628: There’s a Certain Smell
28 Feb 2025John launches Hyperspace! (That’s not the smell. The app is great.)
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco messed with the system
- Follow-up:
- New “Boundless” immersive episode: Arctic Surfing
- Prospects for humanoid robots
- macOS testing (via Anonymous)
- With apologies to Joe Rosensteel
- Netflix’s Apple TV integration
- It’s more than just the app (via Serena)
- What purpose does the TV app serve? (via Daniel Luz)
- Implementation details (via Anonymous)
- iPhone 16e
- Name implications
- Possible role? (via Patch)
- Apple C1
- MagSafe isn’t a problem
- C1 is “just the start”
- It’s really quite impressive (via Pedro Fernandes)
0.0000000000000316 W
- Andru Edwards’ Behind-the-Scenes Tour
- Qualcomm licensure? (via Casey in episode 476 at around 40m)
- Gurman on future Cx chips
- Apple investigates custom Wi-Fi chips as well
- Apple approves new wording for emails
- Apple pulls Advanced Data Protection in the UK
- Full statement
- Screenshot
- Time for pressure (via Berbakay)
- 🎉 Hyperspace is out!!! 🎉
- iPhone 17 camera bumps
- Apple pledges $500B domestic spend
- Post-show: The Hyperspace icon
- Members-only ATP Overtime: New “Apple-like” camera: Sigma BF
Exclusively sponsored by:
- Google Gemini: A tool to complement and enhance human creativity.
Chapters
- Oh Schiit
- New immersive video
- Humanoid-robot follow-up
- “macOS has no QA”
- josteel does NOT like the TV app
- Netflix-TV-app follow-up
- Sponsor: Google Gemini
- iPhone 16e
- C1
- Sponsor: Google Gemini
- “approved” ➡️ “ready”
- Apple pulls ADP from UK
- Sponsor: Google Gemini
- Hyperspace launched! 🖼️
- iPhone 17 camera “bar” 🖼️
- Apple’s 🇺🇸-investment PR
- Ending theme
- Hyperspace icon 🖼️
Oh Schiit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m coming in hot this week, again. This time, my desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio setup is one of those like, you know, the desk is very clean, at least when it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco covered in other crap. But like, my desk is very clean, and it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a very simple audio setup. Three boxes, all next to each other,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all like, neatly tucked away cables. One of them is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Zoom, I think it’s the F1, yeah, the Zoom F1, which serves as my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of backup hardware recorder for podcasting. Next to that is my sound devices USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pre-2, which is my main microphone interface. And to the left of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the American Audio Amplifier Company named after a swear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word that looks German but isn’t. That would be. Sheep. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks. They have a product called the Jottenheim that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used as my headphone amp and speaker volume control and there are switches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the front of it so I can switch between podcasting, which uses a different input and stuff like that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s kind of my audio output control center. And earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this afternoon, I left the house to go pick up my kid from school. I come back and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice upstairs, it smells like someone has left an iron on. Oh no. Oh God, what
⏹️ ▶️ John Did the magic smoke escape?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it smells, it doesn’t, okay, I have smelled like a blown capacitor, I think, or a melted capacitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s a certain smell, like I think the magic smoke is where like, a blown power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supply has a certain smell. This was not that smell. This just smelled like an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iron being left on too long. So like slightly melting, but not like chemical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco melting. Like it smells almost like slightly melting plastic slightly melting, you know, metallic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. And I’m sniffing around, what is the smell?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s an iron, but it’s been unplugged for hours. My God, it’s not that. I’m looking around, sniffing around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upstairs, and I finally come to my desk and I’m like, it smells strongest in my office. I’m like looking around, like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it seems to be concentrated around my Jotunheim. Their products, these are like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audiophile amplifiers and audiophile amplifiers are often very power inefficient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to like, you know, a standard kind of like, you know, class D kind of dynamic switching kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff that most modern, like compact, low power amps are made like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old style amps because they tend to sound better this way. Use electric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topologies, uh, that, and forgive me, I’m not an electric engineer, so I don’t know how any of this stuff works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they use topologies that waste a lot of power because they sound better. that produces a certain amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat that I’m familiar with. You touch it, it’s kind of warm. I wouldn’t describe it as hot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, this time, I touch it and it was hot. Like, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hot. I took out a little thermal camera to measure because that was the most convenient thermal measuring device in my office.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have a thermometer up here, but I do have a thermal camera. And it measured it at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 140 to 160 Fahrenheit. This is hotter than normal. Like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like touch it and you should not leave your hand there because you’ll get some kind of minor burn after a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kind of hot like this is not normal. So I unplug it I’m like then I’m then you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I move on with my day trying to you know I’ve got to make dinner and everything so I eventually come back all up. It’s podcast time let me go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me just turn it on see if it works and see if I can get through the podcast and It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t turn on anymore So, all right. Well that answers the question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has now become a warranty repair but in the meantime I have a podcast to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 15 minutes. What do I do? So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I could, all I need to do is plug my headphones in so I can hear myself and you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But because I have like the Zoom recorder, I have like a kind of split two channel output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like I’m in one ear and you guys are in the other ear for the purpose of the recorder, but then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sum it to mono for myself to hear it. And like, so I have this setup that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visibly very simple, is actually very complicated. And it took me a very long time to finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the, like rushing, like pulling cables out of my closet, pulling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boxes and bins out. Do I have this kind of cable, that kind of cable? I have finally arrived here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not a minute too soon. Like I finished the setup as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were, you know, starting the pre-show discussing the topics and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m finally here. My Jotunheim is unfortunately dead. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to get it repaired. And there are wires everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all over. Like every bin is out. The lids are off. The wires were dug through. Everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like somebody ransacked my office looking for an audio cable because that’s basically what happened and it was me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But all that is to say I am here, just barely, but here.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing you have left is learn how to pronounce the name of that product that you keep talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s Jotunheim, isn’t it? Something like that? Something like that. I mean, I don’t actually know because my basis of pronunciation
⏹️ ▶️ John is a video game. So if you play Destiny,
⏹️ ▶️ John be familiar with Jotun. But some people don’t pronounce it that way, so I don’t even know what’s right, but I’m going to guess
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not Jotunheim.
New immersive video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, all right, let’s do some follow up. It is my self-anointed position
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the show to call attention to new immersive content on the Vision Pro for the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you that have Vision Pros. And so for all three of you, I’m telling you now that there is a new boundless immersive episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called Arctic Surfing. These are probably my least favorite of all the different things that they do, to be completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honest with you. They’re like under 10 minutes, sometimes barely over five minutes, and there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real arc to them generally. Hey, we’re going to talk for a few minutes about hot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air balloons, or we’re going to talk for a few minutes in this case about surfing where it’s really fricking cold in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Norway. That’s all five, six minutes. We’re out. I mean, it’s still gorgeous and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting, but I don’t know. I feel like even just the vague attempt at a storyline is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I would prefer. And I don’t recall if I brought this, um, I don’t know. I don’t recall if I brought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this to the show or not, but they did a rodeo one like a couple of weeks ago. I probably brought it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, uh, that one I liked a lot more and there was a bit of a storyline. It was a very vague and loose storyline,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but a storyline nevertheless. Uh, but anyway, if you have vision pro go check that out. It’s, it’s worth six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a half minutes of your time.
⏹️ ▶️ John How’d you miss this one? The link that I just put in there. They also do are doing some kind of immersive documentary
⏹️ ▶️ John film based on Bono’s autobiography book thingy. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re watching people Arctic surfing and doing a rodeo, but you’re not You’re not gonna listen to Bono
⏹️ ▶️ John do his weird narration of his own life?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I’m sorry, John. U2 has never done anything for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, I guess there probably will be some music part of it. You should, all the
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff you’re watching, you’ll watch anything except for something that you might have some familiarity with. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch it, but I mean, again, I have…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John This one has a
⏹️ ▶️ John narrative, supposedly, or I don’t know. I guess they will play U2 music. I don’t know if you’ll survive, but…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I mean, I’ve seen U2
⏹️ ▶️ John in concert. were fine. But they’re no rodeos or arctic surfing, I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darn right. No, I’m kidding. I’m sure it’s good. I had seen that flyby and honestly, I didn’t pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any attention to it because again, you two is kind of whatever for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not trying to say they’re bad or anything like that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John just a story about a person
⏹️ ▶️ John though. This is like autobiography of someone who’s had a long and interesting life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is very fair. And I’m probably being unfair and poo-pooing it. No, I’ll definitely check it out whenever it comes out. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also it didn’t really hit my radar too hard because it’s not out yet. And honestly, I didn’t even look to see when it’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. May 30th apparently. So I can worry about that in a couple of months.
Humanoid-robot follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were talking last episode, I believe in the after show, excuse me, in overtime, about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey humanoid robots. And I think, John, you have some thoughts on this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, something I forgot to mention that I meant to in the last show, and I actually didn’t hear from anyone as
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback as well, part of the overtime was discussing this whole trend of humanoid
⏹️ ▶️ John robots that lots of companies are talking about or investing money in. Either officially they’re doing press
⏹️ ▶️ John releases, or unofficially they’re investing in companies, or super unofficially we just get rumors about what Apple’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the deal with humanoid robots? Anyway, that was last episode’s overtime segment.
⏹️ ▶️ John And one of the questions I was asking in overtime is, are we on the verge of some kind of technological
⏹️ ▶️ John breakthrough that makes humanoid robots suddenly much more possible than they were previously?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it doesn’t seem like we’re very close to it, but everyone’s investing in it. So what’s the deal?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think we came up with any answers in overtime about like, oh, there is some technological
⏹️ ▶️ John breakthrough, and here’s what it is. And that’s why, even though it seems like humanoid robots are impossible, actually next
⏹️ ▶️ John week, they’re going to be here and it’s going to be here before, you know, we didn’t come up with anything, but I have an idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of how I would imagine that it’s possible that there is some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of breakthrough making humanoid robots or robots in general, much more possible than they used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is actually founded in real things. I don’t know if this is true. I’m not saying it’s true. I’m just coming up with a plausible
⏹️ ▶️ John scenario. And that’s what I wanted to mention last time, but didn’t. So I’ll stay now. So here’s the scenario.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it actually connects to something I talked about in a couple of past episodes. Kind of touched
⏹️ ▶️ John on it by saying like, oh, all the AI stuff. I was like, well, we have software that’s smart now. So that was the missing
⏹️ ▶️ John piece. All we got to do is add the smart LLM powered software to a bunch of servo motors and voila, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John two steps away from human or robots. I don’t think that’s it. But I think the plausible angle, which
⏹️ ▶️ John again, not necessarily true, but could be true, is it’s the same as
⏹️ ▶️ John I mentioned with Google on its data centers, sort of driving the proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ John Unix workstation server vendors out of business. The innovation there was,
⏹️ ▶️ John what if we take cheap, crappy commodity hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John that was previously unviable in the data center because it was cheap, crappy, and commodity, and not purpose-built
⏹️ ▶️ John and unreliable? And what if we apply software to that problem
⏹️ ▶️ John such that the software can manage and corral all this
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy hardware, expecting it to fail, but building a software layer on top
⏹️ ▶️ John that will manage all that by saying, well, it doesn’t matter if things fail, I’ll just bring up new ones and we’ll just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’ll be a sort of a software layer on top of crappy hardware. And as computing and software
⏹️ ▶️ John improves, I always think that maybe there’s a possibility that all of the problems about like
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanical devices that, you know, move like living things are able to navigate our world. It’s such
⏹️ ▶️ John a hard problem. A lot of it, sometimes when I look at them again, like the Boston dynamics
⏹️ ▶️ John robot thingies, it’s like, but they’re trying to do it the hard way. Like, you know, let’s have
⏹️ ▶️ John very precise, careful, uh, machines that are precision made and are
⏹️ ▶️ John strong and reliable and sturdy. Um, and then have computers
⏹️ ▶️ John control them very precisely by having an awareness of their surroundings. And what if the other approach is let’s have
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy hardware that barely works and breaks half the time and just have
⏹️ ▶️ John really smart software surrounding it to make up for that, kind of like the drone revolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John where if you look at the hardware on a drone, it’s a bunch of motors and plastic fans. You’re like, how how do
⏹️ ▶️ John we not have this when we were kids? We had motors. We had plastic fans. Oh, but you didn’t have the software. And the software
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, give me something vaguely spins blades around and have some adjustability. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a question of putting in the right sensors putting in the right control systems so that it takes this crappy hardware and says,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, like you can take a drone and like snip off a piece of one of the propellers and it’ll still kind of figure out how to stay upright because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a control system. It’s like, I give me crappy commodity hardware and some smart software
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ll figure out, oh, how much more power does this need? How do I have to tilt these things? Because there’s something constantly thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do I need to do to stay level, to go up, to do the thing that I want to do? That’s what I’m thinking about with the robots.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, if we can get software that can take hardware that is bad that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know doesn’t serve a motor that you can’t precisely control it doesn’t turn to the exact angle instantly
⏹️ ▶️ John that Sometimes slips or fails or whatever and just put smarts in it kind of like smarts
⏹️ ▶️ John in our decrepit bodies That just says well, it doesn’t work perfectly. You can’t control
⏹️ ▶️ John your body perfectly It doesn’t have infinite strength and as you get older, it gets less coordinated and and creakier
⏹️ ▶️ John But you have the knowledge and experience to control that body to know how much more force
⏹️ ▶️ John do I have to put in all these things, you know, with constant feedback from all the sensors. So that’s just what I wanted to throw out there, that
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if there is a humanoid robot revolution, I see it being like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sort of the opposite of the perfect welding robots in a car factory, where it’s like precision
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff where it moves down to the millimeter very quickly with the expensive motors and everything. Just like
⏹️ ▶️ John really crappy hardware with really smart software. I’d love to see it. I haven’t yet, but
“macOS has no QA”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Anonymous writes in to us, I was on the QA team for iOS from 2009 through 2012.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was told that Mac OS didn’t have a QA department. Let me reread that just to make sure you all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard me. What? I was told that Mac OS didn’t have a QA department.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One more time with feeling. I was told that Mac OS didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a QA department. Even Apple TV gets QA as a derivative of iOS. Why Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t get the same treatment is unknown to me, but John’s probably right that it’s a cost issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, well, hold on though. So first of all, this, this was an one anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco email regarding employment that allegedly ended in 2012. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s, you know, a lot of potential that could have happened in the meantime. And secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, there’s, you know, the asterisk of like, well, what does it mean to have a QA team?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, could they, like, how were they managing testing and quality and things like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There could be some kind of weird technicality where it’s like, well, we didn’t call it QA, but actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was this role being served here. So like there’s a lot of wiggle room here. So I don’t, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this means much.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is in the context of, um, uh, reliability of, uh, software
⏹️ ▶️ John and how much testing like features that don’t get looked at for years and years get like the buried corners
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac OS that no one looks at who’s checking whether they break and the Unix compliance
⏹️ ▶️ John process being one of the few things according to a previous person who sent us feedback one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John few things that actually is testing some of the dark corners of Mac OS on a regular basis.
