John ceilings are very low and in my in-laws house where they are fan people
⏹️ ▶️ John I am forever dodging fans with my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How tall are you? Yeah, John, you’re not 17 feet tall My word, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John tall enough that fans are a threat to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s the average height of an American room like 8 feet? What are we talking about? So my
⏹️ ▶️ John ceilings in this house are not eight feet as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know. And the fans usually hang down by what, about seven or eight inches from the ceiling?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they hang down lower than that, especially if they have the ones with like the little ornate kind of flower,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a swirly little arm with a flowery light thing on the end of them, you know, those things. I don’t think they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John made those in 30 years. Well, I mean, I’m talking about my in-laws house, it’s not brand new stuff. Fair enough. Their
⏹️ ▶️ John fans don’t oscillate at least, but yeah, no. Fan people, I don’t want air blowing on me, I don’t want the sound of
⏹️ ▶️ John a fan. Every time I enter a room in fan houses, I turn them off and then someone comes in and turns them back on. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John constant battle, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco constantly walking through fan houses, your fans,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only fans. Oh wow. Uh, no, first of all, like a ceiling fan on low is usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inaudible and usually having that little bit of air of air movement, if it’s like a hot day outside and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want the air conditioning on, usually I can, if I’m just using the fan, I can wait until the room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like 78 degrees before I really feel like I need the air conditioning on. Whereas if I, if I have no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air movement, it’s more like, you know, 72 degrees. What
⏹️ ▶️ John we had in one of my houses, the last house I was in with my parents, by the way, it
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe doesn’t work in every climate, but it worked pretty well in ours is I think what they call it, like we called it the attic
⏹️ ▶️ John fan. Do you know what I’m talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like a central fan that sucks air into like into the attic from the house. And so it pulled all the air.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly right. And it wasn’t particularly good or fancy or whatever, but it had the same effect that you’re describing
⏹️ ▶️ John where we would just open the windows and turn on the attic fan and you get cool natural air coming in
⏹️ ▶️ John like in the evening or in the morning. And it was great. It It was so much better than the air conditioning, you know, eventually you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to resort to the air conditioning But it was I enjoyed that but that those are those are noisy But the key thing about those
⏹️ ▶️ John is they do not blow air on to you, but that’s what you want That’s called a breeze. That’s not what I want. It’s absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John not what I was a fan people want not what I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I guess I’ve added myself as a fan person, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s me too. Don’t don’t let him shame you or me
⏹️ ▶️ John you I just I did you Marco was a secret fan person. I didn’t know there are dozens of us There
⏹️ ▶️ John are millions of you. Millions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, this is the correct opinion. It’s not fair of me to be the arbiter of what’s right and what’s wrong, but we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe John’s the minority.
⏹️ ▶️ John am. I absolutely am. I understand that the majority of Americans are fan people. My own wife is a fan person. It’s coming from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you live in a fan house then? Is that the problem?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t live in a fan house. I was able to hold the line on that, but she’s absolutely a fan person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So she’s been living this whole time denied of her fans?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, not really, because she has her own fans, they’re just not ceiling fans. But that’s the best kind of fan!
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, I think in our house the ceilings are so low that the fans really would be an issue. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of our ceilings are like seven feet, so do the math on that one, it’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you’ve denied that poor woman not only fans, but air conditioning. You are a monster, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ John She’s not denied air conditioning. She gets her air conditioning. Don’t you worry about that.
iOS AI image captioning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jim Buell writes with regard to image captioning on iOS, and I actually meant to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this up and it completely slipped my mind. I’m glad Jim reminded us of this. Jim writes, regarding image captioning on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS that you spoke about in the last ATP Overtime, I recently noticed that Siri is able to provide a basic description
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of images sent via iMessage. Using AirPods with announced notifications turned on, Siri will say something like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jane sent a photo with a child sitting on the floor playing with a jigsaw puzzle. These descriptions have seemed pretty accurate to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not sure when this debuted, but I started noticing it within the past few weeks. I want to say it’s a little more than a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few weeks. I want to say it was like two to three months maybe, but. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John been a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’ve noticed this as well. And it’s also incredibly nice when you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CarPlay. Because even though I’m not in the car as much as I think I make it out to be, it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unusual for me to receive at least a couple of text messages when I’m driving. And I never look at my phone when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving because I have this magical thing called CarPlay, which Marco used to have and now is forgotten about. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so they’ll do the same thing. You know, CarPlay, their Siri on CarPlay do the same thing where it’ll read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you a vague description of what the picture is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I gotta say it’s not always great, but it’s certainly a heck of a lot better than nothing. Like my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most infuriating moment in CarPlay is, you know, such and such sent you a link to twitter.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lyle Troxell, MPH Useful. Jared Polin, MPH That’s great. And now this message is read, so I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forget to go back to it. And you haven’t told me anything. You can’t read the tweet. You can’t even read the title
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that page. Like it’s useless. It’s so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like do not disturb while driving turned on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no only because of carplay I used to before I had a car with carplay and now with carplay It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t it doesn’t affect me unless I tap on the screen and say I would like to hear this message Pay attention to the road. Don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the messages you’re getting Right. Well, anyways, the point is this is very very cool. And I’m glad that Jim reminded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to bring it up and Again, it ain’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Aaron sent you a picture Sure. Great. Thank you for that. I like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I would love if that if that same AI or or intelligence,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, whatever going to call it, could that be used to improve the way Siri reads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aloud the text messages over AirPods as well, which is probably the same system, because even just not even just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco images, just the way it reads text is often so stupid, like the way it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will stumble through things like phone numbers or package tracking numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll stumble through addresses really weirdly and poorly. It’ll fumble all over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bank alerts that have currency. The way it reads just regular text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs a lot of improvement. This is the kind of thing, as Apple increases its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various use of more advanced AI modeling and stuff across regular feature of iOS, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing I’m looking forward to. Yeah, sure, generate me a picture of a jeep driving into a river, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fun sometimes. But what I really want much more often is like the basics of this kind of stuff to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be better. And so I’m kind of, and that’s like, I’m looking forward to more of that, like the, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the less flashy, more boring improvements to the OS that just kind of make everyday life better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, this image capturing thing, by the way, I’ve had it happen to me as well, but incredibly inconsistently.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what determines when it’s going to do it or when it decides it’s not going to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once it did it the first time, I’m like, oh, this is great. I bet but I’ll be hearing this from now on. Nope, every once in a while it
⏹️ ▶️ John does it, but most of the time it doesn’t and I don’t get it. So hopefully that also gets more consistent.
DMA updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you are super bored and want something to do, you can watch the approximately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nine hours of DMA compliance feedback session, which is now available to anyone, even those who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t sign up for it. And we’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the one thing I’ll say about this is I was watching some of it today. I wanted to confirm the length so
⏹️ ▶️ John I could write the nine hour thing in the show notes here. And so I’m like, okay, well, I’ll just look at it. Will
⏹️ ▶️ John it just tell me the time? No, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John at the top it has like a time, like from 9 a.m. to 1700 hours or whatever, but I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, was that the length of the meeting or is that the length of the video? Like, I’ll just move the scrubber to the end. But this
⏹️ ▶️ John video player that is installed on this webpage is the most infuriating
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I think it is multiple videos, and multiple videos
⏹️ ▶️ John broken up into pieces, right? So even though it’s one continuous scrubber, it’s like segmented,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can’t look at the timestamp to see where you are. So for example, I was playing it here and then I wanted to play it
⏹️ ▶️ John on my phone as I went out to wash dishes or whatever. I’m like, let me just set it to the same place I was. Let me just look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the timestamp. That will not work because on the phone, it plays them with the native player, but it plays
⏹️ ▶️ John them segment wise. So you have to know which segment you’re in and then which offset within that segment. I’ve never seen anything
⏹️ ▶️ John like this in my life. It’s called a timeline. It’s just, it starts at zero and it goes to some amount and you move
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s, oh wow. Just really, really Byzantine. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to watch the thing, it is pretty much as boring as you would think it would be. And probably it’s not that relevant,
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, if you’re a completionist, if you’re a completionist and Apple’s legal
⏹️ ▶️ John woes, it is now available to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Kara Swisher has interviewed Margrethe Vestier, who is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Executive Vice President of the European Commission. She’s been the one that’s been doing a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking and tweeting and whatnot about the DMA and so on and so forth. I do plan to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listen to this. This just broke, I think earlier today, so I didn’t have a chance to listen before we were recorded.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But John Gruber over at Daring Fireball, I don’t know why I introduced him like that, as though we didn’t know who he was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but here we are. Anyways, John has listened to it and has some brief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes on it. And apparently, Margita has confirmed that the EU contacted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple about both the home screen web apps thing and Epic’s account that they took away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then curiously gave back. So here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s me confirming that, because I did listen to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the interview.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, thank you. Yeah, she straight up says like, you know, we were speculating, Oh, it’s probably because the EU contacted them. She just says,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this thing happened. And then we talked to Apple and asked them to change it. And at least those specific two
⏹️ ▶️ John things about the home screen web app thing is a thing we didn’t get a chance to talk about on the show, but it’s not that important, but Apple was doing a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and people were annoyed by it. And the European commission contacted Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and they changed it. And same thing with Africa’s account where we’re like, oh, the EU probably contacted them. That’s why they did it. Yep, she
⏹️ ▶️ John confirms both of those things. In a sort of matter of fact way. And it’s like, we’ve been wondering about that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to hear the confirmation on an interview podcast? Whatever. I mean, more of
⏹️ ▶️ John the mysteries of this process.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Apple, Meta, and Google have been officially targeted by the EU in DMA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noncompliance investigations. This is coverage from The Verge. The European Commission is opening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five noncompliance investigations into how Apple, Google, and Meta are complying with its new Digital
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Markets Act antitrust rules. Quote, we suspect that the suggested solutions put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward by the three companies do not fully comply with the DMA, the EU’s antitrust chief, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Margareta Vestager, I think I have that right, said. And so this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have a little more to say about this, but I find it so delightful, and I know everyone has made this point at least once, maybe twice, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will now make it thrice. It is so delicious that Apple has to just throw stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against the wall and pray that the people in charge like it. Like, oh, the just desserts here, or there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the schadenfreude is just, it’s just chef kiss, it’s so great. I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey here for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they’re really not trying that hard. The EU has issued guidelines, and Apple is welcome to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the work up front to see what will fit, and then submit their work to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco European Commission. And they’ll tell them whether they fit their guidelines or not, but they have to do all the work first.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve already got a much better back and forth because they had that whole feedback session where Apple was allowed to participate.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you imagine having nine hours to talk with App Review about why they rejected your
⏹️ ▶️ John app and to defend why you think it should, that
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is all it’s not just Apple. It’s obviously it’s meta Google and whatever. I continue to think that DMA is poorly
⏹️ ▶️ John written and that if they consulted with people who knew better about the tech industry,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could have said, what do you really want to happen here? Because what you’ve written is not going to cause that to happen. And lo and behold, what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve written has not caused what they wanted to happen. So they had that nine hour feedback session, compliance feedback to basically
⏹️ ▶️ John say, Hey, you out there in the world, do you have a complaint about how any of these companies have complied with
⏹️ ▶️ John the DMA? I think this nine hour one might’ve just been Apple. Right. But anyway, it’s like, do you have complaints about how they complied? And as
⏹️ ▶️ John you imagine, as we discussed at length on past episodes, yes, people have complaints about how Apple is complying.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they had that nine hour session. And in response to that, the European Commission said, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and Meta and Google, we think you’re probably not complying with what we
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote. Which again, isn’t shocking because what they wrote is too vague. And so now they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John investigate whether they are complying and presumably tell them what they need to do to comply.
