633: Moonshoot
01 Apr 2025Rumors of foldable phones, foldable iPads, foldable MacBooks, foldable TVs, foldable EU directives, foldable unemployment, foldable tech support expectations, and foldable universal links.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- 🏳️⚧️ Happy Trans Day of Visibility! 🏳️⚧️
- Happy anniversary, Siracusa!
- Follow-up:
- Vision Pro corner: Volume control (via D. Griffin Jones & Victor Prieto)
- & 🇪🇺
- Prioritization (via Karan J)
- A less complementary take from Thom Holwerda
- More theories on behind-closed-doors talks (via illustro)
- Will EU releases whither? (via David Shayer)
- An anecdote about John Giannandrea (via Wolf)
- Netflix in search on Apple TV (via Ryan Budish)
- Sony’s new RGB backlight tech shines
- Folding MacBook? Giant iPad? Folding iPhones? Oh, my!
- Ask ATP:
- How do we approach feedback? Why are we held to different standards than Apple?
- Are smaller, incremental releases of software killing the joy of a new major version? (via Thom Bullock)
- Post-show: Casey finally stops kicking another can
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Vibe coding
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Chapters
- Type to us, Casey!
- Transgender Day of Visibility
- John’s Unemployaversary
- Vision Pro corner (briefly!)
- Apple/EU follow-up
- Sponsor: Notion
- Giannandrea follow-up
- Netflix on Apple TV
- RGB-backlit TVs
- Sponsor: Factor (code atp50off)
- Foldable rumors
- Sponsor: Wildgrain (code ATP)
- #askatp: Indie support expectations
- #askatp: Big releases for delight
- Ending theme
- Callsheet universal links
Type to us, Casey!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hi everybody, we’re live. That’s it, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the show? Well, that was fast. Thanks for listening, everybody, and we’ll talk to you
⏹️ ▶️ John Did Casey just disappear? I
⏹️ ▶️ John What happened? He just muted himself. He’s moving the cursor around. Type
⏹️ ▶️ John to us, Casey. Tell us. Are you here, Casey? Spirits, are you listening?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God damn it, am I here now? Yes. Jesus Christ, I’ve been talking for the last two minutes. Ah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is user error, user error.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recording is fine. The recording is fine. The recording is fine, Marco, the recording is fine. Jesus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Christ, this is the most Casey moment I’ve had in a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The funny thing is, I had said to Marco before we recorded, before John was even on the call, you know, I’m feeling a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overwhelmed. I have no reason for it, I just am. Well, no reason other than gestures, wildly. But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feeling a little overwhelmed. Anyways, so my ritual when I start recording is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know why this is, but I need to go into system preferences. We talked about this like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months ago. I need to go into system preferences, need to go into sound, and I need to change the input
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my bespoke input for the USB MixPre-3-2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Otherwise, if I don’t do that, when I hit record in Audio Hijack, Audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hijack is like, what MixPre-3-2? It doesn’t exist. It exists up until I hit record, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the moment I hit record, it doesn’t exist. So every time I record, I go into system preferences, sound,
⏹️ ▶️ John input. Why are you in your system settings is what it’s called. And why are you going into there instead of, you love menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ John icons. You could put a menu bar icon that will let you pick the input source.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you? Yeah, right? How? I don’t know. I mean, you’re probably right. I have no idea how, but it doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so this time I did it for MixPre 3.2, which is the physical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection to the MixPre 3. But what I should have done is, and there was a reason for this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the USB Pre days, that Marco, for good reason, had me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set up a loopback interface for when I record. I think it was because I was piping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey y’all’s audio back to you for some strange reason. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco recall why that was. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably, so no, it was probably because the setup I do with USB Pre 2 is I have channel 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being what you two are seeing. And that way, in my recording, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both me and you two, both as a backup and also to help me sync up with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the double-ender method afterwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right, right. So anyways, I’d selected MixPre-3-2. I did not select USB MixPre-3-2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Zoom, which is the loopback one. And as soon as I selected that, you guys could finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear me. That’s all right, I was realizing as this was happening, and I didn’t realize you couldn’t hear me, that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t sure which one of the two pre-shows.
⏹️ ▶️ John What was that? Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, come back to us. Oh, geez. 10-4, good buddy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is happening?
⏹️ ▶️ John You just did like a robot fade out. It was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What the hell is going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you using third party RAM somehow? No!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate everything. You’re all fired. You’re all fired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco and I quit. Has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there been any liquid incursion to this
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t touch anything. Just talking. and don’t touch anything with your hands.
Transgender Day of Visibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so we are recording on Monday, March 31st
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for travel-related reasons, and I wanted, or we really wanted to call attention to the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that today is Trans Day of Visibility. So happy Trans Day of Visibility. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure if that’s really the appropriate way of phrasing it, but this is meant in good spirits, and I hope you take what we mean and what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean by saying this. So if you’re not familiar or aware of this, we will put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link in the show notes, but Reading from GLAAD’s website, each year on March 31st, the world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey observes Transgender Day of Visibility, or TDOV, to raise awareness about transgender people. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a day to celebrate the lives and contributions of trans people while also drawing attention to the disproportionate levels of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey poverty, discrimination, and violence the community faces. I’m pretty darn sure I can speak for all three of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, I am sure I can speak for all three of us in saying trans people are people. Trans people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deserve to be loved and treated and have the rights of any other kind of person. rights
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or human rights and to think otherwise is preposterous and disgusting. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do feel otherwise, you can feel free to turn the program off right now because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this program is not for you if that’s how you feel. So to those of us who are, to those of you who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey identify as transgender, we are here with you to the degree that three straight white old dudes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can and we support you to the degree that we can and we believe in you and hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best for all of you. And if either of you two have something to add, I am all ears.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. This is a kind of a, the name of this holiday is kind of a statement about
⏹️ ▶️ John where things are right now. It’s like trans day of visibility. Like what
⏹️ ▶️ John do they want? What’s their agenda? See us allow
⏹️ ▶️ John us to exist and have rights. And, and like, if you’re my age or older,
⏹️ ▶️ John you might remember a time when lots of different types of people face similar discrimination
⏹️ ▶️ John as in it would be more convenient for me as the default human
⏹️ ▶️ John to not have to think about people who are different than me. So can’t they just like hide themselves or stay
⏹️ ▶️ John in the closet or whatever and then I wouldn’t have to think about them and it would make me feel so much more comfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no such thing as a world without trans people in it. There’s no such thing as a world without gay people in it. And the sooner you realize
⏹️ ▶️ John that, the sooner you can get on board with the idea of like, huh, maybe other human beings exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a journey for a lot of people, especially if you didn’t grow up thinking about this at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I have some confidence that everybody listening to this, if they’re not already on board, can
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually get on board by just slowly breaking it down and thinking, people exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should recognize them as people. It’s as simple as that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, like, don’t be a jerk. Let people be who they are. Call people what they want to be called.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you are not trans, the existence of trans people doesn’t threaten you or make your life worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any way. There is no reason to deny people rights or deny people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safety and dignity. And you know, don’t be a jerk, call people they want to be called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it doesn’t affect you at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. People come up with reasons though. I mean, it wasn’t so long ago that, you know, women want
⏹️ ▶️ John to vote. Are women people? Black people? Are they people? Gay
⏹️ ▶️ John people? That’s too far. Gay people. You’ve got to be kidding me. And every generation
⏹️ ▶️ John and every year, some other group of formerly oppressed people tries to fight for their rights and other
⏹️ ▶️ John people resist it because it just doesn’t seem like that’s the way things should be. But guess what? They’re always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Every single time. So anyway, so again, if this phrasing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incorrect or inappropriate, I genuinely apologize. But to the degree that I don’t know the right way to phrase it, happy Trans Day of Visibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, you are visible to us. class.
John’s Unemployaversary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, John, it is time for your favorite corner. It is recognizing past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey events corner on the 30th of March in 2022, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monumentous thing happened, John, happy anniversary of Indie life. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John really? Yes. I don’t know. Why is this on your calendar and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not on mine? It was that, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not on the calendar. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on my calendar. Are we
⏹️ ▶️ John celebrating the day I announced it on the podcast? Are we celebrating the day the podcast that I announced it on was published?
⏹️ ▶️ John What are we, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, how did I phrase this on do now? I need to go back and look.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think I phrased it as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John announced independence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, there was a blog post and the recording of episode 476. My reminder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and due for every March 29th at 7.50 to give me a little bit of time to get ahead of it is John announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey independence on 4.76 on 30 March 2022. And I re-listened to the after show of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode and it is so freaking delightful because as much as I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you for keeping this from Marco and me until it had already happened and you are already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past your two-week notice, it made for a truly delightful after show. And I was sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Wegmans this morning where I typically go to do my ATP prep and I was beaming from ear to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ear listening to Marco and I just lose our minds over the fact that you would not only quit your job but had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done it two weeks prior. We had no idea. If you recall, you actually posted the blog post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during recording. You presumably queued it up and so on and so forth, and then actually hit go during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recording because you said, oh, there’s a blog post of Adam Marko. And I were like, there is? And you said, yes, I just posted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So yeah, episode 476, there’ll be a link in the show notes. It’s the after show of that episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s chapter markers and so on. But congratulations, John. Three years is a great achievement. And I’m very proud of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you and very excited for
⏹️ ▶️ John just doing the math wrong on my head. I said, boy, I’ve been independent for two years now. now. No, three years,
⏹️ ▶️ John John. 2022. Thank you for saving me from saying that on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s interesting. Like a lot of these stories about people going independent, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John day, the moment or the day or the time or the date that I might celebrate is kind of, it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be different from like the day that like, you know, if you’re picking like the announcement day on the podcast or whatever, it’s like, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John my curly story with his shoelace breaking and him thinking, if I buy another pair of shoelaces, I’ll just, You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just continue the cycle of going back to my jobby job. I need to just not do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to wear dress shoes anymore. I’ll become a podcast or I bet the most important date for him is the
⏹️ ▶️ John day that shoelace broke. It’s like the day a decision was made and for me, maybe it would be like the day
⏹️ ▶️ John I decided I’m going to quit or the day that I like put in my two weeks notice something like that would be, you know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the one that’s significant to me. So just why I can never remember like the day after
⏹️ ▶️ John keeping the secret for multiple weeks. on a podcast. It was a fun episode. Um, and if you want to know how I posted
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the most recent member special will
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Ran a Perl script
⏹️ ▶️ John runs R sync and it was a mess. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh. Well done, John. Yeah. So if you want to hear that members episode and support John’s independence,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey atp.fm slash join. Uh, but no, truly, if you haven’t heard episode 476, or even if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were around for it, you know, three years ago, almost to the day, uh, it is worth a quick re-list. And I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like 25, 30 minutes in the after show in, And this jerk made us go through an entire episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like nothing had changed and then drops this on us in the after show. It was delightful and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still slightly hate you for it. But I wanted to recognize it. And so happy third anniversary of independence,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, big congratulations. And also, thank you for quitting your job because it made you like do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of stuff for the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that we weren’t doing before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, we’ve we talked a little bit about this before listeners, but like when John, like, since John quit his job,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the podcast became John’s job. And he has been doing so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work behind the scenes on the CMS, on the membership system, on all these different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical things, member support issues, merchandise development, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much that John has done since then. Stuff that KC or I either kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of had on our back burners or never even would have thought to do. And either way, weren’t doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, so John has been like having an unemployed John fully deployed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on our project here has been really quite something. It’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and I, this has been excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always did the merch, first of all. And second of all, I also wrote three apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that doesn’t affect Marco and me. What we care about is H-E-B.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, we also want to thank you for writing those three apps because it gave us a bunch of content for the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, it’s funny hearing you discuss, you know, because I was giving you a lot of, you know, stick about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? What are you going to do? And you had started to say, well, you know, I might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write an app or something like that. And, you know, having come to this episode not too long after the release of Hyperspace, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was quite delightful to hear, you know, your expectations, which to be fair, were mostly met as far as I’m concerned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it was funny to listen back to it. So again, if you have, you know, 25 minutes to kill, I strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggest listening back to that after show. It is one of the most delightful segments I think ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has ever done. And so as is my job, I wanted to recognize it. So thank you for
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And just for listeners who are wondering, hey, how’s it been going? It’s been going fine. Like, I mean, I’m so like cautious
⏹️ ▶️ John in these type of things that I didn’t feel like I was in a position to quit my job
⏹️ ▶️ John until I was sure that even if things went disastrously wrong, I would still be mostly OK. And things haven’t gone
⏹️ ▶️ John disastrously wrong. They’ve gone about as well as I can expect. I had prepared
⏹️ ▶️ John for everything that was coming. And obviously my, you know, everything about my income and
⏹️ ▶️ John my life has been scaled back slightly, but like, you know, that was expected. So it’s been going
⏹️ ▶️ John the way I thought it was. And I just you know, do I recommend other people do this? When it feels
⏹️ ▶️ John right to you, you’ll know. Like for Mike, it was a shoelace breaking for me. I don’t remember what it was, but like I knew when it was
⏹️ ▶️ John time for my own reasons. And that’s how it is for everybody. I think everybody has their own time and their own
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons. And you’ll know when it’s time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew the moment I was handed the plans for this vessel.
