catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

599: Where Did Salad Go?

08 Aug 2024

Google’s antitrust lawsuit and its role in Apple’s services narrative, the immense power of 1-star reviews, macOS security vs. utility, and a road trip that relied on Electrify America.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
  • DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online.
  • RevenueCat: Build and grow your subscription business.

Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Pre-show
  2. Twitter song: our bad
  3. 1-star reviews
  4. Sponsor: RevenueCat
  5. US curbside EV charging
  6. iPhone 16 color rumors
  7. Crowdstrike follow-up
  8. Sponsor: DeleteMe (code atp)
  9. Sequoia screen-capture nag
  10. Sponsor: Squarespace
  11. Google monopoly suit
  12. Ending theme
  13. Neutral

Pre-show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We never decided if we had a pre-show. Oh, apparently we don’t. I have a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very boring pre-show. It’s perfect. Perfect for the summer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s give it a shot. What do you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got? Let me put it this way. There are times that I’ll find out or notice that Marco has removed something that I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said from the show. I would say 70 to 80% of the time, it’s a good call.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s for the best. 10 to 15% of the time, I’m like, what the hell, man? And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then 5% of the time, it’s something else entirely. But this is one of those things where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are probably going to remove it and it’s for the best. But no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I so if you

⏹️ ▶️ John wait, is your pre show something that you think Marco is going to remove? Yes. Because that’s not a good pre show because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can’t use that as the pre show. Look at look at it this way. Anytime I try to come up with a pre show, we end up going off on the rails

⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the rails, not on the rails. It’s opposite of that off the rails. And then we find something actually interesting to talk

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. So here we go. And that’s the pre show that’s only for the bootleg because Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to remove it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. as promised.

Twitter song: our bad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with an apology tour. Let’s do some follow up. What happened with the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey theme song there, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so last episode, I accidentally put in the old theme song about Twitter rather than the new theme song

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Mastodon. My bad. Ending theme one, which I used for 10 years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever it’s been, have a bit of a habit on that one. And I accidentally picked that one instead of picking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ending theme 2024.af. So my bad. Sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It happens to the best of us. The offending parties have been sacked, as they say. No big deal.

1-star reviews

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would also like to go on an apology tour. Last episode we were talking about Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Call Sheet. Incidentally, today is the day, is the one year anniversary of Call Sheet. But- Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco congrats. Hey, thanks. Are you looking forward to the App Store Connect Report tomorrow morning?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t even know how this works. I’ve never had a subscription app before. So I’m scared to look, to be honest with you. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, Mike on Analog, we talked about this and Mike had advised, just expect like half

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what you had originally. And I thought, you know what? He’s probably right. that’s probably a good place to start is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever money I made a year ago, just expect half that. And hopefully that’s a good place to reach. And uh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully that that’s, hopefully I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John achieve

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you have to wait more than just like, I know it’s like the anniversary, but like, isn’t there kind of, wasn’t there several days

⏹️ ▶️ John between like the announcement and the publication of the episode where you talked about it and when people got around to listening

⏹️ ▶️ John to the episode, isn’t, it’s going to be kind of smeared out over at least a week.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s part of the reason why I didn’t plan on looking tomorrow. I figured whenever we hit like September-ish

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is when I’ll start looking into it or just wait for hopefully a check from Apple that hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is more than $10 and say, oh, that went well or oh, wow, that really stinks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or the other. I digress. We were talking about call sheet and overcast,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I had made a comment that I thought was very clear what I was saying, and it appears

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a lot of people did not understand because I saw a lot of grumpy people on Reddit, which is arguably redundant,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but here we are. And a handful of people reached out via Mastodon. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I was talking about was, and admittedly I used kind of like a mocky, you know, dorky voice, but what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was trying to say was whenever an app changes its interface, no matter if the change

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is better, worse, or whatever, just by virtue of the fact that it is different,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that pisses a lot of people off. And a lot of times what those people will do is they’ll run to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey App Store and do a one-star review. Oh, it’s different. One star. I stand by that. Now, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my delivery wasn’t exactly the best, but I stand by that. I still believe it. But a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to hear me say, oh, anyone who whines about it being different is wrong,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is not at all what I was trying to say. There are legitimate reasons why one could complain about overcast,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about call sheet. You know, John’s apps are so simple, nobody could complain about them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If only

⏹️ ▶️ John that were true.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But all kidding aside, you know, there are very legitimate reasons to complain about the changes that Marco has made

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything that I have done on call sheet. Like they are not above reproach. And I think that that’s what people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got from what I was saying, which I’m not really sure how or why, but here we are. But I just wanted to be absolutely clear. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was the funny

⏹️ ▶️ John voice. I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think

⏹️ ▶️ John the funny voice you’re putting yourself in the place of the person complaining by saying these people sound like this.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s that’s I think that’s the main source of the complaint. If you hadn’t done, if you hadn’t done the funny voice, I think it would have worked out a lot better

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like you’re making fun of the people who have this complaint when you do that voice you’re saying these people are

⏹️ ▶️ John not justified in their complaints

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if they do sound like that though you

⏹️ ▶️ John still

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco shouldn’t make fun of them

⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s just their regular voice then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah i mean to be fair like there are a lot of people who do sound like that in their reviews but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also like i i see why people do the one star thing because if you If you think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the perspective of a typical iPhone user,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they are accustomed to is big companies redoing their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps all the time, messing up their habits, making their apps worse for their customers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with their customers having basically no power whatsoever. So customers feel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco powerless and kind of helpless, and the one tool they have, the one lever they can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull that they know will have some effect on every single app is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one star nasty review like they know that and so I understand why people jump to that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the entire rest of the market and industry has told them has trained them like that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is your only power and by the way we don’t care about anything else you might do like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know if you just write into support for most companies that’s going to be you know even less

⏹️ ▶️ Marco effective than emailing me, which is really saying something. But so I get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why people do it. I still think it’s not the nicest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to do if, you know, so the one star review,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they are often saying is, I dislike a change that’s been made to this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. But what one star, like the lowest rating you can give an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, what that means ostensibly is this is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible, like broken or dysfunctional app. Like this means this app is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like zero percent useful to you or to me or to whatever. And so I feel like it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s part of the problem with the star rating scale. We see this all over everything uses star ratings, not just apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You tend to get a lot of people who use five stars and one star. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they really, I think, probably mean is like thumbs up or thumbs down. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the scale, the rating scale gives the impression of more granularity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more kind of consideration on what is this a two star, is it a three star? It gives

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the impression of that. And kind of the math is assuming that. But what people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually do does not really reflect that. So what I get annoyed by is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when people are like, this app that I use every day changed something that I don’t like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one star. Well, you use the app every day?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s literally, you’re giving it the worst rating you can give it. Like that seems like an overreaction

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a misrepresentation of the feelings that you’re feeling or what you’re trying to communicate.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I understand again, why people do it because they think this is the only chance I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to maybe do something that works, that gets noticed, that affects change.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I see why people do it. It’s a crap system, but it is the system we have. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have to deal with it as app developers, and we have no choice, because of the way the app store works. If you do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Apple thinks never existed and sell software on your website, for instance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can choose whether you display star ratings from users or not, and you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of sell your products however you wanna sell them. When you’re on iOS, your only choice, outside

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the EU, I guess, but your only choice is you have to accept that there’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a star rating and random reviews from random people very prominently displayed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your app page before anybody downloads it. So you’re stuck with the system that we have and you kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of have to play in it. So that being said, the one star review

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamic is incredibly dysfunctional, extremely harmful to lots of developers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also it’s the tool people have and they use it for a reason. I wish they would use it with a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit more consideration. I wish they would actually use the other ratings that are not just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or five more often. Um, but Hey, but it’s the system we got, we got to live with it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would agree with that. Although I will say, and I think I’m probably speaking for you, Marco, but you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey jump in and correct me if not. For me, I don’t actually pay close

⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention to like reviews and star ratings and whatnot. I do glance from time to time, but to me, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey best way to affect change in my apps is to use the in-app contact form or which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is really just sending an email, but they effectively send me an email and tell me what’s bothering you and why it’s bothering

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you and for triple bonus points, if you have a suggestion as to what to do differently, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I don’t like this. Well, that’s not necessarily actionable. I don’t like this because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, okay, now we’re talking or even better. I don’t like this because whatever And I suggest,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, you’re my new best friend. Because now, even if I don’t agree, now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I at least understand what the problem is, why it’s a problem, and here is what you consider to be, and I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean this to be dismissive, like I mean this genuinely, what you consider to be a worthwhile

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and reasonable fix for the problem. And that, to me, is way better and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way more actionable. And I agree with what you were saying, Marco, that in terms of leverage, the only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey real leverage anyone has other than stopping a subscription or something, is a one-star

⏹️ ▶️ Casey review, and I agree with that. But in terms of actually achieving the goal you’re looking for,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then to me anyway, the best thing you can do is email me or use the in-app feedback or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what have you in order to give me the justification for it, not because I’m the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey king and I don’t wanna be bothered, but because I don’t understand otherwise. If you don’t give

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me that justification and just say, well, I don’t like the way this works, well, I don’t know what to do with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously this was the best option I could come up with. So explain to me why, or like I said, even better,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey give me a suggestion.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the problem is, the one star review thing does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, in the sense that, like I know, I saw some news earlier, like Sonos is really, they’re still kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reeling from their big app thing, which scared the crap out of me when I saw it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, I’m still seeing, my overcast reviews are terrible since the redesign.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are awful to the point where like my business is on fire.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a small fire on a you know on a pretty big building, but it is on fire. I need to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco react. I need to take action. This is not optional. If I do not take action, my business will go away

⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon. Like not well not you know not too soon. I have a lot of you know it turns out over you know when you don’t reset

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your star ratings over ten years, the math works pretty well in your favor that like it takes a lot to move the average

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down because it’s like even, you know, even a few straight weeks of one-star reviews there’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, thousands of reviews to balance it out from the last 10 years mathematically with the average.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But all of these one-star reviews that I’m getting are forcing me to take action.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am being forced to make changes to like, you know, consider, you know, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to re-add, you know, one tap play. I’m having to make design changes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to have to add more options to the app. I’m going to have to like add more buttons, compromise my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco design, compromise my simplicity. I’m actually going to have to make the app in certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways worse in my opinion in order to placate the one-star review people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have no choice. As an iOS developer, if you’re getting a ton of one-star reviews over something,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to fix it. If you care about the future of your app, because if your star rating

⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes down like in a meaningful way on the average, you will get way fewer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloads and it’s really bad for your business. So the fact is like this method works

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I kind of hate that it works, but again this is the system we’re in. We have no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco choice. If there are that many people leaving you one-star reviews, you have to fix whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re complaining about whether you agree with it or not. So it is kind of frustrating as a developer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have to give your customers that much power over what you do, because your app design is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a democracy, but they kind of turn it into one in a way. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can, again, I understand why people use the one-star review

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lever, because it’s the only lever they have as users. But I also understand why developers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are like, I kind of hate that they hold this over me, because it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a dysfunctional system and there is no way to opt out of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just to put a bow on this though and to be absolutely clear, I am sorry that I came across

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a not so kind way. I try to be a decent guy and I think I failed there. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, there’s plenty of things that are worth complaining about. Just don’t complain just because it’s different. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all I was asking.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Revenue Cat. Now last week, you might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recall in the after show, Casey brought up that if he could start call sheet all over again, he’d consider using Revenue

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cat for managing his in-app purchases. And then he jokingly challenged them to sponsor the show. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Revenue Cat’s developer advocate is Charlie Chapman, who you might know from his launch podcast, which I think is great and you should go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to it. It’s wonderful. And so he’s a listener of this show and he said, maybe let’s actually sponsor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. So they got in touch and here they are. might be the first sponsored follow up in a way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s the deal with Revenue Cat. They build an SDK and back end infrastructure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make adding in app purchases and subscriptions to your iOS or Android apps incredibly easy. So let Revenue

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cats engineers keep track of the constant changes to the store API’s. And they can even handle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your paywall UI with their back end configurable, but fully native paywall

⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI framework. So you can do stuff with this like run a B tests with with the experiments feature. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again with a native UI, you can figure out the back end, but then it’s using native code in the app. So you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do full AB tests with that feature. You can also use revenue cat charts to go way beyond

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what App Store Connect offers for understanding your business and they’re constantly improving. In fact, just this

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US curbside EV charging

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so we had a lot of genuinely interesting feedback with regard to curbside charging

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the United States. And I will try to make this as quick as possible, but a bunch of people wrote in and said, surprise,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprise, in some bigger cities, there is curbside charging. So it turns out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gareth Edwards pointed us to Plug NYC, which was apparently in August 2021,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading from untappedcities.com, some neighborhoods in New York are welcoming Plug NYC,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the city’s new curbside electric vehicle chargers that are being tested as a pilot program run as a partnership between

⏹️ ▶️ Casey NYC DOT, Con Edison, and FLO, one of the largest electric vehicle charging networks in North America,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is interesting because I’ve never heard of it, but that’s right. And an initial 34 stations with 100 plugs are coming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey across the five boroughs.

⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder, like, this is a story from 2021 where they had an initial 34 stations. How many stations are there

⏹️ ▶️ John now in 2024? I don’t know. But anyway, it seems like there’s a pilot program in New York City, at least

⏹️ ▶️ John one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then James Brown, presumably not the godfather of Seoul, from Berkeley writes, Berkeley launched a pilot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey program in 2018 for homeowners to install curbside EV chargers. Part of why it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey impractical, they recommend a homeowner’s budget between $5,000 and $20,000

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the install, including, that’s like what, half a Rivian repair? Heyo! For the install, including $2,500 of permit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fees. I’ve seen exactly one of these, ever. We’ll link in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes something that James provided with regard to how to make this happen. Kiel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Seattle writes, I drive an EV in Seattle, and we have some city-sponsored curbside fast charging. Very convenient.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. Voltz is a great podcast about green technology. They recently had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an episode about expanding curbside charging in the US. They provided a overcast link,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which 404s. So I think I’ve dug up the right link, and I’ll put that in the show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. But if it’s wrong, I guess blame me and not Kiel. Seth Karras

⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, Baltimore has been installing curbside electric chargers. See the photo of the chargers along Boston Street in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Baltimore’s Cannon neighborhood. And I don’t know if we’re going to include the photo, but we saw it, and it looked cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Juan Boyce writes, pole volt, P-O-L-E-V-O-L-T. That’s very clever. Curbside

⏹️ ▶️ Casey charging in North Carolina is a thing and included a link to PlugShare where you can see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a photograph of that. And finally, Sam Grover writes, neighborhood EV charging also exists in Portland,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I think we’ve kind of talked about already, but that’s all right. No, we didn’t. Nevermind. It exists in Portland. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link to the information on that from the city of Portland as well.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Seeing

⏹️ ▶️ John all these things of like programs that were started many years ago makes me feel like there was some

⏹️ ▶️ John effort to get curbside charging in some us cities and it just maybe didn’t quite get

⏹️ ▶️ John critical mass. Right. But it’s good that they’re trying. It’s good that they’re doing it. You know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, every little bit helps. I just hope it really starts to snowball somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the problem with charging infrastructure is that I think it’s kind of like when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies hired a bunch of consultants to make their iOS apps and then said, all right, thanks, bye.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then a couple of years later, wait, we need to update the app now because iOS changed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we have no idea. We didn’t budget for ongoing maintenance of this expense. We just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought it was a one-time thing. We make an app, check, done. and that’s curbside or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of EV charging infrastructure. The problem is it takes maintenance and follow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through. And it isn’t just like a one time, hey, let’s put a bunch of chargers there and then profit.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It takes more than that. It takes ongoing maintenance, as we will get to maybe in the after show.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s more difficult than you might expect to maintain these things over time. And at least it seems to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be according to the failure rate I’m seeing on Electrify America chargers.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the curbside ones is an interesting case of that. And I kind of understand why Berkeley was

⏹️ ▶️ John doing the thing of like basically making the homeowners essentially pay for it and own it. Because if it’s a thing that you paid

⏹️ ▶️ John for, you have some stake in keeping it going because presumably you’re using it for your car. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John why you did it. And it’s like, it’s your charger, you know what I mean? And so that’s sort of distributing the responsibility

⏹️ ▶️ John for maintenance. For chargers where you, like destination charger, I don’t know what the right term is. Like chargers that

⏹️ ▶️ John are like gas station. There’s a place where you go that’s a charger and there’s a whole bunch of chargers lined up just like there’d be a whole bunch of gas pumps.

⏹️ ▶️ John For those type of charger things. DC fast chargers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also called level three chargers.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but like what I’m saying is they’re not, they’re not like curbside where it’s just like they’re dotting the streets. There’s a place you go

⏹️ ▶️ John where a bunch of cars park and charge,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, destination chargers are actually something else. That’s like the ones in the hotel parking lot at some hotels.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco got it. Those are

⏹️ ▶️ John level twos, yeah. Yeah, although I would say for the hotel ones, that’s an example of where you feel like the hotel presumably pays for and owns those

⏹️ ▶️ John chargers or maybe gets rent for them or whatever. There’s some responsible body. For the ones that are like a place that you go,

⏹️ ▶️ John like a gas station, we would hope, and I think this was the hope, but apparently there

⏹️ ▶️ John are economics that don’t work out for this, that whoever owns

⏹️ ▶️ John that place where the chargers are would maintain them in the same way that someone who owns a gas

⏹️ ▶️ John station maintains the pumps. How often do you go and see pumps out of order gas stations? It happens,

⏹️ ▶️ John but if you live near one, for example, one of the pumps is out of order, you would expect like by next week, the pump’s not out of order

⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. the people who own the gas station got it fixed, right? And I know the

⏹️ ▶️ John economics of gas stations, at least I’ve read, I think the economics of gas stations very often has to do with selling things from the convenience store,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the gas is like a loss leader to get people to buy potato chips or whatever, right? And maybe there’s just not enough places

⏹️ ▶️ John where you can buy potato chips at like Tesla chargers, and that’s a bad example because they maintain theirs, but like, I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John the failure rates on electric chargers are so bad is because people had that mindset. It’s like, oh, it’s electricity. It’s not like a

⏹️ ▶️ John gas pump that has to be maintained and inspected. You know, you see those inspection stickers and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like all this whole infrastructure of the big trucks come and they fill the big tanks and the pumps are inspected

⏹️ ▶️ John and signed off on and people own things. It’s not like that, it’s just a plug. So like the iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John app you just described, once we install the plugs, we’re done, right? It’s like, no, someone needs to be looking at

⏹️ ▶️ John every single plug every single day. Just like at a gas station, someone who works at the gas station notices

⏹️ ▶️ John if one of the pumps stops working because they work at the gas station and someone says, hey, the pump’s not working and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John there all day and they say, oh, pump number three is out, and then they arranged to get pump number three fixed. And it seems

⏹️ ▶️ John like an electric charger thinks, A, there’s nobody there, and B, when it breaks, it just sits there for months and months and months, and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just like, is anyone ever gonna like, notice that this plug has not working, that the cord got

⏹️ ▶️ John yanked out, that it’s fraying, that the machine is on the fritz, that the software update failed or whatever?

⏹️ ▶️ John They just need someone to take ownership, like they do it at, I’m holding up gas stations,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a paragon of like, responsible stewardship of infrastructure, But honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s asking too much. The gas stations, we’re able to maintain those and they’re just,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would argue, mechanically more complex than chargers, if not technologically more complex. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope this does get better. It seems like it could, but maybe the economics needs to work out to pay someone to sit there and sell you potato chips

⏹️ ▶️ John at the Tesla Chargers. Thank you.

iPhone 16 color rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving along, we’ve got some color information. Apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s been some leaks over the last few weeks or week or so with regard to iPhone 16 and 16 Pro colors.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ve got a couple of posts from 9to5Mac that include some pictures. For the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, we’ve got white, very,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very black, blue, green, and pink. And interestingly, this camera

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bump is different, right? because it’s vertically up and down with a flash kind of separated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not even a

⏹️ ▶️ John key. So I was saying last week, like if you’re expecting that just, oh, it’s great when there’s gonna be top and bottom, it’ll be a narrow opening,

⏹️ ▶️ John but no, because you gotta have that flash exposed. And unless you wanna do like a punch hole cutout for the flash, which you probably don’t wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John do because it won’t be exact and it’ll throw shadows, it’s gonna end up being like a triangular cutout, don’t you think, for cases

⏹️ ▶️ John on this design? Yeah, probably.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think so. But the colors look good. Like the black and blue in particular look

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very good to my eyes. I can see why one would like the green. It’s a little bit on the bluey, like turquoisey

⏹️ ▶️ Casey side, just a touch, but it’s, I mean, actually all of them look pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John good.

⏹️ ▶️ John They are more saturated than all, but they seem kind of like pale, still a little bit pale to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I kind of miss, like my daughter’s got the purple phone. I think that’s more fun. There’s no yellow, there’s no red, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco at

⏹️ ▶️ John least like you said, at least the black is black and the white is white. Like those seem to be more solid and saturated. And

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, anyway, not a great color year, but not the worst. But that’s of course the 16 and the 16 plus.

⏹️ ▶️ John the phones for people who like colors.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. But if you are a professional, you don’t like color. No. You still will not like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey color this September because according to 95Mac, your choices are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey natural titanium, which is what I chose and actually does look really good, but that’s neither here nor there. You get natural titanium,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rose titanium, white titanium, or black titanium. Now, in the defense of these colors,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do genuinely think, and I am biased, that natural looks really damn good. And this black is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking black. Like this is a mighty black titanium, but still, can we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have fun colors on professional devices? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John not very colorful. Like I do like the black and white and I do like the natural titanium and the rose

⏹️ ▶️ John one presumably is red tinted. We don’t have like a picture of that, but that’s not really colors.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just shades of gray. And a nice set of shades of gray and one of the shades of gray has a tint of color

⏹️ ▶️ John in it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s it. I mean, just like all the pro phones that pretty much have ever existed. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, you can have very light gray, which they call white, very dark gray, which they call some form of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco black or space or whatever. Then you can have maybe a medium gray that has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a color whiffed by it, but it’s not, it’s basically, and this year was like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco comically bad, but the 15 Pro line, now we have like four different shades of gray and then a blue

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gray.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, people put cases on most of the time anyway, it’s not a big deal, though. Like I said, on my daughter’s phone, She has a

⏹️ ▶️ John purple 12 that she had a clear case on, and we recently got a new clear case to replace the

⏹️ ▶️ John old yellowed one. Looks really good in a clear case. Clear cases do show off the color of the phone. You know, that

⏹️ ▶️ John purple is a great color. She’s gonna be sad when eventually she has to replace that phone and her choice.

⏹️ ▶️ John If she had to pick from these colors, I don’t know what she would do. I mean, maybe she would like the pink or the pale green, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that purple was great. I miss it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if, I mean, this is wishcasting more than actual prediction.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I wonder if, assuming that the iPhone slim rumor actually has something behind it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for next year, I wonder if they would take advantage of the likelihood that like, I think slim

⏹️ ▶️ Marco owners might be less likely to use cases than everyone else, just because they would want to like kind of show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the slimness of it. Maybe it wouldn’t need a case as much because it would be much lighter, who knows.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or maybe people would use more clear cases to help show it off, you know. But I wonder if they would take the opportunity to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe have some more desirable or more flashy colors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the slim line. We’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, like I said last week, if it is going to be the most expensive phone, that means no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco colors. That’s true. I guess, yeah, following their trend, the less expensive phones have the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most color. The pros have only many shades of gray. So I guess maybe the slim

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would only come in like just an average 50% gray shade. Like that’s it, just the most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco average color that is no color.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, ultimately the Pro phones have about as much color in them as my martinis have vermouth. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just wave it nearby and call it a day. Mm-hmm. Bye!

Crowdstrike follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey CrowdStrike, we’re there. So we have a lot of feedback about CrowdStrike from various

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anonymous peoples. And I will read at least a little bit of one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One anonymous person writes, I am not a lawyer, but I have quite a bit of experience in negotiating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then enforcing software agreements between security vendors like CrowdStrike and large organizations. I can say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitively the type of click-through EULA or end user license agreement individuals are subject to are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in play when multinational giants do deals. Each contract is bespoke, with vendors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and customers going back and forth over months before inking deals lasting multiple years and millions of dollars.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So any CrowdStrike lawsuits won’t add or subtract to case law about EULAs. CrowdStrike Falcon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t something they sell to just anyone, and for sure not to individuals who would click through a one-sided EULA.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The final contracts between giants always have clauses about things like software development life cycles, supply chain management,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey security practices, and service level agreements. It’s very common to see these phrases like quote, reasonable efforts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, and quote, consistent with industry best practices quote, scattered around. One of the deals

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are in, excuse me, once the deals are in place, there are often squabbles about what reasonable efforts look like, but customers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally win because vendors want to keep customers happy and have a hope of renewal. It’s rare for disputes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see the inside of a courtroom since litigation is so expensive. Most of the time, if a vendor isn’t meeting their obligations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey under the contract and shows no sign of improving, it’s much cheaper to just migrate to a different vendor, providing similar capabilities,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then badmouth them to your entire security network. I guess that’s the equivalent of a one star, huh? This is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a typical outage, and there will be tons of litigation, both by customers directly and by their cybersecurity

⏹️ ▶️ Casey insurance underwriters, today I learned that’s a thing, seeking to recover damages. CrowdStrike clearly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fell down on the reasonable efforts part of many clauses around their development and release practices,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so there’s a pretty strong case.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I remember from my jobby job, we had a contract that basically said the sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John the downtime stuff of like, I’m paying for you to do the service and you’re like a web-based company, but what

⏹️ ▶️ John if your site goes down? That hurts my business. What’s the deal there? And the deal was basically

⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, we guarantee you know X amount of uptime per

⏹️ ▶️ John unit, you know for a month a week or whatever and If we fall below the amount that we guarantee we start

⏹️ ▶️ John paying you money for like every minute that we’re down And it’s just a negotiation

⏹️ ▶️ John to say like, okay well, how many hours per month do we need to be up? Like you

⏹️ ▶️ John can have one, one hour of downtime a month, five minutes of downtime a month. And how much do we have

⏹️ ▶️ John to pay for every minute that we’re down after that? And that is clarifying to all involved, both to the engineers

⏹️ ▶️ John who are running the sites and also to, you know, the organization to try to have quality control. And very often

⏹️ ▶️ John we would come close to, I forget what the phrase was, we would come close to our threshold of the downtime for a month for a

⏹️ ▶️ John particular client or a particular contract or all of our contracts or whatever. And you have the classic

⏹️ ▶️ John change freeze, which is like, you know what? Let’s just wait for the next two days to run out so we can clear the end of the month and reset the

⏹️ ▶️ John clock on the the service level agreement. Right. And that’s one way to do it. But this type

⏹️ ▶️ John of thing is like, you know, in case of catastrophic failure like CrowdStrike,

⏹️ ▶️ John what is the what is the remedy there? What was written into the contract? What contracts did people agree to?

⏹️ ▶️ John Does CrowdStrike have the same contract with every single person that it sells to? Probably not. So

⏹️ ▶️ John this is going to be quite a mess.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Marius writes, uh, the update was not released by time zone. It was released globally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the same time. I thought that’s what we said last episode, but I guess

⏹️ ▶️ John not. No, it was, we were thinking like people in New Zealand were noticing at first. So my assumption at the time was that it was released

⏹️ ▶️ John like by, you know, time zone, you know, so one part of the world got it first and then slowly as it went across time zones. But

⏹️ ▶️ John according to Marius, that is not the case.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marius continues. The update propagation took a few minutes to almost all their customers. The source of this is the Risky Business

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Podcast episode 756, which we will link in the show notes. Uh, But anyways, Marius

⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, I’m not sure why Australia and New Zealand reacted first. Maybe it was during their afternoon, but all the customers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were affected at the same time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this seems even more bonkers to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, maybe we didn’t say this on the show, but I feel like we knew this even last

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John week.