⏹️ ▶️ John and the specific things that they have complaints about are things that we talked about in the past, but are
⏹️ ▶️ John also things that they could have written more clearly in the DMA.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And I do find it so funny in every sense of the word that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the European Union, it is apparently okay, and I don’t mean that to be snarky, I genuinely didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know this, but it’s apparently okay to just kind of make these hand-wavy rules and just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expect people to understand it and work on it. And that’s very different than my perception,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least, of the way the US works, where everything is extraordinarily specific. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted, I feel like I’m implying that the EU is not doing a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good job. That’s not what I mean. It’s just that it seems like the EU very much wants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these companies to comply with the very clear spirit of the law. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just not a thing here in the States. Like, the law is the law. The spirit of the law doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter. All that matters is what are the words on the paper.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think our laws are also extremely vague, but maybe there’s a little bit more horse trading up front with the powers
⏹️ ▶️ John that be to make sure that everyone agrees before something is passed, what it’s going to take to comply with it, which is helpful,
⏹️ ▶️ John but apparently that didn’t take place here. I just think they, I mean, the things they wrote in, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and all the other companies probably are not in compliance with the letter of the DMA,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the spirit is beyond that. And I really feel like this could have been avoided. It’s easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to comply in these annoying ways when you don’t specifically anticipate these kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of, people call it malicious compliance. It depends on how pessimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to be about the companies. You could just be saying they’re doing what they think they need to do and it’s not actually malicious
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s poorly written, but it could also be malicious. But either way, the
⏹️ ▶️ John DMA could have been written better, but I think there are actual violations of the letter of it. So this is from
⏹️ ▶️ John the EC’s press release, specifically about Apple, a few highlights that are
⏹️ ▶️ John super interesting and really highlight how the ECU could have improved the DMA to avoid the
⏹️ ▶️ John situation. So it’s the commission has opened proceedings against Apple regarding their measures to comply with their obligations to
⏹️ ▶️ John enable end users to easily uninstall any software applications on iOS, easily change the default settings on
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS and prompt users with choice screens, which most effectively and easily allow them to select alternative default
⏹️ ▶️ John service, such as browser search engine or iPhones. If you watch that nine hour, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback session, so much of the feedback is complaining about minute details about the screen where you get to pick
⏹️ ▶️ John what your browser is. And they have the people who are giving me feedback have legitimate complaints.
⏹️ ▶️ John But honestly, this is not this is not the meat of the problem with apples and competitive behavior like
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Like how like, this is not being not being able to choose
⏹️ ▶️ John the default browser. Okay, they should be able to. Let’s not litigate the minutiae of the selection
⏹️ ▶️ John screen for seven hours. That is missing the forest of the trees entirely. I don’t think they’re wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had some good points, but the amount of time dedicated to that blows my mind. The same thing with the noncompliance.
⏹️ ▶️ John These things like changing default settings and the choice screens and uninstalling. And it’s like, well, you made it possible,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not that possible. They’re just so picky about the details of those things. Not important.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the big one. Lurking, like it’s not even one of the major points. It’s like, oh, and by the way, also this. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the final bullet point. Apple’s new fee structure and other terms and conditions for alternative app stores and
⏹️ ▶️ John distribution of apps from the web may be defeating the purpose of its obligations under Article 6.4 of the
⏹️ ▶️ John DMA. That’s the meat of it. That’s what we talked about when we talked about this. Apple has essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John complied in a way that makes alternative app stores, forces alternative app stores to not be
⏹️ ▶️ John more attractive than what Apple already offers. Like by imposing these fees,
⏹️ ▶️ John by saying, it’s gonna be a real pain in your butt and look at these numbers, you’re probably not gonna be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything better than we do, because we’re gonna be still taking a huge amount of your money, and whatever is left, maybe you can get a little bit of money,
⏹️ ▶️ John and basically in the end, you can’t be any better than us. So it’s, oh, it’s competition, but we’ve arranged
⏹️ ▶️ John financial things that make it so that your alternative app store can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John be that much better than ours, and in fact, may actually be worse, and will certainly be way more work
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. Yeah, that may be defeating the purpose of its obligations under blah blah, yeah, you should have written
⏹️ ▶️ John that in, like, oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t ask for all the money from the alternative app stores, making them economically unviable unless you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a spite store like epic, right? And that’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John they spend so much time talking about, oh, it’s not fair that, that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the selection of browsers on the browser choice screen are browsers that
⏹️ ▶️ John have a large number of sales in the current app store. What if someone has a third party browser that’s not in the current app
⏹️ ▶️ John store and yada yada? I’m like, yeah, that’s a valid point. geez, that is not the big one. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that they throw this in there, like, yeah, the whole thing, they don’t say the core technology fee, they don’t say the whole percentage.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the, you know, all the other things we’ve talked about monetarily with alternative app stores and side loading.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t say that specifically, but they vaguely allude to that. And it’s like, oh, yeah, Apple, as a
⏹️ ▶️ John side note, the entire foundation of your DMA compliance may be considered to be non compliant. So get ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But don’t worry, because we’re going to figure out what the conclusion of those proceedings that they opened today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going to figure out those conclusions and let me check my notes. Oh, a year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah. So this is from Six Colors that Jason pulled from an interview with
⏹️ ▶️ John Margarita Vestiaire and in a Reuters interview. This was before this whole noncompliance
⏹️ ▶️ John investigation was announced. And she said, if the new Apple fee structure will de facto not make it
⏹️ ▶️ John in any way attractive to use the benefits of the DMA, that is the kind of thing we’ll be investigating. Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why you should have written the DMA differently. Because If you had asked, hey, is it possible for Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John seemingly comply with this, but just to make it not attractive at all to have
⏹️ ▶️ John an alternative app store, we all would have raised our hands and we, I know, I know how they’re going to do it. They’re just going to ask for money.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, Oh God. Anyway, so yeah, 12 months, uh, think
⏹️ ▶️ John the government moves slowly. We’ll see how this goes. And it’s not just Apple, it’s Apple, Meta and Google and it’s a multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John threads. And so the fact that apparently nobody was able to comply with this to the satisfaction of the EU and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all being investigated, some of that is on the EU and poorly written guidelines.
DOJ updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes to us with regard to the the DOJ suit here in the States and iOS messages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app versus third-party messages app So this anonymous person writes regarding this bit from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DOJ complaint and this is a quote from there Apple prohibits third-party developers from incorporating other important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features into their messaging apps as well For example third-party messaging apps cannot continue operating in the background when the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app is closed which impairs functionality like message delivery confirmation
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about this last episode and we’re like there’s no definition of those words no reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John definition of the words in that sentence that is technically true, right? But the feedback that you’re about
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to says, okay, those words, even though they are just vague
⏹️ ▶️ John and ridiculous, like obviously third-party messaging apps can continue operating in the background just like any iOS app can,
⏹️ ▶️ John subject to constraints, yada, yada, and message delivery confirmation can be done through push notifications. So
⏹️ ▶️ John on its face, that sentence is not true, it makes no sense, but that’s just in the
⏹️ ▶️ John complaint, that’s not the court case, right? So this feedback, and we got multiple pieces of this feedback, I picked one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the most succinct ones, is basically saying, when you read that, what’s under lurking underneath those two sentences
⏹️ ▶️ John is this and this is actually a an issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I didn’t think it was an issue at all. You know, this is why push notifications exist. But no, it’s an issue. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the comments that we got to convince me. So back to this anonymous feedback, I work in a major messaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, and I can provide some more information from an engineering perspective. iMessage is not a single app, but a set of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey processes and services with escalated or reduced privileges. Other apps are forced to be in a single process.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a severe limitation, especially for security and performance. Apple’s quote-unquote blast door,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low privilege process handles all untrusted and high-risk data, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey media attachments in a message. Only iMessage can do that. Competitor messengers are forced to either compromise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey security and performance or compromise on features, for example, support fewer attachment types.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMessage does a lot of processing in the background, specifically to handle incoming messages much better than any of the competitors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can do. You had mentioned APNS on the show, Apple Push Notification Service, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much more to do for each incoming message than just displaying a notification. For example, for the best receiver experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would want to pre-process attachments and send delivery confirmations. This is currently either severely limited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not possible at all for third-party apps. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check the permissions for the Messages app in iOS settings messages. I see three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey items there, while other full featured third party messaging apps request more than a dozen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think this is with regard to like privacy features and you know, oh, can you share your location? Can you share this? Can you share that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, back to anonymous. And did you notice that messages does not ask you for location access? Have you seen a warning that messages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been able to access your entire photo library for the past 10 months? Probably not. I could go on and on. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point is that messaging really is an example of Apple’s anti-competitive behavior. So I was reading this and I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all ready to start arguing in favor of Apple. And maybe because I’m a shill, who knows. But anyways, I really didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think this was a big deal. And as I read more and more into this, and there were a couple other pieces of feedback, like John said, that were very similar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been convinced that, no, this is legitimately kind of gross.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. This is one of the things about the DOJ trial, I tried to emphasize last week, and I’ll reemphasize now that
⏹️ ▶️ John despite, you know, the complaint being kind of book reporty and technically inaccurate and poorly worded
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that other stuff, the complaint is not the court case. Right. And during the court case, whatever they choose
⏹️ ▶️ John to attack Apple for, there is ample examples
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple preferencing its stuff over third-party stuff. It’s easy to find
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff. We could name stuff off the top of their head. The things they picked in the complaint seem weird to us, but even lurking
⏹️ ▶️ John under something as simple as this, where it tries to say that, you know, third-party messaging apps can’t do message
⏹️ ▶️ John delivery confirmation. I’m like, well, that’s not true. They can’t operate in the background. Well, that’s not true, right? But what is true,
⏹️ ▶️ John and what we could have told them, they could have written a sense better is, yeah, of course, Messages has privileges that third party messaging
⏹️ ▶️ John apps do not have. Here is just a list of some of them. There’s even more from the other people who sent the feedback of, look at all the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that Messages can do that we literally can’t do because we’re not allowed to. And what we would say is, yeah, duh, everyone knows
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple privileges its own apps on its operating system, right? Of course, to win this
⏹️ ▶️ John lawsuit, the DOJ has to prove that Apple has monopoly power before they can then go
⏹️ ▶️ John after them for all the many, many things that Apple does to privilege its own apps over third party apps. And you have to sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of show that it is, you know, it doing that is fine if they’re not a monopoly. So they have to say you
⏹️ ▶️ John are you do have monopoly power in whatever market we define. If we successfully prove that it should be so
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to pick however many small things you can pick that Apple does that privilege its stuff over everybody else’s. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John message example is just one. Now, how significant is that privileging? You know, how important is it? What what kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of remedy is required in response to that? Does it address any of the real issues that we’ve talked about in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of competitive app stores and Apple taking cuts of money and everything goes through the store
⏹️ ▶️ John and having control. Like those are much larger issues. This DOJ thing doesn’t even seem to want to tackle.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if if the DOJ is able to prove that Apple has monopoly power, it should be
⏹️ ▶️ John trivially easy for them to find a whole bunch of, quote unquote, little things like this, because we know Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does this all the time. And, you know, again, we see this and we say, yeah, that’s just the way it is. It’s their platform and they get privileges.
