595: The Best Secret Store
10 Jul 2024Considerations for blocking AI crawlers, tech’s labor issues, and Apple’s continued battles with the world.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Casey’s tales of woe
- Follow-up:
- An 🎵 accidental 🎵 miss from the iPod Tier List special (via Scott Shuchart)
- The origins of
S-Tierin tier lists (via David Schaub) - AirPods Pro do have an inward-facing microphone
- Another entry for Brexit-style name for Apple rage-quitting the EU (via Terry Gilbert)
- What’s the justification for allowing AI crawlers? (via Manu)
- Cloudflare has 1-click AI crawler blocking
- Epic Games & Apple continue to bicker
- Tech and Labor
- Ask ATP:
- Post-show: John still isn’t allowing holes in his house
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Feature Requests for Death
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Chapters
- Casey’s Cord Clumsiness
- Follow-up
- Blocking AI crawlers
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code atp)
- Apple vs. everyone, reprise
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Tech and labor
- #askatp: Password managers vs. OS features
- #askatp: AI reputation vs. Apple
- #askatp: Recall vs. Keychain
- #askatp: Privacy vs. ads
- Ending theme
- Heat pumps
Casey’s Cord Clumsiness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you recall, my backup Vortex is not as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey robust, perhaps, as John’s, but it’s robust. And one part of the backup Vortex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a Synology. I couldn’t even tell you the model number off the top of my head, but a listener and friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco forgot that was a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It scared the poop out of me. But anyways, a listener and friend had sent me one that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he had decommissioned. And really, it was just collecting dust. I was like, sure, I’ll use it. And I put it at mom and dad’s house,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a little less than an hour away from here. And it was literally the only real purpose it had was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to slurp up backups from my sonology here at the house. Well, there was some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real bad thunderstorms that went through the area like a week ago or so. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess wherever my dad and I put the sonology, perhaps it was not on a surge suppressor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what happened, but apparently it is dead. I haven’t gotten physical control of it since this happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I genuinely don’t know what the issue is. It could be just a power supply. It could be something much more damaging,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever the case may be. So that’s tale of woe number one. And again, it could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be an easy fix. Who knows? But tale of woe number two is I decided to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my footstool—I’m sorry, my old Synology—and bring it back to life so it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can serve as the backup vortex. I had an 1813 plus that Synology was kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to give to one to all three of us, one a piece, literally 10 years ago, or 11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey More, I think. Yeah. And so it had been my Synology up until a few months ago when I got a new one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I just kind of turned it off and basically used it as a footstool. Well I brought it back to life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and started the backup process anew. You know, I deleted everything that was on it because I haven’t needed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in months. In theory, everything was duplicated to the new Synology. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I started my backup. I don’t recall exactly what day I started it, but today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was something like two or three days after I started the backup. And I have something to the order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 10 terabytes that I’m backing up. I don’t remember the number offhand, but it was around that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was looking at the hyper backup app within the Synology web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interface, which is what’s doing this backup. it said I was at like 93%. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was very excited because I think I’m going to be seeing my parents in the next couple of days. And I can, and depending on where we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, I’ll either, you know, hand them the Synology and say, please plug this in. Or perhaps I will bring them the Synology if we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to their house and I’ll plug it in and I can assess the damage on the other one. And I really wanted this backup to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be done locally rather than having to do it, you know, across the internet. So it was at like 93%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I went to get up from my desk and past Casey made poor And past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey made poor choices. Because there was no great power outlet anywhere near where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the old Synology needed to be. And I think you can see where this is going.
⏹️ ▶️ John As soon as you said you got up from your desk, I saw where this was going.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a power strip. I have a fully Jarvis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey desk. It’s, you know, the cool kid desk that I got long after it was no longer cool, but I really do love this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey desk. It has on the back of it, a tray, you can put like a power supply and cables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot. Past Casey was smart in so far as I draped like a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six inch extension cord off of it so I can easily plug things in temporarily.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And so that’s where I plugged the Synology in on like a five or five or six foot, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey standard, I don’t remember the code for it, but the standard computer plug, right. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have this going under the desk and just hanging, I mean, not in intention, but hanging off the back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the desk basically in this tray. Well, I had my legs crossed and I go to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get up and I put my legs down and foot 93%. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m starting over baby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that thing just died instantly. It won’t resume. Well, so here’s the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it tried to resume, but it very well could have been user error. I don’t know what I did, but it tried to resume for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second and then it was like no the the target devices not there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had already rebooted everything on the old device, you know, the destination. I tried to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get it in a good known good state and it very well could have been something I screwed up. But one way or another, no, it did not resume.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it tried to and it failed. So now I’m starting over, baby, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really annoying and unfortunate that things could be much worse. Don’t get me wrong. Or you plug it in for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second attempt. Oh, it’s in the exact same spot. However, however, I knew you should, I knew you’re gonna ask this. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did was, there’s enough slack on the cable that I draped it over the edge of the tray.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So instead of being like, you know, directly where my feet would be, it’s way over to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John desk. So- You
⏹️ ▶️ John know this is gonna be a multi-day process now. Why don’t you get it plugged in somewhere that you know it will be safe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because that was, that would make way too much sense. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I didn’t wanna,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t wanna have to get a different extension cord.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rest your glass of water on it while it backs up. you
Follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. Scott Shuchart writes, Did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you forget about the HP iPods in your iPod tier list special? Surely a letter grade off of their proper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey peers. I knew this was a thing, did not even occur to me when we were recording, however, that we should
⏹️ ▶️ John We probably should have included it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they weren’t really distinct models, were they? I mean, although neither were the U2
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the U2 ones I thought were worth putting in because I think they are, are, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are strong opinions in both directions. Some people really love the black and red, uh, and some people hate it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody liked the HP iPods. They were like baby blue, baby bluish gray. So whatever color HP
⏹️ ▶️ John thought stood for HP back in those days, it was kind of like, I don’t know, it was, it was terrible. It was like a
⏹️ ▶️ John powder blue that was really dirty. It just. It was not good. And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they would have just ended up going into F because it’s like taking a good iPod and ruining it. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of the way when, you know, like when Steve Jobs was introducing the rocker phone or I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the device that he threw at somebody. Like you can tell when he was introducing a device that he really had disdain for.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the HP iPod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and it wasn’t the whole point of that basically a distribution deal because HP had so much more distribution than Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back then. And I think that was the point if I remember correctly of just like getting it into places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sold HP products.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe it was definitely one of those deals where somebody convinced Jobs that they should do this for some business-y reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then immediately after, I’m sure he said, we’re never doing this again. Oh yeah, there’s no way he liked that at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all. I think the rocker was the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it was an HP iPod, but the just utter disgust as he was introducing this was so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. Anyways, all right, with regard to the tier list, we’ve asked this question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several times before, I feel like, but it wasn’t until this time that David Schaub wrote in to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, S-tier is borrowed from Japan. So, remember, on a tier list, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S, A, B, C, D, F, or sometimes A, B, C, D, E. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at the Wikipedia entry for the tier list, S-tier may stand for special, super, or the Japanese
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word for exemplary, which is shu, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m not sure I’m pronouncing that wrong. I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And originates from the widespread use in Japanese culture of an S-grade for advertising and academic grading.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then additionally, if you look at the academic grading in Japan entry in Wikipedia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Japan each school has a different grading system. Many universities use the following set of categories. Shu or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S for exemplary or excellent, which apparently is from 90 to 100% in terms of score and it is rarely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given. Yu which is very good, that’s Y-U,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the letter U. That is the letter A for 80 to 89%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is good or a letter B. I’m sure I’m butchering these, I’m so sorry, which is 70
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 79%. Ka, which is an average or pass or C, 60 to 69%. Nin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approved or acceptable, which is D or F, which is 50 to 59%, also uncommon. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fuka, which is unacceptable or failed, which is anything from 0 to 59%.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s interesting that they basically have a shifted version of the American grading system because 8089 is a B around here but in
⏹️ ▶️ John Japan 8089 is an A and as for the tier list like
⏹️ ▶️ John when most people do tier lists and including us I Guess maybe when when
⏹️ ▶️ John Americans do it They’re thinking of a as like the top grade and s is a very very special
⏹️ ▶️ John tier, but the actual Japanese you know, academic grading system. It’s not like that at all. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John S is like 99 to 100 and then A is the rest of the 90s or something. S is the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John range of the A’s, so it’s kind of weird. But yeah, this makes sense. We did link to the Tier List Wikipedia page
⏹️ ▶️ John in the very first time we did a Tier List, but just in case people didn’t follow that link, some more information for you
⏹️ ▶️ John now. Yeah, S tier. In Tier Lists, I think it means maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s see, 90 to 98? 90 to 99? Does it mean 101 to 100? Whatever it is, it’s definitely not 90 to 100. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods Pro do have an inward facing microphone. I thought we had theorized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. In fact, I think I was going to bring it up and then maybe Marco beat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John me to the punch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco was talking about it as if it exists. And I asked, is that a thing that’s actually in there? And we didn’t know for sure. iFixit knows
⏹️ ▶️ John for sure. They tore the thing open. You can find the little microphone. It’s in there. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Terry Gilbert writes with another proposition for a Brexit style name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple leaving EU market. Terry writes, I proposed the term Palm voyage P
⏹️ ▶️ Casey O M M E voyage. It means Apple journey or travel in French, which is one of the main EU languages.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a plan. Bon voyage, which is having
⏹️ ▶️ John journey. And you could also do the apple of the earth, which is everyone knows
⏹️ ▶️ John the potato pump. Pond de terrorists is potato in France.