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know it, so that’s why I put it in there. But anyway, we have a source for it from the Risky Business Podcast. You can listen to the podcast inside, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, you know, I believe it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So another anonymous person writes, a phased rollout approach for CrowdStrike updates has its

⏹️ ▶️ Casey risks unique to the nature of CrowdStrike’s product. That bad actors will obtain the early rollout

⏹️ ▶️ Casey update and, through reverse engineering, obtain information about ongoing attacks or vulnerabilities and take that information

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and use it to attack un-updated CrowdStrike customers and also everyone else. CrowdStrike does a great

⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal of research on the most sophisticated threat actors in the world. They take that research funded by customers who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are at extremely high risk, you know, government, news organizations, finance, etc., and funnel the results into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Falcon sensor product. The exploits used to get the malicious code running are captured and sent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to the CrowdStrike mothership. It’s a virtuous cycle. That cycle is disrupted if CrowdStrike

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot respond to new threats in unison. By not having patches shoved down to all high-risk customers,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey blog posts with data, signatures, sample binaries, ready for the entire industry, then CrowdStrike

⏹️ ▶️ Casey expands access to really bad vulnerabilities to everyone who wants them. All a bad actor needs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do is have a bunch of different CrowdStrike subscription accounts on a bunch of different machines and monitor those machines for updates.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you get lucky and get selected for an early update program, analyze the update. I get that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. This is an argument against the, uh, phase rollout, but I feel like the, maybe we weren’t specific

⏹️ ▶️ John enough to this phase rollout doesn’t have to mean like how Apple does it, or some companies do it where you release to like 1% on the

⏹️ ▶️ John first day and 10% on the second day and whatever phase rollout can be over the course of 30 minutes

⏹️ ▶️ John for the globe, right? It doesn’t have to be, or an hour or whatever it is, whatever window is too

⏹️ ▶️ John small for someone to get your update, analyze your binary, figure out the exploit like this,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re racing against that. How fast can they figure that if they can figure that out in 10 seconds, then yeah, phase rollout is difficult. But

⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, any kind of phase rollout, even if it’s 10 second gaps between time

⏹️ ▶️ John zones, right? And you just do 24 time zones or whatever. Like, even if it’s just like any

⏹️ ▶️ John I know from experience, like when you’re monitoring during a release, and something goes wrong, especially

⏹️ ▶️ John something this catastrophic, Like everything lights up within seconds. You don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John to wait for a long time, right? Phones start ringing, emails start coming, alerts

⏹️ ▶️ John start turning red on the board, like things happen. It’s not, you know, this is what you’re looking for. And

⏹️ ▶️ John rolling out with a 30 second gap between time zones, you’ll know four time

⏹️ ▶️ John zones in that this is catastrophic and you pull the big stop everything thing. And you can say, well, you stopped everything. Now

⏹️ ▶️ John they learned about your exploits. Like it’s better than bricking all of your customers. like CrowdStrike did.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I still think that a phase rod is exactly what CrowdStrike should be doing. I

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t tell them exactly what those phases should be and how long the gap should be and what the risk is or whatever, but

⏹️ ▶️ John all it wants the entire world is a capability they should have in cases of emergencies, but should not

⏹️ ▶️ John be their standard practice. That’s just my opinion.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I completely agree.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it also seems like they didn’t even have like a staging environment. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before you roll it out to anybody public, why don’t you try rolling out to some test servers or some test

⏹️ ▶️ Marco clients.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, obviously their QA process all fell down or whatever. I’m just saying like this, as with all security things,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a multi-level thing. You have staging environments, you have test customers, you have a QA

⏹️ ▶️ John plan, you have automated testing, you have validation, you have people signing off and you have a phased rollout. Those are

⏹️ ▶️ John many different layers of trying to make it so you don’t screw something up, right? And yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John they fell down in lots of ways. I mean, if you look at their analysis, like clearly, hey, you pushed out a thing that didn’t work. That’s a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that you could have determined before you pushed it out. That is obviously what are wrong here, but like we’re always looking at like the

⏹️ ▶️ John very last thing. Like the last line of defense is if it gets past all your other systems and you messed

⏹️ ▶️ John up your QA and all that other stuff, your last line of defense is watch as you roll it out and

⏹️ ▶️ John see if you’re hosing customers as it goes up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another anonymous person writes, CrowdStrike’s driver is not the NVIDIA driver. I’m sorry, I should give

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some context here. This is with regard to how do you disable a crashing kernel extension? So back to anonymous.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey CrowdStrike’s driver is not the NVIDIA driver. If the NVIDIA driver keeps crashing, sure, unload it and continue to boot. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the cybersecurity driver. I imagine every IT admin’s head exploded upon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading Tom Warren’s quote unquote brilliant idea to just unload endpoint protection if it crashes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough times in a row. That machine not booting is a much better outcome than flying blind with my entire organization on the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey line. That’s very much the vibe of a security professional, but I do understand what they’re saying.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I mean, like you still, like this is, we’re talking about what can Microsoft do. Microsoft isn’t responsible

⏹️ ▶️ John for CrowdStrike’s thing, but they make the OS, and the OS could be resilient against failure by,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if something keeps crashing on load, don’t load that thing next time. But it doesn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ John silently don’t load that thing. You know, it could immediately send out some

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of alert through some kind of Windows thing to say, hey, you know, I just booted into safe mode because this

⏹️ ▶️ John thing kept crashing, and that should light up somebody’s board somewhere anyway. Right, so you don’t have to, this doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have to imagine the worst case scenario of like it silently doesn’t unload your endpoint protection and you’re running unprotected

⏹️ ▶️ John for months at a time because you don’t realize like a smart implementation of this feature would

⏹️ ▶️ John light up people’s boards in the NOC just like any other thing would. It’s just that

⏹️ ▶️ John your machine wouldn’t be down, right? Maybe it would just be booted in a safe mode where it doesn’t actually load anything, but it just says I’m sitting

⏹️ ▶️ John here waiting for you to update me because I couldn’t boot all the way. And that is for some people preferable to

⏹️ ▶️ John it not booting at all. And on that topic, it’s the next item.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so what happens if you need to recover an unbootable Windows machine? Enterprise Windows machines often have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lights Out management technology. An IT department can reach out and touch Windows clients from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anywhere, just pull up the ILO, Integrated Lights Out, management product you use, and remote into your non-functioning

⏹️ ▶️ Casey client. You can push out an EFI application that boots the machine, decrypts the disk with the boot locker

⏹️ ▶️ Casey key, deletes the bad CrowdStrike update, and reboots the host. You can script Windows itself, have your Windows clients

⏹️ ▶️ Casey boot into save mode, log in, delete the bad file, and reboot, all via integrated lights out.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that is a cool feature that you can have, which is essentially like, when they say pushing an EFI application, that’s like the firmware,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like before the OS boots, it’s just the firmware that’s bringing up the computer before it even starts loading an OS from

⏹️ ▶️ John a volume somewhere. So if you have the ability to sort of remotely push something,

⏹️ ▶️ John push out an EFI application, you can get that part of the machine up and running, get

⏹️ ▶️ John the EFI program to run, and as they said, decrypt the disk and do the, that is complicated and invasive.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing is, not everybody has that. Yes, maybe it’s industry best practice, but as I think we’re learning the Delta lawsuit,

⏹️ ▶️ John even big companies sometimes don’t follow industry best practices that are up to date within the current decade. That was what Microsoft’s

⏹️ ▶️ John big slam on Delta was. They said, you know, because Delta’s yelling at Microsoft. And Microsoft was like, Delta,

⏹️ ▶️ John unlike some of its competitors, has not updated its IT infrastructure. I think something I’m paraphrasing what they said. But

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, best practices may provide a solution to a non-booting machine, but they’re not ubiquitous.

⏹️ ▶️ John And even just reading this description, fairly sophisticated and complicated. So I would imagine there are a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of companies that don’t have that capability, even though they technically could.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally with regard to CrowdStrike, Michael Cook writes, Do you think there is any chance the CrowdStrike

⏹️ ▶️ Casey incident will lead to requirements for heterogeneous systems in companies, either in OSs or security software,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try to prevent future incidents from taking out all systems at once, or would it be judged too risky slash expensive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the benefit? I am not the most recent actually employed person, that would be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. But to my eyes, knowing IT folks to the degree that I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do, I feel like this is a perfectly reasonable question, but I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most IT security professionals that I’ve ever worked with emphasize simplicity more than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything else and making their jobs and lives simpler. So yes, what Michael’s saying makes sense. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have a bunch of Macs as well as Windows computers, and if you have CrowdStrike as well as one of their competitors that does

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cover your this base so that if CrowdStrike breaks everything everything Windows

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you either have Macs that you can use or you know something that’s not on CrowdStrike but I just don’t see that juice being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth the squeeze from the perspective of IT folks.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah so there’s two kinds of heterogeneity here one is across the industry

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think we kind of have that like this affected like one percent of Windows machines

⏹️ ▶️ John which you You know, there’s obviously not some, CrowdStrike was not on 99% of machines, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John I think across different companies across the entire world, there’s enough heterogeneity

⏹️ ▶️ John that not everybody is running CrowdStrike. Maybe they’re running one of CrowdStrike’s competitors. Maybe they’re running nothing at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I think we have that. Within a given company, like should Delta Airlines not use CrowdStrike

⏹️ ▶️ John on all their machines? No IT person wants to do that, right? They really want a unified

⏹️ ▶️ John solution because running something, CrowdStrike plus a CrowdStrike competitor on

⏹️ ▶️ John half your machines, now you have two places where things can go wrong, right? And also, it’s not like the company can keep running

⏹️ ▶️ John successfully if only half of its computers are affected, right? You know, 100%, half,

⏹️ ▶️ John any significant percentage, even just a few in key areas is bad. And I think in general,

⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t want to, which is why like a Rye CrowdStrike is available for Mac and Linux and everything too. They

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to have seven different endpoint protection solutions deployed in their company. It’s a hassle

⏹️ ▶️ John to manage, it’s difficult to keep up with all those different things. You have to sign seven different

⏹️ ▶️ John contracts and now your user base slash machine base are divided into sevenths,

⏹️ ▶️ John all of which can fail for different reasons. I don’t think this will change much. It may make

⏹️ ▶️ John vendors consider, make companies consider other vendors than CrowdStrike obviously, and the

⏹️ ▶️ John contact renegotiations for CrowdStrike will probably be very interesting in the coming year for the company.

⏹️ ▶️ John But-

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco If the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco company still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John exists in a

⏹️ ▶️ John year. But I think that actually

⏹️ ▶️ John the world of computing showed some resilience given that this company and this update was just as catastrophic

⏹️ ▶️ John as you can imagine it. And it was only like a story for a week and only affected 1% of Windows PCs.

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Sequoia screen-capture nag

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been a whole kerfuffle as we record this today about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey macOS Sequoia, and it apparently has added a weekly permission

⏹️ ▶️ Casey prompt for anything, any app that takes a screenshot or does a screen recording or anything along those

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines. So reading from 9to5Mac, with macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey need access to screen recording permissions will become a little bit more tedious. rolling out a change that will require you to give explicit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey permission on a weekly basis and every time you reboot your Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Multiple developers who spoke to 9to5Mac say they’ve received confirmation from Apple that this is not a bug. In the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey current Mac OS Sequoia beta, this prompt says, whatever the name of the app is, can access this computer screen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and audio. Do you want to continue to allow this access? This application may be able to collect information from any open applications on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your desktop while the app is running. Users can choose to continue to allow that app

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have screen recording access, or they they can click open system settings and immediately be taken to the preferences pane for screen recording

⏹️ ▶️ Casey permissions. This prompt is designed to appear on a weekly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey basis. This has made a lot of people justifiably very, very, very upset.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Jason Snell did the Lord’s work. He did the thing that nobody wants to do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey He filed a feedback.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Which- Oh no. I know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which generally speaking is an entire waste of time for anyone outside of Apple, but here we are.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason filed a feedback number 14689927, asking for one week permissions is untenable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in insulting, which John then duped as feedback 14698922. We’ll put links in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then, or I guess the numbers in the show notes, I should say. And then finally, Jason was so fired up, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my favorite Jason is Salty Jason, was so fired up that he wrote an entire post about all these features,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s basically the Windows Vista-ing of Mac OS. And it’s gotten

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad. It’s gotten real bad. But before we discuss it, the rest of the news with regard to this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a dear friend of the show, Craig Hockenberry, came up with a possible solution. There

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a new API, or I guess a new entitlement,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John really?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s an entitlement. com.apple.developer.persistent-content-capture.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is an entitlement for persistent content capture. Craig writes, the issue

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here is that Apple’s provided no documentation. Imagine that. Or any other guidance

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on how to get this entitlement, prevent an app from becoming nagware. You know, in the defense of Apple, they’ve actually gotten much,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey much better with their documentation, but I feel triggered whenever I see something like this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, click through on the page. That’s why, the thing I quoted there, persistent content capture, that is the extent of the documentation

⏹️ ▶️ John of what this entitlement is for, or does, or anything about that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, was it no overview provided, or something like that? I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John forget. No, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John that bad, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you

⏹️ ▶️ John can click on the link. Take a look at the page for this. It’s not particularly informative. So on this whole topic, like just

⏹️ ▶️ John to give a brief review for people who are less familiar with this, or just from the perspective

⏹️ ▶️ John of an end user being annoyed by these dialog boxes. The thinking behind stuff like this,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it happens on iOS with a different system as well, is Apple’s trying to prevent the case

⏹️ ▶️ John where someone gets an application and that application asks for some very,

⏹️ ▶️ John potentially invasive permission. Screen recording permission is a great one because that’s like, you’re allowing this thing to

⏹️ ▶️ John record your screen and you can imagine all the things an evil application could do with that ability. So they

⏹️ ▶️ John get this application And on their initial run up to, they were highly motivated to get it because it seemed

⏹️ ▶️ John like some cool game or thing or whatever. And they’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, whatever. The prompts come up to like, allow,

⏹️ ▶️ John allow, go, go. And they want to play the thing. And they’re like, do it. And then they find out it’s a scam app or it’s stupid or they don’t like it or they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just like, all right, they leave it and don’t think about it again. But unbeknownst to them, they gave that permission,

⏹️ ▶️ John that app screen recording permission. And on the Mac, maybe it installed a background agent that they also said, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John allow, fine, or whatever. Now there’s this thing that’s on their computer that has the ability to record their

⏹️ ▶️ John screen and they completely forget about it. And so what Apple’s trying to do is every once in a while

⏹️ ▶️ John and go, hey, I know maybe you forgot about this, but like a while ago, you said that this app could do this or extremely invasive

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Do you still want it to be able to do that? And I think on iOS, it says like, no, uninstall the app

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Like it’s kind of like preventing people from clicking through something and then forgetting about it,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s the motivation for features like this. Like why wouldn’t they just take my answer and just say, I told

⏹️ ▶️ John you it’s supposed to be allowed. Don’t bother me about it again. because human nature is that people will sometimes click through those things

⏹️ ▶️ John without reading and they want to remind you, right? The reverse side of that is,

⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple made fun of this in its famous Windows Vista ad, the more of these dialogues you throw in someone’s face,

⏹️ ▶️ John the more you are training them to just say, okay, allow, okay, allow, whatever, okay, just

⏹️ ▶️ John let me use my computer. And doing it once a week, plus on every system reboot,

⏹️ ▶️ John is way, way, way too frequently. That is annoying people to death. Not only will

⏹️ ▶️ John that make people click through dialogue boxes and say, okay, okay, okay, they’re gonna be so annoyed and

⏹️ ▶️ John really to our previous topic, they’re probably gonna think it’s the developer doing it. And the developer

⏹️ ▶️ John has no choice because this is an Apple thing or whatever. This is way too frequent.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just, I can’t even believe that they would think that this is okay. And this is on a system like, Jason’s always

⏹️ ▶️ John been riding this hobby horse for a while. Like on the Mac where in recent years, they’ve been getting worse and worse throwing

⏹️ ▶️ John more and more dialogues. At least when iOS does it, I don’t know what algorithm it uses, but it’s like, you know, just so

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Google Maps is allowed to use your location while on the background. You want it to keep doing that?

