616: I Have No Grippers
06 Dec 2024Third-party Mac SSDs, using Threads and Bluesky, Intel’s CEO-firing, and what features we’d add to our apps without the fear of rejection.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco [re-]discovers progressives
- Follow-up:
- Yet more football (🏈) news
- Seriously y’all, the Giants are so bad 😭
- TVEverywhere & Channels
- AVP immersive content tallies (via _)
- Cleaning a Mac keyboard while screensaver lock is on (via Paradise Pete)
- We are one again asking you to consider CleanupBuddy
- Another explanation for ballooning app sizes (via Alex)
- More thoughts on Mac SSD upgrades (via FotS Jonathan Dietz, Jr.)
- Yet apparently reverse-engineered upgrades are coming?
- Yet more football (🏈) news
- Threads tests allowing users to choose their own default feed
- Pat Gelsinger is out at Intel
#askatp:- What do we wish we could add to our apps, but Apple prevents?
- Post-show:
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Photography Corner
- Tips from FotS Tyler Stalman
- Cropping isn’t always necessary (via Nicholas Gaffney)
- Psychology of photography (via Matt Johnson)
Sponsored by:
- 1Password Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device.
- Trade Coffee: Coffee at home, made better. Get your first bag free!
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Progression
- 🦃📺🏈
- Immersive Video milestone 🖼️
- Keyboard-cleaning vs. Watch
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- App sizes
- Third-party Mac SSDs
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- Threads, Bluesky
- Intel CEO fired
- Sponsor: 1Password XAM
- #askatp: Features we’d add but for Apple
- Ending theme
- CallsheetCloud
Progression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been having a bit of a confusing couple of weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my eyes. Oh, no. Oh, no. So, it’s nothing bad. This is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, compared to, you know, the reality that most people live with any kind of, you know, eye correction, this
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going to find some way to blame this on the Vision Pro. No. Give them time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. Give them time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of the drawer for one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco look what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I just, you know, as I’ve discussed, I think like a year ago, I said I was trying different reading glasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I tried like some progressives from the internet. My lack of close distance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focus now with my, you know, 40s presbyopia, whatever that is called,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is annoying enough in my life now that whenever I am wearing reading glasses and I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like my phone or my watch, I’m like, oh man, that’s so good. Why can’t I look at it all the time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve tried progressives, which for those that don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of doing what bifocals used to do, but where you don’t see the line that differentiates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the bottom part that magnifies and the top part that doesn’t, where it’s just kind of a smooth transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which results in lots of oddities. And so anyway, I decided about a month ago, I decided let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me actually, since it’s annoying enough now in my life not to be able to see sharp things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up close, let me try to actually give progressives a real shot, not get like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco internet ones where I measured my face with an app and hope for the best, but actually go to a real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyeglasses place that sells the best progressives, which I gathered through research are the Zeiss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco individual, whatever, whatever ones. Um, I was like the, like a nice optician in the city
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was like, you know, on Zeiss’s like best recommended list and, you know, got a really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frames and talk to the experts there that work with this stuff all the time. Like, yeah, this is what you want. So anyway, I’ve been trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to wear progressives for long spans, like not just while sitting at my desk, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like while walking around, doing stuff around the house, walking around the city,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like doing stuff like, you know, not I have, I’m not wearing them while driving or using a computer because I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them for those distances, but, uh, for kind of, you know, while doing like general purpose stuff, you know, while eating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dinner, it’s so nice to be able to see my food really sharply, uh, or like at restaurants to be able to read the menus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really sharply in low light. Like that’s all really nice. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been trying it and you know what? You know what’s great about progressives? They let you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see far and close in one. You know what’s not great about progressives? Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. Everything else. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you like seeing the world look like jello? Progressives may be for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, tell me more about this because my eyes are such crap that I have to wear hard contacts. We’ve talked about this many times. Have you ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked in a fun house mirror?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Is that what it’s like?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s not. Well, okay. The problem with progressives is that in order to have magnification at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in my case, no correction at the top, but you know, whatever, whatever your correction is at the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In order to have that, you know, a transition between two different optical characteristics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there has to be some like transitional zones where there is some degree of warping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the image. Now the really good progressives, like I can tell between, between like my internet ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my fancy Zeiss ones now, the Zeiss ones are better. Like their blurry zones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are much smaller, there is much less distortion. It is the best type of aggressive I’ve seen so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far. However, there is still some warping, especially like what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warned me was don’t like run upstairs really quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like what does that mean? And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found that immediately. Why? Because you know the problem with reading glasses, any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of magnifier, is when you look at something through the magnification part you can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close things really sharply but anything that’s not close it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only blurry but it’s also you’re you’re altering your perception of distance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly because it’s just magnifying so things that are far away appear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the wrong distance compared to where they actually are and so the result of this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with progressive since the bottom of the magnify stuff and you look down at your own feet they’re in the magnification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zone, not the nothing zone. So you looked at it in your own feet and you, and your feet are both blurry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they appear like further away than they really are. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco result is it’s really easy to trip on stuff because you don’t know where your feet are. Uh, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing to solve this problem, if listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to solve needing a very, I have a plus one reading prescription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and no other optical correction needed, is there a better solution than progressive glasses?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just, why don’t you just use reading glasses?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have them everywhere, they’re fine, but like, the problem with reading glasses is that you can’t always have them on.
⏹️ ▶️ John You get one of those things that puts them, a little chain around your neck, so they’re always on you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have two months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dignity to wear one of those. Like, I’m just, I’m too, I can’t, I can’t do that. I just, I can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, you can do what I do. So I hate progressives so much that I’ve been fighting against them until I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t anymore. And right now I still can. And I have two pairs of glasses. I have what I call my driving glasses,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey also pretty cool. Even I remember. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I have my around the house glasses, which I use for using the computer. I’m lucky enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t need any glasses to use my phone because my up close vision is good. But the point is I have two pairs of glasses and
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I handle it? I just wear my non-driving glasses all the time around the house. And anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John I leave the house, I wear my driving glasses. And that’s my solution. They’re literally always on my face. Something is always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my face. I don’t mind. Like if there, that’s why I try to progress. Like if there was one kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyeglasses that I could just wear all the time and correct close and far, I’m willing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. The problem is, apparently that’s not really possible without them being progressive, which has a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of other trade-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not what I’m doing. When I’m in the house and wearing my in-the-house glasses, I cannot see distance well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m making that sacrifice because most things aren’t too far away from me in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wear my driving glasses when I watch TV. The TV is too far away for me to see. Although if it’s a show that I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about, maybe I’ll just sit closer or whatever. But yeah, basically what you’re deciding is, What distances
⏹️ ▶️ John do I really need to see stuff at? And for me, I need to see my computer. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when I walk around my house, I need to see stuff that’s, you know, few feet
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of me, but I know what’s in my house. It’s fine, right? So you should just get whatever glasses that you feel comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John using your phone and your computer with. Get a pair of glasses that does that and just wear them all day in the house. And
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that means that stuff that’s far away from you and your house will be blurry, but so what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t, I mean, so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with reading glasses is that the depth of field, so to speak, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much distance from you is in focus is not that much. It’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a few feet that’s actually really in
⏹️ ▶️ John Your eyes aren’t fixed focal length. They squish and stretch to let you focus on things at different distances. So it’s just a question
⏹️ ▶️ John of as you get older, your eyes get, your lenses get stiffer and less squishy and you can’t squish them as much, but you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got some squish left in your lenses there. So you, you know, how much can you squish without feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John eye strain? I bet you can squish from phone distance to computer screen distance with the correct prescription.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what you go to the eye doctor for. You say, doctor, I want to be able to see my phone and my computer screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John and my computer screen is this far away from me, and my phone is this far away from me, and I wanna be able to do that comfortably with my current
⏹️ ▶️ John eye squishiness ability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so frustrating, because like right now, like my computer screen is, you know, whatever, you know, it’s like two and a half feet in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco front of me, perfectly sharp. Like no glasses needed for me to see computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. I mean, maybe in a few more years that might change, but like right now, if I hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my arm out, everything more than like wrist distance away is perfectly sharp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just like, you know, when I’m holding my phone or looking at something closer, that is not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s very frustrating that like there seems to be no correction.
⏹️ ▶️ John My vision is basically the opposite of yours. For me, everything from like the tip of my nose
⏹️ ▶️ John to about a foot and a half away is sharp, and then everything else is blurry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I’m basically the same without contacts. Although I think my range is considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than yours, but same basic idea. Genuine question, Marco, I’m not trying to troll you. What’s wrong with bifocals?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never tried them, maybe they’re garbage, I have no idea, but would that not solve the funhouse mirror problem?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, honestly, I haven’t tried them yet. I just kind of assumed that I am too young to be seen wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fair. Okay, so maybe the social angle is enough to dissuade you from them, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m with you. I get it. But I wonder if maybe that would be a better solution and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe you’d end up enjoying them
⏹️ ▶️ John He doesn’t need bifocals. He needs those ones that are like the bottom part of bifocals only.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah. Like those like half readers. Like, yeah, I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John those. Yeah, exactly. So then you look at Benjamin Franklin or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I think I’m also, I think I’m, I’m both too young for those. And also, yeah, I live 200 years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too far in the future for those.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just, you know, the whole clear part of the lens is doing nothing for you. Just eliminate that part. So you’ve got your little reader,
⏹️ ▶️ John your Benjamin Franklin reader half moons
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hanging off the end of your nose and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else is straight throw.
🦃📺🏈
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are all waiting for more football follow-ups, especially Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I saw a football game. You did?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did. Well, I hope for your sake it wasn’t the Giants because holy crap, are we terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it was the Texas versus other Texas college game. Oh, you watched college football?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why? We were visiting friends and they are from one of the Texas’s and wanted to see it beat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Were they A&M or were they University of Texas Longhorns fans?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were the, our friends are the Longhorns fans.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. I don’t actually have a horse in this race, but having lived in Austin for a couple of years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a, uh, or a cow, right? Sorry, it took me a second. Uh, that joke was better than I gave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you credit for. Um, anyways, I, I don’t have a cow nor horse in this race, but, uh, I spent a couple of years in Austin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a middle schooler and I did not understand really what college was at that point, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew more than anything in the, in the world that the Aggies sucked and the Longhorns were the only team that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mattered. Didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that meant, but I knew it. It took me halfway through the game before I finally asked my friend, why is that team
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called the Yankees? That doesn’t make any sense. And then I was mishearing them say Aggies the whole time. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, that’s, that makes way more sense for a team from Texas. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. No, I’m very proud of you for watching some college football. That makes me very happy because I enjoy me some college football.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you don’t, that’s fine. But I enjoy me some college football. What I don’t enjoy these days though is New York football giants because God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they suck so bad. They played on Thanksgiving, and it was terrible. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lost the Cowboys, who was Gruber’s team. I feel like America wins when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Cowboys lose, but America did not win on Thanksgiving because Cowboys won. It’s sad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times, but here we are. But the other problem with the Giants playing on Thanksgiving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that it was nationally televised. So my whole big contraption that I’ve set up for myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it didn’t do me any good because the game was televised literally the entire nation. But this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming Sunday, I believe they play on Fox at one o’clock if I’m not mistaken. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so hopefully I will put my apparatus to use, which the reason I’m bringing all this up is because I was reminded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by John Fischetti about a checkbox, a very important checkbox in the channels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DVR server app that I completely forgot about. So I told you where we left our hero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week was that I attempted to get TV Everywhere logged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in through my friend’s Spectrum account. I don’t have his credentials, he just logged into it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my server, and I didn’t get any of the local channels. I was really bummed about that, because that was the whole point of this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, you know, that we started with Antenna specifically because all I want is the local channels. I don’t want, I don’t think he gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HBO or anything like that. I’m not looking to get HBO or anything like that. I just want the local channels. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried to suck it in via TV Everywhere, and it didn’t work, and I was very sad, and then John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote to say, Wait a second, did you check the following checkbox? Local networks via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV everywhere. Some major metropolitan areas offer access to ABC, CBS, and Fox stations via TV everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was unchecked. And then I checked it. And guess what came in? Local networks via TV everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I now have hypothetical and theoretical access to all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these via channels, via TV everywhere. So I’m very much looking forward to giving this a shot on Sunday. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey report in, which with what will hopefully be the final bit of football-related follow-up next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this still the device that’s in your friend’s house in Connecticut that
⏹️ ▶️ John running channels? And that’s why when you check this checkbox in his house, then he can get ABC,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so forth from Connecticut.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, hypothetically, if he were willing to password share, which I didn’t ask him to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give me a password or anything like that, I literally told him, look, the computer’s sitting in your network. Just log
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. Go onto this URL and just log into your, it’s basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an OAuth dance. and log into your cable provider if you don’t mind. And then I’ll be able to slurp down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff via TV Everywhere on occasion. But again, like, I mean, hypothetically, I could just cancel my cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subscription. But I’m genuinely not looking to do that. This isn’t about saving money by, well, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of about saving money by cheating the system. But I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco trying to cheat. Yeah, let’s be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honest. That’s definitely what it’s about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not trying to cheat like Verizon or anything like that. I just want to be able to see things that I can’t see locally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, yeah. So he logged into, he got on the channel’s web configurator, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logged into Spectrum using his credentials. I never saw them. I don’t think channels, strictly speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever saw them. And then now it’s all enabled on the server in his house. And then my server
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will, through some channel’s magic, will talk to his, well, it’s really, both of them are my servers, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the sake of discussion, my server will talk to the remote server, maybe that’s a better way of phrasing it, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when they’ll cascade those channels down, or those, those, the programming down to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unrelated to all that.
Immersive Video milestone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We talked last week about, well, we’ve been talking regularly about Apple Vision Pro immersive content.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was very sad that I couldn’t come up with some sort of BS homework assignment for Marco to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oblige to this week. So my apologies to you, Marco. I’m sure you’re just devastated that you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any Vision Pro homework this week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, it was an Apple PR email about a bunch of Vision Pro stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We did. And I was genuinely happy to see it. I hope that they send more of those emails.
