598: Three-Burner Stove
01 Aug 2024CrowdStrike, iPhone “Slim” rumors, the Apple Intelligence rollout, and updates on our apps.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Rivian Repair
- Becki & Chris (timestamp link) (via Matt Rigby)
- Marco’s Repair Breakdown
- Parts: 39%
- Right Uniside assembly quarter panel: $2,751
- Bumper cover: $940
- Right tail lamp assembly: $630
- Right quarter panel glass: $537
- Labor: 53%
- Miscellaneous & taxes: 8%
- Parts: 39%
- PDR videos
- Pictures of the R1S side panel
- Another example of outrageous car body panel prices
- EV charge port locations (via Craig Ritchie)
- Gas-hole locations (via David Barber)
- Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.1
- Rivian Repair
- CrowdStrike
- iPhone 17 “slim” rumors
- Post-show: Overcast launch & Callsheet renewals
- Members-only ATP Overtime: AI & Search
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Chapters
- Casey’s computer
- Follow-up: Rivian repair costs 🖼️
- Follow-up: EV charge-port location
- Sponsor: Green Chef (code atpclass)
- Apple Intelligence in 18.1
- CrowdStrike
- Sponsor: 1Password XAM
- iPhone 17 “Slim” rumors
- Ending theme
- Callsheet & Overcast updates
Casey’s computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so frustrated with this mix pre three. I tried plugging it into different USB C ports because right now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the way it’s always been Is I go via the cal digit and then the cal digit to the computer and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried going via the monitor I tried going via the computer directly and what’s my the behavior is Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that when I hit record on the mix pre 3 which is the thing that the interface that goes from xlr to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usb When I hit record on that and started a couple of months ago So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio hijack will be like, I’m sorry, what microphone? What MixPre3? That doesn’t exist anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then if I hit stop on the MixPre3, then everything’s good again. And I just don’t understand what’s going on. And it very well could be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user error. I’m not saying it’s not user error, but for the life of me, I don’t know what’s happening. I even tried going old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB, so it was a USB-A to C, and I tried one of those cables just to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what if the USB-C port is funky some way, somehow, nothing. So I don’t know what’s going on. It’s driving me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have such a setup there. So one of one of my formative computing experiences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of my best friends growing up in high school, you know, we had this like this like group of friends and we would all like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build each other, you know, tower PCs and work on our PCs together and stuff like that. And one of my friends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a computer that just never really worked right. Like there was always some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird flaky or not working thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, hold on. Don’t you put that bad energy on me, Ricky Bobby. That this computer has been fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this… I’ve had it for six, seven, eight months. I’ve had it since October.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Part of the reason why my friend Ben’s computer was always having problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, and we certainly thought this at the time, was that he insisted on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a thousand different peripherals and carts in it. Like, he had like five hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drives, he had, you know, a thousand cards and other… like, so it was just like this massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conglomeration of just tons of stuff and like theoretically yes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the you know the the motherboard supported that many drives yes the you know it had that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many card slots but we just know in practice with computers that like the more stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you add to a PC the more likely you are that some weird little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing might go wrong sometimes it just it just happens with complexity of a setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now what you just said Casey was that you had something like five different ways you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have plugged this thing in and including like a hub, a monitor hub,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and by the way those monitors are not great monitors. Like there’s all sorts of like complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey your setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the studio display, come on, it’s not that. Well, but it’s connected to the same computer as two LG ultrafines,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus a Thunderbolt hub. There’s all sorts of stuff that like could introduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weirdnesses or unreliabilities because you have what sounds like a fairly complicated setup?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t know, man. First of all, this worked for literally years. I mean, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same setup I’ve had since I left the iMac Pro. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was… But literally, like, every time we start the call for the podcast, you’re like, Oh, wrong mic. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something went wrong. It’s not just my USB interface. Like, there’s always something wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s only that’s true. But that’s only been for the last couple of months. It’s up until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John then, it was rock solid.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t believe you don’t have your microphone directly connected to your computer. I can’t believe you’re going through anything. Monitor, hub,
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. Likewise,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not- Well, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never been a problem before. And I tried again tonight. Still, it still didn’t matter. But it’s been a problem for two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months. Yeah, well. Anyway, that’s not the actual pre-show. That’s the bootleg special pre-show, which is the thing that we- That’s the pre-show. That’s the pre-show. That’s it. pre-show. That’s the pre-show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s the pre-show. That’s it. All right, fine.
Follow-up: Rivian repair costs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matt Rigby writes with regard to Marcos Rivian repair. Here’s an R1S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dent and repair bill that’s almost identical to Marcos on the Becky and Chris YouTube channel. And I did watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of minutes of this. This appeared to be a like, hey, here’s what we think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several months later about their Rivian and they noted that apparently when you are in off-road
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode, and I think Marco, you might’ve said this as well. Anyway, when you’re in an off-road mode, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proximity sensors are turned off, which I I both get and think is absolutely bonkers. I can make a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strong argument either way. And they bumped into a tree not dissimilar from the way Marco did. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the repair bill was something like 40 grand. The difference though, is that they went to a paintless stent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey repair or whatever it’s called, PDR place. And they had it fixed and it looked almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good as new, which although I think the wrap that they did around it probably helped in that department. And they spent considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than $40,000 or whatever your bill was. No
⏹️ ▶️ John wrap required. None of this, uh, slamming PDR. RPDR can make it as perfect as it
⏹️ ▶️ John can be, as that’s what they show in these videos. They love showing the closeups with the bright light shining on
⏹️ ▶️ John it, so you can see that it’s not just sort of okay, it’s perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as new. Yeah, so it turns out, Marco, you didn’t have to spend $40,000 of your insurance’s money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could have spent a lot less.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In all fairness, it was 20, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yeah, it was- Oh, sorry, my mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was what insurance told me to do. That’s it, like I went to insurance, I said, hey, here’s my problem, and they said, okay, go to a body shop, this is what they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Like, you know, I figure at that point, It’s in their hands how they choose to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Then Marco was kind enough to share his final
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bill from the body shop privately with John and I. We will not be sharing this publicly unless Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feeling particularly forthcoming, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco doubt. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I presume, was the one who decided to go through with a fine-tooth comb and come up with a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few figures. So John, can you take us through this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. I asked last time, I wanted to know what the parts and labor breakdown was, and I got that breakdown. So parts
⏹️ ▶️ John was 39% of the total cost and the top four
⏹️ ▶️ John most expensive parts on there were the RT unicyde assembly quarter
⏹️ ▶️ John panel for $2,751 which is pretty good like that panel which we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get to in a little bit That’s a low price. I’ve seen tiny pieces of sheet metal on
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive cars cost four times that much. So hey, not so bad the bumper cover coming
⏹️ ▶️ John in at number two at $940. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds like too much for a bumper cover.
⏹️ ▶️ John RT tail lamp assembly, $630. And finally, RT quarter glass. I didn’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ John they would replace the quarter glass, but maybe it doesn’t, I guess it’s part of the body panel. I mean, it doesn’t come out and go back in like a windshield. They
⏹️ ▶️ John just have to break it. It just, it gets chucked. But anyway, that was $537. So those are the top
⏹️ ▶️ John four things. And parts, so parts was about 39%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So is right, is RT not right? Isn’t that right, tail lamp assembly? Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, probably right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably right. I’m trying to I’m trying to expand the things I was confused by the fact that it’s like, you know, Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one. Oh, it could be.
⏹️ ▶️ John know. You’re right. It’s probably right and left. I’m being silly. Oh, it is all caps, which is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway. Yes, those are all right. Right. Unicide assembly. Unicide. What
⏹️ ▶️ John a word. Fifty three percent labor. So the majority of the cost was labor and then miscellaneous
⏹️ ▶️ John and taxes was eight percent. So that’s the breakdown. surprisingly inexpensive parts, although there
⏹️ ▶️ John were a lot of them, a lot of labor, including I think one part of that 53% labor was like 1300 bucks to calibrate everything after they reassembled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of money. It’s a lot of money. And then John, you provided just to really, uh, you know, rub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco’s face in the pea stain that he left on the carpet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The dog ism. Uh, you included three different videos where they talk about the magic of PDR.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You should never do that
⏹️ ▶️ John to a dog. First of all. And second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, if you’re wondering
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re wondering what painless Denver fair is like I provided three videos two of them are Rivian videos as one One is a
⏹️ ▶️ John different vehicle, but the person explains the process with some terrible backing music behind it
⏹️ ▶️ John Watching watching these watching it be done. It does look like
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks like it’s impossible. It looks like a trick, but I assure you you can just google or search YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John There are so many of these videos all these people aren’t scam artists They’re obviously good at what they do,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re making YouTube videos of it. I’m sure it’s difficult to find someone who’s as good as these people on the channel, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow managed to painstakingly restore these pieces of sheet metal to
⏹️ ▶️ John looking like new by hitting it with things and pulling it with things. It’s fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. All right, and then why don’t we talk about that side panel? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s the thing. I genuinely am enthusiastic that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are entries into the automotive market. 120, 150 years, whatever it’s been since the, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, car has really been a mass produced thing. It doesn’t matter how many years, a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Tesla started and showed us that yes, you know, some plucky upstart could make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a car company and then have a Nazi turn out to be at the helm, but that’s neither here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nor there. But, you know, they weren’t the greatest at putting cars together,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly at first, Maybe they’re a little better now, but they also made a lot of really weird choices And it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rivian is following right in their footsteps because what the hell is
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the R1S side panel. We’ll provide a link to the Rivian forums website where someone posted
⏹️ ▶️ John this picture You can’t tell from the picture Whether this is actually a series of parts that are put
⏹️ ▶️ John together in the factory into one large part or whether it really is one Large part presumably it’s welded together from smaller pieces,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the picture shows a whole bunch of these pieces of metal hanging in a factory.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is clearly like a single thing that gets attached to the car and presumably when Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John got his repair this is what they had to remove from his car and then they ordered one of these from the factory
⏹️ ▶️ John and put a new one on the car. And when you look at this and think about where his dent was and think about
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the size of the piece that they have to replace, think of all the things that attach to that piece including the rear
⏹️ ▶️ John quarter window, the roof, both of the doors, the rear bumper, like the nine yards. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes sense why it would cost so much. Now, I, again, I think it’s a bargain to pay $2,700
⏹️ ▶️ John for this piece of sheet metal because it’s huge. So you’re really getting your money’s worth there. But yeah, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really makes the pro stand seem like a poor value.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s at least three or four, uh, uh, XDR stands inside and she
⏹️ ▶️ John met on this thing. So yeah, check out the picture if you’re really want to see a visualization of what they had to
⏹️ ▶️ John remove and and then replace and repaint on Marco’s car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s basically disassembling like the entire right half of the car like that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it when you see the size of this piece and how much of the car it represents,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes a lot more sense. Now, I think you can make a good a good argument. Like maybe this is a poor design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you talk about design for repairability. This is definitely not designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for repairability at all. This is design, this is like the total opposite. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, what is the least repairable design we can possibly make? Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that and let’s make it include one of the most commonly dented parts of a car. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I really wonder what the trade off is there. Maybe it’s faster to assemble. Maybe it’s more sturdy
⏹️ ▶️ John because there are fewer joints. I have to think that this is made for multiple pieces that are welded together in the factory, but still
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is the part that you buy. I don’t think you can buy any other part. Like if you just wanted like
⏹️ ▶️ John the back part, you can see certain parts of it are clearly just one piece of metal. Maybe like the roof
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other things are welded to it, but if this is the part they sell you, this is what you have to buy. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like the whole thing might just be like stamped out in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like one solid
⏹️ ▶️ John panel. That would be a huge stamping. I think it has to be multiple pieces, but either way, I’ve seen this, there’s other
⏹️ ▶️ John Rivian videos you can see where someone will buy one of these pieces, in this case it was like a pickup truck, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll cut a piece off of it. They’ll buy the whole piece. You gotta buy the whole thing. cut a piece off and they’ll cut the same
⏹️ ▶️ John shape piece off of their dented car and sort of fudge them back together. That gets back to what I was saying before about
⏹️ ▶️ John insurance companies want you to make it like new, right? In the end it should look just like a
⏹️ ▶️ John new one. So you can’t, you know, cut and paste pieces of pieces. And also
⏹️ ▶️ John the insurance company doesn’t want it to be reliant on the artistry of a crafts person doing PDR
⏹️ ▶️ John because that is a highly skilled thing and it’s it’s not I mean not that saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John that doing bodywork isn’t highly skilled as well, but it is, it seems even more
⏹️ ▶️ John dependent on the expertise of the person than regular bodywork, which is, which I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, I just, maybe I’m wrong about this. Someone who does bodywork, let me know. Is PDR actually harder or easier than regular bodywork
⏹️ ▶️ John or is actually regular bodywork harder because you have to do all the filler and everything? But either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of understand both sides of this. Even, even this single piece, like we’ll get to in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of car manufacturers do this because you don’t want to have your robots welding 800 different things
⏹️ ▶️ John on the assembly line. You want to just take the big one piece, put it on a wall that in five places and be done with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fewer squeaks and rattles, better structural integrity, better stiffness, fewer parts like it all makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ John until you get a tiny ding. And then it makes far less sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then apparently it’s not just Rivian. Blaine wrote in with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar story. So Blaine writes, I was recently hit by a large lifted truck while my 2019 Jaguar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry, I was just in Britain, Jaguar F-Type. His bumper hit right where my door and rear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quarter panel came together, denting them and then scraping along the side above my wheel well. Because the panels are aluminum and glued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together for rigidity, cutting out the dented bit and patch wasn’t an option, so both had to be fully replaced for a total
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cost of $32,588.84. Holy crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to think a lot of that is the increased cost of the panels. When I mentioned more expensive of cars where the panels cost a lot more than
⏹️ ▶️ John the 2,700 that the whole side of Marcos car cost, Jaguar would be one of those examples of a
⏹️ ▶️ John where your body panels are going to cost more. And to be fair, this head, if you look at the size of this dent, it does span two
⏹️ ▶️ John big body panels. It’s basically the whole side of the car. But yeah, it’s not just Rivian.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s basically any modern car with like aluminum unibody instruction. I think the trend has been towards
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer and fewer pieces, towards fewer larger pieces, presumably because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John less expensive for manufacturing increases stiffness and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, at the expense of your insurance rates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to people like me. Sorry. Thanks, Marco.