⏹️ ▶️ John I see stuff like that occasionally, but it’s not every week. It’s not every time I reboot my phone. And it seems

⏹️ ▶️ John like basically take my word for it after I’ve said yes to it, maybe once or twice, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So like, it’s a balancing act. Like that’s what the title of Jason’s blog post about this is that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s permissions features are out of balance. Right? It’s not saying that they’re good, bad, and

⏹️ ▶️ John different. there’s a balance to be struck between making something secure while still

⏹️ ▶️ John not annoying people and also not inducing, uh, alert fatigue,

⏹️ ▶️ John approval fatigue. And they’re just way over that line on MacOS. And I really hope that’s why I duped the feedback.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I wrote my own feedback and I didn’t reference this, but I basically filed the exact same bug that said this thing where you ask every

⏹️ ▶️ John week and every reboot, it’s terrible. You need a way to allow someone to say,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, allow permanently. and when Jason was really angry about it on Mastodon, I was basically saying, and I agree

⏹️ ▶️ John with him, what you’re basically saying, Apple, is that I, as a user, can never be trusted

⏹️ ▶️ John to give an application permission to record my screen permanently. That’s what you’re saying to me, that I am so infantile,

⏹️ ▶️ John that I am not a fully, I cannot never make this, not that I have to be asked twice, fine, ask me twice,

⏹️ ▶️ John ask me, are you sure, or whatever, but that at no point will I ever be qualified to say, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John I swear to you, macOS, it is okay for this application to record my screen. It is my preferred screenshotting

⏹️ ▶️ John application. I’ve been using it for years. I’m saying yes. What you’re saying Apple is you

⏹️ ▶️ John are never going to be able to do, you never are never competent to make that decision. And that’s insulting.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s insulting to your users. Your users aren’t babies. Like yes, your users are human and fallible or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s a difference between making sure people are aware of what’s going on and deciding that

⏹️ ▶️ John they are not legally capable, not mentally capable of ever making that decision.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s absurd.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s real bad. And it’s incredibly frustrating when you have a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new computer. And at least last time I did an OS upgrade, it was the same story. It’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, I’m finally ready to go. I’m excited, I’m gonna use this brand new machine. It’s so pretty and beautiful.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, oh, oh, yep, yes, that’s loud. Oh, that’s loud.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All right, let me start doing it. Well, there’s good news

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here on that front, though. Well, apparently, yes. So Jason writes on Mastodon, I haven’t verified it yet, but it’s my understanding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that permissions now survive a system migration, Meaning that when you migrate, you won’t have to approve 200 dialog boxes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and check boxes and settings to get apps up and running.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’ll be great, because that is one huge source of a barrage of these dialogs. Because you kind of do them gradually

⏹️ ▶️ John over time as you install apps, but then you migrate to another Mac or something, and suddenly you get them all at once.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this is what we were saying when we discussed this topic last time. If they can migrate these settings to say, OK, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you already approved these on your old Mac, they’re also approved on your new Mac. That will be great. So hopefully,

⏹️ ▶️ John if they did that work, and that seems like it would be a lot of work, Hopefully, they are willing to hear feedback

⏹️ ▶️ John on this and are trying to make changes, but this weekly screen recording thing, right? And that,

⏹️ ▶️ John the entitlement, right? If they’re doing this weekly screen recording thing, they should have A, documented it,

⏹️ ▶️ John B, announced it, and C said, and by the way, if you don’t like this, please request the new persistent content

⏹️ ▶️ John capture thing. Because I don’t even know if that persistent content capture thing is the entitlement that will stop these things from coming.

⏹️ ▶️ John And how hard is it to get that entitlement? How long would it take to get that entitlement? You know, Sequoia is going to come

⏹️ ▶️ John out. I don’t know, maybe not soon, maybe in October, but whatever, like, this seems like people who have applications

⏹️ ▶️ John that require screen recording permissions are kind of getting caught with their pants down here of like,

⏹️ ▶️ John wait, what are we doing? What is my app throwing up now? What can I get? Can I get this entitlement? With this undocumented title? Is that

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing I should be asking for? This is just not a great way to

⏹️ ▶️ John support your developers in their applications. And if there is this one that allows you to do persistent, what’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point of alerting for weekly? Because won’t all the bad actors have requests this one? how will you stop them from getting it?

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s all re-resolved by next week, but it is an upsetting regression in

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s handling of permissions on macOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s just, it’s one of the things where, I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of this happened, you know, spitefully or anything like that. But if you look at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a security professional, as we’ve spoken a lot about this episode, a security professional’s job is to come

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with effectively infinite amounts of dialogues and nag screens and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so on and so forth, because their job is to make sure that their users are as safe as possible. But as you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, it’s a balancing act. And ultimately, I think this pendulum has swung

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way too far in the bad direction, to the point that I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey often pay attention to these. And I’m the kind of nerd that usually reads every dialogue, you know, and reads every word

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of every dialogue. And most of the time I’m just like, yeah, whatever, whatever, whatever. It’s just so disruptive and so frustrating.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s, you know, Apple was right to poke fun at Vista because it really was that bad. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I think Marco was mostly gone at this point. I was like half.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I never used Vista.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. I was half in that world. Like at this point it was real bad. It was real, real bad. And I would,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my recollection anyway, and admittedly I have a terrible memory, but my recollection is that this is worse.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it’s just incessant and it’s not helping anyone. And hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody with a little bit of, I was going to say design sense, but really just like empathy for the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey user. Hopefully someone will be the voice of reason with an Apple and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s pump the brakes on this and figure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out a better approach. Because-

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just empathy for the user. It is in the service of better security because, you know, alert

⏹️ ▶️ John fatigue or approval fatigue reduces security. Like it’s a thing you want to avoid for security

⏹️ ▶️ John purposes. So if you’re in the security team, your job is to increase security. You should know enough, and I’m sure they do,

⏹️ ▶️ John that too many dialogues reduces security, doesn’t increase it because people, that’s because that’s how people react to

⏹️ ▶️ John them, right? It’s, people don’t react the same way to one alert as they do to

⏹️ ▶️ John a hundred. It changes how they deal with alerts. And it changes that, you know, on a going forward

⏹️ ▶️ John basis for the like, from now on, they will be less inclined to read any alert that you put in front. Even if

⏹️ ▶️ John you reduce the number massively, you’ve trained them, I never wanna read these. Okay, okay, okay. You make them angry

⏹️ ▶️ John about it, right? That’s the last thing you want. that’s bad for security.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I can see why, you know, I’m sure Apple’s engineers who are, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product people who are making these decisions to add these alerts, they, I’m sure they have all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best intentions because the reality is, yeah, some of these alerts, especially on iOS, you know, you look at like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the possible attack surface, the possible damage done, some of the actual sleazy things that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies, you know, big and small have done, you can kind of see why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they think they have to do this or why they think this is the best approach moving forward. But,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there are these downsides and these costs to having these controls and warnings

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, both to the user experience and, as John was just saying, to security itself, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there has to be a known amount of damage that was being done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that we’ve seen in the wild being done to prompt this kind of change. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just don’t, I’ve never heard of that level of damage happening on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would cause anyone, any user to say, oh, thank God they’re making this, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, harder for me. Like, I don’t think we’re seeing where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the justification out there in the wild for tightening these things down. Now, obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want to just, you know, let security problems happen to your users

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then only react to them afterwards. But I feel like there has to be like some balance of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Is there really like a significant threat that’s really actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even ever being seen to have happened here? Like, is there a lot of like Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco malware that’s using screen recording permissions and not just security holes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to cause problems for people? Like, I don’t know, we’ve never heard of that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe it happened or was starting to happen and Apple tamped down on it and that, you know, nipped

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the bud, who knows? But we’ve never seen any evidence of that. So it’s hard for us to see as the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco users, why, what justifies this level of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoyance and, you know, alert fatigue.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the right tool for that, if you have, if there was that type of outbreak, and again, maybe Apple would be quiet about it. The

⏹️ ▶️ John right tool for that is having Apple having the ability and they probably either already have this

⏹️ ▶️ John ability or could make it easily, to essentially cause all the Macs to reprompt for,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a screen recording permission, because like due to like an acute outbreak, sort of nip it

⏹️ ▶️ John in the bud, but that’s so different than every week and every reboot forever, right? That’s situational.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like, here’s a situation, everyone, here’s a one-time push to every Mac out there that’s on the network,

⏹️ ▶️ John re-approve the apps or screen recording, right? Maybe you could even have a system where you could put a message to

⏹️ ▶️ John that effect that says just, you know, due to a recent outbreak or whatever, like, I don’t know how you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do it, but anyway, like a one-time thing, it’s understandable, it’s justifiable. Even Apple doesn’t wanna talk about

⏹️ ▶️ John it. Everyone would just be like, huh, it’s weird. I got reprompted for screen recording, but anyway, going on with my life. It’s so different

⏹️ ▶️ John than as Jason was snarkily putting it, making a schedule on your weekly, making a slot

⏹️ ▶️ John in your weekly schedule to re-approve screen recording of the application you’ve been using since the 90s. Right? It’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s absurd to say, then the solution is weekly and on every reboot. That’s the wrong frequency.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the right frequency is, but that ain’t it, right? So think again.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, somebody just wrote in and wondered, could this be in response to rewind.ai or limitless whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re calling themselves right now?

⏹️ ▶️ John No. Okay. No, I mean, I don’t think Apple has anything against Rewind and that’s like, that product

⏹️ ▶️ John is so clear. Like, you know, it’s recording your screen. It’s part of the functionality. You go back and look at the recordings

⏹️ ▶️ John to find things. Like that’s, that is not the threat actor that Apple is worried about,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that would, it would make using Rewind super annoying, but still like, I love Rewind, I use it all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an important workflow and I have to approve it every week. And every time I reboot, like if you’re like Jason, who I think

⏹️ ▶️ John still, which boggles my mind, reboots his Mac every single day. You’re approving it every single day, not

⏹️ ▶️ John every week.

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Google monopoly suit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google is apparently a monopolist in a US antitrust case. This is reading from The Verge.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quote, after having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reaches the following conclusion. Google is a monopolist and it has acted as one to maintain its

⏹️ ▶️ Casey monopoly, according to the court’s ruling. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google’s fate will be determined in the next phase of proceedings, which could result in anything from a mandate to stop certain business practices

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a breakup of Google’s search businesses. Judge Ahmed Mehta rejected Google’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey arguments that its contracts with phone and browser makers like Apple were not exclusionary and therefore shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey qualify it for liability under the Sherman Act. The prospect of losing tens of billions in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey guaranteed revenue from Google, which presently comes at little to no cost to Apple, disincentivizes Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from launching its own search engine when it otherwise has built the capacity to do so. Time and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, there’s another quote, time and again, Google’s partners have concluded that it is financially infeasible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to switch the default general search engine or seek greater flexibility in search

⏹️ ▶️ Casey offerings because it would mean sacrificing the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars that Google pays them as revenue share,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the judge wrote. In 2022, Google paid Apple $20 billion to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the default search engine in Safari. During the closing arguments, the judge honed in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on these payments, wondering how other players in the market could possibly displace Google from that position. Quote,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that’s what it takes for somebody to dislodge Google as the default search engine, wouldn’t the folks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wrote the Sherman Act be concerned about it? Then continuing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a different post from The Verge, according to Eddie Q, Apple’s senior vice president of services, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no other meaningful alternative to Google. During the trial, he said that, quote, there’s no price that Microsoft could ever offer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Apple to get the company to preload Bing and Safari. Quote, I don’t believe there’s a price in the world that Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could offer us, Q said at another point, they offered to give us Bing for free. They could give

⏹️ ▶️ Casey us the whole company. Jeez, Eddie.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sick burn. I think you might want to talk to Tim about that because I’m pretty sure Microsoft is worth more

⏹️ ▶️ John than $20 billion, but maybe before you turn down Microsoft offering to give you the whole

⏹️ ▶️ John company, Eddie, maybe, obviously he was humorously exaggerating there, although it is a quote that ended up in a

⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of stories. I love it, Q.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey According to the judge, it’s not just that Google pays Apple not to challenge its search supremacy. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be unbelievably difficult for Apple to get in on the action at all. Unsurprisingly, both Google and Apple have looked into this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and their own internal estimates came out at trial. Apparently Apple has calculated that quote, it would cost 6

⏹️ ▶️ Casey billion annually on top of what it already spends developing search capabilities to run a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey general search engine. Meanwhile, in late 2020, Google estimated how much it would cost Apple to create and maintain a general

⏹️ ▶️ Casey search engine that could compete with Google. Apple would have to spend something in the rough order of $20 billion in order

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to reproduce Google’s technical infrastructure dedicated to search.