⏹️ ▶️ John Testing an OS is not easy. I’m sure there are integration tests and other things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are run on a regular basis. In fact, we’ve heard stories of like there’s certain applications that Apple always make sure don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John break as part of a new OS update. So surely there is there there’s got to be some quality control
⏹️ ▶️ John process. Just from the outside, it seems like there’s not enough of it for Mac OS because it is
⏹️ ▶️ John the less popular OS with fewer resources and it makes less money and yada yada. But I still feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like overall, there’s some baseline of reliability that Apple needs to
⏹️ ▶️ John maintain and all its software. And Mac OS is very large and very complex and has a lot of moving parts and a lot of legacy
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and And that’s the challenge. And so I think Mac OS could use a little bit more testing.
josteel does NOT like the TV app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I think you would like to go on an apology tour now. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to apologize to Joe Rosensteil. He says, I have never been so slandered in
⏹️ ▶️ John all my life. I don’t like the Apple TV app at all. I had implied that he did because he would say
⏹️ ▶️ John he was suggesting that he thought that the Netflix should integrate with the Apple TV app. And I said, well, for people like Joe who like the Apple TV app,
⏹️ ▶️ John he says, I don’t like it. And he provides proof. He had an article he wrote in 2023 called 57
⏹️ ▶️ John icons and nothing good on. He wrote that for six colors. Another article from 2023 apps are
⏹️ ▶️ John now flops. Tabs are now sidebars, which is a reference, a very old reference
⏹️ ▶️ John that some people will get. Um, and then finally, uh, from his, uh, not another WTC
⏹️ ▶️ John wishlist from 2024 at Joe steel.com, Joe hyphen steel.com. Uh, he
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote, and I quote the Apple TV app still sucks, but
⏹️ ▶️ John so I asked him if he don’t like the TV, Apple TV app, then why are you rooting for Netflix to integrate with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John He said, It’s better for consumers to have Netflix in places like Up Next. Its absence
⏹️ ▶️ John annoys customers rather than weakening Apple’s position to a substantial degree. People that mostly watch Netflix won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be persuaded to use the TV app to do so. I don’t know if you’ve tried the TV app integrations for Prime Video, etc., but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John an absolute joke. Apple has no ability to steal consumer behavior in the TV app or everyone would be
⏹️ ▶️ John subscribed to Apple TV Plus and using Apple’s channel’s add-on. So he’s basically saying it should be there because it’s convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t worry, it won’t give Apple any more power.
Netflix-TV-app follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and speaking of that Netflix and Apple TV integration, Serena writes, I wouldn’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Apple TV app even if Netflix was integrated, but it would be nice to have Netflix results integrated into the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we got a lot of feedback about that of saying like, it’s not about using the app. I don’t care about the app. I wouldn’t use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s really annoying that when you try to do like the cross-service search, Netflix results are not included
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Daniel Luce writes, regarding Netflix, I agree with everything you said, but there’s another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing I consider important. The TV app isn’t even close to being fair to third-party content.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have two third-party channels and I’m not subscribed to Apple TV+, yet I’ve never seen fewer than half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all trailers and banners in the highlights of the TV app pointing me to Apple TV Plus Originals.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And right now it’s 100%. I have to tap down 10 times to get to the For You section where it finally recommends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something from another channel. When Casey says his mental model is that the TV app is just a place to watch Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV stuff, I certainly understand because this is what the app is primarily designed for. If Apple legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants to be the central hub for all content in the Apple TV, they need to treat all sources fairly. It would be one thing if the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only privilege Apple TV Plus had was an exclusive tab, but even the main screen is just ad upon ad for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a service I don’t subscribe to, while the content I’m paying for is buried deep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Luke Denny Slight conflict of interest when the app is run by a company with its own streaming service.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jim Collison A little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also, I didn’t put any specific person’s feedback in here, but I feel like I saw a lot of feedback that if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall correctly and understand correctly, a lot of people had said, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even necessarily want to use the Apple TV app. However, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it as one of the icons on the top row of the Apple TV icon grid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what is it up? I forget the now playing up next. There’s a term next. Thank you. Up next is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey term for the they show above the grid of icons. There’s actionable buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where different, whatever app you currently have highlighted will give you additional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey options of things to do. And I guess a lot of people use the Apple TV app to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically aggregate, okay, what should I watch right now? And they engage that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via the home screen on the Apple TV. This is a really hard word picture to paint. I apologize if I’m not making a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John terminology doesn’t help. The naming of things doesn’t help.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. But basically by hovering your cursor, if you will, over the Apple TV app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stuff above there is the stuff that you’re most likely to want to watch and having Netflix in that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey list would be very convenient. And that’s something I hadn’t thought about. I don’t believe our Apple TV app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on the first row of our Apple TV. So that never really occurred to me, but it’s a completely
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. A lot of people are also big fans of up next and they were wondering why I was complaining about it. And there’s two reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John One, the most obvious and you’re lucky if it doesn’t occur to you or it doesn’t happen to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, is that it just doesn’t work well for me, as in it doesn’t show me things that I’ve watched recently. When someone said
⏹️ ▶️ John this to me, I had just used television two seconds ago and I said, the third item and up next is a
⏹️ ▶️ John show I have not watched in years. It’s just broken for me a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John It just doesn’t show me things that I want to watch next. So that’s one just reliability. If it works for you
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not totally broken, that’s great. But it’s very broken for me a lot of time. But the second thing is, even if it worked perfectly for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate that interface because I have an entire family watching television and it shows like four icons
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re watching seven shows at the same time. And it’s just like, it’s a bad interface seeing four things with
⏹️ ▶️ John horizontal scrolling. That’s not someone coming from TiVo, or any other service that gives you
⏹️ ▶️ John some better way to manage the list of things you’re watching. If you’re watching one or two things, and the same people are watching
⏹️ ▶️ John that, then maybe it’s not a big deal. But if you have sort of more demanding needs,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re either switching users constantly with the big upper right corner, hold down the button thingy, and hoping that
⏹️ ▶️ John that maintains state across all those users, or you’re trying to use one user. And the show you want to watch isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even in the list anyway, because something in three years, Oh, I know that’s getting to reliability, but I just, I just don’t think it’s a good interface. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if it was, uh, uh, you know, an interface that I enjoyed, it just doesn’t work right
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. Like it, it shows me things that are wrong or I’ll watch an episode and be like, Oh, there’s the next episode. I’ll hit
⏹️ ▶️ John play. Nope. It’s the one we watched last night. Like real basics of like, show me the next thing I want to watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John How about the episode you already watched? No Apple TV. That’s not it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. And then finally from anonymous, I implemented Apple TV app integration for streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service. This is, you know, basically what Netflix has done to integrate with Apple TV app. You need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to one, get a special entitlement from Apple and put it in your app to use a special API that’s available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only if you have the entitlement to mark your app as a video provider. Three, report users playback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey activity with NS user activity using custom keys for Write a backend services which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provides your content to Apple in XML, of course. Five,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with Apple on a deep link format which can open your app, which both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sides need to implement. Oh, hmm. And six, provide Apple with a test build to verify and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approve the implementation. And this anonymous person continues and summarizes, I can’t imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how any of this can happen by mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the question about the brief integration. You know, who accidentally turned it on and this is adding another thing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, this isn’t something that you can do accidentally. This is something that both Netflix and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John have clearly implemented. And just it’s not rolled out, presumably because
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix doesn’t want to roll it out. But I think it’s just Netflix being a smart company and saying, look, if we ever decide to roll
⏹️ ▶️ John this out, we should have it ready to go. And who knows? And maybe they implemented it years ago and it’s just been sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John there in a turned off mode for ages, because like, obviously, it was up to Apple. Apple would just
⏹️ ▶️ John turn it on, but it’s not up to Apple, it is up to Netflix. I don’t know who accidentally turned it on, but it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like Netflix doesn’t want it turned on but somebody did the work to make it work.
Sponsor: Google Gemini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode exclusively by Google Gemini. They really wanted me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to show off the Gemini Live feature. So for each ad we read this episode, we’re going to do something a little bit different. I’m going to ask Gemini Live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual questions I’ve had in real life recently. I haven’t tried any of these before, so we’re going to see how it actually does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve installed the Gemini app on my phone. It’s free. It uses your regular Google login. And this is, I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the free service that everybody else has access to by default. All right. So, first question. This will be completely unedited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and done in real time so you can see the responsiveness. So here goes, tapping live.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do North American GFCI outlets provide protection even for ungrounded loads?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, GFCI outlets protect both grounded and ungrounded loads. They work by
⏹️ ▶️ John monitoring the current flowing through the hot and neutral wires.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If there’s an imbalance, meaning current is leaking away, it trips and cuts the power. Alright, that’s good. Hey, what about, how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does a standard bun commercial coffee pot hold?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That depends a bit on the specific model, but most standard bun commercial coffee pots hold about 12 cups.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What is that in ounces? A
⏹️ ▶️ John standard 12 cup bun coffee pot holds about 96 ounces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, so that’s just one tiny example of what Gemini can do. I’ll ask more questions in a little bit throughout the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Until then, thanks to Google Gemini for sponsoring our show.
iPhone 16e
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk iPhone 16. Uh, do you want to talk about the 16 E name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John implications?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I teased that on last episode, but then we never got to it. We got off on some tangent or something. I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t, I should have,
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of teasing, I should have just said it right there. So the 16 E name, iPhone 16 E, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the possible implications of this name and putting it as part of the 16 family
⏹️ ▶️ John is will there be a 17e? Will every family
⏹️ ▶️ John of iPhones have an e model that is the less expensive one with the older
⏹️ ▶️ John technology? Because that was not the case with the SE line. They would make an SE and it would
⏹️ ▶️ John just sit there for a while and then eventually they made another SE and it would sit there for a while. By putting the
⏹️ ▶️ John number in the name aside from making it part of the 16 family,
⏹️ ▶️ John it opens the possibility that when the 17 family arrives there could be a 17e. Now that
⏹️ ▶️ John seems unlikely to me because the economics and purpose and role of the 16e are very much
⏹️ ▶️ John like the SE as the less expensive phone. I don’t see why they would make a 17e,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the name does nudge things slightly in that direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John something to watch for when the 17 family, which we will discuss later, hopefully, um, 17
⏹️ ▶️ John family arrives. Why don’t you see if I don’t know, six months later, whatever the weird gap is,
⏹️ ▶️ John that another member of the 17 family arrives and it’s the 17 E seems unlikely, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got the 16 E giving you a little hope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we got a handful of feedback about potential uses or, or, or target audiences, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess I should say for the 16. And there were a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people that said, oh, either I have a pacemaker or I know someone with a pacemaker. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, Casey, have no idea how this works, but these people were saying that, oh, if you have something with magnets near a pacemaker, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very bad. So that’s one possibility. And then we got various flavors of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same message, but Patch wrote in, and I think this one is the best or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most concise summary. And let me read what Patch wrote. One of my many day jobs is managing MDM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey systems for companies. What is that, mobile device management, I believe? I think Apple knows exactly who is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buying this phone. To me, the E stands for enterprise. Basically every single company I manage buys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone but the C-suite iPhone SEs. The iPhone 16 E’s spec
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sheet makes sense for this use case too. Enterprise does not care about air tag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finding, multiple cameras, dynamic island, or MagSafe. It’s also been about three years since last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last SE released where a lot of businesses will be looking to start to cycle out their devices for new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones. So here’s a new offering from Apple to fulfill that need. Of course, they will also sell this to the general
⏹️ ▶️ Casey public too. But to me, this is aimed squarely at enterprise purchasing managers who will be buying these in lots of hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who work in enterprise. I think the world revolves around them. Yeah, of course, they want the cheap phone to
⏹️ ▶️ John give to people. But like Apple really doesn’t make products
⏹️ ▶️ John of the size of even the smallest iPhone with the enterprise as
⏹️ ▶️ John the main target. I mean, yeah, whatever the cheapest phone is, enterprise is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be interested in that. And I agree that enterprise is more likely to not care about the lack of MagSafe or AirTag,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like that’s just a side effect of the features that Apple chose for this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has in the past occasionally made products aimed squarely at the enterprise. They made a thing called the
⏹️ ▶️ John XServe for ages. They made XServe Raid. They did all sorts of kind of enterprise-y things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ve definitely pulled back from that in the past decade or two, not gone more
⏹️ ▶️ John heavily into it. I don’t think the E in 16E stands for enterprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what it stands. Did you see that? Someone had the quote, I think maybe Gruber had the quote, but someone asked like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what does the E stand for on iPhone 16E? And the Apple, the official Apple response was, the E doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John stand for anything, but we think it’s the phone for everybody. Like I’m paraphrasing, but that was basically the thing. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John said flat out, it does not stand for anything, but they said, we think it’s the phone for everybody. Wink.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, and speaking of the 16E, was it Connected that did the 16E? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so good. I’m going to steal that forever.
