582: Can't Render, Fog It
11 Apr 2024Spatial personas in the Vision Pro, how to buy a car, how to charge a car, and how not to make cars.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: SD-card failures
- The ATP Store is BACK, baby! 👕
- Runs until Sunday, 28 April. Don’t wait!
- Remember members get 15% off!
- Follow-up:
- The “unpatchable” M-series exploit
- Explanatory video
- Hector Martin found the “chicken bit”
- DMP
- Y’all don’t read the show notes, huh? 😏
- An 🎵 accidental 🎵 rant about the state of podcasting today
- Would a M3-family chip really have no efficiency cores? (via Matthaus Woolard)
- Max Tech’s take on “M4 Ultra” rumors
- Reticle limits
- Apple laying off 700+ workers
- Apple 🤝🏻 Shutterstock
- Apple’s in-box iPhone “Presto” flashing machine
- The “unpatchable” M-series exploit
- Casey has tried Spatial Personas
- Upgrade #507: Differently Social
- Game Room (App Store link)
- Gucci (App Store link)
- Turok
- Ask ATP:
- How does one buy a car? (via Chandler Kent)
- What even is ownership, these days? (via Anonymous)
- Egghead Software
- SimCity copy protection (the red image on the right-hand side)
- Overton Window
- This article says Catalyst is abandoned; is it? (via Jonathan Sibley)
- Post-show: Rivian Bluetooth & Fast-Charging Sitrep
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple making robots? 🤖
Sponsored by:
- Swift Craft: The brand new Swift developers’ conference in the UK, overlooking the sea.
- Trade Coffee: The best coffee is made at home. Enjoy a free bag of roasted-to-order coffee and $15 off select plans when you join.
- Computex: The leading international technology exhibition.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Dead SD cards
- ATP Store: Windows 🖼️
- ATP Store: Graffiti 🖼️
- ATP Store: Blasts from the past 🖼️
- M-series DMP exploit
- The worlds of podcasting
- Sponsor: Swift Craft (code atp)
- M3 Max: No Fusion?
- Apple-car layoffs
- Licensing stock photos for AI
- Apple Store pizza oven 🖼️
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- Spatial personas
- Sponsor: Computex 2024
- #askatp: Buying cars
- #askatp: Product lockdown
- #askatp: Is Catalyst dead?
- Ending theme
- Neutral: NACS/CCS status
Dead SD cards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you have either of you ever had an SD card go bad? Hmm
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t think so I think I want to happens you either the either the capacity becomes so
⏹️ ▶️ John low that it become useless to you or you lose them I think those the two failure modes for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there I actually had one go bad for I think the first time and it’s it’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one It’s like a SanDisk extreme Pro, you know, it’s like one of the really good fairly expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones And it is, it actually went badly. It’s producing right errors in any camera that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tries to write to it. Like my, I’m like shaken to my core. Like I always heard this was a possibility, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen it happen. Like I’m questioning everything now. Is the sky blue?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often because they are, you know, so inexpensive in the grand scheme of things in terms of how many
⏹️ ▶️ John bits they hold, right? And they’re small and flimsy and have those exposed contacts, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess. Yeah, you know, I think the only failure I’ve had, which JJ Cooks in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chat has said the same thing. One where the plastic around the contacts broke and then that made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it like super dodgy to continue to use because it was super duper like structurally compromised.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had that happen. I don’t think in terms of like what you’re talking about, Mark, where it’s just a read or write errors. I can’t recall that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever happening. Although I will say that there is a special place in hell for both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the USB-A designers and the person who designed the write protect switch on SD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cards. Because I have only ever found one device in my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life that I think can actually, into which I can insert an SD card without tripping that switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that is my MacBook Pro. Actually, so the M1 was the same way. So the M1 and the M3 MacBook Pros, I can successfully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey insert an SD card into that without tripping the switch.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s because it sticks out when you stick it in those, right? Doesn’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the- The switch doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco though, because the switch is near the front of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. The card absolutely does, but the Switch does not, like Marco said. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tell you what, every other fricking device I’ve ever, well, that’s not fair, like not the cameras in my life, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the readers in my life, like my beloved CalDigit TS4, that every single fricking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time I put one in, it trips the thing. Oh, it’s awful. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John never tripped that Switch. I even thought it was where the floppy disk was, just goes to show that’s why I said it sticks out. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John the Switch was the other part. I’ve never, never tripped it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t think I ever have either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are a unicorn.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do have a problem though with SD cards where it’s kind of like USB, micro USB ports, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to put it in three different times to figure out which direction it
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, I have a mnemonic for my cameras to remember which way the little notch goes, you know, like this one side
⏹️ ▶️ John at the end. Because at least it is visually asymmetrical, even though slot-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can put it in both ways. But yeah, that’s annoying.
ATP Store: Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some excellent news. It is that time of year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The ATP store is back, baby. It’s WWDC time and it is back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ve got all sorts of stuff. We got old stuff. We got new stuff. We got yellow stuff. We got blue stuff. All sorts of different stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we can talk about now, John, I’m happy to do a nickel tour, but would you rather do it or you want to just interject?
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me go through the store products. So yeah, as Casey said, this is the WWDC sale, which you might be thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s April. WWDC is not until June. Well, you know, it takes a a long time to have the sale and then to
⏹️ ▶️ John take the orders and then to make the shirts. And as always, we try to get products to people
⏹️ ▶️ John in time to go to WWDC. Now, so very few people get to go to WWDC in person these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John As it stands right now, none of us are going to be there, but we love to see photos of people from WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if there’s someone in that photo wearing one of our shirts, that’s just wonderful. So if you order now,
⏹️ ▶️ John you may, may get your merchandise in time to attend WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, we get it earlier and earlier every year. Maybe we’ll start doing it in
⏹️ ▶️ John January sometime. Anyway, here are the products we have. So, our first new shirt is called ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows. No, not the Microsoft kind. The me kind.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The me kind. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’ve watched our recent member special that had a video
⏹️ ▶️ John version where you got to see me try to explain how I use Windows on my Mac, we thought we’d have a shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of in that theme. I’m not sure the design entirely captures
⏹️ ▶️ John the profound beauty that is my window
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco management technique.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. I think you’re looking for a different word there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah, I did my best. It’s got windows on it anyway. So we have this shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John in two different versions. One has the full color ATP logo
⏹️ ▶️ John on it and it also has color window widgets. And the other one, I guess, is the graphite mode, where it is
⏹️ ▶️ John monochrome and a little bit cheaper, and everything is a single color, I think. So, it’s got A2B Windows and A2B
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows monochrome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is, by the way, it’s amazing. Like, when we do shirts with colors, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you make shirts, when they’re being screen printed, you generally pay per color. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every additional color you have on a shirt, either the price goes up or your profit goes down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or both. And so, but we don’t want to make a crappy shirt and our logo happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco planning on our part. We get killed on shirt cost. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. And the funny thing about the Windows shirt is like, yeah, even if we gave it a monochrome logo, you have to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those traffic light colors in the window widgets to make it look right. So yes, we do have a monochrome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of the shirt, but the color version looks so much better and there’s a reason why it’s gonna be more expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yep, so same
⏹️ ▶️ John as it ever was. Although for both of these shirts, something is true that’s true of the other products as
⏹️ ▶️ John well. We are trying to offer a large variety of things. We keep saying shirts and yes, you can buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a t-shirt, but now you can buy a long sleeve t-shirt if you don’t want a short sleeve one,
⏹️ ▶️ John and a sweatshirt, and in some cases, a tank top. So just because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re thinking, oh, I don’t want a t-shirt, or already have a bunch of t-shirts, maybe you want a long sleeve one, maybe you want a sweatshirt for the
⏹️ ▶️ John warmer weather, maybe you want a tank top for the hot summer weather. So take a look. The HP
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows one comes in mostly dark colors to fit with the multicolor logo because the multicolor logo clashes with lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of different short colors. And then the monochrome one comes in a huge variety of colors because it’s just white ink and then it has all sorts of different
ATP Store: Graffiti
⏹️ ▶️ John The second new shirt we have this year is inspired by Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nostalgic eBay hunting for Palm devices. And it is the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John graffiti shirt. It is the ATP logo written in Palm’s graffiti handwriting
⏹️ ▶️ John In particular, the little instruction sheet they would give you to teach you how to use graffiti
⏹️ ▶️ John for younger people who don’t know. It was a way of writing with a stylus on a little writing area.
⏹️ ▶️ John you would draw characters that look mostly like, you know, the Roman alphabet,
⏹️ ▶️ John but a little bit modified so that the computer had an easier time telling what the characters are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, in particular, every character was exactly one stroke. So like every time the pen went down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then moved around and then went up, that was one character. So that made it, with the hardware at the time, that made it much, much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier for the, you know, basic computers of that time to recognize individual letters as opposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what the Newton tried to do, which was write however you want to write and we’ll try to figure it out and we won’t be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. So that’s one of the reasons why Palm really succeeded and took off is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they forced the user to adopt a different style of writing in exchange for it working
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the way they would tell you in a little instruction guide thing is they would have like a little dot where you’re supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to put your pen down or put your stylus down and then you’d see where the stroke goes. So in the shirt, you’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John lines with a little like lollipop circle. That’s where you’re supposed to start the line and then you ended where the line ends because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re all one stroke. One of the most fun characters I always thought was the way they had you do a T, because you can imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you try to do a T without lifting your stylus, how are you gonna do that? It was basically like a rotated L,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s great, it’s in our logo. So we’ve got our little slashes representing the rainbow stripes,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ve got ATP. So it’s the ATP graffiti shirt, slash long sleeve shirt, slash sweatshirt,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, so excluding symbols, what are your favorite graffiti characters? For me, it’s gotta be probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tie between the four and the K.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh golly, I don’t even remember. The K was very good. Looking at the alphabet now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so the four, you just do, like the way little kids write a four where it has an open top, you do like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little down to the right and then a big line down. You just skip the big line down. So it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it looks almost like the opposite of the enter character on a keyboard. It’s just like an arrow going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down to the right and that’s it. And then the K is, it’s as if you’re drawing a capital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco letter K without the big straight stick down. So you skip the straight stick down and you just do a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoop loopy thing on the other side.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my two favorites are, well, I would pick A and T, surprisingly. I like the upside down V for the A.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like that the T is like a rotated L. And I would probably also pick K, because that’s a fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. When Palm Devices came out, before I had one, and I was just like learning about them, researching them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought this was the coolest thing in the world. I would like, I would write handwritten notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought it looked, It was it looked like the future like it looked so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the Newton was the future. I remember the first time I think I’ve told us
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that played out John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t think that was
⏹️ ▶️ John the company that made it actually pretty well in handhelds. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it had nothing to do with the Newton.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pretty sure they killed it pretty quickly. Once the new leader came in who made the company succeed
⏹️ ▶️ John the spirit of the Newton lives on when I first saw
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Newton like a computer store
⏹️ ▶️ John for the first time and I picked it up because I’d seen like what I’d seen I’d read in
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple magazines about the Newton. and I saw it in real life, probably in a college computer store when
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going on college tours for my sister. And so I immediately picked it up, took the pen,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I wrote like, I don’t know what I wrote. It might have been Hello World, but probably not. I wrote something, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote it in cursive, because I knew how to write cursive then. And it translated
⏹️ ▶️ John it perfectly. I’m like, this machine is magic. And then more or less never did that again.
⏹️ ▶️ John the first impression was like, how? I mean, think of this. In the pre-palm
⏹️ ▶️ John days, you had this device that was in your hand and you could write cursive and it would figure out what you wrote in my
⏹️ ▶️ John cursive handwriting. It was amazing. I still have a couple of old ones in the attic, but yeah, before it’s time.