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t read those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I did read it. I would love more Vision Pro content. If we’re to the point now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they can start, where they have so much that they can send us emails containing lots of new Vision Pro content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a great problem to have. I look forward to there being so much content that that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing that we need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But a friend of the show, underscore David Smith, wrote, after listening to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussion last night, obviously this was last week, about the latest Vision Pro thing, I made a little spreadsheet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all the Vision Pro immersive content, adding up the cumulative runtime that they just passed a meaningful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey milestone. There is now slightly longer immersive content at 131 minutes than the 2023 WWDC keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which included its introduction at 126 minutes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me say that again, rephrase it slightly. The entire WWDC keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of which a part of it, a large part of it, was the Vision Pro, that was 126 minutes. And as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of last week, there is 131 minutes of immersive content. So we did it, Joe. We passed the threshold. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a little graph, that underscore, put together in the show notes, and perhaps will be the chapter art for this little section.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It made me laugh quite a bit, that underscore. And it’s a very underscore thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do to put this together. He continues, on average, they have released three minutes and seven seconds of immersive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content per week since launch, if you include the launch content. If you take the launch content out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just look at new content launched since February 2, the average new release rate is 17 seconds per day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or about two minutes per week. I love this. I love this so much. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it made me so happy.
Keyboard-cleaning vs. Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we got some feedback a little while ago from Paradise Pete on Macedon I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who writes I tried cleaning my keyboard using the screensaver method But I also had unlock with Apple watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enabled and now all of my devices are conspiring against me Apple just makes it
⏹️ ▶️ John too easy to unlock your computer I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can’t get near it with my
⏹️ ▶️ John to clean it because as soon as I go near it and it opens up with my Watch imagine if Apple’s laptops also had
⏹️ ▶️ John face ID then you’d be trying to clean it It would unlock because you’d be facing it So you’d have to look away take off your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Apple watch and then look
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t look at it and then you can clean the keyboard and anyway once again We’ll link to clean up buddy
⏹️ ▶️ John an application that will help you lock your screen and of course a couple episodes ago We had that weird Key combo that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do to shut your thing down and make it so it doesn’t wake up and you hit the keyboard Struggle is real.
⏹️ ▶️ John People want to clean their keyboards. Imagine if laptops were waterproof, then it would be a lot easier to do this.
Sponsor: Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you’re just starting out or managing a growing brand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website to engage with your audience and sell anything you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to sell, from your products to your content to your time, all in one place and all on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your terms. Squarespace has so much functionality built in and you don’t have to be a programmer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a nerd to use it. It’s super easy to build all of these features and it looks like your site,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just some templates. So they give you design intelligence. This is AI technology to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlock your strongest creative potential, empowering anyone to build a beautiful personalized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website tailored to their unique needs. So you can craft a bespoke digital identity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use across your entire online presence. And when you’re selling to your customers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s backed by Squarespace payments, the easiest way to manage payments onboarding is fast and simple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You get started in just a few clicks and you can start receiving payments in whatever way your customers want to pay. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always more ways to pay. They’ve recently done things like Klarna, ACX Direct Debit in the US,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Pay, Afterpay, and Clearpay, and they’re always adding more. So as new things come around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people want to use to spend money and how to shop online and get higher conversions. Squarespace is there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to support it. They have so much functionality built in. Whatever kind of business you’re running, whether you’re selling like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physical goods, digital goods, you can even send invoices with Squarespace. There is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built in. You can sell time slots if you’re a consultant or a trainer or something. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many functionalities, newsletters, you know, paid podcasts, ebooks, whatever you want to sell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace has your back and it’s all super easy to use. You can see for yourself by going to squarespace.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and starting a free trial. See how it works for you. When When you’re ready to launch, go to squarespace.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
App sizes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alex wrote in with regard to app sizes. I think another big contributor to app sizes that companies don’t split out their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps based on their offerings either. It’s quote one app per company. Tesla has a whole suite of functionality for their battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and solar offerings that somebody with just the car will never see. Software as a service companies with business
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to consumer and business to business offerings also frequently use the same app for both. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey B2C customers get a lot less functionality, but both groups have to download the same app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this does contribute to the app size in the sense that like, you think about like all the different screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, in the example here, like in the Tesla app, you have all the different graphics that represent the power walls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the you know, the different things versus all the different cars. Yes, that is true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, the problem is still that they don’t really care to minimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such things. Like there are ways to have an app that has images and various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assets and has lots of different functionality. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not 400 megabytes. The thing is they really, again, like we were saying last time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there really is not much of a culture in modern software development around minimizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the size, or even frankly, resource usage of apps. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have apps that are ram hogs too, because modern computer hardware is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vast and fast that for the most part, no one’s really picking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps based on their efficiency. And then when it comes to something like a company app, like the Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco example here, if you have a Tesla vehicle or a Powerwall or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple things, you don’t have any choice but to use their app. Like that’s how you get the function.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t like you have five different apps you can use and you might pick one that takes up less space on your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you don’t have the choice. When you’re dealing with these corporate apps, Usually it’s their app or you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the product. So that’s yet another reason why they have no incentive to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources efficiently because where else are you gonna go?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna make all the Tesla people send you links to third-party apps they use to control their cars. Thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Underscore and I almost wrote one back a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John ago. I know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna say, you should know that they exist. I mean, you have to preempt this. Yes, we know third-party apps exist for control. By the way, I just looked at the
⏹️ ▶️ John app that I use. The app for my washing machine, 500 megabytes. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So how much functionality is in that? It sends me notification
⏹️ ▶️ John when the wash is done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. Gracious. 500 megabytes, like we replaced by a speaker. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it like, well, it does, it also sings a little song. You can also upload a named wash cycles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you can, you can pick any combination
⏹️ ▶️ John and then give it a name and then upload it. It’s, it, please watch these sweaters on Bob. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think so. Like to Alex’s point, I think this app works with every LG appliance that has any smart
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality. So if you get a refrigerator or a dryer or washing machine or any model of anything that’s this is this
⏹️ ▶️ John one 500 megabyte app is for all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’ll permit me a tangent, gentlemen, which I again, I know this never happens on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve become one of those home assistant people. And I feel like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing a good job of not being, you know, like a crossfitter or a home assistant person where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all I ever talk about his home assistant. Give me time. I’m sure I’ll get there, but I bring this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up because a Christmas gift that I’ve asked for and I happen to know will be arriving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on on Christmas. Spoiler alert did Santa tell you? Santa told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He went to the mall and told him. Yeah, that’s exactly that’s why he was ten minutes late today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s why I was late to the recording. I was I needed to explain to Santa what home assistant was. In any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case, after hearing John talk about his what was a yo link thing for the refrigerator.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I decided I would like to do something similar and over automate and over complicate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that really has no business being this complicated nor this automated. And I thought I could get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget the term for it, but proximity sensors for the mailbox, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then hopefully, and then hopefully send myself a push notification when the mail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets here. I’m very excited about this. Don’t yuck my yum. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The reason I bring all this up is because the other thing I really, really want to do, and I haven’t figured out the right way to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’ve been contemplating, like, is there like an accelerometer version of the O-Link sensors or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to know when the washing machine and the dryer are done. And I don’t want to do that via like intercepting and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing like a intercepting the power and like reading the voltage or amperage or whatever that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being used. I feel like there’s a way to sense this using some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crappy O-Link sensor. And I haven’t put too much thought into this, but it’s on my list of things that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t need to automate or whatever, but I want to do it anyway as a fun project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you own, still, from having young children, a video baby monitor? No, actually we don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, okay. I was going to say you could just point that at the washing machine and then carry the screen somewhere and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John then solved. That’s fair. Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’ve got an old iPad or an old iPhone, you could Shazam the song that it sings when the
⏹️ ▶️ John load is done. What? And then have a shortcut that says when Shazam recognizes this
⏹️ ▶️ John song, send a push note of engagement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that? I don’t think you can actually do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s constantly listening. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John No? Well, you just leave it in the Shazam app running constantly. I don’t know. There’s probably some shortcut way. Because the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John point is that they make some kind of noise when the cycle is done, right? So you just got to listen for that noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s true. I mean, there are other ways to
⏹️ ▶️ John solve this problem. Although, how big and or well insulated is your house that you can’t hear that? I think we can hear
⏹️ ▶️ John our laundry machines no matter where we are in our house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We can hear it generally speaking. I mean, our house is a little over 2,000 square feet. It’s really not that big at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it’s bigger than John’s, but not that big. And so anyways, when the kids are really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was gonna say getting into it, but that implies bad. But then again, if the kids are really getting into it or just really playing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oftentimes we can’t hear it. But again, this is a problem that I don’t really need to solve. Same thing with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mailbox. Does it really matter? No. But would it be a fun thing to fix? Or I shouldn’t even say fix.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A fun thing to do? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John think it is somewhat. I mean, before I had my washing machine that sends me notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ John my normal thing is you put the stuff in the laundry, you put it in and then you take out your phone, which you always have with you. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John say, remind me to change the laundry in 35 minutes or whatever the cycle says is going to take, because you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to leave the wet clothes, especially in the summer. You don’t leave the wet clothes sitting in the washing. I know they’ve been spun, but they’re still damp.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can be like, you know, doing stuff and you get lost in work and then you’re like, oh, it’s 5 p.m. and there’s been wet laundry
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting in there for three hours. So just give yourself a reminder. You don’t have to hear anything, and your phone will just boop and tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you, change the laundry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but the problem is, washing machine time estimates are kind of like football time. Oh, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nine minutes left in the quarter. All right, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see you in an hour. You just got to know how long loads actually take. If your numbers on your thing lie, you still kind of know
⏹️ ▶️ John how long is this really going to take. And then just set the timer for that. Or set a timer for, like, give yourself some margin of error. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John set it for 15 minutes past. You’re just trying to not leave damp stuff in the washing machine for several hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, well, I don’t know if I’ll ever do this for the laundry machine. And obviously Santa has committed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to bringing me the proximity sensor. It’s not proximity sensor. I forget what it’s called, but you know what I’m talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Heard the mail about
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little door thing. It’s got two little contacts in there together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. Yep. I think there’s a better name for it. I can’t place it right now. It doesn’t matter. But you get the idea. Contact sensor, maybe. Yes!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, I think that is it. Thank you.
Third-party Mac SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, anyways, why don’t you tell me about what Jonathan Deits Jr., friend of the show, Jonathan Deits Jr. has to say about
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re in the news, and we’ll talk more about them in a little bit, but here we go, Jonathan Deits Jr. always has lots of technical info
⏹️ ▶️ John for us. He says, Apple SSDs utilize multi-chip packages, each of which contains a single MSP
⏹️ ▶️ John or memory signal processing die, along with two to 16 NAND flash memory dies. And
⏹️ ▶️ John while the NAND dies Apple uses are bog standard, the MSP is a proprietary special
⏹️ ▶️ John sauce. Apple developed their proprietary MSP in-house using IP and engineering talent gained through the acquisition
⏹️ ▶️ John of AnnoBit in 2011. Apple’s MSP technology delivers what AnnoBit claimed prior to the
⏹️ ▶️ John acquisition as a 20x increase in NAND endurance. The
⏹️ ▶️ John NAND packages for some Apple M-series SSDs found in desktop Macs are located on proprietary removable modules.
⏹️ ▶️ John These modules are not SSDs, they are merely part of an SSD. It is trivial
⏹️ ▶️ John for third parties to reproduce the printed circuit boards for these modules which again we talked about a company that did that last
⏹️ ▶️ John episode and populate them with the necessary passive components However, the NAND modules
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple’s proprietary MSPs are not available through any legitimate channels making third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrades a non-starter That’s what I was wondering about because all these videos are like look We made the printed circuit board for the
⏹️ ▶️ John little module and you just take these NAND chips and you put them there And it’s like okay. Where did you get those NAND
⏹️ ▶️ John chips from? Jonathan is saying there is no way to get them because those those individual like those
⏹️ ▶️ John nan dies on there is nan but also Apple’s memory signal processor which needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on there it’s on a single die it’s not a separate thing or it’s on a single little rectangle I don’t know if it’s single die
⏹️ ▶️ John inside there anyway continuing the videos of people upgrading the storage on m-series Macs are
⏹️ ▶️ John using nan packages pulled from other devices which is often why they include a reballing step there will always be a small
⏹️ ▶️ John supply of legitimate parts available to the repair community that are pulled from non-functioning devices or or new machines that have
⏹️ ▶️ John been parted out. Then again, there will also be parts illegally diverted from the supply chain or coming from
⏹️ ▶️ John chop shops that break down stolen devices. Swapping NAND modules or packages with pulls from other
⏹️ ▶️ John M-series Macs will only work if the NAND configuration you present to the controller is one that Apple has implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John and provides firmware for. If you have one of the packages with an extra NAND die, it needs to be an MSP0
⏹️ ▶️ John position. That means even when swapping two modules of a four terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD in an M1 generation Mac Studio won’t work. The Mac Studio had two modules in it. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, if you just take those two modules that came from Apple and you swap their positions, you know, in the different slots,
⏹️ ▶️ John even that won’t work because one of them with MSP position zero has to, you know, the one with
⏹️ ▶️ John the extra NAND die has to be in position zero. If you try to plug a module that supports four PCIe
⏹️ ▶️ John lanes into a two slot or vice versa, it’s not going to work. For example, the modules from the M4
⏹️ ▶️ John and M4 Pro Mac minis are neither electrically nor mechanically compatible. I mean, mechanically,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can go in the slots. I know what he’s saying like that there you can’t swap these things because the the number
⏹️ ▶️ John of PCI lanes on the m4 versus The m4 Pro So C’s are different
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also a good chance that swapping SSD components between m-series max of different generations won’t work If you move
⏹️ ▶️ John the man to an end to another Mac The data will not be readable even a file all doesn’t enabled for any of the volumes on
⏹️ ▶️ John the disk The disk itself is encrypted with a yes XTS and the encryption keys are stored in this by the secure
⏹️ ▶️ John enclave integrated into the m-series series SoC. This is why swapping SSD components, even the official
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple SSD upgrades for the Mac Pro, requires performing a DFU reset from another Mac connected via
⏹️ ▶️ John a USB Type-C cable. I’m curious why Dostude1 thought you needed to use blank NAND modules because it should
⏹️ ▶️ John matter in the slightest. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the important bits of information here are those little NAND modules that they They always say, oh, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John just take these and you solder them right on. You can’t get those. That was my question. Where do those come from?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, like I know this company, we’re gonna talk about in a second, this French company is making the printed circuit boards,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you need the actual flash memory chips to go on them. And those chips have an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John proprietary thing inside them. Apparently there are sources from them. I mean, Jonathan Dietz talks
⏹️ ▶️ John about a whole bunch here. You know, sometimes you can get them from old Macs. You can get stuff that’s been illegally diverted
⏹️ ▶️ John from the supply chain. You can get used things, right? There’s ways to get them, but they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John readily available. And the other thing is that because these are just part of an SSD, you
⏹️ ▶️ John really have to match the board with the, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John chips with the Mac and the SoC that know how to read them, because it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John an interface standard, like the M2 things or whatever, where there’s their NVMe standard, where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, if you just comply to the standard, this will work in any machine that can understand this thing. It’s like Apple just tailor makes them.