C1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, anyways, uh, the Apple C1 modem that is in the 16, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, there were a couple of theories that, of why MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was dropped from the 16E and both of them revolved around the C1, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was John Voorhees was the first person I saw who said, Oh, maybe it’s like a clearance or fitment issue or something along
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those lines. Um, and then a couple of other people said, well, what if a MagSafe interferes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the C1. And so Apple said to Macworld, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also 9to5Mac, I believe, that that’s not the case. So reading from a Macworld post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’ll put in the show notes, Apple’s confirmed to Macworld that the C1 modem is not responsible for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decision to leave MagSafe charging off the new 16e. Additionally, from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 9to5Mac, Apple confirmed that the C1 has nothing to do with the omission of of MagSafe on the iPhone 16e.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The new testing conducted by iPhone case accessory manufacturer and shared with 9to5Mac adds more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey detail to the situation. The case manufacturer conducted tests on whether a MagSafe enabled case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and charging puck impaired cellular data speeds. The tests confirmed that there is no difference between the C1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modem in the iPhone 16e and the MagSafe magnets.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no interference between them, yeah. So Apple says no and people tested it and they say no, so that’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Additionally, there is a post on MacRumors, again, linked in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from there, Apple’s new C1 modem in the iPhone 16E is just the start, said chipmaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chief, Johnny Srouji, in an interview with Reuters. We are going, this is a quote from Johnny, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to keep improving that technology each generation so that it becomes a platform for us that will be used to truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey differentiate this technology for our products. The C1 modem is manufactured with a four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nanometer process and the transceiver is manufactured with a seven nanometer process. According to Sruji,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he said the modem is the most complex technology that Apple’s ever built and it was tested with 180 carriers in 55 countries to ensure reliability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for core functionality like phone calls and mobile data. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo today said the iPhone 17 Air will also be equipped with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and this is like, most of us I don’t think really fully appreciate quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how complicated a cellular modem is. Because the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, when we think of modems, we think of these basic things from a thousand years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that translated signals pretty simply and received them pretty simply. Cell networks today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the different tricks they have to use to cram a whole bunch of data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a limited frequency and limited spectrum and share the space with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other phones and all the different coding schemes and everything, like it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so complicated. And there’s all sorts of, you know, just analog complexity,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco digital complexity, computational complexity, like there is so much to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in fact, I’ll link to this Wendover video from a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, which kind of goes over like some of the basic ideas of like how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cell service encodes multiple users into certain frequencies and everything like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this like, it’s just a high level overview. same way it was like, well, computers represent, you know, digits by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones and zeros, and here’s how they add on a basic level. And it’s like, if you compare that to what computers do today, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, yes, that is true. But wow, what a difference in complexity that we have today. That’s how cell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surface works. Like, what the cell modem has to do is so complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has gotten so sophisticated. And there is, and it touches so many different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of sciences and systems and needs. So that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was a massive undertaking. I totally believe the claim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this is their most complicated thing. Apple has defeated CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs to some degree. They’ve made their own versions of those for a long time now, relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking. But this took them until now. They could do an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processor, an entire GPU stack, before they could do a cell modem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how complicated these things are. That’s why this is such a big deal and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s a lot of potential here for Apple to kick butt over time. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll see how the how the first one is here, but I’m sure they have taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it very seriously. The same way way, like the very first Apple Silicon processor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they took that really seriously. And you know, the M1 came out, well, I guess that was the first Mac one, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even before that, the iPhone ones, they were fine. Like the A4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a rock solid chip. Apple has never made a processor that had major flaws as far as we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. It seems like they have tackled this with, you know, as much discipline and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco investment as they did processors and graphics cards. We’ll see how it turns out, but there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, there’s a huge potential ahead for this if they didn’t screw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up and knowing recent Apple and their hardware releases, they probably didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Interestingly, for both of the things you mentioned, or actually for all three of the things you mentioned, Apple did this
⏹️ ▶️ John by acquiring companies. So they acquired PA semi to make the first Apple Silicon chips, the A4
⏹️ ▶️ John series they acquired, but imagine something or or other for the GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, they acquired Intel’s cell modem business. Now, the thing is, PA Sammy was filled with like rock stars
⏹️ ▶️ John and the GPU company was filled with people who knew how to make small GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel’s cell modem business was not doing well when Apple picks it up. It wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John the cream of the crop, but it’s what they could get and they bought it. And so maybe that’s why the
⏹️ ▶️ John cell phone stuff has, again, according to rumors,
⏹️ ▶️ John been delayed, you know, delayed from when and Apple never said that it was coming out. Anyway, the rumor was it was coming years
⏹️ ▶️ John before it actually came. You know, it’s a hard problem. So is making the Apple Silicon,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like PA-Semi was more up to the job than
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel’s failing cell modem business. But in all those cases, it came down to smart
⏹️ ▶️ John strategic acquisitions at the right time, and then a multi-year wait to get
⏹️ ▶️ John to the point where they can produce something that’s ready to be an Apple product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of all of that complexity, Pedro Fernandez writes, from a cellular point of view, the C1 seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have all the bells and whistles, bands, and MIMO. What is MIMO? I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco have looked it up. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry. Yeah, multiple in, multiple out. It’s like simultaneous transmission on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequencies, I guess, or antennas or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are not many countries with millimeter wave, and you do need line of sight and to be close to the radio to get maximum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throughput. We have to wait for measurements of the real life throughput with carrier aggregation. It would be surprising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Apple managed to get as good performance as Qualcomm. One thing is being power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey efficient in standby mode. Another is while actually transmitting. If you have worse sensitivity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and interference resilience, then you can end up using higher transmission power, and that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power consumption is the most impactful on battery life. It really takes a lot of courage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Apple to put out a new cellular radio on an iPhone. Cell radios are one of the most advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey technologies out there. Hello, Marco. I always tell people that a cellular radio with negative 105,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, millidecibels, dBms? I think that’s micro, millidecibels, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very sensitive, anyways. With negative 105 dBm sensitivity translates into decoding a signal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is about 31.6 femtowatts. And on top of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could be interfered with by other signals, it’s basically magic. Now, I think it was John put in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes, to be clear, the measurement that Pedro cited, 31.6 femtowatts. That is 0.000000000000000316 watts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We will put that number in the show notes so you can see how preposterously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey small this number is. It is effectively immeasurable as far as I’m concerned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yet that is the level of information that this chip gets in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order to try to make heads or tails of it. It’s bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having majored in computer engineering in college, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John just electrical engineering with some computer stuff added in. I had to take courses that explained
⏹️ ▶️ John what was then state of the art, like in the 90s, state of the art cell radio stuff, and
⏹️ ▶️ John all the different technologies that go into it, and the competing networks for code division,
⏹️ ▶️ John multiplexing, and old time division, multiplexing and stuff. We went over all the different technologies, and it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what they’re doing, here’s what the more modern ones, here’s the problems with the old ones, here’s, and do you do problems
⏹️ ▶️ John and exercises of like, If you have this number of devices in this amount of area and they require this
⏹️ ▶️ John much power and how could they blah, blah, blah. And it was like, wow, this is really cutting edge stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was nothing compared to the number of phones that are out there, like the number and density
⏹️ ▶️ John of phones that are out there now and how amazing it is that we get signal in so many places.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like because that was part of the problem. It was like, how can we come up with a system where, you know, we’ve seen it ourselves back in
⏹️ ▶️ John the Wi-Fi days? How can we have a room with 5000 people that each have two Wi-Fi devices?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like what can we use to make it so that works? All right, well now how about a football stadium where everyone’s got a cell phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John How can you make all their cell phones work? And the things we were doing in undergrad in the 90s
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about like, what if you have 100 people in a room? And it was like, that’s nothing. Everybody has a cell
⏹️ ▶️ John phone now. And they expect to get signal everywhere. And it’s just like, 31 femto
⏹️ ▶️ John watts. Like you just think about the tiny electromagnetic vibrations.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re like, you’re annoyed when you don’t get enough bars and you can’t load your thing. It’s like, do you know where the cell tower is? You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John inside a building with this tiny device that the battery is going to last all day. How is this even working? It’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Technology is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, couldn’t agree more. I also wanted to call attention to Andrew Edwards,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is a YouTuber in our same space. He got an exclusive tour,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind the scenes tour with Tsuruji for the C1 manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey process and information about the C1 and 16E and so on and so forth. I want to read to you a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little section of what he said in his video, which will be linked in the show notes. This particular section is about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five minutes and 15 seconds in, but the whole video is I think like 10, maybe 15 minutes, and it’s very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In there, Andrew says, the tight integration between the C1 and A18 allows the modem and processor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to communicate in real time. So for example, if your phone encounters a congested network, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s your football stadium, the A18 can signal to the C1 to prioritize critical packets. you just opened up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey messages and you’re trying to send a photo or video to someone. The A18 can direct the C1 to prioritize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’re actively doing. So things don’t feel like they’re bogging down. This dynamic traffic management not only improves the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection speed, but also makes your device feel incredibly responsive under heavy, heavy network loads. That makes a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense. And that’s the first I personally have seen that reported. So I thought that was an interesting tip.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Well, when I hear things like that from Apple, when they’re talking about stuff, especially when I’m not well versed in the
⏹️ ▶️ John technologies they’re describing, I say that sounds great. I bet that’s all true. Do Qualcomm
⏹️ ▶️ John chips also do that? Not mentioning.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You know what I mean? But
⏹️ ▶️ John now, the larger point is, like this is what you’re saying, it’s like, look, now that we’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John this, once we get good at it, which we’re probably not great at yet, but once we get good at it,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll be able to make it, you know, like with Apple Silicon, exactly the chip that we want to make, and we’ll have more on that
⏹️ ▶️ John in a little bit. But like, I trust that they will be able to do better than Qualcomm eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John because Qualcomm has many customers. Apple is just one of them. and it’s a contentious relationship,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like it was with Intel, where Apple would make demands. Intel, we want chips to do X, Y, and Z, and Intel would be like, oh, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll do this. Once Apple can make its own chips, they were much better suited to its hardware. And I hope that same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, I expect that same thing to happen with the modem chips, even if the Cirrus Gen 1 isn’t that great. Like what Pedro
⏹️ ▶️ John was getting at is like, this may be the most power efficient, but there’s like being power efficient and standby is great, I don’t know about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is great at that, but if it’s less power efficient when transmitting, because they’re just not as good as Qualcomm
⏹️ ▶️ John yet, you will burn your battery faster if you’re actually using the cell network versus just sitting there sipping
⏹️ ▶️ John the data. So we’ll see when this thing comes out, you know, how it performs in the real world. But doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John on the 16E is a good test bed because it’s not the flagship phone. No one cares that it’s missing millimeter wave.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if it really screws up, oh well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes in, in this week’s episode, number 627, which I guess was last week actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some guy Casey says that Apple won’t need to pay Qualcomm cellular license royalties on phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that do not use a Qualcomm chip. As Casey himself discussed in ATP episode 476 in March 2022,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at around the 40-minute mark, this is not correct. Qualcomm generally collects royalties
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regardless of whether an OEM gets the modem chip from Qualcomm or someone else. Quoting from page 15 of the FTC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versus Qualcomm court decision from 2020, OEMs are required to pay a per unit licensing royalty to Qualcomm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for its patent portfolios regardless of which company they choose to source their chips from. Put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes to that. For phones, Qualcomm caps the dollar royalty as a percentage of a $400 phone. From Reuters in 2018, quote, Qualcomm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said it would cap the phone price that is the basis of the revenue calculation of $400. More expensive phones, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can sell for $1,000, would still be treated as $400 for the purpose of the Qualcomm license fee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then finally, CNET said that they actually dropped that fee a little bit later
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2018, I believe. So yeah, my bad. I did not remember what I said darn near three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago, which makes sense because I can barely remember what I said three hours ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someday those patents will expire, and by then maybe Apple will have a bunch of its own patents that it can charge people for from
⏹️ ▶️ John its C17 chip. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally on this topic, Mark Gurman says with regard to future chips, Apple has a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long modem roadmap ahead of it with the company already testing the so-called C2 and C3. We’ll see the C2 in 2026
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it’s slated to appear in higher end phones. When the C3 appears the following year, Apple hopes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be able to outdo Qualcomm’s modem capabilities. But there’s a new development. Apple intends to eventually meld
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the modem component into the main processor. That should make the electronics more energy efficient and reduce the cost. I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expect this in 2028 at the earliest. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always the question with these chips that as Apple makes them, hey, it had to be a separate chip on Qualcomm made it, but now that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your own thing, does it make sense to put it into the SoC? Obviously there is some issues there with the radio frequency
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of it. And I’m assuming that’s why part of it is made at seven nanometers and part of it’s made at four. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t fab the radio parts at the same size as the logic parts.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, some kind of integration does seem to make sense. Now Apple has kept some things separate, but it has folded
⏹️ ▶️ John other things into the SoC, like the Wi-Fi chip we’ll get to in a second. So obviously you can’t put
⏹️ ▶️ John everything into one big giant chip. At some point there’s diminishing returns, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting to see that the rumor is that they’re thinking the C3 is when they will be passing Qualcomm
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple years from now and that integration is on the table, which I think would be really useful for
⏹️ ▶️ John phones, larger things like Macs that we want to have cellular, it’s okay to keep the chip separate.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just want cellular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, you brought up Wi-Fi chips in the iPhones and particularly in iPhone 17. Reading from MacRumors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple will use its own custom designed Wi-Fi chip in all upcoming phone iPhone 17 models,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Jeff Pu, another analyst who covers companies within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s supply chain, said in November 2024 that only the iPhone 17 Pro models will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey equipped with an Apple-designed Wi-Fi 7 chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John about this Wi-Fi chip, Wi-Fi slash Bluetooth chip a while ago in the context of lesser products, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s rumored to be coming out in the home products or whatever. This is an interesting rumor, if true, that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to be in all the 17s. That shows a large amount of faith in this
⏹️ ▶️ John chip. So we’ll see if this turns out to be true or not. Like, doing the cell model with
⏹️ ▶️ John a 16E makes sense. I would imagine they were going to roll out the Wi-Fi Bluetooth chip on lesser products
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. But man, if it’s on every single 2017, this thing better be perfect.