⏹️ ▶️ John But some of that stuff, in theory, may be illegal if Apple has monopoly power.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of monopoly power, apparently it is sort of kind of my fault that the DOJ antitrust suit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is happening in New Jersey, because apparently this was a thing with fake teeth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have a couple of those. So. That’s the hell of an intro. Yeah, Virg writes a couple of days ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do artificial teeth have to do with the Department of Justice’s massive lawsuit against Apple? Well, they may be one of the reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the DOJ decided to file its lawsuit in the state of New Jersey instead of, say, Virginia. Hooray. or Washington
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DC like it did for Google and Microsoft. So apparently, William Kovachik,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a former FTC chair, noted that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers the New Jersey District Court,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has, quote, some pretty good law for plaintiffs on monopolization issues, quote. He goes to point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a 2005 decision by the Third Circuit in favor of the government in a case called US
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versus Dent Supply. In that case, the appeals court found that the Denture Manufacturing Company violated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anti-monopoly law by using, quote, exclusive dealing agreements to prevent rivals from getting inputs they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to succeed, quote. Rebecca Hall Allensworth, antitrust professor and associate dean for research
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Vanderbilt Law School notes that the Densply case may prove particularly useful for the government’s argument for Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey market dominance. While she says courts often consider monopoly power to be more in the range of 90% market share, Densply had 75 to 80% market
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share based on revenue and 67% based on units. And then she said, that I’m guessing is at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of why they filed there. For
⏹️ ▶️ John people unfamiliar with our weird US law system, what they’re talking about here is, I think what’s known as forum shopping,
⏹️ ▶️ John or this is probably a similar phrase that I’m forgetting, where basically when you’re going to have a lawsuit, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John choose where you want to file the lawsuit, especially if it’s like a federal lawsuit, they can choose, so they filed in
⏹️ ▶️ John New Jersey. Apple’s not headquartered in New Jersey. The government, you know, the capital of the United States is not New Jersey,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s just, why did they pick New Jersey? This may be why, that you always, That’s why all
⏹️ ▶️ John these patent stuff gets filed in East Texas, because they have judges in that court system that are
⏹️ ▶️ John friendly to stupid patents. So yeah, why is it filed in New Jersey? This
⏹️ ▶️ John probably does not hurt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Then Gavin Lang writes, I am currently a master of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey public policy student interested in the regulation of the technology industry. And I found your conversation in episode 597
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the DOJ lawsuit against Apple very interesting. Senator Bennett of Colorado issued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S.1671, the Digital Platform Commission Act of 2023. Essentially, it would create
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new regulatory body equivalent to the FDA with the authority to regulate tech companies. The stated purpose of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this bill is to address two primary issues, among others, with federal regulation in the tech industry by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allocating significant bureaucratic discretion to the commission. Number one, the tech industry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iterates so quickly that it is impossible for Congress to pass laws quickly enough to keep up adequately with these companies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And two, there is not a culture of highly technical employees in the federal government or in Congress
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to craft policy that appropriately addresses the uniqueness of the tech industry. The commission would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey include a quote-unquote code council, staffed by technical experts, non-profits, academics, and representatives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from companies who own the platforms. This helps to solve many of the issues you noted, such as the federal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey government often having trouble defining what a market is in the industry. To address this concern,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the commission would be required to enter into an MOU, a memorandum of understanding with the FTC and DOJ
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to assist them in enforcing current laws where there is overlap in jurisdiction. I believe the most effective way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the federal government to approach the regulation of the tech industry would be to create a new agency dedicated to creating a comprehensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regulatory regime.
⏹️ ▶️ John Left unsaid here, as I assume in that bill went nowhere. Congress going
⏹️ ▶️ John to Congress. Anyway, this is one bit of feedback I got from the last episode of me saying that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how preferable it is to be able to affirmatively make a law of saying what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think I did mention regulation several times, but maybe I didn’t emphasize it enough. You don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John literally have to pass new laws every time you want something done. One of the things you can do, one of the things Congress
⏹️ ▶️ John can do is pass laws that create regulatory bodies. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the law imbues those regulatory bodies with the power to regulate the industries they control until
⏹️ ▶️ John Republicans get control of the government and tell you that the EPA can’t control people polluting your rivers.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But anyway, setting that aside, we
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have things like
⏹️ ▶️ John the FDA and the EPA that are regulatory bodies who are imbued by laws
⏹️ ▶️ John with the power to regulate the industries that they control. And so every time the FDA determines
⏹️ ▶️ John whether something is safe or unsafe or whatever, makes some new guidelines for poultry or whatever, whatever they’re doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like you have to pass a new law through Congress every time. These regulatory bodies are empowered to do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so they can move much more nimbly and swiftly. The European Commission, from a US perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like a regulatory body, right? They’re not voting on and passing laws in the EU
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way that Congress passes laws that apply to the US. They are a regulatory body that is tasked with regulating
⏹️ ▶️ John commerce, I guess, with European Commission or whatever. Anyway, they’re currently looking at tech sector and they’re passing,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever their system is, I’m sure it’s different than ours, but it looks to us much more like a regulatory body. So it’s not like you have to have individual
⏹️ ▶️ John tailored new laws every time you wanna change something. We can and do make regulatory bodies that regulate
⏹️ ▶️ John all parts of life in the US, with some success, I would say. Things like the FAA, FDA,
⏹️ ▶️ John even the EPA, despite my earlier snark, I think have been shown to be useful
⏹️ ▶️ John and partially successful things within our government. So a bill like this, or
⏹️ ▶️ John even something that expands the, I mean, I wouldn’t expand like the FTC or whatever to cover
⏹️ ▶️ John this. But anyway, all I’m saying is it doesn’t have to be a new law every single time. We can actually have regulatory bodies.
WWDC announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have breaking news as of earlier today. Doo doo doo doo doo doo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC has been announced. I lost a bet with myself. It is actually Marco’s birthday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, which I should have guessed because it always is. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the thing. It usually isn’t. It hasn’t covered my birthday, which is June 11th. It hasn’t covered June 11th for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like seven or eight years. It’s been a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I feel like it always then abutted your birthday, one way or another. Yeah, it’s always the week before. I thought it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be what the second or third or whatever it was that Monday. I don’t have a calendar in front of me. And turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nope, it’s June 10th to 14th, and it’s gonna be just like the last couple of years, a special event on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Monday, June 10th, and you can sign up to get a free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ticket to go to that, which I have done. I honestly don’t know if I will go even if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do get a ticket. I probably would if I got a press pass, but if I get a regular Schmo ticket, I don’t know if I would bother
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s considerable expense, and we’ll see. Marco, did you even know that this was a thing given
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how busy you’ve been? And if so, did you sign up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did indeed sign up. We’ll see what happens. WBDC for me is always fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even though business-wise, I shouldn’t be too excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stuff recently because of all this court stuff and it’s putting a big damper on their image for me as a developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. That’s all true. I also just love their stuff and WBDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is always a really good time for me. It’s always a very motivating time as well. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always am there and I get all jazzed up and all motivated to just go do all the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff for Overcast that I need to do. And so it’s good for that as well. So even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I continue to have conflicting feelings about how Apple treats the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their relationship with developers, I still generally maintain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that’s a problem with a very small number of people at the top. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WWDC is a chance for you to see all the work and interact with all the other people in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company, most of whom have, I would say, healthier views of their relationship with developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s the time when I get to feel really good about what they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and about what I’m doing as a developer on their platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And so, yeah, I mean, I’ve signed up as well. We’ll see what happens. John, I’m sure that you signed up to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leave your house for any reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did. I’ve been trying to go to WDWC ever since there’s been an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John always sign up, every year. What? Haven’t you listened to me? I’ve been so annoyed that I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco been able to go because I’m like, I really want to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to one at Apple Park. I’ve never, well, I have been to Apple Park, but officially
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never been there for an Apple event, let’s say that. And so yeah, I absolutely want to attend WDWC
⏹️ ▶️ John at Apple Park because I have never attended WDWC at Apple Park. I loved going to WDWC in San Francisco. I didn’t like to travel,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I loved going to it. I even mostly liked going to San Jose. wasn’t as good, but
⏹️ ▶️ John still fun. So yeah, I put my hat in the ring to hopefully get a ticket
⏹️ ▶️ John this year, despite missing out. And to be fair to Apple, I was invited to go the year my son
⏹️ ▶️ John graduated from high school. And the reason I remember that is because I had to decline because I had to go to his graduation, didn’t have to, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John chose to go to his graduation rather than attend WOC because they literally overlapped. And it was painful
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to have to say, thank you so much. I invited with a press pass. So thank you so much for the invitation, but I unfortunately have to decline
⏹️ ▶️ John because my son is graduating high school. So I went to my son’s high school graduation and I was never invited to WWDC again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to say? Is that where he-
⏹️ ▶️ John a sophomore in college now, so I don’t know, do the math.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, I don’t want to do that math right now, but I think you and I both got relatively late invites, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is fine, I mean, we’ll take it over no invite. But at that point, I think Michaela still wasn’t vaccinated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so I don’t want to get on a plane and you obviously had a much bigger thing to worry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about than WWDC. And yeah, since then we’ve been ghosted, which is sad, but it’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but anyway, I’m not thinking of getting a press pass. I’m like, I just want like one of the regular lottery things which,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also to be fair to Apple, I was lucky enough to get a lottery driven ticket
⏹️ ▶️ John to WWDC in San Francisco and San Jose, a lot more than should be allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco by chance. So I’m not gonna say that I’ve been deprived, I absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t. But all I’m saying is that I would really like to go to at least one WWDC at Apple Park.
⏹️ ▶️ John So fingers crossed for this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Man, how wild would it be if we do all end up WWDC one way or the other this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’d be pretty cool. So yeah, so we’ll see what happens. Greg Joswiak did tweet, it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be capital A, absolutely capital I, incredible, which I really don’t like reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into these things, but that seems pretty on the nose.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need to read into that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is as upfront as it could possibly be. Yep. And I didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the official WWDC site. I don’t think they make any even
⏹️ ▶️ John faints towards AI stuff, But of course, we all know the rumors have been AI stuff. This is the year of AI. We talked about it in the very first episode
⏹️ ▶️ John of 2024. This is the year Apple sprinkles AI sauce and everything, right? And so here’s Greg Joswiak
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely 100% confirming that this WWDC AI is going to be a big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John case you were wondering if those rumors are true, because sometimes we have these rumors that go on for months and months.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then Apple has to do strategic leaks to undercut them. When there was all these rumors of hardware at
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC, and Apple basically had to say, there’s going to be no hardware at WWDC. to just make sure we all
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t disappointed on the day. Well, this is the opposite of that. They’re saying, AI stuff, it’s coming. So I’m excited
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Car tech is getting worse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going to do a little bit of car-related stuff. This isn’t really neutral. This is technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s car-adjacent or car-jacent technology. You know what I mean. So don’t immediately skip to the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chapter. Give us a chance. You might actually like it. And the first thing we have to talk about is that people are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars. This was from July of 2023,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently, that J.D. Power, which is a, I don’t know, they kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do surveys and stuff of car owners.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like user research and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, The Verge writes, for the first time in 28 years of J.D. Power’s car owner survey, there’s a consecutive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year-over-year decline in satisfaction, with most of the ire directed toward in-car infotainment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The overall satisfaction amongst car owners is 845 on a 1,000-point scale, a decrease
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of two whole points from a year ago and three points lower than in 2021. Only 56% of owners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prefer to use their vehicle’s built-in system to play audio, down from 70% in 2020. Less than half of owners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said they like using their car’s native controls for navigation, voice recognition, or to make phone calls. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I know all the electric car people, hi Marco, are going to come out and be like, oh no, the electric car people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get it, they’re so much better, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, anyway, for all of us regular people with with regular cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can tell you that I have never used an in-car infotainment that was even half as good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as CarPlay. And my Volkswagen’s is pretty good. And I actually really like my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BMWs, even though even when I bought it, it was relatively aged. But that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re just not as good as CarPlay. And so I am not surprised that these auto manufacturers who really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to software, when they try software, I’m not surprised it doesn’t go terribly well.