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, the M4 Pro has this many PCI lanes, we’re gonna make this kind of slot with this voltages
⏹️ ▶️ John or make this printed circuit board to go along with it, we’re gonna put these NANDs on it, and it’s very, very custom.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when you’re buying a memory expansion, you’re buying it for a particular Mac, sometimes with a particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think this just shows like the idea of, all right, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all of these like, you know, custom Mac models now that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like, you know, some kind of like proprietary or permanent or soldered on in some cases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, storage and memory and everything else, Apple is selling them saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not upgradable really. Or in the case of the Mac Pro, it’s upgradable only from us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s Apple’s position. And you see in there, there are certain technical reasons for that as well, or physical reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that as well. And, you know, we have this recent spate of people who are coming up saying like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna sell cheaper modules for this, just back our Kickstarter or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if somebody can get off the ground and somehow do that and somehow survive with that as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a business, both legally and supply chain wise, good for them. But as a buyer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a customer, I would strongly advise that you don’t throw your money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at these people until those businesses are established. And that may never happen. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it looks like is this is a hard problem. we don’t know what Apple’s going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in reaction yet. You know, if they’re depending on Apple for supply of certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco proprietary chips or things like that, in some way, like that could be a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they’re not depending on Apple because Apple won’t give them these things. But they’re, I mean, it’s not actually a complicated problem. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated basically essentially legally. Like where can you legally, apparently you can’t legitimately get those little
⏹️ ▶️ John memory chips. Everything else about it, like it’s a printed circuit board, like those components you can get, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll talk about it in this next item. In fact, the third parties who are doing this say they’re actually improving on Apple’s design by
⏹️ ▶️ John adding some protections that Apple doesn’t include, right? But those memory chips, those little squares that you see them soldering
⏹️ ▶️ John onto there, there’s no legitimate place to get them, apparently. Apple won’t sell them to you, Apple suppliers are
⏹️ ▶️ John not supposed to sell them to you, you could get them from old Macs that are broken, but the SSD is fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then it’s basically a used chip, or, as you know, maybe they’re quote-unquote Diverted
⏹️ ▶️ John illegally in the supply chain where the company that is making and selling these to Apple on the side will sell
⏹️ ▶️ John some you know out the back door to some other people or whatever but all the
⏹️ ▶️ John difficulties in this procedure are not technical are merely Business related
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple doesn’t want there to be a market for a third-party upgrade So these computers despite the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that the SSDs are removable and I think we discussed this last episode that One of the
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious reasons Apple would want to make them to removable is because it makes their repairs cheaper. If the SSD goes bad, they don’t have to throw out
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole logic board. Obviously on the laptops, they’ve been soldering them down because it’s a very small area and size
⏹️ ▶️ John is a constraint, but on their desktop Macs, even in the Mac mini, there’s enough room in there that you can make it removable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Arguably you could still kind of make it removable on a laptop. So for whatever reason, Apple’s been soldering down the SSD chips,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that makes any kind of repair. Like if one of those SSD chips goes bad or something, so expensive because you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to chuck the whole thing out and give an entirely new logic board. now on their desktop Macs, you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. If the SSD goes bad, Apple can just replace it under warranty with one of those little module that
⏹️ ▶️ John costs them a price that is much lower than what we would pay for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of third-party storage upgrades, reported
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Mac rumors, French company Polysoft has successfully reverse engineered Apple’s proprietary storage modules
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the Mac Studio and plans to offer more affordable upgrade options starting in January, 2025, following a successful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kickstarter campaign. it raised a little under $100,000 from 144 backers. They plan to offer two terabytes for $420,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is about 30% less than Apple’s $600.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They plan to offer four terabytes for about 850 bucks, which is again about 30%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than Apple’s 1200 bucks and eight terabytes for a little less than $1200, which is over 50%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than Apple’s $2,400.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Those prices
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple are not the price that they will sell you that module for because they won’t sell you those modules. That’s the price for upgrading
⏹️ ▶️ John from 512 to that amount. So if we’re going from 512 to two terabytes, you’re paying for 1.5 terabytes for $600.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if they were to sell you these individually like they do on the Mac Pro, the eight terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John one would probably be $2,800 or something like that, right? But yeah, for the eight terabyte one, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John undercutting Apple. They’re saying, well, for half price, you can get eight terabytes in your Mac Studio for half price. that
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re selling here is third party SSD upgrades for the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John studio. You can’t just buy these and stick them in your Mac Pro or in another computer. Like they’re just, it is very
⏹️ ▶️ John specific because they have to be matched to the SoC and the whole motherboard and all that other stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I see this and I think, wow, look, storage competition. It
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of opens my, like if they’re successful and Marco listed many reasons why they might not be and we’ll get to some
⏹️ ▶️ John more in a little bit. But if they are successful, this would actually put some competitive pressure on
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and it might bring us back to the days where we say, oh, if you’re gonna get a Mac, get it with the smallest amount of storage available
⏹️ ▶️ John and then just chuck that out and buy one of these upgrades from a third party because it’s the exact same part. In fact, it
⏹️ ▶️ John might even be better, but it can be as cheap as half price.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So apparently Luke Miani, I’m sorry, tried it. I didn’t get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chance to watch this video before we recorded. So what’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, he bought one of these things and installed it in his Mac studio. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John he installed it backwards for the first time. He didn’t realize that one’s gotta go in one slot, and one’s gotta go in the
⏹️ ▶️ John other slot, and it didn’t work right, right? But he eventually figured it out. But yeah, it’s a lot easier than soldering. You just buy
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing from somebody, it comes in the mail, you open up your MacStudio, which is annoying, because there’s this stupid circular
⏹️ ▶️ John foam thing you have to cut off with adhesive. Anyway, Apple could really make these Macs easier to open. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John you open it up and stick the things in, and you got eight terabytes in this MacStudio for half the price that
⏹️ ▶️ John he would have if he bought it from Apple. and you can check out the video, but mostly I put it in there to show
⏹️ ▶️ John that this is, I mean, I guess he’s kind of an Apple-centric type thing, but seeing videos about upgrading
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac storage, this is the topic of the day for these desktop Macs. I mean, obviously this is about the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio, but also the Mac Mini. Like if Apple’s gonna put these in modules, people are gonna look at that and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should be able to upgrade that. And Apple will say, but you shouldn’t. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should be able, like I can physically remove it, it’s here in my hand, can I get another one of these?
⏹️ ▶️ John but not buy it from you? It’s kind of like the App Store stuff where it’s like, everyone’s like, yeah, we wanna sell things to
⏹️ ▶️ John customers, but we don’t wanna give Apple 30%. Is there a way we can do that? Once you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you conceive of the possibility, can you imagine selling software without Apple getting 30%? Well, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John people have that conception in their mind because it’s a thing that used to happen all the time and people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t forget. Or even the people who weren’t alive then, the old people can say, kids, we used to sell software
⏹️ ▶️ John through the web and Apple wouldn’t get any percentage of it. Can you imagine that? But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah. How do things work then?
⏹️ ▶️ John We used to be able to upgrade storage. How did Apple not go bankrupt?
⏹️ ▶️ John used to build upgrades. Well, they almost went bankrupt. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we used to be able to upgrade storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now here it is again, these new Macs, their storage, it comes right out.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is interesting. And so I, you know, we’ll see how this goes. It’s a Kickstarter. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, anyway, so we should read Jonathan Dietz’s analysis of how he thinks this is gonna go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, so Jonathan writes, I stand by what I said in my previous email. I don’t see how they can legitimately gain access to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sufficient supply of NAND packages with Apple’s proprietary MSPs. I’m also not sure they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sufficiently differentiated their design so as to avoid legal action from Apple. Polysoft does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that, quote, the main risks are the supply of certain specific components, which is why we have set up an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extensive inventory, quote. However, it concerns me that Polysoft hasn’t come out and addressed the MSP issue head
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. I’d love to hear their take.
⏹️ ▶️ John The legal thing makes me think, oh, that’s the way Apple will go, because the printed circuit board, so they reverse
⏹️ ▶️ John engineered Apple’s printed circuit board by basically sanding off the layers, like the Luke Miani
⏹️ ▶️ John video shows some pictures from that. That’s how they figured out how the circuit board works. We have a legit
⏹️ ▶️ John one that works. How do we reproduce this? Slowly sand off the layers of the printed circuit
⏹️ ▶️ John boards, you can see what each layer does, and look at all the surface mount components, and maybe upgrade a couple of components,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you just gotta get those NAND chips. So, you know, they’re worried about the supply certain
⏹️ ▶️ John specific components, which has got to be those proprietary NANDs. And I have no idea they’re getting them. And I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want to say anything about the MSP because why would they? Why would they say that they’re doing something
⏹️ ▶️ John illegal? Like someone’s selling them these things on the sly who shouldn’t be so yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and I assume most of them are new, but again, they could be from like Macs that are, you know, old or broken
⏹️ ▶️ John in some other way, but the SSDs are fine. So we’ll see how this goes. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John I was looking to save money on storage on a Mac, I’d be willing to at least try this. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John because storage price on whatever my next Mac is, is going to kill me because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pressing up against my 4TB. I really pressed to get the 4TB on my Mac Pro in 2019. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was like the most expensive upgrade that I applied to this machine, I think, was just increasing
⏹️ ▶️ John the storage. And you know, the only other choice I have that’s bigger than 4 from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is 8, and it’s gonna like double the price of whatever the next computer I get. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m watching with interest how this goes. And I think a lot of other people are too. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I like to see this. I want Apple to feel competitive pressure. If you make a removable component
⏹️ ▶️ John and someone can figure out how to make that same removable component and sell it for what must be still,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Jonathan said this in an email, but I didn’t quote it, must still be really healthy margins for Polysoft,
⏹️ ▶️ John just not Apple healthy, just not 6.5 times market rate, Maybe it’s only three times market
⏹️ ▶️ John rate, but it’s still a good business to be in. You could undercut Apple, sell the eight terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John for half the price that Apple sells at less than half the price, because again, that’s the price of just the upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John from 512. Sell for half price, still make a healthy profit, maybe that’ll put some pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple. Maybe people will, if this becomes a legit business, people will stop paying
⏹️ ▶️ John the giant Apple prices and just go back to the conventional wisdom of, oh yeah, get the desktop Mac with the
⏹️ ▶️ John lowest amount of storage and upgrade it from a third party later.
Sponsor: Trade Coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Trade Coffee.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve all been scrambling for last minute gifts and trying to make them feel like they’re not last minute.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With Trade, you can send somebody a coffee subscription directly to their inbox in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes. It’s fast, easy, and guaranteed to impress because no other gift gives them something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look forward to every single morning. Nothing is as good as freshly roasted coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the morning. And a Trade subscription is a whole experience. Every month, they get a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freshly roasted coffee, perfectly matched to their taste, from one of the top small batch roasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the country. From light and bright to dark and bold, their personalized coffee subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deliver incredible coffee directly from roasters to your loved one’s door. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like giving them a tour of the country’s best coffee shops without leaving home. This is the best way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make good coffee. I’m telling you, nothing else matters. Your brew method, whether you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right fancy brewer or a grinder or anything, those things matter a little bit. But what matters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot is having high quality, freshly roasted beans the way you like them roasted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That matters more than anything else. Trade gives you that. I’ve had an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience with Trade over the years. I’ve used them a lot. They gave me an incredible variety.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Roasters I’ve never even heard of that I then really, I’m very impressed by when I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try them. And it’s such a huge variety of everything that I like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m hugely impressed with trade. And it’s, you know, it’s a good subscription too. Like, you know, you don’t have to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry that you’re gonna have too much or it’s gonna be hard to pause or anything. That stuff’s all easy to take care of all that for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You customize how much you want, you customize when you want it. You gotta go on vacation or skip a week. No problem, it’s super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy. So check it out, it is a great service. If you’re ready to cross that last gift off your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list, Trade is offering their best savings of the year on gift subscriptions right now. So head to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drinktrade.com slash ATP to send a personalized coffee subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in minutes. Thank you so much to Trade for sponsoring our show.