⏹️ ▶️ John I like, I do like that. I love this stuff that comes out in trial. Like the fact that both Apple and Google had done some math to say, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, if we did, if Apple did make a competitor to Google search, how much would that cost? And Apple’s estimate

⏹️ ▶️ John is like 6 billion a year and Google’s estimate is 20 billion. And you would think Google would know

⏹️ ▶️ John more because Google has built Google. Apple’s like, yeah, probably $6 billion. Like not even as

⏹️ ▶️ John much as the car we never shipped. So this this is I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, these things take years and years to go. So there’ll be more about this trial or whatever, but this is a verdict.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the verdict is, does Google have a monopoly in search? And did they abuse it? Yes. That’s the straight

⏹️ ▶️ John up like there was even quotes in the thing of like, I think some some Google argument in court was like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John this isn’t illegal because we’ve been doing this for years. And the judge pointed out, it’s like things that you did when you weren’t a monopoly were OK.

⏹️ ▶️ John But when you come in, happily, they become illegal. And guess what? You’re a monopoly. And this is like the Windows

⏹️ ▶️ John anti-trust case where it’s like, there is no question that Google has monopoly

⏹️ ▶️ John size market share. Like how many people run Windows? It was like everybody, right? 90 something percent. Google

⏹️ ▶️ John search has just the massively dominant play, like 90 plus percent in search.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s fine to be a monopoly. Did you abuse that monopoly to extend or maintain it? And the courts say, yes, you

⏹️ ▶️ John totally did by various things that you do, including making contracts that,

⏹️ ▶️ John for example, dissuade Apple to the tune of $20 billion a year, you shouldn’t make a Google Search competitor

⏹️ ▶️ John now. There have been rumors for years that Apple was considering making a Google Search competitor. And I always looked at those, especially

⏹️ ▶️ John in the early days of like, that is not Apple’s strength. But one of the strongest arguments

⏹️ ▶️ John with respect to that is the very early spat between Apple and Google over Maps. And Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John said, you know what? We’re going to make our own Maps. And they were bad. And Apple wasn’t good at it. but

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple kept plugging away because they were, you know, there was probably no, no reconciliation

⏹️ ▶️ John between Apple and Google with regard to maps. And today Apple maps is a viable competitor

⏹️ ▶️ John to Google maps. Who would have thunk that several times? I mean, it took years and years, right. And still some people like Google maps

⏹️ ▶️ John better, but I use both of them on a regular basis. And I’m not going to say Apple apps is better than Google maps.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even going to say it’s as good as Google maps, but it is definitely a viable competitor. It does some things better.

⏹️ ▶️ John It does many things worse, But Apple built that with tons of money, and that’s a competing

⏹️ ▶️ John product to Google. What if Google had been paying Apple $20 billion a year to make Google Maps the default

⏹️ ▶️ John mapping service? Apple would have never made that. That’s anti-competitive, right? I mean, we’re not talking about mapping, we’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ John search, but like, that’s what, you know, the judge isn’t saying, there’s no remedies here. It’s not like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what are we gonna do about this? That’s a whole other phase, and they’re gonna appeal, and they could appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, and it might be overturned, and

⏹️ ▶️ John like, with court cases, you don’t know what’s gonna come of this, if anything. change administration

⏹️ ▶️ John could change stuff. Like there’s so many factors here, but this is a significant finding and

⏹️ ▶️ John victory for the department of justice of saying Google, you’re a monopoly. You did stuff that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John against the Sherman anti-trash act to maintain it. And we’re going to figure out what that means for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and the reason, the reason this is fun to talk about is because Apple’s over there, over there going to wait, what?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco We

⏹️ ▶️ John get $20 billion a year for Google for having like a URL

⏹️ ▶️ John and a P list somewhere. Right? It’s the easiest money we ever made. It has essentially 100% profit margins.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this is relevant because Apple services revenue and the story about services services where the

⏹️ ▶️ John growth is for Apple as we as it came out in the earlier trials when we all kind of learn the magnitude of

⏹️ ▶️ John this. A huge chunk of Apple’s services, revenue, and also

⏹️ ▶️ John the services profit services income is that 20 billion, it’s like 25% of their services

⏹️ ▶️ John profit. That’s not a small amount. It’s not like a 2% thing or whatever. And if their

⏹️ ▶️ John host if Apple’s whole story for the company is like, yeah, the phones aren’t growing anymore. And other stuff is kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of stable, too. But you know, services is growing like gangbusters year over year. What if I told you Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John that potentially in five years, some court decision could say,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, 25% of your services revenue that’s going to zero starting now.

⏹️ ▶️ John That would be bad for Apple for their stock for their story about services growth. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John that I mean, and what did Apple do to bring that about? Like, did Apple do anything wrong

⏹️ ▶️ John by taking that 20 billion? Like the courts would say no Apple, you know, the courts would potentially say

⏹️ ▶️ John they could say agreements like the one you made with Apple, those are illegal. so you gotta cut off that deal. And Apple’s like, oh, they

⏹️ ▶️ John have to cut off that deal, we like that money. But according to the courts, and I can see their point,

⏹️ ▶️ John that money is Apple or Google using its monopoly in search to

⏹️ ▶️ John prevent competition, to say, we are dominant and we are going to use that dominance to make sure nobody

⏹️ ▶️ John else ever challenges our dominance. We’re gonna make sure that Bing doesn’t get to be the default because they can’t match our 20

⏹️ ▶️ John billions that we’re paying Apple. We’re gonna make sure Apple never makes a competitor, one of the few companies in the world that

⏹️ ▶️ John could potentially even have the funds to try to make a competitor. We’re gonna make sure they don’t do that because we’ll literally

⏹️ ▶️ John pay them off every single year to the tune of $20 billion to make sure they don’t even think about making a competitor.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s anti-competitive. But looking at it from Apple’s perspective, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John this sucks. We like getting 20 billion, because I don’t think Apple wants to make a search engine. And

⏹️ ▶️ John Eddie Cue’s there in court saying, I don’t know what his motivation was, but he’s basically saying, honestly, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John from his perspective, Apple thinks, or Eddie Cue thinks, that Google is better than Bing. And

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s saying, we want to ship the best product to our users. When it comes time to choose the default search for

⏹️ ▶️ John Safari, we’re gonna pick what we think is the best one. And we think Google is the best one. And you know, the $20 billion doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John hurt, but he’s making the argument that like, you know, Microsoft could give it to us for free and we wouldn’t take it

⏹️ ▶️ John because it would be making a worse experience for users on our phone. And you know, they obviously, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the EU would say, why not give them a choice screen where they get to pick what their thing is. And honestly, that’s always been a question about

⏹️ ▶️ John the 20 billion. Google, if Apple just gave people a choice of what they want their default search engine to be, even

⏹️ ▶️ John if they randomized the list, most people are going to pick you anyway, because you got to your dominant

⏹️ ▶️ John place, not through like illegal deals or anything, but because people love Google search. So if

⏹️ ▶️ John you just let everybody pick, 95% of the people are probably going to pick Google anyway, but still,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, good business is like, why would I give them that chance? Why would I take that risk? Why when I can that $20 billion

⏹️ ▶️ John is money well spent, because it prevents Apple from ever wanting to do this. It puts us as the default search engine

⏹️ ▶️ John in the handheld platform where people spend the most money. It’s a no-brainer that we should do this. So if

⏹️ ▶️ John the remedies of this court case, if one of the remedies is that they can’t do deals like that anymore,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it makes sense and I think it kind of sucks for Apple. But honestly, you know, we’ve talked about Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John how services revenue have been distorting Apple for a while, not with respect to this so much, much more with respect

⏹️ ▶️ John to like, what are your incentives when you, when you’re in, when your growth is service revenue in

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of product design and how many ads you throw on people’s faces and how many come ons you have. But this is another aspect

⏹️ ▶️ John of it. It’s like, what is this money preventing Apple from doing?

⏹️ ▶️ John How is this money causing Apple to become misshapen in its decision making

⏹️ ▶️ John to say, well, we could do X and we think it would be better, but $20 billion. $20 billion

⏹️ ▶️ John is a big counterweight to lots of people who might have notions about things inside Apple. Like, oh, what about this?

⏹️ ▶️ John What about that? And someone says, $20 billion. You’re like, OK, never mind. Little things like that. How

⏹️ ▶️ John many little things just never got going because $20 billion, right? So I think in

⏹️ ▶️ John the end, although it will be painful to remove this $20 billion from Apple, it will

⏹️ ▶️ John make them a more effective organization that makes better decisions. It doesn’t at all

⏹️ ▶️ John solve the problem of Apple being motivated to throw stupid come ons for their services in our face constantly, which

⏹️ ▶️ John I think is the worst aspect of their services revenue, like sort of focusing on how can we extract

⏹️ ▶️ John more money from people on a monthly basis rather than how can we satisfy people. But that’s a whole separate

⏹️ ▶️ John issue.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I feel bad, not for Apple, but for, I think Mozilla people have said

⏹️ ▶️ Casey repeatedly that almost all their revenue comes from their own Google search deal.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even though I haven’t personally used Firefox in 20 years

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, nevertheless, it’s just, it’s too bad. Like I think Mozilla

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by and large is doing pretty good work. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for

⏹️ ▶️ John them to- No, like you haven’t been keeping up with the Mozilla thing. they’ve been doing, they’ve been like building like adware into their browser

⏹️ ▶️ John to try to like essentially get money from like this, they’re, the same thing happened to them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like this revenue sort of enabled a set of leadership that’s like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John we got the Google gravy train and now we can get the whole, you know, ad tech built into our browser gravy

⏹️ ▶️ John train and like Firefox users are like, we hate this. The reason we use this Firefox is not to have to deal with

⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff, you’re betraying us or whatever. And it’s like, if Mozilla didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John that money from Google and had to find some other way to fund itself. One argument is like, they’d be gone and there’d be no Firefox, doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John that suck? But the other argument is they would have been forced to find some other way to make money. And maybe that would have led them

⏹️ ▶️ John down this ad tech thing faster, I don’t know. But like having this amount of money

⏹️ ▶️ John from monopolists dissuade you from ever thinking about doing anything except for using them

⏹️ ▶️ John is not healthy for anybody involved. Even though it seems like it is like, oh, it’s keeping Firefox alive, that’s good. And

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s kind of, From Google’s perspective, it’s a double benefit of

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of the same way that like Microsoft invested in Apple to keep Apple alive so they could say, see, we have a competitor.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not a monopoly. It didn’t work out really for them, but you know. Chrome being able to say, Firefox

⏹️ ▶️ John exists. See, we’re not the only browser. People have lots of choices. You can use Edge, you can use Firefox, and

⏹️ ▶️ John you know. But I don’t, like getting that kind of money, it’s not healthy to be getting that

⏹️ ▶️ John money for essentially doing nothing from a monopolist, right? And I think it just, it makes

⏹️ ▶️ John an unhealthy organization. If only because it’s now your organization is susceptible to like, guess what, if that money

⏹️ ▶️ John went away, do you no longer have a business? And what were you getting that money for anyway? We were getting that money because

⏹️ ▶️ John Google thinks it’s important for there to be some tiny browser that they can think of, that they can point to that says,

⏹️ ▶️ John see, there are competitors. And also to make sure no one will ever, ever, ever compete with their Google search monopoly,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s not healthy. Like it’s, you know, ripping that money away is

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be bad, but again, this is gonna be multi-year case and it might even get overturned and who knows what will happen. So maybe this will all come to

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing. But, uh, Apple, uh, Mozilla, all these companies now have a lot of time

⏹️ ▶️ John to think about this. And although I did, I don’t think these are connected. I don’t know. I don’t know if these connected at all. So

⏹️ ▶️ John take this as pure speculation, but a related story that I forgot to put in the notes is that, uh, Warren Buffett,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, who owns a just absolutely tremendous amount of the Berkshire Hathaway company owns a tremendous amount of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John stock sold half of his Apple stock, like a few days before this verdict came out. And for years

⏹️ ▶️ John he’d been saying like, I love Apple, I’m gonna hold it, nothing, you know, unless something extraordinary happens, I would never get rid of it or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Then he sold half his Apple stock. And then this verdict comes out. And I don’t know if they related,

⏹️ ▶️ John but if Apple’s story for the past many years has been service revenue, it’s where the growth for the company is.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this one story says, maybe 25% of that service revenue is now gone.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Is that a reason for Warren Buffett to sell half his stock? I don’t, I don’t even pretend to know what goes through the mind of someone

⏹️ ▶️ John like Warren Buffett when deciding to sell, and why would he only sell 50% and not all of it? And he’s really old, and how

⏹️ ▶️ John much money does he need? And it just confuses me in many ways. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this is good news for Apple’s services narrative, and I hope

⏹️ ▶️ John it makes them reconsider. I really almost honestly, I wish they would break that out somewhere else and not even include it in services

⏹️ ▶️ John revenue. Because what service are they providing there? It’s like monopoly agreement, monopoly maintenance

⏹️ ▶️ John payments. It’s not a service that Apple is providing. Even without that money, they can leave that same value

⏹️ ▶️ John in the plist and still have Google search as their default.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes sense if you are a professional investor. This suggests that Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue in a high growth area has a pretty high chance of going down all of a sudden.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I see why somebody would sell the stock. That being said, I think it would be better for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple as a whole in the long run to not have this giant chunk of this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue being on their books in this place. Because again, as you’re saying, it kind of suggests

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different source of revenue than what it actually is. I’d say it’s actually somewhat misleading.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even calling it services revenue, I would suggest is kind of misleading shareholders. I mean, I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that legally qualifies as that. I’m not a shareholderologist. But it definitely seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it is a little misleading to say we are providing all these wonderful services to our users,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like Apple TV Plus and iCloud. And it’s like, well, where does it come from? A huge amount of comes from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Google commission and App Store taxes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is that services? And at least the App Store taxes, you can say, well, this is, we run the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ John and this is the commission we charge. At least there is a service there, which is the App Store and the in-app payment

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And Apple will tell you a million different ways about how that’s such a wonderful service. But at least it’s a thing that Apple is doing and made.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is just like, we accept the check. And in exchange for the check, We do not change this string in our source code.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is not good for Apple, like kind of psychologically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost, and certainly it creates some weird incentives that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it would be better for them if they didn’t make a huge chunk of this money this way. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though, like if there is a transition away from this that is forced by the government or whatever, I think that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be some short-term pain for the stock and the earnings and things like that. I think longer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco term it will be better for them. But unless a government intervenes, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will never change. It’s kind of like an addiction for them. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s understandable why. Of course they would take this money if they can. But it would be better off if they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were forced not to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the whole point of this thing is like, so, you know, Eddie Hugh was saying, Microsoft could give us Bing

⏹️ ▶️ John for free and we wouldn’t take it, right? But say this money goes away, right? Say this actually does happen, which is, again, is still not a

⏹️ ▶️ John foregone conclusion. At that point, I think Apple would be receptive to accepting

⏹️ ▶️ John a few hundred million from Microsoft for to be in a choice screen, for example, or to be

⏹️ ▶️ John an option in settings. Deals could be made. One of the things deals like this do is they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John even allow competitors to get a foothold. And suddenly, if Google is legally forbidden from paying

⏹️ ▶️ John off Apple to stay as the default, the door opens to other people being willing to pay

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple more than $0 to say, just put us in a choice screen. Just let us have an extension

⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, like anything, like how much money can we give you in exchange for how much? Leave Google as a default,

⏹️ ▶️ John fine, right, whatever, but like, can we have like a one button press way to switch us where we can put on our website?