⏹️ ▶️ John that it makes perfect sense. I mean, apple and then you just buried in the ground. Apple of the earth potato. They’re so similar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Great language. Sure. I know you hear how they say 80. All
Blocking AI crawlers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to blocking AI crawlers, Manu writes, I wish Marco had explained why he thinks it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey short-sighted to block all AI crawlers from being able to see your content. How do I benefit from letting an AI train on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my data and profit from it? Or what do I lose by blocking it, setting aside whether such blocking is actually possible?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it depends on what we think AI will bring to the table in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, imagine if somebody, if there was a big dispute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the web first came out on not allowing search engines to find your page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever reason you might think. Like, obviously, think back to the 1990s when the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was extremely young, the web was extremely young at least. And imagine if there was some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of fear out there. Like, what if Google’s serving results drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wrong people, I don’t know, like whatever people would have been afraid of back then. Not necessarily even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just fear about new tech, but even if even something as simple as like, what might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interrupt somebody’s business model? What if, remember like, there have briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been publishers who think that like, you shouldn’t be allowed to quote deep link into their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco site, that you should force everyone to like go to the homepage first, and then go into the rest of the site from there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Publishers have actually tried to insist upon that or legally require that a long time ago. I don’t think that ever really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got anywhere, but you can imagine, maybe there’s some business case why people might want that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then search engines come along and say, we’re just gonna index anything you have publicly and let people jump directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your other leaf pages without having to go through your entire site navigation first. And that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably better for most sites to have that ability and to have that inbound traffic to those leaf pages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at some point in the past, some publishers have thought that goes against my business model or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my preferences or what I think is right. We don’t know yet what kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of value AI will bring in learning from our content. It looks pretty bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, I’ll give you that. It looks pretty bad. It looks like it’s mostly taking and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of giving. But what if AI models start keeping track of where they learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recognize that is not really how most of them work today with the training methods and everything like that but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are seeing what a lot of people want out of chatbot style models is basically references.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Show me where you got this because I don’t trust you which is fair, right? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if AI models start taking over a large portion of search traffic, which I think seems likely,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what if they start actually having links to follow to verify where they got that information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from? Well, then if that comes to pass and if that becomes a lot of search traffic, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve blocked AI crawling on your site, you’re not going to get that traffic. Now, yes, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meantime, they could steal your traffic or they could steal your value by basically spitting out your content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without linking to you. And I recognize why people don’t want that. Like that makes sense. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if five years from now, half of web searching or more is now going through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an LLM style model and it does link out to where it found the information from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Wikipedia style, and you’re not in there, you’ve just lost half the search traffic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I wanna caution you, like be careful blanket blocking everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you really know it’s actually really going to hurt you right now. If it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not hurting you right now, I would say, wait, see how this plays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Don’t make any rash decisions that might like block your entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco site and all of your content from what might be how most people find stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a really short time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why not do the reverse of that and block everything now and if it turns out beneficial, let them back in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you can, but in the meantime, you’ll be losing out on, you know, whatever comes of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, like if this is actively hurting the value of your content right now, do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you got to do. But if you can’t tell that it’s directly hurting you, I would say hold off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on taking any action if you can, like give it give it a second, see where it goes. If there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harm happening right now, this is not a pressing issue for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it may be like it may be a while to see that harm, because there could be models that were trained on this that
⏹️ ▶️ John have not yet shipped. Right. And who knows how long those models will will be in service, especially if they’re open
⏹️ ▶️ John source models or if Apple doesn’t retrain its models on an annual basis or something. There could be a model that was trained
⏹️ ▶️ John on your content that isn’t hurting you right now, but because you allow them to crawl you, you know, when
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 18.4 comes out and has Apple Intelligence and there’s stuff trained on your model that’s part of it, then it starts
⏹️ ▶️ John hurting you, but by then it’s too late to block them because they already crawled you a year and a half ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and honestly, that might happen, but I think odds are, If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people are going to get most of their searching done through LLMs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not going to matter if you are still in the old Google Index or whatever. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to lose all your search traffic anyway. Granted, this is me not having blogged in like 5,000 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I get why I don’t maybe have a lot of credibility here, because I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have a lot to lose right at the second with the way things are today. But if this is where the world is going,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone starts searching through these kind of interfaces and the regular like web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crawling indexes start becoming marginalized. You’re out of luck if you’re not in them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right now, at least you might be out of luck. You might not be but like if if things go that direction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like you can be pushing really really hard to be included in the Yellow Pages phone book, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t matter so much these days. No matter how great the Yellow Pages was for your business in the past. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality is no one’s finding things that way anymore. So you kind of have to play ball with like Google Maps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple Maps and Yelp and stuff like that. That’s how people find things now and for businesses. If search takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a similar kind of turn where the way web searches are done and where people find content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the web is through LLM based models that train on public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sites and then try to give answers. If you’re not there, you’re leaving yourself out of where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the people are going. Now, it’s a separate problem how we figure out how to compensate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publishers for that. Like, you know, be in the olden days with the search index, like it was, as if we mentioned last episode, it was this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of trade, like, all right, I will let you, you know, index my site because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the value that I’m going to get is that people are going to click on those links and come to my site and then I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve the Mads or whatever. And so there’s kind of an equal value exchange there. Obviously that’s not the case now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with LLM based search answers. You know, that’s, that’s obviously a problem now, but if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where all the searches go, you kind of have no like to stand on if you’re not there. So at least you can be there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if and when this stuff gets worked out a little bit better. And, you know, publishers start figuring out through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of probably lawsuits. Publishers start maybe having some way to have attribution and click through links and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Cloudflare is offering a one-click AI bot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blocker. So from Cloudflare’s blog, we hear today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s available for all customers, including those on the free tier. We’ve observed bot operators attempt to appear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as though they are a real browser by using a spoofed user agent. We’ve monitored this activity over time. We’re proud to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that our global machine learning model has always recognized this activity as a bot, even when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operators lie about their user agent. This feature will automatically be updated over time we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see new fingerprints of offending bots, we identify as widely scraping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the web for model training.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please don’t do this. Please don’t enable this. Please, for the love of God, don’t do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I fire with fire, machine learning versus machine learning, because as we said, there’s no hard and
⏹️ ▶️ John fast way to block this because they can just lie about the user agent. Aha, but we’ll use fingerprinting and we can detect their behavior
⏹️ ▶️ John because bots behave in certain ways. Anything that’s based on sort of heuristics and like
⏹️ ▶️ John best guess and machine learning type stuff, it’s gonna have false positives, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a system between parties that agree on conventions that can be made fairly solid.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is adversarial. One party is trying to get through, the other party is trying to detect them when they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John hide. So inevitably, this will block some legitimate traffic
⏹️ ▶️ John in ways that are not easy to understand or fix. But that
⏹️ ▶️ John might be worth it to some people. And so Cloudflare is just trying to offer a service that people are asking for, I just do wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly how well it will work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so here’s why you shouldn’t do this, unless, again, unless you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically that you have a problem that AI crawlers are causing you directly, please
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do this. Because again, first of all, it always catches other stuff in it. Like, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you how many problems I’ve had with overcast crawling feeds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because some IT admin for a podcast website make some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blanket decision and says, all right, for our entire site, we’re gonna hit this switch on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cloudflare that says protect against DDOS or whatever, and it ends up blocking like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a third of crawlers, including my own, and then their podcast feeds can’t be read by half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the podcast apps out there. This happens all the time. The amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of pain in the buttery that Cloudflare has caused web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crawler and bot and just web app makers, the amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pain in the butt they’ve caused us over the years with these, you know, kind of DDoS like protections
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that maybe put people through a JavaScript redirect or a capture or whatever before they view the site or they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just block you because they think you might be the wrong kind of bot. Like what even is the wrong kind of bot?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s, it’s been such a problem. The only way I even got around this is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cloudflare has a program that you can apply to be a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bot, to be classified for your bot to be a good bot and to not be blocked by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of their stuff. And that process, I think it took me like six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months and repeated emails and reaching out to any contact I might have possibly had like, hey, do I know anybody at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cloudflare? Like, can you please look at this? All this is to say, if you turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on stuff like this for your site, you will be causing lots of problems for things that you probably consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legitimate. So again, I would caution you, if you aren’t having an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco active specific known problem, don’t do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of the stuff is free through Cloudflare. But it is a nice conceptually, it’s a nice business where you sell
⏹️ ▶️ John the blocking and then you also sell the ability to not be blocked by the thing that you sold the person that’s blocking you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there’s other words for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Now, it does make sense, though, because for the types of services that you know, you do actually want DDoS protection,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s just it’s a difficulty to figure out what’s good and what’s bad. What is a good bot? like your example
⏹️ ▶️ John is perfect in the case of podcasts, people publishing podcasts want people to listen to them. That’s the whole point
⏹️ ▶️ John of publishing a podcast. You would think. And the point of podcasting in general is that there’s not one podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John client. There are many of them, right? And some of them have their own crawlers. Some of their listeners
⏹️ ▶️ John are using Overcast or Apple Podcasts or whatever thing they’re using. And if the bots that feed those apps
⏹️ ▶️ John get blocked, you’re cutting off your own audience, right? And it’s not an easy thing to resolve.
⏹️ ▶️ John From a user’s perspective, they’re like, like, oh, your feed doesn’t load. And so maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe if they go beyond that complaint, which is just like the host, they’re like, I don’t know what you’re saying. Our feed is
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. It works for everybody else. I don’t know what your problem is, right? Maybe the next level they go and complain to the developer of the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, I’m using your app and I try to do this thing. Your feed doesn’t load. And if they’re really technical, they go to the app developer
⏹️ ▶️ John and eventually app developer says, when we try to crawl that feed as per your request for the application,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’ve subscribed to it, we get blocked. And then maybe the podcast developer talks to
⏹️ ▶️ John the person and says, why are you blocking us? We can’t load your feed in our client and blah, blah, blah. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then if you’re really, really lucky, they say, oh, it must be that thing that we pay for that blocks DDoS.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you start the six month thing that Marco went down, which is, hey, CloudFlare,
⏹️ ▶️ John can I be classified as a good bot? That’s what happens when you try to use best guess
⏹️ ▶️ John estimates, machine learning, heuristics, stuff like that, to try to implement a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John between parties that are adversarial. because actual DDoS attacks are adversarial. They’re trying to like take down your site
⏹️ ▶️ John by hitting it with tons and tons of requests coming from all over the world. Like that’s what you’re paying to get protected against and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a real thing. And you do have to protect against it and it’s not easy and paying somebody is usually how people
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. But people, you know, legitimate requests get caught up in that and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, it’s a pain. The internet is not as straightforward and simple as you would imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. It’s really more like, you know, just, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, the undersea ecosystem where you’ve got sharks eating little fish and whales and
⏹️ ▶️ John crabs jumping out and biting things. It’s just, it’s, or maybe it’s more like a jungle. I don’t know, but it’s complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a complicated ecosystem with all sorts of things doing all sorts of stuff at all times. We
⏹️ ▶️ John wish it were simpler, but it’s not.
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Apple vs. everyone, reprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The ongoing saga of Epic Games and Apple. A lot happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly on the 5th of July. So at about 9 o’clock in the morning on the 5th of July, or 9 o’clock I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP time anyway, Epic accused Apple of delaying its iOS game store launch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Epic had said we are going to make our own game store for the EU.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In theory, this should be allowed under the terms of the DMA. And they said, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve submitted and Apple’s delaying it. So reading from 9to5Mac, Epic Games has accused Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of deliberately delaying its attempt to launch its own iOS game store in Europe and has filed a further antitrust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complaint with the EU. Now reading from Epic’s newsroom on Twitter, Apple has rejected our Epic Games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store notarization submission twice now, claiming the design and position of Epic’s install button is too similar to Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get button and that our quote in app purchases label, that’s capital I lower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lower P is too similar to the app stores capital I capital a capital P in our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchases label We are using the same install and in-app purchases naming conventions that are used across popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app stores on multiple platforms We are following standard conventions for buttons and iOS apps We’re just trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to build a store that mobile users can easily understand and the disclosure of in-app purchases is a regulatory best practice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey followed by all stores nowadays Apple’s rejection is arbitrary, obstructive, and in violation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the DMA, and we have shared our concerns with the European Commission.”