Vision Pro corner (briefly!)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, all right, let’s do some follow-up. It is Vision Pro Corner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I definitely feel like this was news to me, but a ton
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people wrote in. In fact, if you ever wanna know who owns a Vision Pro, just say something inaccurate about it on AT&T
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’ll let you know. But friend of the show, D. Griffin Jones wrote in. This was with regard to Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I both lamenting how difficult it is to change the volume on the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had said that what I like to do is if you look at the back of your hand, I forget what it is, and then you flip your hand over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you get control center or link to control center. And then you can like pinch laterally to control the volume.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The standard way of doing this is if you twist the digital crown and then there’s two little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey orbs that pop up. One is for immersion level and one is for volume. So you have to twist the digital crown, look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over to the volume immersion or the volume orb. And then as you continue to twist the digital crown, you’ll adjust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the volume. Deke Griffin-Jones wrote, as of Vision OS 2, there’s a setting to make the digital crown adjust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the volume by default rather than the environment. This is in settings, digital crown. And we also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had somebody write in, um, Victor Prieto wrote in with a link to, um, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support guide, if I’m not mistaken, or maybe it was a screen capture, I forget what, but anyways, between the two of them, uh, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appreciate your service and yeah, I will probably be doing that the next time I put my vision pro on. So there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time we talk about this topic, I’m reminded of a clip I saw from, I think an Irish standup comedian,
⏹️ ▶️ John a clip I saw on YouTube talking about how panicked people, his
⏹️ ▶️ John parents would get that if they left the house and left the immersion on the immersion, he left that can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John the accent left the immersion on. It’s so upsetting. And every time you can dial in the immersion, you can turn off the immersion. I keep thinking, do you do either?
⏹️ ▶️ John You have any idea what immersion means in the context of the standup comedian saying that you left it on before you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like an oven or something? I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you’re talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I mean, I don’t know. My understanding is that it is a thing inside a giant tank of water that gets hot.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s immersed in the tank of water. And so that’s how they make the hot water. They turn this thing on. It’s like electric heating element, like a sous vide,
⏹️ ▶️ John like no, for like the hot water for the house to take a shower and stuff like older, you know, way back in the day, people growing up
⏹️ ▶️ John in the 70s in Ireland. We won’t get into the giant rat water tanks in the attics of Irish houses. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t leave the immersion on you. Leave the immersion on your vision, bro. I was afraid the house would burn down or you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be wasting electricity or you’d be costing yourself money. It’s hard to exactly tell what the complaint is, because obviously this
⏹️ ▶️ John was, uh, Irish stand-up comedian talking to an audience that understood what he was talking about. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t leave the immersion on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Don’t leave it on.
Apple/EU follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to Apple and new EU regulations or timelines or what have you, Karan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey J. writes, working in global banking, our work prioritization basically goes, number one, production
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stability, number two, regulatory, number three, literally everything else. Karan continues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a good regulator consults with the regulated entities before setting the timeline. Apple could do it by publishing a standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the third parties would need to build to. It doesn’t mean that there would be any existing products which would work on day one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tom continues, the interoperability requirements set out by the DMA were clear from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the start. Despite Apple getting special treatment in the form of constant communication with lawmakers, something us ordinary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey citizens would never get, Apple has utterly refused to do anything to improve interoperability, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey headphones, smartwatches, etc. Apple had years to come up with timelines or measures, but they did nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now we’re supposed to go easy on them because it might be hard. Apple was given Apple opportunity to comply.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Instead, they chose to knowingly and flagrantly violate the law they knew was coming. Why on earth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should we care about how hard compliance is going to be for them now?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so the main reason you’d care about how hard compliance is going to be to them is if you care about
⏹️ ▶️ John them eventually complying. If you don’t care about them complying and instead you just want to essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John punish them for not following your earlier instructions. And that’s the choice you can make. But I would imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John most parties involved for the reasons we discussed last episode want the end result to be Apple to comply.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why if you care about that, you should care how hard it is for the people to comply,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you give them something that makes them think it’s impossible, it’s going to decrease the likelihood that
⏹️ ▶️ John they will comply. Some people don’t care about that. Some people think Apple had its chance. They were
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to. They were told what they were supposed to do. They didn’t do it. Now we’re just into the punitive phase and
⏹️ ▶️ John we no longer care whether they ever comply with anything. We just want them to be punished because they disobeyed.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think most parties involved, including all of the European companies that want to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John make products interoperate with Apple’s platform so they can make money, want this to happen. The other
⏹️ ▶️ John angle is that like, oh, they just want Apple to leave entirely so that European smartphone companies
⏹️ ▶️ John can spring back to life, you know, Nokia reborn or whatever. And while that might be great
⏹️ ▶️ John and eventually happen, I think the companies that have lobbied for these regulations are companies
⏹️ ▶️ John that exist now and would actually want to sell things to iPhone customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they want Apple to allow that interoperability. I don’t think this entire regulation was a backdoor to
⏹️ ▶️ John just chase Apple out of the EU so that currently nonexistent
⏹️ ▶️ John or tiny European smartphone companies can spring up to take its place because making a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John is hard, even if you’re just going to make an Android phone like everybody else. There’s a lot of competition already, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s a slam dunk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Illustro writes, it’s pretty clear there’s been non-public communication between the EC and Apple prior to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release of this decision. See paragraph 19 of the decision text where it states, bullet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Future functionalities of the P2P Wi-Fi connection include, A, confidential, B, confidential.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’ll put a link to the, to the text in the show notes. Illustro continues. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has told the EU about future plan functionality of at least one of its features. To me, this shows that this decision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was made with detailed knowledge of Apple’s future plans. From working in the insurance industry in the EU, these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey types of behind-the-scenes discussions with EU regulators come with questions of how long it is expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the planned features will take to develop. And those timelines are taken into account when making such decisions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the regulator consulting with technical experts on the feasibility of such changes. The characterization
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this is a decision made by people who don’t know any better is likely wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I wasn’t aware of these confidential redacted things. And this actually gives me some hope that I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have before, that there were actually substantive discussions about timelines
⏹️ ▶️ John between the regulators and Apple. Previously we had heard like, oh, of course, Apple. We’d always say, Apple is of course, talking behind the scenes
⏹️ ▶️ John with the EU. And like, we just assumed that was happening, but we weren’t privy to those conversations. So we never
⏹️ ▶️ John knew whether they were or not. And sometimes from the outside, it was like, but are they talking? Cause it seems like what they
⏹️ ▶️ John say in the public makes it seem like they’re not actually cooperating. But once you see something like this, where it’s confidential Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John features that were clearly communicated to the EU that Apple said, like, don’t put this in your docs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now we know for sure that they’re talking. And that does give me much more faith than I had in the last episode
⏹️ ▶️ John that perhaps the timelines that have been outlined are things that Apple has not
⏹️ ▶️ John agreed to, but like there have been discussions about them and that helps the plausibility
⏹️ ▶️ John of those timelines. It gives me more confidence that those timelines are not entirely arbitrary because if they had just like
⏹️ ▶️ John been yelling at each other in public and not having any kind of conversations behind the scenes, except for negotiations
⏹️ ▶️ John about like, Well, we think we’re complying. Well, we think we’re not. The giant timeline
⏹️ ▶️ John that laid out was just, you know, something you could never do without knowledge of Apple’s plans. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so maybe it’s not as bad as I thought it was. Maybe those timelines are reasonable. Of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they’re talking behind the scenes and even if they have some kind of agreement like, yeah, this is reasonable, as we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John through every past thing that Apple has ever done to try to comply with the DMA, what Apple thinks
⏹️ ▶️ John is compliant is very often not what actually is compliance. So it’s like, oh, we can meet those deadlines. We can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. And then the deadlines come and Apple rolls something out and say, here it is. We did it. And he’s like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t do it. It’s like, all people have to do is let us audit their tax records for the rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of their lives and give us their first born and fill out this form and then wait an undetermined
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of time for it to see if we respond to their request to become a third-party allowed earbud manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ John and like they did with all the other things, you know, often called malicious compliance,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also called Apple will never give up control if they could at all possibly help it. So we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John how that turns out. But it’s sort of certain knowledge or confirmation that they
⏹️ ▶️ John have been talking with Apple behind the scenes on substantive issues, like
⏹️ ▶️ John specifics of the features that they’re being required to open up, as evidenced by redacted
⏹️ ▶️ John things inside the document, definitely increases the chances that what they’re being asked to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, David Sheyer writes, in your discussion of how Apple might comply with EU rules to open up their platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you didn’t mention the possibility of Apple simply removing the controversial features in the EU. Apple did this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Britain, discontinuing advanced data protection rather than implement the changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Britain wanted. If Apple simply disabled AirDrop in Europe, would this comply? All parties now have the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level of access to AirDrop. None. Obviously, this works better for minor features like AirDrop than for major products like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch integration.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so some of the things, well, first of all, the Britain thing, what they did had really no bearing on what the UK
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted. The UK wanted something that Apple will never give. So they did something different instead. But the UK still
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like it’s like this is not what we asked for. This is another thing that you did. So fine, whatever. But this is not what
⏹️ ▶️ John we asked for. We wanted you to backdoor every phone for everybody. And we still don’t know how that’s turning out, by the way. We still have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s going on there anyway. Setting that aside, if it’s just like disabling a feature here
⏹️ ▶️ John and there, fine. But the list of things that the EU wants to Apple to open up
⏹️ ▶️ John is so long that if you removed all of them, you’re really hampering the functionality of the phone. Like essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John you wouldn’t be able to use AirPods with an iPhone, like to quote unquote, drop the feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John or like AirPods would only work in Bluetooth mode or something, and like the peer-to-peer wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff or the payment things, like you wouldn’t be able to use Apple Pay because they didn’t open up the payment thing. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the list is too long for it to be feasible to app for Apple to comply by removing the functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’d be, you know, damaging the functionality of their own products so much that it would become
⏹️ ▶️ John uncompetitive, I feel like.
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Giannandrea follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Wolf writes with regard to John G and Andrea, I don’t know what’s stopping JG from making progress
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Siri, but clearly something is your suggestion that it’s something about the structure of Apple makes sense to me. I will say this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I worked with JG long ago at both general magic and later at Netscape. I knew him pretty well. And in every interaction,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he proved himself to be intelligent, knowledgeable, competent, inventive and effective. Less relevant to this conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He’s also kind and empathetic. I would work with them again in a heartbeat, but I want Siri to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said Wolf for the record. Yeah, I mean and the problem is like we don’t know like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t even know if John G and Andrea was like you know the problem in quotes like we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even know that when you when you put people in companies in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the structure and the incentives and all the messiness that comes around like you know people working together
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the structure itself can often be to blame. It cannot it They can often just be like this dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between this person, this system, these people around them at this time in this company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t work very well for some reason. And you can take that exact same person and put them in a different company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a different structure or at a different time and they can do great. So it isn’t necessarily like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t even know if JG was the problem, but if he was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on him and you could put him somewhere else which Apple literally said they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were doing. You could put him in a different context and he could do great. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe this context just didn’t work very well for him, or maybe nobody could have succeeded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this context. Maybe if you took Gianandre’s position and put anybody else in it at that time with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those people, maybe nobody could have done any better than he did. We don’t really know.
Netflix on Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, in follow-up, Ryan Budish writes on, uh, with regard to Apple TV stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, on a recent episode, which at this point was like two months ago, you read some feedback from a listener who said they wanted Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integration with the Apple TV app so they could use the cross-service search functionality. I almost wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in with the same feedback, but then I checked the app. I searched for Queer Eye, Squid Game, and The Crown, all Netflix exclusives,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they appeared in the search results with links to open in Netflix. They don’t necessarily seem complete. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re missing the current season of Queer Eye, but they are there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think the search is actually separate from the TV integration. Like there’s various ways that you can integrate with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s Apple TV, TV, TV platform and
⏹️ ▶️ John search just one of them. But why would it be incomplete? Like this is part of the difficulty
⏹️ ▶️ John of the TV OS interface. There are inconsistencies like this, like the the the
⏹️ ▶️ John mental model that you require customers to have is too complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you either get everybody on board and unify everything and everything’s always the same in uniform
⏹️ ▶️ John or it’s not. And customers really have no idea what to expect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like Ryan was going to write it and say, yeah, I really wish they could be integrated. So they would work in search because he just assumed they weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John integrated to search. And maybe in some point in the past, they weren’t. But now they are. But he had never realized that, because once you internalize
⏹️ ▶️ John the Netflix isn’t part of the whole thing, you think they’re not part of the whole the whole thing. And actually, they’re part of search,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not part of the TV app. And it’s just it’s too confusing that like it’s not a simplification.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not you’re not actually providing value with an overarching interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it doesn’t actually include everything. Of course, that’s all part of Netflix’s strategy, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, deny Apple the ability to unify everything by being by refusing to participate,
⏹️ ▶️ John because we’re such an important player that if we refuse to participate, your system will can never be
⏹️ ▶️ John viewed by any customer as all encompassing. Because if it doesn’t have Netflix, I mean, come on, we’re a pretty big streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John service. And so far that strategy has mostly worked to make the tvOS interface
⏹️ ▶️ John seem not as good as it could be if it really was unified. We’ll see if that ever changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John This was back when this original item was from the episode where it changed accidentally somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John and then quickly changed back and we briefly saw how it might’ve been, but who knows, we’ll see in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John if we ever get a glimpse of that functionality again.
RGB-backlit TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, as a reward for three years of independence, Marco and I are going to go take a nap while you tell us about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some TV stuff. You
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t take a nap for these things. Someday you’re going to—well, no, someday both of you are going to have to buy new TVs, although Marco being Marco will just
⏹️ ▶️ John buy it without consulting me. But I would hope Casey would buy it by asking me what he should do,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe if you listen to the TV segments, you’d know more about this. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually—John, you’d be surprised. I mean, I’m in a very enviable position
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now where I have been spousally greenlit for a new home TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchase. I just haven’t gotten around to doing it yet because we’ve been busy with the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have and because you know when we want to like wall mount it and stuff when we get it so it’d be a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a project. So I was like I just right now I can’t deal with that. But I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be asking you what TV I should buy and I assume it’s the Sony a 95 whatever but
⏹️ ▶️ John I will say that the new TVs are out for 2025. Oh are kind of up in the air at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you really need to give me more requirements to nail it down. Because remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John the N95L is now a two year old TV. Sony didn’t even launch one last year because
⏹️ ▶️ John the N5L was still the best TV that you could get last year. And this year, we don’t know. They haven’t launched their TVs at all. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the LG G5 this year is pretty impressive because it uses the tandem OLED from the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ John this item is about, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we’ll talk. Well, maybe we
⏹️ ▶️ John can do it as an after show or an overtime or something. When you like if you can save it for the show, we can
⏹️ ▶️ John have a back and forth. But but come with your list of requirements. All right. And we’ll talk about that. But this item
⏹️ ▶️ John here was originally a follow up item back when we talked about CES, but it just aged out of that role.