Threads, Bluesky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some topics. Let’s start with threads. Maybe we should, before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we get into the topic, can we do a quick temperature check on how much all of us are using threads?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, I feel like I started using it a fair bit, three-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months ago, something like that. And I was starting to really like it. And then I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I was feeding the algorithm poorly or if the algorithm changed or something like that. But I started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey falling kind of out of love with it maybe a month or two ago. So it was only like a month or two that I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really kind of into it. And then Blue Sky kind of found the juice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after the election. And I’ve been paying more attention to Blue Sky than Threads recently and generally enjoying it more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s where I am. Marco, where are you on Threads and Blue Sky?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really not there. I have accounts on both of those services for both me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Overcast. And of course, we maintain ATP accounts. That’s a separate thing. John does that, I think, entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so for my stuff, I have my personal account and I have overcast accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Threads and Blue Sky and Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only use Mastodon regularly of those three. As I pulled away from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter over the years, I learned that I didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need Twitter for my business. It was really just a place I enjoyed hanging out personally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes. Sometimes it was not enjoyable. And it was a huge time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sink for me. The whole reason I made an app called Quitter was that I was having trouble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not spending all day on Twitter when I was supposed to be working. But I was spending all that time on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I thought it was necessary for me to reach customers and my audience and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. So it was necessary for business reasons. And what I have found out, when I left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter and only really started spending time on Mastodon, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a way smaller audience there, not even close to the size of the Twitter was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my business metrics didn’t go down at all. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing went down. And what’s interesting too is that over the last year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so, I’ve also really pulled back a lot from just social media in general. I pulled back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. I hardly ever post on Instagram anymore. I don’t post that much on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s mostly just dropping in here and there. And also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my numbers didn’t really go down. With Overcast stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building an announcement mechanism in the app to reach my customers in the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was way more effective and benefited way more people than using the social media channels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that purpose. And so what I’m finding is I don’t really have much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a business need to maintain a strong presence socially. So it’s really just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do I like to do personally? And what I like to do personally is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and more as I get older I’m just I want to just hang out with my friends. And that’s different from broadcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publicly into a room full of strangers most of whom want to yell at me that I didn’t broadcast publicly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correctly. Social media has gotten so much less fun over the years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as just it’s as everyone’s gotten angrier. The recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco election did not help at all. But you know even before the election
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone has been getting angrier for so long that what’s left on social media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a bunch of stuff to make me angry about things I mostly can’t control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are going on in the world and a bunch of people who have been made angry. So when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I come and try to post about programming, I’m mostly posting in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco front of all those people who are angry about other stuff and then sometimes that blows back on me and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just like, I don’t know, what am I doing this for? I just want to hang out with my friends. I’m no longer interested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in sharing what’s going on in my life just for the sake of sharing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a big reason why I pulled back so much on Instagram. If I take some picture of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me in my new glasses, who cares? The people close to me care about it, the people that just see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me every day, they care about it. No one else needs to care about that. What about when I take a trip somewhere?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find this new restaurant in the city, it’s really cool. Who cares? No one’s following me for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So what I’m learning is I don’t want to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be performing my life on social media to try to, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, gain followers? Like that’s not really what I’m there for. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind sharing my life, but I’d rather do it with people I actually know, like my actual friends and family.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I have found relatively little place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my life now for social media besides casual browsing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sharing for professional or business reasons. So if I wanna talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift or some kind of app technical thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mastodon’s great for that, I go there for that. If I wanna ask a question about code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, Mastodon, perfect for that. If I want to read, just catch up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on what my friends are up to, Instagram is good for that, but I consume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly and don’t post much. So it’s becoming primarily a read-only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medium for me. So what am I gonna use threads and BlueSky for? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like Threads and BlueSky are mostly successful for people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to be like really jacked in to social media. This is like journalists,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who were like information junkies, people in certain verticals that those are maybe strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. Like I know sports is kind of gaining traction over on BlueSky from all the Twitter refugees and stuff. And politics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are obviously a huge part of all that. And so when I dip into these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services, what I mostly see is a bunch of people who are probably just gonna make me upset or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco angry based on what they’re talking about or what’s going on that day and what are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we all mad about today? Join the pile on. Like I don’t want that anymore. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a place in my life for that anymore. I have other things that I wanna spend my time and attention on. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that is to answer your question in the longest way possible, No, I don’t really use threads or Blue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Thank you. Thank you for that succinct reply. John?
⏹️ ▶️ John When I left Twitter, I went to Mastodon. And the critical mass of the people that I care about hearing
⏹️ ▶️ John from are also on Mastodon. So I feel like I’m there and my people are there. That’s my main place where I
⏹️ ▶️ John am and have been for a while now. I was excited about Blue
⏹️ ▶️ John Sky back when it was announced way back in the day as a spinoff project from Twitter. And I signed up
⏹️ ▶️ John for a Blue Sky account on day one. And I’ve had it forever. but I haven’t really used it that much. Threads, I also signed
⏹️ ▶️ John up on a day one just to see what that was like. For Threads and BlueSky,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that annoys me about both services is their third-party client ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes. I don’t think there’s any
⏹️ ▶️ John third-party clients for Threads, and there’s some for BlueSky, but none of the
⏹️ ▶️ John clients work the way I want them to, and there’s just not as many as there are Mastodon clients.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are so many Mastodon clients to choose from, There’s some really, really good ones. And that makes a difference to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes a big difference in how I use them. I do check Threads and
⏹️ ▶️ John Blue Sky every single day. I recently promoted those two apps out of a folder on one of my other
⏹️ ▶️ John screens up to, they’re on now on page two of my home screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the second home screen, not in a folder because I’m checking them every single
⏹️ ▶️ John day, usually multiple times a day. But what I’m doing there is I’m essentially monitoring
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are trying to communicate with me there, right? Because I do have accounts there. And so does the I have I
⏹️ ▶️ John managed the ATP counts that are there as well. And people if people who are there are trying to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John with me or with ATP or with rectifs, or with my hypercritical cloud, I actually have a bunch of accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John and all those things. That’s what I’m doing. I’m not reading the timelines on threads
⏹️ ▶️ John or blue sky much. Occasionally I peek but it’s just like it just confirms that that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s not much there for me. And we’ll get to that in a second when we talk about what this actual topic is about.
⏹️ ▶️ John But But yeah, I’m looking at them all the time to see who’s that mentioning any of those four accounts that I have in all the systems,
⏹️ ▶️ John and having to deal with either the first party clients or the not so great third party clients and not not not so great
⏹️ ▶️ John third party clients for blue sky, a lot of them are really good. They’re just not suited to
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m doing, which is shuffling through four different accounts checking for mentions.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not a normal pattern for most users, right? Most users are reading their timelines
⏹️ ▶️ John and replying to people and stuff. And I am basically using it as a essentially customer support type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing. In terms of reading, the I’m looking at mastodon mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John I follow a list of people I’m asked on that gives me things that end up in this show. I’m also looking
⏹️ ▶️ John on threads and blue sky for things that end up in this show. They’re just It’s harder to find because people are talking about different
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Most of the tech people I have found to follow are on Mastodon and there’s fewer of
⏹️ ▶️ John them elsewhere. So yeah, I’m using all those apps every single day. I’m checking them
⏹️ ▶️ John diligently, but I don’t like the clients and I don’t spend any personal
⏹️ ▶️ John time. All my personal time, if I’m spending any personal time or following people who are just like friends or
⏹️ ▶️ John post-interesting, that’s all on Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And just to build on that for a moment, you know, the client thing really heavily affects me as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why I got so into Mastodon was that I learned what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really liked about Twitter was the experience provided to me by Tweetbot, both on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone, but also more often on the Mac. And what TapBots did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Mastodon became big and Twitter shut down their API to third-party clients, they basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adapted the code base that they had for Tweetbot and made the app Ivory, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TweetBot for Mastodon. And because Mastodon is a very Twitter-like service, what that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ended up doing was it let me not really change any of my habits or workflows. I just changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app name that I was using from TweetBot to Ivory. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to move my habit into that and I just kind of fit right in and didn’t have to think about it and could keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working the way I always did. That is not, at least at the moment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As far as I know, they don’t have anything like that for Blue Sky, which at least has an API. Threads doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even have the right API for that, as far as I know. And probably, Threads
⏹️ ▶️ John probably never will, but Blue Sky does have a bunch of pretty good third-party clients.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like knowing Facebook, they’re never gonna have like a client read and write kind of API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They want you to add value to them by posting to them. They have an API for posting, but I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re ever gonna give you an API that will let you build a reading client. So, you know, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really gonna happen for Threads, which is where most of the people are. Blue Sky, I mean, look, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Blue Sky ends up continuing its growth and sustaining all the people, which is hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not super likely, I’m glad they’re having a moment. They’re having strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco growth right now, but a lot of people love kicking the tires on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new social app that they hear is where, quote, everyone is going. Keeping them there after a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while, that’s hard. That doesn’t often happen. We’ve seen that before. I mean, look, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even got people to go try out app.net for a little while, then everyone left.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the throwback. Yeah, that’s, incidentally, that’s why Ivory was as possible as it was, because they
⏹️ ▶️ John adapted TweetBot to app.net, so they had to generalize it. And once they did that generalization, even though app.net went
⏹️ ▶️ John away, when Mastodon came along, they said that we’ve already done the work to generalize our Twitter-like client app,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so it was easier, from what I heard, to slot Mastodon in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we can actually somewhat thank the success of Mastodon among our community of like Apple nerds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to NetBot, which none of them would remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, I remember,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yeah, I’m with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, for anyone who’s making a Blue Sky client or whatever, like Ivory, I also use Ivory,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though Twitter was my first and biggest love on iOS, TweetBot
⏹️ ▶️ John is also very good. And if you’re wondering what kind of features are useful
⏹️ ▶️ John for people like me who are monitoring lots of accounts, just copy everything that Ivory does.
⏹️ ▶️ John They make it easy to switch between accounts with a small number of taps and gestures. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I counted it the other day. I think threads requires three times the number of actions to do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on a regular basis.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s maddening. Yeah, and everything is very compact and they have really good multiple account support.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you’re replying, you can choose which account you want to reply from just at the last moment.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not why most people are using Ivory. They’re just using it because it’s a really good client. But it’s a really good client for a single person
⏹️ ▶️ John reading a single account. it’s also a really good client for someone monitoring quote unquote brand
⏹️ ▶️ John accounts or doing customer service or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s like, what I’m doing is monitoring three different accounts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two of which mostly just for replies, and then my personal one, I’m kind of posting and replying here and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. But like, I monitor three different accounts. Now, even if, suppose, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what, if TapBots is planning on making a Blue Sky client or not, or adapting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it into Ivory, I don’t know that. But suppose they did what I think would be like the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing for my personal preferences, which would be Modify ivory to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also support blue sky in one unified app. That would be great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think maybe that would be great but You know then what then I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know two different personalities on two different services that I’m kind of cross-posting to and that’s always difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like there’s always like little gotchas and little crappinesses that go along with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you trying to use cross-posting and trying to appear that you’re really there in two different services. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s difficult, that’s a difficult problem to solve. You still wouldn’t have threads which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is where by far the most people are and will probably continue to be. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have all those you know kind of logistical and and you know mechanical problems of trying to juggle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple services, ultimately Twitter back in the day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all of its faults, was overall better for most people. Because it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one place that you could be pretty sure, like anybody who you would want to reach that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was probably there. Anything that you wanted to follow, any kind of like informational feed from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco government agencies or businesses or scientific agencies or whatever, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably on Twitter. It was great having it all in one place. As much as Twitter the company was always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a train wreck, even long before Elon bought it, they’ve always been a train wreck as a company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were just train wrecks in different ways than they are now. And maybe overall, maybe less of a train wreck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it was good back in the day when it was one place where everybody was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now when there’s all these different places that everyone has split up to, I don’t really I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of these services enough to really use them heavily the way I used to use Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which honestly has been a huge benefit to my life to not have that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having to go to multiple apps to monitor these things though is annoying. And just to, not
⏹️ ▶️ John that this was, we’re going too deeply here just to let people know and preempt some feedback. There
⏹️ ▶️ John are apps that lets you read multiple services at once. The latest version of the Reader app, R-E-E-D-E-R,
⏹️ ▶️ John is multi-service, you can do RSS feeds, Blue Sky threads, Twitter, not Twitter, well
⏹️ ▶️ John ask Twitter. Oh, no, not with
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. But anyway, you can do multiple stuff. You can do at least Mastodon and Blue Sky. There’s IconFactory
⏹️ ▶️ John has an app that they’re working on, I think it’s still in beta, that lets you have essentially a single timeline
⏹️ ▶️ John with multiple different services mixed into them. That, like Margaret was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John for reading, kind of like treating it as like, it’s an RSS reader, but you can also read social services
⏹️ ▶️ John with it as well. That’s cool, but it’s not quite the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John as participating in the timeline where you’re conversing because it would be like if every
⏹️ ▶️ John one of your messages threads in the messages app was in a single conversation view. Yeah, now you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John everything that everyone’s saying to you, but when you reply to one person, like you reply to someone who posted
⏹️ ▶️ John something on Blue Sky, but then another person replies to something and they’re on Mastodon and they didn’t see either of those two
⏹️ ▶️ John that were on Blue Sky, but you think they did based on what they say and you reply to them as if they saw those, but all you got to scroll up
⏹️ ▶️ John and look, there was a little tag that said that one was from Blue Sky. Like keeping track of an interleaved chronological
⏹️ ▶️ John timeline of seven services and trying to have conversations with the people on those services, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good experience, which is why a lot of those reader apps like R-E-D-E-R
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Icon Factory app are focused on reading primarily. They’re not there for you to have
⏹️ ▶️ John conversations, but it is there for you to have a single timeline that you can catch up on, kind of like an RSS
⏹️ ▶️ John reader. You’re not, you’re just reading different websites, right? That’s there, and of course, there’s the federation
⏹️ ▶️ John aspect. Mastodon is federated, and in theory, independent of any single company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Blue Sky wants to be federated, but is not. It’s centralized,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re working on it. They’ve been working on it for years. Wake me up when they get somewhere. Threads, of
⏹️ ▶️ John course, says, oh yeah, no, we’re totally gonna federate a proprietary service with ActivityPub and Mastodon, and they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been doing it in bits and pieces, but they’re doing it so slowly and so piecemeal, I can
⏹️ ▶️ John follow the, the president, I’ll soon unfollow, but anyway, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey follow big accounts that are on
⏹️ ▶️ John threads, I can follow them from Mastodon, but you can’t really have a two-way conversation. Now, finally, they can follow
⏹️ ▶️ John you, but only if you’ve replied from them. And it’s confusing because someone looking for me will find that I do have
⏹️ ▶️ John an account on threads, but that’s not the one that I use. I use the one on Mastodon. So someone on threads would probably follow me on
⏹️ ▶️ John threads, they wouldn’t follow me on Mastodon. and it’s, you know, maybe someday the federation will actually
⏹️ ▶️ John work and then I could have an account on Mastodon and not feel like I’m missing anything happening on threads,
⏹️ ▶️ John but today is not that day. They’re just taking baby steps in that direction. So the bottom line is I am
⏹️ ▶️ John now checking at least three different social services. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have accounts on Instagram as well for some things, but mainly those three services where once I had to only check
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them and that is not as pleasing and more annoying, but that’s the reality
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re in. You just, you gotta do what you got. You gotta go where the people are. There’s nothing I can say or do that’s going to make everybody go to
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon or everybody go to Blue Sky or everyone go to Threads. People are going where they’re going. Maybe they’ll settle
⏹️ ▶️ John in some position, you know, and the people, when I say everybody, I’m talking about like listeners to the show, which are not
⏹️ ▶️ John representative of the general population, which is why so many of them are on Mastodon. But in the general population,
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly people are on Threads because they leverage the Instagram, social graph and blah, blah, blah. And then Blue Sky is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John is big now, right? but those people who are going to Blue Sky are probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not as many ATP listeners as I were already on Macedon. So anyway, that’s the situation we’re in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now we can finally get to what I thought was gonna be a short topic on threads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you thought wrong. Threads is testing the option to choose your own default feed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from the Verge, threads will now let users decide what feed they want as their default when opening the app. Meta CEO Mark
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Zuckerberg announced the news in a post saying you’ll be able to choose between the for you following or any custom feed you’ve set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. Zuckerberg’s post notes that Threads is quote unquote testing this option will also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offer different feeds more visibly within the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So speaking of Threads, one of the things that has been true of the Threads app from
⏹️ ▶️ John day one is that when you launch the app, it puts you into the algorithmic timeline, which is the right default for
⏹️ ▶️ John most people because most people don’t do what I do, which is carefully follow a list of people and then read everything that they post.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they chuck you into the algorithmic timeline and you can have your complaints about the Threads algorithm. but that’s where it checks
⏹️ ▶️ John you when you launch the app. But if you like pull down on the screen and go up to the top
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, you’ll see that there’s the like, whatever it’s called for you, and there’s the following one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s another tab at the top of the screen that brings you to essentially a chronological timeline of the people you follow.