ATP Store: Blasts from the past
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, next product is we have these are all blasts from the past now the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John performance shirt Which we had on sale ages ago. It is well Casey you describe this one. This is your baby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so it’s in the spirit of Under Armour if memory serves It’s the Nike equivalent of Under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Armour, but this is the sort of thing where if you have it on first of all It’s fairly lightweight. It’s Adidas by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, sorry. I thought it was Nike, but you’re probably I know, you know The Polo’s are Nike. That’s what I’m thinking of it is Adidas. You’re right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, one way or another, when you get super, super sweaty, if you’re working out or whatever, or you’re just listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to our dulcet tones, one way or another, if you get super sweaty, if you try to yank this shirt off of you, unlike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a cotton shirt or whatever, it won’t just stay suction cupped to your body. It will actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come off of you, which is really nice. And so it is 100% my preferred workout shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually am wearing one right now because I worked out this afternoon and I should have looked at my left sleeve where there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an Adidas logo, plain as day. Thank you, Marco. Anyway, so I really, really, really like these as a workout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shirt. Again, it’s not literally Under Armour as stated, but it’s spiritually the same idea. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really enjoy these. And I believe these are fairly, or several different colors, but t-shirt only.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. T-shirt only, but the new colors this year, I think are, uh, navy gray and blue,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, or maybe it was just in red before. Anyway, a bunch of new colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Red and blue were previous. I don’t think we had anything but those.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. So the next returning shirt, I like to have like classic shirts come back. This time it’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ John back so I can buy some for my children because they like the shirt and they’re annoyed that we haven’t sold it in like four years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually can’t be four years really, but they have the older version of the shirt. So this is a ATP Monochrome Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Max 2019. So we sold a shirt that had the side profile of
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of Pro Max many, many years ago, and then we updated it after
⏹️ ▶️ John the 2019 Mac Pro came out to stick the 2019 Mac Pro at the end of the line next to the trash can, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that is this shirt. It’s not the one with wheels. In general, when we do something with wheels, that’s like a one-time only thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John treasure your wheels shirts because those probably aren’t coming back. But it is a bunch of Pro Max. It is a
⏹️ ▶️ John monochrome shirt. It comes in black and white, short sleeve and long sleeve. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I will be buying this for my kids. And hopefully enough other people will buy it that they will print the order and my kids will get replacements
⏹️ ▶️ John for their shirts. They like it because it’s not so like rainbowy colored. And like, I don’t know, I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John less embarrassing for them. It does say Accidental Tech Podcast like spelled out underneath it. It
⏹️ ▶️ John has a bunch of computers on it. Well, people don’t know that they’re computers. They just think it’s an interesting design. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think people recognize those as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John computers. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean if it only had like the trash can, you know, maybe they wouldn’t recognize that but I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest look identifiably enough like computer towers that they figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Well, I mean, I think maybe the classic Mac but the ones that are towers and a side view you had to
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty big nerd to even pick up that those are supposed to be side views of tower computers. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah either way it has six tower computers and the word podcast on it. So I think it’s a pretty nerdy shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ John And a little trash can. All right, next one is our usual ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John six color shirts. Once again, the colors, there’s more than six of them, refer to the color of the shirt. It’s just a monochrome ATP logo on
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of different colorful shirts. These are good and cheaper than the other ones because it’s just one color of
⏹️ ▶️ John ink and you can get them in long sleeve and tank and sweater and all that good stuff. All right, and then we have our classic ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John logo shirt with way too many colors on it. And even that one has changes here. Now you can get a long sleeve version of that
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt. and I think also a tank top version of that shirt. So that’s our classic shirt. We’ve got the hoodie,
⏹️ ▶️ John no different versions of this. The hoodie is the hoodie. The hoodie is great. My kids also both have the hoodie.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thankfully they haven’t lost or destroyed them yet, so I don’t need to buy them another one. But if they did lose or destroy them, I would get them
⏹️ ▶️ John another one. It’s a really good hoodie. This is another Casey special. We’re nearing the end here. The ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John Polo, which Casey loves. This is a Nike shirt. And even the Polo comes in new colors
⏹️ ▶️ John this year. I think where we have like gray and navy and black, Not very exciting new colors, but remember it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got the full color embroidered ATP logo on it. So again, the rainbow colors and logo tend
⏹️ ▶️ John to clash if you have a shirt that’s a different color. So they’re kind of sticking to neutral colors. It works with Navy and
⏹️ ▶️ John black and gray. And then the final blast from the past, the ATP hat, a baseball
⏹️ ▶️ John hat in new colors, because everything’s in new colors. And the new color is I think Navy to
⏹️ ▶️ John go along with the gray. We haven’t sold this in years. So if you want a baseball
⏹️ ▶️ John hat with a full color embroidered ATP logo on top of it. Now you can get one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, and then bringing up the rear, the very final product. Would you believe we still have like a dozen
⏹️ ▶️ John pint glasses left over from our last sale last year? Please somebody buy this dozen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to bother myself just to get them out of inventory. 12 pint glasses, we can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess maybe I’ll just buy a handful and then we’ll be down to single digits, but yeah, a few pint
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses are left. So there you have it, full line of stuff. Again, even if we’re not at WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John we would love to see pictures of people who are lucky enough to attend, maybe wearing one of these shirts
⏹️ ▶️ John or an older ATP shirt, whatever. And of course, if you are an ATP member, don’t forget to use
⏹️ ▶️ John your promo code. It is available on your member page. You go to atp.fm slash member, and right at the top
⏹️ ▶️ John of that page, you will see a section that says ATP store discount, and we’ll have a little code, and you can copy it and paste it into the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this year, we’re trying something new. If you are logged in to atp.fm, like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can go to your member page and see your membership account and your email, that means you’re logged in. We know who you are, right? If you are logged into
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP.fm, or if you log in to ATP.fm to see your member page, and then you go to the store page
⏹️ ▶️ John and click through on any of these products, we will attempt to stick your discount code into your
⏹️ ▶️ John cart for you. If it doesn’t work, just copy and paste it. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John old ways always work, but we are trying to avoid is a situation where people, oh, I forgot to copy and paste my discount code.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we have to give them the discount retroactively and it’s a big hassle and everything, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John try to remember to copy and paste the code, but if you don’t, it should auto populate. You’ll be able to tell, it’ll show when you’re in the cart,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you do the checkout, if you see the promo code area, if there’s something already filled in for you, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John because we got it by you being logged in. So again, you can go to atp.fm, log into your thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the store page, and then click through on any of the products and we’ll try to put the discount code in
⏹️ ▶️ John your thing. And I guess, bearing the lead here, how do you get all this stuff? Atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John slash store, that’s where all this stuff is. That’s our landing page, atp.fm.store.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you go there and you are logged into your member account and click through on any product, your discount code will be used. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t a member and want to join for one month to get a 15% discount, you can do so at atp.fm.join.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, just a couple of quick notes. First of all, this is still Cotton Bureau behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the scenes. So for Europeans, we genuinely are very sorry, but it is expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If it’s not for you, if you don’t want to buy this time, that’s totally fine. You know, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would also make us feel a little better if you did join at hp.fm slash join. We don’t have to do that either, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we get it. It’s expensive. I understand. I’m sorry. We’ve been laying into Cotton Bureau constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ask them to open up a European office and they’ve told us maybe one day. So today is not that day. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John one option, since we are on WWDC season, I know this is very rare, but it has happened in the past. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are going to be attending, if you are living outside the US and you’re going to be attending WWDC in person,
⏹️ ▶️ John Lucky you. And you know somebody else who lives in the US who’s also going to be at WWDC, have
⏹️ ▶️ John them order it, and then just meet up at WWDC. Like, have them order it and ship it to themselves in the US with
⏹️ ▶️ John US shipping, and then just meet up at WWDC and have them give you your order and then just take it back with you when you fly home.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and we wouldn’t want to encourage our listeners to commit tax fraud, so check your local
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laws. But everyone does that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to be prosecuted for raining on one t-shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, Europe’s been pretty aggressive recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Either way, definitely do what you think is best what you think is right, but one way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is my favorite part. You have until the 28th of April, Sunday, the 28th of April,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP time. Here’s the moment where you’re driving or you’re walking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or you’re somehow listening to us. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to use your turn signal because you’re not an animal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re driving, or you’re just going to move yourself to the right hand side or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the walkway that you’re on, pull over if you will, and you’ll go to ATP.fm slash store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you’ll place that order right now. Why you place that order right now because every time, every single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flipping time this the store is closed for literally minutes or at most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours and somebody says, Oh my God, I missed it. I’m that one. Casey have said this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me all these years and now it’s me. I’m that person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t do that. Don’t be that person. Stop what you’re doing right now. Signal, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, to get to the side of the road, use your turn signals, please. If you’re walking in Manhattan or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be aggressive as you get over to the right-hand side, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. But then get out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the damn way and go to atp.fm. Store, place your order. Make sure you use your members discount, if applicable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you so much. We will remind you of this next couple of weeks. But again, until Sunday the 28th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, as always, thank you for all your work on this. I am very excited for this lineup. This is, I think, far and away the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different options we’ve had both in terms of like different items and in terms of flavors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of each item. We’re trying to do our best here to give you whatever options you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Try to diversify people’s wardrobes. You won’t just have podcast t-shirts, now you’ll have podcast long sleeve t-shirts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Podcast tank tops, podcast baseball hats, we got you covered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Podcast the flamethrower. There we go, thank you John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up.
M-series DMP exploit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The unpatchable M-Series Exploit explanatory video, I don’t know if this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made the edit or not, but there was a link in the show notes where there was an explanatory video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in between the time that John had put it in the show notes and when I started getting the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey released version of the show notes ready, that video went private, and I don’t know, John, is this the same one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you would watch or a different one, but one way or another, we’ve got a video for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is the same video, so I was so disappointed that it went private because I thought the video was great, and sure enough, I clicked on it the last time we were
⏹️ ▶️ John recording, I’m like, ah, I don’t know, maybe they took it down or something, but after the show, I’m like, I need to find that video.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they, like, why would they have taken it down? And sure enough, it exists. It’s on the same channel. It’s the same exact video I was trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to link to. Maybe it was just something wrong with the video and YouTube doesn’t let you update videos. You just have to delete it and
⏹️ ▶️ John make a new one. So anyway, we will have a link in the show notes. It is from the Molly Rocket channel.
⏹️ ▶️ John It describes what is known as the go fetch attack on the M-series of
⏹️ ▶️ John system on the chips. And it is a great video. if you actually wanna know
⏹️ ▶️ John what is happening inside the chip. It is explained well enough that if you actually care, anybody can
⏹️ ▶️ John watch it and understand. And like I said, this is a specific instance of a common
⏹️ ▶️ John pattern of attacking chips, but this particular one is pretty weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it is a very good video. It is an hour long, so buckle up, but it does a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good job. If you have even a passing knowledge of how computers and computer science works, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’ll be very palatable and understandable. I know nothing about security-related things. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person who hosts the video is coming at it from a microarchitecture perspective, not from a security perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so they do a really good job of kind of distilling it down to the brass tacks. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very good. Hector Martin found the ChickenBit. I’ve never even heard of a ChickenBit before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was news to me. So John, tell me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John The DMP disabled ChickenBit. So DMP is, I have that in here. What is it called?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Data Memory Dependent Prefetcher. You have it like 10 lines down from where you’re looking.
⏹️ ▶️ John DMP is the feature that this security exploit is exploiting. And chicken bits
⏹️ ▶️ John are bits in a silicon chip that allow you to disable some feature if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not sure about it, right? So if you’re designing a chip, you’re like, well, we think this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good idea, but if there’s ever any problem with it, like it has a performance problem, or there’s a bug, or there’s a security
⏹️ ▶️ John flaw, if you just flip this bit, the chip will just disable that entire feature. So apparently there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a chicken bit for a DMP. Hector Martin found it. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is from a post-amassadon, I think. He says, one interesting finding is that the DMP
⏹️ ▶️ John is already disabled in EL2 and presumably EL1. It only works in EL0. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John EL things are exception levels in the ARM microarchitecture.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is from a page that we’ll link. The ARMv8 architecture defines four exception levels, EL0 to EL3,
⏹️ ▶️ John where EL3 is the highest exception level with the most execution privilege. And here’s the common usage.
⏹️ ▶️ John EL0 is where applications run. EL1 is for OS kernels and associated functions that are typically described as privileged.
⏹️ ▶️ John EL2 is the hypervisor and EL3 is secure monitor. I don’t even know what that is, but that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John the webpage said. So apparently DMP, this data
⏹️ ▶️ John memory dependent prefetcher, is disabled for the kernel. So what Hector says is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like the CPU designer has already had some idea that it is a security liability and chose to
⏹️ ▶️ John hard disable it in kernel mode. that means kernel mode crypto on Linux is already intrinsically safe.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this data memory dependent prefetcher is a cache prefetcher that looks at cache memory content
⏹️ ▶️ John for possible pointer values and prefetches data at those locations in the cache if it sees memory access patterns
⏹️ ▶️ John that suggests that would be useful. So it looks at a number and says, that number looks like it might be a pointer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should go treat it as a pointer and grab the data that’s at that location.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you watch the video, you’ll see how that’s exploited to detect what another process is doing on the
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU. There’s some more stuff that other people turned up about DMP, like there’s a, aside
⏹️ ▶️ John from the chicken bit for disabling it, there’s like a command, I think, on the M3 where you can just turn it off. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you would imagine on the M3, you could turn off DMP, do your encryption stuff and then turn it back on to like avoid this issue. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 and M2 don’t have that command. They just have this chicken bit, which disables it entirely in
⏹️ ▶️ John particular modes. So anyway, this, you know, CPU designers are
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly conservative and cautious, and that’s why things that are quote unquote unpatchable
⏹️ ▶️ John usually have some kind of workaround. Sometimes the workarounds have performance problems, sometimes the workarounds are
⏹️ ▶️ John painful and annoying and require software changes, but usually there’s something that can be done,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m assuming Apple is, I don’t think Apple’s commented on this at all, but since it is
⏹️ ▶️ John better in the M3 than it was in the M2 and M1, maybe they already knew about it and they have these bits to deal with. So
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully, OS updates will help with this in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. A lot of people wrote in last episode, and they did so because they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to help. And there is a charitable read on this, which is that they are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all members who have gone to, in the past, etp.fm.join, and they were listening to the bootleg,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which does not have robust show notes. But one way or another, a lot of people wrote in to say, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alan Pope was one of the first, last episode, you guys briefly mentioned weird square monitors. I wonder if the LG Dual Up 28 inch 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by 18 ratio display may be the one you were thinking of. It is. And I said verbally on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, there’s that one weird squarish monitor that people have been talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently. And then I kind of let it go. But during the course of the recording of that episode, I think somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the chat room found it, and I put the link in the show notes. So the uncharitable read is none of you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pains in my butt, clicked on the, looked at the show notes to see that it was already there. But the charitable read is you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just all bootleg listeners. So anyways, we will put it in this episode show notes as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, but it was indeed the LG Dual Up 28-inch that I was
The worlds of podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s an audio podcast. People are looking at the shots, although I have to say, I don’t know why I continue to
⏹️ ▶️ John be fooled by this, but I did a complaint about the show already. I don’t think I did. I was listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to a famous podcast who shall remain nameless mostly because I can’t remember what it was. And they were talking,
⏹️ ▶️ John they were talking out, but it’s a really popular podcast. And they were talking at length
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco about. Security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through forgetfulness.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, about an image that they were looking at. And they’re like, don’t worry, this image will be, you’ll be able to see it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and there was actually two versions of this image. Says, don’t worry, we’ll put the more detailed versions of this image, if you just go
⏹️ ▶️ John to our webpage, and they gave a URL, and they’re like, in your podcast player, like right now, we’re looking at it, and you can’t see it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like by the time the podcast goes up, you’ll be able to see this image. So everyone go and look at this image right now. And let
⏹️ ▶️ John me tell you, I tried to find that image. The URL they read had nothing on it. Notes in
⏹️ ▶️ John the podcast client, absolutely nothing. And when I say nothing, I don’t mean there was nothing there. I mean, it was a bunch of like
⏹️ ▶️ John SEO garbage, come on, like just random generic text that had nothing to do with the episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like you see sometimes in YouTube videos where every single YouTube video in a channel will have the same garbage tech pasted into
⏹️ ▶️ John the description. That has nothing to do with the video. They spent so long talking about this image. No chapter
⏹️ ▶️ John images, no show notes, website had nothing on it, no URL I could go to, go to the top
⏹️ ▶️ John level of the website, try to find the thing, Google, whatever. I don’t know what it is with podcasts. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John have 60 people, person, staff,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco making their