Follow-up: EV charge-port location
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we got a fair bit of feedback with regard to, I think it was an AskATP question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, hey, where should EV chargers, the ports on board the car, where should they be?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the answer, according to a bunch of Europeans in particular, is the curb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side. So this is best exemplified by Craig Ritchie, who writes, when you were discussing optimum EV charge socket
⏹️ ▶️ Casey position, you didn’t discuss the possibility of charging when parked at the side of the road in a parallel parking position.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This may not be as much of a factor in the US as it is in the UK. But as we all move inevitably towards EVs, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey likely many will charge their cars outside their homes on the main road. And so there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this was really interesting, because we had said the passenger side is the worst side. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is true that when you are charging in your own garage or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a fast charger on a long highway trip, that is the less convenient side. But this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a really good point that if you happen to have curbside charging and you park on the street,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is I think very unusual in most of the US, but is much more common in places that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are more sensible, then it actually does make sense to have charging on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passenger’s head of the car, because that is the side next to the curb. So, interesting option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s still, I think for US-based vehicles, for North American vehicles, I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still driver’s side because there is just not anywhere near enough curbside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco available charging here in the US. It just doesn’t exist here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve never seen it. The idea of having curbside charging things,
⏹️ ▶️ John like we have a picture here that shows a cord seemingly coming from a tree to charge an EV. It’s as fantastical
⏹️ ▶️ John in our country as protected bike lanes and reliable train
⏹️ ▶️ John travel and stuff. We just do not have things that the rest of the world has. And curbside charging
⏹️ ▶️ John is definitely one of them. I’m sure it exists in the US, but so many people wrote in, this must be so much more common
⏹️ ▶️ John elsewhere than it is here. I’ve literally never seen it in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Neither have I. I’ve driven an EV for a long time now, and a lot of places on the Eastern seaboard never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen this available anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes sense in cities where people don’t have parking, right? You don’t have a garage or driveway. It makes
⏹️ ▶️ John total sense. We just, like so many things that make total sense, we don’t have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, it’s one of the things that is hardest for EV adoption in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of places for a lot of people is, what if you live in an apartment and you don’t have a garage?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you know, there’s like you have to, you park on the street as your main parking spot. How do you charge your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EV? It’s a great question. It’s a huge barrier to adoption for lots of people. It’s a very important thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we need to solve, but we have not even begun to solve it in the US and it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody cares to. And it’s the kind of thing that like, culturally speaking in the US,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t see us getting our act together to do this. I see it being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very much like, you know, this is my land, get off my land, you’re not gonna use my power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing. There’s all sorts of problems with it that I think in practice with US culture that I think would make it very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for us to adopt it anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like protected bike lanes and streets made for people and not cars and all that good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It only takes one high profile city to actually do this and to see the massive return
⏹️ ▶️ John on investment that they know they’ll get from it based on every place else in the world that has ever done this and studied it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a story to say, hey, I visited City X the United States, and you know what? It was really pleasant. And they had
⏹️ ▶️ John curbside charging, and you could walk on the streets and not get run over. And there was
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer cars driving back and forth. And mass transit, like, it just takes one or two examples to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the ball rolling. Hopefully we can get there eventually, but we are very, very far behind the rest of the world. So
⏹️ ▶️ John fingers crossed there. I don’t think it’s an impossibility. Like, municipal broadband is another great idea that’s happened in a few
⏹️ ▶️ John places. Still hasn’t quite caught on. But some kind of city-wide charging network,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably run by some private company that takes all the profits and doesn’t maintain the machines. Anyway, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see what we can do. On this topic, also, one other person pointed out slash
⏹️ ▶️ John surmised that I was mentioning like Hondas have the gas filler
⏹️ ▶️ John on the driver’s side. The gas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hole, John. It’s called the gas hole. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the notion that that filler is actually on the passenger side because Honda is a Japanese
⏹️ ▶️ John company and they do right-hand drive. And they just don’t bother changing where the gas goes in when they sell
⏹️ ▶️ John it in America. steering wheel, but they don’t move the gas filler. So I don’t know if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John any truth to that, but it is interesting to think about. I’m pretty sure if you buy a Honda in Japan,
⏹️ ▶️ John the gas filler is still on the same size that it is on my car, but the steering wheel is not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and so David Barber wrote in, I brought a Subaru Ascent a few years back, and I recall wondering why they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would put the gas port on the passenger side. After a bit of digging around, it seems as if it’s a safety feature. Say you run out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of gas on a busy highway or road. If you pull off the road and return with the gas canister, you’ll find yourself on the side of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the car farthest from traffic. That’s clever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m not sure if that’s the reason. It’s definitely a consequence of the decision, but I’m not sure that running
⏹️ ▶️ John out of gas and having to go get a gas can is common enough to dictate the side of a car that the gas port
⏹️ ▶️ John is on, but who knows, maybe that’s where the trend started back when this was more common.
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Apple Intelligence in 18.1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have a series of reports and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t record for two straight weeks because I was overseas. So apologies. But apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as per what is this the 28th of July, so just a few days ago as we record Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is reportedly delayed until iOS 18.1 in October. This is reading from Bloomberg.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Inc’s upcoming artificial Apple Intelligence features will arrive later than anticipated, missing the initial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey launch of its upcoming iPhone and iPad software overhauls, but giving the company more time to fix bugs. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI features will arrive a few weeks after the initial iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 releases planned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for September. The release plan for Apple Intelligence presents the possibility that the first iPhone 16 model shipped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to customers this year will lack the new AI features and require a software update weeks later. Even when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Intelligence launches with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, it will be missing some features. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey includes some of the most significant changes to Siri, such as the ability to use on-device data to help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find queries, and for the system to use what is on a person’s screen to provide context for answers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The company is planning to roll out its full set of Apple Intelligence features via mobile updates, excuse me, multiple updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to iOS 18 across the end of 2024 through the first half of 2025. Steven McLaughlin When I first saw this story,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was confused. I’m like, wait a second, Apple has always said that Apple Intelligence features are going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be delayed and in fact I thought they were going to be delayed until iOS 18.4. So what is this story about? But
⏹️ ▶️ John from what I’ve been able to gather since then, I believe what it’s saying is that the original plan was
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 18 ships, let’s just use iOS 18 for this placeholder for all the other OS’s, iOS 18 ships
⏹️ ▶️ John and it comes with some of Apple intelligence and then later in iOS 18.4 or whatever you get the rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. And now it seems like the story is iOS 18 ships you get none of Apple intelligence, you
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for 18.1, You get some of Apple intelligence, then you wait for 18.4 or whatever and you get the rest of
⏹️ ▶️ John it Which is not great because Apple’s gonna be selling new phones and it would be great if they could advertise
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey buy an iPhone 16 and get the amazing new Apple intelligence But if the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t ship with that and also that OS isn’t out when you buy the phones on day one
⏹️ ▶️ John Harder to make that ad isn’t it? So it’s not great for Apple But on the other hand like I’d much rather have them
⏹️ ▶️ John not ship the software if it’s not done like I don’t you know it’s not a big deal, but like This
⏹️ ▶️ John probably will make the roll less dramatic on the other other hand
⏹️ ▶️ John Being able to launch the iPhone without the risk of Apple intelligence being terrible also
⏹️ ▶️ John simplifies It’s just like you know what the iPhone 16 is gonna live
⏹️ ▶️ John or die on its own merits without worrying about some embarrassing high-profile
⏹️ ▶️ John AI related flub that becomes a big story with the launch of the iPhone. We’ll wait until 18.1 to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. That actually, honestly, that actually might be a really good reason in itself to not have it be too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tied to the launch. Cause, cause look like as far as like using Apple intelligence to sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 16 line, they have a whole year to promote the iPhone 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line and they’re going to, you know, they, throughout the whole year, they use different marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco techniques to push the new phone or the current generation phone as they need to throughout the year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not every, you know, massive big press thing is pulled out at the very beginning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in part, it’s because not everybody buys phones all at once at lunch day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Many people wait until certain payment plans are up or they’re up for credits at their carrier or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, they have supply constraints. They can’t necessarily,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in recent years, the iPhones have not been hard to get. But sometimes, if there’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hot new color, that might be back ordered or whatever. So they do have to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spread the love for the iPhone across more of a time span, across hopefully the entire year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think you’re right, John. I bet they really shouldn’t probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bind these things together too closely in people’s minds that Apple Intelligence is a feature of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new phone. They probably shouldn’t do that, in part because it’s not actually true. It’s gonna work on the 16 or the 15 Pro as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it is, it’s not true, but it’s truer than it has ever been because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Intelligence literally only works on the new phones they’re introducing and last year’s pro
⏹️ ▶️ John phone only, right? So that is the narrowest it’s ever been.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is, but like a lot of people buy the pro phones. So it’s not that narrow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it, you know, it is, you’re right, it is the narrowest it’s been. But anyway, I do think it’s wise to not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tie the fate of the iPhone in people’s mind, PR wise, with the launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a bunch of LLM-based features that are gonna be brand new and shipping around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same time. So this makes total sense to separate this by a few weeks. Like, you know, get this out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the new phones out, get all the reviews of the new phones with Apple Intelligence not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on those phones, and then later in the year, start pushing this more heavily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you can roll it out with reasonable scale and once you’ve ironed out the biggest of the problems and things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. So this makes total sense to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they will actually, when it comes time to pitch the Apple intelligence things, for simplicity sake, just
⏹️ ▶️ John pitch it as a feature of the iPhone 16, because yes, we know that you can run it on the 15 pros or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s such a complicated message to get across. Just say, you know, Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John on the new iPhone 16. It doesn’t say that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco only on the iPhone 16,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, if you just keep saying Apple intelligence on the iPhone 16 as the tagline in your ad or whatever, people
⏹️ ▶️ John will get the idea that, oh, I want one of those Apple intelligence phones. I think that’s the iPhone 16, which is true, it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also, you know, 15 Pro. And presumably they’ll stop selling the 15 Pro and Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Max, right, like they normally do with the Pro phones. You won’t even be able to buy them. So it’ll be kind of true unless you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna buy a used one. Anyway, every review will say, in part of their
⏹️ ▶️ John minuses column, like, oh, it’s a shame that Apple intelligence isn’t out. But they’re all just gonna say, and we’ll see how that turns out, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s obviously, ideally, Apple intelligence would be 100% ready of roll out all at once
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would be amazing, but that’s not the world Apple’s been living in for the past many years. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John though they’ve been having quote unquote annual OS releases every WWDC it’s like and
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the features that will be out on launch and here’s the ones that will be there later this year or the spring or you know like there’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John some later stuff and at a certain point it becomes kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a farce to say they have annual releases because like well this is the headline feature and it’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in the point and it’s not even gonna be all be in the point one. It’ll probably all be in the point four.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not at the farce point now because really they are major releases and each new OS does bring a ton of
⏹️ ▶️ John things with them, but it’s getting to like, when we talk about the OSs, it’s not like, oh, on launch day,
⏹️ ▶️ John we get to try it all the new features. I was thinking about this for like future shows and topics. Like when should we talk about feature
⏹️ ▶️ John X? It’s like, when will that even be on our phones? When will it be in the betas?
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s harder and harder to look at this as a annual giant
⏹️ ▶️ John bundle of goodies that drops on our head. It’s a giant bundle of announcements that gets dropped on our head at WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the goodies trickle out over the year. And like I said, I would much rather have software be held back until it’s ready.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, but it does get a little bit frustrating to announce it all at once, but then dole
⏹️ ▶️ John it out a little piece at a time, especially when it’s, it’s almost impossible to keep track of
⏹️ ▶️ John which pieces are being doled out at which time, especially with Apple intelligence,
⏹️ ▶️ John certain features that people think are Apple intelligence aren’t actually Apple intelligence, and which, there’s like been 50 stories about
⏹️ ▶️ John which features of Apple intelligence are in the 18.1 beta. We’ll be in 18.2, 18.4,
⏹️ ▶️ John and those stories will keep coming because it’s confusing. It’ll be great when we get over this hump and say, finally, all
⏹️ ▶️ John the features of Apple intelligence are out, and that’ll happen probably around WWDC 2025.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have any of you tried the betas of anything with Apple intelligence? Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t tried any of the betas of literally anything this year, not yet, because I’ve been traveling and I didn’t wanna mess with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also have not tried any of the ATN betas because I was like, I’m doing this big overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, like I wanted to like get that done and not be distracted or sidetracked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by beta stuff for this fall. So I’m like, you know what, it’s not that big of a year for most like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API based things that we can actually use yet. Because like, you know, developers still can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything with Apple Intelligence at all. Like there is no API we can use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even for us to expose our app intents to the system, that’s not even being indexed yet by Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intelligence. So there is literally nothing for developers to do involving Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. So the iOS 18 Summer for Developers is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light. It’s make sure your icon works with the new icon theming stuff and not much else. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe Control Center.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out what broke. yeah, but like it’s not it’s not that much. Also, we all know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as developers that if anything breaks, we will know on WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Monday, because our customers will install developer beta one on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day one, and then we’ll tell us what’s broken. So yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a good reason. And I think Casey had a good reason too, because you don’t want to travel internationally running a beta if you can help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. And I have some more travel coming up in September, which I’m sure we’ll talk about on the show, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not quite yet. And, uh, and so because of that, I don’t think I’m going to be running the betas,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly not on my phone, maybe on my iPad. Typically I’ll crumble
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toward the end of the public beta cycle, even though I do have obviously access to the developer betas. Typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like messing with those in the last couple of years. And so maybe in the next, you know, one or two public releases,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll put it on the iPad just to see but no I haven’t I haven’t messed with any of it and honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think maybe I’m just getting old and crusty but it’s I I don’t getting I don’t I yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right uh first of all unnecessary second of all accurate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m no better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but anyway um no I I think it’s just it doesn’t living on the bleeding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey edge in that regard doesn’t really rev my engine like it used to but john I think marco and I haven’t given
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you a chance to answer your own question what’s your situation
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I have actually installed the… so they split the beta. There’s like the…
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is… 18.0 betas and there’s a beta train, 18.0 beta 4 or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re on. Then there’s also the 18.1 beta train, which is separate. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you could… they’re releasing new ones in each of the trains at the same time. So on my Mac, which is running
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS 15, there’s the 15.0 beta and then the the 15.1 beta and the 15.1 beta is the one that has some Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in it. So I installed the 15.1 beta, not on my real machine, but on, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, an external drive and discovered that there’s a waitlist to try Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John intelligence stuff in all the OS’s. You have to like click a button that says join the waitlist for Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John and I click that button on my Mac and it seemed to do nothing. It didn’t disable the button, it didn’t tell me that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m on the waitlist, it literally did nothing. So I clicked it a few more times and then and gave up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, is it in the settings app? Yes. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, anyway, I did that. I don’t know if it did anything. I hope I’m on a wait list. If I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John on a wait list, who knows? Also, there was someone else posted something that like, certain Apple, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John no, it was code completion. Like the Apple intelligence powered code, whatever thing, an Xcode,
⏹️ ▶️ John does not work if you are running Sequoia beta from an external drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s a tool tip to that effect that someone posted a screenshot of. Boggles the mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I’m not installing Sequoia beta on my main drive, so I will just, you know, continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to monitor the betas to see what’s in there. But yeah. Oh, and by the way, the other thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that developers could be doing over the summer for the new OS releases is they could be doing SwiftStack
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, which we’ve talked about in a whole big interview show that you can listen to.
CrowdStrike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some other topics. So I flew over to the UK
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on what day was that? It was Tuesday the 16th in the evening, you know, arrived midday the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 17th. And it was two days later. So impeccable timing from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Thank you very much. Two days later, we got the Y2K bug presented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slightly differently and 24 years late. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we were in the UK,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget exactly what we’re doing that day, but it somebody asked if I was like paying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention to the CrowdStrike thing I was like, I’m sorry what and the name rang a bell and I couldn’t figure out why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until later that day I saw images of the Mercedes f1 team, which is sponsored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a part or no small part by CrowdStrike I saw their pit wall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Set up establishment whatever with a bunch of blue screens of death on it. I don’t think this is a Photoshop I think it was an actual you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know photograph. But anyways Anyways, apparently most Windows machines owned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by corporations, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but a lot of them, were in a blue screen of death loop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a while and may still be for all we know. So…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I was laughing my butt off when I published this episode of our show last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week when I had started it by saying, please, tech companies, don’t make any big news while we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John happened. I’m sure CrowdStrike wishes that they listen to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one of the biggest computer stories that will probably be of the year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It happens like right at right as Casey’s on vacation and we can’t record the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s all my fault and I’m sorry. But anyway, so yeah, so reading from the Verge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 19th of July, thousands of Windows machines are experiencing a blue screen of death issue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at boot today impacting banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets and many more businesses worldwide. A faulty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike is knocking affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them into a recovery boot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loop so machines can’t start properly. The issue is not being caused by Microsoft, but by third-party CrowdStrike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software that’s widely used by many businesses worldwide for managing the security of Windows PCs and servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m going to jump a little bit ahead in our internal show notes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was another Verge blog post this time on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John 23rd that talks about kind of…
⏹️ ▶️ John John Williams Don’t jump ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The order is intentional. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so intentional. John McGuire How dare you question John’s show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to file under protest this order, but carry on John, tell us about Windows 3.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll explain why the order for the bootleg people. The reason the order is because the next item leads into all the rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of the items with the Apple angle, and once we go off into the Apple angle we’ll never come back, so that’s why I wanted to start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. But we don’t even know what happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yet! I haven’t even told the people what happened!