⏹️ ▶️ John Do you wanna use Bing as your default? Press this and we’ll pay you $100 million for that or whatever, because Bing is not

⏹️ ▶️ John a monopoly in the search market, right? How do you ever get more competition,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Google has abused its monopoly, has used its monopoly to maintain and extend itself in ways

⏹️ ▶️ John that are illegal according to this act, according to the judge or whatever. And the remedy is let’s try to

⏹️ ▶️ John bring more competition back to the search market. It doesn’t mean Apple is gonna suddenly make a search engine because I still think that is not Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John strength and it’ll be very, very, very difficult, right? But Microsoft already made one, right? It’s called Bing,

⏹️ ▶️ John it exists. It’s not as good as Google, but it’s never gonna get anywhere if it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John boxed out of even being a choice on platforms like iOS, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John I mostly agree with the verdict here that what Google

⏹️ ▶️ John was doing was distorting the market and reducing competition and they shouldn’t be allowed to do it despite

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it’s gonna end up hurting Apple. And I agree with Marco that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should take this pain and move forward from it. And Jason Stell has a bunch of charts on

⏹️ ▶️ John his story about this that we’ll link showing just how big, this is revenue, not income, but just how big

⏹️ ▶️ John services revenue is for the company now. Used to be when you look at the graph of where does

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s money come from? It was like, the biggest piece is iPhone. And it used to be, I think even closer to bigger than 50% or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. And then you’d see like the Mac and iPad and whatever the other categories were. And it used to be this little

⏹️ ▶️ John wedge called services that was a similar size and services started growing and growing and growing. And now it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone and the second biggest category, services. Now

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this

⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, to the earlier point, what Apple lumps into these categories, You know,

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac makes sense. It’s Macs. iPhones make sense as iPhones, but wearables contains a lot of stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad makes sense there. And then services, a whole bunch of other things, right? But services is getting worryingly

⏹️ ▶️ John large. If you don’t like the things that Apple has been doing in response to its services. And remember services is really $20

⏹️ ▶️ John billion from Google, in-app purchase for games, other

⏹️ ▶️ John app store stuff. And then that’s most of services. And then, oh, everything else, a whole bunch

⏹️ ▶️ John of little pie wedges for like Apple TV plus and blah, blah, blah. People hear service and they think it’s like, it’s Apple Music and Apple TV Plus.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not. It’s App Store. It’s this $20 billion payment. And it’s mostly games on the App

⏹️ ▶️ John Store stuff, right? So it’s not even what it appears to be. And then the other graph was, products,

⏹️ ▶️ John profits versus services products. If you combine all the products, profit from all the products, Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, wearables, iPhone, that profit and compare it to the services profit,

⏹️ ▶️ John the product profit is spiky because it’s like holiday season and stuff or iPhone launch. I don’t even honestly know what the spikes are.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, the product thing is spiky. When the product line spikes up, it’s way higher than services.

⏹️ ▶️ John But at the current state where we’re not in a spike in the yearly product thing, the services

⏹️ ▶️ John line is getting real close to the product line. So as Snell said in his article, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John made 22 billion in profit from products and 18 billion from services. This is in the last quarter. 22 billion

⏹️ ▶️ John versus 18 billion. I think services are a thing that Apple should provide.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I agree with their new slogan of like, the best providers are hardware, software and services.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just think they need to be more careful about not distorting

⏹️ ▶️ John the other two, the hardware and software in service of the services. Like services should

⏹️ ▶️ John be, it’s a prerequisite. You sell hardware and software, today that’s not enough. You

⏹️ ▶️ John have to also sell services because just as hardware is useless without software, hardware

⏹️ ▶️ John and software these days in the internet age are also essentially useless without services. And if you’re not gonna provide them, somebody

⏹️ ▶️ John else will. So why, you know, why not make your own services that work the best

⏹️ ▶️ John with your hardware and your software? It’s the thing they should do, they should, they should do it even better than they’re currently doing it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t mean they have to make Apple TV plus, but all the iCloud stuff, all those API’s, like all, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, the email address they provide the Apple ID system, you know, and expanding on to,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the developer program. And yes, Apple TV plus and Apple Music, like Apple should be making those

⏹️ ▶️ John things. But they should be careful, like the values that led them to make great products and great software

⏹️ ▶️ John on those products, they should be careful to say those values don’t matter anymore because services are growing.

⏹️ ▶️ John So screw those values, whatever we need to do to make services grow, we’re going to do it. So we’re going to start putting ads for our own stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John and settings, right? That is the anti-pattern that should be avoiding. So I don’t really care that the services

⏹️ ▶️ John line is getting close to the product line. I care what that services line represents.

⏹️ ▶️ John I care if that services line represents a new set of values that are not the values

⏹️ ▶️ John that led them to become the Apple that has these great products, right? Because services can infect the products

⏹️ ▶️ John with an incompatible set of values and philosophy. That’s the problem. I don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John if this graph looks like services are more than 50% in 10 years. That’s great, let them be a services

⏹️ ▶️ John company that sells hardware and software that work on them. I just want the whole unit to work

⏹️ ▶️ John together based on the values that led to the creation of like the original iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also just continuing to call the services, I think is really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fundamentally dishonest and misleading. I think a better word for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of this money, which is the App Store taxes and the Google Search deal. Because remember, keep in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind, the Google Search deal, the way it is apparently structured is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a flat 20 billion dollars a year. It is a commission from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google’s ad income that results from Safari searches from being the default in Safari

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think maybe part of that contract which is part of the DOJ’s problem I think part of the contract

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that Google you know is the default but the way it’s structured also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know Apple has 20 billion dollars of motivation to keep them default because it is a commission

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from ad income from Google searches. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would actually call this category, I would not call this services. When you look at it’s coming from the Commission from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google searches and it’s coming from the App Store tax, I would call this category commissions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not services. Now if they want to call it commissions and services, great. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco calling it services when seemingly at least the majority of the money seems to be from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco commissions on activity generated by other people not serving you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you again services is a very misleading word here. This category should be called commissions and they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should either, you know, break it out separately from services, which would look real bad or call

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it call it what it is commission services or just commissions.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I could leave App Store stuff and services because that’s a service they run though. At least like App Store, they run that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I think that’s a very tough call to say the App Store tax is considered a service. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I think this is fundamentally misleading.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they would like the characterization of calling it an App Store tax, by the way. I think their preferred terminology

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John be different.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Tim Cook’s terminology was our commission. So I think, hey, let’s call

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it what it is. It’s commissions. Because otherwise, I really do think you’re misleading investors into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking that things like Apple Music and iCloud and Apple TV Plus,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re misleading investors into thinking that that’s driving a bunch of revenue to the company that it’s really not. While those are are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco successful services, that is not 28% of their revenue. That is not even close to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco making all that up. So I really do think this continued quote, services

⏹️ ▶️ Marco narrative is fundamentally misleading to investors and to analysts like us who don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look too much into it. Because when you look into where this money is coming from, I think most people will be hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pressed to describe that as services.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they would consider it misleading, both legally and just practically speaking. Because one of the

⏹️ ▶️ John things that all companies do, including Apple, is they don’t necessarily break down

⏹️ ▶️ John their finances to the granularity that you as an analyst might want. This is, for every company, this is true. They

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t tell you exactly of how many of each widget, of each color, of each style, of each whatever, right? And so by lumping

⏹️ ▶️ John things into these larger categories, always the analyst’s job is to try to suss out what percentage

⏹️ ▶️ John of that is X, Y, and Z, and they can have guesses, and their guesses may be wildly wrong, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you can say that Apple is misleading. It’s just that it’s a form of like, look, how much information are we gonna give you? Like Apple could

⏹️ ▶️ John say, you’re lucky we’re telling you what iPhone, Mac, we’re lucky we break it down at all. We don’t have to do that. We can just say, here’s our

⏹️ ▶️ John profits, here’s our revenue, here’s our margins, and we can let you figure it out. And there is a trade-off there of like,

⏹️ ▶️ John the more Apple tells analysts, the more control over they have what analysts say

⏹️ ▶️ John about them and the more control they have over what analysts think about them. But the less they tell them,

⏹️ ▶️ John the more they can hide a bad thing here, a bad, you know, a product that didn’t sell well there

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, like where’s Vision Pro hiding in this thing? I guess it’s in wearables or whatever, right? So you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John wanna tell them everything because that highlight, that can cause them to like, you know, zoom

⏹️ ▶️ John in on your weaknesses or whatever. But if you tell them nothing, if you just said, here’s our profits, here’s our revenue, here’s our margins,

⏹️ ▶️ John just as one big pie thing, and we’re not gonna break it down any farther, then they’re left to wildly speculate about how everything

⏹️ ▶️ John is doing. And they could have weird notions that cause the stock to go way down. So this is the dance that Apple has always been playing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in general, as Apple has become more successful, they have reduced the granularity

⏹️ ▶️ John of the stuff that they tell. Like a while ago, I think they even used to give unit sales on stuff and they don’t do that anymore at all, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So, you could say it is not as informative as if they broke

⏹️ ▶️ John it down more and the name is misleading because of the things they put in the categories, but the names of the categories and the categories

⏹️ ▶️ John themselves have changed so much over the years. Like this is just, this is part of the analyst game of like, can

⏹️ ▶️ John I back solve to figure out the stuff? And what we know about this from the billions in

⏹️ ▶️ John service revenue from the Google search thing. We only know that because it came out in discovery

⏹️ ▶️ John in court cases, right? Like Apple didn’t offer that up. Like it was wrenched from them by the law.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the only reason we even know that. And now suddenly we can see into that pie wedge and be like, oh, that wouldn’t have been my

⏹️ ▶️ John guess. Like people didn’t think it was that high, right? That wouldn’t have been my guess to what it is, but now we know that, and now we’re like peering

⏹️ ▶️ John into it or whatever. So again, I don’t think it’s specifically misleading. And I agree the name is not great.

⏹️ ▶️ John The Google thing definitely doesn’t belong in there. maybe App Store is arguable, but

⏹️ ▶️ John things like Apple TV and Apple TV Plus and Apple Music certainly are in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John And iCloud and stuff like that. Like anything, like you pay Apple for iCloud storage, right? So you can use iCloud photo library.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a service. They run a bunch of servers. It’s a service that works with their hardware and software. That should be services revenue. But

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, without knowing about this stuff, a lot of people can look at that services revenue. And like you said before, like just think

⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple TV and Apple Music must be doing great. You’re killing it. Not that great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, but the thing is like, you know, you’re right. Obviously, you know, they control the messaging around this for lots of reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, they try to figure out what they have to and should break out and what they don’t. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, you know, they keep a lot close to the vest, of course. The thing is though, like by making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of your money in a way that’s kind of cagey and not what people expect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can actually work against you as well. So for instance, now, first of all, I should go back and clarify Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Google revenue is a commission on Google search revenue,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple is forced, or if Google is forced to stop the exclusivity clause, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t mean $20 billion needs to go away from Apple’s books. What that means is probably something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple has to have some kind of choice screen like they do in the EU. It’s probably gonna be something like that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the remedy to fix this violation.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, guesses about remedies are like, remember one of the guesses about remedies is like on the table is that

⏹️ ▶️ John Google could be broken up. Right, obviously that’s probably not gonna happen, but like, but I’m saying the spectrum

⏹️ ▶️ John is wide of possibilities. So yeah, they could say you have to have a choice screen or they could say Apple and Google can’t do any

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of deal related to search. Or they could say Google is broken up, like, or they could say nothing because it’s overturned on appeal, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So the possibilities are numerous and wide, but you’re right, one of the possibilities is that it could be

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, you can still have the deal, you just need a choice screen. Which as I said before, everyone would pick Google anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, and so if that’s how this goes, If Google just can’t be exclusively the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco provider anymore, then Apple puts up a choice screen and almost everyone picks Google

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then Google continues to pay Apple a commission on the ad rates, they probably won’t lose much at all. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, obviously maybe Google’s willing to pay a lower rate per user if it’s not exclusive because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s long-term less valuable to them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or if Google was smart, maybe Google would say, our price is this, nothing. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna pay you anything. What are you gonna do now? Just give people the choice. pick us anyway, right? Because the whole

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is like, we were paying you to be exclusive, and now if we can’t be exclusive, we’ll take the 90% we’re gonna get anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. So there’s lots of things that could go there, but here’s the problem. With Apple calling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this services when it’s clearly commissions, then if they do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lose a big chunk of money from this, then the analyst narrative that they have been crafting for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, that Apple services are a big revenue base and growth area for the company,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then everyone starts saying the wrong thing. Everyone starts saying Apple services took a huge

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, but the analysts would know and Apple would explain to them. Apple would say, we have a 2,500% decline in

⏹️ ▶️ John services income this quarter because of the DOJ, Google thing. And the analysts would know that and subtract

⏹️ ▶️ John it out. And then what analysts would be doing is saying, okay, we understand where that hit came from and your stock’s gonna go down, so

⏹️ ▶️ John tough luck. But also next quarter, what we’re gonna look at is, of the remaining pie

⏹️ ▶️ John wedge, is that growing? And that’s where they would take the hit. if that’s not growing. And I don’t actually honestly

⏹️ ▶️ John know, and I don’t think anybody knows, because we just have these points in time of like, you know, what percentage of that

⏹️ ▶️ John pie wedge is Google’s revenue? And is the Google percentage of the pie wedge growing or shrinking? I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think we actually know. If you subtract out the Google payment from services,

⏹️ ▶️ John what has the rate of Apple service growth been over the past three years? Maybe it’s been declining

⏹️ ▶️ John minus that, and maybe that’s been keeping up, or maybe actually the Google revenue has been declining, and it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ John growing faster than that. but we won’t know that until it’s subtracted out. So the first time it disappears,

⏹️ ▶️ John the analyst, they’re gonna explain it, and the analyst is gonna be, yeah, this is a DOG thing, you didn’t get the money, you didn’t renegotiate a deal,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna punish your stock for it because everyone, you know, what, you lost $20 billion or whatever, fine. But the next time, they’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John say, now we can look at the remaining services and say, is it actually growing? And

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t actually know, and I’m not sure anybody actually knows. Again, maybe services is growing faster

⏹️ ▶️ John than it has been on a percentage basis without the Google thing, Or maybe it’s been growing much slower and all the growth has been in Google.