⏹️ ▶️ John and they can’t put an image in show notes, so anyway, this link will be in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are two different worlds of podcasting. Like, there’s probably more than that, honestly, but like there’s at least two different worlds of podcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The first world of podcasting is these high production,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high staff, high budget shows. They’re all hosted on Megaphone. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all using DAI. They’re all using the same backend tools. They all have these big productions. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they put huge amounts of money into the usually writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and editing and production of the podcast. But then all of these basics of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the podcasting format, they don’t ever participate in. They’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used good show notes, which are very easy to do. Their tools don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support them, they don’t care. They certainly have never used chapters. Back in the day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s because they didn’t know they existed. Now they probably still don’t know they exist, but now their DAI tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Megaphone don’t support. Like on the Verge cast, which is actually a pretty good show, I enjoy it. But on the Verge cast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were just complaining this week how Megaphone doesn’t support chapters and they keep getting requests from listeners to add chapters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It must be hard to add chapters. It’s not. DAI tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco splice ads into the file. So what they were saying was, oh it must be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to add them because you don’t know how long the ads are, which is true. One of the ways DAI makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything worse for everybody is that timestamps are no longer consistent between downloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the ads that are injected into each download could be different durations. So if you are trying to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share a clip of a podcast at a certain time stamp, you don’t really have a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know whether someone else’s future download of that episode will have the time stamp lining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with the content that you want because it might have had a different length ad inserted before it than what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have. But the thing is, they know this at download time. You know where chapters are?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the mp3. In the header. You know what you have to modify when you use DAI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to splice an mp3? header. So they’re already… well, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t always modify the header, but you’re supposed to. It makes certain things work better. But the early
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI platforms did a very bad job because MP3s are so easy, you can just kind of stick them together and they work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so the point is, at serving time, they know what they’re putting into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MP3, so they can just offset the timestamps of the chapter markers in the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to account for the ads they’re inserting at that time as they write the header of the file. That sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might involve addition though. Yeah, or maybe subtraction. It depends on how you’re doing it. But yeah, I don’t know if computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do that. Yeah, either way, it’s so easy. The only reason they don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is that like the people who write these tools don’t even know chapters exist. And I understand from the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of view of a big podcast publisher, regular people don’t want this, we don’t need this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I cannot tell you first of all, how many regular people do find it useful. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why things like YouTube support chapters. There’s a reason they added chapters because people find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful. Second of all, everybody always comes up with some crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea for some new podcast spec that we should all implement for something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be solved already with chapters we’ve had for like 20 years. It’s like, there’s so many, you wouldn’t believe how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pitches I’ve heard for some new standard. We’re gonna make this new standard, it’s gonna be great. We’re gonna have the ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to show timed metadata during playback of a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazing. Guess what? We can do that already. We can show timed images, timed links, timed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text, all of that with specs that already exist and are supported by pretty much every podcast app out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including Apple podcasts. So that already, but, but no one knows. And then third of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it blows my mind. They don’t, why don’t they do this for their own commercial gain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they insert an ad? Why don’t they insert the image of the sponsor with a link right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there as a chapter, I don’t understand. There’s reasons they would benefit directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from it, but I think ultimately the cause of all of this is that there has always been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of underlying problem in big podcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It started out as kind of a disrespect of the medium, that for a long time it was podcasts were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so looked down upon, similar to how like blogs were looked down upon by old media, podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were so looked down upon that like people would put podcasts out there and then make a point of saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t listen to podcasts. As if that was some kind of bragging thing. Like imagine if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrote books for a living and you said, oh, I don’t read. Like that’s ridiculous, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasting was looked down upon. So there was this kind of attitude from early on among big, big companies and big publishers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even, you know, big media people of like, oh, I don’t listen to podcasts. I’ll put, I’ll put a podcast out there. Cause I want to take everyone’s time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and money, but I don’t listen to podcasts. And what that resulted in over time is a lot of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of big podcasting industry stuff, a lot of those people and those and the tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stacks and all the stuff that that has built that we built upon comes from people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who don’t really listen to podcasts. First there was a disrespect to the medium, now I don’t I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disrespect is gone now but now it’s just like more of an unfamiliarity with the medium and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people who make these tools have no clue that any of these options exist. So then that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one world of podcasting. That world of podcasting thinks it is the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world of podcasting. This is a separate problem, shows up in a lot of different ways. But that, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who make and listen to those kind of shows typically think that’s all of podcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the wonderful thing about this medium is that it’s such a bigger medium than that, and there’s all these other shows out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what we make and what a bunch of people we know make, and what millions of people we don’t know make. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a huge, wonderful world, and the rest of us can have things like show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes and links and chapters and artwork, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can enjoy these technologies, and the rest of the podcast world will never know about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, and they are doing their listeners and themselves a great disservice, but we will never convince them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use them because they don’t even think we exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes me wonder what the people on the show, like all the hosts of the show, seem sure that they knew not only that
⏹️ ▶️ John this image would be linked, but that they knew the URL to it, and they were wrong. They were entirely wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe they’ve never looked at their own podcasts, I don’t realize that the people who produce their show stop as soon
⏹️ ▶️ John as the audio is done and never do another thing after that. But anyway, frustrating. I never
⏹️ ▶️ John did find the image. The end of the story is I never did find it. If it’s on the internet, I could not, I literally could not find it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And because, like, so much of the show was, like, looking at this image and making jokes about it or whatever, couldn’t find it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what I would have done in your shoes, which is ridiculous that this is how I would have solved the problem, but I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have found the subreddit for that particular podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John because you said it was popular. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guarantee, and I mean, you’re rolling your eyes about Reddit. I’m here for it. I get it. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bet you anything that would have come up with the image, you know, the, the people, the Redditors, what have you in that subreddit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have come up with the image and, you know, made a thread about it and put it, put a link up all to do all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this work to do something that should be table stakes. I don’t know. It’s occasionally I’ll get asked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I can’t think of a way to phrase this without sounding like I’m, you know, toot my own horn here, but yeah, I’ll get asked like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how did you become successful at podcasting or how did you become successful at this or that? And not to say I’m always successful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by any means, let’s talk about fast text and my icon design. But occasionally, I’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lucky. And you know, we’ve, I’ve come up with something decent. And the consistent thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the three of us share in both this show and in our other endeavors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just giving a crap, like, you’d be surprised that just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by giving a crap, you’re gonna be better than almost everyone around. I feel like you’ve made the speech in the past. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just give a crap Just care and you’re already better than almost anyone around you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not table stakes, my friends. Just care. Just give a crap and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ll be so much better than almost everyone around you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and job interviews, competition, any place where you are like competing with other people for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, professional success in some way. Like if you just care, you will be ahead of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vast majority by a surprising and sad amount.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, just don’t phone it in and you’ll be toward the top of the pack. You may not be number one, but you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be toward the top of the pack. Yes, I’m sure there’s exceptions and you know, the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would prove that this isn’t true, but by and large, just give a crap. That’s all you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to do is just give a crap. Anyway, how did that happen? We got off on a tangent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco there. That’s okay, though. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey accidental. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happens when John doesn’t find an image in show Done its
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M3 Max: No Fusion?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matthias Wollard writes, regarding the rumor of an M3 family chip with no efficiency cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having some efficiency cores makes sense, since for highly threaded, multi-threaded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tasks an efficiency core can do more compute per transistor than a power core. Tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me about this, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was one point that we didn’t bring up the last time, like, oh, well, why do you need efficiency cores? You don’t need to save energy. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if your job is massively multi-threaded, cores are better. And as
⏹️ ▶️ John this person points out, if if you just have something that’s a simple job, that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t require a power core, that power core is wasted doing that job. But you can do more compute per transistor
⏹️ ▶️ John with an efficiency core than a power core. So there’s that I mean, historically, especially for the Mac Pro, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has always offered like their top end thing, their top end chip in the Mac Pro in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John decade or so has always been the one with the most cores. And that one usually actually is slower
⏹️ ▶️ John in single especially in the old days, but it makes up for it for being massively multi-core. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that that is a role efficiency cores could play
⏹️ ▶️ John hypothetical bigger than two M3 Max’s stuck-together chip
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac Studio or the Mac Pro. And on that topic, the Max Tech channel on YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John had a bunch of rumors about this upcoming chips and the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John was that this new chip, They’re still on the idea that it’s not going to be two M3 Max’s stuck
⏹️ ▶️ John together It’ll be an entirely new chip and they’re saying they think this new chip will be built on n3e which
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve heard our show in past months, you know is the Three nanometer fabbing process
⏹️ ▶️ John after the n3b process that are the current m3 series chips are made with
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will supposedly have higher Yields, so if you if you have a process that has higher yields That’s good If you’re gonna make a
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger chip because the bigger the chip you make the more chance you have to have errors in the chip chip. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John was presented as a possibility to avoid the situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where Apple rolls out new M chips like the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John and the M3 Pro and the M3 Max. But the quote unquote high end chips
⏹️ ▶️ John are still last year’s model. So right now if you buy a Mac Studio it doesn’t have an M3 anything in it. It’s got an M2
⏹️ ▶️ John something in it. And same thing with the Mac Pro. It M2 something in it and when the m3 max is so powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John in some tests it can best these the supposedly better Pro max because
⏹️ ▶️ John the lower end computers have the m3 chip But the higher end ones don’t now one way to solve that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be release the chips closer to each other So yeah You release the m3 then the m3 plow then the max
⏹️ ▶️ John then the ultra then the extreme if you do that in fairly short succession Within the course of a few months nobody really cares
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you leave the studio and the Mac Pro Languishing with the m2 chips for a long period of time makes them look kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy and makes them look less attractive I don’t know if Apple cares about that that was just a theory
⏹️ ▶️ John presented here and that theory was presented in the context of saying and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John At WWC presumably when Apple comes out with the new Mac studio and Mac Pro the chip
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in them well you know will be a brand new chip that we haven’t seen before not to m3 maxis
⏹️ ▶️ John stuck together right and And they’ll actually call it M4 because it’ll be made with the M3E
⏹️ ▶️ John process and the M3E process is not compatible with the M3B designs, right? So if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna fab something in M3, they have to redesign anyway. Names like M3 and M4 are
⏹️ ▶️ John marketing decisions, have nothing to do with technology really, it’s just up to Apple what they do. So I’m not putting much
⏹️ ▶️ John stake in that. It would seem pretty weird for me to skip the M3 generation for the high-end chips and go
⏹️ ▶️ John to M4, but maybe it’d be a marketing coup and say, hey, we, you know, they’re leaping ahead because there are such great
⏹️ ▶️ John high-end chips for our high-end Pro Max or whatever. Setting that aside, another topic that came up
⏹️ ▶️ John related to this in these discussions that we’re having online since last week’s episode was the
⏹️ ▶️ John reticle limit, which is how big a thing can you make on a silicon wafer
⏹️ ▶️ John at three nanometers with TSMC’s process? You can’t make something like 12
⏹️ ▶️ John inches by 12 inches or whatever, like there is a limit to how big a thing that you can make. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John make a bunch of them on a wafer, But each one of those things has a certain size and it can’t be any bigger than that size due
⏹️ ▶️ John to the way they do the lithography with the extreme ultraviolet, blah, blah, blah, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the radical limit is for TSMC’s three nanometer process. The best
⏹️ ▶️ John I could find was somewhere online, somebody said 858 square millimeters.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the best I could do. I couldn’t find any authoritative, maybe it’s secret proprietary information, maybe I’m just looking at the wrong websites.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, 850 millimeters squared, Probably in that ballpark
⏹️ ▶️ John and to give a comparison the plain old m3 is 146 millimeters squared I think that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a official figure or at least a measured figure or whatever What I wanted to know is how
⏹️ ▶️ John big is the m3 max? How close is the m3 max to the reticle limit because if this
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor is they’re gonna make a chip That’s not to m3 max is stuck together, but is itself
⏹️ ▶️ John a single bigger chip How much bigger can it be? And again, this is just
⏹️ ▶️ John extrapolated from die shots I found on the internet as in me measuring pixels and saying okay
⏹️ ▶️ John Well if the m3 is 146 millimeter squared and this is how big this is pictures to scale This is the max
⏹️ ▶️ John next to an m3 next to a pro. How big are they? Here are my extrapolated values I could not
⏹️ ▶️ John find official figures for this. If anyone knows, please tell me m3 Pro 238 millimeter squared m3 max 522 millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John squared and then again the theoretical reticle
⏹️ ▶️ John limit 858 millimeters squared. So the m3 max is not
⏹️ ▶️ John at the reticle limit but it’s not too far away 500 to 800 like there’s room
⏹️ ▶️ John to be bigger but not a huge amount more room and I did find an NVIDIA gh100 GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John that TSMC fabs on their 4n process which is not the same as 3 nanometer but anyway their 4n process
⏹️ ▶️ John and that is 814 millimeters squared. So by the way the transistor sizes here is
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 25 billion M3 Pro 37 billion M3 max 92 billion
⏹️ ▶️ John and the big Nvidia thing is only 80 billion because it’s on the 4n process not on the 3 nanometer, so
⏹️ ▶️ John Can Apple make a bigger single chip on? TSMC’s 3 nanometer
⏹️ ▶️ John process I think yes, how much bigger well the m3 max is 500 ish
⏹️ ▶️ John And they could probably push up into the 800s and after that they can’t make any single bit Any single
⏹️ ▶️ John chip any bigger than that we’ve talked in the past about chiplets and combining multiple ones and of course as the ultra free Ultra fusion sticking things
⏹️ ▶️ John end to end and they could make like a six or seven or eight hundred millimeters square chip called
⏹️ ▶️ John the ultra and stick two of those together for the extreme or it could just be
⏹️ ▶️ John Two and three maxes stuck together and they called the ultra and it’s in the pro in the studio, but that’s boring So hope it doesn’t happen
⏹️ ▶️ John And I spent so long looking like, you know, remember we talked last week like oh, did they just crop out the the ultra fusion thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. It’s really easy to crop something out of a picture. Apple itself cropped it out. Remember
⏹️ ▶️ John when the M1, you know, the M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max came out? Apple itself cropped out the little
⏹️ ▶️ John interposer part. So when the Ultra came out, they’re like, look, we have the secret thing here, blah, blah, right? I just
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if it’s been cropped out of every picture I’m finding. It’s really easy to crop things. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure this information has to be out there because people are cutting the tops off these chips and taking pictures and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all written in Chinese and I can’t read it.
Apple-car layoffs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, there are upcoming Apple layoffs affecting 700 or more workers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including Apple car and micro LED teams from nine to five Mac Apple’s laying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off more than 700 employees as the company has just canceled its Apple car project and is also reconsidering the project to develop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in in-house micro LED displays The layoffs became known after the company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey filed warn notices in the state of California Mac rumors adds under California law employers must
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give employees and state representatives a 60-day notice before a mass layoff event So here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we didn’t talk about the micro LED thing Recently we I think we talked about ages ago the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple looking into micro LED displays for the Apple watch to begin with and to recap micro
⏹️ ▶️ John LEDs are like very very very tiny LEDs like the little LED lights
⏹️ ▶️ John that are annoying in your Electronics that you cover up with little black pieces of tape those like a little colored
⏹️ ▶️ John LED imagine those but very very very tiny That’s what these are and it would be really cool
⏹️ ▶️ John display technology because unlike organic OLEDs or organic LEDs or OLEDs,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t wear out as fast, so there would be less problems with image retention and potentially they could get
⏹️ ▶️ John brighter, yada yada yada. It’s also really hard to make because everything on it is really tiny and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John was apparently trying to make these displays itself rather than like buying them from Samsung or Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John or whoever else they buy display stuff from and rumor was that
⏹️ ▶️ John a little while ago they They said, yeah, we’re giving up on that for now, which is sad. I really want to see a micro LED
⏹️ ▶️ John based Apple watch, but maybe Apple just found a supplier that can do it. But that’s a small team. The car
⏹️ ▶️ John people I would imagine is the majority of this. You cancel the project. A lot of those people whose expertise
⏹️ ▶️ John has to do with car stuff are probably don’t have anything else they can do at Apple at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Except maybe robotics. stories and behind the scenes the better.
Licensing stock photos for AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One way or another, Apple has struck a deal with Shutterstock to license millions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of images for AI training. From 9to5Mac, Reuters reports that Apple struck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a deal to license millions of images owned by Shutterstock, a stock image site. The value of the deal is likely in the $25
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to $50 million range and was said to have been signed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the months following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Apparently, multiple other big tech firms have made similar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deals with Shutterstock, including meta Google and Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about this when the New York Times did something similar. This is just a smart thing to do if you are a
⏹️ ▶️ John big company with a lot to lose and you have a lot of money and you’re not sure about the legal
⏹️ ▶️ John landscape in terms of training your AI models on like YouTube videos that you scraped from Google
⏹️ ▶️ John or images that you downloaded from the internet. You can just pay somebody and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the rights to these images, will you sell us the rights to train our AI models on them? And they apparently gladly will
⏹️ ▶️ John for a handful of million dollars, which is pocket change to Apple, but it is priceless when it comes time
⏹️ ▶️ John to justify the legality of your AI model.