⏹️ ▶️ John The Verge summary covers the basics of it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am doing this under protest. I would like to formally state. All
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying is it wasn’t an accident. It was thought out this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process is noted. Please proceed. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So I’m apparently needing to tell you next that Windows 3.1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saved Southwest Airlines butt. I don’t remember what news broke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first, whether it was how Southwest’s entire infrastructure is apparently run on Windows 3.1.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not a joke. 32-year-old operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Doesn’t Windows 3.1 predate Southwest as an airline?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t think so. But I’m not confident I’m right about
⏹️ ▶️ John might. I mean, you can run software that was released before you founded your business. Well, okay. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, either way, when was it headlined? 57 years ago as Air Southwest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 1967. So, it was closer to the genesis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Southwest than it is today, Windows 3.1 was, or at least based on my mental math. So, anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so yeah, apparently Southwest, which made news as well, separate from this because the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Southwest works is you just get a boarding number, not a group, but a number and you get in line
⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on your number and you run to whatever seat you want. And that’s your seat. There’s no assigned seating. And they announced recently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they’re going to start doing assigned seating and all the Southwest nerds are very upset about it, which I thought was funny. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading from digitaltrends.com, nearly every flight in the US is grounded right now following a CrowdStrike system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update error that’s affecting everything from travel to mobile ordering at Starbucks. But not Southwest Airlines flights.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Southwest is is still flying high, baby, unaffected by the outage that’s plaguing the world today. And that’s apparently because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s using Windows 3.1. Yes, Windows 3.1, an operating system that is 32 years old. Southwest, along with UPS and FedEx, haven’t had any issues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with CrowdStrike outage. In responses to CNN, Delta, American Spirit, Frontier, United,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Allegiant, all said they were having issues. But Southwest told the outlet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that its operations are going off without a hitch. Major portions of Southwest systems are reportedly built
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows 3.1, which is something the company has come under fire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for in the past several years. It should go without saying that Southwest needs to update its system, but in this case, the ancient operating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system seems to be doing the airline some favors. So when this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing happened, I was also away on vacation and I saw the story go by and I saw the Windows 3.1 thing, I was like, ha
⏹️ ▶️ John ha, that’s funny. I absolutely did not think this was real because it’s such a typical
⏹️ ▶️ John joke of Southwest being the weird backwards airline they don’t even get to pick your seat, although as Casey noted, they’re changing this.
⏹️ ▶️ John running 3.1, and I’m like, I refuse to believe this. I kept falling short. Can I find a more reputable
⏹️ ▶️ John source for this? It’s not like an onion story that’s been reprinted. As far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a real thing. The Southwest Airlines is running Windows 3.1. Now we’ve all heard
⏹️ ▶️ John the stories of like, oh, eight inch floppy drives control the whole transit system for some subway system, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause they updated it, you know, sometime in the seventies or eighties and they haven’t updated
⏹️ ▶️ John it since. Like those are all things that happen, but Southwest is a pretty big airline here in the US. And it just boggles
⏹️ ▶️ John my mind that there are people that they pay to keep their systems running. And what they’re keeping running
⏹️ ▶️ John is something that runs on Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. And the reason this article says it goes
⏹️ ▶️ John about saying that they should update is they’re like, hey, if it works, why would they change it? Because those
⏹️ ▶️ John operating systems have massive known security flaws in them and are generally
⏹️ ▶️ John less secure and less reliable than the things that they replace. And yes, once in a blue moon,
⏹️ ▶️ John your bot’s gonna be saved because you’re running something really old, but you’re also much more vulnerable on a
⏹️ ▶️ John day-to-day basis to someone breaking in and destroying everything and stealing all your data and all that good stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John again also happens with modern software, but I would say in general, it’s not a good idea to continue to run
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows 3.1 forever and ever and ever. It is not perfect. It is not like complete and
⏹️ ▶️ John flawless or anything like that. It is just a really old piece of software that is not getting any better ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s also not getting any worse, but it is probably getting harder to find systems that will run it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I would suggest they change things. Assuming this story is real, does anyone wanna place bets? Is this a real story?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does this help us run Windows 3.1? Please say it’s not real.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me. I mean, I also was like, no way, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wouldn’t surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, what does it mean to run it? Like, does that mean like they have one computer somewhere with
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they have one computer that does their payroll.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like, you know, that’s very different from like all of our systems. Like, can you even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still buy hardware that runs Windows 3.0? Or is it all being run under emulation? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so many questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, or Windows 95
⏹️ ▶️ John is the updated version. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like I said, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John please don’t send us all the stories about all the things that are running off floppy disks and tape drives and especially military stuff or government stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, we all know that exists, but for a large, you know, successful, well-known,
⏹️ ▶️ John private company or commercial company anyway, it seems somehow less excusable
⏹️ ▶️ John than like a government thing or whatever, or some obscure, smaller obscure thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Southwest, get your act together. And as for the assigned seating versus not assigned seating, I have no opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I’ve only flown Southwest a couple of times and I, I think I didn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the unassigned seating in no small part because it’s unfamiliar to me. You know, I’m not used to flying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Southwest because I’ve only done it a couple of times and it just seemed odd. Plus then there’s like people who are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saving seats, but you’re not really supposed to do that. And then you get into like all sorts of unnecessary confrontations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, you know, you can’t save seats and blah, blah, blah. And I don’t know. I don’t think I care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it, but I do not have strong feelings about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I already asked people not to send us things and the chat room was filled with 747s running on floppy drives, a German
⏹️ ▶️ John railway running on MS-DOS, New Jersey needing COBOL programmers to fix the unemployment system. We get it,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know they exist. It’s just shocking that something as big as Southwest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. What was it that Chuck E. Cheese was running on? It was running on floppy disks or something like that? Or PalmPilot
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, the music show was all on floppy disks too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, PalmPilot. You’re thinking of the iMacs PalmPilots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s what you’re completing the two. You’re right. You’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you imagine like a worse programming job though? Like all these other ones running Cobol, running PalmPilot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are all kind of like, you know, Cobol, there was a lot of Cobol programmers at one point. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe some of them retired or, you know, want something, a little side project to do. PalmPilot was like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fun thing people loved. Nobody loved Windows 3.1. I know that was my first operating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system as a computer user. It was fine. No one loved it. Can you imagine today having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go work on a Windows 3.1 software package like for your child? Like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we need to update this because, you know, it’s still being used to run an airline, a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco airline, apparently. Oh my God, that’s, that would be soul crushing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so now we have the real-time follow-up for the debunking story from Kotaku. No, Southwest Airlines
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t using Windows 3.1 in 2024. So my instincts seem to have
⏹️ ▶️ John on the right track here. We will put the link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s probably for the best, but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, because I saw it in reputable publications. I’m like, this cannot be true. This has to be a made up thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, so we will put the Kotaku debunking link in there as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry for besmirching your good name, Southwest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, all right. So going to the Verge again, this time on the 23rd of July, Inside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 78 minutes that took to millions of Windows machines. At 1209 AM Eastern on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey July 19th, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released a faulty update to the Falcon security software it sells to help companies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prevent malware, ransomware, and other cyber threats from taking down their machines. Whoops. CrowdStrike’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update was supposed to be like any other silent update, automatically providing the very latest protections for its customers in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a tiny file, just 40 kilobytes, that’s distributed over the web. CrowdStrike issues these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regularly without incident, and they’re fairly common for security software, but this one was different. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think we have anything in the show notes about this, but I thought it was funny that apparently, like New Zealand and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Australia started sounding the alarm because they got these updates first. And, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think under the radar, certainly you’ve talked about this, Marco, and I think we’ve even talked about it here from time to time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that generally speaking, when you release software to a worldwide audience, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey common, it’s like a good rule of thumb that you don’t want to release it to everyone all at once.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, there’s exceptions and gotchas and catches and whatnot. But generally speaking, you want to kind of dole it out in little bits and pieces.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And a few years ago, Apple started allowing developers like us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, yes, I would like incremental release, where I think they released it to like 1% and 2% and 5%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something along those lines. It doesn’t matter what the specifics are. And that’s what I always choose. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I’m completely confident that something’s good to go, I always choose the incremental rollout because you never know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And apparently, CrowdStrike did not do that. They just said, screw it, baby. We’ll do a live. And they released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing to everyone. And the people at the beginning of the day in New Zealand and Australia started saying, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and it was already too late.
⏹️ ▶️ John As the sun races across the earth, destroying people’s computers. Yeah. We’re going to get to it
⏹️ ▶️ John in a second. The, uh, the, uh, from this verge story about what can be done to present that prevent this, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John like Casey, that is my number one take home point, which is anytime you’re releasing software
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like on critical systems and that you are a critical part of this, and we’ll get to the criticality part in
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit, you do it incrementally. Casey’s releasing an app that lets you look up stuff about movies and TV shows. He’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it incrementally. No planes fail to take off if Casey messes up his app. And still,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would you not do it incrementally? This is just like basic software best practice. And I worked in healthcare, which was
⏹️ ▶️ John similarly critical. You’d never release to everybody all at once if you could possibly help
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Even if you do something incredibly primitive, but they have like a pool of Guinea pigs who
⏹️ ▶️ John you pay money to be your Guinea pigs, knowing that if there’s any problem, they’re gonna see it first
⏹️ ▶️ John and you give them like a discount on the thing that you’re selling or something. Like, but if you’re something like CrowdStrike,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s used like all over the globe, and I forget what the percentage was, but it’s a fairly high percentage, not,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was like maybe 15, 20% or whatever, but still it’s a large number of machines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s like 1% of Windows PCs, but it’s a very important 1%.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was actually, was it 1%? Anyway, whatever it is, it’s millions of machines. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would you not have a strategy? It’s not like they’re a new company. It is just now coming
⏹️ ▶️ John on the scene and releasing software. Like this is their business, this is their main business, this security software,
⏹️ ▶️ John and their regular release procedure is push out to everybody all at once.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can understand having that ability, because if there’s some critical vulnerability and you need to get the fix out there ASAP, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope that one of the things they take away from this, and we’ll put a link in the show notes to their preliminary post-incident
⏹️ ▶️ John reviews of where they go over what they think happened. One of the internal takeaways is, we need to have a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to release our updates incrementally. Not incrementally via the sun, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Via time zones, but incrementally as in, we release a percentage and then we monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the key thing. You have to, releasing a little bit at a time is only works as well as your feedback loop. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the kind of the flow on Apple system where you just like sit back there and wait to hear complaints from users or whatever. But ideally what you want
⏹️ ▶️ John is some kind of way to tell, has this update hosed our customers,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Support call volume, feedback email address, like
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of connection with your customers where you have like a monitoring thing, you’re always monitoring this. What is our
⏹️ ▶️ John incoming support volume? How many crash reports are we getting? Like this should be on a
⏹️ ▶️ John graph with thresholds and alerts, right? So you release to your tiny, tiny little guinea
⏹️ ▶️ John pig pool and then you watch and then you release a little bit more and then you watch like
⏹️ ▶️ John just doing it incrementally and going home doesn’t help you because you’ll just released everybody without anyone watching. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway. Sorry. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also like can we talk yet about like what technically like the kind of update this was?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to me this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is fascinating. Like so it’s, you know, running in kernel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode. So that’s like already, you know, the, and there’s all these politics around, you know, kernel extensions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and security companies with windows and everything. But this is, this is not, this is a driver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that runs in the windows kernel, fully excusable code in the windows kernel. Okay. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already like, you know, something that used to be commonplace in the computing business, but it’s very much not commonplace anymore for the, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most applications, uh, for lots of good reasons. Um, and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the kernel, this, what, what these updates were, were not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data files. It was not like, the kernel driver wasn’t like, alright, here’s what I’m going to load from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this data file is a list of signatures of known bad malware binaries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. What it was loading from from those files was executable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code. Like, so all those updates, they basically seem to be making basically like an interpreter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the kernel and they download these data files with, again, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staging environment, no slow rollout, seemingly not much production testing, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They download these data files and then execute them in the kernel. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are directly sending code from an all-at-once,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-stage rollout directly into Windows machines’ kernels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to execute. So if there’s any crash logic in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will crash the kernel, which will crash the machine and cause a reboot or a blue screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That like, that is bonkers to me. Like the fact that like, that they even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built the system at all, okay, that’s risky enough. To have a system in the kernel that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reads arbitrary executable code from outside the kernel and just runs it, that’s already terrifying on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of levels. But then to also have it be these like quickly deployed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloadable things, we’re just gonna deploy this code out there and just run it in the kernel and just go have fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is this. This was a powder keg just waiting to
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know the specific technical details of their update mechanism, but I have worked
⏹️ ▶️ John with and built myself lots of systems that are like this. And the reason people do stuff like this is because
⏹️ ▶️ John you always want the ability to sort of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John fix the airplane while it’s flying. You don’t want to have to reboot, you don’t want to have to restart anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want to be able to just say, at any point I can push this update in real time to the running system
⏹️ ▶️ John and it updates itself. And that leads you down the path of doing things like, okay, well, we’ll just watch this directory
⏹️ ▶️ John for files. And when a file appears here, we’ll load it and we’ll shove it into, we’ll interpret it and shove it into the memory image of the already
⏹️ ▶️ John running pro, like I totally understand why they made a system like this. It’s just that if you do
⏹️ ▶️ John make a system like this, you have to know what incredible risk you’re taking and be like as conservative
⏹️ ▶️ John as you can possibly be to say if there’s anything even remotely strange about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John do not update it. Do validation on every single thing we can think of. And I think part of the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is they, you know, the thing was loading code and not validating anything about it and it was invalid or whatever. But like, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why they kind of why they do this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the kernel mode thing is an issue. That’s what this next part is about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so reading from the Verge, despite not being directly involved, Microsoft still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey controls Windows experience. And there’s plenty of room for improvement in how Windows handles issues like this. If Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey determines that a driver is crashing the system at boot and forcing it into a recovery mode, Microsoft could build in more intelligent logic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that allows the system to boot without the faulty driver after multiple boot failures.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think macOS does this, by the way. I think there is a system where if it boots, I
⏹️ ▶️ John may be wrong, but like, obviously people manually do this, but like, I think there might be an automated one that’s like, hey, we tried to load this
⏹️ ▶️ John driver and it crashed last time. So now we’re not loading it we’re loading it in safe mode. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John booting in safe mode is probably not the solution here because you probably still couldn’t remotely update the machines without it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that was part of the problem is that they’re crashing on boot. And because they’re crashing on boot, they never can get
⏹️ ▶️ John to a runnable state. So you can’t push your update to them automatically. Like people
⏹️ ▶️ John think of like companies running computers just like a person running a computer, but that’s not how it is. There are
⏹️ ▶️ John thousands upon thousands of computers and a very small number of humans who have to manage them
⏹️ ▶️ John from far away, often very far away. So nobody, like, there’s not like you have physical