⏹️ ▶️ John And particularly when we were talking about in like the episode after we talked about CES, the Hisense 116 UX,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was this very large, very expensive television. It was a mini
⏹️ ▶️ John LED TV, but the LED backlights were RGB backlights. So instead of just having
⏹️ ▶️ John a white backlight, it had red, green, blue, independent backlights. And if you turn
⏹️ ▶️ John them on, yeah, it’s white. But if you don’t turn them on, you can make the backlight match the color
⏹️ ▶️ John that you want the pixels to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be clear, this still is not like a backlight per pixel. This is like zone coverage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like we have in all Apple modern monitors, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly right. It’s a mini LED TV. A mini LED is like, oh, the LEDs in the backlight are small.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re small, like maybe an inch or two square, but they’re not pixels.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, the big pitch here was that you got much better color volume.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s one of the weaknesses of LED, LCD TVs. It’s one of the weaknesses of every OLED TV
⏹️ ▶️ John that has WRGB pixels, because it’s got a white sub-pixel. Color volume is like, okay, so you
⏹️ ▶️ John can be real bright when everything’s all white, and whatever region, you know, your brightness is. But what if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all just red? Now how bright are you? It’s like, well, yeah, because then now we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John blocking light from all the sub-pixels. We have to turn off the white sub-pixel, block all the light from the white sub-pixel,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, or turn off the OLED white sub-pixel or block all the light from the other color because we just let the red through.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so how red is the red? Well, if you have a red backlight behind a red pixel,
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes it more red than if you have a white backlight behind a red color filter or whatever. So that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea behind this. And the Hisense TV at CES was like supposedly $30,000 or something. And at the time
⏹️ ▶️ John I had mentioned that Sony had an RGB backlight technology years ago, back when I was looking to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy my first flat screen TV. I ended up getting a plasma, but I was also considering, I couldn’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John the brand name at the time, and now I’ve already forgotten what it is again, but some, maybe start with a Q, some
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony LCD television back in the plasma days, and its innovation
⏹️ ▶️ John was that it had RGB backlights, that instead of just a white backlight, it had red, green, and blue backlights, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John very chunky backlights. And those were very expensive TVs. They
⏹️ ▶️ John were more expensive than plasma, and it turns out they weren’t as good as plasma, so I ended up getting a plasma. But anyway, so this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a new thing, but apparently it has been historically
⏹️ ▶️ John proven difficult to do. And Hisense had this TV at CS and it was $30,000. But now Sony has made an announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John that they have their own RGB backlight technology. I forget what the brand name
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is called, but anyway, they’re claiming that it can go to 4,000 nits. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re claiming that it, like the color volume is close to QD OLED. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the Verge has a story about it here, which we’ll link to. And
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people are really excited about this because, like, why would they care? Why do you want this other thing? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, making a mini LED TV is pretty inexpensive at
⏹️ ▶️ John this point. Like, the LCD panels are a well-proven technology. And
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the innovation is happening in the backlight in the controller software. And in particular, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want a really, really big TV, You just keep making the LCD bigger and bigger. It’s really easy to make the
⏹️ ▶️ John backlight bigger. In fact, it’s easier because you don’t have to jam things together as closely, like you can make things bigger. And then the pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John also get bigger because you’re just making a 4K TV and you can print those LCD panels pretty cheaply. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want like 115 inch TV, your only choice other than like micro
⏹️ ▶️ John LED, which will cost a hundred thousand dollars, is a mini LED TV. You can’t get an OLED that big
⏹️ ▶️ John because OLEDs are expensive and difficult to manufacture and they just don’t make them in that size.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the problem, of course, with many LEDs is the color volume is not as good as the QD OLEDs,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also it’s not per-pixel light control. You have a big, chunky light behind thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John and thousands of pixels, and if any one of those thousands of pixels is supposed to be lit up, you gotta turn on the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John backlight behind it. It’s a, it’s, you know, there’s millions of pixels and maybe thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of backlights. But the color volume is an issue. Like that’s where the
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony’s a 95 L and the Samsung QD OLEDs are doing really well because they can
⏹️ ▶️ John produce the purest colors because QD OLEDs only have RGB sub pixels and they are self-emissive
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s all the light that’s coming directly from the pixels and you turn on and off individual pixels and they
⏹️ ▶️ John always win the color volume test. Like whatever that rec 2020 color volume thing that other TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John get to like 60% of and like the QD OLEDs get to like 80% and the
⏹️ ▶️ John QDL LEDs can do like 100% P3 and LCDs, TVs struggle with that. Anyway, people
⏹️ ▶️ John are very excited about this because you get a huge TV with great color volume. And they’re like, eh, don’t worry about the blooming and
⏹️ ▶️ John the backlighting, but the Verge’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey view on this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not quite as rosy. I’ll put a link in the show notes to two YouTube videos, one for digital trends
⏹️ ▶️ John and one for HDTV tests. But, and a lot of people were asking about this TV. Here’s what it comes down to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Per pixel lighting or bust. That’s it. Like any TV technology that doesn’t let
⏹️ ▶️ John you control the light coming from individual pixels exactly is never going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John like the future of TV tech. I know people like it because you can make a big TV and the color volume is better and it’s really bright
⏹️ ▶️ John and yada, yada. But it’s like, okay, let’s put up a star field where everything is black except for pinpricks of
⏹️ ▶️ John white light. Oh, now it’s not so good, is it? They’re like, oh, but blooming, you can’t even tell. The
⏹️ ▶️ John blooming is so well controlled. You’ll never even notice. But like, look, if you watch these TV reviewers,
⏹️ ▶️ John There are situations with real content where you can see, oh, yeah, no, put
⏹️ ▶️ John an OLED next to it. And even if the other TV is bigger and it’s brighter and it’s like, quote unquote,
⏹️ ▶️ John better and people would prefer it, from my perspective, I care about
⏹️ ▶️ John per pixel lighting control. Like I don’t have it on my computer monitor and maybe someday I will, but on a television
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re watching TV content, that feel like should be the standard. And so unless
⏹️ ▶️ John you absolutely positively must have television that is bigger than at this point, 83 inches, still
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED’s the way to go. The scary thing about Sony and Sony talking about this and bragging about it is like people are thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, when Sony rolls out its 2025 TVs, are they not gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ John an OLED as their flagship TV? Are they gonna claim that this RGB backlight thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that they have is their new flagship TV because it’s brighter and has better color volume?
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope not, Because they’re gonna lose in all the TV shootout tests. Because they’ll be brighter, and they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have better color volume, but they won’t be able to handle challenging lighting
⏹️ ▶️ John situations, as well as a screen with per pixel lighting control. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John quoting from The Verge, from people who actually saw this television. And Sony put it next
⏹️ ▶️ John to, I think it’s a 895L. And this person said, I would say the difference in color
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduction and viewing angles were a wash at best. I generally prefer the picture from the OLED in the most challenging comparisons
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think a lot of OLED TV owners would probably agree. That’s not a ringing endorsement. It’s brave of Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, here it is versus our A95L. It was awarded the King of TVs when
⏹️ ▶️ John it came out. And a year later, we didn’t even produce a new TV because this one’s great. And we’re showing it right next to
⏹️ ▶️ John our new TV and having people from The Verge go there and look at it and go, yeah, it’s still take the A95L,
⏹️ ▶️ John not a ringing endorsement. But we don’t actually know what Sony is gonna do. I haven’t been following the rumors that closely. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just waiting for them to, waiting for people to shoot a drop for them to reveal what they’re going to consider their flagship
⏹️ ▶️ John TV. Samsung did this a little while back to where Samsung was insisting that their flagship
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs were their LCD TVs, despite the fact that they had just produced a QD OLED TV. It’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the company can say what their flagship is, but the market decides in the end, which is the best TV. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s coming down the pipe. I think it is a boon for people who don’t care about per pixel lighting
⏹️ ▶️ John control like I do, because you’ll be able to get brighter, better TVs in larger sizes for less money. So thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ John up. I’m not down on this technology. By all means, continue to advance many LED LED
⏹️ ▶️ John tech to get better and better. But as far as I’m concerned right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John the top end is still per pixel lighting control and OLEDs. And this is relevant for Max, by the way, because 2026
⏹️ ▶️ John is the rumors that you had OLED Max and OLED screens in the MacBook Pros and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right now, the Max are mini LED and the screens are amazing. Will they get better with OLED? We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, man, I can’t wait for that. I love OLED so, so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually have, I’ve had OLED for a while on my gaming laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My Razer occasionally uses OLED in its 15-inch-ish class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops. I know why people wouldn’t necessarily want it for certain reasons, but for my preferences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s amazing. And so I very much look forward to having that in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a MacBook Pro and maybe even a desktop Pro display at some
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco point. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s ready to revise desktop monitors. We’ve got another five years to wait on that one, but yeah, that would be amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the real innovation here on the OLEDs, and I would hope Apple does with the OLED stuff, is what they did with
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad, tandem OLED, which we talked about when the iPad Pro was introduced. It’s just basically
⏹️ ▶️ John sandwiching another light emitting layer in the OLED stack, so you drive all the light emitting layers at less power, so
⏹️ ▶️ John you have less burn-in issues. That makes so many things possible. That’s why the LG G5 this year is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John so well, because LG G5 gave up the micro lens array, didn’t go to QD OLED, they went to their
⏹️ ▶️ John tandem OLED tech. It’s real bright, it’s got better color volume, it’s got pro pixel lighting control.
⏹️ ▶️ John Still not as good as QD OLED in some things like viewing angle and still
⏹️ ▶️ John not quite there in color volume I think, but until we see all the comparison tests. Like this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the annoying thing that Sony does. Every year, like Samsung and LG come out with their TVs at CES and everyone just
⏹️ ▶️ John has to wait around to see what Sony’s gonna do, because there’s no sense in doing a comparison of saying what’s the best TV of 2025 until all the 2025 TVs have been
⏹️ ▶️ John out. And so you’re just waiting around for Sony to release theirs. And then finally you can do the review.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, because the contenders are always LG, Samsung and Sony let’s see who has the best
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Right now I feel like LG has the best one but Sony hasn’t shipped yet. So stay tuned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you were to buy a TV today would you buy an LG given what you just said?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’d probably still get the N5L just because of the viewing angle things. And my viewing situation has lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ John off access including me sometimes. So that would be my choice there. And also, I don’t have,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a pretty dimly lit room. I don’t have a lot of bright lights on it, but the G5 may actually be the better
⏹️ ▶️ John choice for a lot of people than the 895L at this point, depending on their size
⏹️ ▶️ John preferences and viewing situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we in another situation where it’s gonna take somebody gifting you a hundred grand to get anything but a Sony TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a Honda Accord?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not brand, I’ve had two Panasonic TVs before this. I am not sticking to any particular brand.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just buy the best TV. I bought the best TV available the year I bought my TV. It just so happens that in the following
⏹️ ▶️ John years, the best TV available was also a Sony, but might be an LG this year, depending on what Sony does.
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Foldable rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. There’s been some reports over the last few months, predominantly from Mark Gurman, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about various different new kinds of Apple hardware, new shapes of Apple hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from a report that he wrote on December 15th, Apple designers are developing something akin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a giant iPad that unfolds to the size of two iPad pros side by side. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been honing the product for a couple of years now and is aiming to bring something to market around 2028.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s goal for a foldable device is to avoid the crease that current products have when they’re in the open position, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company has made progress on this front. Prototypes of this new product within Apple’s industrial design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey group have a nearly invisible crease, but it’s too early to tell if Apple can get rid of it altogether.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Samsung, which launched its first foldable phone five years ago, has tried unsuccessfully to remove
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the crease. Apple wouldn’t be the first to try such a concept. Microsoft prototyped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something similar with the Courier more than a decade ago and then announced a dual screen tablet called the Neo in 2019. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company abandoned both attempts and the conclusion of the Neo cancellation was that consumers weren’t clamoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a dual screen tablet. Lenovo has taken a crack at this concept as well. It’s Yoga Book
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 9i, which sells for less than two grand, has dual 13.3 inch OLED screens that work side-by-side.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s approach would be difficult, or excuse me, different because it wants the screen to look like a single uninterrupted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey piece of glass. The Lenovo product has two displays attached by a hinge. Apple’s version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also would likely be more expensive. It’s not yet clear what operating system the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer will run.
⏹️ ▶️ John Love it. Just pause here. I love these rumors. I know this is a while ago and I know it’s like a rumor about a thing that’s gonna come
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2028, but like the story of this was the origin of this item which has been in the notes for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John Giant thing, like two big iPads, it folds. But we We don’t know if it’s a Mac or
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad. It’s not yet clear what I, it’s a pretty important detail, don’t you think? Especially
⏹️ ▶️ John given the current state of iPadOS and the current non-touch operable
⏹️ ▶️ John state of macOS. Yeah, there’s a giant thing. It looks like two tablets folding.