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s part of the problem with Apple being in this role of like, okay, so you can have third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John stores and you have to pay us for them. And also, by the way, you have to go through us to get anything into
⏹️ ▶️ John the third-party store. And that’s that last one that makes Apple do things that
⏹️ ▶️ John would never happen if third-party app stores were truly independent. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s think of it this way. Personal computers, you know, Apple sells them, other people sell them. Apple has no control
⏹️ ▶️ John over approving other people’s personal computers. So when the iMac came out, and I forget what company is, but some company
⏹️ ▶️ John introduced a computer that was made with translucent teal plastic right after the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John came out. Apple had no control over them doing that because Apple did not have approval,
⏹️ ▶️ John a right of approval or a rejection on every single personal computer that was sold because those are independent
⏹️ ▶️ John companies. Apple was not like the funnel for everything. Presumably, Apple would have
⏹️ ▶️ John stopped many computers from being shipped, but instead what happens is the companies ship them, but Apple does have
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanisms to stop that. I think they sued one of these companies for violating Apple’s trade
⏹️ ▶️ John dress. It’s some part of the law that’s like if a customer could reasonably be confused to think
⏹️ ▶️ John that your thing is actually an iMac because they’d heard of an iMac or whatever, and I think they won that suit,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. But anyway, when you have actual independent parties in the market when there actually
⏹️ ▶️ John is independent competition. It’s not like Apple has to let people rip them off. There are ways that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can stop things that are rip off. So this is if Apple thinks that this thing looks too much like their app store, that people
⏹️ ▶️ John would be confused by it, that is a violation of their artwork, copyright, trade
⏹️ ▶️ John dress. I don’t know all the things that might apply to it. They can. There are ways they can
⏹️ ▶️ John sue to stop that. But having them say, actually, we just looked at this and that we’re not even going to allow it
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on the we’re not even allowed the store to ship. That’s not the way
⏹️ ▶️ John a healthy market works. There were one party who’s by the way, Epic’s competitor for selling games on
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones gets to decide ahead of time. Yeah, no, I don’t like that. Like they become,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’re, they’re judge dread, right? They are the law, like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey judge jury and executioner.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s, that’s not due process. No one wants their competitor being able to decide whether
⏹️ ▶️ John their thing is allowed to be available to the public. So I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in a healthy market, Epic should have shipped this. And if it is a ripoff, Apple will sue them and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will win. That’s a much better system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that was nine in the morning at about five in the afternoon slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey evening. Apple approved the Epic Games Store for iPhone and iPad in the European Union.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacRumors reports, Apple today said it has approved the third party Epic Games Store in the European Union, allowing the Fortnite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer to launch its alternative app marketplace in those countries, reports Reuters. It appears Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has relented and approved Epic’s previously rejected submission. Tim Sweeney chimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and says Apple is now telling reporters that this approval is temporary and they are demanding we change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the buttons in the next version, which would make our store less standard and harder to use.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like they, you know, Epic complains to the EU. Apple says, okay, maybe we went too far.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll let you, we’ll allow it to go through. But then supposedly saying we let it go through, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they still have to change the buttons. They just have to change it in the next version. It’s like this is not this is not a healthy relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John Like Apple shouldn’t be a decision maker in this process of whether or not the Epic Games Store can
⏹️ ▶️ John be released that Really flies in the face of what the DMA is supposed to be doing again
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t want your competitor being able to stop your competing product from launching for whatever reason they feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John it or to say Okay, we’ll let this one go through but the next time you try to do an update you better have changed all those buttons if the buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s really a ripoff sue them and And you’ll win if it’s a ripoff. If someone
⏹️ ▶️ John is confused and they go, this looks just like the App Store. It looks pixel for pixel. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John put the exhibits in court, say look, they’re tricking people into thinking their store is as trustworthy as our store. Sue and
⏹️ ▶️ John win. But you can’t preemptively reject stuff like this. It’s not, it’s an abuse
⏹️ ▶️ John of their power and it’s a power that arguably they shouldn’t have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is a bad idea. Like, Apple should not be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tarnishing what notarization means by basically making it just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app review. This both harms their notarization politics on their other platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Mac that use it, and it will further alienate and freak out Mac developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who rely on that for their entire businesses, and Mac users who rely on notarized software that can’t be in the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their work. But also it just flies in the face of the EU rulings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and clear intent of the DMA and you know This is gonna just blow up in their face again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and again and again Why does Apple continue to provoke
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and more? Regulation I don’t again. What’s the strategy here like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what first of all? This this kind of particular nitpick that they’re doing here who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cares that’s number one who cares, right? It doesn’t affect them really at all. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number two, what’s going to happen here? I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. They’re going to keep fighting the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EU forever, until the EU basically says, alright, you know what, no, you can’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notarization. You cannot screen things at all, even for your alleged security and privacy reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what’s going to happen. And then, the iPhone as a platform gets worse. They’re going to lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their ability to even do security screening, because the regulators will never let this stand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, again, like Apple, what are you doing? You are bringing on problems yourself that will undermine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your biggest and most important platform’s future. This is not a good strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re just judging that they can get away with it and that dragging their feet is the best strategy because the longer you
⏹️ ▶️ John delay and the more you drag your feet, the less harm you have from competitors. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think the EU will ever say you can’t do notarization at all. I think just, you know, even the worst case scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ John The EU will say we allowed this carve-out for security or whatever. That’s all you’re allowed to
⏹️ ▶️ John use it for So every time Apple does something that clearly has nothing to do with security like we think your buttons look too much
⏹️ ▶️ John like ours or whatever The EU will will forbid them from doing that find them from doing it You
⏹️ ▶️ John know Like I I don’t think the EU is gonna get rid of the carve-out because EU is not Apple They’re not going to punitively
⏹️ ▶️ John say because you also doesn’t want the iPhone platform to be a free-for-all in Europe That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John they wrote the DMA this way, right? So I don’t think there’s any fear of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this definitely doesn’t make the relationship between the parties any better. I just think Apple’s calculation is
⏹️ ▶️ John we can afford to make them drag it out of us. We’ll see how that goes if and when fines
⏹️ ▶️ John actually appear and have to be paid. And of course, Apple is like counter-suing and using whatever repeal process
⏹️ ▶️ John that is available in the EU. So as always, this will continue to drag on and on. But right
⏹️ ▶️ John now, the outcome is not clear. But yeah, just as we said, it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be better if Apple figured out a solution that worked for everybody, but that’s not currently their strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, a lot of times in lawsuits where the two parties are really,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t say two parties really hate each other, but either way, the two parties, neither one wants to give an inch. Like the optimal strategy,
⏹️ ▶️ John they both think the optimal strategy for them is to give nothing, take everything, be as extreme as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously that’s usually not the way it goes down. Usually one side is gonna win, one side’s gonna lose, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not always entirely one-sided in the judgment. But sometimes both parties can think the
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy is to be as extreme as possible. And from the outside, seeing that strategy play out, it’s like, why can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John these people be reasonable? They’re just making it worse for themselves. But, you know, especially when lawyers are involved, sometimes they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, you gotta fight tooth and nail to get in the end an agreement
⏹️ ▶️ John that is somewhat equitable. Because if you’re reasonable now, the other party will take advantage of that. I don’t know if that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John true here. Apple definitely seems like they’re doing that. The EU, debatable.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, this continues to grind on. And you keep mentioning notarization. This is another instance where Apple has used
⏹️ ▶️ John the same word to describe two fairly different things. So, notarization has existed on the Mac for
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time. And as far as I’m aware, notarization on the Mac does not involve humans at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John You submit an applicant, you get a developer account, you get certificates, blah, blah, blah. You can submit your application to a
⏹️ ▶️ John server that Apple runs, that they will do whatever private API scanning, or I don’t know, whatever they do. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John involve a human. A computer will just take your input, grind it up, and if it passes some basic checks,
⏹️ ▶️ John spit it back to you and say, here you go, notarized application. No humans involved, no one’s gonna look at it and say your buttons look too
⏹️ ▶️ John much like the app stores. There’s absolutely no human intervention. That is my understanding of notarization on the Mac. And as someone who has
⏹️ ▶️ John notarized many, many Mac apps and seen it come back pretty much immediately, I continue to think that there’s no human
⏹️ ▶️ John involved. But this, this is also called notarization, and people are getting things delayed for
⏹️ ▶️ John months or weeks or months, and then get them rejected for things that obviously a human had a hand in, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John even an executive had a hand in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is just app review. It’s like app review lite. Well, not only is it app review,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is like, so there’s, you’ve always kind of been able to feel this as an app developer. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second level of app review that your app sometimes gets kicked to for what appears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be some kind of executive review. And so this is like, if something in your app is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe on the edge of a rule or maybe controversial, your app will be stuck quote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in review for a long time. Like normally the in review status lasts less than one day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can kind of always tell like if you’re quote in review for more than a day, chances are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you got kicked up to the higher queue and you know, somebody between the reviewer and possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to Phil Schiller has to make a decision on that. It seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the, you know, alternative app store kind of things are getting that level of scrutiny.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably if I had to guess I bet Phil Schiller is personally approving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or denying each one because there’s gonna be so few of them and they’re gonna be so Important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of PR and and so, you know, so they’re gonna be such big stories I bet every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single one of these is Phil Schiller reviewed and so you’re gonna get the Phil Schiller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attitude You’re gonna get like the harshness the punitive rejections, you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get the personality, you’re going to get all that from these. So it’s going to continue to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, again, I think this is the wrong approach. I really do. I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should make this notarization a lot more like the other notarization because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they continue not to, they’re only going to keep inviting regulators to take control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away from them in ways that matter a lot, like actual security and privacy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which this is not that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, John, you make a really good point about this being kind of two different kinds of notarization.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s really too bad because Apple has done a really good job, to your point earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of treating notarization as notarization. It literally just says, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s nothing that an automated system, or at least we think automated system, can tell is bad about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This seems to be good. And worst case, if it isn’t, they can revoke whatever thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they need to revoke to prevent from running that app anymore. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has been a really good steward of notarization on the Mac for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nobody’s ever really doubted it. Nobody’s ever really, to my recollection, had this kind of drama with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And here it is. They said, okay, we’re going to notarize third-party apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the EU app stores. And everyone kind of shrugged and said, yeah, okay, I guess that makes sense. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey none of us, I don’t think, or maybe you guys did, and I just didn’t realize it, it. But none of us really thought that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were going to treat this, like you said, as app review light. And now they’re treating it as app review light. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that that very clearly flies in the face of the DMA. It’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gross, anyhow. And now they’ve kind of tarnished the sanctity of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the they’ve sullied the good name of notarization. And so now the next time Apple says, Oh, we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to start notarizing, you know, x, y, and z, my eyebrow is going to go up and be like, Oh, what