⏹️ ▶️ John access to these thousands of computers. Somebody does somewhere eventually, but there’s not enough people
⏹️ ▶️ John out there to go and manually fix computers. That was why this was such a problem. It’s like, well, so what, they made a boo-boo,
⏹️ ▶️ John just push out the new version of the software. Well, you can’t push software to a computer that hasn’t booted. And none of these computers could
⏹️ ▶️ John boot. So someone had to physically go to them and physically like boot them into safe mode and
⏹️ ▶️ John repair them. And this is not something you can be done remotely or whatever, so it was a big problem. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, it was, it was a bad situation, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there is room for improvement here. Yeah. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on Microsoft’s
⏹️ ▶️ John side, I’m like, but again, it’s not Microsoft’s fault. Like Microsoft didn’t write the bad software, but Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to defend itself against bad software, because in the end, Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John took some of the blame for this, probably unfairly. Microsoft deserves some tiny part of the blame
⏹️ ▶️ John for making Windows not as resilient as it could be in this basic way. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, this is the verge, not some deep technical analysis. No, it’s like, hey, if you’ve tried to do something and it’s failed
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of times, don’t keep trying to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing from the verge, but the bigger change would be to lock down the Windows kernel access to prevent third-party drivers from crashing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an entire PC. Ironically, Microsoft tried to do exactly this with Windows Vista, but was met with resistance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from cybersecurity vendors and guess who? EU regulators.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft tried to implement a feature known at the time as PatchGuard in Windows Vista in 2006, restricting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey third parties from accessing the kernel. McAfee and Symantec, the two big antivirus companies at the time, opposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft’s changes. Geez, why? And Symantec even complained to the European Commission. Microsoft eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backed down, allowing security vendors to access the kernel once again for security monitoring purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this example of applying pressure, I’m gonna mostly blame the virus vendors and not the EU. It’s not like the EU said,
⏹️ ▶️ John So a lot of people are reporting this and saying, well, the EU told Microsoft that Microsoft, because you have access
⏹️ ▶️ John to the kernel, you have to give all third parties access to the kernel. Otherwise it’s not fair. Otherwise you’re giving
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself an advantage that they don’t have, which is not a thing that they said, first of all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And second of all, is mostly kind of silly because Microsoft writes the kernel. They write code in the kernel
⏹️ ▶️ John and no other people can’t write code in the kernel. Now, Windows does have a kernel extension
⏹️ ▶️ John feature that is available to third parties and also Microsoft itself can also write
⏹️ ▶️ John kernel extensions. But it would be ridiculous. And again, I don’t think this is the thing that you did
⏹️ ▶️ John to say that because you have kernel extensions, you must forever have kernel extensions because forbidding
⏹️ ▶️ John third parties from making kernel extensions doesn’t stop the need for kernel extensions from
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft. Many things in windows are implemented in the kernel. Some of those are packaged as drivers
⏹️ ▶️ John that come with the operating system. That is probably never going to go away. If a kernel exists,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes sense to have parts of it modularized into a driver system, even if that system is not
⏹️ ▶️ John accessible to third parties. So the idea that you, that you could say, well, either everybody gets to write
⏹️ ▶️ John the kernel extensions or nobody does, doesn’t make any sense because the one that the company that makes the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system will almost certainly continue to me need to make kernel extensions to its own
⏹️ ▶️ John kernel as part of making the operating system. But again, I think this, you know, throwing the EU under the bus
⏹️ ▶️ John here is as part of the whole big regulatory thing. I’m sure they did complain to the European Commission, but the EU
⏹️ ▶️ John did not come to Microsoft and say, you are not allowed, like issue a decree, if you’re going to have kernel
⏹️ ▶️ John extensions in Windows, you must allow everyone access to it. What did happen is the virus makers
⏹️ ▶️ John said, hey, all our software uses kernel extensions. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The virus makers? Yeah, the anti-virus, anti-virus makers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a thin line there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John There’s a very, very thin line. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John the malware is coming from inside the house. Yeah, I think that they applied pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of the same way that like Microsoft and Adobe applied pressure to Apple to said hey If you ship a
⏹️ ▶️ John new version of Mac OS that Photoshop and office don’t run on that doesn’t include a good way to port
⏹️ ▶️ John our apps We’re not gonna support it and you’re not gonna have office in Photoshop, right? I think McAfee and Symantec
⏹️ ▶️ John said if you ship Windows Vista Without our software’s ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John run on it. We’re gonna be super mad and you’re not gonna like it and Microsoft back down
⏹️ ▶️ John on that. And that was, Windows Vista was a while ago, right? So this is kind of older history, but anyway, I’m going to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t blame any of this on the EU really. Although if the, I’m not putting it past the EU to come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with a wrong-headed notion like that, but I’m pretty sure that they didn’t in this specific case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, continuing from the verge, Apple began locking down its Mac OS operating system in 2020 so that developers could no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey longer get access to the kernel. Quote, it was definitely the right decision by Apple to deprecate third-party kernel extensions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says Patrick Wardle, but the road to actually accomplishing that been fraught with issues. Apple has had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some kernel bugs or security tools. Running in user mode could still trigger a kernel panic, as Worrall says.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, quote, has also introduced some privilege execution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vulnerabilities. Ooh, that’s a mouthful. And there are still some other bugs that could allow security tools on Mac to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be unloaded by malware. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So in our neck of the woods, kernel extensions were a thing in Mac OS X for a very long time. It’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of software installed its quote-unquote drivers to work with hardware peripherals
⏹️ ▶️ John and other random stuff. And in 2020, Apple said, you know what? Kernel extensions are going away.
⏹️ ▶️ John Over the course of several years, in cooperation with our vendors that have things based on kernel extensions, and the vendors would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John but our software needs a kernel extension to do its job. How are we supposed to ship our software? We literally,
⏹️ ▶️ John we need kernel extensions. And Apple’s answer was, whatever things you need to do, we will
⏹️ ▶️ John provide a way to do in user space, as in, in a process that is separate from the kernel. so that
⏹️ ▶️ John if your code crashes, it’s not inside the kernel and the kernel keeps running and the operating system stays
⏹️ ▶️ John up. And bit by bit, piece by piece, Apple has been rolling out user space versions
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that used to require kernel extensions. And what Patrick is saying here is sometimes Apple rolls out those things and they’re bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have bugs. And still, you can end up crashing the kernel because there’s something on the kernel talking
⏹️ ▶️ John to the user space thing. And if the thing in the kernel that Apple wrote has a bug in it, it can take down
⏹️ ▶️ John the kernel. It’s a long, slow, painful process. Third parties don’t like it, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John third parties that have kernel extensions. They may say, you know, back when we had a kernel extension, we had really smart people on
⏹️ ▶️ John our team and they wrote a really good kernel extension and we debugged it over the course of 10 years and we think it’s a bulletproof.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now our choice is to use this user space thing that Apple is offering that connects to Apple’s own
⏹️ ▶️ John little thing in the kernel and their thing in the kernel sucks and has bugs and is brand new this year. This is a downgrade. So
⏹️ ▶️ John people are angry, but Apple is taking its lumps and causing
⏹️ ▶️ John disruption with its eyes on the prize of no more third-party code running inside the kernel.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s, you know, we make the joke about courage with Phil Schiller and with the getting
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of the headphone port or whatever, but in some respects, it does take courage to essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John endure the pain and the justified anger of your developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John If the goal is a future that is better for everybody involved, it’s better for user, surely
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s better for Apple. And in the end, hopefully it will also be better for third party developers who don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to write that super high risk code that runs inside the kernel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, it’s it’s a tough nut to crack, right? And everyone has both,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, selfish and unselfish motivations for it. So I don’t know. But apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a official like we were saying an official API for this and there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even a WWDC video from 2020. The API is endpoint security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is reading from Apple’s developer site, endpoint security is an API for monitoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system events for potentially malicious activity. Your client registers with endpoint security to authorize pending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey events or receive notifications of events that have already occurred. These events include process executions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mounting file systems, forking processes, and raising signals. Develop your system extension with endpoint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey security and package that in an app that uses the system extensions framework to install and upgrade the extension
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the user’s Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s the equivalent of if CrowdStrike existed for Mac OS, it would use endpoint
⏹️ ▶️ John security, which is a user space API that connects to a thing that Apple wrote inside the kernel.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s how every going forward, that’s how every sort of anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John thing made by third parties on Mac OS must use Apple’s endpoint security
⏹️ ▶️ John system, which is new and has bugs and is not as good as when you could write your own kernel extension. But in the long
⏹️ ▶️ John run, it’s better to have, in theory, One vendor who’s the vendor that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John the operating system writing the thing inside the kernel That everybody else all the third
⏹️ ▶️ John parties talk to and they’re out there in user space So all those third parties if they crash
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t take down the operating system, but if Apple crashes that they do That’s the that’s the theory behind it
⏹️ ▶️ John again It’s not always a smooth road to get there because people complain that the thing Apple wrote is not as good as the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John They had wrote before and for a long time. They’re going to be right about that But the thing is there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John many third-party developers and just one Apple and hopefully eventually Apple iterate and iterate
⏹️ ▶️ John on its endpoint security thing and all the other stuff they have inside the kernel talking to those user space processes
⏹️ ▶️ John and Once it gets ironed out that makes it better for every Antivirus program and every
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac user you don’t have to wait for every individual third party to Get up to snuff or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally Microsoft does what you would expect it calls for Windows changes and resilience after CrowdStrike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like reading from a new article on The Verge from the 26th, Microsoft wants to reopen the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conversations about restricting kernel-level access inside Windows. Quote, this incident shows clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Microsoft Windows must prioritize change and innovation in the area of end-to-end resilience, says John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cable, vice president of program management for Windows servicing and delivery, in a blog post titled, Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Resiliency, Best Practices and the Path Forward. Cable calls out a new VBS enclaves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feature that does not require kernel mode drivers to be tamper resistant and Microsoft’s Azure Attestation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Service as examples of recent security innovations. These examples use modern zero-trust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approaches and show what can be done to encourage development practices that do not rely on kernel access. As Cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will continue to develop these capabilities, harden our platform, and do even more to improve the resiliency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Windows ecosystem, working openly and collaboratively with the broad security community.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so Microsoft is, you know, working on the same things that Apple has done, which is let’s make user space
⏹️ ▶️ John equivalents, all the stuff that used to require kernel access. But they’re apparently have not
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten to the point where Apple has a flat out forbidding kernel extensions or
⏹️ ▶️ John making it extremely, extremely difficult for them to load and requiring all sorts of hoops to jump through and
⏹️ ▶️ John all that other stuff. And real time follow up someone in the chat room said that CrowdStrike does exist for the Mac. So there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and Linux too, I believe, actually. Yeah. Right. So then, you know what, it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. All is well that ends well because CrowdStrike is taking care of their customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are doing what’s right. They’re offering them a $10 apology gift card
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Uber Eats for the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I saw this, I’m like, this has to be fake. Like, there’s no way this is a real
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just like the Windows 3.1 thing. This has to be a joke. But this is a tech crunch, so I’m going to click
⏹️ ▶️ John on it again. Have they updated and say this is a joke? I think this is real. Oh, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause they have like first party sourcing. So it was, you know, one, one person
⏹️ ▶️ John said that they received it and so did somebody, I think at TechCrunch or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John $10 gift certificate is not going to cut. I think I, we don’t have the links in here, but I think like a bunch of the, I think Delta’s like suing
⏹️ ▶️ John them for a billion dollars. I should have put that link. I did have it somewhere and then I said, I just didn’t get to it
⏹️ ▶️ John in time. But I think it’s Delta Airlines is suing CrowdStrike. And I think that it’s actually interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John because as anyone who has used software for a long time knows, there’s a thing called end
⏹️ ▶️ John user license agreement, and surely something that is equivalent in enterprise software sales,
⏹️ ▶️ John that usually says in all caps somewhere, words to the effect, we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t guarantee this software does literally anything. We don’t, like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you think this software does, you’re paying us money and we’re saying we are not promising that it will do that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, ever under any circumstances.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And furthermore, if we break your stuff, if we delete your data, if our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software does anything to harm you, you agree it’s not our fault because we couldn’t possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be held to the standard of making working software.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Now, again, I’m not a lawyer, and I know there are certain things that you cannot put in a contract and sign away all
⏹️ ▶️ John your rights or whatever. So the courts in our country will figure out whether Delta is owed billions of dollars from
⏹️ ▶️ John CrowdStrike or not. But I do have to say this is a fun test, because normally these things don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get tested, because we click through the end user license agreements because we’re like, yada, yada, yada. There’s nothing we can do about it anyway. What are we gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do? Sue Microsoft, sue Apple. Like we don’t have that kind of money, right? But Delta Airlines does. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Delta Airlines versus CrowdStrike will be another interesting test of end user license agreements.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can CrowdStrike make Delta Airlines agree that they pay X amount of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John per year for essentially nothing? Right, for saying, you know, we’re giving you money and we’re signing
⏹️ ▶️ John a contract that says, In exchange, we expect nothing from your software. Whatever you’re telling
⏹️ ▶️ John us it does, if it doesn’t do that, we’re saying that’s okay. Because that’s what all the end user
⏹️ ▶️ John license agreements say. Because lawyers put it on there, in there early on, and they got away with it, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we all just ignored it. And I’m sure there’ve been other tests that have tested you, Liz. I don’t know what the law precedents are or whatever, but this is a fairly high profile
⏹️ ▶️ John one. So I think when this, I mean, I’m assuming they’ll just settle, so there’ll probably no precedents set here. Because what’s gonna happen is, Dell’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna extract a bunch of money and they’ll settle out of court because that’s what they’ll do. But it would be fun if it actually went to court
⏹️ ▶️ John and actually established some legal precedents. If someone, if a listener knows what established legal precedents on enforceability
⏹️ ▶️ John of ULAs is, please let us know. But I imagine a lot of these cases get settled because in the end, Delta just wants
⏹️ ▶️ John some money to make up for all the money that they lost. I saw a graph somewhere of like takeoffs per
⏹️ ▶️ John minute per airline, right? And as you can imagine during CrowdStrike, it went down,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Delta’s graph was so much worse than everybody else’s. I don’t know why it was so much worse. Maybe there’s a lot of Delta
⏹️ ▶️ John flights or whatever, but I mean, there was a dip in the overall like global takeoffs for a minute, but Delta
⏹️ ▶️ John was like plummeted to almost nothing. It was terrible. So good luck Delta getting
⏹️ ▶️ John some money in that settlement. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole CrowdStrike thing here, I think, you know, the bigger story here is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, that, you know, this company I think was doing things in a pretty reckless way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But second of all, like you have to, as a company, as a computer, you really have to weigh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the value of, you know, malware prevention software, or like malware defense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software against the malware. Like what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what, what likely outcomes are they actually protecting you from?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And how can the malware itself go wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ John The, the anti-mal, the anti-malware, you did the same thing I did, the anti-malware software, how can the antivirus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, yes, that, yeah, sure. That is what I meant, you’re right. But like, when you look at what the anti-malware software has to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does a lot of the same things that malware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to do. It has to hook into your system at a very low level, which introduces tons of risks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and possible instability and possible performance problems. If you look at what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco malware does, malware hooks into your system at a very low level. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can potentially see all your data and potentially have problems with that. It can potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause instability of your system and performance problems and can rob your resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and can introduce weird risks. Well, anti-malware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software does all of those things, all of them. So granted, the anti-malware companies have very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different incentives and they have, I think, a better track record of not actively trying to hurt people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when you are trying to combat the risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dealing with malware, you are trading a possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad experience with a guaranteed bad experience. Like when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco install anti-malware software, in a lot of ways you are guaranteeing that you will have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mediocre performance on certain levels, you’re introducing more risks, more moving parts, you know, more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potential for instability and stuff like that. And so you have to have a really good reason. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to really choose that software very carefully. And And I think what I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the CrowdStrike problem, I hope a lot of learning goes on here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the thing is, the motivation, the reason why you have to be very careful and decide
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re doing, companies have a very strong motivation
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy this software, because it’s required for compliance reasons. And they have a very strong reason to go with a company like
⏹️ ▶️ John CrowdStrike, because CrowdStrike will sell you a thing that will cover all your compliance needs.