⏹️ ▶️ John An OS unknown. Maybe it’ll run audio OS or TV OS. Maybe it’ll run vision
⏹️ ▶️ John OS. Who knows? This is the real
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of like, you’re going to see what you want to see type of rumor. I mean, I’m still looking at this and thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, this just sounds like something you’d be toying with internally and surely this will be canceled because they can’t even nail it down to an OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, if this is a Mac, a bunch of stuff has to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John between now and 2028 to make that plausible. And if it’s not a Mac, then like, why all the secrecy?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a weird giant folding iPad. Anyway, continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last week, this was again in December, a document alleging to show Apple’s display plans was posted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Twitter. It indicated the iPhone maker aims to use an 18.8 inch foldable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen. Let me reread that 18.8 inch foldable screen between 2028 and 2030.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That roadmap also suggests that the MacBook Pro will switch to OLED screens in 26
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the MacBook Air following in 27. This aligns with what Mark Gurman has heard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that’s from December and just I think just last this week, like the 2026 date for OLED screens
⏹️ ▶️ John has been repeated multiple times, including very recently. So like the m6, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John by then m6 based MacBook Pros from that OLED screen Apple’s taking its sweet time Rolling out these screens
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s kind of interesting That the iPad Pro has now kind of become the technological
⏹️ ▶️ John testbed for the most advanced basic technologies It gets the you know I think it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s gonna get the m5 chip first just like I got the m4 chip first It got the tandem OLED what’s gonna turn
⏹️ ▶️ John out to be years before they appear on Macs It’s a convenient way to roll out
⏹️ ▶️ John that tech, I guess, but it just seems weird to me that like, that’s the way the timelines
⏹️ ▶️ John have aligned because I don’t know how many iPad Pros they sell, but surely they sell more MacBook Pros, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe they’re just selling all MacBook Airs and they actually sell more iPad Pros than MacBook Pros. Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John break that down for us very well, so it’s hard to tell. But yeah, like it’s good. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re out here waiting a while for OLEDs. I guess we should just be glad we’ve had them on the phones for so long because they make such a difference and
⏹️ ▶️ John on the watch for so long, because it makes such a difference in those devices and I really love them there. But tandem OLEDs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks great on the iPad. I love it. It would look great on a laptop, 2026.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then MacRumors writes in mid to late February, another week, another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alleged leak regarding Apple’s fabled foldable iPhone. We’ve been hearing rumors about an iPhone that folds in half for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over eight years now. While they have lacked consistency, they do suggest that Apple has tested various
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prototypes with the hinge seemingly the biggest challenge Apple has been trying to overcome. Apple wants to eliminate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an increase in the screen before bringing a device to market. Our latest information about Apple’s foldable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes from Weibo-based leaker Digital Chat Station, and it concerns the screen measurements.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey According to the Chinese leaker, the device has a five, basically five and a half inch outer screen that resembles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new Oppo Find N5. Yes, that is literally what the device is called, the OPPO
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Find N5, but it’s shorter and wider. The inner screen is seven and three quarters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inches and unfolds like an iPad. Apparently both displays have an unprecedented aspect ratio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s foldable phone will launch next year or the year after that, says the leaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Next year or the year after that, okay, great. Says the leaker with the foldable iPad also expected to arrive within the same timeframe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, foldable phone things are in there. What is the common thing? Apple doesn’t like creases. Apple really,
⏹️ ▶️ John really doesn’t want there to be, of all the things to be hung up on. Like I know it’s bad, like have you ever seen someone who has these
⏹️ ▶️ John foldable phones? Like it’s, it’s hard to have it for a long time and be folding and unfolding it and not have
⏹️ ▶️ John that part of the screen look and, or feel not exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as the flat parts of the screen. So it is a challenge, but, uh, yeah, they’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re folding all the things over there. It’s just this entire lab of like, can we make a folding home pod,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, folding Apple TV? Just if it has a, I guess if it has a screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s try to make a folding version of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t, I mean, look, there is a huge benefit to if you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a small device that then unfolds into a big screen when you want it. Like, that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we see that in the Android flagships now that do it, and that is pretty compelling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it does come with significant trade-offs. I mean, I think number one trade-off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is these phones are very expensive when they do this. And you better believe if, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the Android brands are making their phones two grand ish to be good foldables,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Apple’s going to be probably even above that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John to be fair to the Android makers, I guess, evidence, because like they, they, they actually are in pretty fierce price competition with each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t be that cheap because they’re taking the most expensive part of the phone, which is the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and often tripling it because like the foldable phones have three phone size, essentially three
⏹️ ▶️ John times the pixels. They have a regular screen that looks like your phone, and then when you open it up, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John inside there, the two halves are one continuous screen. And so just there’s, there’s no way
⏹️ ▶️ John around it. It’s like, it’s like electric cars and batteries, given the current cost of screen technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t make a folding phone in that style. That is not just so much
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive than just a regular phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And the trade-offs, it isn’t just cost, there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant mechanical complexity. There are significant durability challenges. There’s significant water
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resistance and dust resistance challenges because you’re adding a lot more moving parts than a regular phone has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is significantly more difficult to make these and there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major trade-offs in buying and owning them. But the value if you get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right is high. But you know what what the rest of the computing world has done when it comes time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to train and try to get these things to market is they kind of throw their hands up and say, well, here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all these tradeoffs. We don’t care. Hey, any of you out there, if you don’t care either, you can buy this right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is kind of allergic to that kind of thing. Apple does not like to expose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain types of trade-offs in their released products to the world. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the context of putting out a foldable phone, they’re either going to have to be very patient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they’re going to have to really hold their nose when they release something, or both. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain aspects about this that I would be surprised if they could overcome. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not have overcome certain of these challenges and trade-offs, and they might just have to hold their nose eventually and say, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what, we’re going to release us anyway, even though we know this tradeoff kind of hurts us to release.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the Vision Pro. I mean, that’s kind of evidence that they are able to ship things that have tradeoffs
⏹️ ▶️ John that they kind of have to hold their nose about. But they’re like, you know what? We’re going to ship it. Like and I think the results
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of speak for themselves with the success of the Vision Pro, but like they know what the limitation is. Big, it was heavy. Battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life was not long. I’m sure Apple wish it could have been better. I don’t know if they
⏹️ ▶️ John wish it could have been cheaper because if it had been, you know, a quarter of the weight and twice the
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution, I think people will be snapping them up at 30 or 100 bucks. But this is the current state of technology. And like
⏹️ ▶️ John in the wider world of Android, where there are many, many competitors, other many companies are motivated to, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, ship what we have, you know, just get it out there, try it. And Apple is essentially waiting on the sidelines,
⏹️ ▶️ John letting other people iterate, letting the technology advance. Meanwhile, those companies are making
⏹️ ▶️ John money from these things because in a wide market where there’s not just one company, where there’s lots of different
⏹️ ▶️ John Android phone makers, There’s going to be a company that says, we’re going to try it. We’re going to try the folding phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s going to be awkward and weird. But because we’re the first folding phone or the biggest or the best, we’ll get some sales that
⏹️ ▶️ John are significant to us. And then we’ll just keep trying and keep trying. And Apple just keeps looking at it and saying, it’s not time for us to
⏹️ ▶️ John ship. Somehow they looked at the headset market and they said, it’s not time for us to ship. Not time, not time,
⏹️ ▶️ John not time. And eventually said, you know what? It’s time. And I think they shipped a product that has exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John those compromises you were talking about that, like that, Apple tends not to want to put out
⏹️ ▶️ John into the world, but they decided they had to do it anyway because I don’t know. They’re just, they felt like they wanted to be at the forefront
⏹️ ▶️ John of this, or maybe they were scared by meta talking about the metaverse or whatever, but, uh, yeah, they shipped the vision
⏹️ ▶️ John pro. So it makes me think that eventually, you know, in a, in a year or two,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to ship something foldable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and honestly, I do think they should, uh, even though it will have those trade-offs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, sometimes those trade-offs, you know, those nose holding trade-offs, sometimes they just can’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past them. Like, for instance, I know I use this metaphor a lot sometimes, but like when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go back to when the iPad was first being rumored, and we were all talking about like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s Apple going to do about text input? Because so far, text input on tablets kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks. How do you deal with the, you know, text input? And when Apple released the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t deal with text input. They just punted. They’re like, well, you all figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out. Here’s a mediocre solution. Look. And- I mean, I had an on-screen keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and you could buy a hardware keyboard for it. That’s what it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And so it was like, it was two kind of hacks. It was like, well, this isn’t ideal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but here are two ways you can do it anyway that both kind of work okay and have trade-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the iPad was a successful product. Like nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t buying it because text input kind of sucked on it. You know, we kind of just worked around that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a kind of an inherent limitation. yeah, okay, text input kind of sucks on the iPad, but we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still like it for reasons one, two, and three over here. So there are similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-offs here with folding phones. Like there are certain inherent downsides to folding phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we might think, I wonder how Apple has solved, maybe Apple’s come up with some magical solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that, probably not. Like typically, if a solution to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a substantial like physical reality problem is not apparent to us before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has released a product into a category, odds are they haven’t solved it either. Like if no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one else has figured out how to do a good job of some kind of physical challenge here odds are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple hasn’t either, they’ve just designed around it. So you look at, you know, what will an Apple foldable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely suffer from? High price, you know, mechanical complexity, fragility, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, this is what everyone else has suffered from. Apple’s will probably suffer from the same things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they will probably design with those in mind and say, okay, well, it’s not gonna have, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco water resistance or whatever, or it’s not gonna have, you know, certain, you know, it’s gonna be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thick when you fold it up and it’s gonna be pretty bulky and it’s gonna be pretty expensive, you know, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the people who are willing to tolerate those trade-offs, here is a big foldable, you know, unfolded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this big screen. And I gotta say people who have those foldable phones and who use them all the time, who aren’t just gadget reviewers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to love them because it is like having an iPad in your pocket that you can take out and unfold whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want. Like it is substantially higher value for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone-based productivity. If you wanna take out your phone and work on like a document or a spreadsheet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just watch a movie or something, yeah, when you can unfold that screen to a much bigger one, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more valuable to you. It’s really nice. And that’s why people are willing, not in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive numbers yet, but that’s why some people at the high end are willing to buy these super expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very fragile, huge trade-off folding phones because there is that big value on the other side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if Apple is going to have the iPhone be such an important part of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business as it is, I think they should do more crazy experiments once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the market has shown like, this type of thing is possible and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a lot of utility to certain people. You know, I think Apple, we know that they came late to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the game for big screen phones. It took them a while before they got to that party because they at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first thought nobody wanted that. Then it turns out Android covered it pretty well and Apple’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hmm, turns out everyone wants that and we’re not doing it. Let’s try putting out some bigger phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they sold like gangbusters. I don’t think the folding phone phenomenon is anywhere near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that big or universal. And I don’t think if Apple puts one out, it’s going to have anywhere near that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of effect. But they are the world’s flagship cell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone company. So if somebody else makes a really, really good kind of cell phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple doesn’t have something in that category, and it’s proving to be like a pretty good idea for certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, I encourage them to put out experiments and to try riskier things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPhone, the way it is now, is very good but kind of boring. They should put out cool stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, and if other people can do it, they can do it too, and they can probably, if they put their minds to it, do a better job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, despite all of the inherent trade-offs and weirdnesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about folding phones, the fact is people use them, people love them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they can be pretty good. So I want Apple to make one. And I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I hear these rumors that it seems like they’re taking that seriously and will actually put one out, even though I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know it will have massive trade-offs. That’s the name of the game. The iPad had massive trade-offs, but I’m glad Apple released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad. And you know, this is the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I feel like a folding phone is one of those things that sitting here now, I’m like, yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess that’s neat. I don’t know if it would be for me or not, but I guess that’s neat. And then especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, and I’m jumping ahead and I apologize to John, but, um, John had put in those show notes, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a video that MKBHD did.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re killing me here. It’s relevant. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John just do two more short things before we get to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, listeners. I’ve been told breaking news that I’m not allowed to jump ahead even to make a relevant point. So instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will plow forward as per as per demanded, or as as it was demanded. All right, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s foldable iPad Pro prototype features under display face ID. Again, iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro prototype features under display face ID. According to the Weibo based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaker digital chat station, one of Apple’s engineering prototypes features an 18.8 inch foldable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen with a quote metal superstructure lens quote, that integrates the receiver and transmitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey components of face ID for under display facial recognition.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is one of the like enabling technologies of like a folding thing. One of your problems you have is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh now we have like less room underneath the screen for stuff. And this combines with
⏹️ ▶️ John all the rumors about upcoming iPhones having things under the screen. The notch
⏹️ ▶️ John gave way to the dynamic island which could give way to a hole punch which Android
⏹️ ▶️ John phones have had forever. But then what do you do with face ID? Well, maybe we can get face ID under the screen. Maybe we can
⏹️ ▶️ John get the cameras under the screen finally achieve the goal of a complete screen iPhone with
⏹️ ▶️ John no notch, no hole, no nothing. Anyway, Face ID might just
⏹️ ▶️ John might not fit behind a folding phone or even a folding iPad. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea what a metal superstructure lens is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know this, how long have we been hearing about underscreen stuff and it exists on other platforms. This is another place where
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has been sitting it out and saying other people are doing underscreen stuff, but their underscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff isn’t as good. Remember the underscreen fingerprint readers on Android phones and Apple’s like, yeah, we’ll stick to touch ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re still sticking with touch ID. They don’t have underscreen fingerprint readers. They use the power button on things that don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a face ID and cameras and other things behind the screen. Same deal. They’re like, Oh, other people