⏹️ ▶️ John mean? Yeah, which notarization is this? Is it the Mac automated notarization or the third party
⏹️ ▶️ John app store Phil Schiller review?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand why they keep kicking the hornet’s nest. I don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I do know, and I’ve said it many times, having spoken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to many rank and file employees, well, that sounds like it’s hundreds, I shouldn’t say that, but I’ve spoken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to enough rank and file employees to know that a common understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perspective is that, look, we did a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard work to make iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, VisionOS, etc., etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we deserve to be compensated for that. We are owed for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the implication there is, by our good graces, are you allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be there, third party developers? I really think that that perspective
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not only is it gross, but I think it’s losing sight of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact that without those third party developers, and granted, I am a very biased participant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this conversation. Without these third party developers, there isn’t an iPhone or at least not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way it is today. And I don’t think that Apple realizes that while we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are scratching their back or and they’re having to scratch ours too. ours too. Like it’s both ways that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that analogy fell right down, but that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You know what I’m driving at is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, you know, it’s, it’s mutual, right? It’s, it’s, it’s symbiosis or whatever the biology term for it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. Aaron will correct me, but, um, it’s, it’s symbiotic and I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple appreciates that. I don’t think Apple realizes that. And if they do realize it, they don’t frigging care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are owed. They are owed all of this money. They are owed this control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s, it’s all because of us, you know, all because of Apple that you guys can have call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sheet and overcast and all of these other apps and you should be thankful that we allow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you on our platforms. And it’s on the surface, like I guess if that’s the attitude you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have, fine, but you know, they around and now we’re finding out with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vision pro, right? Cause nobody’s touching it. I mean, I have an app on there, but nobody’s really touching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And this is, I really think this is part of the reason why. And if you want to hear more about it, listen to what was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it last week’s over time. Yeah, because we had thoughts. But it’s just, it really is too bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this thing that, okay, well, they’re gonna notarize and, well, we know from the past that’s, that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re okay with that. And now, well, are we okay with that? Which notarization is it? Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just, it’s a bummer. It’s such an own goal, is I guess what I’m saying, and it just bums me out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it too, because like, you know, I mean, look, we’ve had this discussion so many times on the show because they keep messing it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, people will say like, well, well, of course they should be able to monetize. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the history of capitalism, we make exceptions to that all the time once it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly damaging to a market not to. So that you can set aside. You can also say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, what incentive does Apple have to make their platforms if they can’t make money on them? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, so you covered that well. There’s other value to apps being on their platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides being able to extract money from the apps. This is just gravy. You can try to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pure capitalist arguments. You can try to say, well, of course, they should be able to make as much money as they can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why should we, you know, you can make all those, even if you accept those arguments, which you shouldn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because most of them have giant holes in them or are invalid for lots of other reasons, but even if you would let those arguments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pass, it’s a bad strategy long-term for Apple as a company and for the quality and health
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their products and ecosystem, because they depend on developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making software for their platforms, for the platforms to succeed. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very true when you look at their less successful platforms in terms of third-party support, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision OS is obviously like the big headlining one right now. There’s no apps for it, and there’s lots of reasons for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But even if you look at things like the iPad, like how many big companies have made their iPad apps great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even are there at all? That’s been a problem for the iPad since day one. And even now, when the iPad has lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of apps, a lot of times their companies drive their feet on them. When we think about the way the iPhone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store came up, it was a lot of indies like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us making apps for it. Today, it’s a very different world. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could maybe make some argument back then that Apple created this market and it helped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indies like me succeed. That is largely true. There’s some asterisks on that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the most part, that is largely true. There’s a lot of merit to that argument. And I’ve personally been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those people. I’ve benefited from that because I have had my apps in the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since day two or whatever, and it’s been great. It has been my career. It’s wonderful. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however, this is a different world today. Today, most indie developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t exist anymore. Today, what most people want in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software for these platforms is made by big companies. So, you launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like the Vision Pro, Not only are there no indie developers there effectively for lots of reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’ve covered. Basically nobody can afford them and there’s no users so they can’t afford to buy them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then once they’re there, they can’t make any money there. That’s okay. But what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users of the Vision Pro mostly want is for larger companies and larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content producers to adopt it and bring their stuff there because that’s what, you know, we wanna do things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, watch the YouTube app, and I know of Christian Seelig’s app and that’s wonderful, But that’s what most people are looking for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they’re looking for things like Netflix, HBO, YouTube. They’re looking for the big players.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When for something like an app platform, they’re gonna look for things from Microsoft and Adobe and Google.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re gonna look for things from the big companies. If you think Apple has soured relations with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the small developers, you should ask some big companies what they think of Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their developer platforms. The relationship, Apple has poisoned the well so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much that their platforms are suffering. Like, look at how much money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have poured into the Vision Pro. So much time, so much engineering resource
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into this platform. It’s going to probably fail in ways that, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multivariate reasons why this platform is not doing great. But a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is the lack of content and apps on it. Whatever they’re doing is not working enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make this new platform succeed. Again, look at all their platforms that don’t have the iPhone’s customer base,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they all have similar problems. So this isn’t just about Apple, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it being their right to take their 30% or enforce their very, very strict rules.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t just about that. It’s literally that their products are being held back, where they make way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money than the App Store. Their products are being held back by their App Store policies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not just us saying we should have more money and Apple should have less. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally, this is probably the wrong strategy for Apple overall.
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Tech and labor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tech and labor. So this is something that we’ve kind of had bubbling around in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our internal show notes for a while and it seems like there’s a bunch of different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storylines that are all kind of intermingled and interleaved together. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll start with in April in the United States, the FTC, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Federal Trade Commission, banned non-compete agreements for workers. So reading from the Washington Post,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, April 23, banned non-compete agreements for most US workers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a new rule that will bar employers from enforcing clauses that restrict workers from switching employers within their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey industry, which the agency said suppresses wages and gums up labor markets. The FTC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey voted 3 to 2 Tuesday to issue the rule it proposed more than a year ago. The new rule
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes it illegal for employers to include the agreements in employment contracts and requires companies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with active non-compete agreements to inform workers that they are void. The agency received more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than 26,000 comments about the rule after it was proposed some 16 months ago. The rule
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will take effect after 120 days, although business groups have promised to challenge it in court, which could delay
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder how pervasive non-competes are. When I started in the industry after graduating college
⏹️ ▶️ John in the 90s, they were standard. I don’t think of if the first like
⏹️ ▶️ John two, three, maybe even four jobs I had all had non-competes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe that’s not as common now, but I don’t remember what I thought of them back then. I mean, I thought they were
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty terrible, but I’m like, well, I guess this is just the way things are done. This is my first real job. I don’t really know how things go.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, for people in other countries who just don’t know what we’re talking about here, if you worked, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John for a video game developer, you’re a non-competer, and I don’t know if non-competes are common video games, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John just as an example, your non-compete would say, okay, well, You can quit this job whenever you want, like you’re, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not a prisoner here. But if you quit, you can’t get a job with another video game developer
⏹️ ▶️ John for two years. And if that sounds totally bonkers to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the reaction you should have. It’s like, well, wait a second. I’m a video game developer. If I quit
⏹️ ▶️ John this job, presumably I would want to go work for a different video game developer, and you’re telling me, oh, you can quit.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just have to get a job doing something other than video game development. Right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John that was across all industries, all like sometimes it’d be narrow, like you can’t work for these specific competitors, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do this specific thing or whatever, but as an employee, I was like, well, I do want a job
⏹️ ▶️ John and this does seem like a good job and they’re gonna pay me a lot of money and I’m gonna get this, that and the other thing and I like this company.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you’re taking the job, you’re like, I don’t have to worry about quitting or whatever, but then like three years later, you
⏹️ ▶️ John decide you want to quit and go work somewhere else and you’re like, oh, now I can’t go work for any of
⏹️ ▶️ John the three companies that I wanted to go work for instead of this one, what am I gonna do? So this
⏹️ ▶️ John article saying that it is, oh, gums up the labor market? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s putting it mildly. Suppresses wages and gums up the labor market. Suppresses wages because if a competitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re working for one company and you’re gonna work for a competitor because they’re gonna pay you more money, you’re like, oh, I’ll go work over there.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re offering me more money. I’m good at my job. I did a good job on the last product that my company makes.