⏹️ ▶️ John And remember when threads launch, like, oh, there’ll be an algorithmic timeline and there’ll also be a chronological one. So it’s whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you want. If you want the algorithmic one, you got it. The threads will try to show you, post it if it thinks you’re interested and
⏹️ ▶️ John mix them with the people you follow. But do you want it to be like old school for the weird funny duddies
⏹️ ▶️ John like me who want to read a chronological timeline of the post from the people they follow? It’s right next to it. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John tap that and now you’re reading a chronological timeline. Well, guess what? From day one, the Threads app
⏹️ ▶️ John lets you do that and click on the following tab and get a chronological timeline. But every single
⏹️ ▶️ John time you relaunch the app, it says, oh, here’s the algorithmic
⏹️ ▶️ John timeline. You can go to the chronological one if you want. It never remembers, intentionally.
⏹️ ▶️ John It always wants you to go to the algorithm. It could remember, it’s just a simple preference. They could save the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that I went there. They could save the fact that I always wanted to go to the chronological one. They could save
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that literally the first thing I do every single time launch the app is go to that one, but no, they won’t save it. It’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the most user hostile things a piece of software can ever do is intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John ignore what they know you want because it’s not what they want. They want you to
⏹️ ▶️ John see the algorithmic timeline because they think they know better. They think we get more engagement when we
⏹️ ▶️ John force people to see our algorithmic timeline. Doesn’t matter what they want,
⏹️ ▶️ John because our testing has shown if we let people make that preference sticky, if we remember
⏹️ ▶️ John that they went to the chronological timeline and we keep it there, we get less engagement from that person. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t matter what they want. It only matters what we want, what metrics that we care about. So
⏹️ ▶️ John from day zero, the Threads app has been doing this, and I’ve hated them for it. And it’s like, well, it’s Facebook. What do you
⏹️ ▶️ John expect? But here’s the story from, this is from November 25th. This
⏹️ ▶️ John story, oh, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, the big CEO says, hey, guess what? And this was around the time blue sky was
⏹️ ▶️ John getting popular because of the election or whatever, right? So, oh, competition, threads is feeling the heat. People are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to blue sky. They got to do something. Even just the slightest bit of competition, the slightest idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that anyone might know blue sky exists, makes the CEO of the company, Mark Zuckerberg,
⏹️ ▶️ John come out and say, oh yeah, now we’re working on the secret technology that will allow you to
⏹️ ▶️ John see the chronological timeline. We finally figured out how to save a Boolean and a preference. We
⏹️ ▶️ John did it. We finally figured it out. And how did they figure it out? Nothing to do with Blue Sky. We just
⏹️ ▶️ John thought this would be a cool feature that you might like. So we decided to roll this out for
⏹️ ▶️ John no reason. And it’s being announced by the CEO of the company. So incredibly use a hostile
⏹️ ▶️ John feature that only gets reversed when there’s even the hint of competition.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here’s the thing. As they say, they’re testing this option. I still
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have it. Every day I go to threads and every day I check, do I have
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Am I being A-B tested? Have they done the update? No, they haven’t. That was November
⏹️ ▶️ John 25th and I’m still waiting to be able to get this stupid app to remember that I always
⏹️ ▶️ John want the chronological timeline every single time. Instead, it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like the crop format original had original or whatever, a
⏹️ ▶️ John crop aspect original thing that before every time I went to photos and resize an image 65,000 times
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it was I came up with, that was just an oversight. This is them legitimately doing a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t want them to do because it’s better for them. And they finally say that they’re not going to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John in November. And here we are, December 5, still not out. So I’ll keep you updated on
⏹️ ▶️ John this. But like, I want this option because I never want to see the algorithmic timeline ever,
⏹️ ▶️ John ever. Please, It just it almost like they got the PR boost
⏹️ ▶️ John of saying, hey, the CEO said we’re going to stop doing this incredibly evil thing we’ve been doing because of the slight hint
⏹️ ▶️ John of competition from Blue Sky. But then they don’t actually do it. Like, did they just take the PR window announcing that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about doing it? Yes. So I know it might take them a while to figure out how to implement that. You know, they really have to
⏹️ ▶️ John test this feature, really, really test them. And I don’t want to screw up the whole application with saving this preference. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just driving me nuts. But if you’re out there and you have this feature, and by the way, the way they implement it is insane. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John to go to, let me just pull up the app to figure out what you have to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You have to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to, well, again, you have to go to following and just hold down on following
⏹️ ▶️ John and say edit feeds. And then you have create new feed and then you see for you and following. If you have the
⏹️ ▶️ John feature, there will be little reorder grippers in for you and following, and you change it so that following is
⏹️ ▶️ John on the top. And whatever’s on the top will be the default. That’s how they implemented it. I had to look this up
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, do I have this feature? What is it? It’s just, yeah, I don’t have it yet. I have no grippers, I can’t reorder
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I’ll keep you posted. But anyway, Mark Zuckerberg is terrible, Facebook is terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like threads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, so what do you do? You say that again? You, I wanna see if I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it cause it’ll make you so upset.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go to the threads app, see the little at sign at the top where it says for you and following? Yeah, yeah. Hold down on following.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey following. Edit feeds.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh-huh. And then you see create new feed for you and following?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, you don’t have the grippers? You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see the reorder grippers on
⏹️ ▶️ John following? Oh, I absolutely do. Well, you’ve got it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t. I’m just messing with you. I’m just messing with you. I don’t have any creepers.
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Someday, Mark said in November, they’re testing this option. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to test and say, you know, we get less engagement. So forget it. We’re not doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, what do you expect? book.
Intel CEO fired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, so breaking news as of a couple of days ago. Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out reading from The Verge. On Monday, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger abruptly decided to retire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after less than four years on the job. That was the official story, anyhow. Within hours, Reuters, Bloomberg, and The New
⏹️ ▶️ Casey York Times had a different one. The board of directors pushed him out. Three and a half years ago, Gelsinger announced an ambitious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan to turn around the troubled chipmaker within four years. Now he’s reportedly been kicked out of the company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before he could see it through. It happened so abruptly that Intel doesn’t have a plan in mind. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so completely that Gelsinger won’t even stick around as an advisor. He’s gone. Intel’s been in a tailspin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for years. It missed the smartphone revolution. It has been plagued by quality control issues with its chips, lost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey customers like Apple to alternative processors and is now at risk of missing out on AI too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If Intel is falling apart, this isn’t just a business story. The United States government has called it a national security story too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intel isn’t just the world’s former leading maker of computer chips. It’s one of the last last companies to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do both design and manufacture of them in itself, instead of outsourcing the latter part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the manufacturing to Asia. It’s one of the only levers the US can pull to reduce dependence on Taiwan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for chips, should China decide to exert control. Some of that might be in jeopardy because of what Intel’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey management has or hasn’t done, or might newly be in jeopardy now that the board has kicked Gelsinger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. Now, with regard to splitting Intel into a chip designer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and as one standalone business and as a fab business as another. Intel can’t spin off its own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey foundries very easily, particularly now that it’s receiving nearly $8 billion in Chips and Science
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Act funding from the US government. That money not only keeps Intel from engaging in stock buybacks for the next five years, but also specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gives the US government, excuse me, the US Department of Commerce oversight over any change of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control. If anything would see Intel own less than 50.1% of the new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company or lose its voting rights, the Commerce Department wants to make sure Intel will still fulfill its US manufacturing promises.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That could make it difficult to fully spin out. Quote, the economics of Intel’s foundry are so challenged that I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a spin-off is even feasible without a massive cash infusion, quote Ben Bajaran writes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultimately, I hope a buyer for Intel foundry emerges who can help the US gain an edge in domestic semiconductor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manufacturing, as this is far more strategically important geopolitically than many realize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ooh, there’s a lot there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the sad story of Intel. Our perspective on the Apple side of things was that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple, Intel was the enemy. Then Apple went over to Intel when they had the best chips and
⏹️ ▶️ John then they left them when they didn’t anymore. And in between, a lot of stuff has been going on at Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, for the young young people, remember, there was the Wintel duopoly, which was Windows for
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft and Intel chips that those two companies dominated
⏹️ ▶️ John the personal computer age from the dawning of the PC until basically the internet age.
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel was powerful because of, you know, legacy and history and
⏹️ ▶️ John the duopoly power that they had. And also for a while there,
⏹️ ▶️ John they were powerful because they were the best at manufacturing silicon chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John Their fab, their fabrication facilities for silicon chips was better than everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else’s. People who dislike x86 will say that’s how they can make the ugly pig
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the x86 construction set be the dominant chip in the world because their fabs
⏹️ ▶️ John are so much better. They have they had finer processes than other people. Their processes were multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John years ahead of the competition. They were the best in the world. When Apple went over to them that was
⏹️ ▶️ John true. They made the best chips in the world. It just so happens the chips they made were x86
⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever you could make that pig fly if you put it on a fad that’s two years ahead of everybody else.
⏹️ ▶️ John During that time when they’re making all that money they were blinded by their success. They
⏹️ ▶️ John missed out on the smartphone resolution but they’re like we make all our money selling these x86 chips we’re the best in the world
⏹️ ▶️ John we sell the best PC chips that’s where the show is we sell server chips that’s great who cares about phones we’re not interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in that. Intel owned a big stake in a company that made ARM chips,
⏹️ ▶️ John so did Apple for that matter. And Intel said, you know what? We don’t think there’s any future in ARM chips and they
⏹️ ▶️ John sold it. Whether or not that was a smart move that, you know, they also
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t make their own mobile chips for the AI machine learning stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John or even like the crypto things or whatever, or Nvidia was out there, you know, is now
⏹️ ▶️ John the was briefly the biggest company in the world is now the size of Apple, thanks to all the AI training they do on their GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel missed out on all that as well. Speaking of GPUs, Nvidia AMD
⏹️ ▶️ John will make GPUs Intel tried to make GPUs a couple of times they’re currently making GPUs. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not very good at it. One of their products by the way, I remember I had someone who worked
⏹️ ▶️ John at a job with who left the job to go work on at Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John on this project. The either you remember the Larrabee project, let’s let’s make a GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s make a graphics card out of tons and tons of tiny x86 chips because that’s what Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John knew how to do. We make x86 chips. Can we make a graphics card out of those? What if we make
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole bunch of little tiny x86s and put a ton of them on the chip? Can we make a GPU out of
⏹️ ▶️ John that? That was the Larrabee project. You know who’s in charge of the Larrabee project? Pat Gelsinger.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? He was trying to make a general purpose like GPU massively parallel computing thing. That project
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t go well. But during all this time, Intel has been like, Yeah, but we make all our money
⏹️ ▶️ John on our other chips. And so we’re doing fine. But then a bad thing, another bad thing happened. Yet another bad thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple or Apple Intel, which used to be the leader in fabrication, lost that lead, they made
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong bet, stupidly on what the next generation of silicon,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, fabrication would be, they actually made the right bet, they invested in this company that would be the future of that they
⏹️ ▶️ John invested in this EUV, you know, technology, but then And they said, you know what, even though we invested
⏹️ ▶️ John billions of dollars in it, we think that’s kind of expensive and we think we can do it a different, cheaper way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they were wrong, they could not. So they blew a multi-year lead on the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John industry while the rest of the world made the right bet, or TSMC made the right bet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now Intel has got chips that they sell for like
⏹️ ▶️ John servers and PCs. Apple doesn’t buy from them anymore. Their fab technology stagnated
⏹️ ▶️ John for years because they made the wrong bet, right? So they didn’t have the best fab in the world anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t even have the best x86 chips in the world. I think one of the worst, one of the biggest signs that Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John was in trouble, one of the sort of leading indicators that Intel was in trouble if you were paying attention,
⏹️ ▶️ John was way back when they were all powerful, they couldn’t even successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John transition from 32-bit to 64-bit. They tried with Itanium, and it was another
⏹️ ▶️ John bad bet. Their competitor, they’re sort of like little tiny little brother
⏹️ ▶️ John copying off them, AMD came up with x86-64.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Intel didn’t come up with that. Intel wanted to do Itanium and didn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John out. And guess what we’re all using? When we say Apple went to Intel chips, with the exception of I think some of the early ones, they
⏹️ ▶️ John went to x86 underscore 64. And Intel didn’t make that instruction set,
⏹️ ▶️ John AMD did, right? So they just lost, Intel has lost everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not the best at making chips. They don’t have the best chips. They’re not selling the most chips. They’re not selling into any
⏹️ ▶️ John of the big growth markets, mobile, GPUs, crypto, AI training.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re nowhere to be found. So into this, Pat Gelsinger comes, comes back to the company. He
⏹️ ▶️ John was also the lead architect on the 486. He worked on Larrabee. He’s like, he spent 30 years at the company. He left, he came back
⏹️ ▶️ John after being at VMware. Save the company, Pat. And Pat says, here’s how I’m gonna save it. I’m gonna fix everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna make our fab best in the world again. I’m going to start, I’m going to have
⏹️ ▶️ John our fab take, we’re going to make chips for other people. We didn’t used to do that. We only made them for ourselves because
⏹️ ▶️ John we were the best, but now we’re going to make them for other people too. And then the other part of the company, we’re going to make the best chips
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world. And if our fab can’t fab them, we’re going to fab parts of them at TSMC because they’re the best in
⏹️ ▶️ John the world now, right? So we’re just going to, we just, you know, no more of this like, oh, we have to be tied to our fab. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to do everything. We’re going to make great chips. We’re going to fab them, whoever’s the best. And our fab people are going to try to make the
⏹️ ▶️ John best fab. and he was on the way to trying to do this plan and it wasn’t working
⏹️ ▶️ John great. And they just, the board of directors got tired of it and said, you’ve spent too much money. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John look like it’s going well, you’re out. Arguably, they didn’t give it a chance to see it through to the end,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also arguably the end could have been the company going under, right? Because they spent so much
⏹️ ▶️ John money, especially on the process stuff. Their new processes that are supposed to be competing with TSMC are
⏹️ ▶️ John not as good as TSMC’s, are behind schedule, and they apparently have no customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you’re gonna be like TSMC and you’re gonna be in the business of making chips for other people and you wanna make the best
⏹️ ▶️ John fab in the world, A, you better have the best fab in the world, and B, you gotta have someone who’s gonna pay you money to make chips for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an important part of the business if that’s what you’re doing. And then the other side of it, Intel trying to make its
⏹️ ▶️ John own chips, it’s been messing up by making chips with a bunch of problems that you may have read about in the news.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s been using TSMC to help fab them, but TSMC is like, if you wanna fab your chips with
⏹️ ▶️ John us, We would prefer it if you weren’t also trying to be a fab yourself. And so if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna have your own fab over there where you’re trying to get our, compete for our customers, we’re gonna charge you more.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you give up on that whole fab thing, TSMC might say, yeah, we’ll give you a better price. Just be like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. Like they don’t have a fab. They just pass money and we make their chips. They’re not competing with us.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, you know, Pat was trying to make Intel do everything all at once and
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t going that great and they kicked him out. And this is a really, really sad,
⏹️ ▶️ John another very sad chapter in the downfall of Intel. Not that I care that much because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not too invested in Intel and AMD is doing great and NVIDIA is doing great and Apple’s doing great and TSMC is doing great.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that whole part that we read at the end there with the whole sort of geopolitical thing, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a real thing. It’s not just like rah-rah USA. So much of the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ John economy essentially depends on TSMC now. all of the top end chips, the best