Sponsor: Google Gemini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode exclusively by Google Gemini. Now, if you recall from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last ad break, I’m asking Gemini Live a question on the air to show some of the ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be useful. This is not just simple questions, though, so you can have a full conversation. Here’s a question I had recently, and as you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard in the last one, you can interrupt the response, you can ask follow-up questions. So here’s a real question I had recently. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to ask it to Gemini for the very first time. Here we go. What are some established VoIP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services in the US, and which ones are good for small businesses and can support old analog phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure thing. Some good established VoIP services that are great for small businesses include RingCentral,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vonage, and Nextiva. They’re all really reliable and have features that smaller businesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need. Plus, they work with those older analog phones if you need to keep using them. Can I port the existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone number to them? Absolutely. You can usually transfer your existing
⏹️ ▶️ John phone number to a VoIP service. The process is called porting your number. It can take a little time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the good news is that you keep the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number, so your customers don’t have to know anything’s changed. See, that’s great. So you can just talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco naturally. You can ask follow-up questions. Gemini can do so many things. It’s pretty useful. So there’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be one more ad break after this. You’re going to hear even more examples, even more from Gemini Live. In the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go download the free Gemini app and start having your own conversations. You can see for yourself what it can do in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your life. So thanks to Google Gemini for sponsoring our show.
“approved” ➡️ “ready”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the show, Riley Tested has noticed something and I think it was John that put this summary in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes, which is just chef’s kiss. Apple approves new wording for emails. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Riley writes, looks like Apple changed the wording of notarization emails to no longer say approved. Wonder what caused
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that? And there’s two screenshots, old and new. From From February 11, it says, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hello, Alt Store LLC. The following app has been approved for distribution. From February 19, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, hello, Alt Store LLC. The following app is ready for distribution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This annoys me, because like, look, I’m, maybe this is the New Yorker in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me speaking. I’m a fan of direct language. Now, obviously in this, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous sentence, the following app has been approved. Obviously this is a passive voice usage and there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no actor in this sentence. who has approved the following app? Well- And
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the previous language. Like it’s not like change it to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, the following app has been approved. Well, that’s very handy. If they were more direct, they would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has approved the following app for distribution, but that’s not what they said before. But they have now made it even worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from it’s been approved to the following app is ready.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is it ready? How did it get ready?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would argue it was ready before. It was ready when Riley submitted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. Right? Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s when it’s ready. when the developer submits it, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you submitting it to? Huh. Because if you’re submitting something, that kind of suggests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that your app is ready. So for Apple to then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco approve it and then say, your app is ready as the notification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that, it’s like, well, it was already ready. This is Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gross, stupid policy having some gross euphemistic language tweaks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put on top of it, right in line with exactly the kind of behavior that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come to expect around this. Good job, Apple. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John being you. I think this change is super dumb because, like, as I
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to emphasize last time we discussed this, any reasonable person looking at this from the outside understands
⏹️ ▶️ John the two different contexts and meanings of the word approved. You didn’t have to change
⏹️ ▶️ John the wording to somehow avoid something. Like, you could have just left it as approved.
⏹️ ▶️ John We under the situation is not mysterious. It is spelled out. It is experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John by people every day. There is no mystery about how products get through this process. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it is so clear to everyone and arguing over the words is such a sideshow. There’s no reason to change
⏹️ ▶️ John the words. No one disagrees about what happens when you submit an app
⏹️ ▶️ John and who decides whether like there’s no mystery. So this is just incredibly dumb. Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ John someone changing this, they’re doing nothing except for making themselves look even more
⏹️ ▶️ John foolish because no one is confused by that word. Nothing hinges on that word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s just, it’s a weasel move. You know, this is them trying to weasel out of the mess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have created and continue to maintain for themselves. That’s the opposite of courage. You know, making the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cell modem, that is courage. This is cowardice.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not even, this doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t, like weaseling out of it would be doing something to avoid something, this does
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing. It doesn’t help Apple in any way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s an extension of the passive voice. This is them trying not to own what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are doing with linguistic cowardice. Like, that’s all this is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but it’s not possible not to own it. They own it so thoroughly. No one doubts it. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ John debate about who decides what gets through approval. They do. It’s Apple. They decide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We see that. It seems like they think that’s different.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could be do like the the miracle on 34th Street thing, where if there’s a court case, you just have developer
⏹️ ▶️ John after developer and you just call now to the 700,000th developer on the stand. When you
⏹️ ▶️ John send an application, who decides whether it gets through? Do you decide? No, who decides? Apple. Okay, next witness.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey When you submit an application,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like how many applications
⏹️ ▶️ John have you, like you could just person after person, it’s like dumping the letters to Santa out
⏹️ ▶️ John on, okay, so the letters to Santa is less, maybe less admissible as evidence except
⏹️ ▶️ John in the movies. But again, I think there is no shortage of witnesses to tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John how this process, Apple will agree, that’s how this process works. Changing the words doesn’t change it. It’s not like somebody says,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know how things get through, they just somehow, they become ready. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process. Nothing acts upon them to make them ready, they just are ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just walk away whistling, who knows how they got ready. Gracious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Alex Pretzlov writes, They even changed the regular App Store emails. It used to say the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accepted, and now apparently it says, review of your submission has been completed. It is now eligible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See this? So about every year, they change this phrasing of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it means for your app to be approved by App Review, even in the regular App Store. And every year it confuses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, because I’m like, my app is eligible for distribution. Does that-
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, or ready for sale. Does that mean it’s in the store?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like before it said, your app is ready for distribution. Does that, yeah, does that mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in the store? It sounds like I still have to do something, but no, that means in the store, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and every year or two, they change the phrasing to be even more obtuse. Like, this is just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, this would drive George Carlin crazy. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John actually like maybe a year or two ago, remember when they changed App Store Connect
⏹️ ▶️ John to like submitting your app as like a two-step process? now you had to like, get it ready
⏹️ ▶️ John for review, but then like submit it for review. So sometimes, sometimes you think, oh, they just changed the language.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you’ll be sitting there going, I wonder when they’re gonna review my app. And you realize, no, now there’s a second step where you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to like really, really submit it to review. Yeah. So it’s quite a puzzle game for people who
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t developers in Apple platforms. It’s kind of like destiny.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an ever-changing
⏹️ ▶️ John and releases and buffs and nerfs, mostly nerfs.
Apple pulls ADP from UK
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally, and we would be wise not to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a long time about this, so we’ll see what happens. But Apple has done what we all expected.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has removed advanced data protection from the UK after the alleged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey orders from the king of the surveillance states. Reading from Bloomberg, advanced data protection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is no longer available in the UK for new users. This layer of security covers iCloud data storage, device backups, web bookmarks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey voice memos, notes, photos, reminders, and text message backups. Customers already using Advanced Data Protection, or ADP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will need to manually disable it during an unspecified grace period to keep their iCloud accounts. The company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said it will issue additional guidance in the future to affected users, and that it does not have the ability to automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disable it on their behalf. Apple writes, we are gravely disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey breaches and other threats to customer privacy. ADP protects iCloud data with intent encryption, which means
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it and not, excuse me, and only on their trusted devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As we’ve said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we never will. Which smells a lot like a canary to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a bold statement. Like, and we never will. Like that’s, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no ambiguity left there, which, and honestly, this, like, look, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people have called them out and saying this was a cowardly move. You know from what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just said two minutes ago, I’m happy to call Apple out if they do something cowardly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or weasely or otherwise selling out in bad ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this was the best move they had in this situation. This was a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation. They were put in by another government. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was their best move. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I completely agree with you. Continuing from Bloomberg here, just to make this clear, and this is what so many people got wrong about
⏹️ ▶️ John this, what Bloomberg writes, which I think is true, is the move to pull its encryption feature rather than
⏹️ ▶️ John complying with building a backdoor is a clear rebuke of the government’s order. They’re not complying with the
⏹️ ▶️ John government’s order, to be clear. By pulling advanced data protection, as we noted last time, if that Verge story was true, which it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was, this does not comply. The UK government wanted them to put
⏹️ ▶️ John a backdoor so that they had access to everyone’s iCloud stuff in the entire world. Pulling
⏹️ ▶️ John ADP from the UK does not comply with what they were requested. So they did something, but they basically
⏹️ ▶️ John did the thing that they’re willing to do, which is kind of like what they do in China and other places is like, look, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna screw over your own citizens, fine, they don’t get access to this thing. We can do that, but we will never
⏹️ ▶️ John give you the backdoor to every single Apple customer’s thing. So when this first came out,
⏹️ ▶️ John people were like, oh, Apple caved in. They absolutely did not. They did not cave in. They are not in compliance
⏹️ ▶️ John with this law or this request or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and to say, you know, we didn’t build a backdoor and we never
⏹️ ▶️ John never going to. So don’t be wait. We’re not it’s not gonna come next week. Don’t wait for it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a very bold and clear statement. So that I mean and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we’ll see what that means. But you know, I think it’s important for people to realize what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was giving up and where we were before. What this is giving up is advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data protection. And they’ve only they only added this what a year ago or two years ago. It was two years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty recent. And it’s not enabled by default. And for most people, they probably shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enable it by default because this is the situation where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you forget your password and lose access to all of your devices and things like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple cannot recover your data. They cannot reset your iCloud password. They cannot get your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data back. Like Apple can’t help you if you lock yourself out in this context.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The number of people who lock themselves out of their Apple accounts all the time is way higher than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of us would assume. Apple is constantly dealing with that kind of support need in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stores and in their other support channels. So the default always has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be Apple has a key to your data that they can use if you or they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need them to. That’s also used to respond to warrants from law enforcement agencies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the world. So what they did with advanced data protection is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give you an option to optionally close that door to say, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t have a key. Therefore, if law enforcement comes to us, we won’t be able to help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. But also if you come to us, we won’t be able to help you either. In the context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a mass market consumer device and platform, I think the right default is to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that not be the case. So what they’ve said is that will no longer be offered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the UK. The rest of the privacy and encryption
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and end-to-end stuff, the rest of it that was there before two years ago will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still be there. They will still be able to respond to law enforcement requests just like they were before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the most part, most of the other privacy protections are all still there because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, This is only removing the option to enable or continue to use advanced data protection,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is only two years old and which most people aren’t using and shouldn’t use.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the interesting twist on that, uh, in the, as Casey read there, like they can’t, uh, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t disable this for people. So if there are people in the UK who have this enabled because it was available in the UK before. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you try to do it, Paul Hudson posted a graphic, it just basically says Apple can no longer offer advanced data protection
⏹️ ▶️ John in the United Kingdom to new users, but existing users still have it. what happens to them. And like the statement
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, if these people wanna keep their iCloud accounts, they have to turn it off. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can’t turn it off for them. Again, if Apple could turn it off for them, it wouldn’t be much protection. Cause if you ever need to get into the account,
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, oh, I’ll just turn off advanced data protection for you. Apple cannot turn it off. That’s the point of advanced data.