Apple Store pizza oven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And then finally, for follow up this week, here’s our first look at Apple’s in the box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone updating machine. So for context, it’s really crummy when you pick up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPhone, and you get it home, or maybe you’re in the store, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to set it up and do a transfer and so on and so forth. And the iPhone comes out of the box and says, Ah, nope, you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to update me first. No fun. And so we had heard a while ago, that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were working on a mechanism by which they could update an iPhone in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sealed box. Well, apparently this thing is real, and so according to Bloomberg’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Gurman, Presto, which is the name of it, uses MagSafe and other wireless technologies to turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone on, apply the update, and turn it off again. An earlier report from iGeneration also mentions that the machines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are connected to specific servers that can access software updates 24 hours ahead of their general release. Gurman says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Presto machines are in limited testing in the U.S. with a wide deployment planned for April. So if you buy a new iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Apple after April and it comes with the latest OS version installed in the box, you’ll know you have Presto to thank.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, there is a very important image associated with this. Where will users be able to, or listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to find this image?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Directly on your podcast app right now as chapter art, and also in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I’m so proud of us. You know, you just got to give a crap. That’s all it takes. So
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Spatial personas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had a very interesting week over the last week. Everything’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a great way to start.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nobody’s in trouble, everybody’s fine. Everything’s fine. Last week, all three of us, to varying degrees, were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very blasé at best and kind of really grumpy at worst
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the state of Vision Pro and Vision OS. And I stand by everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, at least that I said last week. And yet I kind of want to take it all back because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last week I have had three different experiences. One is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey related. That I wouldn’t say have changed my mind about the Vision Pro, but have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really shaped or changed, I guess, changed my mind and certainly my opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a degree about what the Vision Pro is and what it’s all about. So I, shortly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after recording, I spent some time with our friend, Mike Hurley of Upgrade and connected in many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other shows, including analog for that matter. Uh, I spent some time with Mike doing a spatial persona FaceTime call,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was a little bit frustrating at first because I connected via FaceTime and I hadn’t yet updated my persona
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Vision OS one, one or whatever it is. And I couldn’t do a FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call with personas and I don’t recall the specifics, but it was like, it wouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It, it, it real it, the Vision OS took away my old persona. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not that they just let it hang out. It just erased my original one one-oh persona and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needed to create a new one But as with so many things the error messaging about that was very vague and not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very actionable But eventually I figured it out So I did spatial personas with Mike as it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turns out this past Monday I was on upgrade because Jason was chasing waterfalls
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eclipses And so I stood in for Jason and we talked Mike and I about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so I’ll refer you to that show if you want to hear the long long version of this story, but the short short version is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s unreal. Leaving aside the fact that Mike’s spatial persona or Mike’s persona,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his mouth doesn’t move when he talks because his mustache apparently is too bushy for the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see when his mouth is moving. Have
⏹️ ▶️ John you ever considered the fact that maybe people can’t see his mouth move because his mustache is too bushy?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s an accurate
⏹️ ▶️ John representation of reaction. He should look in the mirror and talk and see if he can see his mouth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s something I’m sure he’ll try and take that on his homework. But one way or another, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is extremely disconcerting and and you never really get used to that. But leaving that aside, his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey persona visually, you know, when he’s not talking, is pretty darn good. And he said mine was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking pretty good as well. But the spatial persona thing is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool and incredibly well done. When I did FaceTime calls in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just straight up regular FaceTime calls, it didn’t take very long for me to think that I was talking to, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, Mike or James Thompson or whoever. Um, but it was still, it was never like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really right. You know, I, I felt like, oh yeah, that’s James, but it was never like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fricking James. And of course it’s, of course it’s never going to be like a hundred percent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the spatial personas got us so much closer because there’s a presence there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that just isn’t there when you’re looking at a rectangle and you know, Mike was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey facing me and then, uh, We decided to share a freeform board
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and next thing you know, we’re on either side of the freeform board. And he can point to things on the freeform board.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, oh, look at this red rectangle over here. And I see his kind of ghostly, kind of weird hand, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, it looks like a hand. I see his hand with his pointer finger extended, pointing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a red rectangle. And then I could do the same thing and he sees what I’m doing. It’s like we were standing in front of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a whiteboard. Now, doing anything with Freeform was not a lot of fun because, you know, gaze-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manipulation and pinching and whatnot, maybe it’s just user error, but I did not find it fun to try to manipulate the board.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in terms of looking at the board and talking about what was on the board, it was very, very cool. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with spatial audio, Mike sounded, you know, I was on the left side of the board, he was on the right side of the board, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure enough, when I was looking at the board, it sounds like he’s over to my right. If I turn my head to look at him, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sounds like he’s right in front of me. It was very well done. Then at one point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget exactly what the circumstance was, I believe we were facing each other, I don’t remember for sure, but one way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a situation in which he said, watch this. And I’m just looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at his spatial persona, and all of a sudden, I could tell that he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stood up. Not only because his persona got higher and above my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head, but just the way in which it moved. You could tell, holy s***, Mike just stood up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what just happened. That’s incredible. Like, it’s so silly, and as with so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many things in the Vision Pro, you kind of have to experience it to truly and properly understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But it was so cool. And I had a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presence there that I had not experienced with a regular FaceTime call that I really hadn’t experienced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a lot of other ways. So if you are one of the people who has a Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to find somebody else with a Vision Pro that you can FaceTime. Maybe I should offer this as like a cameo or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but find somebody else that you can do a FaceTime call with and do the spatial persona thing. It’s extremely cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then it got better. Mike says to me, go to the App Store, go to Apple Arcade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and download the Game Room app. And I will put a link in the show notes. I believe it is only available in the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But actually, I believe it’s actually available on other VR platforms as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, sorry, yes, I was just thinking Apple platforms. That very well could be true. So it’s only available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Apple platforms in Vision Pro. And it’s genericized versions of, I think, Yahtzee, Solitaire,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or two other things, and Battleship. And so Mike said, we’re going to play a round of Battleship. And I’m like, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike, I’m really hungry. It’s right before lunchtime. I want to go make my lunch. I’ll play a couple of shots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what have you. And then I’m going to go, and I’m going to eat my lunch. Fast forward 15 minutes later, and I couldn’t resist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing the whole damn game because it was so freaking cool. So not only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the game board 3D rendered, and the art looks really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. But beyond all that, it was incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. When you’re, the idea of Battleship is you have, you know, like a board in between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you and your opponent and you place like pretend ships in a square grid and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you call out, you know, oh, C5. And the person on the other side of the board either says hit or miss.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you have to deduce where their ships are based on this experience. And based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, you know, hits or misses or whatnot, and you try to sink all of their ships. And so we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing this. And the way this particular app works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that it’s all 3D rendered. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so when I fire, a missile launches from a little missile launcher adjacent to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey game board over the game board between us and flies into Mike’s view
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and either hits or misses his thing. And if it lands in the water, the dead missile just kind of bobs around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the water where I had launched it to. And then he launches a missile and it flies over the game board toward me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and hits one of my ships. And you can see the damage in the ship. You can see the 3D water flow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the damage within the ship. And then when he finally sank one of my ships, the ship sank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the 3D water. This sounds so bananas, the way I’m describing it. I am quite confident. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably sound like I am Looney Tunes. I cannot begin to tell you how freaking cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this experience was. And the other thing is, If I, he could lean over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the side, like away from the game board, and then I could see his face again. And if I held up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my hand above the game board, he could see my hand above the game board. The presence here was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so unbelievably cool. Again, it’s one of those things that for better and for worse you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really just kind of have to experience. And if you don’t own a Vision Pro and you can’t do the spatial persona thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or FaceTime thing, I don’t know what to tell you. And I don’t mean that to be flippant. I don’t know what to tell you. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just go to an Apple store and try this. There’s nothing you can do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is incredibly cool. It was a transformative moment for me to play freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Battleship on the Fish and Fro. I know that sounds nuts, but it really was
⏹️ ▶️ John I think one of the things you left out for people who don’t play Battleship is the reason such a good example
⏹️ ▶️ John of this, a good game example of this, is that the Battleship board is a vertical, there’s a horizontal portion,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s also a vertical portion. and the vertical portion has two sides to it. And the whole point
⏹️ ▶️ John of the game when you play in person in real life is that you can’t see what’s on the other side of that
⏹️ ▶️ John board. So you’re you’re the side that’s facing you. You can see in the side that’s facing them. They can see. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But and so they render this in 3D space. So I would imagine I don’t know if you try this, Casey, but I imagine what the game would let you do
⏹️ ▶️ John is could you peek around and cheat just like real life by looking at his board on his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could try, but it wouldn’t let me because it clears his game board from my perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s stinky. Anyway, so the whole point is they’re they’re modeling a game that like that when you
⏹️ ▶️ John play it in real life Your physical presence is part of the game like it forms a blind between
⏹️ ▶️ John you it blocks Yeah, you know your view is private to you in their view and that’s trivially easy to do in computer
⏹️ ▶️ John games Oh, I’m seeing my screen here. You’re seeing your screen, you know over in the UK, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, we’re not looking at each other’s screens But when you’re in the same virtual place with that whole presence
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is now Now we’re back to just like the real life thing where, well, there are two sides of this board. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see my side is because I’m sitting on this side of it. And the reason you can see your side is because you’re sitting on that side, but we’re all in the same
⏹️ ▶️ John shared space. That’s kind of annoying that it doesn’t let you cheat. But at least it knows that you’re trying to cheat and blanks it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. Right. It is so cool. I am making no promises. But I did record a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of this from my perspective. And I recorded a video of it. Gentlemen, for you, it’s in Slack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now. I’ll see if I can cut it down. And I’ll have to ask Mike if he’s OK with this, because I didn’t ask permission
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for him for me to like, you know, make this public. If it’s cool with Mike, and if I can figure out a way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to cut it down, so it’s a little bit slimmer and post it somewhere, then I’ll put a link in the show notes. No promises.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’d have to tell me if it’s not there again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to work it out or not, but I’ll see what I can do. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is incredibly cool. It’s such a silly thing to play battleship with somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but he is across a freaking ocean and we’re, it feels like we’re there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together playing battleship. It was unreal. I cannot begin to tell you how cool it was. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the final thing in Vision Pro Corner, I hope you two are sitting down because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to tell you, Marco, whenever you get your Vision Pro back, if you ever take it back,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to download the Gucci app. I’m sorry, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco did I just say? As
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fashion brand? You need to download the Gucci app, the fashion brand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not kidding. Somebody wrote to me and said, hey, why is nobody talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? Gentlemen, why is nobody talking about the Gucci app? I am not kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what this is, and I know nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can I guess that maybe a lot of tech podcasters in the Apple space aren’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It turns out that that seems to be accurate. And so what this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is apparently, and I’m sure I’m gonna get the details wrong, but the broad strokes are all that really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently what this is, is that they have a new creative director. The Gucci company has a new creative director, Sabato
⏹️ ▶️ Casey De Sarno, and they do this 20 minute video of who is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the title is literally who is Sabato De Sarno. And it starts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as just a regular old video. I’m not talking 3D video, just a regular old video. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then during the course of this 20 minute video, the app is free, the video is 20ish minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long. Try it. During the 20 minute video, and I’m going to spoil a little bit here, there are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different things that happen and it suddenly becomes immersive in a way that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so well done and so freaking cool and such a great example of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at what is possible with this device. So silly example. At one point, I forget the exact context,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but at some point they talk about being on a tram or something like that and so they’re talking about this in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the video and again this is a rectangle that you’re seeing in your space. It is not 3D. I know John and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I were going back and forth about this last week. It’s just a regular 2D rectangle in your space. But then,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside of this rectangle, suddenly you see like the tram tracks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like just silvery gray tracks, extend out from this rectangle. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then a tram, a 3D tram, rendered, but a 3D tram comes in along
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the tracks. And I think you can interact with it, I’m not 100% sure, but I believe you can. And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so cool and so different. Later on, they show that there was a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sabato walks into a room that there’s a bunch of like Gucci red balloons inflated in it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they did during that moment is they have a gazillion rendered balloons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, it’s not real, it’s just renders, but there’s a zillion rendered balloons between you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the video, not in a way that’s like, yeah, I guess you’re obscuring the video a little bit, which is weird, but like in a in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complimentary way, not in a way that takes away from your viewing experience. And there’s a lot of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is so cool. It’s 20 minutes. It is so freaking cool. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have a vision pro, there is a link in the show notes to this app. I cannot tell you how cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is. I, I love that this is what we’re starting to get now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, I stand by just a week ago, I hadn’t seen anything like this doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, because I’m pretty sure it did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I hadn’t seen any anyway. But now at least people are starting to let me know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of cool and interesting takes and different things that people are doing now with the Vision Pro. Does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, does the Gucci app justify a $3,500 Vision Pro? Hell no, it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do Gucci shoppers care?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah, Gucci
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shoppers probably don’t care. But we’re getting a glimpse now with Game Room, with the Gucci
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. And I’m sure some of you who have used, you know, the Oculus in the past are telling me, are thinking to yourselves,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course, you moron, this is where we’ve been for years. And that very well may be true, but this is not where I’ve been for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And some of this stuff, the special personas, the presence there, the game room app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the free form thing, this Gucci app, they are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so incredibly cool and has made me so much more. What’s the good one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bullish bearish is bad bullish is good. I was getting wrong. So much more bullish about the vision pro because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting to see an inkling that people are starting to experiment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now it bums me out that Apple doesn’t seem to be doing much as we talked to ad nauseum last week. But at least people are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting to do it. And this stuff is so cool. And Marco, whenever you get this thing back,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve got to do a spatial persona call. And maybe you’ll say to me, I hate this and it’s awful, but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? It’s worth trying. So whenever you get that thing back, let me know. We’ll get on FaceTime together.
⏹️ ▶️ John Something I had to mention last week about the spatial personas, comparing them to other
⏹️ ▶️ John virtual representations of people, both VR and non-VR. So for example, the Miis and Nintendos Wii,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, where you can make a little, you know, avatar, 3D avatar of yourself and the
⏹️ ▶️ John meta ones where you’re in a meeting with people and you got these little rendered versions of yourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John All those have made a different choice than Apple has with the
⏹️ ▶️ John spatial personas, both the current ones and the previous one that were inside the little rectangle, in
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Miis and the meta ones modeled you in 3D and yeah, they mapped
⏹️ ▶️ John your face on there and you had your little cartoon hands and sometimes you didn’t have legs or whatever, but they model you
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely from all directions. And the Apple ones, the original ones and the current
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote spatial ones, basically just do your front and some
⏹️ ▶️ John of your sides. And as you go towards the back, they kind of go, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Like just just blur that out. And you can see a lot in a lot of the space persona videos like the Verge
⏹️ ▶️ John article that that we linked in last week’s episode, where when somebody turns in profile, you can see their profile
⏹️ ▶️ John and it looks like them. Like it’s clear that their persona has mapped that, so it’s not just like, you know, generic.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as you get back past like the ear, the back half of the head
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t exist, right? And they blur it artistically. Like before when you were in the little rectangle, they
⏹️ ▶️ John had all sorts of artsy blurring around the edges there. And now that you’re out of the rectangle, still the back
⏹️ ▶️ John half of you doesn’t exist, which makes sense because you didn’t scan the back half of you, you
⏹️ ▶️ John just scanned the front half of you when you did the persona setup. And it could, like the Miis or the
⏹️ ▶️ John Meta things, extrapolate and sort of close off your head shape there and
⏹️ ▶️ John try to make it whatever. But so far, Apple is doing the sort of, I guess the Nintendo 64 school of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t render it, fog it, right? Just the wall of fog that’s like, we can’t render past this
⏹️ ▶️ John distance, but we need something that looks, you know, realistic in context. So like everything is always foggy in
⏹️ ▶️ John the land of Turok for some reason. Right? And the personas are doing that
⏹️ ▶️ John with you. They’re like, oh, your head kind of fades into a mist. You
⏹️ ▶️ John go back on your way. And it’s fine. He’s mostly you’re looking at people from the front. But like what Casey was saying, if two people
⏹️ ▶️ John are collaborating on like a free forum board or whatever, like you do have an occasion,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if it’s like three people, you might have an occasion to see them from the side. And it is a little bit weird. So I am
⏹️ ▶️ John wondering if eventually the next step in this that Apple will be brave enough to try to do the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of your head. Of course, the other thing that’s the problem with the back of your head is there’s even more hair back there for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Not me these days. Yeah, rendering hair is tricky.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they kind of get like, your hairline is kind of fuzzed out anyway with the current personas. Like, oh, you have hair
⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever we scanned, but then it just fades into blurriness, right? But like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, ponytails would have to be rendered with physics or whatever. And the reason I’m drawing a distinction between the Mii’s and
⏹️ ▶️ John the Meta ones is those are all cartoonish, like to varying degrees. I know Meta has ones that are not cartoonish and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve talked about those in past episodes as well, but the cartoonish ones, it’s like, like kind of like Memoji. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we can just render that because the back of your head is just like the front of it. You’re all made of plastic, right? But they’re trying to make them realistic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think they’re like, we’re not ready to do hair yet. So hair equals blur and back of your head does not exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ll definitely be watching for that to see how far back they can push the fog. Already,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it feel like it’s farther. Obviously there’s not the rectangle anymore that had all that weird fog in it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now the personas themselves have fog on the back of them, and we’ll see how far back that goes. But that’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John quite a challenge. But as Casey said, most of the time you’re facing the people, and like, it goes a long way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having you feel like you’re there in a physical space with a physical thing like the battleship board