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturing, that’s in Taiwan. Taiwan is in a politically
⏹️ ▶️ John precarious situation. It would be great for the US government or any government to say, do we
⏹️ ▶️ John have a hedge against that? If things go really badly over there, can we make chips? And the current
⏹️ ▶️ John answer is no, not really. I know we’ve got TSMC with a plant in Arizona, but again, it’s the same company.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also they’re not making the top end chips. They’re making like two years behind type chips. Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John got $8 billion from the US government to help with manufacturing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now the CEO that was trying to make that plan happen is out and now like
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumor is that maybe the board wants to really split it off and say, okay, we’re just gonna be fabulous. We’re not gonna make any chips. We’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna design them and then farm them out to somebody else. And the US government’s like, wait, no, don’t do that. The whole point is we need
⏹️ ▶️ John someone in this country who can make chips. A US company that can make the best
⏹️ ▶️ John chips in the world. We used to have that, Intel, that used to be you, but it’s not anymore. and we need to get that back strategically.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so maybe Intel has got these $8 billion handcuffs here, which isn’t that much, because I think Intel like lost $16 billion in like
⏹️ ▶️ John the last quarter or something. So the numbers here are big, but yeah, if the US government
⏹️ ▶️ John wants some US company to compete with TSMC, I think it’s gonna take more money and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure it’s gonna be Intel. But I just look at this whole story and I feel bad for Pat Gelsinger because I think he,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe he bid off too much. Maybe there’s no way that his plan was gonna work anyway, but at least he
⏹️ ▶️ John was trying. And his heart was in the right place.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the things he were trying to do were technically possible if he was given
⏹️ ▶️ John enough runway. It’s almost kind of like if Steve Jobs, when he came back to Apple in like 1998, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John he started working on his plan, and if there was some board of directors that said, it doesn’t look like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going well, Steve. He gave you a couple of years, but you’re out. And that would have been the wrong move. Like, I’m not saying that he
⏹️ ▶️ John would have turned it around like Steve did, but I really feel like he didn’t have enough chance. Like if the board’s gonna support him and
⏹️ ▶️ John support this plan as they did, see it through to the end. Don’t get cold feet halfway through because you can
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote tell that it’s going downhill because from everything that I’ve read, the Intel board of directors doesn’t really know
⏹️ ▶️ John or care anything about technology. It’s kind of the reason they’re in this situation is like we know how to make money and we wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John make more money and don’t tell me that mobile’s gonna be big and don’t tell me the GPUs are gonna be big and I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John hear about AI training and nothing will ever change because we’re Intel. And those are the people who got
⏹️ ▶️ John them in this situation. And so they hired Pat Gelsinger and then I just fired him. And I think it’s sad
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m sad about it. I feel bad for Pat and I feel bad for Intel. Uh, but I, I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is isolated from it, but I still just worry about, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire world depending so heavily on, uh, one small
⏹️ ▶️ John island in a, uh, politically precarious situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Growing up, especially as a PC person, like Intel was amazing. Like, I was never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upset about anything Intel ever did growing up. Now, granted, they obviously made a lot of wrong choices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Pentium 4, you weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eh, that was, I mean, maybe some, but…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has NetBurst architecture. It’ll make the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John burst faster. But see, the thing is, Intel, for the young people, they made a chip that wasn’t that great.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then what did they do? They made a better chip after. Like, they fixed it, right? They were good.
⏹️ ▶️ John For a while, they were good at what they did. And again, it really helped that they had the best fab.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, in either way, like it was, they were firing on all cylinders for most of my childhood, or at least that’s the way I reflect upon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I feel like that’s the way I knew about it then. And, and even when, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even when I was really into windows, there would still be a lot of stuff that would annoy me about Microsoft. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only thing that annoyed me about Intel was that they kept coming out with better stuff that I didn’t have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it was, it was the march of progress and Moore’s law was reliable as hell at the time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, it was such a like, maybe the American in me is coming out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I’m getting a little rah-rah USA and I don’t realize it, but it was such a great story of like, you know, let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of these people came together and made this just unbelievable company kind of sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of nothing. I know it was from a shell of, what was it? Something, semiconductor?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Fairchild? Fairchild, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for the purposes of this conversation, it came from almost nothing and became this juggernaut, international
⏹️ ▶️ Casey juggernaut. And it was so cool, I mean, in that it was so important. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, when Intel wasn’t what generated Silicon Valley, but it was early on in Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Valley. And, you know, there was such a great American story, a great corporate story. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know I have very different feelings about capitalism than I did a little while ago, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still, it was such a great story. It was something to be proud of as a nerd, as an American.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it really, from the outside, It seems like they were sniffing their own farts way too much,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they just thought they could do nothing wrong. And then they continually did things wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and didn’t seem to care because other parts of the business were, you know, booing them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were money. They found they wanted to make money. They did what they thought were smart decisions to make money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those people who made those decisions are rich and retired now. And so they’re like, yeah, it worked out. But none of them were
⏹️ ▶️ John technologists. Like to be in the tech industry long term, you
⏹️ ▶️ John do have to have some, your decision making needs to be influenced in some way based
⏹️ ▶️ John on technical understanding. What’s the next big thing? Is it important to be in mobile?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is power consumption important on CPUs? Are GPUs going to be more or less important in the future? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John things like that. Or like, you’d come to that, to like a bunch of business people and they’d say,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, yeah, sure, maybe, but like, let me show you the numbers. we’re making money selling x86 in the
⏹️ ▶️ John server right now because the internet is booming and we’re better than AMD and we’re better than everybody in the world and we just got
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. So we don’t have to worry about like the iPhone, who’s gonna buy an Apple phone, that’s so stupid. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you need someone with some tech industry instincts
⏹️ ▶️ John to influence your decisions. That if you don’t do that and you just do what’s gonna make you the most money right now, you will
⏹️ ▶️ John miss everything and Intel missed everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s really, it’s such a sad story. And again, from the outside, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a cautionary tale about hubris that, um, it really seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they thought they could do no wrong and didn’t really understand or believe when they did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do wrong. And it’s really just crummy. It’s, it bums me out, but I, and as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much as I feel for them, like if you’ve been shooting yourself in the foot slash torso slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey face enough times, like I’m running out of sympathy. And while from a geopolitical standpoint,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, I think it’s important that we are not completely and utterly reliant on Taiwan, but it certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t seem like Intel’s going to fix that problem for us, no matter how much money the US government is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John pumping. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like they’re handcuffed now because the way they would fix it is like, we should just be giving money to a company, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the only thing they’re going to do is figure out how to fab chips well. And being tied to Intel, which
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to sell chips that it designs, some of which are fabbed to TSMC, just complicates
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Like if you’re a fab, you just make chips. Anybody who wants to make you, they give you money, you make their chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s your whole business. You don’t make any chips. You don’t sell any chips. You build chips that other people tell you to
⏹️ ▶️ John build and they give you money for it. That’s what TSMC does. It’s a business that makes sense. And the other side
⏹️ ▶️ John are all the other chip makers, Apple, AMD, like they don’t make their own chips. They design
⏹️ ▶️ John them and then they pay somebody else to make them. They call it fabless chip designers, right? And Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John Pat’s plan for Intel was like, we’re gonna be, have a fabulous chip design, part of the company and we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have a fab part and they’re gonna be the same company technically, but like we’re gonna build a wall between them
⏹️ ▶️ John and the people who are designing the chips, they don’t have to go to Intel to build them, they should go to whoever
⏹️ ▶️ John has the best and then the Intel fab, you should just try to be the best and it was just, it was never
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna work out. Again, because when Intel is trying to fab its chips with TSMC, TSMC is gonna be like, so you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John fab your chips with us while you try to work on a business that competes with us? Here’s your
⏹️ ▶️ John price. It’s a different price than Apple gets. And
⏹️ ▶️ John now Apple’s, you know, the US government’s giving the $8 billion and Intel, I think the board of directors
⏹️ ▶️ John would want to say, we just need to split this. We’re just two companies. We need to not be with just two companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fab and not the fab. But where does the $8 billion go? And the US government’s like, you can’t do that because we gave
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel $8 billion. And so you cannot split. Otherwise we’re gonna have something to say about that. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how this is gonna work out. I don’t see how firing Pat does anything except for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John lets them stop spending so much money because they were spending a lot of money trying to implement his plan
⏹️ ▶️ John and now he’s gone and now the plan is gone and now what do they do next? They don’t even have a CEO, they just have interim
⏹️ ▶️ John CEOs. Not great, not great Intel.
Sponsor: 1Password XAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by 1Password Extended Access Management.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Quick question, do your end users always, and I mean always without exception,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do their work on company owned devices and IT approved apps? All of it? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t think so. So next question, how do you keep your company’s data safe when it’s sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all of those unmanaged apps and devices? 1Password has an answer to this question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Extended Access Management. OnePassword Extended Access Management helps you secure every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign-in for every app on every device because it solves the problems that traditional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IAM and MDM tools can’t touch. Check it out at onepassword.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s onepassword.com. Thank you so much to 1Password
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Extended Access Management for sponsoring our show.
#askatp: Features we’d add but for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. We probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only have time for one of them. And John C.G. writes, after Jason Snell’s, the Mac is the model piece, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an aside from me, if you haven’t read that, I recommend it. It’s really good. Anyways, after Jason Snell’s, the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the model piece, what are some features you’d love to add to your apps, but deliberately don’t ship
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you don’t think Apple would approve? This is a really good question. And I was thinking about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier today. And off the top of my head, I can’t really think of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything, which is bad. No, no, no, I’m sure there are some things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The only thing I could come up with, which is, I think I could work around it today, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have any particular interest in running a server for call sheet. And I think, and we’ll talk about this in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the future, I think I’m going to end up doing so a little bit in the near future. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I can avoid it, I’d like to. And one of the most frequently requested features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I haven’t even begun to think about is let me know when a movie is available. Perfectly reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Perfectly reasonable thing to do. And the easiest way to do that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have some sort of like background daemon that will every great once in a while look and see, all right, of all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things you have like pinned or favorited or what have you, are any of them available yet? And if so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey send a notification. And there are ways that you can work around this within the context of what Apple allows today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the easiest way one could argue for me to handle this is just to have some process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s running in the background always. And once every hour, once every day, whatever the case may be, it wakes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and does a little research and processing and then goes back to sleep. And that’s not allowed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And honestly, I think it’s for the best. But that’s the only thing that I can think of off the top of my head that I would potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ship. But again, that’s kind of a weak answer because I can work around that in other ways. In fact, Marco, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I talked about this. I can’t remember if it was privately or on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John telling you to make a server. That’s what he’s gonna tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you and I had talked about this, I think, privately, and there are ways to handle this outside of running a server.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or having a daemon or what have you. And I’m not interested in exploring that right now. We will surely explore that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime eventually in the future but that’s the only answer I have. John, let’s go to you next because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a feeling your answer will also be pretty simple. And then Marco, I think you’re gonna have a little bit more to say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, there’s things that I don’t ship not because I think Apple wanna prove them, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know they wanna prove them. Some of them I’ve tried to submit just to see that they want to. On
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, the things my app does are not that complicated, but I would like to do some other things that
⏹️ ▶️ John there just aren’t APIs for. To give just one example, my Twitch Glass thing is like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John pallets on the side of the screen. And of course the doc exists too, and you can’t get rid of it because there’s things only the doc can
⏹️ ▶️ John do. So I guess that’s one category of like things that only the doc can do, like get notification badges
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. There at various times in history have been ways to sneakily get at those private APIs and use them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But of course, if you figure out how to do that, you will not get into the app store. So if I want to be in the app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t do any of that. But let’s talk about something much more basic. My little switch
⏹️ ▶️ John glass palette thing can be on any edge of the screen, right? But I also want
⏹️ ▶️ John to know when the dock is on the same edge, so I can implement things of like hiding
⏹️ ▶️ John when the dock, like if you’re on the same edge as the dock and you make the dock appear, I want my thing to hide itself so
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t conflict with each other, you know, that type of thing, right? I’ve got a preference that says like hide on doc conflict
⏹️ ▶️ John in my settings screen or whatever. But to implement that well, what I have to know is
⏹️ ▶️ John something that I’m sure everybody who thinks about this for two seconds thinks surely there’s an API for this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which edge of the screen is the doc on? Simple question. You can only have it in three
⏹️ ▶️ John places, bottom, left and right. That’s it. I just wanna know, where’s the doc?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not only is there no API for that, but in some situations, there’s no way for you to figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John the way you can figure it out sometimes is by comparing the available
⏹️ ▶️ John height of the screen versus the full height of the screen, because there’s an API that will tell you here’s the pixels you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John able to draw in and it subtracts like the menu bar and the dock. And you can figure out, you can,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically I know the menu bar is roughly this height. And if the height, if the
⏹️ ▶️ John remaining height is not what I think it should be, it probably because the dock is down there taking up some part of it. So you can figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out where the dock is based on those APIs, which is a real roundabout way to do it that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to try to figure out how you’re going to estimate the menu bar Height which is not also a really good API for and it’s like look
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want an answer with three possible, you know an API where doc where is the doc? Tell me left
⏹️ ▶️ John right bottom Just tell me that’s all I need to know. But no you’re doing a bunch of math But if they have the doc set
⏹️ ▶️ John to hide Then you can’t even do that because then it says available pixels all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but the doc is hiding down there I have no way to know what’s hiding down there because now the math doesn’t work anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s taking up zero space unless it’s visible. So at any given point, if you try
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that math, you don’t know where the doc is. But guess what? There is an API for this. It’s just private.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can get at it, and I figured out how to get at it, and it’s an API that says, where’s the doc? And it tells you whether it’s left, right, or center,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what I wanted. But no, Apple rejected my app because I used that API.
⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously I filed feedbacks, and I said, please give me an API that lets me know where the doc is, and they’re never gonna do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Simple stuff like that is maddening because back in the pre-App Store days,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could just do it. If you could figure out how to do it, just ship it. And if they break that private API, well, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have to fix it in your app and test it on betas and so on and so forth. Tons of apps do that. I was thinking about the
⏹️ ▶️ John Christmas Lights app. What is the name of that one that has been going around?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I know exactly what you’re thinking of. I can’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of the name of it. Festivus
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Festival or something like that. I think it’s like Festivus.
⏹️ ▶️ John Festivus, yeah. One of the things it does, it puts Christmas lights on your dock And when you’re like mousing over the dock, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have magnification enabled, the Christmas lights move up along with the magnification. I looked at that and I said, how are they
⏹️ ▶️ John figuring out what level of magnification it’s set to? I know you can find a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to get that on the Mac, but is that an API that would be acceptable in the Mac App Store? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know for a fact that they’re using private APIs to implement that, but I think that app is not available in the Mac App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John which makes me think, hey, they’re doing something. It’s a Christmas lights app, who cares? But Apple would be like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t have it on the Mac App Store. you’ve figured out how to tell what the magnification is set to on the dock.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause you can set the magnification at different levels still, right? So you don’t know, like you can track where the cursor is, but you have to know
⏹️ ▶️ John A, that magnification is enabled and B, how high is the magnification enabled? So they know how high
⏹️ ▶️ John to move the Christmas lights up as the cursor moves around. And it’s just a fun little app
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Things like that can exist. The fact that things like that can exist in the Mac App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John is criminal. Like I understand why they like, you know, oh, we don’t want you to use private API or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s either like, allow people to do that or make APIs for that stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s frustrating. Anyway, and yes, of course you can say, well, why are you distributing thing on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac App Store at all? Why don’t you just do what the Christmas Light app did and just sell it on a website? For
⏹️ ▶️ John me with my apps, they’re worth more than $0, but not much more.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not worth enough for me to run my own store. They don’t make that kind of money, right? to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, so I’m kind of, for me, the Mac App Store is a boon because I can sell apps
⏹️ ▶️ John for a pittance and not make too much money and not have to worry about it or whatever. But it is frustrating to me. And very often
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve thought about having a version that’s outside the Mac App Store that has more features.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the final thing that I’ve talked about in the past is my app is like the dock and I wanted to be able to right click and quit
⏹️ ▶️ John quit apps. And I couldn’t do that. See a past episode where I talked about this, I had to ship a non sandboxed app
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can download from my website that communicates with my Mac App Store app to allow you to quit apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s basically like the functionality that I couldn’t ship to the Mac App Store, I shipped in a
⏹️ ▶️ John separate app that I have to sneakily lead you to download if you know where my website is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And once you have that app installed, my app will find it and launch it in the background so it can talk to it
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the thing that I want it to do. That’s insanity and it’s entirely because Apple will reject my app
⏹️ ▶️ John if it does what I want it to do. Which is be able to right click something It’s like quit like you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s really quite sad. All right, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually have much less to say here than John. Oh, I’m surprised why
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause they actually add APIs to iOS, I think, but not so much to MacOS. Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, so basically there, there’s a couple of reasons why you might want to do something that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would reject. One of them, you know, a big one is something about money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Another big one is a category of app they won’t even allow the entire category. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, you know, stuff like, you know, porn or emulators previously, you know, that kind of stuff. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another one is, you know, John’s thing of like, I want to either use a private API or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to use an API that is public, but use it in a way that Apple would reject them using it like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, quote, wrong, like in an unintended way, like hijacking the volume button for the camera shutter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, that, that kind of stuff. And so when I look at what I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought about doing with Overcast over the years, in the context of types of apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or types of features they won’t allow, I’ve never really run into that kind of problem. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to make an emulator or a gambling app or anything like that. That’s not really been a problem for
⏹️ ▶️ John What you also don’t want to do, which is also totally forbidden on iOS, is make, I guess what you would
⏹️ ▶️ John call a system enhancement app. like Quicksilver or Switch Glass or like a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John like when people use the jailbreak phones that like change notifications or the multitasking switch or like
⏹️ ▶️ John things that work at the system level that they’re not an individual app, you just want to change how the whole system works, like
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple clipboards that people have been trying to do on iOS forever and it’s so clunky because Apple absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John does not want you to make apps like that for the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. So I haven’t run into that. And so you know, there I don’t have an answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to anything like that. Now if you look into the private API side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the unintended API side, I have occasionally had ideas for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features or implementation details that I have backed away from. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forget what this idea was, but a long time ago I had some idea that was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m always playing podcasts while walking my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dog in all kinds of weather, including rain and snow and cold and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had all sorts of different ideas for like how to remotely control the app when the phone is in your pocket.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve tried things like using the accelerometer to detect certain tap patterns if you like just whack the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back of the phone. That was even before they added the triple tap accessibility gesture you can now do that with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, stuff like that. And one idea I had was what if you, what if like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you pause the podcast while it’s paused if you use the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and down buttons, maybe it can navigate through a spoken menu. And you can like. It’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPod without the buttons on it. Yeah, so I’ve had ideas like that over time where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve thought about the idea, I’m like well, but then they would probably reject that because I’m misusing the volume buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. Or in the
⏹️ ▶️ John modern day, like the AirPods thing where you can shake yes or no. Yeah, right. Apparently I bounce my head too
⏹️ ▶️ John much because every time a notification comes in, I start hearing those little ticks. Like people don’t know when you get a message
⏹️ ▶️ John and it says, like, do you want me to reply? You can shake your head left and right to say no or up and down to say yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you shake it, what you hear in the AirPods is a little doop, doop, doop. That sounds like little like beads
⏹️ ▶️ John knocking around to let you know that it’s sensing your shaking. But whenever it comes on and notifies
⏹️ ▶️ John me, I’m not shaking my head. I’m not trying to say yes or no, but already while it’s reading me the message,
⏹️ ▶️ John it says, do you want me to reply? It’s going to tick, to tick, because I just move my head around too much. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John trigger a yes or a no, but it is weird that I feel like these little rattly things are loose.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, you could use that for like head shake gestures to control overcast, but
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, there’s no APIs for that, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or you know, there’s been other stuff like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last year’s OS’s, watchOS 9, or yeah, whatever, last year’s OS’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they released the series nine watch that had the double tap gesture introduced.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then you know it’s not watchOS 9 because it was series nine and the numbers never matched. right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, yeah, you’re right. So you know that for the first year of the double tap gesture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the OS did not let third parties do anything good with it. All week, all it would do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be hit the first button on any notifications that would show up on our app. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. You know, so all there were all these customer requests saying, Hey, can you please make double tap, play or pause?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I couldn’t do it because there was no API. I bet there were some kind of private notification name somewhere that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being posted that I could have responded to, you know, but I wouldn’t, but you know, Apple would definitely reject that. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s been occasional things like that, but nothing really big. And then finally, like the other big area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, stuff Apple would, would probably reject that I would stay away from as mentioned earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is money stuff. So what could I do with money or business model stuff that Apple would most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely reject? And the only time I’ve ever really thought of something good here, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t actually good in the end was, and I’ve mentioned this before, I briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started asking around different podcasters I knew if they’d be interested in participating in what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would call the readability of podcasts. This is like a throwback back to my newspaper days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a competing app called Readability that I was briefly involved with. They had a scheme where you’d pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, I think it was like 20 bucks a month or something. It would keep track of what articles you saved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. And if you saved articles from sites that participated with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and that agreed to their program, they would divvy up your 19 bucks a month or whatever and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, all right, well, you read five articles from the New York Times and five articles from USA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Today, then we’d give, you know, 10 bucks to New York Times and 10 bucks to USA Today, like that kind of thing. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never really took off with readability in large part because the publishers didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to form agreements with them. And I had the bright idea, why don’t I do this for podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and briefly forgot about that side of it. My idea was what if Overcast collects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, 10, 20, 30 bucks a month from people and divvies it up to pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever podcast they listen to, make an alternative revenue stream for podcasts. Apple’s 30%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time cut would really eat into how that would look to people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the idea is like, all right, well, if Apple’s taking… If you’re paying $10 a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s taking three of them, Overcast would probably take one to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to pay for the admin costs of the program and have any kind of revenue for me. Then you’re down to 40% down from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your price. You’re paying $10 a month and what’s going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco divvied up to podcasters is only six of it? That’s a crap selling proposition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s mainly what kept me from moving forward with it. And then, of course, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second problem with it is that no podcaster wanted to do it. But that’s the second problem. It turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people don’t like you getting in the way between them and their customers and their money. Nobody likes that. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want another middle
⏹️ ▶️ John party taking a cut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can’t blame them, because you know what? We wouldn’t, like, if that was us, we wouldn’t do it either. I can’t blame them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s the biggest reason I didn’t do it. But anyway, so I’ve had over the years a few bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideas for things that probably would have not worked. The only time it came close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a few years back, Overcast briefly had, for maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year, I forget how long I did it, I had a feature where you could add a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rel tag, if you did like a rel equals payment, in either your feed somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in the show notes for an individual episode, I would highlight that link
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in green, to indicate money of course, Green is the color of money. So I would highlight the link
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in green, or in the interface of Overcast, if you have one of those links, I would replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the buttons in the bottom of the Now Playing screen with a dollar sign button. And if you tap that dollar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign, it would just open whatever the URL was to that link. So the idea was give people a way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their podcasts or show notes, to link to something that gives them money, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a Patreon or their own membership program or whatever. And I ran this for about a year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I kept analytics on how many podcasts showed it and how many times did people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually click on it. It was used very, very little. And then this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was right around the time when Apple started getting up everybody’s butts trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scrounge up more services revenue. And this is when they started giving 37
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey signals a hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. But this was when they really ratcheted it up. They started looking around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the couch cushions. So this is the 37 signals with the Hey app, I believe that was the big controversy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time like they were starting to get really aggressive with people having any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to link out to anything that gave anybody else except them any money and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though overcast was not making any money from those at all. It was just literally just like the publisher specify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a link and I direct people to it with a dollar sign, but because of all that stuff going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it spooked me and I didn’t want to become the next story.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you put overcast wasn’t make any money, but neither
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was Apple. Right. And so I knew that was a risk. And then I went, I looked at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers and like, it just, it didn’t get that much traction. So I just quietly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turned it off one time, like in some update and no one said anything because nobody was really using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But, you know, it sounds like what I’m saying is I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more freedom and we should leave things the way they are because all the ideas I had to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things that Apple wouldn’t like were were actually bad ideas also. And that is somewhat true, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the spirit of what Jason is saying in the Mac is the Model piece, which is very good, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically that there’s a lot of software out there that never even sees the light of day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because people know that, well, this is close to the edge of the rules or this is kind of maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the rules, over the line, and so Apple will probably reject this so I won’t even bother making
⏹️ ▶️ John An example from your business models thing is the thing you didn’t even mention because we’ve all just been so institutionalized
⏹️ ▶️ John to reference the Shawshank Redemption, upgrade pricing. We just don’t even talk or think
⏹️ ▶️ John about that. It’s not because we don’t want to do it, but we just know that’s against the rules. So accepting
⏹️ ▶️ John of the walls that we’re in, what you’re talking about is things that are like, oh, they might be around the edge or they’re interesting ideas.
⏹️ ▶️ John Part of the reason what you’re coming up with is like, oh, it’s just a bunch of bad ideas that I didn’t want to do, is because a bunch of proven
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas like upgrade pricing are just flat out forbidden and there’s no way to do them sensibly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we just don’t discuss them and don’t talk about them and don’t say, oh, it’s a thing I wish I could ship,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I can’t because it’s like, well, everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco knows you can’t do upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That would be madness.