⏹️ ▶️ John So these people have basically a time bomb on their phones. Like, I mean, I guess it’ll just stop working or just
⏹️ ▶️ John stop syncing or whatever. But at a certain point, they have to manually turn off advanced data protection
⏹️ ▶️ John on one of their trusted devices using their authentication and blah, blah, blah, right? Because they’re the only
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that can do it. And if they don’t do it, all of their iCloud syncing backup stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever is just going to stop doing that because Apple’s gonna turn it off for
⏹️ ▶️ John the country. So I wonder how that will go in terms of people coming to an Apple store and saying, my stuff’s not syncing and saying, oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John got to turn off the security feature, which you can never turn back on after that. In terms of the defaults, like I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like it’s just a simple calculation of like, what is more likely to be a problem in your life?
⏹️ ▶️ John someone hacking you and stealing all your data, or you locking yourself out of your account? If you
⏹️ ▶️ John are a government official or a celebrity, you might make a different choice than if you’re just a random
⏹️ ▶️ John person on the street. Most people are not specifically targeting you, like
⏹️ ▶️ John state actors are probably not specifically targeting you to get into your phone data, because you’re just not
⏹️ ▶️ John that interesting or important, but you will probably lock yourself out of your account
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow at some point in your life. And so you really just have to decide that for yourself, which is the problem that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more likely to happen to me and what are the consequences of that problem. So I feel like people who
⏹️ ▶️ John need advanced data protection, they know they need it. Again, government officials, celebrities, or just
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are really super serious about security, but it’s always that trade-off, security versus convenience. It’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have advanced data protection on, because I fear losing my data more than I fear being hacked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Burbike writes, could you put out a call to all UK listeners to contact their local MP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regarding the Investigative Powers Act in Apple’s decision to remove ADP from UK phones. The more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who raise the stink, the more chance we have to turn things around.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and meanwhile in the US, we’re trying to make sure that our dumb government doesn’t try to do the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to the UK government. So we’re all in this fight on our own little islands
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to keep sanity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and as I said, you know, two weeks ago or last week, I think ultimately we’re gonna lose this battle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I think in most first world countries, we are likely to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have major platforms permitted to give us end-to-end encryption
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools that they can’t decrypt with law enforcement requests. That’s just the culture of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, law enforcement, it’s very hard for politicians to fight against them, politically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legally, power-wise. It’s just, law enforcement tends over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get the surveillance that they want. And they want it all. I mean, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be clear, like what law enforcement agencies want and feel incredibly entitled to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is access to everything all the time, often without warrants or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of outside the bounds of, you know, like they do not like, look, the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco U.S. Constitution was designed to help protect us from overzealous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco law enforcement. It’s a powerful force in governments and over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it tends to get more powerful. So we will lose this battle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have already lost it in so many ways. That we already have like you know secret courts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know warrants that for you know monitoring our communications and everything and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems to monitor. Like we already have lost this on so many fronts. It’s only a matter of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before no major platform can offer end-to-end encryption and that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to rely on apps that kind of do it on a smaller scale for that kind of need.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m more optimistic than you are. I think the things in the Constitution regarding
⏹️ ▶️ John rights to privacy and everything will probably hold up in the long run, despite backsliding.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know what you’re saying about national security. If there’s any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John military conflict or 9-11 type things, whenever that happens and people are the most afraid,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s when people pounce and put in all these terrible laws. And then of course, once they get them, it’s like a ratchet. They will never give
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right? Oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is only, we only need this because of terrorism, except we’re now we’re going to use it when people, you know, steal
⏹️ ▶️ John a bicycle in a neighborhood. Right? So it’s, you know, but still historically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the trend, I felt like, I don’t feel like they’ll be able to breach the firewall
⏹️ ▶️ John of the constitution, assuming that document still stands and remains relevant because there are such strong protections
⏹️ ▶️ John against some aspects of rights to privacy. The UK is already far, it’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ John different environment. Like the amount of surveillance cameras they have in that country. And they don’t have the same type of constitution
⏹️ ▶️ John that we do. So that’s why we have held up better than them. And I think we will hold up better than them. Doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John necessarily mean that ADP is not going to get out lower than the US. That could totally happen. But I’m slightly more optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John that on a long scale, assuming the US survives as a going concern and the Constitution
⏹️ ▶️ John remains roughly as it is now, that this battle will, not that
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be won, but that we will still be doing better than
⏹️ ▶️ John countries without the same type of constitution. Hope you’re right. We’ll probably be dead by then, so don’t worry
Sponsor: Google Gemini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode exclusively by Google Gemini. Now you’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me in the last couple ad reads show off the Gemini live feature. What about conversational brainstorming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just questions? Let’s see what it can do. I’ve never asked it this before. I’m gonna see how it does live right here in the ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break. So here we go. I make a podcast app that already does what most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect from a podcast app. What other features might I want to add?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s a couple of ideas to make your podcast app stand out. First, think about adding a feature that helps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people discover new podcasts. Maybe it suggests new shows based on what they already listen to. Or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a quiz that helps listeners find their perfect podcast match. Also, you could add a feature that makes it easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to listen to podcasts with friends. Imagine being able to sync up playback with your friends so you can all listen together,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you’re not in the same room. Or you could add a way to discuss episodes with friends right in the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you. On a totally separate note here, what are some surprising things people can ask you that they might not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect you to be good at, but you are good at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, here’s one. You could ask me to write different kinds of creative text formats. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could ask for a poem, a song, a script for a play, or even a computer program. I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also translate things into different languages or create summaries of factual topics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, as you can see, there’s so much that Gemini can do. There’s so much it can offer you in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life. This barely even scratches the surface. You know, you can’t fit too much in a two-minute ad already, even though I did have it just basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write its own ad read there at the end. But anyway, try Gemini today, go get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app. This was all with just the free app on my iPhone. Go check it out today. It’s really amazing what it can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So thanks to Gemini for sponsoring our show.
Hyperspace launched!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been an incredible bit of news this week, a phenomenal, exciting bit of news this week coming from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one John Siracusa. John, you put up another blog post. I’m stunned. I can’t believe my
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I launched my app, Hyperspace. For anyone who doesn’t know, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John an app that will give you free disk space. There are lots of Mac apps out there
⏹️ ▶️ John that will find duplicate files on your system and and then like give you back disk space by deleting some
⏹️ ▶️ John of the duplicates. The tricky bit about hyperspace is that we’ll find duplicate files and give you back disk space
⏹️ ▶️ John without removing any of the files. I am, as I said in the blog post, a digital pack rat,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this appeals to me. I don’t want to delete files. I do want disk space back, but I don’t want to delete anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you got the same file in seven places. Yeah, just leave it there. Can I just have the disk space back? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what hyperspace does for you. It’s been in beta testing for a while with the ATP members for finding a
⏹️ ▶️ John great testing service. It is now out on the Mac App Store, available to download.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s free to download, free to scan. You can find out how much space it will save you if it’s not gonna save any space. Oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John throw it away. But if it’s gonna save you a bunch of space and you want that space, then you gotta pay to get that space back.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll put a link in the show notes to my blog post about it. If you’ve been listening to the show, you know more than already
⏹️ ▶️ John is in that blog post. That in turn links to my fairly extensive documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly extent. So just to interrupt you here for a minute, is there more documentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than there is code for this app?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t think so. I can check though. I mean, code tends to be sparse, like in terms of number of lines, no, in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of number of characters, I’ll have to compare. Haven’t even really looked at how many lines of code this app is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John SwiftUI does make things more terse. But yeah, I like that. One of the things about the documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, is that like it evolved? It has evolved over the course of testing. Like everything in that document
⏹️ ▶️ John is there because some beta tester had a question about it or because I found myself answering the same
⏹️ ▶️ John question. So I put the answer in there and I’ve been refining it over time. Save so much time to just do this up
⏹️ ▶️ John front. Like, and then on launch day, if anyone has some question about something, I could just link them directly
⏹️ ▶️ John to the part of the documentation that addresses it. Uh, so that’s been going pretty well. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John as I said before, to all of the, uh, the ATP members who were on the test flight now that the app is out, the test
⏹️ ▶️ John flight will be ending. Probably by the time you listen to this, I will have expired the last
⏹️ ▶️ John test flight build for ATP members. Thanks for all your hard work
⏹️ ▶️ John testing. There were a lot of you. I’m sure you’re probably sick of this app
⏹️ ▶️ John by now. But if you are not sick of being a tester and you actually enjoy testing it
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ve been providing good bug reports or whatever, and you want to be on the real test flight, not the one for ATP members,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the real test flight to get on that, you have to give me your email address because I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Even though you’re on the ATP members test flight, that was done with the public link. And so it’s all anonymous. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea who you are, right? If you want in on the real test flight, send an email to hyperspace
⏹️ ▶️ John at hypercritical.co and tell me you want on the test flight. And then I will add you to the list. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John keep in mind, test flight means you get to use a broken application. I mean, I hope you’ve all figured that out from being
⏹️ ▶️ John on the beta for, Like it’s the one that doesn’t work right. It’s the one that’s weird and could
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially hose all your files. Like, but if you’re game for that, like I had a lot of good testers and a lot of them already
⏹️ ▶️ John moved to the real test flight. So yeah, sign up if you want. And if you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were on the test flight or not, but if you have purchased the app and you think it’s good, app store ratings would be
⏹️ ▶️ John appreciated. I believe there is currently one rating and that’s from me. I gave it five stars.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco More than one rating
⏹️ ▶️ John would be great. If you like the app, please rate it. Uh, yeah, it’s been out for
⏹️ ▶️ John one day now. Um, well, I soft launched it earlier in the week as you do. I had version 1.0.1
⏹️ ▶️ John out before I even posted about it. Um, I had a little bit of fun with the app
⏹️ ▶️ John review. Uh, the, the very first build, the one point, very first 1.0 build I submitted,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was watching it. It’s like waiting for review of all in review. It’s like two minutes and 30 seconds
⏹️ ▶️ John later, instantly rejected. Oh, neat. Yeah. And what was it rejected for?
⏹️ ▶️ John that was rejected with a message from the reviewer that said, your app says that it gets back free disk space without removing
⏹️ ▶️ John any files. How does it do that? Good grief. But there
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, I’m paraphrasing, but it was literally like two sentences. Those are basically those two sentences. And I’m like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you read the description, which is only a paragraph, the app store metadata description,
⏹️ ▶️ John it links to the documentation, which explains this. If you launch the app, the first thing you
⏹️ ▶️ John see is a window that describes how the app works and links to the documentation, which explains this.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you select the top item from the help menu in the app, it links to the documentation, which explains this. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how you could literally look at or do anything with my app without
⏹️ ▶️ John having the answer to the question that was asked staring you in the face. But what did they do? They looked at the app and I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, read the tagline and said, I don’t get this. Reject, boom.
⏹️ ▶️ John Could hold app review. So I replied with the link to my documentation and said, if you read this, it will explain it. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they let it through. Let me Google that for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was basically what it was like. I should have said, if you launch the app and read the window that appears in front of your face, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, I didn’t want to be rude about it. It was fine. It was, you know, a turnaround time of like an hour and then they put it back
⏹️ ▶️ John in review and then it went through and it was fine. I did get rejected in my 1.0.2 thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that rejection, both of you should be able to tell me what it is based on the complete inconsistency of the
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store plus your experience with the App Store. Oh, I have no idea. You do
⏹️ ▶️ John know what it is, but it’s not occurring to you because it is so illogical. A metadata rejection
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but what specifically? I don’t know. This is my first app with an app purchase. Privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s a good one, that’s a good one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or is it that giant disclaimer that you’re supposed to have in your app description that’s documented
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s exactly what you said. you have to have a link to the terms and conditions and privacy policy
⏹️ ▶️ John in your app’s description.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We, even I remember all of us whining about this, perhaps during call sheet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whining about this recently, like a year or two back, just to make things clear. And I know we’ve been around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this block once before, but it is so frigging bananas that we have to do it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You need to have a URL in your app description to your privacy policy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, John, is that URL clickable on any of Apple’s platforms?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, why would URLs be clickable? It’s too dangerous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course not. So I don’t know what freaking purpose this serves, but they will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reject you every time if you do not have a URL pointing to your privacy policy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your description.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, let me correct you there. They will not reject you every time, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John knew about this thing being in the description. I’d heard you guys complain about it many times.
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, oh, when I have my first output in-app purchase, I gotta remember to do this thing. And when I was filling out my metadata, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like seven places you put this in. It’s in the app’s interface, on the store page, otherwise they’ll reject you there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s in the metadata. It’s not like the terms and conditions and privacy policy aren’t in a million different places already.
⏹️ ▶️ John But because I had submitted 1.0 and it had gotten through, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I’m good. And then I submitted 1.0.1 and that got through. I’m like, boy, I nailed it. Aside from that one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where they didn’t understand how my app worked, because they didn’t bother reading anything, I guess I got all the metadata
⏹️ ▶️ John right. No, on the third version, the third submission, then somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John says, oh, you gotta have privacy policy in terms of the user’s encryption. So I was fooled
⏹️ ▶️ John into thinking that I had covered all my bases and I didn’t. But the nice thing is they did actually let me do the thing of saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if this is a bug fix update, you can do that fix in the next update. And so I said, yes, I’d like to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, great. So that system actually kind of worked. Anyway, AppReview as always
⏹️ ▶️ John is totally inconsistent. Like there’s no way, even if you
⏹️ ▶️ John played the game perfectly, which I did not, you will be confounded by the results. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there we have it. So far so good, no big disasters. As far as I know, I did the typical
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I always do. It’s like, as soon as 1.0 comes out, it’s like now I have a big dangerous change I wanna make.