⏹️ ▶️ John But we’ll find that out only after it is removed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, ultimately, I don’t think the classification is really that big a deal, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any investors worth their salt is, or any analyst, I should say, that’s worth their salt is going to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to figure out what this is about. And average day-to-day investors, like the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey individuals, if they decide to sell because the revenue is down, then so be it. I don’t really think they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna sweat that part of this. I mean, I think they’re going to sweat losing that money. But I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they can talk their way through it in a way that would probably be satisfactory, at least at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey first, to anyone that’s paying attention. And then, like John just said, the rubber will hit the road the following quarter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see, can they make up some of that space? And that’s fine. I mean, ultimately, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have terribly strong opinions about this. I think people choose Google, like you both have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been saying. They choose Google because Google is, in many ways, the best. And I think where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it becomes gross, and this is what Ben Thompson’s been saying on like dithering and on his own website is where it gets,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it becomes gross is when Google is contractually, you know, in entrenching

⏹️ ▶️ Casey themselves as a monopolist. Like if you got to be a monopolist by being really good, then well, okay, so be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But if you stay there by way of, you know, contracts and law that, that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe not law, but contracts, you know, that, that’s where it becomes gross and apparently illegal.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And also like Google is, Google is the best partially because they have done everything

⏹️ ▶️ John they can to box out competition. So they’ll stay the best if you never let anybody who could potentially compete with you

⏹️ ▶️ John from getting better. You can’t just say, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John Google is the best because everyone picks them, and everyone picks them because they’re the best. If you don’t also acknowledge, okay, well, then how is someone

⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to get better and start competing with Google when there’s exclusive contracts exist that prevent competition? And so

⏹️ ▶️ John I think things like this have been holding back Bing, it’s all speculative. You can say, well, Bing would suck no matter what. Maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Bing would suck even if these things didn’t happen. Right. But we don’t know. Right. The whole point is we

⏹️ ▶️ John actually want to have a more level playing field. Do not let the dominant player use their dominance

⏹️ ▶️ John to prevent you from ever getting good enough. Right. And so even though we’re all dismissively saying, well, if you put a choice

⏹️ ▶️ John screen, everyone’s going to pick Google anyway. It’s like maybe part of the reason that’s true is because Google has

⏹️ ▶️ John made sure no one can compete with them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. That’s a really good point. And I think the thing that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most interested in about this is what it means for Apple’s perspective on services. We glanced

⏹️ ▶️ Casey off this a few minutes ago, but this is what Jason’s post was largely about. And I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that kind of gives me pause and creeps me out isn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right turn of phrase, but I can’t think of a better way to phrase it, is that we just had a discussion about how the security

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dialogues, which are user hostile, are constantly being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thrown in our faces and there’s becoming more and more and more of them. And as we discussed already,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a detriment to the user, we’re seeing more and more of these and whoever used

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fight against these sorts of things isn’t winning that fight anymore. We’re also seeing more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and more and more, hey, have you heard about dark matter? Hey, have you heard about that thing with Jake Gyllenhaal? Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you heard about MLS whatever whatever? Hey, have you heard about Friday night lights? We’re getting more and more and more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these advertising and you’ll push notifications and things and settings and whatnot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a way that that doesn’t feel like the Apple that, not that I grew up on, but for lack of a better

⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn of phrase that I grew up on. And the fact that all these things are happening, that the people who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to say no to these things apparently can’t or won’t say no anymore, or maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just aren’t there anymore. That’s what gives me pause and gives me the heebie-jeebies is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want Apple, and this was the thesis of Jason’s post, I don’t want Apple to lose sight of what makes Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so great and why we are so enthusiastic about Apple that we have done damn near 600 episodes of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show largely about this silly company. I don’t want them to lose that. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I fear that I’m starting to see a little bit of smoke around

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them losing sight of what makes them so special. And, and you know, things happen, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometimes mistakes are made, and maybe they’ll course correct, and maybe it’ll be fine. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t love this feeling that I just got this like, that they’re prioritizing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey services to the detriment of other things, that they’re prioritizing security,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in some ways, to the detriment of other things like the user experience. And I just, I don’t love that. And I feel like they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey error, they’re going too far on a few of these things. And I want, I want there to be a better balance.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is one of those things where I want a better balance.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was one of the one of the places where some aspects of Apple’s corporate

⏹️ ▶️ John structure have helped it in this way. And I’m not quite sure how this works with the services things. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John in a company that was really divided up by like division, you can say, well, the people in the services department are totally incentivized to

⏹️ ▶️ John throw ads in our face because they’re their whole point is make the line go up on their services, right? It makes

⏹️ ▶️ John sense. But like Apple has had counterbalances against that by, for example,

⏹️ ▶️ John back in the old days, you know, despite some of his bad decisions, Johnny Ive is the head of user experience

⏹️ ▶️ John or UI or whatever for the whole company, for everything, every single product, hardware

⏹️ ▶️ John and software. At one point it was like Johnny Ive and his department, it’s like, there’s no division like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, oh, you’re an Apple TV, oh, I can’t tell you anything. No, I cut across the whole company and I say,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I am in charge of the user experience, of the Apple experience of using our products. So whether it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac, an iPhone, a pencil, the music player,

⏹️ ▶️ John music app on Mac OS, like software, hardware, anything,

⏹️ ▶️ John someone was overseeing that and that group had expertise and incentives to make

⏹️ ▶️ John good user experience because they were judged on, like do people like Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John products? Do they think they’re easy to use and pleasant to use? Do they

⏹️ ▶️ John induce surprise and delight? That’s what they’re motivated to do. And maybe you in the Apple TV Plus

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is motivated to get more subscriptions, but guess what, you gotta go through them because you don’t have your own UI team,

⏹️ ▶️ John you gotta go through the Apple-wide UI team. I forget what they call that type of organization, but it’s like, it’s the opposite of

⏹️ ▶️ John divisions. It’s the opposite of having the Mac division, the iPhone division, the iPad division, and then having them

⏹️ ▶️ John just have their own little kingdoms and their own little worlds and their own motivations because that can distort

⏹️ ▶️ John each one of those products because the people in that group are motivated to sell more iPhones or sell more

⏹️ ▶️ John iPads or whatever. And for example, if you had the iPod as a division, they’d be motivated to sell more iPods.

⏹️ ▶️ John But sometimes the best thing to do is not to sell more iPods, it’s to have the iPhone totally cannibalize the iPod. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the best for the company, but if you had the iPod as a division, they’d be fighting tooth and nail to prevent that from happening and that’s not healthy,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I look at things like, how the hell do come-ons about like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple Payment and the Apple Card and MLS get into the Settings app? Like

⏹️ ▶️ John where is the cross-cutting user interface design team on that?

⏹️ ▶️ John Cause I know why like the Apple card, people want that to be there. But to your point, Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ John like shouldn’t there be the user experience team saying you may want that, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t have that. And how are they losing that fight now? Like how is that, is that not taking place? Where is that? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I know Johnny Ives gone and maybe there’s just no, but like that department still exists. And it’s still, as far as I know, it cuts across

⏹️ ▶️ John hardware and software. Does it not cut across services? This is a structural thing that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John too much like sort of inside baseball about how Apple works that I’m too far removed from that. I don’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ John know, but I would hope that the structures that prevented this when with the hardware software

⏹️ ▶️ John divide would like not having the iPod team, you know, fighting to keep that product alive when it was so clear that the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone should sweep it away. Right. Whatever allowed that to happen. I would hope those same checks and balances are

⏹️ ▶️ John still in place. But everything from the services side makes me think that somehow they are

⏹️ ▶️ John excluded from from this, these checks and balances and somehow are able

⏹️ ▶️ John to infect the rest of the products, which is not great. And like I said, it’s not about the revenue. I’m not worried about the services

⏹️ ▶️ John line going up and the product line going down. I would love it if the products were sold at cost or were loss leaders, and

⏹️ ▶️ John they made all their profit from high margin services, as long as the holistic experience

⏹️ ▶️ John was the Apple experience that I know and love, right? And it wasn’t the throw ads in your face,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, crappy experiences that the services people seem to want.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, Revenue Cat, Squarespace, and Delete Me. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our member exclusive perks is that you get a bonus topic every week called ATP Overtime.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This week, members are going to hear about COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, and the role

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of government in keeping kids safe online. It’s a pretty interesting kind of thorny topic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll be talking about that in overtime. You can hear it by joining as a member, atp.fm slash join. and we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can

⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into mastodon, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they did it mean

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ Tech Podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long.

Neutral

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Marco doesn’t really believe in the show notes for the most part. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey every great once in a while, little snippets will arrive. And sometimes I just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know, and sometimes I don’t even want to know what they’re about. In the after show section of our internal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, I see the following. Marco’s Rivian drama.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sitting down, I’m leaning back. All right, Marco, what’s going on?

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like we already did Rivian drama. Is there, could there possibly be more Rivian drama?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey narrator says oh wait there’s more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right so there’s two areas of drama one is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember when John said after I got half of my car disassembled he’s like no he’s like at some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco point if that happened to my car there would be like rattles and stuff everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know nothing is a pair of paraphrase but I always said I worry if you have a

⏹️ ▶️ John large amount of a complicated product is disassembled like in the shop I worry that it’s not gonna go back together

⏹️ ▶️ John the same way it was.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I now have a substantial amount more wind noise coming from the right side of my car

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I did before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to get that looked at. It was not perfect before. Before the repair, if Tiff ever rolled

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the passenger side window while the vehicle was in motion, when she rolled her back up again, you’d hear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wind noise. Until we stopped, she would open the door and close the door.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s obviously like a somewhat of a seal issue on that window

⏹️ ▶️ John so strange. It seems like such an aerodynamic vehicle. It’s brick shape.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the wind.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now there is substantially more wind noise from the right side and some occasional hums

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at certain speed. So

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need to back into a stump with your other side of the bumper.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’ll fix

⏹️ ▶️ John it. Then you balance out the wind noise. It will cancel out like force cancelling woofers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, so I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to deal with that at some point. God knows if it’s gonna be a mess of like who deals with it the body shop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Rivian service who knows we’ll find that out that’s that’s part of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem so I took a long trip with the Rivian this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco past weekend after the first fast charge at a Rivian charger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Rivian adventure network which is very good I pulled away from the charger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I got a bunch of warnings on the dash saying battery fault service SUV immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s definitely reassuring as you’re presumably two to three to four hours away from home.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco On a multi-hour trip that I intend to keep going on, going to an event that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we were going to a friend’s wedding in Canada. So, you know, it’s a bit of a drive. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, well, let’s see if I can just defer this service till I get home, try

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go. And I noticed the car’s going extremely slowly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm. This sounds all too familiar and I am having real bad flashbacks right now. Mm hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s running on half the number of cylinders.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I pulled into a gas station and I’m like, what, like it’s barely usable. I’m like, what do I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do? So I thought, let me try. This is a computer product. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John You got to reboot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I’ll try rebooting it. That’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it fails, never fails. Number one, a diagnostic technique.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. And I had to do this for, you know, for Tesla on a fairly regular basis as well. You know, you figure out like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, you push the steering wheel button and something else for a few seconds. So with Rivian, it’s so funny. It’s like you push the left

⏹️ ▶️ Marco steering wheel button and the emergency flasher button on the roof. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it feels just like control delete for a car like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it is. You should

⏹️ ▶️ John have to hold down the horn as part of it. I’m holding down the power button in the horn is like, what

⏹️ ▶️ John is that? Oh, something just rebooted.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. So it’s this ridiculous process, but I did the full

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reboot and they even warn you when doing that, there’s a couple of minor reboots, but if you do the big reboot,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they even say, don’t do this more than once an hour because certain subsystems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might take that long to come back up. I’m like, okay, that’s a little disconcerting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well, but fine, we’ll deal with that. So anyway, I do the full reboot, the car, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes like five minutes to reboot. It comes up, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey This

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is basically what happened with us, if I recall correctly. When it came back up, it was not fine for just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a moment, and then within moments of you driving away, if I recall correctly, it was fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this was fine immediately this time. It’s like, okay, well, I guess I need to get service, but maybe I can continue this trip

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get service like next week and not right now and canceling this trip

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or getting a rental car and leaving my car in Newburgh or whatever. So anyway, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue on the trip, fine. At the next charging stop,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I plugged in the fast charger, now I should clarify, at the next charging stop,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was the only charger in a pretty big area.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew it was there, and so I kind of took a risk to get to it. I arrived at it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like 10% charge. It’s a pretty low amount of charge, and it was like, if I really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to go to another charger I could maybe make it, but it would be a stretch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really need to charge here. So I get there 10% and I plug in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the charger will not start. Every time it’s about to start, the car shows a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco message saying, battery fault, please service immediately. Oh no. So I’m like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now my car won’t charge. On a trip, when I’m in the middle of nowhere at 10%,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco percent this is not good so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I try let me let me reboot again after the reboot comes back up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem is fixed I can charge again ok whoo on the way home