⏹️ ▶️ John They know what they’re doing when it comes to pinching pennies, though. And I feel like the headline here is not so much that the score
⏹️ ▶️ John was awful or that the people don’t like the native stuff and prefer their phone stuff. The
⏹️ ▶️ John headline is, in 28 years of doing this stupid survey, and I don’t put too much stock in their surveys, but either
⏹️ ▶️ John way, in 28 years, this is the first year-over-year decline, right? And so that shows it’s not just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, it fluctuates from year to year and who cares or whatever. That’s a long run with people generally saying
⏹️ ▶️ John each year they’re a little bit more satisfied because the tech inside their car would get better or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, year over year decline, with most of them signing dissatisfaction with the infotainment,
⏹️ ▶️ John I see that squarely on the automakers of, like you said, Casey, A, not being good at this, but B,
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing as we’ve discussed and we’re about to discuss further, dollar signs when they say, oh, we
⏹️ ▶️ John can get rid of all of these buttons and stuff and just put everything on touchscreens. And yeah, we’re not very good
⏹️ ▶️ John at making touchscreens, but it’ll save us so much money and it’s futuristic, people will love it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the fancy electric cars actually do have native in-car stuff, even though Casey still wishes they had CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re mostly a rounding error, with the exception of Tesla. The Model Y sells in huge numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And maybe that’s trying to bring up the average for everybody else. But I can tell you, outside of Tesla and the
⏹️ ▶️ John other good EV makers, infotainment situation on cars that regular people buy
⏹️ ▶️ John has been getting worse and worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s really no good. And I mean, as much as I snark on Marco and his electric cars, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely admit and concede that the Teslas of the world and the Rivians of the world have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way better infotainment than pretty much anything else that I’ve seen. For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still don’t particularly care for it, and I still would vastly prefer CarPlay. Vastly prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CarPlay. But they are definitely the best of the breed if you’re not considering Android Auto or
⏹️ ▶️ John But they’re also, and a Tesla in particular, is one of the largest vendors for this next item.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So European crash tester Euro NCAP, I mean, I don’t know how to summarize it other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than they’re doing the Lord’s work. So they say that car makers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey must bring back physical controls, or they will pay the price in terms of ratings. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was covered on Ars Technica earlier this month. Matthew Avery, who is the director of strategic development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the Automotive Safety Organization European New Car Assessment Program, or Euro NCAP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says that the overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, amen, with almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vehicle maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, preach, obliging drivers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes. Uh-huh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey New Euro NCAP’s tests due in 2026 will encourage manufacturers to use separate physical controls for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basic functions in an intuitive manner, limiting eyes-off-road time, and therefore promoting safer driving.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Euro NCAP wants to see the physical controls for turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the horn, and any SOS features like the European Union’s e-call feature. Euro NCAP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not a government regulator, so it has no power to mandate the car makers use physical controls for these functions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But a five-star safety score from Euro NCAP is a strong selling point, similar to the IAHS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s coveted top safety pick program here in the US. And it is likely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this pressure will be effective. Just, I’m here for this. I am so
⏹️ ▶️ John here for this. It’s one of the great things about it not being a government regulator. So they’re kind of making
⏹️ ▶️ John these assertions. Like there’s no sort of burden of proof to say, well, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it actually safer to have physical controls versus test controls? How would have you tested to show this is the case
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts of things? And I know that we’ve talked about stories in the past where people have done studies in this to show that it is safer. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, you look at this, you’re like, oh, common sense dictates that. Yeah, you can use a physical control without looking at it much more easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can use touch screen without looking at it, even if things never move in the touch screen, even if they’re always in the same place. You can’t really feel for the
⏹️ ▶️ John location. One of the things that I thought about when considering the story was like, we’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to get out of winter here, although it’s still, I’m still ice on my morning walks with the dog. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, spring is coming. But during the whole winter, in my wife’s car, which has heated seats,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wear gloves in the car, big winter gloves, because my hands are always freezing. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can not only turn the seat heaters heaters to off, low
⏹️ ▶️ John or high for either one of the front seats with my gloves on without looking. I can
⏹️ ▶️ John also tell if they are currently off, low or high for both
⏹️ ▶️ John seats in the dark without looking at them with my winter gloves on, with my big giant winter
⏹️ ▶️ John gloves on. And you know why? Because they both have rocker switches that are level when the thing is off,
⏹️ ▶️ John tilted forward when it’s low and tilted back when it’s high. I can literally feel for that without
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at it ever. I’ve never looked at those switches. Why would I look at them? Because they’re down there. They’re like in front of the stick
⏹️ ▶️ John shift, right? That’s where they are on the central console. So when I look at this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, I don’t have to see your 17 scientific surveys to support your new law that the
⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to use physical controls. When they say physical controls allow drivers
⏹️ ▶️ John to take their eyes off the road less, I look at that and say, yes, that is obviously true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, I’m not saying they shouldn’t study this. They should. The more evidence we have to say, no, We didn’t just assume this is true, we
⏹️ ▶️ John actually tested it. But the common sense in me says, yeah, in my experience, that’s true. Common
⏹️ ▶️ John sense to me says it’s true. My experience using touchscreens, which at this point is vast, says that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true, right? And the fact that they’re not making a law, but they’re just saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John do what you want. But we are a respected organization that rates cars based on their safety. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John have decided as part of our ratings, which are not binding, right? We’re not a government, we’re not forcing
⏹️ ▶️ John you to do anything. You do what you want. But we think that here at Euro NCAP, that if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do this, you’re going to get dinged and you’re not going to get a five star score. And the same thing, we have those same things in the US
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s a thing that is respected, that people look up the crash safety ratings.
⏹️ ▶️ John We also have government things to do that as well. But like the, it’s not legally binding. You don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do what they tell you. We don’t stop you from selling a car if it doesn’t get a five star crash rating. You can still sell it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John know that people are going to look this up and they’re going to see that your car got a three star instead of a five star. And maybe they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John pick a competitor car, which is why, as the story says, even though this is not a law or a government regulatory
⏹️ ▶️ John body, this kind of pressure will likely be effective. Even on US car makers, because they’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make a separate car for Europe with physical controls, and then one for the US with just a touchscreen. They’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make one car to save, again, to save costs. Like, they don’t wanna make two different cars for different jurisdictions. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John will help us in the same way that California’s more stringent emissions laws tend to help all cars
⏹️ ▶️ John in the US, kind of, sorta, depending on how annoying the car maker is about making a California-only model.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I read this and I’m like, you go Euro NCAP because I 100% agree with this. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the reason car makers are doing it is to save money. And I think it’s a terrible decision and I think it is unsafe,
⏹️ ▶️ John but more importantly, it’s annoying. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn’t agree more. It’s just, there are certain things that you should be able to do without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking away from the road. I think adjusting the temperature, turn signals. I could even say that hazards,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could get behind not having to look at in order to use.
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s more like hazards type of thing where maybe the touchscreen is dead because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like an essential, like, you know what I mean? And so I would say you need a physical thing because like, if you had some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of accident or whatever and you gotta turn the hazards on because you’re off the road and your touchscreen is dead, there should be a physical button for that. Not that you need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving. That’s why that’s required in the US. Yeah. But yeah, I think most of these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, most of the things that this, you know, that this European body is requesting are very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable, you know, turn signals, horn, like that all is very reasonable. And I think really the only car, as far as I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has not already complied with that is Tesla’s new steering wheel designs for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of their cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I thought, John, weren’t there some Ferraris that had turn signals on the wheel or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the new Ferraris have a turn. Well, so here’s the thing. I don’t know the details of this, but it says physical controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John The controls on the Ferrari, I think, are capacitive touch, but a lot of the Tesla ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe it’s that stupid thing where the entire thing is a button and where you have your finger on it. You know, we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John it before. Like, the whole thing does move. So I think Teslas might be compliant, but it depends
⏹️ ▶️ John on when they say like physical controls, do they mean it has to be a stock or can it be a stupid button on your steering wheel?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, either way, I think this is mostly currently aimed at Tesla. I mean, I don’t think many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to change their mind on their Ferrari purchase because Euro NCAP does not give it a full safety rating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and a Ferrari, to be clear, does not care what
⏹️ ▶️ John to say about its cars. Because they don’t need to. No one’s cross-shopping the Ferrari and say, but it doesn’t have a five star crash rating.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, yes, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know that I, of the three of us, I’m the only one who drives cars with touch controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco largely. But I think old Tesla, the Model S’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had years ago, and my current Rivian, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think strike a fairly good overall balance of there are stalks and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons for some critical things, and then a lot of other stuff is on the touch screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m fine with that. Like, and I think what, you know, what Euro NCAP is saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is not all touch controls are bad. What they’re saying is there are certain controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are so important to safety and basic operation that they need to be physical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the vehicles I’ve owned have had those controls be physical. And it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I agree that that is a very good balance. And that’s part of the reason why I don’t like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the modern direction Tesla has gone because they’re going a little further, a little too far in that direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my taste. But I think this is not like a massive shift in what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have to do or what they want people to do. I think this is a small course correction that mostly just applies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Tesla and not many other
⏹️ ▶️ John makers. Well, I mean, it’s like the thing we talked about with the, whenever we’re talking about Volkswagen, like that they had a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of generations of cars where they had the climate controls on the touchscreen and their customers
⏹️ ▶️ John complained so much that they’re changing it on all their models going forward. But unfortunately, they just introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole new line of this year’s model year crop of cars that have the old system. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, no, I know you’re annoyed by it, but we totally fixed this. Not these cars, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco time we show
⏹️ ▶️ John you a car. And that stuff is not part of NCAP. They’re not saying you have to have climate controls according to this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John here, right? But customers want that. And so customer feedback is also a way to make this happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it took however many years of VW shipping cars with the climate controls and touch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen. And it’s not that much. It’s only been for the Mark VIII Golfs, as far as I understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s also on like the ID4 and all their other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true, but it’s only been a couple of years. It’s been like one or two.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but the reason they get dinged for it is because they have the benefit of seeing every other car maker
⏹️ ▶️ John do this and get complained about, and they didn’t learn from it. It’s just like, you know, these are recent models, right? And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, climate controls and touchscreen, it’s everywhere. BMW does it on all their new cars. They are not going back
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Like, everybody does it, you know, And it remains to be seen if anyone will complain about that or maybe they won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care because everyone just uses automatic climate control in BMWs, but stuff like that, I think, falls into
⏹️ ▶️ John the category of foolish cost savings or foolish attempt to be
⏹️ ▶️ John futuristic. Like, I mean, the worst one for me is aiming the air in the Teslas with that stupid interface
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve always had. Oh, yeah. Jeez Louise, just let me point a vent. Like, it’s just so much better in every possible
⏹️ ▶️ John way, but you gotta save those two cents on the little, you know, or whatever it is, sense on the little moving vent pieces.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just it drives me bonkers, right? So consumer feedback will give you some of this, but apparently consumer
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback isn’t sufficient to, to like, you know, to fix all the problems rapidly. And this is like, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Margo said, this is for the essential stuff. I don’t know what the details are, but I really do think that
⏹️ ▶️ John things like turn signals being buttons on a steering wheel, then the steering wheel like, you know, turns and
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to kind of like find them. It’s just going to make people either use their blinkers less frequently or less adeptly,
⏹️ ▶️ John or not use them at all like BMW drivers. Because the stock interface to turn signals,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that the stock is always in the same place and doesn’t move and you can just hit it, like that is an amazing interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John The stock interface or turn signals, the traditional one where it stays up when you push it to go to the right and stays down
⏹️ ▶️ John when you push it to go to the left, that stock interface has amazing ergonomics. It’s so easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. It’s so unconscious. It’s so clear what you’re in the process of
⏹️ ▶️ John doing. The little blinking light on the instrument cluster just to show the arrow where it’s like, it’s tried
⏹️ ▶️ John and true for a reason. I would say the same thing, by the way, about round steering wheels, car makers, if you’re listening. Round is a good shape for
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that rotates, just FYI. No one wants to make round steering wheels anymore. Hopefully that will come around, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel that strongly about like flat-bottomed wheels. My Volkswagen’s wheel is a flat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bottom and it’s fine. Like, I’m not saying you’re wrong for the record. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now they’re flat everywhere. Have you seen, Casey, they’re not flat bottom anymore. Like, yours is a circle with a flat bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now they’re all like hexagons or-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, no, no, I know. I think my dad’s Corvette, if I’m not mistaken, has a flat top and a flat
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom. Yeah, it does. And they’re getting even funkier. It’s like, wheels, man, wheels. But the big thing
⏹️ ▶️ John about picking which controls need to be physical and which don’t brings up a thing that I brought up when we were talking about touchscreens
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago. It’s like, OK, why don’t you just put the steering wheel on touchscreen?