⏹️ ▶️ John between you that you can interact with or whatever, goes a long way towards making you feel like you’re in a place,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if the back half of your body doesn’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s just, it’s so funny because, again, I stand by last week’s episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that was my perspective at the time, and I stand by it, but I feel so differently now after this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, well, two experiences, if you include the Gucci thing. It’s just, it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. Could you play patty cake with Mike?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kind of, we did high five once, and obviously you kind of float through each other, your hands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey float through each other, because what’s gonna stop you, you know? It’s not like you’re-
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I just meant like the alignment, like could you, where you- I think we could. Was the spatialness good enough where you
⏹️ ▶️ John felt like it was pretty easy to high five, right? Although what’s gonna stop you reminds me of my window management thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John I was talking about how in Fitts’ law, like the top of the screen stops your cursor, but nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John stops it in the 3D world. But a choice that Apple could have made, and I think some other VR people have
⏹️ ▶️ John made is that virtual hand that you’re waving around, there’s no reason that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro OS can’t choose to stop your virtual hand when
⏹️ ▶️ John it encounters another virtual hand or a piece of scenery. Your actual hand will keep going, just like when you
⏹️ ▶️ John jam the mouse cursor against the top of the screen, your mouse hand keeps going, but the cursor
⏹️ ▶️ John stops, right? And that disconnected, like, wait a second, my hand is still moving, but the cursor is not.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re familiar with that as like, oh, my cursor has hit the edge of a thing. So Apple could in
⏹️ ▶️ John the future choose to have you interact, for example, for window management, interacting with window management with a virtual hand,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you jam your hands turned to window, and you don’t have to get the depth exactly right. Because when your virtual
⏹️ ▶️ John hand hits the virtual window, it will stop just like your cursor stops when it hits the top edge of the screen and then you’ll grip and grab
⏹️ ▶️ John and move. And I think that type of interface could be good because it would essentially be the equivalent of Fitts’ law in 3D space.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will jam my hand cursor towards this window because I know, just like you wouldn’t realize, I know eventually it will
⏹️ ▶️ John hit it so I don’t have to be exactly precise. And when it does hit it, the cursor will stop and then I’ll grip.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be cool. So you could actually, you know, high five with Mike and your hand will actually stop and they’d have a little high five sound
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would sound spatially correct. Maybe in version two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that was the other thing that reminds me. The other thing that we did during this time is I don’t, I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t recall how you enable it, but one way or another, you can have, you can share play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your perspective in your actual physical space. And so he took me on a tour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of his studio office, whatever he calls it, I think studio. He took me on a tour of mega studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I could see this studio. I’d have seen photos of it, but it’s different when you can see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if memory serves, it wasn’t 3D. It was like, I don’t think it was rendered in 3D.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll have to try it again at some point, but it was very, you have this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presence when you’re getting whipped around a space from somebody’s perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was very, very, very cool. And I really enjoyed that as well. So again, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have two people, if you know another person with a Vision Pro, you gotta try this. It’s all so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very impressive. And it really gives me hope that even if Apple’s dropping the ball on immersive stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people are trying, and people are trying, and people are doing cool stuff. and we just gotta give it time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I wanted to clarify what I actually said last episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the Vision Pro. I feel like I need to defend myself a little bit against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what sounded like Mike subtweeting me in the beginning of the podcast, sub-potting me. I didn’t say the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro has already failed or is a failure. My concern is that the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will fail if it continues on the path it appears to be on so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of support from developers and Apple. What I stand by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they have a pretty significant challenge on their hands of there being a massive chicken and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco egg problem here. That there are not many users, there are not many apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is not almost any content. That’s a big problem. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to get more users, somebody has to be making the content or the apps or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both to get them there. And right now it seems like the biggest chance of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that support coming from somewhere is from Apple. Because the other content makers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and publishers out there are gonna have a hard time justifying making content for Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s gonna be for such a small number of people. Now, there’s also obviously other VR platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even they, like the MetaQuest series has been very popular, relatively speaking, for a VR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform for a number of years now. but even that has not been enough to get tons of custom content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made for it. So really, Apple needs to seed this ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a whole bunch of content that they are making, even though it appears as though it’s probably not gonna be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote, worth it yet for a while. And what you’re saying, Casey, is not wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I haven’t tried the 3D personas yet, but I’ve heard everyone else’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes that they’re amazing and everything. And you’re describing experiences that I’ve had on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro of just like being blown away, really feeling something different, feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you’re having an experience or being able to do something that you cannot do on any of Apple’s other platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any of the platforms sometimes in the world. And that is correct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also not enough. Those are amazing experiences. Those are amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibilities. That’s amazing potential. What it is right now so far for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these things more like a tech demo than a long-lasting product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve seen other VR headsets do this for years. Look back to when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Meta’s Horizon Workroom, is that what it was called? When that launched, what was it, about a year or two ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we heard from people who tried that, especially Ben Thompson was a huge champion of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of just how amazing it was to do basically these kind of like virtual meetings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with 3D avatars in a virtual room. And it was all, everything you were saying about how great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the spatial personas were, of like spatial audio being, you know, coming from the person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like a 3D representation of that person in the room. Ben Thompson was saying for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when that came out, and I believe when Mike and Gray did it on Cortex a couple years back, I believe they came to a similar conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, it really is way better than like a Zoom or FaceTime meeting for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, virtually meeting with people. And we know this already, but yet that product never really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took off. Like, Horizon Workrooms doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. The coolness of the meeting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not enough. The coolness of these experiences of, wow, I played Battleship with my friend once,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not enough. That’s a great experience. It’s a cool demo. It’s more like going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a theme park, though. How do we get people to integrate this into more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyday life or work types of uses? And that really comes down to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of more fundamental things. How do you get the hardware to be more mass market friendly, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s through cost or changes to the hardware itself, probably both. And then how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you get people to buy it and to use it regularly, not just use it once, have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cool experience and then put it back in the drawer and not use it for another six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s really hard. My concern is that we’re not yet seeing Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really ramp up the content story or the app story. That’s concerning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because if not enough people buy this or the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who do buy it end up not using it very often, then all those cool experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re describing won’t happen. People will do them once and then never do them again. It’s only so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful if you and a handful of your podcaster friends have this but no one else in the world does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like they have to get the product from where it is now to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more people being willing and happy to buy it and use it more often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the the chasm they have to cross. And they might do it. They might really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blow us away and get there. Or maybe it’ll be a really slow boil, like John was saying last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe three years from now we might say, hey, you know what it’s slowly gaining steam that may happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that happens I’m not like pessimistic about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the product being able to be good I’m scared that Apple won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do what it takes to get it there because they’re not investing enough in the contents ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that that’s my main concern here is first for any of these experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be compelling to be used more than once you You have to get a bunch of people to buy this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. How are they going to do that? Well the easiest way to do that I think is with really compelling content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the apps aren’t going to be there. So the next best thing, really compelling content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get a bunch of like music and movies and sports videos and concerts and like get like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this different types of content that people will be like, yes I want to watch my basketball
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or my fish concert in 3D. I will get it just for that. Yes, do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Somehow get people to buy it. would be step one. And then once you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people accepting this device into their lives and using it more than once,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you can start having these amazing experiences with people where you’re playing Battleship and 3D together
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. But it’s not going to get beyond this is a fun demo we did twice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until you have a lot of people buying it. And how are you going to get a lot of people to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it without this whole ecosystem existing already? That’s It’s a very tough thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I still don’t think we’ve seen enough from Apple yet. But again, it is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early days. It’s been out for two months. WWDC is, you know, another two months from now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we still could see great things here, but it seems like we should have seen more of it already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being two months past, you know, post launch. Like I would have expected to see more of a push from Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of a content push, more of a press push. It’s just something like to keep reminding people, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this cool thing that we did, It’s out there and here’s a new thing this week that we’ve released on it or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that we’re just we’re not really getting that yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think a lot of the reason people talk about content so much for it and particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John content that is either entirely made by Apple or essentially paid for or sponsored or subsidized by
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is because that is the one realm where nobody can test
⏹️ ▶️ John that headsets can do something other platforms can’t. You can use a web browser
⏹️ ▶️ John on a Mac, on your phone, on your iPad or whatever. You can’t watch 3D video on any of those
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, right? You need a headset to get the headset experience. And why should Apple help fund that? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple either produces or helps fund content, A, they can make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John it is optimized for their headset, which happens to be very expensive and has high resolution, right? So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, they’re not going to make the lowest common denominator content. and B, they can essentially say this is exclusively for people
⏹️ ▶️ John with Vision Pro, right? Because if they help pay for it, it doesn’t need to be for everybody. It can
⏹️ ▶️ John just be for people who have the Vision Pro. And content is the most compelling
⏹️ ▶️ John use for the product that Apple has put out. Despite the fact that they say it’s spatial computing, that’s not the other thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything you can do in spatial computing in terms of I can use applications and scroll windows and type
⏹️ ▶️ John text, you can do all those things on other platforms. There are advantages and disadvantages, but it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John slam dunk. well, you can’t do any 3D video on any other thing that Apple makes.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the only one. So there’s no, you don’t need to make some sophisticated argument on how it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John to manipulate Windows in 3D space and how you like looking up at the ceiling to see your web browser. You don’t have to make a
⏹️ ▶️ John nuanced argument like that. It’s like literally you cannot do this on anything else that Apple sells. And also, by the
⏹️ ▶️ John way, people who see the 3D video find it impressive and compelling, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, apps and make the OS better and so on and so forth, or like Apple, just make more content.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the easiest thing, because first of all, it doesn’t require anything of the user. You just have to like launch it and look at it and be amazed, right? And look
⏹️ ▶️ John around, right? It’s very natural. You don’t need to learn any weird pinch gestures. You don’t have to, you know, this there’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John learning curve is low. It’s incredibly impressive. I feel like it is the thing that is most impressive to people when
⏹️ ▶️ John they do the in-store demo is seeing the 3D video. It has no competition in Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John entire line. And if Apple pays for it, they can essentially make it optimized for an exclusive for this device.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a short-term thing. Like eventually if watching NBA games with a, you know, courtside
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective in 3D becomes a thing, presumably the NBA would want that to be available on every headset platform, not
⏹️ ▶️ John just Apple’s. But if Apple foots the bill in the beginning, yeah, you can make that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple exclusive, only on Vision Pro, not because Vision Pro is the only headset, but because Apple paid literally millions of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John to make this happen, or because it’s MLB and Apple owns the rights to it. Like that’s the part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the frustration is, we see how you can make this product more compelling
⏹️ ▶️ John simply by producing content. And that’s not the story Apple wants to tell about this device. They want to call it a spatial
⏹️ ▶️ John computing device and it is, right? But the easiest sale is you can see 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John video like you’ve never seen it before. And how about you make some of that Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do, I concur it’s the easiest. I’m not sure it’s the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey striking for lack of a better word. Like it, unquestionably it’s the easiest way to do this immersive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or even 3D video. But I don’t know, some of the most compelling experiences I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had were, you know, like the spatial persona thing and these FaceTime calls. And-
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s quite a learning curve. You gotta know somebody else with one, you gotta be computery, like, yeah, like that’s, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of of the mindset of like, you know, kickstart this and then once people get accustomed,
⏹️ ▶️ John because just getting them used to the idea of you put this on your head and you somehow navigate to a thing where you can see the game,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually they’ll be like, you know what, I’m feeling comfortable in this world. And then, hey, I can I watch a game with my
⏹️ ▶️ John friend? Remember when Ben talked about this recently? You can be sitting in the stands of a baseball stadium next to each other? It started
⏹️ ▶️ John out as you’re just watching a baseball game, but now you’re doing what you’re talking about, Casey, where now you’re sitting next to your friend watching
⏹️ ▶️ John the same game together and you can turn and talk to them. It’s like, I feel like that’s the way in, because starting with a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t require almost anything of the user is a good way to get them used to all the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that comes with it. You know, get them to shell out for it in the first place, get them used to putting it on their head, get them to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out how it fits into their life, whether they’re going to feel comfortable using the library or in the Wegmans or whatever, and then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John you ease them into like, oh, now my friend is sitting next to me and we’re watching the same movie screen together, but now we’re watching a baseball
⏹️ ▶️ John game together. And now we’re both courtside, but now we’re talking to each other and playing battleship. That’s, I feel like that is a,
⏹️ ▶️ John a long road to, to, uh, drive down and Apple has not even like really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I mean, I think this, uh, by virtue of this game room app being in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple arcade, it would imply to me anyway, that it was funded at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in part by Apple. Now to Marco’s point earlier, perhaps it was already written for other platforms and the funding was just the porting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey onto the vision pro, but still, this is the kind of thing that all three of us are talking about. Like do more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this, please. Apple give us immersive video, give us 3d video, give us all this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I really want there to be more of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that there is a world in which the Vision Pro can take off to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey degree that a $3,500 device can’t, a frivolous device can take off. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s going to be a long road. I mean, Marco, you’re not wrong about that. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And it will be a long road, but they have to start driving down it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can make it down a long road. Just wait. Like over time, be patient. If you’re, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue driving down the long road, like you will get there. For me to have more confidence in the products, I need to see that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually driving down the road. And Apple Arcade is a great tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can use. We don’t really see a lot of ways that Apple funds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development of third-party software. They don’t really do that. Obviously, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let you put it in the store, asterisk, asterisk, but you don’t see Apple behaving like a studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very often, where they will front the money to fund some third-party making something. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Arcade is, I think, sort of one of those things. I don’t know the details, and I know it’s kind of shifted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and changed a little bit over time, but from what we understand, Apple Arcade is a way they could do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if they wanted to fund some games and interactive type entertainment experiences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a great place to do it, like a great tool they already have. Use Apple Arcade. Use the relationships you have there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But everything we keep hearing is that the relationships there aren’t that good, maybe. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I worry that it’s going to take types of relationships and types of skills
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and attitudes that Apple historically has not really shown that they have in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make good software happen for the vision. Honestly, like you guys were saying a few minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago about the computing aspect, and John was saying the computing aspects kind of were like less important or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less doable maybe than the video aspects. But longer term, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there is more promise in some of the computing aspects than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we think now. For instance, I’m currently trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco furnish some rooms in a house and figure out certain decor choices and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. It would be great to have some of the 3D house remodeling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of apps or room envisioning. What is it, like if I paint this room green, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of stuff. How does this chair look in my room? Some of that stuff is there now, very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very little. Mostly through like Safari and the support for the AR model stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of that stuff exists, sort of, but it’s very, very minimal. The Vision Pro would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be amazing for stuff like that. What about virtual tourism? Take me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a balcony in a villa in Spain or whatever. You can do amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff with 3D worlds and virtual tourism. mindfulness kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exercises and environments. Apple’s own environments, they can broaden that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, there is a lot of value to a lot of that stuff, but that, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of that to happen, you first need enough users on the platform that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth those developers making those things. So that’s hopefully where content can kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jumpstart the install base. Make must-have, must-see content. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, again, I’m not a sports person, but sports seem like a really obvious good way to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see Apple is kind of sort of dipping their toe into that so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That could be very compelling for a lot of people. I think also, yeah, concerts, live events, stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, that could get a lot of people as well. I just hope they’re doing that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m scared because what they have launched with is basically nothing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two months in and it’s still basically nothing. So how are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they going to get from here to there? If the answer is just that we don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about their production pipeline and it turns out maybe like over the course of the rest of this year, maybe they have a bunch of cool stuff coming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. Then we can look back at this and look how wrong I was. That’ll be awesome because I want this to succeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so far we have no sign of that. So I hope I’m wrong. Again, just like I said last week, I hope I’m wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we’ll see what happens. just funny how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wasn’t, I don’t think I was deeply pessimistic about the vision pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just wasn’t deeply optimistic about it. And now I’m not sure if I would go so far as to say I’m deeply optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. But my goodness, I feel like I’m much closer to that than I was ever before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so yeah, I mean there there’s with with time, I’m finding more and more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways that this thing has impressed me and I think that’s cool.