⏹️ ▶️ John So let me start working on that. So yeah, I’m in the middle of testing a big dangerous change to the internals
⏹️ ▶️ John that I had put off. I said, let’s not do this for 1.0, but for the next day after 1.0, sure, yeah, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John rip out the guts. Because I had some different ideas about how I might do something, and I stopped
⏹️ ▶️ John myself from doing this before 1.0 came out, but now I’m doing it. So I did a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of minor bug fixes, and now I’m doing some major surgery for the real test slide.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve reverted to a build that doesn’t actually do the reclamation for real, but does everything up to that step,
⏹️ ▶️ John just so people can test it better. Yeah, a lot of people have reclaimed all their space, and so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem. They have to do what I do, We just have a system for making duplicate files. Anyway, that’s what it’s like to be a beta tester.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just because, you know, I was like, oh great, I wanna be on a test flight. Do you though? It’s not an easy app to test and it might hose
⏹️ ▶️ John your file. So if you really want to, again, send me an email. Oh, and then one final thing. For all
⏹️ ▶️ John the test flight people, obviously when you’re on the test flight, you can like quote unquote purchase the app for free. It doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John charge you. And what people were saying is, hey, I downloaded the real app from the store. It’s a free
⏹️ ▶️ John download. And when I launched it, it thinks I still own it because I bought the test flight.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, because test flight on Mac OS works perfectly all the time. And the solution to that, as far
⏹️ ▶️ John as I’ve been able to tell, everybody who I’ve suggested this to has told me they have followed these steps and it has worked for them. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John step one, delete all copies of my app. Empty the trash, like get them off your computer. Just delete, delete, delete,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Two, you probably don’t have to do this, but I always throw it in there for good measure, reboot. Step
⏹️ ▶️ John three, install Hyperspace from the Mac App Store, launch it, and then go into
⏹️ ▶️ John the settings window. And if the settings window still tells you that it thinks you own the app, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John you know you didn’t buy it for real, click on the text that’s telling you that it’s like unlocked
⏹️ ▶️ John forever or whatever, click on that text. And if it prompts you to sign in with one of those janky Apple sign-in
⏹️ ▶️ John things, sign in. Step four, quit the app. And step five, relaunch
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Everybody who has tried those steps has found that now you have convinced it that you don’t own it. But boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John what a terrible system. And to answer people’s questions, no, there’s nothing I can do about that. I have no idea what backend system
⏹️ ▶️ John or cache thing or whatever is making you think, because I can tell you from experience in many, many test
⏹️ ▶️ John flights, buying the test flight does not entitle you to the finished application in any way, shape
⏹️ ▶️ John or form, even if macOS apparently can get confused about that fact for some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, congratulations, John. How long did this take you, roughly? Like four or five months, which is not bad for
⏹️ ▶️ John No, when I talked about it on the show at the end of December, I basically had
⏹️ ▶️ John gone from zero to a bare bones working app that week that we recorded. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John December until end of February.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. That’s really fast. Good for you. No, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that complicated. It’s a little, it’s not a complicated app. Most of that time was spent just like being incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John cautious about like, you know, as you know, I only turned on the feature that this app supposedly exists
⏹️ ▶️ John for like in the last few weeks. It’s always just been a slow buildup. making sure lots of testing,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of, you know, so yeah. It’s not too complicated,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is something, an app that needs to be developed very carefully and hopefully I have done so. So
⏹️ ▶️ John again, fingers crossed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and honestly, it’s, I, so I ran it. I finally did my big reclaim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today on my giant Synology NAS copy on my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini. I had 1.03 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of duplicated files. Gracious. So today I paid John $10 to get 1.03 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back. Did Lifetime Unlock you cheapskate. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, the reason I didn’t do Lifetime Unlock is because I wanna actually just, like I did the one month,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I wanna actually keep going back to this over time. And because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels kind of weird I was able to reclaim a terabyte for just 10 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No matter how much I was reclaiming, it was the same 10 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We talked about the business model options in earlier episodes, and Casey and I were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unable to convince you to do a tiered set of space-based options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how much space you were recovering. It does feel kind of odd that I paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a small amount to get so much value. So instead, I will just run it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once a year on all my computers and see where I get.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, hopefully you don’t have a new terabyte next year. I don’t think you’re going to need to run this again for a while. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, all the more reason why you should have charged me more for my terabyte. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see how it goes. That’s one thing about the press that has gotten. Apparently, I mean, not surprisingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John the pricing things that I offer are confusing enough that people who write about it
⏹️ ▶️ John all tend to make the same mistake, which is they think that the app is available for a one-time lifetime unlock
⏹️ ▶️ John or subscription. That’s true, but there’s a third option that is too subtle for people to know because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s UI for it is confusing and I tried my best to make it clear, but there are auto-renewing
⏹️ ▶️ John subscriptions, which will keep charging you over and over again until you cancel them. Then there are one-time
⏹️ ▶️ John purchases, like unlock everything for whatever. And then there are also non-renewing
⏹️ ▶️ John subscriptions. Pay for one month of use. That’s what Marco did. He paid for one month and
⏹️ ▶️ John at the end of the month, that goes back to being locked. It will not renew, it will not charge him again. That is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple offers that seems like very few apps actually offer, but mine does. And in fact, it’s probably the
⏹️ ▶️ John best option and is one of the more popular options, but everyone who writes about it is like, oh, it’s a subscription or
⏹️ ▶️ John you can pay for it. No, there’s another thing. I know it’s confusing. A subscription that doesn’t renew?
⏹️ ▶️ John What is that? And of course, all the buttons in Apple’s UI say subscribe and people are like, oh, I don’t wanna subscribe. I just wanna pay
⏹️ ▶️ John one time. It’s like, I know I can’t control that that button says subscribe, but anyway, I try to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the documentation, which nobody reads, but to be clear, you can pay for a single
⏹️ ▶️ John month as a one-time purchase or a single year as a one-time purchase, and those purchases will not renew.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you can pay for a renewing subscription, or you can pay one-time lump sum big amount to unlock
⏹️ ▶️ John it forever and ever and ever. Those are all the choices. I’ll probably end up eliminating some of these choices when I
⏹️ ▶️ John see which ones people don’t like, but the distribution for like day one purchases That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John about what I would expect. It’s actually pretty even with the exception of the Lifetime Unlock, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is obviously gonna be super popular with the people who are buying the app on day one because they’re like people listen to the show and wanna support me
⏹️ ▶️ John and blah, blah. And I thank you all for that. But we’ll see how this, you know, after the
⏹️ ▶️ John initial launch and all the people who actually, you know, listen to the show and are interested in the app buy
⏹️ ▶️ John it, we’ll see what the long tail of this is. My expectation is that this app will be a slow
⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing because regular people honestly should really not be interested in this app
⏹️ ▶️ John until it’s been out for a year and not destroyed too many people’s hard drives,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it would have to like build up a reputation as a thing that it is safe to run and that you’re aware of. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it can’t do that on day one. On day one, it’s the most dangerous it’s ever gonna be. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, I don’t know why Marco’s destroying all his data with it, but he did. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John tune in a year from now and we’ll see like, it really needs to build up trust in the community
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to be a thing that people turn to to use. And I think for the early adopters and
⏹️ ▶️ John fans of the show and fans of me, yeah, sure, buy on day one. But for people who’ve never heard of me or the show, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t expect them to even discover this app until next year. So we’ll see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, again, congratulations and good luck.
iPhone 17 camera “bar”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk interesting iPhone 17 rumor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is for the entire family of iPhone 17s. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post on the verge about this and I will read some of it. Leaker Majin Boo has shared CAD renderings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what are purported to be the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max and the rumored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 17 Air with the latter three all featuring pixel-like rectangular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera bars. The new CAD renders show the rear camera bars on the iPhone 17 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Pro Max models stretch to extend their currently square design, now reaching across the entire upper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey body. They still retain the rounder edges as seen on the current models. The iPhone 17 Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features a similar design, albeit with only a single rear camera lens. According to these renders, the camera module
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the standard 17 model will be largely unchanged, differentiating it from the premium models. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll attempt to paint a word picture here. So imagine the 16-y, But the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera Mesa, copyright John Syracuse, extends the entire width of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back of the phone. Then the standard iPhone 17 is the same basic idea as the iPhone 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where there’s the two lenses, one above the other, with, I think it’s not LiDAR, is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s a flash. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like the 16, is what you’re saying. No one remembers what the 10 looks like. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t it look exactly the same as the 16 today? No, no, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe. Yeah, the regular 16. Two cameras, one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on top of the other,
⏹️ ▶️ John on a Lawson shaped Mesa with the flash off to the right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that’s right actually, now that you say that. Then the 17 Pro and Pro Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way this CAD rendering has been rendered is that what I presume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be metal is a gold color. And I don’t think that’s indicative of-
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is just a rendering, these colors mean nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so there’s gold that runs through the Mesa area but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it also goes down all the way to the bottom of the phone. And I think that’s metal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s a maroonish, reddish, brownish sort of section that’s most of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back of the phone, with the exception of the Mesa. And that appears to be a cutout or something for glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to reiterate, the shell of the phone is all metal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including just a little bit of the back of the phone. But then there’s a large glass section as well, presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Qi charging and MagSafe for, um, uh, for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the radios and whatnot, wifi. Yeah, exactly. And so there, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may be a best of both worlds situation from a robustness standpoint, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you won’t find it quite so easy. If I’m reading this right, you won’t find it quite so easy to crack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the corner of the back glass because the corner of the back glass is actually the back, you know, steel or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey titanium or whatever the flavor du jour is All that being said, and I’m very happy about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey theories I’ve got here if they come true, all that being said, the enlarged camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may still look freaking ridiculous and I really don’t like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a couple of interesting things here. First, let’s start with the 17 Air, far left
⏹️ ▶️ John in this picture if you follow the link in the show notes. It is disappointing to me that
⏹️ ▶️ John that the cool back of the 16E is not
⏹️ ▶️ John copied by the 17 Air. The 16E has one little camera and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just sitting there all on its own. I don’t even know if it has a Mesa. Does it have a Mesa or is it just poking out of the flat back of the phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s a Mesa because we look at the right-hand side of the phone or the right-hand side is presented on this image. It looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a little bit of depth there to me but I hear what you’re saying and I may have this wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the 16E, you mean? Let me see. No, no, no, I’m looking at the- Yeah, I know, but I’m saying like the, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John 16E does not have a Mesa. It has
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one camera. I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it does not have a Mesa.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, you might be right about that. My apologies. I thought we were talking about the 17 Air.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, no, I’m saying the 16E. And the reason I’m comparing it to 16E is 16E also has one camera. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, this is what a one camera phone can look like. It’s one of the best things about the 16E appearance-wise. It just looks so clean on
⏹️ ▶️ John the back. It’s just a piece of glass. It’s got one camera, no Mesa. The camera, of course, sticks out a little bit, but
⏹️ ▶️ John given what camera bumps have looked like for the past several years, the 16E is a breath of fresh air.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here comes the 17 Air, the super thin one. It’s also got one camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s not room for any more and blah, blah, blah, whatever. It’s fine, makes sense. And then they put a pixel-like
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone Mesa that spans the entire width of the phone, which I think really
⏹️ ▶️ John takes away from the slimness of this. There’s also some photos of what is supposedly a
⏹️ ▶️ John physical reality of the 17 Air case, and it doesn’t look much better there.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s someone’s rendering. I don’t know, I have a link to this, but you too can look at it. The rendering of
⏹️ ▶️ John how big the air is supposed to be, 5.5 millimeters as compared to the 8.25 millimeter 16 Pro Max. Like it does look slim,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then there’s the usual camera mesa and camera bump thing or whatever. One of my questions
⏹️ ▶️ John about the 17 Air is, what’s in the rest of that mesa? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what could they possibly be filling that space with? Obviously there’s the flash and the light
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor or whatever when I see that, but like that whole big Mesa, I don’t think they can
⏹️ ▶️ John fit more battery in there. Is it the Face ID sensor on the front that needs more depth that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John taking that spot? Like I do wonder what’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The whole rest of the phone is so thin. I bet maybe there is some part of the Face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID component assembly kind of thing that’s right in the middle there that maybe that is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco require that kind of thickness.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe we’ll see what the teardown looks like. And then on the Plane 17, that looks very much like
⏹️ ▶️ John the plain 16. It doesn’t have anything extending across the full width of the phone. It just,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, looks like the 16 with two cameras on top of each other. And then we get to the ones that have three cameras, the 17
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and 17 Pro Max. And I’ve been saying for years and years and years that they’re well past the time
⏹️ ▶️ John where Apple should stop pretending that their cameras are in the corner of their phone and instead do something
⏹️ ▶️ John that uses the whole width of the phone. And if this is to be believed, and I put this in here because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re kind of at the point where like the CAD renders are probably like the real thing and not just like people making
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff up. So if this is to be believed, they heard my years of complaining, you know, hypothetically,
⏹️ ▶️ John about pretending their cameras exist in the corner of their phone. And they said, you’re right,
⏹️ ▶️ John we should use that width. You know how we’ll do it? We’ll leave the cameras exactly where they are
⏹️ ▶️ John and just make the Mesa the full width of the phone. And you may be thinking to yourself, well, at least this solves
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem of the phone wobbling on the table, right? At least now you won’t have this thing where there’s a lump
⏹️ ▶️ John on one corner and it’s just like a table that’s not even or whatever. But no, you’re forgetting
⏹️ ▶️ John that the camera mesa is not where the cameras exist. They exist on top
⏹️ ▶️ John of the camera mesa. So all of these phones, even the ones that have a camera
⏹️ ▶️ John mesa that extends the entire width of the phone, all of them have camera
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses that stick out from the mesa and those lenses are all shoved
⏹️ ▶️ John still gonna wobble on the table. What have we done here, Apple? What have we gained?