⏹️ ▶️ John do them. Apple’s not ready to go there yet. Uh, but they’re still trying, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ll, they might be forced to, uh, for, um, a folding phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then six things to know about Apple’s upcoming foldable phone. I find this so funny because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody knows what’s going on, but apparently Mac rumors does.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a, it’s a good, this is like a recent, so we’ve read a lot of articles that have been months and months ago, but this is a summary
⏹️ ▶️ John of everything that like the consensus leaks about the foldable phone as of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So six items, number one, Apple wants to make it creaseless. You don’t say number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two, it’ll open like a book. Uh, and that actually is relevant because sometimes they open the other direction. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s kind of like a tent, if you will, but no, it’ll open like a book. Three, for size, imagine the iPad mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Four, nine to nine and a half millimeters thick when closed. Five, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might have Touch ID due to thickness limits.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will be expensive, between $2,000 and $2,500. Yikes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so the thickness thing about having Touch ID, so where do they put the Touch ID? There’s not enough room for a Touch
⏹️ ▶️ John ID power button at these thicknesses. Is it an underscreen Touch ID, or have they figured out some way with
⏹️ ▶️ John a metal superstructure lens to put Face ID under underneath the screen and the thing. Now finally, we come
⏹️ ▶️ John to the MKBHD video and you can make your point, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, thanks, dad. All right, so MKBHD put up a video about this Oppo Find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey N5, which seems to be a very, very well executed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android folding phone. And at a glance, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say it looks like an iPhone or anything like that, but you can tell that it was competently done. You know, it’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very thin. I think MKBHD said it’s roughly the same thickness as a 15 Pro Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John believe. Most importantly
⏹️ ▶️ John about the thickness, because when we talk about the thickness of the phone, the most relevant thing is when it
⏹️ ▶️ John is unfolded, how thick is it? And why is that relevant? Because if the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John has a port on it of any kind and the Oppo Find N5 does
⏹️ ▶️ John have a port, you are limited by, here it is, we talked about it years and years ago, the thickness
⏹️ ▶️ John of USB-C is the limiting factor in the thickness of the phone. go look at
⏹️ ▶️ John the Oppo Find N5 in this video, you will see when unfolded, the USB plug plugs into
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the parts and it is literally the thickness of a USB plug with the
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of metal above and below it. You can’t make it any thinner. That’s it. We’re at the limit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unless you either go portless or you have some kind of like magnetically attaching dongle or thing or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you wanna plug a USB-C port in, Oppo’s done it. They have made it, it’s the thinnest
⏹️ ▶️ John they could possibly, now they can make the other half thinner, I suppose, to remove the overall thickness, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s something, right? And if you’re wondering, like, Oppo, this is a shipping product, not a prototype,
⏹️ ▶️ John not a rumor, not a thing. It’s a thing that you can buy with money right now. And the beauty of it is when you
⏹️ ▶️ John do fold it up, if you’re watching the video, it looks, MKBHD makes this point, because he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been reviewing these Android folding phones forever. It looks almost
⏹️ ▶️ John like a regular phone. When it’s folded up, you’re like, it doesn’t look like,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the old ones basically look like, originally like two giant iPhones stuck together. Like they were
⏹️ ▶️ John huge when they were folded. Sometimes they didn’t even stick all the way together because the crease, remember the one that like didn’t actually close? Like the crease
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t close all the way as it was like a teardrop shaped when it was closed. They used to be giant,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the Android folks have been working and working and now the N5, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John almost like a regular phone. And that’s like, now we’re getting in the territory where you look at that and you’re like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John now Apple should feel comfortable Because if they can do that, then Apple can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that means Apple can ship a folding phone that basically looks like a regular iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John but happens to unfold.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s kind of the thesis of MKBHD’s video. And as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he so often is, it’s very astute. And the thesis is basically, look, when it’s no compromise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way I’m summarizing it doesn’t make it sound very interesting, but he does a good job of coming up with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something distilling the thought of once there’s no compromise, then that’s when consumers will buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. And, you know, right now it’s compromised city. And as I was starting to say before I was told I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not allowed to continue that, you know, I’m looking at this Oppo Find N5 and it again is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey competently done. I’m not sure that it’s something I want, but it’s clearly competently done in a way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I haven’t seen folding phones done previously. I can imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finding an Apple version of this to be quite attractive. Yeah, maybe not aesthetically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but in terms of like, I want one of these, um, I don’t feel like I have a folding phone shaped hole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my life, but I think if this were to come out, you know, assuming the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aren’t utterly crippled, which is tough because they might be because you know, the, the, each of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these halves has to be so darn thin. Um, but assuming the cameras aren’t utterly crippled, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably get this and at least have it for a year and see what I think. And maybe I’ll decide, nope, not for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but, uh, I would definitely give it a shot in a way that I do not plan to get the alleged, uh, 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air because the camera situation is so crippled and I’m not willing to give up the pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cameras, whether or not I actually need them. I feel like I need them and I feel like I use them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not willing to give those up. And so if, and when the 17 air or whatever it’s called arrives, I don’t plan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get one because I don’t want to give up the cameras. And if this does have decent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cameras, then yeah, I probably will give this, give this a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John try. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to have worse cameras than the air because it’ll be thinner. Like the halves will be thinner than the air. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, I’m guessing it has the same camera situation as the air.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s a bunch of enabling technologies you need to make this happen, right? One of them
⏹️ ▶️ John is you need enough to make this happen within the constraints that Apple usually applies to their products,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Although, again, Vision Pro is a counterexample here, but you would imagine, and the rumors are
⏹️ ▶️ John for the iPad, for the iPhone Air, that Apple doesn’t want to massively compromise on battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John for having a thin one. The rumors again, the rumors about the 17, the slimmer 17, iPhone 17, is that the battery life won’t be horrendously worse than
⏹️ ▶️ John the regular phones. Same thing with the Oppo Find
⏹️ ▶️ John N5. There have been advances in battery technology that allow for
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable battery life in a phone that has three screens. First of all, all three screens aren’t lit up all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time and most you have are, you know, two screens, but it’s like three Area wise anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not looking at both the back in the front at the same time So I would imagine one of the screens is always off and that helps in the second
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget this new chemical formulation for batteries that helps give them higher capacity With
⏹️ ▶️ John a lower thickness the that’s an enabling technology that needs to happen Another enabling technology
⏹️ ▶️ John for Casey to Casey’s point is if you don’t want to compromise on cameras you need some way to get decent
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras into a thin case. The rumors are that the iPhone 17 or iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ John Air or the slim 17 is going to compromise on camera because they don’t have the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to put as good or as many cameras in such a thin phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Foldable is going to have to be thinner than that if it’s not going to be a giant chonker, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, thinner than the the air. The N5 compromises on cameras. It’s so darn
⏹️ ▶️ John thin. Someone in chat room said that you had a port bump like, yeah, you could if you wanted to add a bump for the port, you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But like, as you make the thing thinner, it makes your other problems harder. How
⏹️ ▶️ John do you deal with the camera situation? Like, oh, we can make it thinner and thinner. All right, it’s great. It’s in. And now when I fold it
⏹️ ▶️ John up, it’s the thickness of a quote unquote regular phone. What do you do about the cameras? It’s a problem because you only have half
⏹️ ▶️ John that with or maybe you have like three quarters of that with if one if it’s not uniform thickness, when you open it up, it’s like one side
⏹️ ▶️ John is thicker than the other. But that’s a problem they have to deal with. And Apple also has to deal with face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID, which they were just talking about in that rumor about the iPad. What do you do about face ID? Are you gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John sell a phone with that face ID? Are you, where are you gonna put touch ID? You can’t put it on the edges of this thing. It’s so skinny.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you gonna have an under screen touch ID? A thing that Apple has never done or that they decided was never up to their quality
⏹️ ▶️ John standards. So there are still like, there’s enough enabling technologies for Oppo to put
⏹️ ▶️ John out this phone that I think is, meets the criteria of like, this is almost like a normal Android phone
⏹️ ▶️ John except horrendously expensive. Battery life is OK. The screens are amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The size and weight is OK. It does unfold into a giant thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Android World doesn’t have the same standards for face
⏹️ ▶️ John ubiquitous face ID and or touch ID of the quality and security of Apple’s. They’ve just never
⏹️ ▶️ John like that hasn’t been a universal requirement. They’ve been willing to ship phones without face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John phones with fingerprint sensors that are not secure as touch ID or whatever, because it’s a bigger market. They don’t there’s not one company dictating
⏹️ ▶️ John the standards. They make lots of things for lots of people. So it seems like a valid, you know, Android phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I don’t think right now, 2025 is the right time for Apple to ship a foldable
⏹️ ▶️ John phone because I don’t think enough technologies are available. And I feel kind of like the the the slimmer 17
⏹️ ▶️ John is like a trial balloon, not just a marketing test of like, let’s test our ability to make things thinner.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s test our thin battery technology. Let’s see. Test our thin camera technology. But also
⏹️ ▶️ John see do people hate this? Are they going to be like Casey and say, oh, I would buy it, but I won’t compromise on camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that will help them decide, should we go with the foldable phone or not? Like, are,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, are the tradeoffs desirable enough that, you know, the market, the Apple market
⏹️ ▶️ John wants it? And to that end, one of the most interesting things I thought was in this video is
⏹️ ▶️ John MKBHD musing on the supposed utility of folding phones
⏹️ ▶️ John based on his personal experience. Yeah, you open it up and there’s just this giant screen
⏹️ ▶️ John He had some angles. I’m like, okay. What does Android do with that giant screen and historically?
⏹️ ▶️ John Android apps Have not taken advantage of all the space available to them
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s one of the reason Android tablets have never really caught on because there’s not a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John you know development and applications to to like make good use of
⏹️ ▶️ John of the larger screen available, even if you go from a phone all the way up to a tablet. So with folding phones, first of all, you need
⏹️ ▶️ John all the apps to be at least aware enough that they have a much larger screen to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John and scale to that. And second, they can’t just take their phone interface and stretch it, that’s not useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like why you have the screen, you know, why are you paying this money for so
⏹️ ▶️ John much more screen space if all you’re gonna do is take your existing apps and make them really wide? If anything, it might make the lines of text harder to
⏹️ ▶️ John read or something. But the second thing is, as he opens it up, It’s like, oh, don’t worry about apps. I’m going to open it up and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be great as a consumption device. But if it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPhone or an Android, if it looks like a phone aspect ratio rectangle when it’s folded,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you unfold it, it doesn’t become an iPad mini aspect ratio. It becomes an iPad mini
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of area, like, you know, the square centimeters or whatever, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John aspect ratio is not the same. So if you watch, for example, a television or a movie,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a 16 by nine or like a letterbox movie on there, there’s a huge amount of wasted
⏹️ ▶️ John space. He shows it in the video. It’s like, here’s an actual iPad mini showing video and I’m holding it in landscape.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here’s my N5 showing a video and I’m holding it in a landscape. And the video is bigger on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John mini, despite the fact that they’re both similarly sized because the aspect ratio doesn’t match. And if you make the aspect ratio
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s unfolded, be suitable for like an iPad on its side, like watching videos on a plane
⏹️ ▶️ John or in bed at night, like I do, then when you fold it, it looks really weird. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not phone shaped anymore. It’s this weird shape. So that’s another kind of compromise where I’m not sure what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s gonna do there. Like what’s the correct size? I mean, I presume everyone wants to do what the N5 did,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, make it phone size when it’s folded. But then when you unfold it, it’s like, well, what do I do with
⏹️ ▶️ John all this space? Apple has an advantage there in that I think they’ll be able to revise their applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John take advantage of that. There’s more iPad apps available. They might be able to sort of port their iPad-ness to
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone. Like I think that Android has real problems in there for a lot of reasons that Apple doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John but watching video is an area that Apple can’t control. I don’t think an unfolded
⏹️ ▶️ John foldable iPhone will be as good a video, video viewing device as even an iPad mini, let
⏹️ ▶️ John alone a full size iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I think it’ll be fascinating as you’ve said many times to see what trade-offs, you know, what levers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple pulls and what levers they push if you will, and to see where this goes. I’m excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though. And as Marco said earlier, I think Apple trying new things is good. You know, I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m mostly a fan of the Vision Pro. You know, I think there’s problems and foibles and Marco, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure you’ll be happy to jump in and explain some of them if you’d like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think. I’m a fan of the Vision Pro. And I think that whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not you, the listener, are a fan of the Vision Pro, I think we should all celebrate that they’re trying something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is what Marco was saying earlier. And I’m really interested to see what they try here and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not trying anything is one potential answer or option, but I think they will try something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think it will be sooner rather than later. And I think it’s going to be really interesting and exciting. Same thing with the iPhone Air, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever it’s called. I’m excited for them to try something super thin. And let me tell you, I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey miss my, to a degree, miss my Motorola Razr from the early aughts or maybe it was mid-aughts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That thing was so small and so thin for the time that it seemed impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m sitting here telling you, oh, I don’t want an an iPhone Air because I don’t want to compromise the cameras. But man, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s as cool looking as I suspect it may be, it’s gonna be tough. It’s gonna be tough,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what do you think about, I know we sort of ran through it a little bit here, but what do you think about the
⏹️ ▶️ John gigantic 18 inch folding iPad thing? Because that I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is a product without much precedent in the market, mostly because Android tablets aren’t particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. And I know there’s that, we mentioned it in the other story, Like there’s laptops that are like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially Windows laptops that are one big giant screen that you fold, but even those I think are not
⏹️ ▶️ John of the sizes being rumored here. What is that? Is that just like random stuff Apple is doing internally?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that a real product? Is that a MacBook Pro with a screen keyboard which you used to make jokes about with the butterfly keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John days that they’re just gonna make it all screen and you open it up and there’ll be a software keyboard? Like what is that product? And
⏹️ ▶️ John do you find that kind of product enticing in any way in the same way that you might a foldable phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think the problem with that is like, does iPad OS allow enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco utility to take advantage of that larger size, first of all, and then to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be worth carrying it and paying for it and all these other, like, so, you know, every device you add to your life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has costs. You have to, first of all, you know, monetary costs are huge. Like, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy these things, and iPads are already, like, the high-end of iPads are already very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s double the screen size. Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add all this crazy folding stuff that’s gonna be very cutting edge and that’s definitely going to impact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco costs in very large ways. So a huge folding iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna cost a lot. That’s going to have to have a lot of utility to people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it worth the money cost alone, let alone the cost of carrying it around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Where does this go in your life physically? Does it replace a laptop? Maybe, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. You know, there’s a lot of, is it a desktop device? In which case, why does it need to fold?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, there’s all sorts of questions here. I mean, but again, like, I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s trying these things, but I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly going to be an area where Apple’s hardware prowess for the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco family is, as always, kind of waiting for the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side of iPad land to provide more utility to more people.