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#askatp: Buying cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Chandler Kent wrote probably six months ago, but here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are. Lesson learned, don’t ever use Ask ATP for timely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey related things because we probably won’t get to it in time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes that happens, though. Sometimes someone writes an Ask ATP and it goes in the next day’s recording, so you never know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You never know, but I wouldn’t rely on it. But Chandler wrote 18 years ago, I need to buy a car, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about buying a Power Mac G5. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. I’m a tech nerd with no experience buying cars. I fear that having the feeling of getting screwed by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sleazy car salesman. As tech nerds who are also into cars, what are your best tips for first-time car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buyers to make the process less stressful and hopefully get a fair price? I’m based in the US. We are buying our first family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car since we have two kids and are thinking about expanding our family. Currently own a Volkswagen Jetta that my wife bought in 2011.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my two cents, and I will try to make this quick because this could go on for another 90 minutes if we let it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My two cents are twofold. Number One, if you really want a stress-free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience, I haven’t bought from this company, but I have sold to this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company. And there are other equivalents, I think, similar to it. And full disclosure, they’re based out of Richmond, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CarMax, they sell used cars and their whole thing is no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haggling. Like the price is the price. Granted, you probably will not get the world’s best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal by going to CarMax, but you will have an easy transaction. Carvana I’ve heard very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mixed things about, but this is sort of similar, but it’s all internet based. But I would consider CarMax.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re not trying to buy new, go to CarMax and just find something on their lot or find something nearby and it’ll be fairly straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You won’t get the best price, but it’ll be easy. But for me, when we’ve bought cars, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last couple of cars we’ve bought, we’ve bought new mostly to get car play.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what we did was I emailed or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reached out to the salespeople for all the dealers within in like two to three hours of my house and said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is your best out the door price for the following car? With an XC90 with this, that, this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, this, that, this, that, what’s your best price? And by the way, I’m emailing a bunch of other dealers to ask the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so what ends up happening is one or two of the dealers will come up with a decent price and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via email, you can just say, oh, well, you know, the dealer down the road said, you know, 50,000 and the dealer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up the road said 55,000. Can you come down dealer up the road? And you can kind of create a bidding war. Now, granted, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the intermediary to do this It’s a pain in the butt, and it takes forever. But we’ve gotten some pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darn good deals on our last couple of cars by doing something like that. So it takes a lot of work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you can get a pretty decent deal. And pretty much all the haggling is done up front,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is really, really nice. So by the time you go in, it’s mostly about just signing a few papers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and getting the car. The other thing I would also advocate, and then I’ll stop talking, is if you can provide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your own financing, I would at least be prepared to. Now there’s catches and caveats with that because oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you may get a better deal if you use the dealer’s financing, but sometimes the dealer likes an easy transaction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and when you just hand them a check or pay cash, that can go a lot easier. So I think John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has some links he’s going to talk about. So before we get there, Marco, what would you like to add to this or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything else you’d like to contribute?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some brands, notably like Tesla and also Rivian and many of the new brands,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t like the ones that sell direct where you’re not going through dealers, usually they don’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco negotiable prices. Like usually it’s just here’s the price. It’s like buying something on Amazon. Like this is the price,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can order it or not. And in some ways, you know, that kind of takes some of the quote fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of it for some people. For me, that took a lot of stress out of it because I didn’t have to worry, am I getting screwed? Everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting screwed equally. So it’s, you don’t have to like feel bad about it or put any thought or time into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s wonderful when there’s a brand that just, there is no negotiation. when you’re dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most other brands, where you’re going through dealers and having all these markups, it’s like any other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco negotiation, the more information you have about their situation, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. It helps to know things like, for instance, if you can use online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerdery to find out what does this car cost the dealer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe this is called the invoice price in some circles or whatever else, but you can usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use some kind of online research to figure out what is the dealer cost for this car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, it’s a little more complicated. Sometimes there’s like certain incentives and everything the dealer gets to kind of cut into it a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the most part, you should have some idea of what you can reasonably even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask for. Because if you’re asking to buy a $35,000 car and it costs the dealer $32,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you go in there and say, I’ll give you 20, they’re gonna laugh at you. Like, because what you’re asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for is totally impossible and unreasonable. and that just shows you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go in there with some idea of what you’re talking about, and you know that their cost is 32,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you say, I’ll give you 32.5 right now, walk out the door. You’re giving them a profit margin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know they’re not gonna give it to you for their cost, they’re gonna want some profit. So you give them 500 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 1,000 bucks in profit, and usually they’ll be fine with that, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll be happy to have the deal done quickly. Now, Casey’s method is better, and you should probably combine these two. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should probably like, you know, have, if you have multiple dealers in the region who will compete with each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other, who you can, you know, just email and deal with it that way, that’s better. But you should also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what to ask for in the first place and you should know kind of what kind of pricing is reasonable to expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should also know about other factors. So for instance, oftentimes, depending on how you wanna,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, finance it, oftentimes the, some of the best values in the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business are lease specials. because if you want to and can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lease the vehicle, leasing is usually backed by some financial arm of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car company who you’re buying the car from. And so if the car company is, say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of maybe looking to miss some of their sales targets for the quarter, and the end of the quarter’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up soon, they might borrow against their future selves by offering a lease special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give you a pretty good deal on a car to get you to please, for the love of God, this lease now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this quarter. So you can take advantage of factors like that, you know, end of month, end of quarter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. There’s some wiggle room there. Ultimately though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of this comes down to basic negotiation. Which of you needs it more?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you want this certain car a lot? Do a lot of other people want that same car? So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if what you’re going for is a very in-demand car that maybe is in a bit of a short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supply, you’re going to pay pay through the nose and they know it and there’s nothing you can do about it because if you don’t buy it someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will come in you know later that day and they’ll buy it so that but whereas if the flip side is true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if what you are trying to buy is a car that is pretty plentiful and the dealer is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to miss their sales target or the manufacturer is going to miss their quarterly earnings target
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can take advantage of that and you can get a good price so the more information you have the better because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to know where you stand, how much leverage you have depends on how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want to sell you that car. And you need to know like how far down you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can even go in the price while still being reasonable and within what they can accept.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s the John answer to this question?
⏹️ ▶️ John So my suggestion is, so there’s lots of online tools to help you with this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s a YouTube channel that I found interesting and it’s a good example. I’m not gonna, a good example of
⏹️ ▶️ John a genre of YouTube type channel where the channel is essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John a come on for you to sign up for a service, right? But they have lots of free videos
⏹️ ▶️ John on YouTube, all of which are telling you to go to the website and sign up for the service and pay the money, right? This is,
⏹️ ▶️ John the channel is called Car Edge and they have a website and they do have a thing they want you to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for, right? But there’s a lot of free value that you can extract
⏹️ ▶️ John from something like Car Edge without ever paying them any money. I’ve never paid CarEdge any money, but I’ve watched a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John their videos. And the thing I like about CarEdge is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you watch enough of the videos, the free videos that are on YouTube, you will eventually start to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a feel for what the dealership experience is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, the bad old negotiated price dealership experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the people who runs the channel used to be a car dealer, so he knows what it’s like on the other side,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And they do lots of role-playing in the channel, which I think is the other important part of negotiating
⏹️ ▶️ John for a car. Car dealers, just like any other salespeople, will
⏹️ ▶️ John leverage social norms, essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John to get you to do something you otherwise wouldn’t, right? So social norms of not wanting to
⏹️ ▶️ John disagree with somebody or not wanting to be rude to them,
⏹️ ▶️ John those sound like things that wouldn’t cause you to pay thousands of dollars more for a car, but they absolutely will, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not saying you have to be obnoxious and rude, but there are many things that you will feel uncomfortable doing if
⏹️ ▶️ John you haven’t either rehearsed them yourself or at least seen other people role-playing and rehearsing them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s very easy to sort of get caught up. And also, frankly, if you find yourself in a car dealer,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things they do is keep you there for a long time, because you’re like, I don’t want to go through this all again on
⏹️ ▶️ John another day. I just wasted one of my weekend days doing this. and I basically decided that I don’t want to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John this car at this price. But if I leave now, all I’m doing is signing myself up to have to do this again
⏹️ ▶️ John next weekend. And how soon do I need the car? I needed ASAP because my old car was totaled
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Like you don’t ever want to be in that situation. Right. Sometimes you can’t help it. But that’s just the thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep in mind. Like they’re relying on you not wanting to feel like you’re rude and
⏹️ ▶️ John you not feeling exhausted and not wanting to go through this whole ordeal again to just be like, fine, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Resist that. So I would suggest going to something like the Car Edge YouTube channel or their website
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything similar and sucking all the value out of that for free. If you want to sign up for it, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t give them any money, but there’s so much good knowledge on YouTube of like, here’s what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be like when you go in the dealer. Here’s what the dealer is going to say to you. Here’s why this is not true. Here’s why that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not true. And yes, there are tons of websites where you can look up what the dealer prices for this car and
⏹️ ▶️ John incentives and all that stuff. What Marco said about rare cars is true. If you want a Civic Type R, bad news for
⏹️ ▶️ John you. You’re lucky if you can even find one, let alone get one that’s not $10,000 over MSRP.
⏹️ ▶️ John So try to buy a car that is not very rare. Try to not be in a hurry for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Do your research ahead of time and practice. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in a partnership and your partner is more comfortable doing this type of
⏹️ ▶️ John negotiation, if you do role playing and one of you just can’t bring themselves to just walk out
⏹️ ▶️ John the door, say no or no, I can’t do that. Have the other person to negotiate.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just it’s because you have to you have to end up doing that. And I will say, finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, if you before you even start this process, if you have in mind,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I want a Honda Civic ish car and I have this amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of money for it. And if I paid this amount of money and I got a brand new Honda Civic, Civic ish car I would be happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the end, if you do get exhausted and someone says, Hey, I’ll give you a Honda civic for a number that is within the
⏹️ ▶️ John range that you want it to pay. Even if you essentially, Oh, I’m overpaying, I got screwed.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you paid an extra thousand dollars for a civic. The world will not end. Make sure you get
⏹️ ▶️ John the car you want for a price that you’re okay with. And then maybe you’ve done minimal sanity
⏹️ ▶️ John checking on that price to make sure it’s not completely outrageous and you’ll be fine. Like there’s no, No one
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s going to come to your house and say, I heard you paid $500 more than your neighbor for your car. Don’t you feel bad? Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel bad. Just get a car that you’re happy with, that you’ll hopefully like for a reasonable price.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no award for shaving down that last $100 off the price. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to spend that much filling up the tank twice. Or if you get an EV, you’re spending so much money anyway, so who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think just to reiterate what John just said, It is important to know that no matter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how nice or not sleazy the dealer is, their profession is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to manipulate you into paying them as much money as you are possibly capable of paying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so there will be moments where you have to say, nope, I’m out and walk away. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are moments where you probably will have to be kind of rude. When I bought the Volkswagen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I negotiated in advance, we came to a price. I said, okay, I’m going to come up at such and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a time. We, we, everything’s good to go. I’ll have all the paperwork I need. I’ll have a check for you, et cetera, et
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cetera. And this was at a Volkswagen dealer, the Volkswagen dealer, dealer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nearest the Volkswagen of America headquarters up in the DC area. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was trying to get this car bought. Everything was squared away. I just had to sign the paperwork
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they wouldn’t get, they wouldn’t put me in front of the finance people, which was silly because I didn’t even need to finance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything. But nevertheless, they wouldn’t put me in front of the finance people for, for like an hour. And eventually I sent a text to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey child that was my dealer. And I said, look, I am going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to leave if I’m not in front of somebody in five minutes. Like I was a total
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chad about it because I’d been saying like, what’s the story? What’s the story? What’s the story? And he’d run off to go ask such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and such and such who’s a mob. And eventually I sent a text and I was like, I will leave in five minutes if I’m not in front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of somebody. And do you know what, fellas, do you know what happened? In about three minutes I was sitting in front of the finance person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who was then and giving me the rigmarole about, oh, you need the underbody protection, oh, you need the wheel protection, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need the tire protection, and you have to say no, no, no, no. But eventually, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure enough got out of there with the car I wanted at the price I wanted, and it all worked out. But it took me being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Chad to get there, and that was no fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although, yeah, on the topic of, this is another thing to watch the Car Age videos about, it’s complicated, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John should I tell them that I’m paying them cash? Should I tell them I have a trade-in? When should I tell them these things? Should I not say
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about it until we’ve agreed on a number? Like it’s more complicated than you think, which is why I think you should watch these free
⏹️ ▶️ John videos and get an idea of like the things you should and shouldn’t say until you
⏹️ ▶️ John get an agreed upon price. And then you pull it, oh, and by the way, I have a trade. And oh, and by the way, I’m paying cash. Or by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll do your finance thing as long as there’s no early penalty thing because they often have incentives
⏹️ ▶️ John to get you to sign up for the finance thing. They’re like, look, we know you’re gonna pay cash for it. But if you will just
⏹️ ▶️ John sign up for this loan and then immediately pay it off, you’ll never pay a penny in interest or whatever. That’s not always a scam.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes that’s a real thing. I’ve done it with my own cars, where we get a quote unquote car loan,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then just immediately pay it off with no prepayment penalty whatsoever to get a lower price on the
⏹️ ▶️ John car. But that usually, by the time you’re negotiating that, it’s after you’ve essentially got agreed upon price
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe you’re trying to get it to go even lower. So anyway, watch these carage videos. I found them very educational. It may make you think,
⏹️ ▶️ John I never want to buy a car again, or I want to buy something with no higher price. Do you guys remember when Saturn did that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of the first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had a Saturn. That was my first car was a
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was a dealership thing. Like it was GM. It’s not, it wasn’t like, it wasn’t like Rivian or Tesla. It was a
⏹️ ▶️ John car from a big car company with a dealership chain where it was still no haggle pricing. So yeah, no haggle pricing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marco said, everyone gets screwed equally. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is possible to find a good deal on a new car. And if not, uh, then on a used car
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. So yeah. And this, and obviously Marco has the most experience buying cars in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey many of us, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I feel like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. I don’t know if he has the most experience buying cars. He has a lot of experience leasing cars, but buying
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re in a dealership. You’re dealing with those people. You’re giving them money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same. But you know, leases are also negotiable, right? Everyone knows that. You can negotiate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the price on which they’re basing the lease.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. I wish…
#askatp: Product lockdown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and Anonymous writes, when Apple, Hewlett Packard, and John Deere sells physical products, we don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own the product. John Deere uses software to prevent farmers from repairing their tractors. HP uses software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to prevent users from using non-HP ink in their printers. Apple uses software to prevent users from installing Fortnite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on their phones. With all this discussion of the DMA and Apple’s treatment of developers, there’s little mention of Apple’s taking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of iPhone device ownership from consumers. Do you, the hosts of ATP, have any opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on how Apple’s assertion of ownership over iPhones after they’ve sold them to consumers harms said consumers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand the premise here. I granted I give Apple a pass on a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things that maybe I shouldn’t, but I don’t really get vibes that it’s Apple’s device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in fact, there was what was the kerfuffle about like photo scanning or something like that? There was something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently that all of us were like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s not for you to be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco permission. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the CSAM analysis from last year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, like it’s not that I have a problem with CSAM analysis, but like just telling me that you’re doing this on my phone and sucking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up my battery to do it and stuff like that, I don’t love that and they reverse course. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the broader point I don’t think is unreasonable and I certainly don’t love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that ownership is a lot squishier now than it was before. But with Apple particularly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really feel that squeeze quite yet. I think I started with Marco last time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, what are your thoughts here?
⏹️ ▶️ John I put this question in here because it gives, just to give myself an opportunity to say something that I kept meaning to say that basically
⏹️ ▶️ John goes unsaid in all of our discussions of the iPhone on the app store and developers being annoyed or whatever, but I figured we should
⏹️ ▶️ John say it in case people don’t just assume it. Whenever we talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John developers being annoyed that they’re not getting, they don’t feel like they’re getting their money’s worth from Apple, Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John running the app store in a way they disagree with, it’s taking too much of their profits, whatever their cut is, like, And people
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, why are people mad about that? They shouldn’t be mad. Here is another situation where another company takes an even bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John cut and people aren’t mad. It’s unfair that people are mad at Apple. And this is, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get to it. This is actually related to the whole John Deere HP printering thing. One of the
⏹️ ▶️ John explanations of why people might be mad at Apple for doing something that they’re not mad
⏹️ ▶️ John at other companies for doing an even worse thing is because those people who are mad
⏹️ ▶️ John view the phone the same way they view Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John other earlier platforms, personal computers. Personal computers have existed
⏹️ ▶️ John for a really long time. Some of the people who have sold software for personal computers are still
⏹️ ▶️ John alive and selling software or trying to sell software for things like iPhones. And on personal computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the whole history of that product, companies would
⏹️ ▶️ John make a computer and there’d be an operating system, sometimes made made by the same company, sometimes made by the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you’d buy applications for them, and you’d run them, right? And the applications
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be sold through Egghead Software. Egghead Software would take 55% of every single box of software they sold, which is way more than 30%.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the rest would go to the software developer or the publisher, whatever, in any way. And you’d put it on your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then with the advent of the internet, people said, I don’t need Egghead Software. I can sell you my software directly. You
⏹️ ▶️ John buy it from my website, download it to your computer, you install it, and you run it. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t involved at all in that transaction. Apple sold you the computer, maybe Apple sold you the operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has its own applications that you can buy, but when you buy the application from me, you go to my website, you give
⏹️ ▶️ John me money, maybe I pay a credit card processor, maybe I pay some other payment processor, whatever, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all my business. And if you own a computer, you can buy from me and put that software on your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people look at the phone and they think, that’s how the phone should work. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John we have literal decades of precedent, maybe not decades with the internet, buying on websites, but decades of precedent
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, hey, I buy a computer from a company and maybe they make an operating system, but after that
⏹️ ▶️ John I can do whatever I want. And yeah, maybe Egghead Software gets 55% of every box of software, but that’s not my problem. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to deal with that. And in some respects, people are more okay with retailers taking stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, look, they have to make a physical box and we ship it to them and they have warehouses and inventory and they pay employees
⏹️ ▶️ John and they rent a building and they heat and they cool it. You know, like there’s obvious costs involved there
⏹️ ▶️ John and retail is a long established thing, but still the computer is sort of like, it’s my
⏹️ ▶️ John computer, I own it, I can run whatever software I want on it. It’s not like Microsoft can reach
⏹️ ▶️ John out and say, or Dell or whatever and say, no, I’m sorry, you’re not allowed to play Fortnite anymore because Dell says you can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when Apple says that you can’t have Fortnite on your phone anymore, a lot of times it feels like Dell is telling them that they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John play Doom on their PC. It’s absurd to them. I’m not saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re right or wrong, I’m just saying that this is a thing that happened in history. People remember that history.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, that history continues to this day on platforms that Apple sells, like the Mac, where they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John stop me from downloading a piece of software off the Internet and playing using my Mac. Like and so far,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has not. They mean they could. But so far, Apple has said they won’t and they haven’t. Right. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John is this other thing that looks a lot like a computer or a lot like the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you squint, that makes people feel like the phone should work that way. And I feel like this this person’s
⏹️ ▶️ John question is similar. They say they remember a world or know
⏹️ ▶️ John about currently a world where the situation is different. And they say, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John different between the phone and the iPad and a Mac and a PC?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re all computers with screens and RAM and communication. Like, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so different? And I’m sure you can come up with the reasons why it’s different. Certainly, Apple has tried
⏹️ ▶️ John over the years. I remember when the iPhone first came out. a lot of the reasons that Apple said it was different was because it’s the cell phone network and you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John arbitrary software running on here because that could destroy the cell phone. Remember the whole like scare
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mongering about it? Wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Steve Jobs himself who gave that excuse?