⏹️ ▶️ John These phones are uglier. I mean, I get what Casey’s saying about like the metal being sturdy around the edges and just having a small glass
⏹️ ▶️ John region for radio transparency, but boy, I’m not liking the look of the 17 Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I just, they just didn’t, just like they didn’t do anything. They left the cameras where they
⏹️ ▶️ John were and just made the Mesa wider. I guess that gives them some more space
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. I wonder what they’re gonna use that space for because those phones aren’t as thin as the 17 Air. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they already had room for the face ID sensor. They didn’t need that giant Mesa. So they put the extended
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mesa anyway. Like what does that? Just, it’s frustrating to me. I’m frustrated with the way these phones
⏹️ ▶️ John look. I was hoping all of the, like the fake renders that people had on these stories based on the descriptions.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was hoping that they were just entirely wrong. But now when the quote unquote CAD
⏹️ ▶️ John renders come out, presumably leaked from like case manufacturers or people who are machining in these cases or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John At this point, I’m starting to believe. And yeah, there’s things you can do with surface treatments to make this look less gross.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am not a fan. And honestly, like it’s making the plain 17 be the clear looker in
⏹️ ▶️ John this arrangement. I was hoping the 17 air would be the looker, but that stupid like pixel-like
⏹️ ▶️ John lozenge is really throwing off the balance of the air to me. So I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of glad that next year is not my year for cameras, but really,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s for phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John but really it doesn’t matter because if things go as they have gone for the past
⏹️ ▶️ John many years, even though I’m not buying an iPhone 17, when the 18 family arrives, chances are good that the 18
⏹️ ▶️ John family will look a lot like the 17 family because Apple does not change their cases
⏹️ ▶️ John every single year or hasn’t recently anyway. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, assuming this is all true, which at this stage is probably true, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole family of phones looks, I think fairly hideous from the back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that being said, how often have I seen the back of my current phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not that often. I mean, first of all, I’m still using that leather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco magnetic snap-on back, so I’m not really seeing the back plate of the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I do see the part where the camera pokes out. So okay, if I get one of these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the part where the camera pokes out will be much bigger and span across the whole back of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone. How will that affect my life? It won’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because when I put my phone down on a surface, it’s face up, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m using my phone, my hand covers the back, and I’m looking at the front.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s pretty much no time where I’m really seeing the back of my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as much as I can look at all these and say, ooh, that’s kind of hideous, the way I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use my phone, which I think is fairly common, with some kind of case on the back, and almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never seeing the back, I think it’s fine. We’ll survive, and I would rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the better cameras as possible. And in the case of the 17
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air, which at the moment, I don’t think I will get a 17 Air,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think there’s a chance that once I handle one, I will have to have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’ll see. But anyway, all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to say, I think this will be fine. And we will, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same thing that we said when the camera Mesa got bigger every time over the years, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks hideous when you first see it and then you just get used to it and that’s just how iPhones look. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll be used to it, it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we should have slightly less wobble because the Mesa does extend the full width.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even though the camera lenses do jut out farther, there will be, it will be closer to being even than it
⏹️ ▶️ John was before. But the other thing to consider on the 17 Pro and Pro Max is
⏹️ ▶️ John there are now things, important things in a region where there weren’t before. I see those two dots
⏹️ ▶️ John on the right side that are across from the camera lens. It’s like right now on a 16 Pro, the like
⏹️ ▶️ John light sensor and flash thing are like above and below the third
⏹️ ▶️ John camera, but within the little square that you can draw around them, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John now, because in my current phone, if I put my finger over like
⏹️ ▶️ John the area that’s next to the camera Mesa, it’s not blocking anything. There’s nothing there. But now on
⏹️ ▶️ John both of these phones, if you put your finger anywhere that’s like across from the cameras, they
⏹️ ▶️ John would previously be blocking nothing. It will be blocking potentially the flash or the light sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy. And so you may have to do a little bit of change your grip on these phones
⏹️ ▶️ John to not do that. I mean, I never used the flash anyway, so it’s not a big deal, but whatever that other hole is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming it’s a light sensor or light meter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I believe it’s LiDAR. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, well, maybe it’s not a big deal then, because we, well, I don’t, wait, it uses LiDAR for like the auto portrait mode thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s correct, as far as I know. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, anyway, there’s potentially another area on the back of the phone where you can’t cover stuff with your fingers, so
⏹️ ▶️ John be aware of that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m sure it’ll be fine. My wife will get this phone. If it has better battery life, it’ll be great. The rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John about the camera, that it’s better, but I’m just kind of disappointed that they didn’t do, I was kind of excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about this year, both because of the air and because of the rumors about them changing the camera arrangement. And I’m kind of really disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John to see that it’s just like a Photoshop stretch of the camera mason on the existing pro
Apple’s 🇺🇸-investment PR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Then finally for this week, Apple has announced on their newsroom that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they will spend more than $500 billion in the US over the next how many years you ask?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Four. Reading from their newsroom post, Apple Today, which was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Monday the 24th, announced its largest ever spend commitment with plans to spend and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey invest more than $500 billion in the US over the next four years. This new pledge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey builds on Apple’s long history of investing in American innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing and will support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a wide range of initiatives that focused on artificial intelligence, silicon engineering, and skills development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for students and workers across the country. As part of this package of us investments, Apple and partners will open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new advanced manufacturing facility in Houston to produce servers that support Apple intelligence, the personal intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system that helps users write, blah, blah, blah, blah. Apple will also double its us advanced manufacturing fund
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to create an academy in Michigan to train the next generation of us manufacturers and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grow its research and development investments in the U S to support cutting edge fields like Silicon engineering.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if you go back four years, you will find a very similar announcement that adjusted for inflation, give
⏹️ ▶️ John similar numbers with Apple saying from 2021 ish, I believe in the next four years we’re going to spend $400 billion,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. So this is actually isn’t particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John unprecedented, but I will say this about Apple’s seemingly every four years announcement of how how much money
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to invest in the United States, they should be investing more.
⏹️ ▶️ John As we’ve harped on for many years now, Apple’s reliance on China for everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is so problematic for multiple reasons, but one of them is that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not an easy thing to fix. To fix it is going to take a huge amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ John and a huge amount of money. And I’m not saying Apple should switch to manufacturing everything in the United States, that’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. But trying to become
⏹️ ▶️ John less reliant on China means investing in places that are not
⏹️ ▶️ John China. One of those places is the US and Apple has had these announcements like, oh, we’re investing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the US, we’re building these factories, we’re doing this, we’re gonna make the Mac Pro here, we’re gonna do whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacture servers for Apple intelligence.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would wanna see on a graph of like Apple’s investment in the US, I would want to see that going up
⏹️ ▶️ John by a lot as part of a strategy to reduce their reliance
⏹️ ▶️ John on China. And seeing a number that just looks like an inflation-adjusted diversion of
⏹️ ▶️ John the number that they had four years ago is not reassuring. It’s almost like they’re just, I’m not saying $500
⏹️ ▶️ John billion is trivial, but I would like to see a trend line going
⏹️ ▶️ John up. And this is completely setting aside politics and who’s going to use
⏹️ ▶️ John this as a political football. just forget about all that and just say, if you’re just in charge of Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John from a business and technology perspective, having all your eggs in one basket,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever that basket is, is not good. Having all your eggs in a basket that
⏹️ ▶️ John is very not friendly to many things that Apple stands for,
⏹️ ▶️ John including encryption and other things that they’re not allowed to do in China, is also not good. And Apple has been
⏹️ ▶️ John branching out to more manufacturing in India, which also has its own kind of rightward lurching problems
⏹️ ▶️ John going on, more manufacturing in other countries, and the U.S. should be one of those. So I’m kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of disappointed to see this announcement, and it just seemed
⏹️ ▶️ John like business as usual with the usual rah-rah, USA, here’s another $500
⏹️ ▶️ John billion to you in four years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, Apple PR has a track record of issuing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco self-flatulence-inhaling press releases that Mostly just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to promote in a new way things they were already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing or have already done. That’s what this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is just a political statement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They make them all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t think, like 500 billion dollars is not nothing though. Like they are doing something, I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, oh we’re just doing something for appearances. 500 billion dollars is not doing something for appearances. They’re clearly like
⏹️ ▶️ John have committed to invest like 100 billion dollars ish a year for the past like eight to ten years, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not nothing but it’s also not an upward trend so it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John If they had done something like oh like a 1 million dollar program to help school kids learn to be advanced manufacturing people
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s nothing 500 billion dollars is not nothing. I just my question is is like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even care with them trying to use it as a political football fine, whatever, but they they’re spending 500 billion dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John why aren’t we spending 600, 700, 800 trillion? Like why is the amount not
⏹️ ▶️ John going up over the years? It just doesn’t, it doesn’t send a message to me that they are,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s baffling to me that they would be willing to spend this much money but
⏹️ ▶️ John not have it be part of a strategy to increase their spend over time or decrease it or whatever, whatever direction they want to go
⏹️ ▶️ John in. They’re not doing any of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not really news because this investment was, like, this is just what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were already going to do anyway for their own expansion. They didn’t decide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last 30 or so days for political reasons, they didn’t decide, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re suddenly going to spend $500 billion because of this brand new plan that we have, out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the goodness of our hearts and investing in America. No, they were going to do this anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just for their own expansion. And here we have some candy coating on top of it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please the administration.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, so doing it for their own expansion, Like they can choose where they expand. Like, yes, they’re growing over time
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, like making these announcements every four years makes it seem like it’s an every four years thing, but it’s just, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you said, it’s an ongoing thing. Every year they spend X amount of dollars on whatever they’re going to do. And that X hasn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John changed that much other than ramping up with inflation. So you can make these announcements
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to make political head of it, but like, you’re saying they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do this expansion anyway. They could have put all this money into expansion elsewhere. They could have put it all into
⏹️ ▶️ John India, But they didn’t. They’re taking 500 billion of their, you know, worldwide expansion money
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re doing 100 billion a year in the US, which is exactly what they’ve been doing for like 10, 15 years. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, but it’s just it’s strange to me that they would put so much money in and
⏹️ ▶️ John do all these announcements every year without a trend in one direction or another, especially when I strongly
⏹️ ▶️ John feel that they should be going in one particular direction. So, you know, I don’t I don’t fault them for trying to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, score political points with it. They did it in the last administration. and they did it with the administration before that, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do it in the next one. And I do credit them for investing $100 billion a year in
⏹️ ▶️ John the US, but I don’t understand, I don’t understand the strategy. I don’t get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t either. And you know, I was on Upgrade earlier this week, filling in for Mike and Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I talked about it. And his point was the same as yours is that, look, Apple’s been doing this for a long time in similar ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I get that, but I don’t know, it’s just, it still feels a little icky. Plus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, I’ll try to remember to put a link in the show notes, but I believe that some of the things that they swear they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing, all outward indication is that they’re not doing it. Like there’s some data center project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in like North Carolina or something like that, that if I understand correctly, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think anything is really actually happening with it yet or something like that. Check my math
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that. I might be completely wrong. But anyways, it’s just a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gross. It’s gross when, you know, one of our guys or one of our people is president. It’s gross
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it’s not one of our people. It’s just, I don’t know, it just seems silly. But all that aside, all the posturing
⏹️ ▶️ John You think it’s gross that a US company is investing in US
⏹️ ▶️ John Set aside the current administration. Back when they did it
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it’s gross. I think it’s insufficient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s 100% insufficient. But it’s, look at us. Look at us. Look at how good we are.
⏹️ ▶️ John we want them to expand more in different places. We want them to invest more in the United States. So in 2021, when they say we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to spend $400 billion over the next four years, I say, good. You get to announce that
⏹️ ▶️ John and do the thing. Now make that investment. And next year, have it be substantially more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I don’t know. They’re smelling their own farts. That’s what Marco said. They’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smelling their own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John farts. It is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but even for a press release, it’s an unnecessary press release. Just do it. Just do the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Also, with the North Carolina Data Center, that’s the problem with these big projects. There’s always so much
⏹️ ▶️ John to them, and they get so entangled with local and state governments and changing
⏹️ ▶️ John investment landscape, just keeping track of all this money and where they actually end up spending and how it gets shifted around.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s difficult. The problem with this is kind of like cell radios we talked about before, how
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly complicated and difficult a problem that is. Advanced manufacturing, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff that builds Apple products is not the type of thing where you can just say, oh, well, just build a factory and then we can make iPhones in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, there’s so much supporting infrastructure from every single manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ John that produces the little screws and the machines that make the screws and the machine and the machines that make the machines
⏹️ ▶️ John that assemble the products that like, and that’s before you even get to the workforce and. All the transportation
⏹️ ▶️ John systems and shipping. And like, there’s a reason it’s not so easy for them to get out of China. And so if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to get anything like that type of advanced manufacturing Somewhere that’s not China.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to invest so much money over so much time and if you’re gonna spend tons of money and
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of time Maybe you want to spend some of that in your own country granted The cost of labor is much higher
⏹️ ▶️ John here and there are lots of other problems in terms of being far away from the people who Make all the parts and so on and so forth but like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re never gonna get there if you don’t start right it’s it shouldn’t be totally an Apple move to have like a
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-decade strategy of diversifying their manufacturing. And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like they have that kind of, they’ve been doing so much more in India and I think in some other countries around
⏹️ ▶️ John that area, which granted are a lot closer to China and it makes it a little bit easier. But every time I see a US
⏹️ ▶️ John investment, it’s like, are you in this or are you out of it? Like, are you trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John create advanced manufacturing with this like advanced manufacturing fund? Like, is that just so those people can go get jobs in China?