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s like, well, that’s ridiculous. Steering wheel on the touchscreen? Aside from all the people who think the cars are going to drive
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves. No one would ever put the steering wheel on touchscreen. But then a few years later, Tesla put the frigging gear selector on the touchscreen,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Well, why not put the steering wheel on the touchscreen? So great. Everyone has their limit. It’s like, OK, I’m with
⏹️ ▶️ John you right up until you put the steering wheel on the touchscreen. I’m like, well, good. So now we know there is a limit. We’re just arguing over where it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think Euro NCAP is going to help move that line back a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sure hope so. I don’t know. Aaron’s car has climate control on the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it is fine, but it is not fun to use. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would much rather be able to have a dial for the temperature and preferably for heated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seats, like a button or a rocker or something like that. Both heated seats and wheel and temperature,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of that is on the touchscreen and I really don’t care for it. And I mean, and I mostly like her infotainment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s pretty good and honestly, the only time we use CarPlay is generally speaking, if I’m driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the car, which is pretty rare. She does occasionally use CarPlay, but very infrequently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she generally just uses the infotainment and leaving aside the fact that it takes a calendar year to start the infotainment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s actually pretty good. But I absolutely am driven bananas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by having the HVAC controls in the touchscreen. I don’t care for it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is so much nicer in my car to just reach down to where the dial,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that where that dial will be, and I just twist the littlest bit. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can feel for it. That’s the important thing. It was people like, oh, but it’s always in the same place as the touchscreen. I know just where it will be. Okay, that helps,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can’t feel for it. Like in the dark or to micro adjust your reach if you just were off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but you know, in defense of these controls on touch screens, I’ve driven the Model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S, I’ve driven the Rivia. Both of those have almost all of the HVAC, if not all of the HVAC stuff, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of them, all of the HVAC stuff is on the touch screen. I did have some issues with the Model S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when that Facebook designer took over and redid their whole design and did things like hide the defroster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside of a menu, but that was later in the ownership of that car. And for the first few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years of owning that car, that was not a problem and it was great. I would caution you not to rule out the concept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it is possible to design a good one. You know, in the sense that like, if for instance, suppose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone hadn’t happened yet and we were all using weird advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versions of BlackBerrys and they put out touch screen things and it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch screen phones just don’t work. And the real problem might be that the touch screen phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we had, that we were accustomed to or that we had been exposed to was not a good touchscreen phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or didn’t have a good touchscreen design.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a bad example, Marco, because we look at our phones when we use them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but this is not a bad example because you can account for a lot of the flaws of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience, like, you know, Casey, your experience with the Volvo one. What you keep saying is it’s poorly designed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s slow, it’s cumbersome. Like those are not inherent flaws of touchscreens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is flaws of that touchscreen system, but it is possible to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good touchscreen controls for many of these things. And in some ways, the trade-offs end up being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. Like for instance, the vent thing that you hate so much, John, where you get to aim the vents on modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Teslas. I didn’t have that on my Model S. I do have that on the Rivian. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are certain advantages. There are certain disadvantages. It’s fine. And a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people with Tesla Model 3s that have that, love them. It’s fine. Many of these differences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just different and there are pluses and minuses, but if you’ve only ever, if you never really lived with one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might still only ever be in the transition learning phase, this thing sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phase, instead of like, I actually am used to this now and I appreciate what’s better about it. Or if you’ve only been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exposed to a bad one, like Casey’s Volvo, like, you know, that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s possible that there’s good ones out there that you just haven’t lived with. As I can say, like, as the only one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us that has actually owned two, actually three, touchscreen cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t hate all these climate controls that are on the touchscreen when it is properly designed. When the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco defroster is always in that one spot and always available, which it is on the Rivian and it was for most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Model S, when they are well-designed, it’s fine. It is totally fine. And there actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are some benefits.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you just highlighted one of the problems with it, which is that you bought the car and it was fine. And then there was a software
⏹️ ▶️ John update that was buried in the menu. And that doesn’t happen with a button. So that’s one downside. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s an upside to that too, which is they can fix things that are annoying later on and they can’t move a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button. And honestly, and as much as that drove me nuts with the Tesla when they did that, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, that was just a bad design. But as much as that drove me nuts, I also did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefit quite a lot from Tesla adding features and making improvements over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time that I owned the vehicle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’re not saying touchscreens are bad and they shouldn’t be in cars. We’re just saying what you put on them. Like again, what we
⏹️ ▶️ John were just talking about was like, we’re talking about HVAC specifically. None of us were talking about like the drive mode selector
⏹️ ▶️ John or the place where you program in your personalized driving thing where you pick the steering feel and the regen and blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, obviously, the touchscreens are great for all of that. We know what their strengths are, right? But even the thing where you’re saying, like, well, you just
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t tried a good one, that is another condemnation of using touchscreens for things like vents
⏹️ ▶️ John because we weren’t in a situation where we didn’t have a tried and true solution that
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody could do. Nobody was confused, for the most part. Most car makers were not
⏹️ ▶️ John confused about how to do a vent that you could point the airflow out. Pretty much all the car makers did a thing and it was competent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Enter touchscreens and now suddenly a thing that we had a solution to on every car from inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ John to expensive. Now it’s chaos and it’s like, nobody knows how to do it anymore. It’s like, wait a second, we do know how to do it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John called a vent and you pointed to people and only the good, expensive car makers know how to do it. You took a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that was a solved problem across the entire industry and you turned it into a thing where, well, you just have to make
⏹️ ▶️ John sure you get the right one, you must’ve just got a bad one. So that’s one damn thing. And the second thing I’m going to say about your phone example
⏹️ ▶️ John and the BlackBerry thing is, like I said, we’re meant to look at our phones. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John when we use our phones, we’re looking at them so much so that the fact that we do have to look at our phones to
⏹️ ▶️ John use them is used as an example of why you should not use your phone while you’re driving. Because when you’re driving, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to look at the road. That’s how much you have to look at the phone. It’s a thing that you look at. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that we’re complaining about for touchscreens and HVAC, that’s not a weakness of the phone because when you go
⏹️ ▶️ John to use it, you’re looking at it. So you don’t have to wonder where the button is. you’re always looking at it. That’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John you use a phone. Whereas how you drive a car is looking out the windshield of the road. And when I want to turn on the seat heaters
⏹️ ▶️ John or figure out if they’re on low or high or whatever, I should be able to do that without taking
⏹️ ▶️ John my eyes off the road at all with winter gloves on, which was if it was a capacitive button or something else, there’s no way I
⏹️ ▶️ John could do that. I could feel through the winter gloves what position the switch is already in and adjust it to
⏹️ ▶️ John the position I want. And I would say seat heaters is a pretty esoteric feature of the car. It’s not like turn signals
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And the fact that we can do that with seat heaters with the amazing technology called switches, that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco want to give
⏹️ ▶️ John up for the hopes that someone can find something, you know, on a touchscreen that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John almost as good, but only if you buy a very expensive, very fancy car. Like I said, touchscreens have huge advantages.
⏹️ ▶️ John They should be used for all the things that are impossible to do with buttons or are way worse with buttons,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there are enough things that that is not the case on. And HVAC, I can, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I would, I’m not going to not buy another car, A new car that has HVAC on the touchscreen. In fact, I’m probably going to have no choice,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s not actually a big deal to me. But for me, if I could choose where to draw the line, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John make HVAC physical, right? But the line that Euro NCAP is drawing is like turn signals,
⏹️ ▶️ John the steering wheel, wipers, like, and I totally agree with that. That stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more essential, like not being able to, having to fiddle to turn on the wipers. Oh, just use automatic
⏹️ ▶️ John wipers that work perfectly. Well, you must not have good ones. The good automatic ones work well. Like, no, wipers are a solved
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Again, it’s a stock, you know, or however you’re going to do it, a twisty thing on the stock or a stock
⏹️ ▶️ John itself. I want to be able to get to the wipers ASAP. I want to be able to know how to adjust them without thinking. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to have to use a touch screen for that. So I’m cheering on your end cap, but HVAC,
⏹️ ▶️ John my preferences for not to be there. Casey doesn’t like his touch screen HVAC, but I am perfectly willing to believe
⏹️ ▶️ John the touch screen HVAC will not, or is not the end of the world and will not drive me completely insane,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll see when I get one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think you might eat those words at some point, but we’ll see. I mean, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do take Marco’s broader point that, you know, a well-done infotainment can be not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that bad, but I don’t know. There are certain things that I’m willing to futz around on a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for and certain things I’m not. And for me, HVAC is one of those things. I do not want to go to a screen for it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doubt that the Rivian screen is way better and works much faster and better and so on and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so forth. But ultimately, particularly when I’m driving, I don’t want to have to look anywhere. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that these buttons don’t move within the screen, but because there’s nothing physical to feel for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will never be 100% sure where these buttons are. And you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John look to check state. That’s why I keep talking about the seat heating buttons. I can check the state of it. Is it already
⏹️ ▶️ John on? Is it already on high? Is it already on low? Is my daughter’s in the passenger seat, is hers on high
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m gonna need to turn it off or she’s gonna complain that she’s getting too hot, right? Like that I can check that with my gloved fingers in the
⏹️ ▶️ John dark without looking.