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. It’s like before the App Store existed, like why they have to be web apps and can’t be regular apps, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know. But like, I’m not explaining this to say this is why
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is wrong. I’m just putting this out there so people know this
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the things that contributes to people’s dissatisfaction. because they know it has been,
⏹️ ▶️ John can be, and is different on other platforms that people think are close enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to the iPhone that it shouldn’t be that different. And we never, we don’t really mention that, we don’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about that because we’re always like, oh, everyone knows on PCs it’s not like it is on the iPhone. But I just want to reiterate, on PCs
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not like it is on the iPhone. And that contributes greatly to certain, maybe just old
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s, but certain people’s attitude towards the iPhone and iOS and the Mac App Store and stuff like that is
⏹️ ▶️ John because maybe they’re old than they remember the olden times, but even if not, even if the young people, if you buy a Mac today,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can run any software you want on it and Apple can’t stop you. And that’s a platform that Apple sells today.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think when all us old people die, I don’t think everyone will just accept Apple’s cut and their
⏹️ ▶️ John total control over the app store. I think as long as the Mac continues to exist, as long as the
⏹️ ▶️ John PC continues to exist, as long as those platforms like that exist, as long as the web exists,
⏹️ ▶️ John and people are born every day and see those things, they will ask that same question. And the question is,
⏹️ ▶️ John why is this phone different than this PC? Or, you know, the John
⏹️ ▶️ John Deere tractor people. I’ve been buying John Deere tractors for 50 years. Why is this tractor something
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t fix it myself? Right? Why can’t I take my cracked phone screen and get it fixed at the mall kiosk
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m willing to do that for less money? Parts pairing, like, I hope that we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John lose sight of the way things used to be, because the way things are today on the iPhone are not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John the way they always have to be. same deal with John Deere tractors or whatever. And in particular, when it
⏹️ ▶️ John comes to Apple’s platforms, the fact that they were founded as a personal computer company and have
⏹️ ▶️ John all those decades of experience with personal computers, and we did have that time when personal computers existed
⏹️ ▶️ John and the internet existed and you could buy software directly from software developers without the platform vendor being involved at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John that contributes greatly to people’s dissatisfaction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just things used to be simple and now they’re not. And before we even started recording the bootleg,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was whining and moaning to the boys about doing some Minecraft related things for Declan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this evening. And I couldn’t help but think to myself as this was going on, like, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, the, the canceled comic when he was talking about wifi on a plane, like everything’s awesome and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody’s happy. Um, this is kind of like, everything’s awful and nobody’s happy because there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were like so many layers I had to jump through and so many hoops I had to jump through in order to get something working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it used to be that you installed a piece of software and then it ran. And I get why things are not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way today, and for the most part, I prefer it the way it is today, but golly, when it goes bad, it goes real bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but also, you know, there’s kind of an Overton window effect here of, you know, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sliding window of what we accept as normal slash acceptable slash palatable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in computers, and that changes over time, you know. And, you know, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of build little much I was saying back in the day when when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of our listeners were probably not even born yet we had a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a huge ripple throughout the computer enthusiast community when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware started including DRM in hardware I remember there was um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was it the Intel TPM there was like there was like the the Microsoft and Intel were working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together on like a trusted platform and this was when they were first adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically security in the hardware for DRM for DRM media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playback to PC hardware for the first time. This was I believe in the late 90s it was around the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know DVDs had come out and and all the DRM arguments over the DVD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CSS you know horribleness and the DCSS lawsuits and all this other stuff was going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was really the rise of mainstream DRM in PC hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And before that, you had formats like the CD, which had absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no protection whatsoever. I mean, people tried to add it later, kind of, sort of worked sometimes, but for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most part, it was no protection whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My guy, we had protection before CDs. Do you not remember trying to photocopy the SimCity black
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on red? Oh, the red? Yeah. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come on! Right. Anyway, so like, there were all these, like, you know, in the olden days before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, before basically the late 90s, there was really no good way to do DRM for most PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media, or most media at all. And so it was kind of just unprotected and left to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, most people probably won’t copy it, or copying it’s a little bit hard, or a little bit expensive, so maybe people won’t do it a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot. And then we started adding DRM to PC hardware and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all the enthusiast forums and the media and everybody like exploded when people started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding these things. I’m never gonna buy a PC with a DRM chip in it. It’s my PC I can do whatever I want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now every PC has DRM chips in it. Every phone of the modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know phone type has always had DRM type support in it. Now Now DRM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is everywhere. Everything we play, everything we stream,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything we download. Remember Steve Jobs’ thoughts on DRM? Thoughts on music?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Where he gave this big thing about DRM basically shouldn’t exist? Now it’s all back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every streaming service that you play music from or that you watch video from, if it’s a streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service, everything’s DRM’d. There’s DRM in web browsers now. There’s all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful web streaming media things that you can view in a web browser with various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web standards like HLS. Then you have DRM in those. I believe Widevine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the one that keeps getting up my butt when I try to download Phish concerts. There’s DRM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your web browser in the open world of the web, running on your open world of your PC. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full of DRM now. That’s just considered normal. No one even blinks an eye.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window of what’s acceptable to consumers does shift over time. You know, it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a frog boiling thing and that like this is not necessarily a good thing for us in many ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but over time people stop caring. You know, you fight a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you give up and you move on or something compelling is on the other side, like you really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to use one of those streaming services, you really want to use the iPod or what you know whatever it is that it has some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of DRM in it or some other you know form of of restriction of you as an owner, and you go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it for other factors. It’s hard to service your own car these days in many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways because cars have all these different electronically bonded parts and everything’s complicated and requires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco special computers and everything. And yeah, it is hard to do a lot of that stuff yourself now, but most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not driving big blocky cars from the 1970s that are death traps today, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are easy to service because we have other alternatives or other advantages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to modern vehicles now, that, okay, fine, we’ll accept that we can’t do all of our own work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on our car anymore. Not that I ever could, but other people could. You know, there’s technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moves forward and it gives us certain advantages that convince people to move forward with it. And we generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accept some of the restrictions that didn’t exist in the old world. So as we move from PCs to phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco largely for a lot of people, phones have always been incredibly locked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down. The result of all of that is we do, as consumers, have less control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than we used to over a lot of these devices in our lives. But the result also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that because it’s so locked down, we have Netflix and HBO
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff willing to bring their content to these devices and not have to worry that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s all gonna get ripped off super easily off of somebody’s hacked up phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s at least more difficult to do that. Not that stuff doesn’t get pirated, but it’s more difficult to pirate it directly that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is not a defense of DRM by any means, or of these various control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanisms that these companies use. It’s just the reality of how this works. Like over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of these control systems are added because it benefits the companies, and in some cases it benefits the product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And people accept them over time. That’s just how it goes. People accept it because there’s some trade-off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they decide, you know what? Yes, I wish I could copy the songs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opposite direction off my iPod, but I can’t and I’m just going to buy the iPod anyway because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like everything else about it. That’s what happens. And that’s what has happened with our phones and with John Deere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tractors. The only thing that won’t happen to is HP printers because they’re terrible no matter what.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s not always just in one direction. There is a moment when you have an amazing advantage that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially force people to take these other things that are not advantageous for them, but that are advantageous for you. But that
⏹️ ▶️ John moment does eventually pass. That’s why you have the pushback of these right to repair laws. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John push back against the John Deere stuff or whatever. We try to come to
⏹️ ▶️ John an arrangement that is acceptable to all involved. On the one side are the big
⏹️ ▶️ John companies that have a lot of power. And initially, they usually use that
⏹️ ▶️ John power to say, look, we have the amazing iPod. We know you want the iPod. There are restrictions on
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but you will accept those restrictions because the iPod is so amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But eventually that does shift. I mean, you saw the shift of people going away from DRM music downloads,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it became commoditized and DRM was more annoying and even Apple eventually went DRM free. But then streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John came and you want the streaming because now you don’t have to worry about syncing and downloading. And by the way, with the streaming,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re getting DRM because I know you want the streaming. And so I feel like it’s more of a seesaw, you know, like we
⏹️ ▶️ John get the advantage, we, the big companies take advantage of it, but then we push back, right? We push back as things
⏹️ ▶️ John become commodified, we push back with regulation, push back with things like right to repair laws. Even the
⏹️ ▶️ John things like the TPUs and the DRM stuff like that, that’s essentially the same technology that gives us like the secure
⏹️ ▶️ John boot on modern Apple hardware that lets us know that the OS that it’s booting is really the OS that it’s booting. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John are advantages to some of that technology as well. The people are like, no, I’ve never won any cryptographic stuff, no secure
⏹️ ▶️ John enclaves on my, no, we want that stuff. It can be used to work for us as well because we want our things to,
⏹️ ▶️ John we wanna know that the OS that our phone is running is the one that we expect it to run and it hasn’t been modified in some way. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John all that cryptographic stuff can work for us as well. And that’s what we want in the end. And in terms of the
⏹️ ▶️ John marketplace things with platform orders controlling things, like I said, it’s like, it is the institutional memory
⏹️ ▶️ John and the, and the actual present of the Mac and the PC that lets people know that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this isn’t the only way a software marketplace has to be, we either,
⏹️ ▶️ John they remember how it used to be, or they can see, Hey, over there, that’s a software marketplace. And it doesn’t work with this software marketplace.
⏹️ ▶️ John So explain to me again, why this software marketplace has to be so different. And in the beginning it was like, be quiet, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John selling a billion iPhones. And now it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been a decade or two and are having some doubts about this arrangement between us and Apple. Governments
⏹️ ▶️ John have doubts about it and people have doubts about it and software developers have doubts. So I feel like this is an ongoing negotiation, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there is definitely an ebb and flow of amazing thing comes out and we will accept a lot of compromises,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that does fade over time as we push back. So hopefully, and you know, HP printers, who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m with Marco on that one, But hopefully on John Deere tractors and right to repair and Apple’s complete
⏹️ ▶️ John control of the iOS marketplace, hopefully we’re starting to push back the other direction now.
#askatp: Is Catalyst dead?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jonathan Sibley writes, the recent episode where you, gosh, only knows how recent it was, where you discussed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey native versus electron style apps on the Mac made me wonder what you think about Catalyst as a development platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I recently came across an article, which we will link in the show notes, which is complaining about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Does it feel abandoned, neglected as this author seems to think it is? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t really have a lot of constructive things to say about this because I’ve never really done that much Catalyst.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I, I ha I’m doing the thing with call sheet where I have the iPad app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allowed to be run on Mac OS. But that catalyst is the thing where you’re using UI kit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Mac OS, right? Do I have that distinction? Correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Like when we, I think when we did the first episode, but I think this was the episode title. I think it was something that I said on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John So putting UI kit as a way for you to write Mac applications, I described it as an extinction
⏹️ ▶️ John level event for app kit because there are so many developers who are familiar with UI kit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And once you’re able to use UI kit to make Mac applications, if Apple actually continues to support that
⏹️ ▶️ John and make it a thing, why would Apple itself even continue to develop AppKit?
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, I believe at that time we didn’t know about SwiftUI. So as it turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ John the story is a little bit different because Apple eventually decided after several years of kind of just implying,
⏹️ ▶️ John they came out and said, SwiftUI is the way you make applications for our platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, we have AppKit. Yes, we have UIKit. Yes, we have UIKit on the Mac that we call Catalyst or whatever. But just so you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift UI, and we all said Swift UI is not yet ready, but the Apple said, doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s what we’re doing. And so it’s not like Apple has stopped developing AppKit and Catalyst entirely,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s not where the action is. So as it turns out, Catalyst didn’t have a long life in
⏹️ ▶️ John the sun as it, but it did effectively make, uh, AppKit on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John which the, you know, Cocoa, it’s complicated API history on the Mac, but setting aside carbon for now, which
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s not go back too far in history. AppKit was the approved native way to make
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac apps because there was no other approved native way to make Mac apps. So then came Catalyst. And once Catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ John arrived with all the UIKit, iPhone developers was like, all right, well then what
⏹️ ▶️ John is AppKit now? Are you gonna keep making AppKit better? Or are you just gonna concentrate entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John on UIKit and Catalyst? And Apple just said, nevermind all that SwiftUI. But either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John you look at AppKit and UIKit and Catalyst and you think,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much more work is Apple going to put into these things? And year after year at WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you go to the what’s new in UI kit, what’s new in app kit sessions, how much big new stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John do you see versus the what’s new in Swift UI session, right? That is the thing that you have to gauge.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not like there’s not new stuff happening app kit. There still is and will be this year, I predict, a what’s new in app kit session,
⏹️ ▶️ John a what’s new in UI kit session, a session about Catalyst, and there’ll be stuff in them and there’ll be exciting things and they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be cool. But that’s, Apple has told us, that’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John future. The future is SwiftUI, and the future is not quite ready yet but the future is SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re trying to look at like, how’s Catalyst doing, if SwiftUI hadn’t arrived,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Catalyst would be doing a lot better. Apple has made a lot of the apps that come with the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John with Catalyst. Now, very, very slowly, Apple is starting to make
⏹️ ▶️ John apps or parts of apps with SwiftUI on the Mac. So I think the story about Catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of the same story as AppKit, which is there is a new
⏹️ ▶️ John star in town and it’s SwiftUI and it’s not ready yet, but Apple says it’s the future. So all of
⏹️ ▶️ John the frameworks are essentially legacy. AppKit is the most full featured.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it makes the best looking, best working Mac apps. It’s had literal decades of development.