⏹️ ▶️ John What are they gonna be using this advanced manufacturing skill? What are they gonna be building at those skills in the US.
⏹️ ▶️ John The best we’ve got is enticing TSMC to make two-year-old chips in Arizona for
⏹️ ▶️ John us, which there’s a whole bunch of stuff about that lower in the show. It’s who knows we’ll ever get to. But that’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John ongoing thing. And it’s the best we’ve got. And in theory, they
⏹️ ▶️ John will be building chips for Apple products there that are close to cutting edge. But TSMC is not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, well, thank you to our sponsor this week, Google Gemini. and thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In overtime this week, which is our weekly bonus topic exclusively for members, we’re gonna be talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Sigma’s new camera that they announced, the Sigma BF. This is a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting kind of radical design, a little full frame camera. So we’re gonna be talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that in overtime. You can join to listen atv.fm slash join. Thanks everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, accidental They didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to, accidental, accidental Tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Podcasts, it’s so long.
Hyperspace icon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, any other hyperspace stuff we want to talk about? I
⏹️ ▶️ John was actually talking about the icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I freaking love this icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it is very good.
⏹️ ▶️ John think people like the icon more than they like my app. In fact, something I’ve explicitly said. I don’t even like your app, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John like the icon. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, that’s very kind.
⏹️ ▶️ John Icons. Icons are tricky. I am
⏹️ ▶️ John an icon aficionado. I have collected icons for my entire
⏹️ ▶️ John computing life because icons have been a thing since 1984 for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a vast collection of 32 by 32
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel icons in the classic Mac OS days. There were multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John classic Mac OS applications whose only job was to be libraries for
⏹️ ▶️ John icons. Not just one of them, multiple ones, and I had multiple of them
⏹️ ▶️ John In the Mac OS X days, obviously there was a big change from the 32 by 32 pixel app icons
⏹️ ▶️ John of classic to the what was then massive, I think 128 by 128 in
⏹️ ▶️ John the first version of Mac OS X icons that were like photo realistic and just like it changed the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John landscape of icons. It was no longer pixel art. Now you could have these other things. And anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John Panic, did Panic make this app? I know Icon Factory made this. Either Panic or Icon Factory made an app. I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John who, yeah, I think Icon Factory made it and then it changed hands to panic. Anyway, it was an app called Candy Bar
⏹️ ▶️ John that was a modern Mac OS X version of an app that just collects icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that app was eventually discontinued, but then I begged them to bring it back. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John actually let me hack on it a little bit to get it up and running, and I did. And then they took it back and hacked on it a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John more. Now when you launch it, it shows a dialogue that says, Candy Bar is a 20-year-old application. Don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John everything to work. I’m like, fine, fine, candy bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just keep my icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John All this is to say is I love icons. I have tons of icons. And so when it comes time to make
⏹️ ▶️ John icons for my own Mac apps, I have very strong opinions. If you go to my website and go to
⏹️ ▶️ John the app section, you will see. My three apps, my three weird little apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is kind of an awkward arrangement, because there’s three of them instead of four, maybe I’ll fix that someday. And the first
⏹️ ▶️ John app that I made, it was an icon that I made myself, and it was easy for me to make because it involved
⏹️ ▶️ John using pixel art from classic Mac OS, which apparently is old enough that Apple doesn’t care anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ John front and center, that’s an icon that I made. It’s kind of amazing that
⏹️ ▶️ John I was able to make an icon out of the window UI of my previous operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I could fit like one-to-one non-scaled pixel accurate representations
⏹️ ▶️ John of actual windows from my previous operating system. Now it’s the icon of an app. I found that incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John enjoyable. My second icon was made by a talented artist
⏹️ ▶️ John at my request based on a design that I suggested. That’s Switch Glass.
⏹️ ▶️ John You will note that neither of these icons is the, what
⏹️ ▶️ John was it? Big surrounded rectangle thing that Apple said that all
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac apps should have. Front and center I think predates that, but Switch Glass I think does not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Either way, I am against that. I like it when Mac icons were not
⏹️ ▶️ John all squircles. Right, I liked it when they were out of sight of their bounds. So Switch Glass is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a squircle, but it’s tilted, so screw you. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it looks lickable and kind of aqua-y. That one’s done by Brad Ellis, it’s really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so then I had Hyperspace. The TestFlight icon was just a stock art picture of the Milky
⏹️ ▶️ John Way, because I didn’t have an icon yet. I said the icon is temporary. But I had an idea for the icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to draw it myself. And so I got IconFactory
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it. IconFactory, maker of some of those classic Mac OS apps that we use to collect your icons,
⏹️ ▶️ John maker of tons of the free icons that I downloaded from their website and put into my icon collections.
⏹️ ▶️ John And either the original maker of Candy Bar or the eventual owner of Candy Bar, I forget which. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John as the name says, they make icons. And so I, I came up with a concept document.
⏹️ ▶️ John The way too long. It said like, here’s my app. Here’s what it does. Here’s what it’s called. Here’s my concept
⏹️ ▶️ John for the icon of kids. If you want to understand what this document, I showed them my Pinterest.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what kids say these days, where you, you put up little pictures of things that inspire you about the kitchen of your dreams
⏹️ ▶️ John while mine was like, here’s some pictures of the icon, here’s what I’m thinking, here’s some, you know, it was, it was a ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John document. Uh, but this, the icon that you see. Was my idea. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John a hard drive spaceship going into a legally distinct hyperspace.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my original idea was that the hard drive spaceship would have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John surface treatment as the Millennium Falcon. And as I said in the concept document, this
⏹️ ▶️ John may be a terrible idea because at actual icon sizes, all that detail may be entirely lost.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, that was my concept. And working with Icon Factory on this was great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know some of those folks from years ago, and they know us, they did some art for one of our
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP t-shirts, the big Angel of Death trashcan Mac Pro one, that was Icon
⏹️ ▶️ John Factory that did the art for that. They’re really great. So anyway, work together
⏹️ ▶️ John with an artist at Icon Factory on this icon and going through many iterations and many concepts,
⏹️ ▶️ John including we got to a point where there’s a fork in the road where it was like, Do we want to go in the direction of Millennium Falcon
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of greebles or greeblies? It’s pronounced two different, both
⏹️ ▶️ John those words are apparently valid. Anyway, the little nerly things that are on the top of the Millennium Falcon, do we want to go in that direction
⏹️ ▶️ John or do you want to go in the shiny direction? And in the end I chose shiny, even though that wasn’t my original concept just because
⏹️ ▶️ John as part of making the actual icon, you learn what works and what doesn’t. And as I suspected, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t going to read well. I did decide to make this one a squircle.
⏹️ ▶️ John I Thought it would work. Okay with the design It’s this is the all my
⏹️ ▶️ John apps are weird But this is the most mainstream of any of my apps not saying much not very mainstream But
⏹️ ▶️ John you know It’s a low bar and so I figured if ever I’m going to go normie and use the
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid squircle macOS icons now
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because I had
⏹️ ▶️ John a background idea like
⏹️ ▶️ John hyperspace like the stars and everything. That’s the background So I have something to put in the squircle at least
⏹️ ▶️ John And as you might imagine, we went back and forth. When I say we, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John IconFactory artist and me. He’s doing all the work and I’m just complaining about it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John many iterations, refining so many nuances of this that no one cares about and I hope I didn’t drive
⏹️ ▶️ John them crazy, but I think the result is
⏹️ ▶️ John what I wanted it to be. And I think it came out pretty well. It was difficult to make this
⏹️ ▶️ John design work at all an icon because it is very busy and
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to understand and visually grok, but I’m happy to see
⏹️ ▶️ John that most people who have seen this icon understood it and got it and think it’s cool
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think it works really well for my app and I like how it looks and I also kind of like how I have three apps
⏹️ ▶️ John with three icons that look nothing like each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic. I really like Chefskiss A plus in the icons. Agreed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The app’s pretty good too.
⏹️ ▶️ John We had some other ideas too. Like I kind of wanted to do, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, not for 1.0, but at some point, maybe when I get back into doing fun stuff, Mac apps
⏹️ ▶️ John can have alternate icons, even if the Mac OS APIs do not expose those
⏹️ ▶️ John icons to other apps. There’s multiple feedbacks about this. Please address
⏹️ ▶️ John that. There’s literal APIs that say, give me the icon of this running application. Totally ignores
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s official API for changing the icon. Anyway, there are official APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John for Mac apps where you can change the icon. Ivory, a Mac app, has a thing in its settings
⏹️ ▶️ John that says, hey, what icon do you want to use for Ivory? And I’ve picked an alternate icon, and I like that feature. So someday I
⏹️ ▶️ John might have in hyperspace an alternate icon feature, which has nothing to do with reclaiming disk
⏹️ ▶️ John space and everything to do with just being fun, just like the Ivory icon. So I figured I would use the test flight icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I have some fondness for, even though it’s just stupid looking. It’s just a star field, but whatever. I would put that in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I first put the real icon, but there were some other concepts that I want to spoil what they are, but there
⏹️ ▶️ John were some other concepts that we explored early on in the icon factory engagement for this
⏹️ ▶️ John icon that I think would make a cool other icons. I may actually re-engage icon
⏹️ ▶️ John factory at some point in the future and say, hey, let’s do
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those other ideas. And then I would have at least three icons to choose from and we would see how it goes. But
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things with the launch in terms of how things do financially, like, again, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John expect to see a big spell or whatever. But it was nice that on day one,
⏹️ ▶️ John the app paid for its own icon. Oh, good. That’s great. So I am officially in the black.
⏹️ ▶️ John Woo. Now we just need one more person to buy something. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ John worth every penny. Because like, honestly, as someone who’s so obsessed with icons, having a really
⏹️ ▶️ John good icon or at least an icon that I like for the app means just so much to me. And even though people might look at
⏹️ ▶️ John my other icons and think they’re just like ugly or nothing special, I like them and that’s what’s important. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John just feel like that is really like. I know it’s so important to
⏹️ ▶️ John to me personally, but also I just think in general, the first thing people see gives a
⏹️ ▶️ John good impression about your application and the icon does that. And so, yeah, I think I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great. It makes me happy to see it on my website. It makes me happy to see it in my doc. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad that people like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And it’s a great icon. It really is.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are other fun things in the application too. If you look around for them, I try not to spend too much time doing
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid stuff that has nothing to do with anything. Uh, you know, if you go too far down that road,
⏹️ ▶️ John you end up at James Thompson. But of course he shot the moon and wrapped back around and made a whole separate app about his fun things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, I’m never going to achieve that level of awesomeness, but I do in the very traditional
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac sense, enjoy. Adding fun little things to my apps. I just have to like time box them
⏹️ ▶️ John and be like, you are not allowed to spend more than 1.5 days on this before you get back to doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual app because nobody cares about this. But it was something I used to distract myself during a development
⏹️ ▶️ John and I may return to that well in the future. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, again, congratulations. I’m really excited for you. I’m proud of you. You’ve done great work and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app is great. So I’m looking forward to a long future with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you download it and add a rating Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not yet, but I’m going to, I’ve been busy, man. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you don’t give
⏹️ ▶️ John me five stars, they’re going to kill my entire family.
⏹️ ▶️ John for it is not what everybody says to you at any time. You you pay for any service. It really helped people discover the
⏹️ ▶️ John show. No, that’s a different joke. The other joke is like you go buy a cup of coffee and the person
⏹️ ▶️ John says to you, they have my family hostage and they’re going to kill them if you don’t give me
⏹️ ▶️ John a 10. Like every every like every single thing I buy, someone
⏹️ ▶️ John says, oh, and by the way, thanks. Well, they do it in a practice way, but it’s like but just so you know, is real important that
⏹️ ▶️ John if anyone contacts you about this, you tell them that blah, blah, blah, and give me a 10 because if anything less than a 10, they’re just going to fire me,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s like, I hate the system. So I give them 10s. Like I want them to continue to be employed, but I hate
⏹️ ▶️ John it so much. So I, you know, I understand why people are not writing my rating map.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s fine. But, uh, I guess I’m in the same situation. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, John, uh, all that anti Virginia slander now that’s coming home to roost my friend.
⏹️ ▶️ John bought your app and rated it five stars. I’m just giving you a hard time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just giving you a hard time.
⏹️ ▶️ John My app will never prompt you to review it. I’ll promise you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You say that, you know, I said that 10 years ago too, and I had to stop saying it.
⏹️ ▶️ John you actually try to make money from your apps. I don’t, these are just fun. I will never prompt you for ratings.
⏹️ ▶️ John I promise you. The only prompting you’re gonna get is on my podcast I’ll ask you to do it.