⏹️ ▶️ John They know I worked on that product and I applied for a job over there And they said, hey, we’ll give you more money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you go where you can make more money. That’s a competitive market for labor. The more in demand
⏹️ ▶️ John you are, the more in demand your skills are, the better you are at your job, the more you can get paid. Oh, but if
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a non-compete, yeah, you can’t. If you quit your job today, you can’t apply for a new job at us for
⏹️ ▶️ John two years according to this non-compete that you got. So it’s terrible. It’s terrible for employees. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John this big major topic here is tech and labor. And even though people who work in the tech industry don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John to think of themselves as labor to resist the idea of unions and stuff. We are
⏹️ ▶️ John workers just like anybody else. We do not own or run the company. Sometimes we get equity in them, depending.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re just working for a salary, part of your power,
⏹️ ▶️ John your meager amount of power you have in the market is that if someone wants to pay you more for your skills
⏹️ ▶️ John and your labor, you should be able to go over there and do that. And non-competes fly in the face of that. So they are super duper
⏹️ ▶️ John evil, and I came to hate them more and more as I worked in the industry. And in my limited experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John they did become less pervasive. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because people stopped taking jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ John They said, you know, like people would turn down jobs because they had a non-compete or whatever, and they could find one that didn’t have one.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, they seemed less pervasive to me in my experience, and the FTC banning
⏹️ ▶️ John them is long, long, long overdue. They’re banned in many specific states. Like I think California has had them banned
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while, but a federal ban makes a huge amount of sense. This gives way too
⏹️ ▶️ John much power. If non-competes give way too much power to employers, the ability to quit one job
⏹️ ▶️ John and go get a better job, that is a power that employees should have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No argument here. I completely agree. So put that aside for a second. We’re going to come back to it. Meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also in April, Inside TSMC’s Expansion Struggles in Arizona. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a post that Gruber put up, which is commenting on a post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from restofworld.org. We will link to both. Vilo Hsiao reporting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the rest of world on TSMC’s massive but now much delayed chip fabrication campus outside Phoenix.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So from rest of world, the American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they believed to be the foundation of their company’s world-leading success. TSMC’s work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey culture is notoriously rigorous, even by Taiwanese standards. executives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have hailed the Confucian culture, which promotes diligence and respect for authority, as well as Taiwan’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strict work ethic as key to the company’s success. Chang,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking last year about Taiwan’s competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey “‘If a machine breaks down at one in the morning, in the U.S. it will be fixed the next morning, but in Taiwan it will be fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 2 a.m.’ And he added, the wife of a Taiwanese engineer would go back to sleep without saying another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word.” Gruber very astutely points out, even the use of wife rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spouse speaks to the culture clash.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So I just mentioned how people in the rest of the world with stronger labor laws would
⏹️ ▶️ John be shocked about the idea of non-competes. Here’s another culture clash, this time in the other direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are many markets in the world where labor has even less rights and
⏹️ ▶️ John stricter expectations than in America. So the kind of work culture where
⏹️ ▶️ John loyalty to your business is above even your own family, it’s above your own health,
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly, it’s above your own everything. It’s like the company is everything, strict hierarchies,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever your boss says goes. That flies in the face of American culture in many
⏹️ ▶️ John ways, but also it flies in the face of a lot of American labor laws and
⏹️ ▶️ John basic American values. And having worked with people, engineers even, just
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the same job as me in other countries, I can tell you that some countries pride themselves, on the same as Taiwanese, they
⏹️ ▶️ John pride themselves on the idea of our employees work late and they’ll stay until the
⏹️ ▶️ John job gets done and they’ll do all this sort of self-sacrifice
⏹️ ▶️ John to do whatever it takes to make the company successful. And the first time someone said
⏹️ ▶️ John this to me in a casual environment, someone from another country at work, I was like, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John something to be proud of. I know it sounds like it is. It sounds like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing a great job or whatever, and for limited amounts of time that can be true. But at this point, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, it is a resolved, it’s not an open question
⏹️ ▶️ John that driving your employees to the point of burnout is obviously bad for the people involved,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also counterproductive to the organization. That people who are working longer and longer
⏹️ ▶️ John hours, the work they’re doing an hour 14 costs you money. Like it’s negative money is
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing such a bad job because they’re burnt out because they’ve been working for 14 hours straight. The
⏹️ ▶️ John company would do better if it let them go home after an eight hour shift and sleep and come back rested the next day, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John in programming and that type of work. But a lot of countries don’t think that way. And their culture
⏹️ ▶️ John is about, talk about all the other counter anti-patterns of
⏹️ ▶️ John being blindly loyal to a strict hierarchy and doing whatever your bosses say. You need
⏹️ ▶️ John people at all levels of an organization to not
⏹️ ▶️ John blindly obey what they’re told to do, but to have minds of their own and to stand up when they’re told to do something that’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John or wrong or a safety hazard or whatever. And workers should stand up for their rights to have a life
⏹️ ▶️ John and to be healthy. And that is kind of similar to Marcus point before in
⏹️ ▶️ John the end, that is better for the organization too. He was like, Oh, that’s you’re taking stuff away from the company. The company would do
⏹️ ▶️ John better if all their employees work 14 hour days, the company wouldn’t do better. That’s the thing. The company believes
⏹️ ▶️ John that they should drive employees to work, you know, And if there’s anything wrong, you got to jump out of bed and do it and we don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John how you destroy your life and a company comes to a family. That’s not better for the company
⏹️ ▶️ John in the long run. And whether or not American companies actually realize that or
⏹️ ▶️ John whether existing American laws constrain them from doing things, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s questionable. Depending on the company you work for, you may feel like the only thing stopping my company
⏹️ ▶️ John from being exactly like this are laws, right? And even those they break as much as they possibly can. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, it’s more true of lower paid jobs, believe it or not. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, relatively speaking, if you’re like a tech employee in America, you are
⏹️ ▶️ John treated the nicest of any employee in any industry in America, because you get paid
⏹️ ▶️ John the most money and you actually do get vacation days and there is some acknowledgement of burnout. And still,
⏹️ ▶️ John as someone in the game development industry, and still, even those tech jobs, people are exploited. People are
⏹️ ▶️ John ground up and spit out. And it just gets worse and worse as you go down the line to people
⏹️ ▶️ John working just hourly wage jobs that are not big fancy tech jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ John They get treated even worse. And that’s why, well, it’s not why, but one of the reasons that you see
⏹️ ▶️ John more willingness to unionize in industries that get paid less is because
⏹️ ▶️ John tech employees are like, oh, we get paid so much money. We don’t need a union. We’re doing fine or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this culture clash really highlights just the lack of agreement across the world and across cultures
⏹️ ▶️ John about what a healthy working relationship looks like. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the TSMC CEO saying, this is why we’re ahead of you, America. I mean, there’s lots of reasons why other countries
⏹️ ▶️ John are ahead of us in various industries. I don’t think one of them is that their
⏹️ ▶️ John employees are willing to work longer hours. They have a better
⏹️ ▶️ John educated workforce. They have a better government system with better support,
⏹️ ▶️ John better education, better health care. Like there’s all sorts of reasons why, government reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John why they may be doing better in a certain area, cheaper labor, so on and so forth. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the willingness to work hard is really not one of them. Like I think America is closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to a reasonable balance of productivity and hours worked than
⏹️ ▶️ John a culture like the one described here in Taiwan, which I don’t know if this is pervasive culture or just TSMC or whatever. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John and even in America, whenever you look the big studies are like Americans work longer and harder than other countries and get less
⏹️ ▶️ John vacation days. Uh, and, and then the people say, that’s why we have higher productivity in America because we work
⏹️ ▶️ John longer and harder. It’s like, that’s probably why we have more burnout. I’m not sure why it’s uh, how we
⏹️ ▶️ John get more productivity. But anyway, this of all the things that are delaying and messing with this TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in Arizona, I’m kind of not surprised that, uh, one of them
⏹️ ▶️ John is the culture clash about, uh, uh, engineering practices and work-life balance. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John even, I don’t know if you guys remember this, but back in the 80s, there was a movie, Gung Ho, back when the
⏹️ ▶️ John Japanese were gonna take over America. There was a movie, I think it was Michael Keaton, where it was like a Japanese car company
⏹️ ▶️ John came to build a factory in America and they had to deal with all the lazy, shiftless American workers who didn’t know what they were doing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually in the end, the Americans showed that they’re good workers too. And it’s a rah-rah, completely racist 80s movie
⏹️ ▶️ John about fear of Japanese people. I was gonna say, were Casey and I even alive yet for this? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not. But anyway, that was the big fear. like Japan, they do everything efficiently, all their workers are hardworking and diligent,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do exactly what they’re told and so on and so forth. And it’s just so much more complicated than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, on this specific issue of employees staying late
⏹️ ▶️ John and working long hours and sacrificing their family for their job, that’s not healthy and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not something we should endorse. No, definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. All right. So continuing on, uh, US made chips will cost Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more despite government subsidies also from April. This is 9to5Mac. Apple was pledged by at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least some of its chips from TSMC’s upcoming plants in Arizona. There had initially been doubts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about whether this was much more of a PR move since the chip elements seemed likely to have to be sent back to Taiwan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for what’s known as packaging, or final assembly. One analyst said this made the Arizona
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plant quote, a paperweight. However, Apple later said it would use another US company, Amcor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do the chip packaging. Producing chips in the US carries higher costs than doing it in Taiwan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subsidies were recently confirmed as totaling $6.6 billion in grants across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three plants and a further $5 billion in loans. Then according to the Financial Times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TSMC plans to charge customers more for making their chips outside of Taiwan as global capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expansion, power costs, and increasingly complex cutting-edge technologies weigh on its
⏹️ ▶️ Casey profitability. Quote, if a customer requests to be in a certain geographical area, then the customer needs to share
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the incremental costs, said C.C. Wei, chief executive of the world’s largest chip manufacturer, to investors on Thursday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the company’s first quarter earnings call, again quoting, “…in today’s fragmented globalization environment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey costs will be higher for everyone, including TSMC, our customers, and our competitors,” Wei said, adding that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussions with customers about price increases had started.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so it’s good that Apple is trying to get more things manufactured in the U.S. As happened
⏹️ ▶️ John with Mac Pro, the trashcan Mac Pro, I believe even this one too, I forget. stuff in the US
⏹️ ▶️ John tends to be more expensive. The cost of living is more expensive, the cost of labor is more expensive because you have to pay those people so they can
⏹️ ▶️ John afford to live here than it is in some other countries. And TSMC is passing
⏹️ ▶️ John that cost on to the customer. So if some customer, I mean like Apple, not like an individual, if some customer of TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ John says, hey, we want to buy chips from you and we’d like them to be manufactured in the US, please, they’ll say, great, that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be X amount extra because it costs us more to manufacture them there. Strategically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, it is a good idea for Apple to have multiple geographic
⏹️ ▶️ John sources for its ships. Now, having TSMC make them in Taiwan and TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ John make them in the US is not as good as having two different companies, but you take what you can get. And Taiwan, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a geopolitical, potential geopolitical instability over there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John having a backup plan is good. And honestly, It’s yes, it’s going to cost more and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should pay more It was again usually unlike things like phones and Macs and stuff. The chip is
⏹️ ▶️ John not the most expensive component. It’s usually the screen Pay,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know as long as it’s not twice or three times the price or whatever Pay a little extra pass some of that cost on to the
⏹️ ▶️ John customer advertise the fact that more and more your components are made in The u.s. I’m not sure how much of a selling point that is But Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has been touting for years and years how much of their devices are recycled
⏹️ ▶️ John and they keep increasing that and I applaud that effort. I also don’t know how much customers care about
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but whether customers care or not, Apple continues to travel that road, to reduce
⏹️ ▶️ John their packaging, to use more recycled materials, to try for that carbon neutral 2030 goal. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think those are all things they should be doing and not just out of a sense of nobility, but just because
⏹️ ▶️ John if they achieve them, they’ll be so far ahead of their competition in these areas because everyone will have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this stuff eventually. And if Apple does it first voluntarily, yeah, it’s kind of an analogy for the
⏹️ ▶️ John regulations, like if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Apple does it first
⏹️ ▶️ John voluntarily and does a good job of it, they will be ahead of their competitors. And I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same is true of sort of like paying to build up US manufacturing prowess. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple put billions of dollars into manufacturing in China to help pay for all
⏹️ ▶️ John the, to help subsidize the plants and the machines that are in them to build all their fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John computers and help train all the employees and so on and so forth, obviously there was a much bigger industry there already before Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple did put a lot of money into that. Apple should be dedicated to putting in even more
⏹️ ▶️ John money in factories and all the surrounding infrastructure to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that stuff in America. That means paying to educate the workers, paying, you know, paying to build
⏹️ ▶️ John the housing that’s going to, you know, I’m not saying like I have a company store or whatever, but like through through the means that we
⏹️ ▶️ John have in this country, through government subsidies, through Apple, paying higher prices for
⏹️ ▶️ John products, that’s the way Apple would do this. It’s not like Apple’s going to build everybody houses and stuff. What they’re going to do is they’re going to pay X
⏹️ ▶️ John dollars more per chip, and that’s going to allow these factories to exist and be profitable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, as opposed to Apple saying, no, we demand the lowest possible prices. So we’re not going to buy a single thing from Arizona. We’re going to buy it all from Taiwan.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? So they, this, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be expensive. It’s going to take a really
⏹️ ▶️ John long time. And in the end, it’s still just TSMC instead of an actual American company like Intel and Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, do get also get some billions of dollars in subsidies. But I feel like this is the road Apple should be traveling
⏹️ ▶️ John down. And US labor is a big factor in this, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the path to success here is not, you know what? US employees should also sacrifice
⏹️ ▶️ John their health and family life for our employers. It’s the only way we compete. Can’t compete. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the way to do this. That’s not the way to win. That’s not the correct move here. And in the end,
⏹️ ▶️ John Taiwan will also have to grow out of that as well, if and when they travel the same path we have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then moving on, and we said we would come back to this, just a few days ago on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5th of July, a judge has said that the FTC lacks the authority to issue rules
⏹️ ▶️ Casey banning non-compete agreements. So reading from Ars Technica, a U.S. judge ruled against the FTC in a challenge to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its rule banning non-compete agreements, saying the FTC lacks substantive, there we go, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can just leave it in, who cares, rule-making authority. The preliminary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ruling only blocks enforcement of the non-compete ban against the plaintiff and other groups that intervened in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case. But it signals that the judge believes the FTC cannot enforce the rule. The case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in U.S. District Court for Northern District of Texas, so appeals would be heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the Fifth District, which is generally regarded as one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country.”