⏹️ ▶️ John unless it’s a Mac. Again, it’s not yet clear what operating system this is running
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if it runs Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s basically like the M7 MacBook Pro fold.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the thing that I’m thinking about is like, okay, I can see that product. You don’t have all the problems. You have to make Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John be touch-based, but who knows, maybe they’re doing that in the big redesign, we’ll see. Anyway, assuming you’ve sorted that
⏹️ ▶️ John out, what is the utility? Oh, and I know there’s, again, there’s Windows laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John that do this already. Like what is the utility of having the keyboard part of your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially be replaced by a screen? Well, one of the utilities is if you pick it up and unfold it and
⏹️ ▶️ John it has like a kit stand, you can have a much bigger screen and then you just bring it like a portable keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John like an iPad type keyboard with you. So it’s like it folds up in your backpack, but when you’re setting up at a table,
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of having to look at a 13 inch screen or a 15 inch screen, you can look at basically a 19 inch screen or a 20 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. But when you fold it up, it’s the size of a 13 inch laptop. When you don’t have it
⏹️ ▶️ John folded that way, do you wanna use a software keyboard on the screen part that’s laying on your
⏹️ ▶️ John desk? Nope. Like when it’s just open as a regular laptop? I don’t, I don’t wanna use a screen keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. So I don’t know if that compromise is gonna really
⏹️ ▶️ John be worth it for anybody. Like if you really, really need a portable computer
⏹️ ▶️ John with a 20 inch screen, I mean, they sell 20 inch laptops, I guess, but they’re huge. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just so difficult for me to see like, what problem is this solving? someone out there right now and they’re saying, well, I really hate working on my laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I had a screen that was, you know, five inches bigger diagonally.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in exchange for that, I’ll give up my
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard. Most of the time. I don’t know that it’s such a fascinating rumor because it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make sense to me as an iPad product. Uh, and it also doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John to me as a Mac product. Uh, but maybe I haven’t seen the vision yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s something like it would be very specialized. This was not be mass market. because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, honestly, I think the high-end iPad Pro is already somewhat specialized,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco merely for price reasons alone. And once you start going, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure this would definitely be above two grand and possibly even above that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you start looking at like, okay, well, who is such an iPad power user that they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be willing to spend that and carry that around and have all the trade-offs that comes with that? I mean, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people do exist. They sell the Mac Pro. Like, you know, it’s probably a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller market than the people who buy the Mac Pro. But- The problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with the iPad Pro, folks, is don’t a lot of those high-end ones like use it as like a graphics tablet with the pencil?
⏹️ ▶️ John And now the crease concerns come into sharp focus because try drawing on a screen that has like a subtle
⏹️ ▶️ John crease down the whole center of it. Oh, that’d be real annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s why like I, this is, this I think is even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more of a moon shoot than a foldable phone. a moon shoot moon shot
⏹️ ▶️ John not to make that title no promises.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, this is so much more of a risk than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foldable iPhone because the foldable iPhone we already see foldable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foldable phones out there that are that have high utility that are worth their price to a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we’ve ever seen a device like this kind of you know, dual screen laptop thing or, you know, I don’t think we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever seen anything like that, that had any success whatsoever in any market.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t think I have a place in my life at all for a giant iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know that there are people that very much want this and you know, I’m happy for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. It’s just, I don’t think I want that in my life. Now, if this was a foldable Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has at least piqued my interest. But as you said, John, I do not want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey type on a screen regularly. like a little bit, tiny bit here and there on an iPad or Mac-sized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device, sure. But regularly, mm-mm, not for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like revenge of the touch bar, you know? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco didn’t like me and
⏹️ ▶️ John you banished me from your laptop, so guess what? I’m back and now I’m taking up that whole section of the laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all just a giant touch bar. How you like me now?
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#askatp: Indie support expectations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, you want to do some ask ATP?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. All right, let’s start off this week with Anonymous, who writes, it seems like everyone likes to rail on Apple feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for lack of transparency, but it isn’t just Apple. Anyone who’s ever sent feedback or a suggestion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knows the pain of the feedback black hole. My suggestions and bug reports for Overcast Call Sheet and even Witch Smith have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gone to dev null. Should users have any expectation of support? What is one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing you would want your customers to know about support? And then additionally, Tony writes, how do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all as individual developers deal with feedback or bug reports for your applications? For each of you, what is your preferred method of receiving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback? How do you triage the issues reported or enhancement requests? What systems and or applications do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you use to do so? Do you target a specific cadence for bug fix releases? How do you prioritize bug fixes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with feature enhancements? This is a lot of questions I wanna ask ATP Tony. I’d be interested to know how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each of you deal with such things since your apps vary in size, complexity and platform. For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that’s a fair comparison compare the operations of single individuals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to one of, if not the richest company on the planet. Like that, that’s, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very false equivalence. And I do understand what anonymous is saying, but for what it’s worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say of whenever I am sent a question about call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sheet, I typically try to answer it. And if I’m sent like a bug report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or, or, or suggestion, I note it. And to answer Tony’s question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s something I think is actionable, I’ll put that, I’ll make a new GitHub issue for it and I will track it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I just, if all I did was work on support, I would never advance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app, but that’s because it’s just me. Again, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. There’s not time in the day for me to treat support the way I wish I could treat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I wish I had the time to be able to treat it with the respect that I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, but I just don’t. And I got to assume that, Marco, you feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even strongly the same way, even more strongly the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of differences here. I mean, number one, yes, it is a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question of scale. And, you know, to be brutally honest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s also a question of lifetime customer value versus the time it’s going to take and, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it worth? How much of our time is worth, you know, trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like handhold one person through a problem? You know, when you look at like traditional, what we consider support,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typically that can range from, I have a quick question and I can type out a four-word reply,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or more frequently, I have a long thing that’s going to take you a while to read and understand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you might have to do some work to answer it, and then that’s going to take you a half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hour or something. And then when you look at the maximum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lifetime value that you’re likely to earn from that customer, the more of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco emails you spend that kind of time on, the more you are losing, losing, losing money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, develop a sense of customer support based on products and services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their life that they’re paying a lot more for, frankly. If you have a problem with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your cable service, well, you’re giving them $80 a month. The lifetime value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you as a customer is pretty high to them, so they can afford to have somebody answering your questions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you. When you’re looking at an app that you got for free, or maybe you’re paying a few bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year for, that’s a lot harder for that developer to be able to afford
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to walk you through things or to answer questions individually one by one. So there is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant difference in scale and in just plain old dollars and cents.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as Casey said, as one person, there’s a total amount of time that we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spend on work every day. And when you are answering individual emails,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not a great way to leverage the limited time that you have. You’re better off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of taking all the emails as an input and saying, hmm, a lot of people are finding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this button confusing or whatever. Let me fix that design. And then you make the product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better for everyone. And that’s kind of an indirect way to fix it. Is that ideal?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, obviously, it’d be great if we had time and resources to answer everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it deserves to be answered. But when you’re dealing with individual one-person types of businesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they stand to make very little money from each person and they have a lot of emails, it is not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great use of their time to provide individual support. The way I kind of squared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this in my head is I set expectations accordingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app. That I think is very important. It’d be one thing if you said, email me with any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions you have, come on, I’ll answer them and then you never did. That’s kind of crappy. And if you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the Apple feedback system and what we are told about it, the problem we have with it is that we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco repeatedly told over and over again by lots of people on Apple, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to file bugs, please. It makes a big difference. They really do matter. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the reaction we get when we actually do file bugs is crickets and it’s the system shows us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s wasting our time. Whereas I think what I’m doing by not responding to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most emails to overcast, I think it’s different because I’m setting the expectation right up front, right in the app, right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the email form is. I’m saying, I will read most emails,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but will not respond to most of them, because I don’t have time to respond to most of them. So I’m setting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the expectation before you’ve even emailed me, and you can, of course, get to that screen before you’ve paid me a dime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m setting right there in the app, I’m probably not going to respond to your email. And so I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, in a perfect world, yeah, everybody would have time to respond to everybody, and everybody will get what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want. In the actual world that we’re in as indie businesses where we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t afford to respond to every single thing and give people the support that they sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want, I think the best way to do that, to handle that is expectation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting. So that people are told right up front before they’ve invested a bunch of time, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going through your process, that you can say, hey, you know what? I’m probably not gonna respond. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can choose, they can say, all right, you know what, this app isn’t for me then. And sometimes I will tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who get very mad at me, sometimes I’ll say like, listen, it sounds like you want a level of support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can’t provide, so you should probably use a different app, like that provides what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want. And I’m fine with that trade-off. I know that not everybody is, you know, willing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to accept my point of view on this. And like for those people who demand a more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engaged developer or team behind their apps, other apps out there that offer that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I accept the reality that I’m going to lose those people to those apps. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I accept that. To me, I’ve made that cost-benefit analysis and decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not going to change the way I operate my entire business for what seems to be a fairly small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco percentage of the audience that really can’t take the way I do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. The thing I’d add is I would imagine when people hear us give our usual answer this is like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s the biggest company in the world and has billions of dollars and were individual people,
⏹️ ▶️ John they might think to themselves, OK, but also, Apple has way more customers than you. So
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t it all even out? Because they may be huge, but literally billions of people own their products, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like it should be the same. And this is what I would say. If you are an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John developer, like you don’t have a company, you don’t have any employees you’re hiring to do
⏹️ ▶️ John support or anything, it’s just a single person. if you are successful
⏹️ ▶️ John enough with your app sales for it to be any kind of reasonable income or any kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of reasonable augment to your income, like if that, you know, if you make maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ John enough money to just live off your app, but like enough money that it’s not just pocket change, like you’re really
⏹️ ▶️ John helping support the household with your app. That means that you have too many customers
⏹️ ▶️ John to support individually. So like the ratio, like if you are even remotely successful
⏹️ ▶️ John as an individual, you have too many customers that you can’t spend your time responding to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s no business unless you sell like, I don’t know, you sell an app for $50,000 and you sell like two
⏹️ ▶️ John copies of it or something. Like there’s no business that you can have as an individual where the number
⏹️ ▶️ John of customers is tractable, where you do have time to give people individual support
⏹️ ▶️ John and also that your business is successful. Because if you have an app and two people download it, you can spend all day
⏹️ ▶️ John emailing with those two people and supporting them at a very personal basis. but two customers is not enough to support you
⏹️ ▶️ John unless your app is tremendously expensive. So, and I know because I’m usually on
⏹️ ▶️ John the other side of that because I have three apps now, they are not particularly successful, which means
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t have that many customers, which means when customers email me, they’re much more likely to get a
⏹️ ▶️ John response. And it’s not because I’m nicer than Marco and Casey, it’s because I have fewer customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And you’re also nicer. I would love to have the
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah, you’re also nicer. Yeah, but no, but this is the real thing, right? But still, even with the amount of customers that I have, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to make the same exact trade-offs, which is, you know, some customers who email me about apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they gave me $5 once five years ago, and I’ve spent just, you know, dozens
⏹️ ▶️ John and dozens of hours going back and forth over the course of months, helping them debug a problem. Why am I doing that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it out of the goodness of my heart? No, because one of the things that you have to do as an independent developer
⏹️ ▶️ John is like Mark was saying, figure out how best to spend your time. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s some problem and some bug that never happens to you that you can’t reproduce, but that you know some
⏹️ ▶️ John portion of your customer base has, if you get one person who contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John you about that bug and they’re willing to be like your remote debugging buddy,
⏹️ ▶️ John the time you spend with them is going to pay dividends for all your other customers
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe for a future version of your app or whatever. You’re spending a lot of time with them not to help
⏹️ ▶️ John solve their problem, but because that person is helping solve a problem that lots of other people have experienced.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s basically the interactive version of what Margo was talking about. It was like, if you take your feedback in aggregate, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can figure out where the pain points are and concentrate on them. But if you’re trying to find a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I know this is a problem on my app. I can’t debug it because it never happens to me, but I know it’s happening to customers
⏹️ ▶️ John out there. What you need is like one hero to come through and like someone who is just, they wanna get it
⏹️ ▶️ John figured out too. Why are they doing it? It’s not their app. They’re not gonna benefit from this bug being fixed. So maybe they just wanna participate
⏹️ ▶️ John in bug fixing. And I treasure those people because sometimes you need just one person out there
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s got a problem, who’s gonna pull the logs for you and go back and forth and figure it out until you figure out like, what is the problem?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why does this not happen to most people, but it happens to some people and you just narrow it down. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the trade-off that I do with all of my feedback. It’s like, if it’s a two-word answer, fine. If it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if it’s 17 pages of me trying to debug their entire life, they’re just not gonna get a response at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if I know there’s some problem somewhere or there’s some issue or whatever, like in Switch Glass, I had such problems
⏹️ ▶️ John with like screen identification of like, you know, figuring out which screen is this
⏹️ ▶️ John for a variety of both hardware and software based reasons, hardware having to do with like identical monitors,
⏹️ ▶️ John lying about their serial numbers and software having to do with how Apple exposes which monitor is which. And this is like a core
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality of my app, assign a different palette, you know, switch glass thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John each individual screen. And you want it to always remember, this is the screen on my left and this is the screen on my right. And from a user
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective, you’re like, how dumb is this app? I can’t tell this is screen on my left and this is a screen in my right. But from a software perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, I don’t know where your screens are, man. I just got to call APIs and hope I get IDs back. And getting someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who could debug that with me, like what screens do you have? Can you take a picture of the back of your screens? Can you run this
⏹️ ▶️ John test program for me that dumps a bunch of information from the IO registry? And like, that really helped me
⏹️ ▶️ John fix some problems early on in SwitchGlass. And all the SwitchGlass users benefited from
⏹️ ▶️ John that problem being solved. So yeah, a lot of people,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially listening to the show, I think like apps are just like a fun thing or like a privilege to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to make them. And that is all true, but like Marco said, it is also a business or in my case, attempting
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a business. And so you have to think like a business person and
⏹️ ▶️ John budget your time and money wisely. And sometimes that means massively over engaging with one or two people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes that means ignoring a whole bunch of them. And sometimes it means figuring out what you have to do to
⏹️ ▶️ John improve your app so that you actually do get more customers. So then you have so many that you have to ignore them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not easy being a new developer. There’s trade-offs all the way down. But yeah, anyway, all I
⏹️ ▶️ John just wanted to say is that the trope about Apple is big and we’re small, so we should be excused.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even acknowledging that they also have more customers, the math just still doesn’t work. Because to become successful
⏹️ ▶️ John as an individual, you have too many customers to support. And there’s this gap, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John before you, when you have enough customers to be a significant, but before you have enough customers to hire a support
⏹️ ▶️ John person. There’s this gap where it’s like, we really should hire a support person, but we can’t because we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have enough customers. Eventually you get enough customers that you can hire someone and should hire someone to do
⏹️ ▶️ John support for you. But I don’t think any of us have really passed that threshold. So yeah, business is tricky.