New CarPlay vs. Android Automotive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so there’s one more piece of automotive-related news.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Gurman wrote, what is this, on my birthday, actually, that Apple’s new CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is the thing where they like take over the instrument cluster and the whole rigmarole, is their last hope to crack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the auto industry. Gurman writes, the concept for the new CarPlay, known as Project Ironheart within Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was to take the system to the next level by fully integrating it into vehicles. It would take over more screens in a car’s instrument
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cluster, as well as features like the radio and air conditioning system. This is a big change from the current CarPlay interface, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more focused on letting you operate Apple services and doesn’t handle most of the car’s controls. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point, we should probably do a quick refresher on what the equivalent system is from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google. So I’m going to start and John just interrupt me when I go off the rails here, but Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a long time has had Android auto, which is their equivalent of CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is how you would mess with, um, your music app or, you know, your podcasting app and so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s how you project your phone onto car screens. So you have a, if you have an Android phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and your car is Android auto, your Android phone can project its screen onto one or more
⏹️ ▶️ John screens in the car. And that’s what CarPlay does. It projects your iPhone screen onto one or more screens in your car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So it may not be exactly one-to-one with CarPlay, but it’s effectively the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, in the last few years, they’ve come out with Android Automotive. This is different than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android Auto that we just described, Android Automotive. And Android Automotive is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know how to appropriately describe it, but it’s the infotainment system that the car is running, irrespective
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of whether or not a phone is connected, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an operating system. Like basically, you can think of it this way, oh, my car runs Linux. Well, just say, oh, my car runs
⏹️ ▶️ John Android Automotive, which is Linux-based, whatever. Like Android Automotive is running on
⏹️ ▶️ John your car. It’s not running on your phone. You don’t have to have a phone at all. You can get in any car that’s running Android Automotive. when
⏹️ ▶️ John you start the thing up and the infotainment screen lights up and lets you pick radio stations and do whatever you’re gonna do,
⏹️ ▶️ John the operating system that those screens are projecting from is Android Automotive and it is running on the
⏹️ ▶️ John car. It is not related to your phone at all. You can have Android Automotive in your car, and many manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John do, and Android Automotive cars can support CarPlay and Android Auto,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So the operating system of the car, Android, not the whole car, but just the infotainment thing, is Android Automotive,
⏹️ ▶️ John and And that supports CarPlay. When you say, oh, I really wish they would add CarPlay support to my car. Chances
⏹️ ▶️ John are good that your car is running Android Automotive and when you say you want them to add CarPlay support, you want them to add CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ John support to the Android Automotive operating system that is running on your car. Because that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John your car is able to project itself onto the screens in your car, because the OS that your car is running, which is Android Automotive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, and actually my parents just got a new Volvo and their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Volvo has Android Automotive as the infotainment system. And I’ve used it for literally 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds. But that being said, it was so much faster and nicer than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our, what is it, like almost 10-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old Volvo at this point. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was so much more responsive and so much nicer. But again, that was only 30 seconds of use. I might have a different opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over time. But my understanding from those who have used Android Automotive, like our friend Jelly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a Polestar sedan. I forget which one that is, the Polestar 2, I think. And Jelly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has had very complimentary things to say about Android Automotive as well. So anyway, coming back to Mark
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gurman. Polestar, there you go. Porsche, BMW, excuse me, Porsche, BMW, Volkswagen, Ford,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lucid, Stellantis, which is, you know, Chrysler, et cetera. And General Motors now offer cars with the Android Automotive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operating system built in. After just seven years, Android Automotive is the market leader with an estimated 35%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the car operating system market. The new CarPlay is a response to that. Apple hopes it can win over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users and automakers with a slicker interface and greater customization. There’s one big difference though, the new CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still runs on the phone and isn’t a new OS embedded in the vehicle.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we need to stop right here. This is not a place where a German’s analysis as usual makes me just my head
⏹️ ▶️ John spin. Like how in the world is the new CarPlay a response to an operating system that runs on the car?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the difference is it’s not an operating system that runs in the car. It’s, I mean, it’s not the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I’m saying is the new CarPlay, the one that projects itself on all the different screens, still runs
⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone. You still need an iPhone and needs to be in the car and needs to be connected either wired or wirelessly
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the new CarPlay experience. Which means that all of these cars need to have
⏹️ ▶️ John some operating system that runs them when you don’t have a phone, because you need to be able to get into them and drive without an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John or without any phone, like the car should work, right? So is it a response? Maybe you can say yes, because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple thinks this is the way it should work. But the bottom line is that this new CarPlay does
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely nothing to stop car manufacturers from using Android automotive, because how the heck are
⏹️ ▶️ John you gonna do this new CarPlay without some kind of operating system on the car? And the car needs to have, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, a speedometer and stuff when you’re not in it with your iPhone. So I object
⏹️ ▶️ John to this entire paragraph, but I kind of get what he’s trying to say, but pick different words.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so coming back to German, Apple explored turning the new CarPlay into a full operating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system that runs on cars directly, but the approach would have worked best with Apple-designed chips and other proprietary technologies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like displays. It wasn’t seen as practical to install that in cars. Another pause,
⏹️ ▶️ John another pause now. So I get what he’s saying here too, but I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say that the counter example, the Apple counter example is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV, right? They sell a little hockey puck with Apple Silicon in it that will run
⏹️ ▶️ John tvOS and it will do Apple TV plus, you know, and a bunch of other apps and stuff too.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also you can buy a TV and watch Apple TV plus on it. And there’s no Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John in that TV. It’s some garbagy media tech chip, right? Like when it comes to it,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can get its software onto non-Apple Silicon with
⏹️ ▶️ John much worse processors and these weird things they have to deal with all these different manufacturers, but when it’s important,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do it. And it’s important to get more people to watch and pay for Apple TV+. So now every time
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy a TV, it’s got Netflix built in, it’s got Apple TV+, built in, it’s got all these things built in. And that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon in there. And there’s no Apple proprietary hardware in there making
⏹️ ▶️ John that happen. It is just plain, oh, the smart TVs are essentially little computers, by the way, a lot of them
⏹️ ▶️ John are on Android, and Apple wants to be everywhere, so it makes sure that it writes a little Apple TV Plus
⏹️ ▶️ John app that works there. So I understand why Apple would prefer that all
⏹️ ▶️ John these cars have Apple Silicon in them to give really good experience, and I would imagine that the iPhone that people
⏹️ ▶️ John are projecting from is significantly more powerful and better tuned to iOS than any car is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be. But when it’s important, if you actually want to be everywhere in the market, like they did
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple TV+, it’s a thing that Apple is actually willing to do sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I take your point, but I don’t think it’s apples to apples. Like in the case of an infotainment system, it would still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably, particularly for gauges, need to be a real-time OS, which has very specific
⏹️ ▶️ John think any gauges are real-time OS. Do you think the gauges are run by real-time OS? I think they have to be. I mean, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly not in CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the thing is that, well, oh, you mean in the new CarPlay. Yeah, that’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John point. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new car point. Yeah, I don’t know. But I think if you were the car manufacturer and Apple comes to you and says, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll take over the gauge cluster for you, I would say, look, you need to have something that’s reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s real time, in every definition of the word.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the gauge cluster in Marco’s Rivian is real time OS. I don’t think the gauge cluster in any car,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, every car has an LCD gauge cluster now. I don’t think there’s a real time OS running that. I think that is just the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John It can crash at any time. It’s not a big deal thing that is running the infotainment. It’s basically Android. Android Automotive is
⏹️ ▶️ John running those instrument clusters, and it’s not real time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Didn’t we get some feedback a few months back that they had to be real time in the US?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, again, I don’t know the details, but my guess would be that’s not what they’re currently doing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple doing it with the iPhone thing, Apple hasn’t announced anything related to that. So we can, I actually
⏹️ ▶️ John had this discussion recently with somebody about Apple Vision Pro and the R1 chip, we’ve talked about before, about is it running a real
⏹️ ▶️ John time OS or is it not? And still, no one from Apple has officially down from on
⏹️ ▶️ John high and given a secret anonymous feedback to let us know definitively what is or isn’t real time. There’s supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John some real time subsystem that’s happening somewhere in iOS, but iOS itself is not a real time operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know. But anyway, I a lot of the stuff like you don’t bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John line is, if your instrument cluster goes black, the car continues to work. Yeah, it’s bad that you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see the speedometer and all that other stuff. And it shouldn’t be that way permanently. But it’s not as essential as like the steer
⏹️ ▶️ John by wire system, right or your brakes, the brake by wire systems, you You know what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean? Yeah, that’s a good point. And I guess what I was eventually driving at was if I was Apple and I was building a car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Project Titan and I built a real-time OS, I probably would have built that real-time OS against some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of Apple Silicon. And it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t particularly want to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey build that same OS against a different kind of Silicon. And it’s not impossible, I would assume, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t want to. And so that’s kind of how they back themselves into this corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s another thing I don’t know. Does Android Automotive have a real-time kernel or the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to run real-time processes for its instrument cluster stuff? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. And I don’t think I’d be able to figure that out without having to give future Marco a whole bunch of work. We’ll presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get some feedback. Maybe Sam at WellSummit is still listening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it would be interesting, but like this whole thing, to clarify technically, if people know when we say real-time
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system, what does that mean or whatever? It’s basically like, if you think about, the example from my childhood is
⏹️ ▶️ John operating systems that would run on space probes, right? And the thing that distinguishes them is that
⏹️ ▶️ John when you set something up and you say this program runs and does this thing, it always does things
⏹️ ▶️ John according to guaranteed deadlines. So there’s no scenario in which some operation
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s supposed to get done at the very latest by this particular time, will occasionally take a little bit longer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And how could that happen? Well, for example, say your program’s running along and all of a sudden some other process starts
⏹️ ▶️ John and it allocates a bunch of memory. And then when some instruction goes in your program, your thing is supposed to be done already, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oops, this page was swapped out and now I got to pull it back in from swap. So this operation
⏹️ ▶️ John took twice as long as it normally does. Sorry about that. Now you just missed your deadline. Real-time operating systems for
⏹️ ▶️ John things like space probes or whatever, like if they miss their deadline for anything, like it’s a complete failure,
⏹️ ▶️ John like absolutely 100% complete failure. It’s not like oopsie or whatever. That’s not how our computers work now. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John do something like run a benchmark and then you like start up some other program and start rendering
⏹️ ▶️ John in the background, your benchmark score will go down because your other process is taking resources from it. Real-time operating
⏹️ ▶️ John systems allow processes to reserve essentially, I am always going to get these resources. My things are always
⏹️ ▶️ John going to happen on this time schedule, guaranteed by the operating system. There’s nothing anything else on this
⏹️ ▶️ John system can do to make it so that I don’t hit my deadlines. That is important for things
⏹️ ▶️ John like space probes that are going, you know, hundreds of thousands of miles an hour or whatever, and they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John make split second decisions. You can’t have a situation in which like, oops, some other process ran and your thing ran
⏹️ ▶️ John a little slower. Now you missed your deadline. As you can imagine, that’s not important
⏹️ ▶️ John for phones, computers, all these systems that we have where yeah, you know if you run two things, you,
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing will go slower than if you’re running it by itself, right? That’s why we say if you’re running benchmarks, make sure you don’t have other processes running,
⏹️ ▶️ John make sure Time Machine isn’t running in the background, because the things we do with our computers do not get reserved,
⏹️ ▶️ John unperturbable, guaranteed resources with deadlines on all of them. That’s not the way we want
⏹️ ▶️ John our computers to work. But if you have something that’s supposed to control like a machine hurtling down
⏹️ ▶️ John the road that could kill somebody, it’s a good idea to have some part of that system,
⏹️ ▶️ John be if it’s running software, be real time such that you’re never surprised by like
⏹️ ▶️ John something taking twice as long as expected or some other process spinning up and making your thing slower and
⏹️ ▶️ John delaying something. And so that’s what we mean when we need real time operating system. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ John page, which there are other various more vague definitions of it, but this is what we’re talking about. Things happen on a guaranteed
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Resources are guaranteed. And nothing else that happens on the system can perturb those. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is totally inappropriate for the thing that lets you play podcasts over Bluetooth in your car.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So that’s not going to be a real-time operating system. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John not essential functionality. Speedometers, is that essential? It would be useful, because if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want it to be as real-time as a physical speedometer used to be in the really old days. But in the end, the car
⏹️ ▶️ John still works without it. But when we say drive-by-wire and brake-by-wire, what we mean Lots of modern cars
⏹️ ▶️ John have a brake pedal that is not physically connected in any way to the braking system It’s just basically
⏹️ ▶️ John like an electronic switch that sends a signal to a computer that actuates the braking system And they have steer-by-wire
⏹️ ▶️ John systems where your steering wheel is not connected to the front wheels physically but instead is just connected to a thing that senses
⏹️ ▶️ John its position and then activates a bunch of electronic motors and Those those probably don’t even run an operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system at all really it’s because it’s probably just embedded systems or whatever but if there was any kind of Involvement
⏹️ ▶️ John of any operating system or a kernel involved in those systems It’s probably a real-time operating system because
⏹️ ▶️ John you want pretty hard guarantees that when you turn the wheel under some very
⏹️ ▶️ John controlled deadline The wheels of your car will also react in turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real-time follow-up from hairline one in the chat Apparently Android Auto is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real-time in they had the hairline one provided a page where there’s a compare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and contrast between between QNX, which is the kind of de facto standard real-time OS that’s used in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most cars, versus Android Auto. And that’s one of the cons for Android Automotive is that it’s not real-time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then as I was clicking around looking at QNX a little bit, it was written by two different people, Dan Dodge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Gordon Bell. And apparently, Dan Dodge, as per Wikipedia, announced his retirement from QNX
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2015. And then in mid to late 2016, it was reported that he joined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple to work on the Project Titan thing, which I did not know. So there you go. I wonder what he’s doing now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so just to finish out this never-ending topic on CarPlay, Mark
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gurman writes, the limited rollout of the new version of CarPlay is focused on very high-end cars. In fact, the only model confirmed to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting the new CarPlay is the Aston Martin DB12, which costs roughly $245,000 and up. Porsche hasn’t said which model or models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are getting the feature. Gurman says, I’m told that Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no plan in place to make money from the new software, as with the current version of CarPlay. The company isn’t looking to charge users for it or force
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car manufacturers to pay to install it. Just for the record, Apple, if you are listening, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would like to send me a DB12 to test for a little while, I am happy to do that at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no cost to you. And I will happily feature that car and that experience on a full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode of this podcast. I promise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John They won’t give you a press pass to any of their events, but they’ll send you a $245,000 car. That’s right. That makes sense. I’m here for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve waited. They knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was coming. They knew I needed to build up the credit, so to speak, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could get this. This is my moment. This is my time to shine. Please send me the DB12 whenever you’re ready.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and not to drag this back down into the regulatory stuff, but there is a bunch of stuff in the DOJ complaint about the
⏹️ ▶️ John potential threat of Apple extending its monopoly power to take over the car industry. And I hope you’ve seen as we’ve gone through
⏹️ ▶️ John the landscape and what Apple is currently doing, that I don’t think Android Automotive has much to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John from CarPlay at this moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think so either.