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I arrive at this charge now I should clarify what this charger is this is an electrify America charger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I have when I first got the Rivian a year ago I believe I said on this show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco electrify America chargers are fine. They’re plentiful, they work, some of them are pretty fast.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s fine and it’s competitive with the superchargers in terms of utility that it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offers on a long road trip. And a vehicle that has a CCS plug and has no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco supercharger access is fine to own because Electrify America stations are pretty decent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I believe I gave an update to that statement a few months ago that my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience with them was declining rapidly. It seemed like even within the span of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one year that Electrify America’s chargers, which are the primary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco decent fast chargers that are not Tesla’s port in the US,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that Electrify America’s chargers were, in my experience, declining quickly. There were way more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco breakages of them. You show up and half of them aren’t working to our earlier conversation.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And way longer lines. You had to actually wait to gets them sometimes because there’s been so many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco EVs sold in the last couple of years in the US like there which is great. EVs are taking off. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere especially in like wealthy areas like New York. They’re very they’re getting very very common

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the problem is that the the Electrify America network and chargers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only have not scaled to the growth you know to address the growth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also are actually getting worse because they keep breaking and it seems like no one is fixing them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is what this station was. I stopped there on the way up, it has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco four chargers in the middle of this giant parking lot surrounded by big box retail stores. Four chargers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the way up, three of the only three of them were working and I had to wait 20 minutes. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I actually finally plugged in, it advertised that it could go up to 350 kilowatts and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it went 90. So okay, not a great showing. When I get to the same

⏹️ ▶️ Marco station on the way home, only two of them are working. So- Why would you go to the same one?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go to a different one. There’s nothing else around. That’s why. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get there, only two of the four are working. They’re all full of course when I get there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now of course, I do what everyone does when they pull up to an Electrify America charger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has two open bays because the things are dead. I pull into the one of them and say, let’s try

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. What the heck? Maybe it’ll work for me. And of course I pull in and it doesn’t work for me. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back out and I kind of get in a position that suggests I’m in line.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because see, this is the problem with car chargers. It’s like the Apple store. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Imagine the Apple store, but with way higher stakes and everyone’s mad and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one working it. And they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John the size of cars. Right. So you can’t easily jockey for, you know, jostling around to form some amorphous

⏹️ ▶️ John blob of checkout. Imagine that, but with pieces of steel that can’t touch each other.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, or it’ll cost $20,000. So anyway, so the problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with EV charging now, again, I’ve before this, I had Tesla’s, of course, so I’ve done a lot of EV charging,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco EV charging logistics when you’re when you’re at a fast charger on the highway trip. Again, these are unstaffed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one is working the chargers. No one is watching the chargers. No one is policing the chargers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is just unstaffed, like almost public infrastructure are kind of, you know, you show up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you hope that nothing bad happens and you hope you know your car can get there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people won’t mess with it and other other people won’t be a problem because again, there’s no one working it.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why they should be selling potato chips in a little hut with the surly teenager in there because then he at least note, hey, one of the things

⏹️ ▶️ John went out and you know, send an email to somebody who comes and fix it eventually, but with nobody there and with like

⏹️ ▶️ John Target doesn’t care like you know what I mean? It’s just there’s literally zero people to notice. Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ John is breaking, call the people who come and fix it. Like that probably happens on like

⏹️ ▶️ John a week or a month lag when just enough people get angry about showing up there and having it not work and send some angry email

⏹️ ▶️ John when they get home. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. And so here’s the thing is like when I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, you know, first in the EV world, it was pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much only Teslas that were getting any kind of traction and certainly at Tesla’s own chargers, there was only Teslas.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Superchargers tend to be built with lots of bays. Even back when I first got the Tesla,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean 2016 I think was my first one, it was a while ago. So even back then, the superchargers that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be built with like 6, 8, 12 bays, so like there were a lot of bays. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, and because it was only Teslas and because it was so long ago, there was never a wait. There was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always capacity and you would show up and the only other car that would be there would be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other like nerd or hippie who bought a Tesla. So it was a very different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crowd and a much smaller one than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is at a modern Electrify America charger today.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So today you show up to these chargers and they are almost always full

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or almost full. Now the entire idea of like an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unmonitored, unstaffed, unpoliced charger totally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco falls apart when you have to wait because now it’s anarchy like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have to wait now it’s like okay we’re gonna like kind of form like a weird

⏹️ ▶️ Marco queue and everyone’s gonna kind of you’re oh you were here first then you then you but like what happens if someone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco jumps the line or is a jerk or you know has a dispute over who was first

⏹️ ▶️ John you should just put your quarter up on the charger

⏹️ ▶️ John kids listening a quarter is a unit of currency that comes in coin form. You thought I was going to explain

⏹️ ▶️ John the arcade thing, but now I’m trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey get my sure did

⏹️ ▶️ John because how many kids know what how many kids know what coins are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair enough. I mean they barely know what cash is anymore. Anyway, so we arrive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this charger on the way home again. I have I have something like you know twelve percent like I’m not going to make it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the next one and there and the two that are working are of course taken

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s another car waiting. So now so I’m going to be the second in line for the next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course there’s nowhere to park that would form a natural line. It’s just like these things on the side of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a parking lot with like one of those parking lot through streets right in front of it. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not even really space around it to form a weird queue. So we just kind of pull up near

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and hope for the best. The car on the end, one of the active cars,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is parked comically diagonally across two spots. It’s chaos.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, all right, I’ll wait. weight, you know, and because EV charging

⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes, you know, half hour or whatever, most people who charge their car don’t stay in it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They get out of the car and they go over to one of the big box stores that’s nearby and, you know, go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the bathroom, you know, do some shopping, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now it’s the communal laundry machine at college where it’s like the person’s not there, but their load is done. So you take those

⏹️ ▶️ John wet clothes out and you shove it on top of the machine and you put your clothes in but kind of hard to do that with a car.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Interesting that you mentioned that. So, as we’re sitting there waiting, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty long wait, and so everyone’s upset. So the one car

⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting is upset, everyone else is upset. Eventually, one of the cars finishes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one person in front of me, they get to take that spot, okay, so now I’m next in line.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The diagonally parked car is still there, it’s been there for a while. So I’m like, I wonder how close

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are to finish. Let me get out and look. I get out, I walk over, their screen says like 81%. 81% I’m like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great that means this person is a is gonna be done really soon I’m gonna get this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco spot next this will be great and a few minutes later a woman walks up to this car and I’m like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes this is it finally gonna be us she walked through the car she opens the door pulls out of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car one of those like clear square to-go containers full of salad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco opens it up and starts eating the salad and closes the car door and walks away with the salad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to disappear into the nearby shopping center.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No!

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No!

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, uh oh, she’s not leaving, but her car’s at this point probably well into the 80s.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s going to happen? Where is she going? No! Go! She wants that 100%.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so Tiff and I are like, where? And of course, we name her Salad. We’re like, where did Salad go?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When’s Salad coming back? And surely the car has to be in the 90s by now. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we’re wondering where Salad went, another car pulls up up and two dudes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get out and I use the term dudes with some emphasis here. These are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of guys who if they walk up to a bunch of people at an elevator who are standing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting for the elevator to come, they’re the kind of guys who will tap the button like this. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really like just like tap it a thousand times just because they assume of course none of you thought to push

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the button and not only do you not think to push the button but if you push the button very aggressively maybe the elevator will come faster.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those kinds of dudes who come up. They come up. Of course, they try both

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the other spots that don’t work because again it doesn’t work for anyone else. The app says it doesn’t work,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but hey, maybe that maybe it’ll work for these dudes. Of course, not. Then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they look over at salad’s car and they unplug it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, that’s possible.

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t think that was possible. Some of them have locking mechanisms, but not all of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Exactly. Some of them, the cables lock in. in for this reason.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keep in mind, and this is one of the things, all Teslas lock their cables in. The reason why is because,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, things like this, but when Tesla was first entering the market, there was,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and still in some places is, but especially back then, there was a lot of, kinda,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s say conservative people who would even vandalize or try to vandalize EVs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just their mere existence angered certain people in the US.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so Tesla had to design their systems to be a little bit defensive.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s one of the reasons why the Tesla plug locks into the vehicle and why you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop a Tesla from charging if the car is locked and the person’s not there. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, you can try to cut the cable, I guess, but that would be quite an operation. Don’t do that, please. Yeah, please, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for lots of reasons. Like you will probably kill yourself and also you shouldn’t do it for lots of other reasons. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco salad’s car is unplugged. Now, we are in line right behind Salad, and we’re like, when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco she comes back, she’s gonna think we unplugged it. Sure is. And then there’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like a conflict that I really don’t want, and I’m like, oh God, I don’t want, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes me look really bad because these dudes came and unplugged it. And oh, and the dudes motioned to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to say, oh, come pull up next to her and start plugging it. So they want me to pull up diagonally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next to her diagonally parked car.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh no.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which, of course, I’m like, then I’m gonna walk away, She’s gonna come back thinking I did this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe vandalize my car or something. There goes another $20,000. I don’t want, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many parts of this that I do not want this. I’m like, now what? So I told these guys,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I’m gonna wait for her to come back. I’m not taking that, I’m not doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they had unplugged it. They even then closed her flap

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the plug. And I’m like, I can’t believe the gall of these dudes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, what were they driving? Um, the uh, the Kia thing that I like. The,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hatchback-y one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey The EV6? No, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good one. The 5, I think. The Ioniq 5?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s it. Not Kia.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Whatever, yeah, the Ioniq 5. Anyway, um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now the car’s unplugged. It’s starting to rain. We’re like, where the heck

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Salad? Now it’s raining, she’s stuck in the mall somewhere. Like, now what do we do? Oh god, she’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna come back, see us, we’re gonna have to explain to her.” Tiff’s like, don’t worry, I’ll explain to her, like, she’ll, I’m a woman,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco she’ll get it. Like, I’m, no, that’s not, I don’t want any of this. Like, I just, it’s like, I’m like freaking out. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff’s gonna get beat up. If there was like any other charger nearby, I would have just left. I’m like, I don’t want to deal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this, but I couldn’t go anywhere else. Eventually, like, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other car, eventually, like the other one that was working, that car finishes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, thank God. I’ll take that. I positioned myself, yourself, I would say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely aggressively as they pull out so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dude car does not take this spot.

⏹️ ▶️ John Suddenly you don’t care about another

⏹️ ▶️ Marco twenty thousand

⏹️ ▶️ John dollar repair

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah like I am not going to have a conflict with salad over this unplugging incident that I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would never do. So finally I like I pull in I get my spot. I start

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course the dudes immediately go diagonally park next to salad and take her cable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like you know fine, but you plugged We got out, the dudes get over there, and of course, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tip was like, the way the dudes used their car was the car version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of manspreading. Like, they opened, they like, parked next to Salad, definitely, and they opened

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up every door and the trunk, and the car was just like spread out across like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole, and we’re like, of course, these dudes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so we get out and we’re like this is perfect now when salad comes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back She can deal with these dudes who actually did it we are out of here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we go you know do some shopping ourselves.

⏹️ ▶️ John Why you went to do some shopping? I would be in that car waiting for salad to come back. There’s no way I’d want to miss that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I would want to watch absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I want the op I’m so conflict avoidant I’m like I don’t even want to see this. I don’t want any part of this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get

⏹️ ▶️ John splash damage from the conflict go get to defend your car.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know so anyway we’re shopping the charges going actually impressively fast that time when it went to one hundred and fifty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kilowatts like art that’s good and then I get a notice as I am shopping

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that charging has stopped on my car at about eighty two percent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh that’s not so bad. I like well I’m like I mean I need it. I was hoping to get into like eighty five

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ninety but okay you know that’s weird though. Why did the charger stop charging my car and the app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just said like waiting on charger or something. I’m like, I bet I bet they tried to unplug me. Does the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rivian lock in? It sure does. But if you push the release

⏹️ ▶️ Marco button on Electrify America charger, it stops charging. So they you’re able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stop someone’s charge. But if their cables locked in, you just can’t take it. So you’ve just now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stopped it for no reason. And then you’re just wasting time. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So sure enough I go back to the car those dudes have since left now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a new set there are two new vehicles waiting one of them is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course a giant truck with a guy who is exactly what you’d expect the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of guy to be driving a giant truck and the other one is just some other do and that you could tell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are having a heated discussion possibly over who goes next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I walk up and tiff and I get in the car and I unplug my charger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we just get the hell out of there. I said nothing, I didn’t look at them, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco said nothing to them, I’m just like, you know what, screw these guys, they can fight it out themselves,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am getting the hell out of here. We went to the next charger down the road to top

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off and it was one of those that’s a combo supercharger and Electrify America

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same parking lot and there were 12 chargers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco four were occupied, there was a family like playing catch in a field next to them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like an oasis of peace. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that is to say the Electrify America charging experience

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really I think degrading quite a lot to the point where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even as as my car is is breaking. Oh, and I did have to reboot it two more times at different chargers on the trip.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even as my car is weirdly breaking and I have to maybe get it serviced and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe get it surface. You have to get service. I hope it’s already in the shop.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not yet. I have to schedule it now, but I’ve been traveling until like yesterday. So it’s it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been an ordeal, but I will never buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any Evie for the foreseeable future that cannot at least

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also use Tesla’s superchargers. There’s so many great options on the market right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that only have CCS plugs for, you know, the next year or two or three maybe, and then they’ll convert

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to NACS. There are certain brands that have deals with Tesla or can use adapters.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will not buy any other EV, and I cannot recommend that anybody else

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy any EV that cannot somehow, either natively or through an adapter, use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla superchargers in the US, because the rest of the charging scene is getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad very quickly. It’s only going to keep getting bad. And like, you know, what if you were

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that situation where you have to kind of, you know, stand up for yourself in a charger and say, you’re a woman.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the other people that charge you are kind of aggressive seeming dudes. Like this could be really bad. Like this could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause bad situations for sure. Again, I’ve had only positive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco experiences with Tesla superchargers. and I have had so far only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite negative experiences with Electrify America and other CCS chargers. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta say, use Tesla chargers whenever you can, people out there with EVs, and do not buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any more EVs that can’t use them.

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope this whole experience has made you more prepared for the coming water wars.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God. I’m sorry, what?

⏹️ ▶️ John Climate change,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, water wars. Come

⏹️ ▶️ John on, keep up, science fiction. But not really science fiction, now it’s science fact. Yeah, resource scarcity

⏹️ ▶️ John brings out the best in everyone, said no one ever.

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