⏹️ ▶️ John It came from Next and then Apple took it on and it’s just had so much incredibly full featured,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple has not said the future of Mac development is AppKit. So don’t keep looking at that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same deal with UIKit, it grew on the iPhone, has so many things added to it. It’s amazing, but Apple has not
⏹️ ▶️ John said that UIKit is the future of phone and iOS and Vision OS development.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s the answer. Catalyst is in the same sad little car with AppKit
⏹️ ▶️ John and UIKit on iOS and iPadOS and Vision OS for that matter. They’re not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all, Apple says it’s Swift and SwiftUI. And even though we all agree that SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John is not ready to replace any of those things yet, someday Apple thinks it will be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and a huge part of the value of Catalyst is, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can take your UI kit code that you wrote for your iPhone app, and you can make a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app with most of that same code running pretty much the same way with not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too many changes. That’s the appeal. But then when the Apple, Silicon, Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition happened, they allowed iPad apps to just run unmodified.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you compare the, as a developer, and you compare the amount of work it takes to make a catalyst version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your app, it is way more custom work. It’s not a ton of custom work, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is way more custom work than just letting your iPad app run. You need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a separate app store entry so that you can upload to the Mac app store, And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t be the same upload that you use for the iOS app store. You need Mac screenshots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You need to submit updates separately for your Mac version and deal with app reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco separately for your Mac version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is all applicable, by the way, if you make a Vision OS native app, which this bit me because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know why I didn’t realize this, but I assumed that even once I flipped the no, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go from iPad compatibility mode to Vision OS native, I just assumed I would still be uploading a single binary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so on and so forth. And then I realized, oh, oh, oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that adds a whole bunch of just overhead and potential for problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for developers. So it is pretty compelling for developers if we can get 80%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the way there, just letting our iPad app run and not have to take on any of that overhead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s pretty compelling to say, okay, yeah, we’ll just do that. So what really ultimately I think made Catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot less appealing for third-party developers was that iPad apps running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac with Apple Silicon transition. And as time goes on, that’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to increase because at least three years ago when this transition began
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or four years ago, whenever that was, at least then the argument was, well, you can let your iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app run on the M1 Macs, but if you do Catalyst, it will run on the entire install base of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel Macs also. But over time, the install base of Intel Mac is going to get smaller and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco install base of the Apple Silicon Mac is going to get larger. And so that keeps shifting the balance even more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towards, I’m just gonna let my iPad app run. Now with Catalyst, you can make a better app by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far. Like you can take advantage of very, you know, Mac specialized things with Catalyst. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Catalyst gives you a lot of good abilities where you’re still using mostly UI kit code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you have certain kind of like custom hooks into, you know, Mac specific things to a larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree than you have when running your iPad app. But from a developer point of view, that comes with some pretty large costs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I don’t see it really being compelling for most developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is useful just as kind of a middleware layer for Apple. And I think that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what John was saying earlier, like many Mac OS Apple provided apps are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now written in Catalyst. And I think that is for the best because we saw in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era before that was really a thing, Apple had a lot more trouble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping up feature parity between their platforms. Like the Mac really got low priority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work and it showed. And Mac versions of apps that were also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS or that were supposed to be on other platforms, the Mac versions were lagging way behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before Catalyst. Since Catalyst, you know, the Mac is still not like the first priority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it probably never will be, but it’s way closer now. And they keep up way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever since then. So the greatest value to the platform of Catalyst is that it made it easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple to keep up their own software between the platforms better than they were before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to keep doing that for the foreseeable future. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think the iPad apps are really the nail in Catalyst’s coffin. It was SwiftUI, right? Because like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get your iPad app on the Mac and yes, they’re all gonna be armed so you don’t have to worry about Intel or whatever and that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re like, oh, it’s so much easier than all the work I’d have to do with rewriting with Catalyst. Not that you need to rewrite it entirely, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta do more work. Well now, if you’re gonna take that step to do more work, you’re not gonna use Catalyst.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna say, oh, Apple has another way that if I’m willing to do some rewriting, I can get the same app running
⏹️ ▶️ John on all their platforms. And it’s called SwiftUI. Like that’s the thing that’s killing Catalyst. Isn’t like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna write an application, if you write it in UIKit, you can get a Mac version pretty easy. Like you do
⏹️ ▶️ John a little small amount of work, you know, and you’ll have like a quote unquote native Mac version with Catalyst, then you’ll have an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and an iPad version. And that’s not Apple’s answer anymore. Apple’s answer is do it in SwiftUI. That’s how you get a Mac version
⏹️ ▶️ John and a tvOS version and a Vision Pro version and an iOS version. Like, that’s their answer. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, what place does Catalyst have anymore? If you don’t wanna do any work, run your iPad app. If you wanna do some work,
⏹️ ▶️ John use SwiftUI. If you’re Apple and already did some work, use Catalyst. That’s like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s legacy code bases. Like, that’s, look, there’s a ton of UI kit and app kit code out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. Like, believe me, I know I’m trying right now. I’m trying to replace.
⏹️ ▶️ John easy, just rewrite it in SwiftUI, Mark,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how hard can it be? Yeah, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard can it be? for like, it’s taking me like two years to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this. I know, but like for new development, Apple’s obviously pushing people to switch to UI, but yeah, but Apple is one of the biggest holders of legacy
⏹️ ▶️ John UI code in the entire world. So that’s obviously really important for them. But that’s why I think it feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you’re like a new developer and you’re like, what should I use? If you’re starting from nothing and you have no legacy code base,
⏹️ ▶️ John Catalyst is not screaming to you for you to be your choice for making a Mac app, like under no
⏹️ ▶️ John circumstance. It’s only like, I’ve already got a UI kit, the app, and I have a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app and it’s written in AppKit, but I don’t wanna maintain it. Is there a way I can just leverage the work I had to already do for the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and the iPad? And the answer for Apple is yes, you can make a Catalyst version of Messages and finally
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac can have frickin’ laser beams.
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have the lasers feature, it was very annoying and then we got the Catalyst version and now we have it and still the Catalyst version of Messages is
⏹️ ▶️ John not great, but you know, I mean. Anyway, like Apple’s got tons of AppKit code too,
⏹️ ▶️ John So Apkits not going away, Catalyst is not going away and SwiftUI is still, still I think not as good,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially not as good as Apkit, but probably not even as good as Catalyst at making native Mag apps, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wants it to be. So presumably it eventually will be. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, SwiftCraft and Computex 2024.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thank you very much to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re now doing a member special extra topic every week called ATP Overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This week’s overtime for members only, it is Apple’s work on robots. The new rumors and what we know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far with Apple possibly working on robots, which I think could be really cool. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can hear that as members, atp.fm slash join as this week’s overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much, and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to, accidental Tech Podcasts,
Neutral: NACS/CCS status
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I went on an eclipse trip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as everyone but me did and I’m assuming John because John never leaves his house but as everyone but John
⏹️ ▶️ John eclipse came to me more or less.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah anyway it was it was a wonderful trip I’m very very glad I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and as part of this trip I got to drive all the way up to Lake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Placid. Now what’s interesting about this trip is that I actually made the same trip for a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vacation in the fall last year. So I and I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the course of that time this is this is like a seven hour drive for me it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very long very it’s a lot of driving from here it involves a good amount of distance and a good amount of car charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is now a trip I’ve done twice with the Rivian and I kind of want to give an update on some things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have changed with Rivian and and kind of CCS versus Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash NACS charging and fast charging there have been substantial changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the charging environment in the last whatever it’s been seven months and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we say here right now Rivian has just done a deal with Tesla and the latest software update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Rivian’s allows you to plug directly into a supercharger with the right adapters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have them just bill you. Somehow Tesla and Rivian worked it out behind the scenes so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s basically the the same experience you get as a Rivian as Tesla owners get. You just walk up to it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and plug it in, and if you have a payment method on file in your Rivian app, it just works, and you get charged.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s awesome. And they’re going to start sending out adapters soon. There’s a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of third-party ones I might take a risk on in the meantime, because they’re talking about later this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other thing about that though is that Tesla, before everyone was talking about adapters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla actually built adapters into some of their superchargers, they call them magic docks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually used that in September for the first time, on the last time I went up this trip, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have some of those upstate New York. So I used that already and it worked great then. I went to the same one this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and it worked great again. Here’s what’s interesting. Now that Rivian and Tesla have this deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going, Rivian’s infotainment system now shows Tesla charging stops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the map along with everyone else’s. you can say like only show me charging stops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from brand X, Y, or Z, because they have different reliability, let’s say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so what I’ve been doing most of the time, you know, before all this is, only show me Electrify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco America chargers, because they were the most reliable, you know, last fall when I was first using the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla got added by default, it’s on by default. And so every Rivian nav system is now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommending Tesla charging stops as like, you should stop here, you know, for in the middle of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trip at this point. So one thing I noticed first of all, is that over the last seven months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the quality and reliability of the Electrify America chargers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has gone down, noticeably so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t think that was possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assure you it is possible because it has been noticeable. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of times I approach an EA charger and it’s broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s offline or it tries to connect and then somehow something times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and you can just never get it to begin the charge. That has gone up significantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also the crowding at them has gone way up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The entire time that I owned my two Model S’s and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire time I’ve owned a Rivian until about two months ago, I’ve never had to wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a charger. Two months ago I had to wait for the very first time. I I had to wait like a half hour, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucked. And I know this has been different on the West Coast. They’ve had more crowding over there because they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had more people using Teslas and stuff like that. But that’s never been a problem over here. What has happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeably over the last seven months? I know everybody keeps saying that apparently EVs aren’t selling that well because high-end cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t selling that well right now. You wouldn’t know it by looking at the chargers because what I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really just like in the last like three to four months is a huge increase of not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only other vehicles with chargers, but a huge increase in the variety of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different models of vehicles with the chargers. There are tons of them, and you’re seeing them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from all different brands. And what’s interesting is that the other vehicles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to not have deals with Tesla superchargers so much. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re seeing is at the CCS chargers, like Electrify America, they are just being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crammed full of all the other cars. In the meantime, also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla has sold more Teslas. So the superchargers, the Tesla superchargers are also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really getting much more full than they were before. Now, granted the trip I just took, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a high travel trip because it was for the eclipse. A lot of people are traveling, especially a lot of the kind of people who would have EVs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So. This was more than usual, but I’ve been seeing this just recently with any trip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve taken. The charging situation is getting way worse for both for CCS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the chargers are getting worse and no one seems to be working on them. And for Tesla, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re getting more crowded. What’s interesting though, is that now that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Rivian that has a deal with Tesla and some adapters here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can go to some chargers. And a lot of times now, Tesla superchargers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Electrify America superchargers or other CCS chargers, a lot of times they share a parking lot. Now that the Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has this deal, I can use either of them. I can go to wherever the open space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. Now, there’s a bunch of other problems, like the fact that Tesla superchargers have really short cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are optimized to fit only where a Tesla’s charging port is, and that Rivian’s charging port on their vehicle so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is in the total wrong spot to do that. So you have to kind of take up two bays, or take like the one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the end. So it messes up the whole parking arrangement at superchargers. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see a future in which things get really good because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just go to Tesla chargers, and Tesla’s gonna keep building more of them because they have to for their cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Tesla has the best chargers. It is simple as that. They are the best charger, although actually, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with one exception. For the very first time, I got to try a Rivian Adventure Network charger on this trip. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing because I think only Rivians can use it, so no one’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went to the one in Newburgh, it was empty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey But I went there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In Newburgh? Why is there an Adventure charger in Newburgh?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s a huge hole in the New York State Thruway that there were not enough chargers. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just put that one there recently. Like it was not there in the winter and it’s there now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s bananas. My mom grew up in Newburgh. I’ve been to Newburgh many times. That’s wild.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it’s right across the parking lot from a Tesla Supercharger that’s been there forever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, that was an amazing charger. Everything’s brand new. It overlooks like this river in the back of the parking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot. So it’s an adventure. It was nice and there was no one using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And it was amazingly fast. I got like 218 kilowatts. It’s the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge I’ve seen so far. So that was wonderful. But anyway, other than that, Tesla otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has the best chargers, generally speaking, because they’re reliable and there’s a bunch of them and they’re in good spots. The problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I see here, so we were saying back when Tesla gave this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard to whatever the standard body was and kind of opened it up and made all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these deals to make everyone convert all their ports over and all this other stuff, We were saying, what a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move from Tesla. This will be great because then they can become the great charging network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the country. That’s true and they are and they will keep doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the more I see how incredibly bad the CCS ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has gotten just in the last six months, the more I think Tesla gave away the farm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now already at Tesla chargers you’re starting to see Rivian’s move in. you’re going to start to see other brands move in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla owners are now having a worse experience because their chargers are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now going to get crowded up with people like me who are not Tesla owners. So it’s making it worse for Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers. Meanwhile, CCS chargers have gotten so bad. If Tesla would have kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their chargers proprietary, that would be a really strong selling point for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, you know what, I’m just going to get a Tesla next time because their network is just better and I’m tired of dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the CCS crap. So I think honestly they might have done a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disservice to themselves here. I mean, maybe regulation would have forced it in the end anyway. And so maybe they kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of got ahead of it from that angle. Uh, but things are different now and I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they might’ve given away the farm. I’m happy they did as a non Tesla owner because they, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are making my life a lot easier on long highway trips now. Uh, but I don’t know. I think if I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Tesla owner, I’d be a little upset about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, I think you’re right that they got ahead of the regulation. Like because it’s if if they if the government had mandated
⏹️ ▶️ John something other than the Tesla Connector or some other market force that Tesla would have to change all of its charging stations
⏹️ ▶️ John So at least now Tesla doesn’t need to change its other making like longer cords, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John and also to keep in mind those crappy CCS one setting aside the compliance network Which is like a Volkswagen
⏹️ ▶️ John forced because of the diesel gate thing to make You know the whatever like for Electrify America charger
⏹️ ▶️ John things that it doesn’t actually want to do but whatever whatever, all those CCS chargers,
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably, eventually, will not be CCS chargers anymore. Because I think pretty much at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much everybody has pledged to go NACS in North America. I think, is there anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John left? I don’t remember if Stellantis went. I think they did, right? I think they did. Yeah, I think it’s everyone. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John all those CCS chargers, like, this is an opportunity to get eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John greatly diminish the number of CCS chargers, which means either just simply by building
⏹️ ▶️ John massively more NACS ones so the CCS ones become a smaller percentage, or literally removing the really
⏹️ ▶️ John old cranky CCS ones and leaving one or two for legacy connections as
⏹️ ▶️ John more NACS cars are sold in the US. But yeah, now this is, there is still
⏹️ ▶️ John an opportunity for either Tesla or anyone else who wants it to become a good
⏹️ ▶️ John NACS based electric charging infrastructure in the US. And Tesla’s got the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John head start. I feel like it’s possible to make money doing this well
⏹️ ▶️ John and with a single standard for all of North America, it should simplify the landscape, but we are definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John in a very uncomfortable transition period as you’re noting, where there’s the CCS ones and there’s tons of CCS cars
⏹️ ▶️ John out there and they’re still gonna need to charge, but the charging network, nobody cares about it and they care even less now because
⏹️ ▶️ John those connectors aren’t even the future anymore. And then there’s the Tesla one that’s getting overcrowded. And I feel like there’s an opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John for either one of these existing companies or a new one to come in and start building out There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John something, speaking of overtime, there’s something way down in the show notes from like the latest US government
⏹️ ▶️ John plan involving a bunch of car companies and a bunch of money to start building
⏹️ ▶️ John an NACS powered charging network that is not Tesla, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, that is an effort through a cooperative effort through a bunch of companies that are not Tesla to basically
⏹️ ▶️ John make a bunch of NACS chargers that plug in and charge and all that other stuff or whatever. So maybe eventually we’ll get to that because
⏹️ ▶️ John like all government things, it’s probably years and years in the future. But I feel like the future is still bright and I feel like Tesla still made
⏹️ ▶️ John a smart move because now at the very least Tesla does not need to overhaul all of
⏹️ ▶️ John its charging stations and change all of its connectors on its cars and all of its connectors on its charging it’s good. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was a smart move. It’s just you know I think they held the
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage that you were talking about. Oh buy a Tesla because they have the best charging. They held that advantage for essentially as long as they could
⏹️ ▶️ John and now as you noted the floodgates are open. Everybody has EVs. They’re all going to need somewhere to charge. So
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully they’ll just build more of them and better.
⏹️ ▶️ John how good we are at building infrastructure in this country, so I’m sure it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, honestly, I think for Tesla to have this be a big,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a growing part of their business, obviously, I don’t know about stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco financing and expectations and everything. So I’m sure this is less exciting to Tesla’s investors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than they might replace taxis everywhere, whatever all their crazy self-driving promises
⏹️ ▶️ John if they want it to be a big part of their business, they need to sell snacks, because as we all know, gas stations make all their money on the convenience stores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But yeah, honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think Tesla has a giant head start in just being the default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-speed EV chargers for the US highway system. I don’t know how it is in other places, like how competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, but here it’s very competitive, extremely so. They have a huge head start. This could be a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of their business, but I think it’s an unsexy part of the business for investors. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the kind of thing that it’ll just throw off, you know, regular dependable amounts of cash forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s not going to, you know, be a hockey stick kind of situation. And so, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it’s not very exciting, but I think it’s a really, really good kind of just baseline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cash generator for them. And I want them to keep expanding it and doing well with it because they really, the Tesla chargers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, they do a very good job with them. A very, very good job with them. And again,