#askcortex: Morning screens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should probably do some Ask ATP, and we’re gonna start that right now with a question from Ask Cortex,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode 153. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can steal whatever we want from other podcasts, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s part of the community of podcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are a melting pot. Stolen from Ask Cortex, number 153, Nick writes, how soon after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey waking up do you begin actively engaging with your phone or another screen? I don’t wanna answer this question, so Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will give the answer that we all do because we’re all being honest, we all know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I interact with my phone pretty much immediately after waking up.
⏹️ ▶️ John It says actively engaging, so I’m gonna say that, clarifying this question, I’m gonna say turning off your alarm does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well, okay, so most days I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit snooze you know, once or twice, then get up. But when I go into the bathroom to like brush my teeth and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bring my phone with me.
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta brush his little phone teeth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually I am reading, you know, I’m like doing my initial phone triage of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check the email, all that stuff. Usually I’m doing that while brushing my teeth.
⏹️ ▶️ John But wait a second, this is actually related. You wake up and immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Am I doing this wrong? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I brush mine after breakfast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Correct. That is the correct answer. Now, using a communal cup to rinse is not the correct answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but brushing your teeth after breakfast is the correct answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, see, now we’re going to hear from all the dentists, but like, Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what I read forever ago somewhere, you know, which is not a very credible information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco source is that you don’t want all of the, like, crap in your mouth from overnight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want to like consume that. So the idea is brush and get it out of your mouth as soon as you can when you
⏹️ ▶️ John you said something different than I thought you were going to say. No, I have never heard that. I also don’t think that’s a thing. But you know, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John harm in brushing before as long as you also brush after breakfast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. That’s fair. I will allow that. For me, I wake up and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking, this has been the case for most of my life, if I open my eyes, even just to look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a clock, I will be, if it’s after like, or if it’s within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an hour of when I normally need to wake up, the moment I open my eyes, that’s it for the day, I’m up. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s generally speaking the way it works. And so if I open my eyes, I maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will wait 15 seconds before I grab my phone and start screwing around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. But yeah, it’s pretty much instant. I don’t use an alarm pretty much ever because Erin gets out of bed before me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even though she is effectively a ninja when she gets out of bed, I am a light sleeper, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it gets to morning time. And so by her getting out of bed before me, it wakes me up and yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, from in the time it takes her to walk from the bed to the bathroom, and I assure you our house is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that large, I have already grabbed my phone and started looking at something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does she use an alarm?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She does, although more often than not, she’ll wake up before the alarm by a little bit. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she’ll have silenced it before it goes off. But again, just her getting out of bed will wake me up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if her alarm doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I’m the only one out here holding strong against the
⏹️ ▶️ John irresistible draw of the phone. So like both of you, apparently, my phone is reachable
⏹️ ▶️ John from my bed. It’s on my nightstand where it charges. I don’t use it as my alarm clock. I have a
⏹️ ▶️ John super crappy ancient clock radio, Sony digital clock radio thing that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it the square white one that we all had in the 90s?
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s a, it’s a, you would be a familiar model. It’s, it’s not great, but I’ve had it forever. I think what I should probably
⏹️ ▶️ John just do is record that, I hate all the phone alarms. Like I, the only time I use my phone is when
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m traveling and I have like PTSD from it, like waking me up at like 5 a.m. to get a line on WNBC.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I, and all the ring, all the, all the alarm tones that I use just give me bad memories of travel
⏹️ ▶️ John stress. And that’s just a me thing. Anyway, so I have my clock radio. I do set an alarm on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John My routine on weekdays is very well defined.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes I wake up before my alarm, sometimes I don’t or whatever. But anyway, I get out of bed,
⏹️ ▶️ John I pick up my phone and I put it in my pocket. I take my AirPods and put them in my pocket too.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I eventually make my way downstairs and put my phone and my AirPods in the downstairs location,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like on a little sideboard table or whatever. And I do my morning routine,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has involved various times and still does involve getting my kids ready for
⏹️ ▶️ John school and currently involves driving my daughter to school and dropping her off at school.
⏹️ ▶️ John That whole morning routine happens and I literally do not look at my phone. I don’t even look to see if there are notifications
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. What? Because remember, I put it in my pocket, I put it on the sideboard, put everything downstairs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s how we know John doesn’t run servers. A,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t really want servers, but B, if they’re like, if my phone made a noise or like
⏹️ ▶️ John vibrated with the notification, I would probably look at it. My notifications are so
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I have so few of them. That’s probably not going to happen unless like,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless literally somebody calls me. I guess if I got a text message, my phone would vibrate. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m like, I have text messages notifications on, but I get so few text messages, right? But in the absence of any
⏹️ ▶️ John surprising thing, my phone screen goes unlooked at, I guess until essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, it used to be until I would get in the car to like drive kids, but now my kids don’t let me play my music in the car anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do take my phone and stick it to the MagSafe mount, but it’s not doing anything there except for like trickle
⏹️ ▶️ John charging, right? So I bring my phone with me in case like, again, to an accident, I need to call somebody or whatever. Like when I
⏹️ ▶️ John leave the house, I have my phone, but still I have not actively engaged with the screen. only when I get back
⏹️ ▶️ John after the morning has been done, everybody’s off to where they need to go and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m back in the house, that is when I sit down and look at my phone screen, usually when I’m eating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is bananas to me. I thought it was bananas enough that Snell keeps his, well, I say that as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though it’s bad. I thought it was unusual that Snell charges his phone in a different room. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not bad, it’s actually probably healthy, but it’s unusual. But for you not to even look at it until you’ve made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an entire school run, That is,
⏹️ ▶️ John wow. Yeah, because at this point I’m waking up 7ish, 7.30, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m back at the house after dropping my daughter off at a little bit after 9. So my first active engagement
⏹️ ▶️ John with the phone screen every day is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, it takes you an hour and a half to drop her off? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not how long it takes. That’s when I wake up versus when I drop her off. Well, what are you doing then?
⏹️ ▶️ John Go downstairs, clean up whatever mess was in the kitchen, make her lunch, make sure she’s awake,
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with whatever last minute emergencies there are related to school stuff, like things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing is, because this is, this is specifically asked about my phone screen, it didn’t answer, ask
⏹️ ▶️ John about my Mac screen. And if I managed to get everything ready and I’m waiting for her to finish getting ready, I may go
⏹️ ▶️ John in and look at what’s happening on my Mac and look at my email on my Mac screen for two minutes. Usually I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have that kind of time, but because I’m usually trying to chase her out of the house because she’s not a morning person.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if I do have time, that’s what I go to. my phone, my phone screen does not get looked
⏹️ ▶️ John at until I’m back at the house and I’m about to eat breakfast. And even then, like I’ll put the phone on the table
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I’ll get my breakfast, get all my stuff out or whatever. And like, as I’m, you know, eating breakfast, I’m putting the food
⏹️ ▶️ John into my mouth, then I’m unlocking my phone and probably going to mastodon. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my God. Good for you. I mean, I, I, I’m poking fun a little bit, but good for you. That’s probably, um, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would argue that as a much healthier relationship than I have. So, credit to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the thing is, I’m also not a morning person. So if I woke up a half an hour earlier, I could stare at my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone for a half an hour in bed, but I’d rather be asleep. So I get up when I have to, to
⏹️ ▶️ John do the things I have to do in the morning, which involves, used to be hurting two people, now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just hurting one person. But, like I said, depending on what kind of disaster is in the kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ John from the night before that didn’t get cleaned up, I’m dealing with that, emptying the dishwasher, doing all that stuff in the morning, making my daughter
⏹️ ▶️ John breakfast, if that’s what she wants me to do at that time, figuring out if she does want me to make her breakfast. You know, there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of child serving going on. Once all my kids are off at college, maybe this routine will change and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll stare at my phone in the bed like a normal person, but right now it’s not happening. And then on
⏹️ ▶️ John I try to sleep on weekends because I don’t have to do anything in the morning if I’m lucky. And in weekends,
⏹️ ▶️ John I will, if I’m able actually to sleep in, I will grab my phone and look at it in bed before I get out of bed.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the luxury of the weekend that I don’t have to go and deal with anything. If I’m lucky, if that happens to be that day, I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to drive someone somewhere to do something. I will look at it for a few minutes before I get out of bed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, I’ve learned a lot tonight.