⏹️ ▶️ John Blomp. It’s an ongoing problem in this country where, you know, one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John major parties and all of the people in power who support that major party
⏹️ ▶️ John believe that the government shouldn’t be allowed to do things that they don’t like. And one of those is restraining companies in any
⏹️ ▶️ John way. And so, of course, of course, there’s going to be a judge and a bunch of plaintiffs who are going to say, non-competes,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not fair. We should be able to stop employees from getting another job in the industry for as long as we want. If they don’t like it, they can just
⏹️ ▶️ John choose not to take this job. There’s nothing wrong with this system. Please don’t try to give any power to employees.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going to claw that back by saying the FTC lacks the authority to do that. In fact, all government agencies lack
⏹️ ▶️ John all authority to do anything and they shouldn’t be allowed to do anything. Companies should be able to do whatever they want and there’s no problem with this system.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so exhausting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is so very exhausting. It stinks, but what are you going to do? I mean, you just do the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can, I suppose. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you- I mean, they
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, oh, let the States do it. California did it or whatever. We just don’t want a national one.
⏹️ ▶️ John we think it’s good. It’s great. want that, go move to California. No tech company has ever succeeded there. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John These laws are going to strangle the economy.
#askatp: Password managers vs. OS features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do a little ask ATP and Traeger writes with the announcement of Apple migrating their password functions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into a standalone app, adopting pass keys is getting more interesting and I’m starting to consider moving away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my password manager of choice. I’ve always been hesitant to do so in the past because I figured that an OS native
⏹️ ▶️ Casey password manager would be a more likely target for getting hacked. Is this a rational or do you think there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may be a might be a case for third party managers being more secure?
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely is a case for this. This is one of the strongest arguments at this point for third-party managers now that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John adding more and more features to their own password Manager, it’s built in it’s well supported You know the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ones Have shared groups now like the number of things that third-party ones do that Apple doesn’t do is
⏹️ ▶️ John getting smaller by the day But one thing they do have going for them is that if your Apple ID gets compromised
⏹️ ▶️ John for example And you don’t have like your third-party password manager or like master password
⏹️ ▶️ John in your iCloud keychain they can’t get at all your other password things. Now obviously if they’ve cracked your Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John and you use that email address, then they can use your password to reset things or whatever, but anyway, it is still one more
⏹️ ▶️ John layer of protection. Lots of stuff in security is how many different layers of protection can you add. And by
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of tying your password manager to your Apple ID to the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like just all one big ball of stuff, if that ball gets cracked, that’s just one
⏹️ ▶️ John layer. Now I know within Apple stuff there are additional layers, but a third party password manager does
⏹️ ▶️ John add an additional layer. Third party password managers don’t have as nice integration as Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff tends to have third party password managers can get compromised. You hear the stories all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. I can’t even remember the name of the company so I don’t wanna throw them out there, but a bunch of names of third party password managers that I recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past several years, I’ve seen stories that, oh, they got hacked and all their stuff might be compromised and
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry about that and that’s really bad. And Apple is a bigger company and has had better
⏹️ ▶️ John luck defending iCloud keychain, but maybe their day is gonna come eventually, right? This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the difficulty of making security decisions. When I recommend what people should do, I usually try
⏹️ ▶️ John to pick the passive least resistance, which is not to use a third party one, and because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re much more likely to have problems dealing with a piece of third party software than they
⏹️ ▶️ John are to get hacked by somebody because everything was all in one place.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for people listening to the show and tech nerds or people who have higher security needs, using things from
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple vendors that are truly separated from each other does add an extra level of security.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, that’s one of the strongest remaining reasons to use a third-party password manager is if you feel like you need
⏹️ ▶️ John or want that additional level of security and you can deal with the downsides.
#askatp: AI reputation vs. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Jamie writes, with so many flops and mistakes, the reputation of AI is arguably going the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of crypto. Do you envisage WWDC changing this course with Apple’s input, or do you think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frantically scaling back the emphasis they put on the words AI in their presentations and perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey returning to machine learning to avoid being lumped together with all the failures of other tech companies? I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was sent in before WWDC. Yes, it was. Sorry, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is an old Ask ATP, but I thought it would be fun to read now. They didn’t do that, Jamie.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s a little bit unfair for us to answer the question after we know the
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s just like, this was a reasonable thing to think about, because if you’re only hearing
⏹️ ▶️ John like the bad stories about AI, you might think, geez, are the negatives outweighing
⏹️ ▶️ John the positives? But Apple’s judgment, and I think the judgment of everyone in the industry was like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple needs to have an AI story. Yes, there are bad things and downsides, but if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t say anything or shied away from the letters A
⏹️ ▶️ John and I, and instead said machine learning or tried to separate themselves in a way that was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of like, oh, everyone else is doing AI, but we’re not. That would have been bad for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would have been an example of Apple not, not correctly having
⏹️ ▶️ John their finger on the pulse of the industry. And in the end, Apple did not do that. And I think the comparison to
⏹️ ▶️ John crypto is unfair because AI already does useful things And crypto does
⏹️ ▶️ John such a small number of useful things that are the most useful for
⏹️ ▶️ John applications that people don’t want to encourage, like illegal activity. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a fair comparison. AI has already shown that it does a bunch of useful things. It’s just a question of
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the best way to use it and where should it be applied and how can we make it better? And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple’s answer to WWDC was pretty good. I think we talked about this on the WWDC show. Apple did have
⏹️ ▶️ John a different angle on it. They are leveraging their strengths. They’re trying to maintain their values
⏹️ ▶️ John while implementing AI, but they are not shying away from the term and they were trying to get as much value out of it for the customer
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible while still maintaining privacy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think also, keep in mind what Apple did here with their marketing was they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly calling it AI, they’re calling it Apple intelligence, which is interesting. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for lots of reasons, but I think one area that will be interesting to see how this plays out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time is, by calling it Apple Intelligence,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it better work. Because imagine how bad that looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if, quote, Apple Intelligence gets a bad reputation of not being reliable or not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being good. Like if it, imagine if Siri was called Apple Intelligence all these years. Like it would have a pretty bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reputation. So I think naming it that is both pretty good marketing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also that’s a bold stance to take. that sets the bar high and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that puts a lot of pressure on them to make sure it’s really good and really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable and really stable and really gives decent answers to things or performs well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have set the bar very high by putting their name so prominently on it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it works for them, I hope it plays out. Time will tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they did call the device Apple TV and for many, many years it did not live up to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple name, but eventually it got okay. So I don’t know, I mean, it’s the old joke,
⏹️ ▶️ John the example of an oxymoron is military intelligence. Hopefully Apple intelligence is not the punchline to that same joke.
#askatp: Recall vs. Keychain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then John Wilson writes, you rightly said that the Windows recall database is a valuable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trove of information that can be accessed by the user and so could be vulnerable to exploitation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It would be disastrous if some bad actor gained access to it, but don’t you all have the same arguments, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t all the same arguments, excuse me, apply to other things like iCloud Keychain? I mean, yes, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s a treasure trove, but no, in that it’s not stored in plain text, right? I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, to be fair, a recall was stored in plain text and then they fixed that, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John having, this is kind of, links up well with the first question. Having all your important stuff in one place
⏹️ ▶️ John is great for convenience and it also allows for that one, for you to
⏹️ ▶️ John pick for that one place, the most secure one place. Part of the reason iCloud Keychain exists is
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple also values making one big secure thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and making sure it’s implemented right and securely instead of having a bunch of little things of variable levels
⏹️ ▶️ John of security. If you need some secret to be stored somewhere, put it in iCloud Keychain. It’s accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John to applications. You can use it in a browser. Like it’s used everywhere, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John In cloud parlances, it’s called a secret store. There are whole companies that have businesses making secret stores for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the strategy here. But it also means that if iCloud Keychain gets hacked or there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some flaw or whatever, and someone gets access to this stuff, they get everything. That’s true of a lot of stuff. That’s usually true of
⏹️ ▶️ John our email addresses. We’ve said this a million times. If someone has access to your email account, which is probably not that secure because
⏹️ ▶️ John your email password maybe isn’t that great, they can just use the forgot password links on most of the websites and reset
⏹️ ▶️ John all of your passwords. Some sites will be more secure than that, but it’s not gonna be stuff like your bank. It’s gonna be like
⏹️ ▶️ John some shoe store that requires like two-factor authentication and wants to have someone give you a call
⏹️ ▶️ John and show a picture of yourself and scan your photo ID or whatever, but your bank will be like, fine, yeah, you’re in. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John security is difficult. But the recall database was egregious because all the stuff that went into iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Keychain ended encrypted, even Apple can’t get access to it using things in the secure enclave. So even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have access to RAM, you can’t read this information because this is in a secure enclave, which is not accessible to regular
⏹️ ▶️ John programs from RAM. Apple has worked really hard to make iCloud Keychain as secure as possible
⏹️ ▶️ John from the world and even from itself. Windows recall database, that was not true
⏹️ ▶️ John of and remains not true of. So yeah, that’s part of the tradeoffs of security.
⏹️ ▶️ John We always talk about the convenience and security tradeoff. The other tradeoff is, should I have one really secure place
⏹️ ▶️ John that I put all my energy into making sure that’s secure or should I have a bunch of little individual places? And I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John one really secure place, despite the concentration of data, is the better strategy because it’s so hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to make something secure. Even a company the size of Apple does well to
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially make a secret store and have a dedicated team whose only job is to make sure that is the best secret store
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world, as opposed to letting like, oh, the mail team will come up with its secret store and the notes team will come up with a secret store
⏹️ ▶️ John and the safari team will come up with its secret store, which maybe it’s the best one in the company, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John have it have a single place and put the team on that because having a bunch of little ones is
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to mean you’re going to be exploited in more easily in multiple places rather than making
⏹️ ▶️ John one place. It’s really scary. That’s my opinion. Now, if I call it, you can get 100% broken and my life gets destroyed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it was still would have been my opinion, but I think the odds are lower that happened with iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Keychain. Certainly they’re lower than with the Windows recall database.