⏹️ ▶️ John they have gone through all the certifications and they can say whatever things you need to comply with, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John buy and install CrowdStrike, you will be compliant with all of them because we went through the certification
⏹️ ▶️ John procedures. That’s what, like most enterprise software, that’s what they’re selling. You company, whether you want
⏹️ ▶️ John this or not, you have to have some solution to this. Are you gonna roll your own and go through your own certification and
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with that? Or are you just gonna install our product and we cover all the bases for you? And nowhere in that scenario
⏹️ ▶️ John is there any kind of consideration for the quality of that software. And on a smaller level,
⏹️ ▶️ John not on the big like blue screen of death and no one can get on their planes level, but on the small level, we’ve talked about this. It’s like, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about it back in my jobby jobs of having what I called corporate malware installed on my laptop. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you were saying, Marco, it makes the laptop worse. Not in a way that like it crashes and it blue screens and it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you know, people are getting their stuff encrypted and asking for a ransom. It just makes every
⏹️ ▶️ John corporate laptop a little bit worse than it would be if it didn’t have that installed. when the thing grinds
⏹️ ▶️ John over your whole system, this is even worse back in the days of hard drives, looking for whatever it’s looking for, scanning
⏹️ ▶️ John every file that’s run or causing weird bugs. It’s just a tiny little tax that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John paid by every person using a corporate laptop. And it’s probably lesser a case for the servers and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, because there’s no human experiencing that, but the risk is still there of like, hey, what if the company that you paid all this money
⏹️ ▶️ John to get for your security compliance, what if they’re not particularly careful? What if they do a bad job? You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly monitoring them, that’s what you’re paying them for. So you don’t have to worry about it. Now, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of companies will be looking other vendors, but CrowdStrike was a pretty popular one.
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iPhone 17 “Slim” rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been some rumors going around and this one in particular with regard to forthcoming hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very unusual. They’re talking about iPhone 17, not 16,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but 17 slim rumors. Iphone 16? Who
⏹️ ▶️ John cares about Iphone 16? That’s old news.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re talking about Iphone 17. I think we didn’t we even talk, no, we talked about, uh, in an overtime, I think we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John like making thinner laptops and stuff or making slimmer products.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So even we were
⏹️ ▶️ John the hot rumors are all about iPhone 17. Forget about iPhone 16. It’s not even going to come with Apple intelligence on launch.
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 17 is where it’s at.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or so it seems. So John, can you tell us what’s going on here? So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stories about the iPhone slim and related stories
⏹️ ▶️ John about the iPhone ultra. So here’s an example headline, ultra thin iPhone 17, see what they did there?
⏹️ ▶️ John to feature A19 chip, shocking, single rear camera, semi-titanium frame,
⏹️ ▶️ John and more. This is from Ming-Chi Kuo. Shared a specification for a new Ultra Thin iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ John model rumored to launch next year. Kuo expects the device to be equipped with a 6.6 inch display with a current size
⏹️ ▶️ John dynamic island, a standard A19 chip rather than an A19 Pro, a single rear camera, and
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple-designed 5G chip. He also expects the device to have a titanium aluminum frame, but with lower percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John of titanium than those used for the 15 Pro. So this is the current or a recent
⏹️ ▶️ John mutation of the iPhone slim model. And the whole idea, you know, as the name says, it’s an iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s slim. So what sacrifices do you have to make to get it slim? Well, it’s only gonna have one
⏹️ ▶️ John camera. It doesn’t have an 8019 Pro. It’s rumored to have the Apple design 5G chip that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been working on for years and years. iPhone 17 in 2026, this is the year for the 5G chip and it’s gonna come in an iPhone slim.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then there’s also the rumor that the iPhone SE4 will also have the 5G chip, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And Ming-Chi Kuo has a reasonable track record and sources and supply chain and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. So other than just vague rumors of an iPhone slim or an ultra thin phone or an iPhone ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s like, okay, some parts suppliers or think that this conglomeration of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John equals a phone. And if it does, it’s a weird one because there is no current phone that
⏹️ ▶️ John is known for being slim. There’s no separate slim model. And this sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John a strange device. It’s not a pro model, but has a single rear camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s Apple hasn’t done that in ages on any of the phones that are like exclusive or expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John and presumably the slim would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See this. I love this rumor, and I hope they do something really out there with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, well, you know, for Apple, it’s not going to be that out there because it’s Apple, but But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this sounds like a lot of fun to me. Because if you look at what the iPhone line has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been, it’s been so good. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been so good in fairly predictable ways for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t really get a lot of surprises in the iPhone line. We don’t get a lot of seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-risk experiments in the iPhone line. It’s just a really good product line. They deliver every year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with these wonderful, often incremental, sometimes bigger improvements. And it’s just a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solid all around predictable thing. I’ve been having the same phone, the same size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and approximate weight class phone for years now, just as so many other iPhone customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have through multiple models here and there as various upgrades and replacements happen over the years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you kind of feel like you get the same phone over and over again for quite some time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Something like this could make a lot of people change their pattern. It could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be something new. It could be something different. And I think it’s interesting, as you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the smartphone industry, what most people are using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just like these standard kind of like mid to high end, you know, boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but really great smartphones. Like we don’t talk much about them anymore in terms of like, oh, what did they upgrade this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year? Because you know, it’s a mature category. We’re all using them constantly, every minute of the day. They’re the most important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers in our lives, but they don’t change that much in ways that we really notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that often. Something like this, I think this has the potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make a bunch of people make a different decision than what they’ve been making recently. This has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the potential to be kind of like what the original MacBook Air was, hopefully better, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like that, of people were delighted by the MacBook Air because it was just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different from what they had used before, and it looked delightful, it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even more delightful, and it was just cool, even though it had lower technical specs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than similarly priced computers from the similar era. And so, what I’m kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hoping for this iPhone 17 slim rumor, whatever they end up calling it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like it’s trying to kind of maybe replace the Plus phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain ways, in the sense that like, Alright, they have the pro phones. They get all the pro features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco highest price, biggest cameras, biggest everything, you know, biggest screens. Then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the less expensive, you know, iPhone 15, iPhone 14, like the non-pro phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have been like, you know, about the same size, near the same weight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit lighter because they don’t use steel or titanium. So like, it’s been kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar, but just like cut down. And then they have the base iPhone 15 slash iPhone 14.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then they have the Plus, which they launched what a year or two ago. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Plus seems to not be selling because it’s just like, all right, we made the base phone bigger, but nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants that really. So they kind of had this like hold and lineup. They did the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini for a while, killed that. They did the Plus now for a while. I think they’re gonna kill it too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t seem to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John be going anywhere. You know what I’m gonna say about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. What am I gonna say? Well, you’re probably gonna say they have tons, they sell a ton of
⏹️ ▶️ John these things, they can keep both, but. I’m gonna say that every phone can be your best selling phone. Yes, right. Sometimes you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell a model, there’s always gonna be a model or two in last place. Anyway, yeah, the rumor is that this would be replacing
⏹️ ▶️ John the Plus, but you should buckle up because there’s more coming that you may not be prepared for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think overall though, like I love the idea that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying something that’s much more different than the Plus versus the regular or the Plus versus the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max. Like, they’re trying something that is much more different by all these rumors. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if only some of this stuff ends up panning out, like, you know, usually iPhone hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumors from decent sources like Ming-Chi Kuo, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are pretty reliable. And so there is enough smoke around this fire that it does seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, maybe we don’t know every detail yet, but it does seem like there is some kind of additional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 17 model that is going to be very thin and have like kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of more hardware risks being taken, including some lower end components than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro phones. And I think that is an interesting thing because like the direction the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones have gone, like I keep buying the Pro phones, even though I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t use some of the most, you know, the pro-iest features of the Pro phones because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, what I want is stuff, like I want the nicest screen, like I want ProMotion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want titanium and stuff like that. I want some of the pro camera systems features, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the pro camera systems features I don’t use at all. Like anything involving like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, pro res or even much video shooting or, you know, stuff like that. Like there’s all sorts of, you know, raw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shooting, like there’s all sorts of like pro camera stuff that I just don’t use. And I think it’s true of a lot of people who buy the pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People buy the pro, not because they want all the pro features, but because it’s the nicest.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it has the best cameras, like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, and the best cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, even if you don’t use the video features, it’s the best still image camera. Even if you don’t use raw, it’s making the best JPEGs
⏹️ ▶️ John too in theory as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, like, you know, having the multi-camera system has always been a bit of a crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shoot because like, you know, what does it mean to have the best cameras versus like, you know, like is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3X or 2X before or 5X now? Like is that camera like that good? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are asterisks on it sometimes, but overall, yes, you’re right. But I think it’s interesting if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to make a new iPhone model that is going to be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physically and or visually very distinctive from the other ones. Even if it ends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up having lower end specs in order to achieve that, I think a lot of people would choose that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco partly because it’ll be cool, and partly because it’ll just be different and it’ll be a novel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing for them. You look around the rest of the cell phone business and everyone’s making folding phones. They’re trying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like other companies are trying to do, like all right, let’s see, what can we do that’s gonna shake up the smartphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market a little bit, maybe got us some attention and some new sales. Folding phones have actually started to take off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain markets. Like there’s still a lot of challenges around them. There’s a decent amount of shortcomings to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And you know, not every folding concept is a very good one, but there is some traction happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. Like people are finding, oh, this kind of crazy hack actually does work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actually is good for certain things. I think this is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of taking their own version of a bet like that. This is them saying, all right, We’re gonna mix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up too. We’re not convinced on a folding maybe yet or ever, but we’re gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Apple way of taking a weird hardware risk. This sounds like that weird hardware risk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think it’s gonna be really fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, well, we’ll see. So a few things about what you’ve said here. So the first is
⏹️ ▶️ John for the cameras, like, well, how good are all those cameras, having all those cameras in the phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John There are rumors that an upcoming phone, I think maybe the 17, that all the cameras would
⏹️ ▶️ John be 48 megapixel on the back instead of just like the good camera being 48 megapixel and the other ones being lesser.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also rumors, I forget, again, I forget what you’re about, a mechanical aperture changing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the cameras on the back. So an actual iris that expands and contracts
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanically inside the phone to get potentially real depth, more real
⏹️ ▶️ John depth of field instead of the portrait mode type thing. For this particular rumor now, This
⏹️ ▶️ John is here’s another another iPhone slim dugout from the past This is from May and this is from the information
⏹️ ▶️ John which again is usually usually has some good sources The saying the information today
⏹️ ▶️ John reported that Apple plans to release an all-new high-end iPhone 17 model next year And there was one detail worth singling out
⏹️ ▶️ John the rear camera could be relocated to the top center of the device The report says the new iPhone 17 model
⏹️ ▶️ John will feature a major redesign akin to the iPhone 10 and a higher price tag than the Pro And the Max model. So this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit older rumor, but the same type of thing top center phone I’ve been complaining for years that they shouldn’t put it
⏹️ ▶️ John in the corner or anywhere. It’s ridiculous and the earlier rumor was a single camera to your point
⏹️ ▶️ John about the cameras that you use one trade-off that Apple could make is Have
⏹️ ▶️ John one camera instead of three but make that camera two and a half times as expensive two and a half times is
⏹️ ▶️ John good You know, maybe that’s the one with the mechanical iris for aperture on it, right? Have one really good
⏹️ ▶️ John camera instead of or one really really good camera instead of one really good camera and two meteor
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras or whatever Um, and as we say, like being in the Apple ecosystem, one of the sacrifices
⏹️ ▶️ John is you do not get the diversity that exists in the rest of the ecosystem. So there’s Android phones of all
⏹️ ▶️ John shapes and sizes, but when you buy a Mac, an Apple phone, you have a choice of whatever models
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple puts out and they can’t even be bothered to make a mini phone, let alone all the diversity
⏹️ ▶️ John of things they can make. So this would be another play for them to diversify their lineup now that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve undiversified it by getting off the mini train. Again, I think stopping
⏹️ ▶️ John the mini and stopping the plus are, I mean, you can’t have every model in the world. Like the question
⏹️ ▶️ John is how much diversity is enough for Apple to have? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John a mini and one other non mini phone is probably near their limit. Right now the
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor is they’re going to have neither, but I guess the plus would be replaced by this. So here’s the rumored iPhone 17 lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is from earlier in July. This is from Mac rumors. in recent
⏹️ ▶️ John months have converged in agreement that Apple would discontinue the Plus iPhone model in 2025 while introducing an all
⏹️ ▶️ John new iPhone 17 slim model that has an even more high-end option sitting above the 17
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Max, and we’ll get to that in a second, in the lineup. The latest information from Ice Universe,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the person’s name apparently, shared yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ John Weibo, corroborates this and claims that the alleged display sizes and price points will be as follows. Plain
⏹️ ▶️ John old iPhone 17 with a 6.27 inch display for 800 bucks, 17 Pro for 1,100 bucks with a 6.27 inch display
⏹️ ▶️ John and 12 gigs of RAM. iPhone 17 Pro Max with a 6.86 display for 1,200 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ John and 12 gigs of RAM. And iPhone 17 Slim with a 6.65 inch display,
⏹️ ▶️ John 1,300 bucks, eight gigs of RAM. So they’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ John this Slim will be the most expensive phone, won’t have the most RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t have the most cameras, its screen won’t be the biggest. So the screen is like, the screen is closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Pro Max size, but it’s bigger than the plain old Pro and 17 size, and only eight gigs of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then notably all four iPhone 17 models will apparently feature the LTPO
⏹️ ▶️ John display for the first time, enabling ProMotion across the whole line, so isn’t that great?
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s the rumored iPhone 17 lineup, and you may be thinking, how does that make any sense? Well, it kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of makes some sense in like the MacBook Air thing, it was kind of expensive when it came out, it was actually less powerful than the ones that
⏹️ ▶️ John it replaced but yeah, what are you getting for that extra money? You’re getting the slimness, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John getting the coolness factor. That’s the theory. But here I’m gonna probably make Marco sad because
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the current thinking slash rumors say the following, and we will link to the Max Tech’s
⏹️ ▶️ John video, Max Tech video where he talks about this and there’s also a Rack rumor story that we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John link to as well. The gist of it is that the new iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ John slim model is actually, drum roll please, the iPhone Fold,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was leaked years ago from multiple sources, but it’s not going to be called the Fold, Max Tech says, it’s going to be called the
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra. And he says, he thinks the reason everyone is calling it the iPhone Slim is because the device is significantly thinner than any other
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. That’s the current state of this rumor is that, you know what, this iPhone 17 Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 17 Slim, it’s thinner than all the other models, but it costs more than them. How do I square this circle?