#askatp: Big releases for delight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tom Bullock writes, in big corporate software, it’s often said that big bang releases are bad, and small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incremental releases are good. They’re good for the company, certainly, and you might be able to argue that they’re good for users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of avoiding a huge deluge of new bugs at once. As Apple has also moved this direction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the past few years, it makes me wonder, what about delight as a user priority? The experience of going to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new major version and having a bunch of cool new features spring to life now seems diminished,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since all the features are sprinkled out over the year. It makes me wonder whether we’ve traded away something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey important in order to get more stability. Uh, I hear Tom’s point, but I think I prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it this way. I like having incremental releases and we’re actually going to talk about something that I’m going to be releasing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real soon in the after show. But I, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean Tom is wrong by any stretch, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of like the status quo. I don’t know, John, what’s the right answer here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So I, are we missing out on delight as a priority? like the experience of having a cool new, a
⏹️ ▶️ John big new version with cool new features in it. The thing about the like
⏹️ ▶️ John big bang releases and like just a release where you change a whole bunch of stuff is,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not a formula for delight for the end user really. That is a formula for
⏹️ ▶️ John you broke tons of stuff that worked before and all the new things you rolled out are buggy. There’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John essay from Joel Spolsky from 2000, talking about things you should never do part one,
⏹️ ▶️ John quoting from that, Netscape made the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make.
⏹️ ▶️ John They decided to rewrite the code from scratch. As developers, we all know that instinct. Look at all this code,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s cruddy, it’s been, it’s cruft, tech debt, it’s built up, it needs to be redone, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John redo it all. That is sometimes a good instinct, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the right way to do that is still in incremental pieces with the goal of eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John replacing it all and doing important parts first or whatever, but you can’t do all that work internally
⏹️ ▶️ John and just like say, we’re working right here and we won’t release until we rewritten everything from scratch. And then one day we’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John the old thing and the next day we’ll swap out the old thing and put in the new thing. Just ask Sonos if this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey formula for delight. But it’s not just Sonos.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so hard to do that and not end up angering more people than you delight because
⏹️ ▶️ John the old code has all the bug fixes in it and all the wisdom of all the people who’ve left the company. You can read the Joel Spolsky
⏹️ ▶️ John article. That’s why it’s accepted wisdom that you shouldn’t give in fully to the desire
⏹️ ▶️ John to just wipe the slate clean and start over, unless you’ve made the wrong app, in which case make a new app or whatever. Like obviously doing
⏹️ ▶️ John a pivot or going in a new direction or whatever. Like there are ways that this can work.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one of the things that I hated about the Spolsky article back in 2000. I’m like, but this is wrong. There are cases when you should do
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but his larger point was like, even, and he didn’t hedge about this, which is what you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hedge back in the 2000s when you were a blogger. Anyway, you should never, ever do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the wrong lesson. The lesson is you will want to do this more than you should.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the lesson. That’s the sort of like more accurate, less sensational
⏹️ ▶️ John early 2000s blogger thing. We know you want to do this, especially if you’re a programmer, but you should
⏹️ ▶️ John resist that. And only do it in careful ways under certain circumstances, yada,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, yada. And that is a very boring blog post to read, so it’s much better to say this is the single worst mistake you should make. You should never, ever do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And as evidenced, by 25 years later, people will still quote this article and say, Well, Joel Spolsky said you should never do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Therefore, you should never do it. There are cases where you should do it. Maybe Siri should be rewritten, but
⏹️ ▶️ John but like it’s so much more prevalent, so much more desirable. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John so hard to resist that you should do it. And it’s because rewrites like that do not delight
⏹️ ▶️ John your users. They don’t delight you either. Everyone is sad. Everything breaks stuff that used to exist
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t exist anymore. All the new stuff you rolled out isn’t as good as you thought. And it’s all buggy as hell. and you
⏹️ ▶️ John sign yourself up for another decade of finding and fixing bugs that you already found and fixed before you get to the point where you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John and fix the bugs in the new stuff you added. So I disagree with this
⏹️ ▶️ John question or we are not missing out on anything. If anything, Apple should be
⏹️ ▶️ John more judicious with the features it rolls out and maybe more judicious with the features it announces because
⏹️ ▶️ John the real way to surprise and delight users is to take the features that you know and love and use every day and make
⏹️ ▶️ John them better and better and better over time. polish them, remove longstanding
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs, make the performance better. People
⏹️ ▶️ John use features every single day, day in, day out. Make those better. That’s how you delight users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I mean, in all fairness, I think Tom’s question here, it isn’t just about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big rewrites. I think it’s more about the features that we’re already delivering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of staging them out on every 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, having each one of those deliver a chunk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what was announced at WDC, instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the one big release in the fall deliver everything that was supposed to be in that OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major version, as opposed to month by month by month. So there is certainly a question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of whether dropping everything all at once in a Big Bang is better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in certain ways that is better. That is definitely better for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making a big splash in marketing if it’s hard for you to get a lot of attention otherwise. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t hard for Apple to get attention. Apple can, you know, fart and they’ll get attention from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the major press outlets, you know, so they can do whatever they want. They can stay shut about and for in when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are when you have that kind of status, it’s actually good to trickle things out because then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you kind of stay in the press constantly. There’s always something that you are doing that’s new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the press. Whereas, although
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think That’s why Apple does it because Apple used to do the thing where all the OS features were supposed to launch in the.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think that there was a reason the.0s were just way buggier. Like they so clearly they used to release
⏹️ ▶️ John features that were at the same doneness state as the ones they don’t release now, but they just released them anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And guess what? In the.0 it was buggy, in the.2 some bugs were fixed, in the.3 some bugs were fixed, in the.4 it finally
⏹️ ▶️ John worked. Now they just hold it for the.4, which I think is the right decision because I think the big bang release
⏹️ ▶️ John despite us being excited by seeing it. WWDC like, oh, we’re all going to get this as soon as the point O is out
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re so excited for it. But when we get it, it’s disappointing when the stuff is buggy as hell until
⏹️ ▶️ John the point three just hold it for the point three.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but so anyway, like if you have like one strategy for marketing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trickle stuff out to constantly remind people about you. This is why you can buy like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a single sock from a website once and they will start emailing you literally every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day after that, telling you all of the breaking news in their sock specials before your sock even arrives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve got nine emails from them reminding you of all the great news happening in socks.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you don’t think that’s why Apple like marketing is not dictating that Apple holds things to the point three, right? I guess that’s engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, probably, but but I think Apple appreciates the benefit that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they are artificially holding stuff back to trickle stuff out. You are probably right that it is engineering driven. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think that this is a benefit they enjoy, that it does spread the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco press splash for their stuff throughout the whole year, rather than just happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the summer and fall. But when you are an indie and you don’t have the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attention that Apple gets from the world with everything you do, there is some value to having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those big splashes. Like when you are pretty much anybody who’s small, even like a a medium-sized company. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you have like, you know, like Evernote, I think they’re dead now, but you know, something like that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size company of like, you know, if you, you can make a big, you know, 3.0
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever and have a whole bunch of stuff all drop at once in that one big version. And everything John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just said about like, you know, having a big release, also having a bunch of bugs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is true. But that does get a big PR splash. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are times where you would want that strategy for sure. But when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it comes to delighting users, I mean maybe this is just my style as a developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my favorite ways to delight users are with small features. They might never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see an announcement for it, but they might run into it in the app sometime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is, you know, if you’re optimizing for delight, that’s a little bit different from like wowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. I think the big PR feature drops that’s to wow people and maybe get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new attention to your app. But if you want to delight your users, I find it way more fun and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more delightful to offer them something helpful or nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or fun at a random time that they weren’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily looking for that but it they something helps them like oh cool. So an example
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this This would be like my undo seek. This has been like when I did the big overcast rewrite that I should never have done thanks to Joel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spolsky. When I did that, the big rewrite last year, I improved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much about the app. The thing that people love the most, they constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell me they love the most is undo seek. Because a lot of times it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out people accidentally seek in a podcast by dragging the bar accidentally with their finger or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then having the undo thing pop up right there, undo seek, and you tap it and you undo it that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very delightful feature to people. It was not a big PR splash but it’s something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they run into when they are using the app and as you are you know developing an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and serving your users over time you can add little things like that whenever you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know the sooner you get it in there the sooner people are going to start being delighted by it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think there there is a way to optimize for designing for delighting users and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t actually require big bang, big drop releases. You can do it incrementally by slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding that kind of thing over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the delight that Tom was asking about is like the Christmas morning feeling of like watching the
⏹️ ▶️ John announcement video and say, look at all these goodies and I’m gonna get all of them and you can continue to think that and just know that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna space out but it’s just so nice to like, now finally I’m installing iOS N plus one
⏹️ ▶️ John cause it’s been publicly released and now I get everything that I saw in that video And yeah, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John that was never really a realistic world. Your choices were exchange that great feeling for a buggy point. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John or, you know, just have they could just simply announce fewer features and release them all on day one and just
⏹️ ▶️ John release fewer things throughout the year. I think what they’re currently doing is a reasonable ish compromise, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John announce all the things in your big video and then release them over the course of the year. As long as over
⏹️ ▶️ John the course of the year, a actually fits within the year, which hasn’t worked out that well for Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John intelligence stuff. and B, that you don’t get like the last bushel of things
⏹️ ▶️ John in like the end of December and it includes like really important features like spreading it over the year,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe try to spread it over the first half of the year. Because honestly, if you’re planning features and they’re taking your whole
⏹️ ▶️ John year to roll out in any reasonable form, you probably put too much into the year. But yeah, like I do think
⏹️ ▶️ John polishing existing features and I would say the seek undo, that’s an example of polishing an existing feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John Seeking, that was done in 1.0, whatever needs to be done with seeking, but people use seeking all the time. Is there something that
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be polished in seeking? Well, it works fine. Seeking is fine. Like, nothing is
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong with seeking. It’s like, but, let me really think about seeking. Is there any part
⏹️ ▶️ John of seeking experience could be better? I’m gonna go revisit the seeking feature, which I’ve never needed to touch because it works
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly fine. And you find something to add and guess what? People love it. Not because seeking is a new feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John not because it lets them do anything they couldn’t do before, because you could always just slide it back and figure out where you were, but it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John some part of seeking better. It acknowledges the reality of seeking, which is sometimes you do it by accident,
⏹️ ▶️ John let the app help you out there. Polishing existing feature like that, I just, I wish Mac OS had
⏹️ ▶️ John this. I wish it so bad. Like every single thing I do every day in Mac OS is like, this has been this way for 10
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody work on this one feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, my bugbear is like file sharing in the Finder. Those dialogues, that whole
⏹️ ▶️ John interface, that whole experience has not gotten better in so long and I do it every single day and I wish someone would
⏹️ ▶️ John come and give me the Finder file sharing equivalent of, uh, Undo Seek.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, bringing both these askATPs together, my favorite support email to get,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I always respond to, is, hey, just FYI, um, you know, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of these ages for these actors on, you know, this movie, but they’re all wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because, you know, Pierce Brosnan isn’t 35 anymore, and that’s what it says he is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, you know, Goldeneye or whatever, I’m making all this up. And I get to respond and say, no, no, no, no, no. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s how old he was when it was released.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s a design bug, I feel like. Yeah, actually. People are misunderstanding it. You need to make that clearer in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you for ruining my moment, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s both. It’s both. It’s good that you get to delight them. They’re like, oh, that’s really useful. And now they know that. And from that
⏹️ ▶️ John point on, they will be delighted by that aspect of your application. But also, it shows that there’s a part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the application that’s confusing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe put like a little tiny text above that says like, then. Then, 35.