#askatp: Privacy vs. ads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do a little more ask ATP and Steven Wood writes is Apple still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a privacy first company We know that Android isn’t due to Google being the world’s biggest advertising company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in recent years Microsoft has been evolving Windows to display ads and track users a few years ago Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was consistently and constantly emphasizing privacy However with Apple now earning more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from ads can we still expect them to uphold their commitment to privacy or will they compromise it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a good question. I mean, they’ve kind of, I don’t know if they’ve already compromised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but they’ve certainly gotten fast and loose with what’s okay. Like, Hey, did you know this Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus show is starting soon? Do you want to try it? You know, like all that sort of stuff. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily not private. I don’t know, but it’s just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey icky. I don’t know. What do you, what do you fellows think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have already seen exactly how Apple compromises
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its standards for advertising. Because look, the reality is most people don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads. And so almost any ad-based business is having to form some kind of compromise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the product quality or the user experience in some way. And I wouldn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say Android isn’t private because Google is an ad company. I think lots of other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google products have severe privacy problems, especially the way they treat their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dumb login prompts around the web these days. Which, I mean, those are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive disrespect of the web experience. Because, again, like I’ve said this before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way Apple views everything that happens on the iPhone is theirs and they own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it, that’s how Google views the entire web. Google thinks the entire web is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theirs to do whatever they want with. That they always have, and over time, they’ve only gotten more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more power, especially with the rise of Chrome being such a dominant browser. So Google is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfectly willing to crap all over the web, to harvest it for everything it’s possibly worth, to totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invade people’s privacy all over the web. But I don’t think we see them doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of abuse on Android specifically. I think that’s more of a Google and the web problem, not Google and Android problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so going back to Apple and privacy here, I think we have seen exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how Apple compromises their standards in the name of increasing revenue through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like ads, whether that’s ad money directly, but like things like app store search ads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether it’s using promotion, cross promotion, you know, within their products to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to promote their services, which is kind of like ads, kind of different, but so that’ll be things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the promos in the setting screen, when you haven’t like finished setting up your phone, like, oh, do you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to maybe set up Apple Music? You know, like all those kinds of things. And then of course, when you’re in Apple Music or things like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t subscribe to their plan, they harass you endlessly, or they’ll send notifications from their apps that you never gave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco permission to send notifications from, like from their own store app and their own app store app and their own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has shown they will harass people, they will bug people, they will shamelessly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promote upsells everywhere, all over their platforms. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a massive compromise, but it’s a compromise in user experience and respect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the users and respect for their own products and respect for themselves, but it is not a compromise in privacy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So obviously you can tell by the way I’m phrasing this, I’m not a fan of this practice at all. It kind of saddens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me that platform vendors for like general computing platforms have now taken it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upon themselves. And Microsoft is again, a good example of this. I think they go even too far with it, but like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now acceptable for general purpose computing platforms to harass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the user on a regular basis for upsells or put ads in the general UI of the platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is not the only person doing this. They’re not the only company doing this. But I always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought Apple was above that. And what they’ve shown in recent years is that they’re not, which is sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They really should raise their standards in that department because they used to be the most respectful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their users across the entire computing industry. And that is no longer the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways like this. So they will happily spam the crap out of users. They will bother users,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will harass people, they will put ads and promos and interstitials and notifications up to promote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own stuff or to drive their own services revenue or to promote upsells or sell more AppleCare or sell more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Music or whatever else. But they’re not actually doing that in a way that invades privacy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are also in efforts to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve their own goals. They’re also doing things like app tracking transparency, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really good for privacy for the user and actually helps destroy other people’s ad models,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is its own antitrust potential issue over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of a thorny issue. There’s a lot of detail to that that I’m not gonna get into in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AskATV question. But I think what they’ve shown is that privacy is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something they compromise on. They will just compromise the user experience in lots of other small, annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s why Apple, you know, say, oh, well, Apple making more money from ads. Apple, it’s not just that their heart isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John into ads. To do advertising in the way that makes the most money requires
⏹️ ▶️ John an innovation of privacy that Apple will not do. You need to know so much about a customer
⏹️ ▶️ John and track them across all sorts of things. Apple will track you across all of its own platforms. And to Marco’s point,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google thinks the entire web is its platform, so it will track you across the entire web and that makes perfect sense to them. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple does have platforms that it owns. Google doesn’t actually own the web, so there’s the difference there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, Apple’s not willing to do that. So when it does sell ads, it can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sell ads as well as Facebook and Google, because it doesn’t have the kind of privacy-invasive
⏹️ ▶️ John tracking and targeting that lets you pick, you know, 18 to 13-year-old people who live in this state who
⏹️ ▶️ John recently looked for a mattress and blah blah. Like, they just don’t have the power to do that. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have it, their platforms aren’t big enough, and they don’t gather that information, and they don’t sell that information. They
⏹️ ▶️ John anonymize everything in their own services. They don’t wanna know stuff about you. And so the parts of Apple that do have
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell actual ads, not ads for Apple’s own stuff, but they have to sell ads that other people pay for,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an anemic, less powerful interface because the whole rest of the company says, yeah, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have that information. It’s probably difficult to run an ad platform inside Apple because you have to constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John tell the people who wanna run ads, no, that information isn’t available to you. Even if Apple itself tracks
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I would imagine they wouldn’t give it up to third parties because they know once you give that up to third parties, third parties will
⏹️ ▶️ John do things with it that Apple doesn’t agree with. So I do think Apple is still, for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ John holding strong on all their privacy stuff. But when it comes to Apple looking at itself, oh, these aren’t ads,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just trying to tell you about the other great services Apple has, right? And in some ways, like, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John should tell people about Apple TV Plus and the shows that are available on it. Like, when Apple does an ad for Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus at the beginning of your WWDC keynote, you’re like, how does that relate to developers? Apple’s got a service, they paid a lot of money to
⏹️ ▶️ John make those shows, they should advertise. They advertise on television, they advertise in magazines, they advertise in their
⏹️ ▶️ John own materials. I give them a pass on that. It’s stuff like the Apple equivalent of what everyone complains
⏹️ ▶️ John about at Windows these days, where you go to the start menu and there’s like a third party ad in there. The Apple equivalent of that is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to upsell you in the settings screen. Granted, it’s all Apple stuff. You’re not seeing an ad for like a mortgage
⏹️ ▶️ John lender inside the settings screen, right? That’s more of a Microsoft move. But even when we just see stuff from Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John we, it’s hard to distinguish that from, you know, the perspective of the users. Like a thing that I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ask for that’s in my face. I think there is a balance to be struck there. Because Apple does have to let you know about
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that are available to you. Like, for example, when you fill your phone, that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be a good time to tell somebody that one of the solutions to this is to pay Apple for more storage. In
⏹️ ▶️ John fact, probably the only solution
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to this is to pay Apple for
⏹️ ▶️ John more storage, right? But getting that message at that time, It’s like, oh, and then all Apple did was sell
⏹️ ▶️ John me an ad and you’re mad because you got to pay money or whatever. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be, I think Apple has to do stuff like that. Not has to like, oh, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s forcing them. I think it’s just good business. And despite the fact that some people are
⏹️ ▶️ John annoyed by it, letting people know about the products and services you offer is a part of being a good
⏹️ ▶️ John business. It’s just a question of when, how often, where, what context, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John the context is uncomfortable. Like you just filled your phone. That is an uncomfortable context, but it is also a time when you should show them.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you just set up your phone and then you have 25 come ons for you to set up Apple Pay, not appropriate. Too
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying or whatever, but the people who run Apple Pay probably lobbied hard to the other executives to say, look, we
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta be in there because otherwise we’re not gonna hit our numbers for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that’s, again, not privacy invasive,
⏹️ ▶️ John but annoying. So this is a multifaceted angle and sometimes people lump it all into privacy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Technically there are distinctions, but from a user experience perspective, people always say they don’t wanna be tracked,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in practice they don’t care when it happens to them, right? As evidenced by their actions and what they’re willing to pay for versus
⏹️ ▶️ John not when given the choice between like, like the, there’s another EU case about a Facebook saying you can use Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ John for free and we’ll track you or you can pass money and we won’t track you as much. Everybody picks the free one,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So everyone says, Oh, I don’t want to be tracked. And there are a few people who are really genuine about that and change their
⏹️ ▶️ John life to surround it. But in practice, being tracked in that way, had doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John as many consequences that most people choose not to do it. right? Um, privacy invasion. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think people can feel more acutely like if they knew that anyone in the world could find out what they had for
⏹️ ▶️ John breakfast yesterday, that’s an invasion of privacy. And even though it’s probably you don’t, you know, I didn’t have anything super
⏹️ ▶️ John secret for breakfast. You don’t want the world knowing that. And if you knew they could know that by like going to an ad vendor
⏹️ ▶️ John and getting that information, like it’s shocking what ad companies know about individual
⏹️ ▶️ John people based on the magic of computers and data aggregation and various other signals. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one of one of the reasons everyone is convinced that their phones are listening to them because it’s sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John non-technological explanation of how would somebody know this about me? They must have been listening. So they just personify
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone and say, how would the phone know this about me? It must have been listening. It’s like, no, they can get all this information about
⏹️ ▶️ John you from your activity of using the internet. They don’t need to use the microphones. They would if they could,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they don’t need to, right? So, and people don’t understand how that mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John works, so they just think that it’s been eavesdropping on them, but it’s so much more complicated than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why it all gets lumped together. It’s like your actual privacy of other
⏹️ ▶️ John companies not knowing stuff about you that you don’t want to know is actually separate from how annoyed you are at ads that are thrown in
⏹️ ▶️ John your face, which is separate from who those ads are from and so on and so forth. So anyway, we’ve gone around in circles about
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Sorry, Stephen, but I would say my answer is that I think Apple still is being consistent in their dedication
⏹️ ▶️ John to privacy, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Delete.me, and thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm.com. One of the big benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of membership is we do a bonus topic every week now called ATP Overtime. This week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bonus topic is feature requests for death, for dealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with deceased people and your contacts and things like that. That’s an interesting issue that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think people don’t generally think about until it happens to them. And so we’ll talk about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and kind of where Apple could go from there, certain considerations they should have for dealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with death and their features. So it’s kind of a bummer, but I think it’ll be an interesting conversation. So that’s ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime happening right after the show for members. You can join it and hear it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at ATP.FM slash join. Thanks everybody. you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it mean to Accidental, check podcast so long.
Heat pumps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s super hot here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me tell you about super hot. This tiny little closet closed in here with a dog for extra body heat
⏹️ ▶️ John and a 2019 Mac Pro. No air conditioning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you can solve these problems. You can install air conditioning and you can get a good computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is an air conditioner in the room and it doesn’t turn it on. It’s too noisy. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could get a mini split.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot less. They’re very quiet. They are way quieter than a window unit. You just don’t want to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holes in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also my property is so oddly shaped that the mini split fan would probably be like
⏹️ ▶️ John right on the other side of this wall. I could touch it with my hand. So as quiet as they are, I still wouldn’t be able to have it on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they’re really like the condenser or compressor, whatever it is, those things for them, the outside part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is also really quiet. Like if it’s just a one room sized one, especially, they’re really small and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really quiet. Strongly recommended.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the low, low price of putting holes in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think your house is just going to fall down when you put a couple holes in it?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Let this be the next person’s problem. Resale value, Casey. You know about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do. But the thing is, nobody’s going to buy that house in this globally warmed world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you don’t have any sort of air conditioning answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, sure they will. But just everyone buys houses that are fixer-uppers. This is going to be a fixer-upper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. If there’s no air conditioning, it will be. That’s what people
⏹️ ▶️ John do. The number of houses in our neighborhood that have air conditioning has gone up over time, but it would shock you how
⏹️ ▶️ John low it is. in Virginia, every place has air conditioning. And even Long Island, I think it’s more than here. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, New England, it’s not the same as old England. It’s not as bad as old England in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of air conditioning penetration. But the number is surprisingly low. But when I left Long
⏹️ ▶️ John Island, pretty much every house had air conditioning. Not true here in New England.