⏹️ ▶️ John And also Apple’s thinking about making a folding phone. The iPhone 17 Ultra slash Slim is the folding
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. It has to be thinner because when you fold it in half, it gets twice as thick. Apple has been working
⏹️ ▶️ John on a folding phone. Lots of other manufacturers have shipped them. Some rumors for years about Apple trying to solve the creasing
⏹️ ▶️ John problem with the screen and everything. The information, I’m not gonna say corroborates
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but information had a story from last year, this time,
⏹️ ▶️ John saying that Apple’s absolutely working on a folding phone. It’s gonna be like the Galaxy Z Flip phones, where it flips like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John goes down vertically or whatever. It has a code name of V68 inside the company. and
⏹️ ▶️ John they do all the caveating or whatever, the information says, Apple designers have struggled to come up with enough compelling features
⏹️ ▶️ John that would make consumers want one, especially given its high retail costs compared to non-foldable phones. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the sad ending of this room where Mark was like, I’m gonna have a cool
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco slim phone, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be a different form factor and you know, folding phones, whatever. But anyway, an iPhone slim will be cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John How are you gonna feel if the iPhone slim is in fact the iPhone fold?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, I mean, so, okay, it depends on how much of this rumor is accurate. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the biggest thing for me is that I have yet to see any good reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why a foldable phone should be the kind of flip phone style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that flips up like a Nintendo DS or like an old flip phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Diagonal. You want diagonal like a sandwich? The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main utility I’ve seen from foldable phones are the ones that unfold like a book
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into basically like a little square tablet. I think that makes a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense because you it’s basically like having like an iPad mini, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, not quite that big but like it’s like having a small iPad with you all the time. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to do something that needs more screen space, like you’re working on like a document or something. There is I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think substantial utility for that while keeping it still in like the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like smartphone rectangular shape in your pocket. I don’t think I would need something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that. Wait a
⏹️ ▶️ John second, so would you want a phone that folded that way, that has a screen that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can use without unfolding it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ideally, yes, but I don’t know how that would be done necessarily by
⏹️ ▶️ John Android phones do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John both ways. I believe they have the ones where to use it at all, you gotta unfold it, and it becomes like a small tablet-sized
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And there are also ones that say, actually, to use it, there’s another screen, because of course, then it has to be two screens,
⏹️ ▶️ John then the folding screen, and then the non-folding screen, which is a separate regular portrait orientation screen
⏹️ ▶️ John that you use when you don’t unfold it. And obviously that would make this thing even more expensive, given that this rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John here is that it’s only gonna be $1,300. I can’t imagine that’s what Apple’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing, like, and if you look at the price of like good folding phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no way Apple’s making one anytime soon for $1,300. It’s just not gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, if Apple’s going to make a folding phone at some point, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do think it makes a lot more sense to make it the opening book style folding rather than the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flip phone style folding. Because the flip phone style of folding, what you start with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a thick square, which doesn’t fit very well into pockets anyway. And what you end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with after it unfolds is basically just a regular smartphone size screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe a slightly larger one, but it’s not that much of a big screen. Whereas the book
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones, at least you start out with something that’s roughly the size of the phones we’ve already had for years. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you open it up, it becomes almost a small tablet. That is way more utility than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a flip-up phone. So I can’t imagine Apple doing the flip-up style. But anyway, all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to say, I don’t think these specs, I don’t think the rumored specs of the iPhone 17,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote, slim, I don’t think these specs match up to a folding phone. The screen is not big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough and the price is too low.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, price is obviously is the most difficult thing to get an accurate rumor about because that’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John leak through the supply chain or whatever, right? So I’d take that with an even bigger grain of salt.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not up on the latest sales trends and folding phones, but my impression is the vertically
⏹️ ▶️ John folded ones are more popular than the ones that open up into books. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s my impression
⏹️ ▶️ John just from seeing reviews of Android phones and stuff. So if Apple is making one, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I mean, this is from the information from last year. The rumor was, was that it’s like the Galaxy Z Flip, that it’s a vertical
⏹️ ▶️ John folding phone. That’s what Apple’s working on. Doesn’t mean they’re not working on other folding phones. Doesn’t mean there couldn’t be other ones, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if I had to bet, I would say, if Apple makes a folding phone in the next few years, it will be vertically folding.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I agree with you about everything you said. It’s like, well, what the heck is the point? All you’ve got it is, you know, you’ve made it smaller, but it also
⏹️ ▶️ John got thicker. And when you open it up, it’s the size of a regular phone. Again, it’s close to the size of the Max, but it’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger than the Max. So it’s not even like, oh, you’re getting an even bigger screen. No, you’re not. You’re getting a sub-Max
⏹️ ▶️ John size screen. Again, these rumors are to be believed. in exchange for it being a little bit smaller in your pocket. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the vertical size change, as long as it doesn’t get too much thicker, might actually
⏹️ ▶️ John make a difference, especially for people who have clothing with pockets that are not sufficiently
⏹️ ▶️ John large for an actual phone. Even, I mean, obviously I have, you know, fairly big
⏹️ ▶️ John pockets on most of my pairs of clothing, but my shorts that I wear in the summer, some of them have
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger pockets than others. And even with a plain old 14 Pro, I notice when I wear the shorts
⏹️ ▶️ John that pockets are a little bit shallower. Does it have to be a little bit more aware that when I sit down to make
⏹️ ▶️ John sure my phone doesn’t squirt out of the pocket or fall out of my pocket when I get up from sitting down or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John And my pockets are big. Like I’m not even, like women’s clothes that have fake pockets that aren’t even real
⏹️ ▶️ John or real pockets that are like two inches deep or whatever. I’m not sure folding phones are gonna solve
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but for whatever reason, my impression is that the vertically folding ones are more
⏹️ ▶️ John popular in the market than the book open folding ones. And I think the book open folding ones
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have a second screen on them because nobody wants to manually unfold something the size of a small
⏹️ ▶️ John tablet every time they wanna do something with their phone. There are use cases for that when you essentially, hey, I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John carry an iPad mini around with me, but I don’t want it to be that big in my pocket. Great, folding one. But I think there has to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. And once you’re doing one gigantic folding screen plus a regular phone size screen, that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a $3,000 device from Apple, right? So I find that less likely than a vertically folding
⏹️ ▶️ John one. But at this point, I like the I like the notion of all the rumors swirling together
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying the slim, the ultra, the fold. These are not three separate products. It’s one product.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But on the other hand, I think I personally would
⏹️ ▶️ John be more excited by a plain old non folding slim one good
⏹️ ▶️ John camera new form factor iPhone 17 called the ultra. It doesn’t fold at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. It’s thirteen hundred bucks. That is the product that is the most exciting for me. that is more
⏹️ ▶️ John boring than a folding phone. And every story about the folding phone always has the caveat to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple might decide they can’t do it. Apple’s still working on the creasing. Apple’s not sure they’re gonna ship anything like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think these just might be getting combined together. I understand the logic. Slim, fold, slim, fold.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, if it folds, it’s probably also slim when it’s unfolded because when you fold it, it’s gonna get thicker and then that’s why, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I get it. But I’m just not quite sure. But all this is to say that the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 17 lineup It’s currently shaping up to be a lot more interesting than the iPhone 16.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not the iPhone 16 is gonna be bad. I’m gonna get one. It’s my year to get a new phone. I’m sure it’ll be great and everything, but it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of, it suits me because I will be happy to for once
⏹️ ▶️ John have the final most refined iteration of the current stupid design with
⏹️ ▶️ John the gigantic three burner stove in the corner of the phone or whatever. Like I’ve been saying for years, every time I do
⏹️ ▶️ John that, the Jason Stell report card thing, I say, they can’t go on with this. They can’t keep
⏹️ ▶️ John making this thing that’s supposed to, like, just look at the back of your phone. Once it passed the 50% mark, I’m like, that’s not in the
⏹️ ▶️ John corner of the phone anymore. It’s just a poorly centered thing in the back of your phone. Like, they need
⏹️ ▶️ John to find a way out of this. And one centrally mounted camera is a way out. I’m ready
⏹️ ▶️ John for a new big redesign, but I am happy to this year buy a 16 Pro, which will be
⏹️ ▶️ John the last greatest best refinement of the design we’ve had for how many years now? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll let my wife figure out what she wants to do with the 17 fold slim or ultra in 2025, six,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. When’s the 75? Five. Five, okay, yeah, 2025, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two other interesting points here. Number one, a 17 slim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, by these rumors would, yes, not only be slim, it would probably also be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot lighter because the way they would make it slim would be removing certain components,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making the battery smaller, things like that. it would probably end up being a lighter weight phone by a noticeable amount.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that would be really nice to feel in the hand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, is it a terrible battery life? Well, we’ll see. And that’s the risk of slim. You get rid of those cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it slimmer. You get rid of a bunch of other stuff. You know, you take everything you can to make it slim. You take out
⏹️ ▶️ John battery for sure. And like I said, the rumor is that having an A19 and not an A19 Pro is an effort
⏹️ ▶️ John to preserve that battery life. So you don’t put the hottest, you know, CPU in there. You get the
⏹️ ▶️ John one that’s like a step down. I think they could do it. Like, I think there is a place for that. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I say the same thing about like, I thought that the Plus was the model that they should have had in their lineup just for like consistency and because
⏹️ ▶️ John some people buy it, I think the Mini should be in their lineup because some people want a small phone. If they’re getting rid of the Plus, please
⏹️ ▶️ John bring the Slim in and bring back the Mini. I think that is the, a Mini, a Slim, a Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John a Pro Max, and a regular, I think that is an adequate amount of diversity. Even the rumors don’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John that. No rumors of the Mini coming back. Sorry, Mini folks. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the Slim is the Mini. This is just like, all right, We’re gonna make a phone that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller in certain dimensions, but doesn’t sacrifice the big screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everyone actually wants and ends up buying.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not the many people, the many people don’t want the big screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but there weren’t enough of them. And what’s interesting about this too, is like even, so a couple things. So number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, they’re probably going to sell a smaller volume of this one. It makes more sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple to say, all right, if we’re gonna have a smaller volume phone, we’ll make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of a statement piece and we’ll charge more money for it. So smaller volume, sure, but then we’ll charge more for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each one and we’ll make up some of that difference. Secondly, this could enable them, you know, one of the things we talked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about in the past a lot is like, for Apple to choose a component
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a material or a technique in iPhone manufacturing, they can only,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re restricted to only choosing things that they can mass produce in very large numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they just sell so many of the regular mainstream iPhones. maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having this other model in the lineup can allow them to make more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bold choices with things like materials or components. That maybe they just can’t get the volume.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like maybe if they have some really good camera module, maybe they can’t make however many millions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iPhones they sell every year. Maybe they can’t source that many millions of this camera, but they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it in this model that they don’t have to sell that many millions of because most of the ones they’re gonna sell are gonna be the pro phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the regular phones. and then this model can have some crazy new component
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it can have some material like this, like they’re saying like a half titanium frame or whatever that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means. They could do things like that that maybe they can’t mass produce for the volumes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the regular iPhone lines. Also, this allows them to take some risks. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the market is telling them, we want more and more cameras, but they can make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this phone with just one and that saves them a bunch of other stuff and allows this to happen, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allows them to actually give people some different options. Again, for the first time, we don’t have a lot of different options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the iPhone line. We have a small number of extremely similar options that make extremely similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-offs. Again, this is something that’s going to be a different set of trade-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s very exciting. I think, honestly, I think I would love this phone. From what I’m seeing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what the rumors are, I am tentatively very optimistic. I think I might actually really like this, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really am looking forward to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John but keep in mind that it will be bigger than your plain old pro in your hand. Like again, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John closer to a pro max size when you’re actually using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I guess redesign my app to put all the controls at the bottom, I’m good. Yeah. No, I mean, but like, but again, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s offering lightness and thinness, like that’s really cool. And again, like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if some of the ways they achieve that lightness and thinness are doing other things that seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bold or that might require feature removals or limits. So for instance, if you only have one camera, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not shooting spatial video. That is an interesting trade-off at this point in Apple’s history.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see how that goes. Spatial video, I think has not taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the way we expected it to, or the way I think they expected it
⏹️ ▶️ John to. Well, the iPhone 16’s moved their cameras for it, so Apple hopes it’s still a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, well, they moved the cameras and that will become possible. We don’t know if that’s why they moved their cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s absolutely why, that’s absolutely why they moved it. 100%. I think the giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plateau that only had two cameras diagonally set looked kind of bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so that’s the thing about it, by the way, the plain old iPhone 16. So that what we’re referring to is that the two cameras in the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 16 are not on an angle. They’re straight up and down from each other, which is better for spatial video. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John was looking at that and I was like, oh, and this will, you know, this will be back like, which one was it? Like the 10 or the 10 and a- The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco seven, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which one had two cameras vertically or like the vertical lozenge? The seven plus. Are you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure that was vertical? Cause the iPhone 10 was
⏹️ ▶️ John vertical. No, I think the seven might’ve been horizontal, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, there have been past cameras that have had essentially a long, thin lozenge with either
⏹️ ▶️ John one camera or two, right? But- Real time follow up, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John on the 16, the, I was like, oh, the lozenge will be there and that way the cases
⏹️ ▶️ John will just have to have a narrow slit for the cameras, but no, because the rumored
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures of the back of the 16 show that the flash thing is to the right of both of the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle. So you’re still gonna need like a triangular opening or some kind of like vertical opening with a
⏹️ ▶️ John little notch cut out of it so the flash can go out of the thing. So if you’re thinking that
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera Mesa will be smaller because they just have two vertical cameras, think again, the flash is gonna ruin it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, anyway, going back to the 17th Slim, I think this is a very, very fun sounding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option. I’m very excited for it. I think it can be really, really, like it could shake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things up in a fun way. And I wonder too, like, how will they achieve such thinness?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe the whole back of it isn’t a sheet of glass. You know, like maybe they found other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways to have radio transparency for the NFC antenna. Maybe it doesn’t have one, who knows? Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of what ifs that I think, I think it’ll just be a really interesting story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be a really interesting product and it will inject some delight into a market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is very nice. Like the iPhones have been very good, but we’ve been a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short on the like newness and delight factors, just because it’s such a mature market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this could be really fun and I’m looking forward to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, on the cameras, by the way, there is rumors lately that Apple is, for the first time in
⏹️ ▶️ John a while, gonna be going with LG and Samsung in addition to Sony for
⏹️ ▶️ John camera sensors. It used to be that basically all Sony for all their camera sensors in their phones for several years
⏹️ ▶️ John now, but pulling in LG and Samsung, I mean, A, it’s just good business to have more than one source
⏹️ ▶️ John for a lot of your stuff, and B, it could lend credence to the idea that Apple is doing different
⏹️ ▶️ John things with cameras in different volumes for different phones instead of just, you know, Sony sourcing all
⏹️ ▶️ John of them and trying to reuse them across all of their things. So the rumor about the phones with lots of cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ John the pro phones being all 48 megapixels also kind of exciting. I don’t, that doesn’t mean that all the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna be equally good, cause that’s just probably not the way it’s gonna work, but it seems like they’re getting closer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like for too long, we’ve been like the 1X camera is really good. And the 2X camera’s there, and the wide angle
⏹️ ▶️ John also exists, you know, and they improve them a little bit year after year, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John 1X camera seems to always just race ahead of them. I would love for those cameras to come together again. Again, I think the 16
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor is that the 5X camera that Casey’s got on his giant phone is also going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on the pro phones, the small pro phone as well. So that’s another thing that I’m looking forward to. The camera
⏹️ ▶️ John that Casey has tested out for me, I’ll be able to get that in a reasonable size phone on the 16. So yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John 16 is sounding like it’s a good thing for me. And the 17, assuming it doesn’t fold, sounds like it might be
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone for Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I wouldn’t hold my breath on all three cameras being 48
⏹️ ▶️ Marco megapixels actually delivering the quality upgrade that we want. I think what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has held back those cameras to date has been smaller sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just optical realities of those focal lengths. I don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either of those being massively different because those are also related. You know, you can’t fit a larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensor behind certain optics at certain focal distances within a certain amount of thickness. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what’s more likely, keep in mind when the iPhone 1X camera went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from 12 to 48 megapixels, they did that with a bit of a trick on how the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sub pixels on the sensor were read. And the sensor size, I believe it increased a little bit in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year because it increased a little bit a lot of years, but it was not, the sensor did not get four times larger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think what is, with that rumor, what is more likely to be the case is maybe the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two sensors grow a little bit in size, kind of incrementally, but the way they would achieve 48
⏹️ ▶️ Marco megapixels would be the same method. It would be like the sub-pixel tricks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the pixel binning. Yeah, of course they would be. They’re not gonna be real 48 pixels, but the good thing is even with the
⏹️ ▶️ John binned pixels with the One X camera, you can shoot in that 48 megapixel mode if you have sufficient light, and
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably that would become an option on the others. Like, I mean, the other thing holding back the other two cameras is cost. Like, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to make all three cameras cost as much as the most expensive one, they’re going to spend less. I’m just saying like the gap
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna be there. I would just like the gap to be narrowed and all the other cameras having the ability, for example, to do 48 megapixel
⏹️ ▶️ John RAWs, that does occasionally come in handy if you’re doing like an outdoor picture and you wanna do like a landscape and you wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John use the ultra wide, but the ultra wide looks kind of soft and smushy. On a bright day, I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to do the 48 megapixel unbinned. It’s not, the optical reality is sort of still there. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny, tiny lenses, tiny sensors, but I’m willing to see what those trade-offs are like. I’ve kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of always been disappointed that the One X has just been moving farther away from the
⏹️ ▶️ John other cameras. Maybe the gap was narrowed by the 5X. I don’t know, Casey, do you feel like the 5X camera is
⏹️ ▶️ John closer to the One X camera than the old 3X was? Yeah, like, so there’s the quality of the One X that sets
⏹️ ▶️ John the bar on any given phone. And then the lesser cameras are always worse than it. And it used to be like
⏹️ ▶️ John that the 3X camera was tons worse than the One X. What is the gap between the
⏹️ ▶️ John 5X and the One X in terms of quality?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anecdotally, I don’t think it’s that big. Well, unless you’re talking like low light, but in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just average everyday use, I don’t think the gap is very big at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, anyway, I’m looking forward to the gap being narrowed somewhat between those cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m also intrigued by the idea of one really good camera with like a mechanical aperture in it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain point, I mean, that’s why I think they should redesign the bump or think more about the bump. Like obviously they need more depth