⏹️ ▶️ John Upgrade pricing doesn’t even work. It’s not sustainable, unlike the App Store model, which is totally sustainable. So now we all have subscriptions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even beyond that, there are so many features that, yeah, I did have some pretty bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideas for how to use the volume buttons. And I did have a pretty bad idea of how I could let podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a little bit more money somehow. But I knew so soon into thinking of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew Apple wouldn’t permit them probably, or they would cause problems for me, that I dropped them before I even tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to develop them into something that could have been better. And that I think, the real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loss here, yeah, you have problems where Apple starts shaking down somebody to get more money,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what’s very clear to all of us is that Apple really needs more money. They’re having some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard times over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, they need our help to get through these hard times. So there’s always gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be stories like that where Apple’s being a jerk to somebody because they need all their money, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s just today’s Apple. That’s the kind of people they are. And that’s the kind of people that Tim Cook,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what his Apple is. They’ve decided that is the kind of people that they are and that they wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be. So you know what? Good for you, Tim. We’re really happy for you. But the real harm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s done is in all those ideas out there that people talk themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of even trying. Because yes, some of them are bad, but not all of them. Some of them have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promise, and some of them could actually be good if they were allowed to develop and evolve. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s this overall chilling effect on the ecosystem when we know that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this potential that could be really great, but we kind of think like, well, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably wouldn’t like that or probably wouldn’t allow that, so we don’t even try. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the developers who would make that kind of thing not the only people losing value here. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are Apple’s customers and so is Apple. I hope someday when they get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new leadership that maybe they reconsider this stance because it isn’t just about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dimes and dollars that they’re going to make on commissions or possibly miss out on commissions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s about the ecosystem and the usefulness of their devices and the software that can run their devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way people can use their devices, having more software and more types of software and more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business models for a software has huge benefits to the entire ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that platform, which they make tons of money from in lots of other ways, chiefly the sales
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the hardware and their super expensive storage devices. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have lots of reasons to have a healthy software ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has less of their own filtering, keeping things from being made.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it isn’t just about trying to make sure you get your 30% of every dime that somebody spends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Candy Crush. It’s so much more complicated than that. Previous Apple leadership that liked computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would understand that a little bit better. But that’s not going to happen with current Apple leadership. And it’s a shame because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does overall limit the software that can run on their products and therefore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limit the usefulness of their products.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can even blame some of my woes on the iOS side of the fence because I mean you may be
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking like what’s the problem on the Mac you don’t have to be in the Mac App Store that’s why you got the Christmas lights app so you’re complaining about you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t put your apps you can’t put these APIs in your apps because they’re in the Mac App Store or what just not be in the Mac App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ John As I mentioned like they’re running your own payment processing and everything is a little bit of a pain and you need
⏹️ ▶️ John some minimum amount of money that your apps are going to make to make that worthwhile it doesn’t really make sense for my apps or whatever but setting Putting
⏹️ ▶️ John that aside, if Apple allowed,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually allowed and not just like fought tooth and nail not to allow, despite government asking them to,
⏹️ ▶️ John more competitive ways to distribute software on their big platform, iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would make it more possible for there to be competition for the Mac App Store. Now there is competition for the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store. There are companies like Paddle and there was Kagi back in the day and stuff like, but The problem is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac is not where the show is now. It’s tiny compared to the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So in order for a third-party company to compete with the Mac App Store, it basically
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be a company that can sell phone apps, iPad apps, oh yeah, and maybe also Mac apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? If it’s just a company that just basically does what the Mac App Store does, but not by Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a tough business to be in, which is why the choices for me as a very small-time developer
⏹️ ▶️ John with some dinky apps It’s like, yeah, the Mac App Store is basically the best fit for me. And so my apps
⏹️ ▶️ John are worse because my options for selling them at the volumes that I’m able to sell my dinky
⏹️ ▶️ John apps make the Mac App Store the best choice, and it has the worst rules for distributing stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple allowed competition on its phone platform, the
⏹️ ▶️ John companies that would grow up around that, actual good big companies that are not constantly being
⏹️ ▶️ John beat down by Apple, and we’ll talk about that in future shows, it’s just, If there was actual
⏹️ ▶️ John real open competition for stores that could distribute things to the iPhone, surely those companies
⏹️ ▶️ John would also sell iPad apps and probably eventually Mac apps. Because they build all this infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a developer and distribute to their store and blah, blah, blah. And their rules would be more open than
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s and they would take a smaller cut than Apple’s because of the magic of competition. And then maybe I would have
⏹️ ▶️ John an option that is as easy for me as the Mac app store, but allows
⏹️ ▶️ John me to do things like find out outside of your screen that Doc is on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, One Password, Standard Access Management,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Trade Coffee. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we’re kind of having a collective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photography corner. We have a lot of kind of follow up and new directions on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some photography topics we’ve talked about in the past, some of them in overtime, and so we’re gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some more photography talk this time in overtime. You can join us to listen at atv.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join one more time. Thank you everybody for listening and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco atp.fm And if you’re into mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they did it mean to
CallsheetCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m on the precipice and I’m scared.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you about to mail me a TV antenna or something? Like what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on? No, no, no, no, no. Well, we’ll see how Sunday goes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no. But no, what’s going on is, so I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working, well, I started by kicking this can down the road repeatedly over summertime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and early fall. And I’m almost at the point of delivering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on something I’ve been working on for Callsheet for quite a while. So my biggest, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe not the, but certainly one of the top three biggest requests I get is to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to have multiple lists of pins. So CallSheet has the ability to pin movies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV shows, or even people. So basically a way of favoriting or saving, or harding,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, just marking things as your favorite. That gives you, among other things, quick access on that main
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discover screen and affords a couple other things as well. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people have been saying, and justifiably, this is great and all, but I want one list for perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things I would like to watch and one list for things I have watched, or maybe another list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for just my favorites, or whatever the case may be. And this was taking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you could think of as a single database table and blowing it into two database tables. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for what it’s worth, the actual database in question is not SQLite. It’s Cloud Kit, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve actually had pretty good experiences with. It’s not core data in the Cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever the current flavor of that, I forget the actual name of it is, but it’s just regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey raw Cloud Kit. It’s been generally speaking pretty reliable. I’ve written what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m actually pretty proud of as a front end to Cloud Kit. It’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simple for me to use where I need to use it, which I really like and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey abstracts away a lot of the complexity, which is obviously great. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really feared doing this, because now I’m changing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the wings of the airplane while I’m in the air, right? Because I’ve already deployed the Cloud Kit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey schema, the way the database looks to iCloud. And in order to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to change the schema. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right and so this is something that Apple affords you to do. But this Oh, no, that you just said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is exactly why I said, I’m going to do that this summer. And then I had a busy summer with like life things. Everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine, but everything’s great in fact, but I had busy summer with life things. I said, okay, I’m going to do it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey early this fall. And then I had, you know, the return to school and all of that is in, you know, the kids return
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to school and busy life. And so hopefully before the end of the year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m happy to report that once I finally like forced myself, no, really, you need to stop kicking this can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just freaking do it. Once I, once I sat down to really just do it. I didn’t need a graycation, although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was wondering if I was getting to that point. I didn’t need a graycation and it took a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of weeks to do the heavy lifting and, you know, while after that to kind of clear everything up. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it always is, the last 20% takes at least as long as the first 80%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it is in TestFlight right now. And at the moment, I’m not really looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for new TestFlight users. So please, I appreciate your offer, but no, thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’m at the point where really I should probably just ship it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am so freaking scared and I probably shouldn’t be because one of the things I had to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and one of the only things that kind of bums me out about CloudKit is that in order to push it to test flight, I needed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to actually push the schema change to production. So this schema is live in production right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The good news is it was all additive. So my CloudKit facade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just ignored or didn’t even look at anything. The ship version of the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t look at any of this new data. It’s completely ignored, it’s never requested. It’s just sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there out in the ether. I don’t think anyway, it’s not hurting anything. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first of all, was super freaking scary. I really wish I could have told TestFlight, use the development iCloud schema
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for TestFlight users. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have to actually push it to production yet. But I’ve already pushed the scheme into production and I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least a handful of people trying it on test flight, and it seems like that’s going okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is really impressive because one of the things I had to do as part of this was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you think about the way the database was laid out with the currently shipping version of Callsheet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it expected a database that is just one table. That’s the name of the pin and what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the unique identifier is of that pin, and whether it’s a movie or show or a person and whatnot, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe a couple of other superfluous things, but not much else. Whereas now, what I needed to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was add a column to that, which is what list is this pin a part of, and then a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new table that is what are all the lists. And that means that what do you need to do when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you upgrade or when the new version of Call Sheet gets installed that can talk multiple lists?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the things you need to do is a database migration, or not really a database migration, but you need to do a data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey migration. So you need to add a entry to the table
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that represents all the lists, that is, pinned items, as I think what I called it by default. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you need to edit or modify, update, I guess, strictly speaking, to use the right term for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You need to update all of the rows in the existing pin column and say, oh, they’re a part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that list, the pinned item list. And so far the handful of data beta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey testers I have, it seems like it’s working. I’m knocking furiously on my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I say that, but it seems fine. But I have watched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco in particular, many friends as well, do this enough to know that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially because I haven’t had like a catastrophic failure for my test batch yet, my test group yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shortly I’m missing something and I’m so scared to actually push this out, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, the scheme is there, it’s just, you know, submitting the app to app review and then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presumably it’ll get through and then hitting go. Even knowing that I can do the incremental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rollout, which I do every time, just for safety sake, I’m so scared y’all. I’m so freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John scared. I was like, you shouldn’t be on the photos team in Apple because I think someone, if someone lost had a, had a data
⏹️ ▶️ John loss event and they lost their pinned items and call sheet, they’d be annoyed. Maybe you get some complaints,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in the grand scheme of things, Oh, 100% losing the access to their photos is, or their
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. Oh yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, it could be so much worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, imagine changing the file system live, in flight, on the phone. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John this. The file system team is like, I can lose all your data at once. I’m not restricted to
⏹️ ▶️ John just losing your photos. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can lose it all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you know what I’m saying? I mean, I don’t know if I’m, I guess I’m half looking for you to say, it’ll be okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just do it. And I’m half just saying, you know, letting people look at what I, what I slash we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go through as developers is, this is so scary. And I I agree with you wholeheartedly, John, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultimately, if people lose their list of pins, yeah, it kind of stinks. But is that going to hurt
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s an additive change to a low volume, low stakes data collection. It’s pretty much the
⏹️ ▶️ John best case scenario for the first attempt at doing a migration. The only thing you have against you is that you’re forced to use
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Apple’s APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they do mysterious things that you don’t control. You don’t have the source code for it or whatever, which is part of why Marko
⏹️ ▶️ John does everything himself. Because at least he knows then, if he screws up, it’s something that he did. Oh, yeah. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the challenge that you face with CloudKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that you are in very little control of that infrastructure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if you are running your own server, which you should not do, please, for the love of God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do that. I would love, take my servers, please. You know, like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I would love to get rid of my servers. Anyway, so if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are running your own servers, though, you control every part of that. like if you’re just adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a column to a table in my sequel, you just you know, you know, alter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco table pins, add column, you know, pin book, you know, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big it’s default default null or default zero right then are everyone has everyone has a column
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number a column area, you know, a pin list zero and you’re set and you’re done like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost something else you have to do yeah and you know that just build up you know the stuff on the client side that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talks to it. doing it on cloud kit theoretically that should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fine but if it’s not but first of all it’s difficult to test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it’s difficult to like try things out and then it’s difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know what to do if it goes wrong because it’s not in your control that is the tradeoff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you make when you use someone else’s server side infrastructure like when you’re using when you’re not running your own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers and you’re using some kind of like managed hosted service of some kind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what that’s the trade-off that you’re making. Now the advantage is if you know in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time in the middle of you know of next year when you know years a year after you’ve written
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this code and it’s just running out there in the wild if cloud kit has some data center break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going to have some email but it’s not really your thing to fix like fixing it is not on you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it becomes your problem to your customers and that you know depending on how how bad of a problem it is you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know You could regret that down the road, but it isn’t your job to get up in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco middle of the night and fix that server when it breaks. It’s Apple’s job and they have people to do it for you with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks to all of our 30%. So, because they really need your 30%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep those people, those starving server admins, they need to keep them fed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, the thing is like what you’re doing here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a relatively ancillary function of the app. And what you’re doing here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding a column for which the previous version of the app, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long as they can continue reading and writing to the schema. So I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there’s some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concept of like a default value for the column or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As long as that’s not breaking, this seems like a pretty low stakes migration. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like moving, like rearranging the whole arrangement of the data of the table. You’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you’re not changing it to a whole different table for storing all people’s pins like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this seems like a pretty safe one to do so I think you’ll be okay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and intellectually I know you’re right both of you are right but it’s so scary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so scared to actually do it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and it goes wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John you can put a put out a bug fix update really quickly so you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know right I don’t have to wait for anyone to approve it or anything like that I mean all kidding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aside the good news is, is that I can do the incremental rollout or whatever Apple calls it, where I think it’s something like they do 1%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the first day and 5% more on the next day and then like, I forget what it, where it goes after that. But basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the course of a week is when they start offering the update to people. And I think we’ve covered this on the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before, but if you know an update is available and it hasn’t been offered to you, generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you do an actual search for that app, so if you search for call sheet on the app store, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you have to go all the way into the details. It’s not enough to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on the search results. You have to drill into the details for call sheet or whatever the app may be. And then usually what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ll see happen is the open button will magically turn into an upgrade or update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever button if you want to kind of jump the queue a little bit. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any case, I can do this rollout to 1, 5, 10 percent or whatever the numbers are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over time. And I think I would find out reasonably quickly like, oh, your junk is all broken, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guy. You need to stop the rollout and do something to fix it. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, intellectually, I think it will be fine, and it shouldn’t be an issue. But it’s just scary. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve used CloudKit a touch in the past, but not a ton. And this is the first time I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any sort of migration or schema change or anything like that. And so I’m scared of it. And I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just do it. I’m going to give it, I think, a few more days in test flight to see if I get any feedback that’s worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey investigating or changing or whatnot. But hopefully sometime next week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and certainly before Christmas, unless something weird happens, I hope to have this out and done. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then after that, we’ll see what I get into next. I have some thoughts, one of which includes running a very small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server, which we’ll talk about in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey future. No, don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, we can talk about it another time. But I think you would agree with this one use case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s very, very, very simple. But we’ll bicker about it another time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unless it’s saying if it’s sending push notifications, then definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a server because that is some like it is really I find it kind of sad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many like services businesses there have been launched over the years that try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell to developers the ability to send push notifications because it’s so easy to send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and it’s like it’s so incredibly low resource usage like it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy and costs nothing to send push notifications and they’re oh god
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it pains me when I see people like you know paying some absurd price to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was saying for the thing that notifies you when a movie comes out. And he’s like, oh, I got to run a job in the background. Just run a server. It just has
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch the list of movies is finite. And there could be millions of people who are interested in one movie. But
⏹️ ▶️ John your server just needs to know when that one movie comes out, and they can send push notifications to everyone who’s interested. It makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, what you’re saying is, in the middle of that, you said, just run a server. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a pretty big just.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but like you said, for push notifications, it gets you out of the business of worrying about how you’re going to run in the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, running in the background on everyone’s to check. And they’re all checking when some popular new movies coming out
⏹️ ▶️ John versus one server that you’re running checking one time, it’s so much more efficient in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John resources and usage. It’s just like it just it makes so much more sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I have alternate plans for that specifically, which Marco and I discussed in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which again, I don’t want to get into that now we’re already running a little bit long, but we can talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the in the future for sure. Yeah, right. But in any case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a use case for a server that I think you both will approve of. And we can, maybe we’ll talk about that next week if we have time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t run it as a server, just run it as a Lambda on AWS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually what I’m talking about doing, that is potentially possible, but the big problem with that is I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know in principle what Lambda on AWS means. I have zero experience with it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and don’t truly understand it. So maybe that’ll be next week’s After Shows. we can talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. But one way or another, wish me luck. Godspeed.