#askatp: From 64 to 128-bit?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Brian asks, you mentioned on a recent episode that we’ll probably not upgrade to 128-bit in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our lifetime. What would be the impetus for going from 64-bit to 128-bit? Wasn’t this about memory in 8 to 16 to 32 to 64? Wasn’t it about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey addressable memory? Well, sort of, yeah. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this came up like, I was talking about how like, it came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up like, why did mobile phone software age out? Like, the early mobile phone software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aged out of being able to run so quickly compared to early computer software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one of the things I said was like, well, we did a bunch of transitions over the last few years, like 32 to 64-bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we probably won’t have to do that again in our lifetime for that particular one. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why is, I mean, obviously, like there’s not every value that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processors deal with is 64-bits these days. There’s all sorts of different ways that processors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can deal with larger numbers or larger, you you know, wider data paths than this. But 64-bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of like, when usually we’re referring to whether a processor is 32-bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 64-bit, usually we are referring to the size of the like kind of regular integer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type as well as the memory address. So like when you’re referring to an address in memory, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually like the size of the pointer that refers to the memory addresses. And so all sorts of, you know, software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, details and tricks rely on these sizes and everything. So it’s fairly important to have software is compiled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how it’s made and everything else. And of course, it implies limits of how much memory you can address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that. And the reason why we are unlikely to make that jump again in our lifetime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go from 64 bit to 128 bit on that kind of level is do the math.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See what kind of numbers you are dealing with when you compare 2 to the 64th
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 2 to the 128th. And I think what you will find is that all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those doublings that are happening with every single one of those bits really add up. And so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of resources that we would be talking about, that would be, that would require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over 64 bits of address space. I don’t have the tool, I don’t have the number in front of me right at the second. I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look it up while John explains why I’m wrong, but it’s a large amount of memory, a very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large amount of memory.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you’re not, you’re not wrong, but the more important comparison is a 32 bit. Two 2 to
⏹️ ▶️ John the 32nd is a tractable number. It’s like 4 billion. You can think of all sorts of real world problems
⏹️ ▶️ John where being able to count up to 4 billion is a limiting factor. It’s like, especially if it’s a signed thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s negative 2 billion to positive 2 billion or whatever. Like, okay, well, there’s more than 4 billion people
⏹️ ▶️ John on earth, right? So there’s one, right? There’s more than 4
⏹️ ▶️ John billion computers on earth, right? So if you had to assign addresses to them, so we have IPv4
⏹️ ▶️ John versus IPv6, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in storage space, it’s 4 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, for, you know, 2 to the 32nd, there’s lots of real world problems
⏹️ ▶️ John where we need to count higher than that. 2 to the 64th, on the other hand, I believe is enough to give like a memory
⏹️ ▶️ John address to every grain of sand on the planet or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that. Like it’s really big,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a really big number, right? And so practically speaking, yes, of course you can use floating point numbers to count higher
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but practically speaking, we’re ever gonna need to address more than 2 to the 32nd bits of RAM?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we already do, right? That’s why we have 64 bit. Are we ever gonna need to address more than two to the
⏹️ ▶️ John 64th bits of RAM? Maybe someday, but not anytime soon. Let me tell you, because that’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM, right? This is a tremendous, it’s so much RAM in fact, that yes, even though 64-bit processors have
⏹️ ▶️ John 64-bit integers and 64-bit pointers, quote unquote, if you look at the hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John almost all of it doesn’t use all 64 bits for the hardware addressing, because they’re like, come on,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much RAM is ever gonna be in your phone? They will not use all those address lines in the hardware sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John They will save a lot of money by only using like 40 address lines, you know, from 32
⏹️ ▶️ John up to 40, like again, those doublings add up real fast. There’s no reason to put
⏹️ ▶️ John enough address lines and like even operating systems will just like ignore the top end bits of pointers
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, just ignore those pointers. No one’s ever gonna have that amount of RAM because you know, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe someday, but two to the 64th is huge, right? So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why even though Nintendo 64 came out and said, it’s better because it’s 64. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t worry, next year there’ll be Nintendo 128. No, there won’t. I mean, they can call it that, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no reason to do that. There’s no benefit to that. There’s tremendous cost. And there
⏹️ ▶️ John are no sort of real world problems that we’re tackling these days that require more than 2 to
⏹️ ▶️ John the 64th of anything. 2 to the 64th bits of RAM, 2 to the 64th things that we’re counting. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John floating point exists, setting aside the gaps in the numbers or whatever. So someday, yeah, we’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John there, but not in our lifetime, except for in very special applications. And there are some supercomputer
⏹️ ▶️ John persons that are gonna say, oh, we use a 512-bit interface because it’s really important for, yeah. There are specialist
⏹️ ▶️ John applications, but for your phone, for your personal computer, there is lots of cost and currently
⏹️ ▶️ John zero benefit to going to 128-bit. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, thank you to our sponsor this week, Factor, and thank you to our members who support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. Our new member perk is called ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime. This is an extra segment that we do for members exclusive. This week’s Overtime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is on the future of Apple IDs. In particular, Apple ID was recently rumored to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be rebranded to the Apple account in the near future. And so we’re gonna talk about that in this week’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP Overtime. Thank you so much once again for the members who support us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to begin Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John didn’t do any research,
⏹️ ▶️ John Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, oh it’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accidental, tech podcast so long.
John vs. vector apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I hear you’ve been having some troubles with software these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing I have with, uh, graphics programs in particular, I guess the only time I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John ever really felt satisfied that I didn’t have the problem of how to describe this probably
⏹️ ▶️ John when some college course that I was taking where I think don’t quote me on this, but I think I was using AutoCAD.
⏹️ ▶️ John People who know CAD programs probably know when I describe it. But anyway, this it was a CAD program.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was for some computer-aided design thing where you could design something. I forget if there was no 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John printers then. I forget how we were manufacturing stuff. But it was basically just how to design physical things in a way that they could be manufactured.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And the CAD program, you know, it had palettes
⏹️ ▶️ John and tools and a mouse cursor and the same thing, you know, all the stuff you used to but it also had a command line.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the things you do with tools you could also do from the command line. And I feel like that was the only time
⏹️ ▶️ John I really felt like I could make the program always do what I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted And maybe it’ll make sense when I describe what I was trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do with this graphics program but the command-line thing was very useful, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I use affinity designer as my vector drawing program to do most of the artwork for
⏹️ ▶️ John the t-shirts that we sell Stay tuned for our WWDC sale coming up sometime in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John future. And it’s a vector program like Illustrator where you’re not laying
⏹️ ▶️ John out pixels on a big grid you are defining these vectors mathematically and then so it’s resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John independent so you can make it any size you want. And when you’re doing stuff like that because you’re not laying down
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of pixels and everything needs to be mathematically defined these tools usually have
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting let’s say ways to manipulate the things that you have drawn
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like a CAD program, right? So the problem I was facing for
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the shirt designs that we’ve come up with for this year’s sale, which I’m not gonna spoil, but you’ll see when we
⏹️ ▶️ John announce the sale at some point, I was using Affinity Designer’s tools
⏹️ ▶️ John to draw a shape and in vector drawing program parlance, I call that a stroke.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the stroke is just a mathematical definition, right? And you can give the stroke a width
⏹️ ▶️ John or it could be zero width, right? If it’s zero width, it’s just a totally invisible thing that you can curve
⏹️ ▶️ John text along or whatever. But I wanted to give the stroke a width, which means this is a line and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna show up on the page and say it’s just a circle or whatever it is. And when you do the stroke width,
⏹️ ▶️ John you give the stroke width and whatever, however you laid out the document, whether it’s in inches or points or whatever, you can even
⏹️ ▶️ John give it a stroke width in pixels, despite the fact that it’s a vector drawing program. One of the tools Affinity
⏹️ ▶️ John has that most vector programs have is, Okay, how do you want me to draw this stroke though? Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want me to draw the stroke? It’s like a one centimeter stroke. You want me to draw it in black, right? Should it be centered
⏹️ ▶️ John on the path that you’ve defined? So like half of the black is on the outside of the circle and half of the black
⏹️ ▶️ John is on the inside if you’re visualizing the stroke going around or should the stroke be all on the inside of the path
⏹️ ▶️ John or should the stroke be all on the outside of the path or various things in between? This is a common feature of vector programs, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wanted this for the thing I was drawing because I wanted the stroke to be entirely on the outside of my
⏹️ ▶️ John shape, because it was important that the inside proportions remain the same. So the entire stroke width needs to be on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then at a certain point, what I wanted to do was
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially slice samurai sword style through the shape that
⏹️ ▶️ John I had drawn. And in AutoCAD and things like that, this is exactly the type of thing I
⏹️ ▶️ John would do, probably from the command line to say, All right, here’s the shape, do this, you know, define
⏹️ ▶️ John a new line, like a line that goes through the thing and slice through it or whatever. Stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that always seem to be ready at hand in AutoCAD. Extend this line until it hits that line,
⏹️ ▶️ John make this thing perpendicular to that, cut this thing here, right? Those things
⏹️ ▶️ John seem to work for me in AutoCAD. And in this program, Affinity Designer, there’s 15 ways
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to use a shape to chop another shape. They have all the Boolean operations. You can take a circle and
⏹️ ▶️ John a triangle, lay them over each other, and you can and them and or them or XOR them or subtract them and just like
⏹️ ▶️ John everything you could possibly imagine. You can draw a line through a thing. You can add nodes to a line and break the curve at this point and break the
⏹️ ▶️ John curve at that point. Like there’s 55 ways to do this. And let me just stipulate right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s probably a way to do what I’m about to complain about in Affinity Designer. My complaint is I could not find it.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so here was the problem. I do the thing, I have the shape. It’s a stroke is on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John of the path. I draw the thing through it, I’m like, slice it here. And it slices it, and the second it
⏹️ ▶️ John slices, the stroke moves to be centered on the path. Because the definition
⏹️ ▶️ John of outside of the path only really makes sense for a closed shape, like a circle,
⏹️ ▶️ John and once I had sliced that circle, what is the outside and what is the inside? And as far
⏹️ ▶️ John as I was concerned, well, you know what the outside is, it’s whatever it was before I sliced the damn thing. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I had it set to outside, you knew it was a closed shape, you considered that the outside, I sliced it in half,
⏹️ ▶️ John just leave the stroke where it is. I know it’s confusing about where it might be, maybe don’t let me change it after that or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the bottom line is I had a shape, the stroke was on the outside of the path, I cut it and the stroke immediately moved to the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this was a problem that was repeated, let’s say multiple times over this design, and I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how am I gonna fix this? I have to go back and redraw these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I couldn’t like mask them because I need these transparent areas and everything like that, And it just made me think,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, program, I know you can do this. I know you have it in you.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s clear you can, it’s just a question of, do your tools, are your tools orthogonal
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to let me accomplish a thing that I know must be possible? And the answer as far as me
⏹️ ▶️ John flailing and doing Google searches and YouTube searches and everything like that was, no, I could not figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to redraw every single one of those strokes with the line centered on the path, moving
⏹️ ▶️ John the path by eye to try to, and any time you do anything by eye in a vector drawing program, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John lost. You’ve lost the game. It’s kind of like in a real time, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John when the deadline isn’t met. Any time you are aligning something by eye in a vector program, you have 100% lost.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re like me and you’re freaking XDR and you’re zoomed in to 17,000%, trying to align it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just know it’s like, no matter how much you zoom, it’ll always be off by a little bit. Like, I really hope
⏹️ ▶️ John bad designers are nodding their heads and an acknowledgement of, yes, you can zoom forever
⏹️ ▶️ John and you realize you never have it dead on, right? Now, the good thing for me is I understand this is gonna be printed on a t-shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John at like maybe three to 600 DPI. So I don’t need like, it’s not as important as machining
⏹️ ▶️ John a part for the use inside an engine or something, right? So I can get away with fudging this, but it annoys
⏹️ ▶️ John me. I don’t wanna have to fudge it. I want it to be mathematically perfect like it used to be when the stroke was on the outside of the line
⏹️ ▶️ John until I cut the shape in half. So this is my plea for anybody making
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of tool Be like AutoCAD. If you have a set of operations that you can perform or a set
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that you can adjust, make sure they’re all orthogonal, which means they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t interfere with each other. If you can do A and you can do B, doing A in some circumstances
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make B impossible. They’re orthogonal, they’re unrelated, they’re at right angles to each other. If I can stroke
⏹️ ▶️ John the outside of a line and I can cut a shape, cutting a shape should not make it impossible for me to stroke the outside of a line anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if the line’s already stroked on the outside. So if any Affinity Designer people are listening to this
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can just tell me how to do it. It’s too late now. I’m already done with the design. But for future reference, I would love to know.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if it literally isn’t possible in Affinity Designer, please make it possible. I know this company has just been acquired by a
⏹️ ▶️ John larger company, which probably spells doom for the program, but that’s a shame. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John until that happens, I would love to know how to do this.