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. A centralized bump maybe gives you more depth. Look at the Pixel phones. they do essentially like
⏹️ ▶️ John a strip across the whole back. In fact, to the extent that the rumors about the 17 have been using
⏹️ ▶️ John Photoshopped or very similar pictures to like the Pixel phones with their strip that
⏹️ ▶️ John goes across and saying, look, it’s the iPhone 17. I’m like, that’s the Google Pixel. You’ve just pasted on some Apple cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like everybody sees the Pixel. Like, yeah, if you just like, it’s a huge thing on the back of the camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s thick, but it goes from edge to edge. You don’t have to worry about the phone wobbling and just like, just give into it. We know
⏹️ ▶️ John that like most of the huge amount of cost and space this camera is being taken and this phone is being,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just called it a camera on this phone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is being taken up by the cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t pretend that you’re hiding them in the corner. You’re not right. So a centrally located one or a Mesa
⏹️ ▶️ John that goes across the whole thing or something. That’s, that’s our dreams for the 17. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I feel like this is what Marco was saying earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it at least in part, but what I find appealing about the 17 and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hypothetical 17 slim, slim, less folding like I don’t know that I don’t personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I want a folding phone, but then Apple make it and I’ll say I must have it, but naturally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re all but we’re all going to buy it. Well, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey well, in case you and I will buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I really like the idea of Apple having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an additional phone, be it a slim or a wonky or a you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t throw stuff against the wall. The the iPhone seventeen al dente where it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, it gives them permission to try crazy stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhones are really, really, really great. And I would argue have been for a long time, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really great. And they’re also really, really kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of boring at this point. And that’s good, boring because they’re so great, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love for Apple to, to allow themselves to do like an iPhone 5C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all over again. You know, or whatever the colorful plastic ones were. Granted, those were not that popular. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone, or certainly the nerds, didn’t seem to like them for the most part. And this is where, you know, all the seven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fans, or the dozens of fans are writing us saying, -“Oh, I loved
⏹️ ▶️ John -“I feel like there’s been a lot of rehabilitation of the 5C. People look back on it fondly now.” No one was fond of it when it was being
⏹️ ▶️ John released, but people look back on it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fondly. I think for
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason you’re outlining, is like, remember when Apple did fun things?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And so I feel like having a slim or whatever, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even care what it’s called. I don’t care how
⏹️ ▶️ John IPhone Air was suggested in the chat room, which I think is an obvious example that they probably won’t use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably. I feel like having Apple, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, give themselves a little slack to get a little crazy, I think would be super fun. And it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the kind, and it would inject the kind of, you know, like interest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and fun into the iPhone that like the, the political situation here in America has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot more fun over the last week or two. And so I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really excited at the idea of Apple getting an additional phone where they can just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, loosen the belt and just kind of have fun and we’ll see if that happens, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’ll see if it’s, it’ll be folding, if it’ll be colorful, it’ll, or what it might be if it’ll just be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just absurdly thin, but I would love for them to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some fun and let us have some fun along with them. And that hasn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened in a meaningful way in a long time, especially with the top of the line device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And maybe the state of the art device is still the boring iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro or whatever, but like we’ve said, maybe there’s some interesting little tidbits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in treats in the 17 slim or whatever it ends up being. And I’m here for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m excited about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, if the iPhone 17 slim Ultra is the most expensive iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John that probably dooms it not to have exciting colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week. One password extended access manager
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and green chef. Thanks for our members who support us directly. You can join us at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the perks of being a member is you get our ATP overtime segment. In every show we do an extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bonus topic called ATP overtime. This week’s bonus is about AI and search.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Reddit, Google, and search GPT. A lot of good stuff happening there, so we’re going to talk about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, a lot of stuff happening there at least. We’re going to talk about that in ATP overtime. You can hear it by becoming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a member, atp.fm. Thanks for listening everybody and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accidental, tech podcast so long.
Callsheet & Overcast updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, we’ve had a busy time in our apps lives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I discussed on last show, I was about to launch the Overcast rewrite. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here we are now, two weeks later, and it is launched, and it is out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. I’ve already issued three bug fix updates to it in the time since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we last talked about it. And meanwhile, your app Call Sheet is about to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit its one year anniversary. And I kind of wanted to go kind of revisit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, what’s been going on, how has call sheet gone? And I wanted to discuss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco briefly how the overcast launch has gone so far in our after show. So you want to go first?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure, I certainly can. I don’t have too much to say at the moment, because the renewals,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t watch App Store Connect like a hawk, you know, it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do look at it from time to time, but I’m not sitting in there, like refreshing every five minutes to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what my retention rates look like or anything like that. So I haven’t gone in and I haven’t gone spelunking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try to get advanced warning or notice or enthusiasm about what my renewal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey situation looks like. But it occurred to me, I think because I got my own renewal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notice. And obviously, if you don’t recall, I had put,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I almost said overcast, I had put a call sheet on the App Store a couple of days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before its official release to do a few things that apparently CrowdStrike didn’t want to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like test and make sure that in-app purchase worked and your subscriptions work and so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forth. And so my renewal notice came before most and it was the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, in a month you’re going to renew. And this was like two or three, maybe even three or four weeks ago at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I got that renewal notice and I knew it was coming and I thought to myself, well, oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably need to start reminding people what they’re getting for their money. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the more I think about it, the more I think I might have priced call sheet a little too cheaply. And I’m not interested in having that conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now. But I’m happy to have that conversation another time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t that interesting? I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey surprised to hear that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco as I sit here at 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks a year, trust me, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right. So we again, we can have that conversation. I just don’t think now’s the time for it. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with that said, even though I don’t think it’s a bad deal by any stretch of the imagination,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do also concurrently think I should remind people, hey, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’re getting for your money. And so a couple of weeks ago now I put up a blog post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I basically said, hey, renewals are coming. Here’s a list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of literally all the release notes summarized, but all the release notes from all the different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versions I released in the past year. And there’s a lot. And you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I’m not one to toot my own horn, really ever. But there’s a lot here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I really think in my heart that if you even vaguely enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call sheet, if you open it at least once every month, I think it’s worth the money. I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really do. And I hope that people who are getting these renewal notices for year subscriptions, and I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also offer monthly subscriptions. So, you know, some people have renewed and some people fallen off already. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the year people, I really thought it would be a good idea to remind them, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s what you’re getting. And that’s what I did. And we’ll see how it goes. If you haven’t renewed yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I encourage you to please allow it to happen. If you’re feeling particularly generous,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can go into the app and into the in-app settings and where you manage your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subscription, you can go in there and you can choose a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subscription. And if you want, want, once you tap the choose different subscription or choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new subscription button, that you see the monthly and the yearly plans, but then there’s a more purchase options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of text that’s a button that you can tap on and you can choose to even up your subscription if you like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or, I mean, you could also back it down if you wanted to, but we’re not going to do that around here, right? So you could up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your subscription to either $20 a year or $50 a year from the default 10 or excuse me, 9
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually. You don’t have to do that, it would be really neat if you did. And so I’m hopeful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in the next, I don’t know, two to four weeks, I’ll get a, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey candidly, I hope I get a whole pile of money from Apple, from people who have, you know, renewed and re-upped,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that would be really great. And I have my fingers and toes crossed. I have no reason to believe that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not going to go well, but this is my first rodeo when it comes to subscriptions. So I’m nervous about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and, and I’m hopeful. And so that’s basically my story. I’m happy to, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have questions, I’m happy to talk further about it. But if not, we can talk overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am a little curious. Do you have the stats anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like how many people have told it not to renew? Because that’s something that we now have like store kit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to or whatever, you know, at some point, they change that. So that now you have that data available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you. And I wonder like, Oh, like, I knew that. Yeah, you can you can tell if something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is set not to renew now. Oh, right. I see your point. I see your point. I also I use app figures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to track my stuff. Do you use anything like app figures to for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, I don’t I probably should
⏹️ ▶️ John should have figures is really good despite their latest update being annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Probably should you know embrace that honestly I was talking to I think was Ben McCarthy about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and when they released I think it was ketchup That they did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subscriptions. If I’m not mistaken This ketchup is a really fun like pokedex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of thing for Pokemon players We’ll put a link in the show notes. In any case, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was Ben that I was talking to that and they were wondering, you know, would I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roll my own when it comes to in-app purchasing and subscription and all that or would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do it differently? And honestly, I don’t regret rolling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my own, but I think if I were to do it all over again, I would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just use Revenue Cat. And I think they are a former sponsor to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honest. and I genuinely sitting here right now, I don’t know if they’re a future sponsor, but they should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. I think if I were to do it all over again, I’d probably just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do Revenue Cat because you get so much for free and I think I’ve gotten for better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco and for worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it’s not for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, fair. It depends on how much you’re earning, I suppose. My level, I think it might be for free. I haven’t looked at this in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while, but I think if I were to do it again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s nothing stopping me from like, adding it now, but it seems like a whole bunch of rework for not that much benefit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if I were to launch a new app tomorrow, I’d probably start by at least looking into revenue, cats pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and seeing if I thought it was worth it. Um, because that gives you a lot more of this visibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I have right now, because I have to do it all myself. And I, and I see what you’re saying about knowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if people are going to renew or not. And honestly, it never occurred to me to, to fire analytics entries about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. So no, it’s going to be an adventure for all of us, but particularly me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say for whatever it’s worth, maybe this will prevent them from becoming a future sponsor. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think with your needs and with StoreKit too, I don’t think you need RevenueCat. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, the in-app purchase handling of subscription stuff used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a lot harder. It is a lot less hard now, especially if you’re willing to not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do server-side validation, which it depends, like, you know, how much risk are you willing to take for somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stealing your service through some kind of weird jailbreak or whatever. Like for me, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduced that over time, like to the point where I think right now, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, with my rewrite, I have to double check the server side, but I think I’m actually not validating the receipts server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side anymore. I’m still sending them to the server and the server is saying, okay, but I’m not actually doing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco validation because they changed like the signature mechanism a long time ago and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just never updated to it. And like, I would have to rewrite it. And like when I was trying to get my rewrite out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the door, like the last thing I needed to spend time on was validating an app purchase receipt in the server for something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t cost me much money if somebody steals it. So I’m like, I just said, all right, whatever. Just say, okay, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trust the device validation enough. And so far that’s been fine. And I think as long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you’re willing to do that, which for most apps where you’re just like kind of getting features and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting like expensive resources necessarily, that’s generally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think ultimately you could do this all yourself, you are doing it all yourself so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I think you could do it again very easily yourself. Anyway, that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will be very curious to hear how the renewals go. In my experience, renewal rates are actually very high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Overcast, but that’s a different app, it’s a different audience. My renewal rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is shockingly high. Like I don’t have it in front of me, but like when Apple did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the small business program for developers where you pay 85% or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get 85 15 from the beginning not not just after one year of renewals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that didn’t change my income very much because I already have so many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who subscribe for more than a year to overcast that my average rate I was paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was something more like 80 20 or whatever that yeah it was something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 80 20 instead of 85 15 like it. So it was it was already pretty close to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up from 70 30. So anyway, so yes. So how are you? How do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel about like it? How has a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of call sheet been like for you like you know professionally like how happy are you with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? How is it? You know how is it going like kind of momentum wise not just money wise?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think it’s gone better than I ever could have dreamed. You know, we’ve talked about it on and off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last year or so. I mean, I’m happy to go on and talk about this for as long as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want, but in the interest of trying to be a little bit brief about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a very big problem with call sheet, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been well-received and well-regarded enough that it’s hard to cling to my imposter syndrome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I mean? Oh, what a problem, Casey. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, I’m saying this with a big smile on my face, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco such a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people keep telling me that I’m good at my job. I know, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god! It’s really difficult. Please, please weep for me. No, but I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all snark and kidding aside, it’s been weird trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not reinvent myself or reevaluate, but it’s been weird, and it’s hard, honestly, if I’m being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely honest with you. It’s hard for me to accept what evidence seems to indicate, which is that I’m not altogether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dope, you know, and that I actually have put together something that’s pretty great. It’s not perfect, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty great. And you know, I, I’ve been trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey embrace that without letting it go to my head. And it’s cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be mentioned in the same breath as Overcast or any number of other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey highly regarded iOS apps. And it’s a very unusual thing for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine, if you will, if you’re a long-time listener, it was 10 years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, which is a long time, but it feels like it was just yesterday that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was making fun of fast text, and justifiably, and especially the icon, justifiably. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was a long time ago, and in a far cry from where I am today. But it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out if you’re persistent and stubborn, and you are willing to just keep trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and if you’re willing to keep failing to a degree, it turns out you can come out eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with something pretty great and that’s where I’ve gotten. And it’s been really hard and weird in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best possible way for me to accept that, hey, I’m actually pretty good at my job
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s pretty awesome. And I’ve been really overjoyed by that. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably shouldn’t admit this publicly, but I’m very tired and I’m feeling a little sensitive in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy way. once in a while, like maybe once a week, I’ll search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for overcast. I’ll search for call sheet in the app store just to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my little editor’s choice badge because it is so lovely and wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and means so much to me that I am one of a relatively small list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of apps that has that badge and it just makes me really happy. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s probably not something I I should be saying out loud, but here we are. And we’re amongst friends, so it’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I just, I’m really proud of that. I really, really, really am. And I’m super proud of my upgrade that I received.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s just, it’s, you know, you look around and you say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, and I think from the song, it was meant in a not so great way, but you look around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in a good way, you say, this is not my beautiful life. Like, how is this me? I was always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one everyone was making fun of. And now I’m one of the ones that people are saying, hey, you do great work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s such an amazing professional and personal achievement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m so deeply thankful for. And again, I’m not trying to sit here and say that Call Sheet is perfect. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. I’m not trying to say that it’s without problems. It’s not. It has problems. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really am proud of it, and I’m really overjoyed with the reception to it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really am optimistic, very optimistic, about how the next month or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so will go when I start getting more feedback from Apple and eventually, hopefully,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a big, relatively speaking, a big fat check from Apple. So it’s been great. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if I’ve actually answered your question or not, but it’s been really great. And I’m really thankful for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s great. Honestly, I’m very happy to hear that. Because it’s a great app and you deserve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this success and happiness and some fighting against your massive imposter spree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tell me about Overcast, though, because the release happened, if I recall correctly, recorded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our most recent episode right before release. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I have that? Right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after. So it doesn’t, it doesn’t, it’s something like that. Um, yeah, so we recorded it, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I released it on July 16th. And so this is kind of the first episode we’re really recording,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like after it has been out and after the reception and all the bug fixes and everything else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, it has been a whirlwind, but mostly a good one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is, there are some exceptions to the goodness, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll get, well, you know, let’s do the exceptions first. I’ll end on a good note.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey There we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The exceptions are, I’m getting a ton of negative reviews. Right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, AppFigures does a helpful thing if you go over to the ratings tab, where you can graph