⏹️ ▶️ John Getting truer all the time, but not true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it was a real weird thing when I graduated high
⏹️ ▶️ Casey school in Western Connecticut, where there was no air conditioning in the school except for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey main office and the library. Still true in our schools. Yep. And then I came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down to Blacksburg, which is southwest Virginia, where there were no air conditioning in almost all the dorms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The brand new ones that were suite style did have air conditioning. And everyone was very jealous. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking, there was no air conditioning in the dorms. And to be fair, it was in the mountains, so well, to a degree. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it did get relatively cool most nights. But a lot of the, I think all the academic buildings that air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conditioning, I think. And it was quite a change.
⏹️ ▶️ John At my son’s school, there’s people when they’re picking the dorms, like if you’re a freshman, you’re coming in, which dorm
⏹️ ▶️ John should I pick? I think one or two of them have air conditioning and the rest of them don’t. The
⏹️ ▶️ John assumption is, oh, well, you’re not in school during the summer and that’s the only time you need air conditioning, so I’m sure it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. But when it’s 90 degrees in September and you’re moving everything into a dorm room and it’s not air conditioned, everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got these fans in the window blowing 90 degree humid air at you. Yeah, there’s, like
⏹️ ▶️ John old England, It takes a while for people to get over the idea of like, look, it does actually get hot.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You can’t pretend that it doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Sometimes, and hey, I was, none of my dorms, my freshman
⏹️ ▶️ John dorm for sure was not air conditioned. I don’t think any of the other dorms I was in were air conditioned. And yeah, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John even in Boston, it gets hot in the dorms. And you know, then the winter comes, you don’t have to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But yeah, we’ll get there eventually. Have you seen the trend lately? So, you know, air conditioners,
⏹️ ▶️ John mini splits, blah, blah, they’re all just heat pumps. We can link that technology connections video if you want to learn a little heat
⏹️ ▶️ John pumps. Air conditioners have always been heat pumps or refrigerators. This is not new technology. This exists for many many decades.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they’re getting more popular because they’re really efficient. And again if you want to see in that video
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’ll link, the reason they’re efficient is because they don’t, you know, produce
⏹️ ▶️ John heat for example when heating in the winter. They move heat from one place to another so they don’t have to do the work to produce it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you for for example, have an electric heater, it can be essentially 100% efficient because all of the waste energy
⏹️ ▶️ John gets emitted as heat, but that’s what you wanted anyway, so success. But that means
⏹️ ▶️ John every amount of heating you get comes from the electricity that goes into it. So it’s a, best case
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 100% efficient, but a heat pump doesn’t produce heat or cool, it moves
⏹️ ▶️ John it from one place to another. So all it has to do is expend the energy to move it. So you can have
⏹️ ▶️ John an efficiency, it’s called like a COP coefficient of something or other, anyway, of like five
⏹️ ▶️ John to one. So you put in like one unit of energy and you get five units of heating out. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you didn’t get all the heat from the one unit of energy you put in. You used one unit of energy to pick up a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of heat from one location and carry it over to a new location and dump it, right? That’s why heat pumps
⏹️ ▶️ John are great. And that’s what air conditioners do. And here’s just air conditioning running in reverse. The new trend is
⏹️ ▶️ John for essentially what something that looks like a window unit air conditioner. Have you
⏹️ ▶️ John all seen the window unit air conditioner It lets you close the window. It’s shaped like a U. So rather than
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey having to have your window
⏹️ ▶️ John propped open. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s like imagine a window unit air conditioner, but put a slot in it. And obviously, the slot doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go all the way to the bottom. There’s a little thin thing. It lets you close your window, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Most of the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, almost all the way. Anyway, that’s been around for ages. I don’t know how good those are. I’ve never had one of those.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s the same thing. It’s just a heat pump. And you can do this because if you look at how heat pumps are designed, you can snake
⏹️ ▶️ John all the piping through the bottom part and it works fine. it lets you close your window more. A new version of that is inverted.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now it’s like an upside down U and it hangs down on the window, which is much more stable
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re basically putting it in your window and half of it is hanging on the outside of your house and half of it is hanging on the inside of your
⏹️ ▶️ John house, right? And then you can put your window down almost all the way, same type of deal. But they’re huge, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like the size of the inside portion is the size of like a radiator and the outside portion
⏹️ ▶️ John is often even bigger, right? This is a way to add heating and cooling
⏹️ ▶️ John more efficiently to things like apartment buildings. So in every single window in an apartment building, you hang one of these big
⏹️ ▶️ John U-shaped things. Like it’s not like just a window unit that you put in and out. It’s a permanent part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the infrastructure. But if you have a really old building and you’re using like steam heater radiators or whatever, and you want to like refurbish
⏹️ ▶️ John it, this is in theory a less expensive way to do it, to put one of these units in every single room. You often see them in like hotel
⏹️ ▶️ John rooms where there’s that annoying thing on the wall that does both heating and cooling. I’m assuming those are also heat pumps,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a built-in type of thing. Anyway, they’re really kind of scary looking and kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of cool looking, but I endorse this technology because you can use it for like a whole house heat pump
⏹️ ▶️ John or something that’s built into your basement and just has like the little fan units outside, individual window
⏹️ ▶️ John units, or things that essentially replace radiators in apartment buildings without having to replumb the whole building
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Of course, those upside-down U-shaped ones wouldn’t work in a house in New England. Actually, it’s actual radiators
⏹️ ▶️ John because the actual radiator is sitting in front of the window and you can’t hang a unit like that down into it. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat pumps are great. Houses in New England don’t need a thing like that. Apartment buildings, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, it’s a great use for apartment buildings. Houses in New England can just install split units.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t need to put anything in the windows. You can let the windows be windows. You can let them be closed and sealed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all winter and some summer long, and you can just have heat pumps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuck to the wall with a small pipe running through the house to go to the outside. Trust me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a great system. Everything you said about heat pumps is correct. Every modern split unit that’s worth anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can also heat because it’s just, when you convert an air conditioning unit to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air conditioner or heater heat pump, it’s a very, very minor difference in hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s a very cheap difference. It’s basically like a reversing valve or something. It’s a very, very simple difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the two. So anybody out there, if you are buying a new method of air conditioning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your house, whether it’s wall split units or whether it’s like a central thing, central air conditioner,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend the extra very small amount of money if there even is a difference for you and get one that can also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat. Because again, it’s so simple. It’s usually it’s either no cost difference or it’s like 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks. I think it isn’t a big difference. So if you get an air conditioner that can also heat, then you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pure electric heat, either as your only heat or as an option. But as John was saying, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever impression you might have about electric heat being like super expensive or whatever, That’s because it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the old electric baseball radiators that were just giant toaster oven elements that were just, you know, 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heating and that’s and that’s it. But heat pumps, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I was saying, like you get more out of them than you put into them in terms of heat because it steals heat from the outside world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, even in the winter. Yes, even when it’s like zero degrees outside, they still work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they can still steal heat from the zero degree air and make your house warm. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still works. And I can tell you this because now I am 100% heat pump.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of my heat and cooling comes from central heat pumps. And it is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, cause you know, you have obviously a forced air, you have some downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of forced air heat, but the way people always say like, it’s so dry. That’s not true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything you know about humidity is probably wrong. Forced air central heat is actually the easiest kind to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco humidify. because you just put a central humidifier on it and it works all winter long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, it is the best because once you have heat being produced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by electricity, but not that much electricity compared to the old ways of doing it, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have more energy options available to you. You can put solar on your house, you can reduce the cost of it. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign up for one of those various ways to get renewable energy to your house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the grid. Usually most places will have some way where you can pay a little bit extra through your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco utility company and they’ll give you wind power instead, or whatever it is. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot more options there. So it’s something to really consider, even if it’s not gonna be your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only heat source, even if you wanna have some kind of like oil or gas as backup heat, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the heat pump your primary source and only use the oil and gas as some kind of backup if you really think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need it. Trust me, it’s great. And it’s certainly a lot better in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, climate control or climate change rather. Certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot better in terms of like energy options. It’s way more efficient and way more people should be using heat pumps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to heat their houses. And whatever you think you might know about heat pumps, check your information, it’s probably outdated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re better than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a time of rapid advancement in heat pumps. They’re getting so much better every year. Like you mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ John like how low a temperature can they handle? Even within just like the past five years, the lowest
⏹️ ▶️ John temperature and the most efficient heat pump, like that record is being broken all the time. they’re getting more efficient, they can go down
⏹️ ▶️ John into the negative degrees. Like, it’s just changing so fast that like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John already in most of the United States, the heat pump can do everything for you. And in the places where you need supplemental
⏹️ ▶️ John heat, like heat pumps are trying to get down to that. Obviously, someone mentioned in the chat the thing I remember seeing on this whole house, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John decades ago, which is really cool, but also super expensive, which is a geothermal heat pump, where it steals
⏹️ ▶️ John heat from the ground. They build, they dig a gigantic hole in your property, which is where all the money is,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the ground may freeze down to X number of feet, but if you just keep digging, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John you get down to ground that is above freezing all the time. And during the winter, when it’s negative
⏹️ ▶️ John a bazillion degrees, you have essentially an infinite source of above freezing
⏹️ ▶️ John heat that you can move with a heat pump into your house. The big cost there is, okay, now I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to dig a gigantic hole and deal with all that cost or whatever. But heat pumps that work with just in the air,
⏹️ ▶️ John like air conditioners and air conditioners running in reverse, no giant
⏹️ ▶️ John hole needs to be dug in your yard. And they’re not as efficient as geothermal ones yet, but they cost so much less. So that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re so popular. And lots of the government programs, like those things in apartment units, like government programs subsidizing
⏹️ ▶️ John those to say, we want all of New York City to be more efficient. They’re using fossil fuels to
⏹️ ▶️ John run steam radiators through these giant buildings. It’s massively inefficient, right? What can we do about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John And these type of mobile heat pump units are a great way to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that without having to pay millions and millions of dollars to like replumb an entire building for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, forced air heat pumps, I think, so you just put one in every single unit or whatever. We’ll see how this works
⏹️ ▶️ John out because again, technology is advancing. If you put those units in a building and they end up being obsolete,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can tear them all out in 20 years and put in the new more efficient ones that are half the size and twice the efficiency, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m optimistic about this and yeah, you have limited choices when you’re buying a