⏹️ ▶️ John not an easy if it was easy problem to solve, you’d already solved it like this. Every all of our apps have situations like this, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, how can I make this clear without cluttering up the app with a bunch of instructions that once you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you never need this again, because I don’t need that instruction. I know about it. But I know about it because I talked to you like but if I had just seen it without
⏹️ ▶️ John any information, what I have known, this is one of the problems of app design that
⏹️ ▶️ John are you optimizing for the first user who knows nothing or the user after that? Or do you want your application to adapt
⏹️ ▶️ John to it? You might have already made the right trade off, which is don’t put anything and if anyone doesn’t understand what it is, they’ll write you and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll tell them and they’ll be happy. But you know, it could be better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and actually, now that I think about it, I embraced tip kit just the teeniest bit when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did the big multiple lists. I almost said rewrite, it wasn’t a rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily, but the multiple list feature. And so now that I’ve gone down the tip kit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line, for lack of a better word, you know, perhaps the right answer is to add a tip for this. So the first once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or twice that they see it, they’ll get the little pop up that says, Hey, This is how old these actors were when the movie was released.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then they never see it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they send you an angry email. I just think popping up tips in my face. I don’t need you to tell him to use my app. Get this
⏹️ ▶️ John out. You know, it’s hard to please everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got one of those. It was so obnoxious. It was so obnoxious on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mastodon. It was just hilariously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John obnoxious. You want
⏹️ ▶️ John to see obnoxious. Like I, I, I posted a mastodon asking about a shopping list app or whatever. And a bunch of people sent me
⏹️ ▶️ John suggestions, uh, most of which I already tried. But anyway, in the course of trying all of the suggestions,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, I saw just how aggressive like the average iOS app is
⏹️ ▶️ John about sending you BS notifications, like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey install the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would be like, allow notifications just because like, I wanna see how the app works. You know, if notification is a part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the app, if I was gonna use this app, I would enable notifications. So I install the app, enable notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ John use it for two seconds, close the app, go back to the app store, one, two, three, bloop, notification
⏹️ ▶️ John from the app, instant delete. Like, I don’t even know what those notifications saying is like, I’ve barely
⏹️ ▶️ John even used your app. I just installed it like, like less than 60 seconds ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re already sending me notifications like no, no, no delete.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think tip kit is way below that threshold. But yeah, apps just apps that don’t respect,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, their intrusion into your life like it’s just it’s madness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Wild Grain, Factor and Notion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the many perks of membership is called ATP overtime. This is our weekly bonus topic. Every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode of the show gets ATP overtime. There’s about 15 to 30 minutes usually of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole other topic that you aren’t hearing if you’re not a member. So if you want to hear all these, if you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after hearing two hours of us, you’re like, the one thing I need is to hear more of these people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BS about computer stuff. You can join us at atp.fm.com. and you can hear Overtime every week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this week on Overtime, the topic is gonna be vibe coding. This new phrase that came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, which I find this very amusing. But anyway, vibe coding, we’re gonna be talking about that in Overtime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week. So you can join the list, and once again, atb.fm slash join. Thanks everybody, talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, Cause it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm And if you’re into Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean
Callsheet universal links
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the realm of delighting users, kind of, sort of, um, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been a handful of features that CallSheet either hasn’t done or hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done the way I want. And I’d been kicking the can down the road on a lot of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in some ways, cause I was scared of them in some ways, because I just didn’t think it was the right time in some ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because other things were a bigger priority. The number one on the list was having multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lists of, of pins. And, you know, we’ve talked about that that already launched a month ago or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And another one that I probably should have prioritized higher,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but honestly, I was a little scared of was, um, universal links and in a web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presence. And I don’t mean like a marketing page. I still don’t really have that. But what I mean is when you go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to share like a movie or a show or a person and call sheet, um, I present
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you with a prompt the way in the released version of the app that says, do you want to share, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a call sheet link, which is the call sheet colon slash slash URL scheme that only works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have call sheet installed on a, on your device. Do you want to share a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movie database link where you just go straight to the movie database? I feel like there might’ve been one other option. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall, but, um, but you had the, the user has to make a choice, right? And if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they send a call sheet link, like, you know, say my close friends and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share link from for a movie, what they’re what’s getting sent in like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iMessage is call she colon slash slash, you know, in some URL, which is presented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a completely useless URL in messages. There’s no there’s no web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey component to it whatsoever. So there’s no poster, there’s no title, there’s no anything, I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m looking at, other than other than looking at the URL and knowing if it’s a movie, a show or a person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that kind of sucks and it’s always kind of sucked. And even leaving aside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the growth hacking of like having a nice web link to, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, to point people to, it’s just icky to look at messages, like even for people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who love the app, you know, I really like the app and when I send these links to like Aaron or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my friends or what have you, they’re gross. And so what I knew I wanted to do was have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, some sort of universal link in like web presence such that when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share a link, instead of sharing call sheet colon slash slash, you’re sharing a link to some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey website. And then when you open that link, it will at the very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least, you know, show a presentable version of that website that, um, that you can then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from that webpage, click a link that, you know, sends you into call sheet or, uh, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey double bonus points, you open that URL, from messages and it immediately hops you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right into call sheet, deep links you to the particular thing that you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at. So as an example, if I sent to the two of you the link to the Hunt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Red October in iMessage, I would expect to see the poster for the Hunt for Red October. I would expect to see the title.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would expect that if you tap on that link, we’d open call sheet and dive directly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the hunt for October. And on the surface, this shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be that complicated. But the complicated thing was, I, and slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of Marco, but mostly because of me, I have a deep aversion to running any sort of server component
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all for any of my apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to bother with it. I don’t want to bother with it. I don’t want to mess with it. I don’t want to deal with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to scale it. I don’t want to think of So that’s a large part of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the reason why I’ve been kicking this can. And the obvious answer is, well, you dumb dumb, you already run a server
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your website, just tack on the side of that. And yeah, I could, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like my website is old and creaky. See the recent, I remember special. And although it works perfectly for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the needs I have of it today, I think extending it for this purpose is not really the right idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then I need to like stand up a whole new thing. And do I want to stand up an entire new, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Linode, Nanode and, you in, you know, another VMs in the cloud somewhere just to service this and like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, I think yes, but anyway, I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I just kept kicking this can down the road. And I kicked it and I kicked it and I kicked it and I kicked it kicked it and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lo and behold, and this is the lesson that Marco and I have both learned many times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and keep trying to unlearn and then keep getting reinforced that we should continue to do it. Procrastination
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has saved the day. And so, an extremely kind listener who I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not get blessings to use their name one way or the other, so I’ll just call them Josh S.,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an extremely kind listener late last year said, hey, I’m tired of sending links to people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for call sheet that are so hideous. So I stood up my own little baby setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that does it for you. And so what Josh had done was had set up, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly where he had put it, I want to say it was on Cloudflare, but I’m not 100% certain. And basically, these were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single-serving pages, sort of, kind of. And what it would do is it would mimic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the call sheet colon slash slash URLs, but it was an actual website, right? And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used the movie databases API on the client side to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey load details about the film or the show or what have you. So you get this really nice landing page for The Hunt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for October. And it has the poster. And in the background of the page is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a faded out like image from the movie. And it was just really, really good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have Link in front of me, and I don’t want to swamp his setup, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway. But it was incredible. And I immediately reached out and was like, holy crap, may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I steal this, please? And again, procrastination has saved the day. And Josh was extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gracious and courteous about it. And was like, yeah, absolutely steal it. Have fun. And that was months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Over the last week, I finally decided to get off my butt and actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to implement this. To make this a little broader and not all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about me, I feel like I learned a really good lesson from this experience because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew I didn’t want to listen to John and stand up a new VM in the Cloud. I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do something serverless, which is a buzzword that I’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more in the past a little bit, not as much recently, but I’ve heard plenty of times. And I don’t really even know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that means, but I know that it means I don’t have to deal with a full-on server.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, surely somebody’s servers are running these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Sure. No, no, you’re exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was getting at when I said, yes, you want to do that, because I wanted you to have a website. But
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re talking about now is an implementation detail, which is like, OK, what answers? When I make an HTTP request,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is on the other end of this thing answering my question? And it could be a computer in a rack somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could be a virtual machine inside a computer in Iraq somewhere, or it could be a quote unquote serverless
⏹️ ▶️ John endpoint, which is a bunch of software running on a computer inside Iraq somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But it does it does
⏹️ ▶️ John change like your perspective in that. Like, am I responsible for running a machine?
⏹️ ▶️ John Am I responsible for like instantiating and running a VM? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John am I not responsible for any of that? And instead, my responsibility begins and ends with me uploading a blob of
⏹️ ▶️ John code or an executable into this magic bucket. and then I’m not responsible for anything that runs
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And the only thing that can be my fault is there’s a bug in the code that I uploaded, so I should upload a new version
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. But everything else is essentially not my fault. And that is what it sounds like you’re looking for. That is the quote unquote serverless
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, I don’t want any of this to be my responsibility. But there are other trade-offs with quote unquote serverless,
⏹️ ▶️ John which have to do with things that aren’t your problem, may become your problem. If there’s something like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t fix them, if there’s a problem, so you want it to be reliable. And also surprisingly costs. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John serverless can save you huge amounts of money depending on what you’re doing. If
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re doing is. Let’s say extremely simple and low traffic,
⏹️ ▶️ John putting it as a tiny little thing on some existing VM you have could save you more money than paying
⏹️ ▶️ John per request to a serverless thing. So I get you wanting to do it because it’s like cool and you
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t tried it before and you should check it out. And it might be the best choice for what you’re doing. But also
⏹️ ▶️ John it might end up being way
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive than putting a static page on the cheapest static hosting you could find.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And you hit the nail on the head that I wanted to, I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leverage as much of somebody else’s infrastructure as possible in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just care about the thing I actually care about. And I think, you know, I’m, I’m stealing a little bit of Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thunder, so to speak, in that you’ve said this many times, I believe Marco and summarize it probably better than I’m about to in that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, our value add is probably working on the native app and being a Linux administrator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not really what you or me or John is, well, maybe John, but not what Marco and I are meant to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I don’t want to do that for this particular context. And so I decided to bite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bullet, that’s probably a terrible turn of phrase, I decided to learn how to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do this. And what I ended up doing was looking at Cloudflare pages, which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what very little I know, and I’m sure I’m going to get some things factually wrong here, but the gist is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can send them static HTML or some,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can use some very, very, very basic, I guess, web frameworks to do very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very basic websites. I think this is kind of spiritually similar to GitHub. What is it? GitHub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pages? GitHub something rather that they’ll host a website for you as well. It’s Cloudflare’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cut of that. But the problem is, is that I wanted this to be dynamic and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m putting huge air quotes in there insofar as I don’t want to have to, and I don’t have any mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, of sending all the data to this page. I could send a title
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a query string or whatever, but that would look ugly. And how am I going to send an image? What am I going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey base 64 and code an image and put that in a URL? That’s gross. That’s not at all what I want. So what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this website slash web page or what have you would need to do is make its own request
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the movie database and get the data it needs based on just an identifier. And so it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out Cloudflare Pages also uses or offers Cloudflare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey functions, which I guess in turn are just like a slightly rejiggered versions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Cloudflare Workers, which all of that is to say you can basically push
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HTML and JavaScript to Cloudflare. And as long as they’re not super intensive and as long as you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting a gazillion hits, it’s, as far as I know, it is literally free for me to host
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this so far. I haven’t paid for an SSL cert, which I know is not that common anymore. I already paid for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey domain like a year and a half ago, but I’m not paying for hosting yet. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there could change and I might get so much traffic that I need to start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paying them, but the free limits are extremely generous. I don’t remember offhand what they are, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very generous. Now, you can go to callsheetapp.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash movie slash 1669 as an example, and you can see the hunt for October.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can do that for people, you can do it for TV shows, you can do it for TV shows, TV show seasons, and TV show episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really, really pleased with this. The look and feel of it is 98 percent Josh S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did change a couple of things here and there, but the overwhelming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey majority of it was Josh. The JavaScript, again, make an air quotes, back-end code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so to speak. Most of that was Josh. again, I tweaked it and changed it and so on and so forth. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I think the, a couple of big lessons for me that may be relevant to everyone, I guess I’m trying to channel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under the radar here a little bit. Uh, first of all, this was something I deeply feared and I was able to put it together in a few days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, similarly, uh, I deeply feared lists of pins and that took longer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but as it turns out for both of these, I was capable of it, like I didn’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was, but I And I think what I need to take from this and maybe someone else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening is in similar, in a similar position, like I’ve been doing this for a long time. I shouldn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shouldn’t doubt myself the way I have been on a couple of these things, like normally every everyday stuff, I’ve got that no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem, but some of the stuff where I’m outside of my comfort zone, I don’t need to be doubting myself as much as I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m pretty decent at my job and I can figure stuff out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, as I’ve said, probably on the show before, and I’ve said certainly certainly in many times in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, when I went to school and I think I speak for all of you, probably when I went to school, I did learn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some marketable skills, but ultimately what I learned was how to learn and I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey learn things and I knew this intellectually, but I don’t know, for whatever reason, I just got so scared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this and I didn’t need to be. And, you know, then I, I was able to put all this web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff together again, thanks so much to Josh S. Uh, and then I was able to, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thanks to some tutelage from him, get it so So that when you open these URLs, if the app is installed, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will automatically deep link into the app, which was not challenging, but was something I’d never done before. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to get a certain file on the web server in a certain spot. And Marco’s probably done all this 15 times. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve put a certain page or a certain file, excuse me, on the web server in a certain spot. Then you’ve got to report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into Apple about, oh, what domain do you bless? And does the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey domain bless you back, and so on and so forth. But ultimately I have feared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this for months, probably a year now, year and a half now, and I ended up conquering it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a few days. So if you’re in a position where there’s something, be it a work issue or a programming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue or a life issue that you’ve been fearing, stop kicking that can. Don’t be like me. Don’t procrastinate except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it’s useful, but don’t procrastinate and just give it a shot because you’d be surprised what you’re capable of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, and I’m sure there’s problems with this. I’m sure someone will find a bug and I’m sure there will be an issue, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultimately, it’s there, and at least in the happy path, it works. I’m really pleased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it. And the best part of all, gentlemen, is if I need to change something, I change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I upload it, and I wait about 15 seconds, and then it’s live, which is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frigging refreshing. And I know that this is so obvious, but I’m so used to living in native
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app land where even a test flight takes like 10, 15 minutes to go through. I am so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loving the world of the web where when I upload something, I wait a minute and then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live and it’s delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some listener out there is very upset that we’ve had this entire conversation and not once said the phrase AWS
⏹️ ▶️ John Lambda. So now we’ve said it, so you can all exhale.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. And you know, I know that there are plenty of other technologies that would work for this. I don’t know why I chose Cloudflare to be honest with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John heard of it. It sounds like they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I mean, that’s the other thing. It’s like AWS scares the piss out of me because there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much to it. There’s so many nooks and crannies that I, and I know almost nothing about any of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus it seems like so much of the terminology is so like domain specific that I would just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not even, I would take so long for me to even understand the terminology I needed to ask the question that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I don’t, I don’t think I would ever turn to AWS now, John, if I recall correctly, you have plenty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of experience with AWS. So maybe for you, if you were to go down this route and if you wanted, quote quote, unquote, serverless, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would jump directly to AWS and AWS. Lambda.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because because like AWS as the market leader is not incentivized to offer
⏹️ ▶️ John as generous a free plan as you seem to be experiencing from CloudFlare. So I will never be
⏹️ ▶️ John at the scale where AWS will make the most sense for me. I would imagine Marco probably already is at that scale.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ve discussed that many times in the past. But it is terrifying. You are right to be scared. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the sort of competitive niche that like companies like Fastly and CloudFlare, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they are able to offer services that are aimed at people like you, like people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are potential customers of many of their services and may eventually pay for them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but right now are like need a kind of a user-friendly on-ramp and maybe don’t have a lot of traffic to begin with,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they want to get those because they’re below the concern of AWS.