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of things, including your average rating over time. And my average rating over time, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, from before the update it was 4.72 it is now 4.68 so it has dropped a tiny bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s because I have like 65,000 total ratings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also graphs some things for you that are more informative such as average of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new ratings. That’s an interesting metric. What’s the average among new ratings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each day? That tells a very different picture. That, the average of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new ratings from before the release, was in the high fours, like 4.7, 4.5.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the average of new ratings is 1.9.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s what’s happening. That’s undesirable. Yes, so what’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is my customer sentiment is on fire. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think overall the customer sentiment is not terrible for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rewrite, but the people who don’t like it are being a lot louder than the people who do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first of all, listeners, if you do like the rewrite, I would love to hear from you in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco form of a star rating in the app store to that effect. Please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But secondly, it is also an important feedback mechanism. In the rewrite,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there have been some fires I had to put out that justifiably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made people upset. There have been a few bugs that I was able to iron out, including a release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally this morning that did some of the more important bug fixes like playlist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco orderings being lost and stuff like that. There are a couple of big bug fixes in today’s update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s also design changes and there’s the big feature change of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing streaming. What was interesting so far is I thought losing streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would cost me a lot more in user sentiment and negativity. What has actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost me a lot more, you know, certainly people don’t, there are people out there who don’t like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s fine. I accept that. That’s, I knew losing streaming was an expensive thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hoped and I think so far still believe that it would be worth it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of Problems and technical complexity that it solves I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think are worth Taking a temporary hit in that area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I was not expecting was that most of the problems people have with the new design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not about streaming They’re about like just you know smaller little little things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller behavioral changes some of which I’ve already fixed Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took out one tap play mode in in the original release. I have since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco re-added it, because you would not believe how many people were very upset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that. Like, that was a massive thing. Just about how the episode cells respond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to taps. Like, that was a huge thing for people. So I ended up putting that back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of the negativity now, there’s a little bit left of, that’s like people who hit a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug here and there. For the most part, that’s mostly ironed out. Most of the negativity now is design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs. Now I use that term literally, I’m not saying design feedback, because there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are people who hate any design change. I accept that as part of doing a design change, like that’s what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You do a design change, because you kind of have to just stay fresh over time. And whenever you do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna have people who hate it. And that’s gonna give you a bunch of one-star reviews. Okay, I accept that as a reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of doing business. But design bugs are things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this feature is not being found, or people are misunderstanding this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one of the, like right now, I am literally like, my head is like on fire with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brainstorming ways to solve a massive design bug I have, which is people are not finding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm, isn’t it a little clock at the bottom? I never use it, so I’ve never paid attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a little clock at the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, okay. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I moved it into the audio settings panel. Like, so the bottom now has, you know, airplane in the middle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the right is show notes info, And on the left is like the, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of adjustments icon. And that’s where in that panel, you have sleep timer and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio settings. No one is finding it there. I’ve had so many people say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you took out the sleep timer. Where is the sleep timer? Uh, I have also had many people say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did find it, but they, they hate it being there. It that it’s like that they have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now have one more tap to get to it. And they use it so often. That’s like a huge friction point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have to figure out where to put that. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s going to be my next kind of, you know, larger update is going to be like tweak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the now playing layout. I want to try to put the chapter list in where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the info is, like in the screen, not as a sheet above the screen. Maybe also the audio settings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe convert the buttons down below from 3 to 5 to put the sleep timer back. And one other thing, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a star, who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re straight lines, Marco. You’re straight lines. I know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. You’re gonna be in an hourglass now. I know. So, I mean, I was. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, for a long time. It’s kind of the opposite of my actual body shape. But…
⏹️ ▶️ John What we’re talking about is that he had aligned the items where, like, the progress bar is wide, then the three buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle are a little bit narrower, then the three buttons in the bottom are narrower still, and you could draw a straight line at an angle
⏹️ ▶️ John down both sides, going from wide to narrow. But once he gets rid of the three items in the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John and replaces it with four or maybe even five Straight line is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gone and four would be tricky because much of that screen visually is centered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s a very centered design heavy screen and if if I make it four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then the airplay Source label when it’s not the built-in speaker I I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show the name of your headphones or that are connected or whatever and that would have a hard time being centered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with four things down there. So it would it would probably go back to being five, which is what it was before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one of them would be the sleep timer. And the other one would probably be the star. And or maybe maybe a Marcus played
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Well, I haven’t quite decided all that yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John going to get all the reviews like, yeah, he finally brought back the sleep timer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. Well, yeah, well, because it would never actually left. People aren’t like that. But that’s a design bug. Like the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like the design is not working. If people are not finding this like that, then that is a design bug I have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix. Those are a little harder to fix than functionality bugs because it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t quite know you know you could do some testing you could you could you know do some like surveys or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t until it’s really out there you don’t really get the full effect of like how effective this thing is or isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m gonna have to you know look at stuff like that but otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has gone overall very well the trend of my ratings is indeed very concerning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for long-term health of my ratings that that is extremely concerning but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that exception and with the exception of the bugs I had to fix which are mostly and mostly most of the bugs are fixed now I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has overall gone very well in terms of having to rewrite a 10 year old app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from scratch in a new language and new UI framework I think it went very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there is still a lot of work to do but it’s mostly it’s mostly now getting down to like the more fun stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know re-adding little details that didn’t quite make the ship date or whatever else. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, it’s, uh, it has been quite a roller coaster. I am exhausted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very glad I hit this release date. It was very important to me. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m glad that it is done and out there now. It was this huge thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s been hanging over me for a long time. And, again, like, as I talked about, you know, two episodes ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really was getting to me personally and emotionally as a developer that I wasn’t shipping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing. It wasn’t out there. I was falling behind whatever else. So to have all of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind me is just a massive deal to me. So now I just have to figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make people hate it less. But again, I don’t want to overstate the problem. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure that the people who were leaving all the one-star reviews, that doesn’t seem to be the majority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opinion because Because if that was a majority opinion, I think there’d be a lot more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So mathematically, I think I’m still okay. But I do want to try to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how can I fix design changes here and there that are causing people paper cuts and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see if I can improve that. But that’s going to be a little bit longer of a process, probably over the span of weeks, not days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe even longer depending. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll see. I mean, from my perspective, from what I’ve seen, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like the response has been really, really, really good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not here to argue about, you know, whether or not the ratings have gone up or down or whatever. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would not at all surprise me if your ratings have plummeted because you have a wildly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different user interface. And that isn’t necessarily bad, but as you said earlier, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different and different when it comes to user interfaces for a lot of people is bad. And if it’s better, it’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it would not surprise me at all if you’re taking a bath on ratings because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s one of the only ways that regular people feel like they have leverage over you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in terms of what I’ve seen and the people I’ve spoken to about it, everyone seemed pretty universally enthusiastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a couple of bugbears here and there. I had no idea how unbelievably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offended people are by two-tap playback because I’ve seen some of these conversations go by in Slack.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t get why it is such an immense burden, but oh my word, apparently it’s an immense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey burden to tap twice instead of once to start a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have come to the same conclusion as you that this is probably unnecessary and useless complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to continue to have the two different ways of doing it. But here we are. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I had a couple of very frustrating bugs that understandably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since you had this deadline you didn’t fix before release, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, I don’t know if the playback when you do priority podcasts, you know what I’m thinking of, I forget how you describe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it specifically, but basically it would finish playback on a podcast and stop, stop dead instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of continuing with the next one. And you fix that bug certainly in the test flight beta. Is that released yet or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that, yeah, that was fixed on day two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think or day three. That was, that was one of the that was the biggest day one on fire bug was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continuous play was not working with play next by priority like that it was and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t real like a couple of people reported that during the beta and I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find it and it seemed like a weird edge case I figured like I can’t find it yet I need a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sample to really find this and sure enough I got one but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was it was like oh, this broke in a really big way for people. And it took
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, I think it took me like two days to figure it out. But that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely like a show stopping, like must fix immediately kind of bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I mean, once you got that squared away, I was good. And you know, things are in different places,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you get used to it. Like at first I really didn’t like not having the lateral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey swipe to look at show notes and stuff, but it’s fine. Like you just relearn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, I was going to say gesture, but that’s a bit overloaded in this context. You relearn what you have to do in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use the app. And that sounds bad. I think I’m coming across negatively. I don’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to at all. It’s fine. And the app is responsive and it works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well and it lets you do what you need to do with it efficiently. So I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an update you should be proud of. And it certainly seems like. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know a lot of this is your hair being on fire because it’s a new release and you’re putting out fires and fixing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bugs and blah, blah, blah. But I just get the vibe that you are far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more productive in the code base today than you were yesterday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey day. Night and day. And that’s got to feel incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’ve issued like three updates in, what, two weeks? Like, I have never had this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of productivity with the code, because it is all like new, fresh code. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s better. Like, it’s just better code. I am 10 years better as a programmer writing this code as I was with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the old app. So like, and the languages have gotten better, the tools have gotten better, like everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has gotten better and more productive now. Like one thing that’s interesting is like, my crash rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way down because Swift just doesn’t crash as much when you write it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correctly as old apps. And I’m doing a lot less with concurrency in weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. And so like that’s, like a lot less unsafe concurrency practice basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like there’s all sorts of ways like the new app really does not crash very much at all compared to the old app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the old app wasn’t crashing constantly or anything but it just it’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the you know for some people the new app has been less reliable because they were hitting some of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs. I’m curious to see like from today now that I fixed the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playlist reordering bug at least the biggest one and there was a minor progress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loss bug that I I also fixed in today’s build. So I’m hoping I’m hoping to see like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I think more people out there will start to see the rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as being as solid as it is for me and my usage. And I and I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they get that and appreciate that. And it works as well for them as it works for me. But either way, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I have to fix something or tweak something or change something, it is so much. I mean, look, I added one tap playback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like an hour. it was so fast to add that back in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like it’s just it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like working with SwiftUI, oh my god, it’s a delight. Like yeah, it’s a slow start,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is so easy to do stuff like like, you know, for instance, one thing, you know, some people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, when you change the design, the immediate feedback you get is, give me an option to change it back. Jared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ranere, J.D. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Steven Punishment Right. Jared Ranere, J.D.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get it, but it’s bananas. Steven Punishment I get it. And so, you know, and so it’s it helps to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Like, don’t react immediately when people say that. Like, give it a second. See how you and they feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after a bit of time, you know? But if for some reason I have to do things like, you know, give people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way to view playlists as a vertical list again, instead of a horizontal list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I can do that without a ton of work. It’s some work. It’s not nothing. It certainly creates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some more conditions I have to test in the future. That’s probably the biggest cost of it. But to have things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like UI preferences there are very easy in SwiftUI compared to how they were before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So much easier. So that’s the kind of value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’ve built by having this new code base. I have created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier opportunities to make the app better for people, to add more weird options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I wanna have, I probably won’t do this, but on the Now Playing screen, If I want to have a like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prominent sleep timer mode where you can go set a setting and the sleep timer is always displayed in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom. Like I can do that very easily now. I won’t do that because that’s a bad idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like I can do things like that. So like, you know, like one, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things people have requested since the beginning of Overcast is an on-screen volume control.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way the music app has an on-screen volume control. You have the big slider. I’ve never had one in Overcast because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve always thought it wasn’t worth screen space took up. Well now if I want to have an option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that most people won’t want or need and I won’t want it to be on for most people but if I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have an option that adds you can you know what fine have an on-screen volume control I can do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now with very little work and it probably won’t break too much if anything and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like that kind of flexibility I just didn’t have before with UI kit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with all my like massive complicated layout code and everything. I just didn’t have any of that flexibility before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now I do. So that’s what I’ve built. I’ve built the ability to have not only a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast framework now and what seems so far to be a much more reliable one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also to be able in the future to iterate more quickly and to give more people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird little options that I don’t think should be the default, but I can add them for you. Like I can do so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more of that now and so much more easily. And I can actually iterate a lot to find the best design that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best in the first place that I don’t even have to make options for. Like there’s so much of that possibility now and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I was building towards and I’m finally here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s awesome. I mean, I hear your concern about your ratings and I get it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I absolutely get it and it makes sense, but I feel like overall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you sound like a coiled up spring that has been released,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, that you’re feeling mostly at peace. And once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get through this phase of, screw that guy, he changed what I knew. It’s different, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it. And I think once you get through that, you’re gonna be in a real, real solid, real good place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you certainly sound like you’re much better for it. And I’m excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you, because I know this was a long, hard road, and you’ve made it to the end.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or, well, maybe not the end, but you’ve made it to the next milestone, the next waypoint, and that’s super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you. And to torture this metaphor further, it’s like that highway was ending.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I made it to the junction with the next highway. Because like the highway I was on, I’d reached the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end. And I couldn’t keep going on that highway. Like I could not keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going with the old code base anymore. I just couldn’t. It had no future. It barely had a present. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I couldn’t work on it anymore. I couldn’t maintain it anymore. I couldn’t keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with it. I couldn’t add new features. I couldn’t iterate the design. Like it had just grown too much and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too complicated and I couldn’t keep up with it. And so there was no other option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there was no option to continue on that path. It was merely a question of how great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or how acceptable can I make the new path to people? And you know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be an ongoing process. I’m still working on it. I’m still open to ideas for changing things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still gonna tweak the design here and there, but we’re not going back. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t go back. There is no back to go to. This is the way. Ready
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, well, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have one? No. No. I feel left out. I do have two apps. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John buys them, they’re fine. Two Dinky
⏹️ ▶️ John They do not have subscriptions. I don’t have any renewals. People paid me $5 four years ago, and that’s all the
⏹️ ▶️ John money I’m ever getting from them. There’s no new sales. Although I did, while you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys were on through that, I did count up how many releases I’ve done. How many releases for my two Dinky apps do you think I’ve done total?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And how many years did you say?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m gonna say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe like 15, 20? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was gonna say 20.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh wow. Oh, look at you.
⏹️ ▶️ John 75 releases for that $5 you paid me once back in 2020, you’ve gotten 75 really well, 75 combined releases. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much more on one app than the other, but anyway. Yeah, no, I still like my apps. I use them every day. I’m glad they keep
⏹️ ▶️ John working. I still have to test, I did test build. I test one of them on Sequoia. I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John test build another one to see how they’re doing. But I did make one of them strict and currency compliant, like
⏹️ ▶️ John earlier in the year. The other one I’ll tackle eventually too. So I do continue to develop these
⏹️ ▶️ John and they exist. And my review activity is
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing, no reviews. So what does that mean? My average is zero or five.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, sometimes nothing is better than what you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I have a good average. Don’t want to break the average with bad reviews.