ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► It has been so long since we recorded.

00:00:02 ◼   ► So since we last recorded,

00:00:05 ◼   ► I have gotten the new MacBook Air,

00:00:07 ◼   ► already did an entire three hour podcast about it

00:00:10 ◼   ► with Jon Gruber, the talk show at 352.

00:00:12 ◼   ► I DFU restored my 14 inch MacBook Pro,

00:00:15 ◼   ► which I think has fixed most of its problems,

00:00:17 ◼   ► and I went to two fish concerts.

00:00:19 ◼   ► - You went to two fish concerts?

00:00:21 ◼   ► Why were you going to two?

00:00:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, we got a poll on that thread in a second,

00:00:24 ◼   ► but since we're doing our quick updates,

00:00:26 ◼   ► meanwhile, I went to Cape Charles for a week

00:00:28 ◼   ► and Michaela got her second shot.

00:00:30 ◼   ► So the List family is as vaccinated

00:00:32 ◼   ► as we can possibly be right now,

00:00:33 ◼   ► and I'm very excited about that.

00:00:34 ◼   ► - All right. - John,

00:00:35 ◼   ► what have you been doing?

00:00:36 ◼   ► - I've been on Long Island just hanging out at the beach.

00:00:40 ◼   ► I'm back now, though.

00:00:40 ◼   ► My most exciting upcoming news,

00:00:42 ◼   ► oh, I did get my M2 MacBook Air.

00:00:44 ◼   ► Well, it's not mine.

00:00:45 ◼   ► My M2 MacBook Air for my son,

00:00:47 ◼   ► he's got that up on his desk,

00:00:48 ◼   ► and he's using it as if nothing has changed

00:00:50 ◼   ► from his M1 MacBook Air, so that's fine.

00:00:52 ◼   ► But my exciting news is that my television,

00:00:55 ◼   ► in theory, is arriving on Monday.

00:00:57 ◼   ► (all gasp)

00:00:58 ◼   ► - Did you prepare the way?

00:00:59 ◼   ► - The way is not yet prepared.

00:01:00 ◼   ► I just got back from vacation literally today.

00:01:02 ◼   ► So I really haven't, I've just barely started unpacking

00:01:06 ◼   ► stuff and plugging things back in.

00:01:08 ◼   ► Oh, I had an ominous email for my Synology

00:01:10 ◼   ► while I was gone too.

00:01:11 ◼   ► - Saying what?

00:01:12 ◼   ► - Tell me if you ever got this one.

00:01:14 ◼   ► Let me see.

00:01:15 ◼   ► Synology detected an abnormal power failure

00:01:18 ◼   ► that occurred on drive two in volume one.

00:01:20 ◼   ► - Oh, that doesn't sound good.

00:01:21 ◼   ► - Are there normal power failures?

00:01:23 ◼   ► - What is an abnormal power failure that occurred on drive,

00:01:26 ◼   ► how can a power failure occur on a drive?

00:01:28 ◼   ► Anyway, I didn't do anything to it yet.

00:01:31 ◼   ► I went downstairs and looked at it

00:01:32 ◼   ► and all the lights are on and none of the lights are angry.

00:01:35 ◼   ► It says to, for more information, go to storage manager,

00:01:38 ◼   ► storage, and check the suggestions

00:01:39 ◼   ► under the corresponding volume.

00:01:40 ◼   ► The suggestion probably is,

00:01:41 ◼   ► hey, don't use hard drives for eight years.

00:01:43 ◼   ► - I mean, that's a pretty good suggestion.

00:01:45 ◼   ► - But anyway, I haven't looked into my Synology yet,

00:01:47 ◼   ► but tomorrow, in theory, I will begin preparing the way

00:01:50 ◼   ► for the television.

00:01:52 ◼   ► - That's gotta be a big job.

00:01:54 ◼   ► - So I was gonna ask, we don't have to go into the nitty-gritty

00:01:56 ◼   ► but would you mind giving just like the briefest overview

00:01:59 ◼   ► of what you expect preparing the way to look like?

00:02:01 ◼   ► - So I have to rip everything out

00:02:03 ◼   ► that's under my television stand thing now.

00:02:06 ◼   ► So I've got a receiver, I've got a bunch of game consoles,

00:02:09 ◼   ► I've got a TiVo, I've got a PlayStation 3.

00:02:11 ◼   ► Let's see, Apple TV, there's a lot of crap back there

00:02:17 ◼   ► across all the like plugs and surge strips

00:02:19 ◼   ► and all that other stuff that it plugs into.

00:02:22 ◼   ► That's all gotta come out

00:02:23 ◼   ► because some of those game consoles

00:02:25 ◼   ► either can't connect to my television or I won't be connecting to my television.

00:02:29 ◼   ► The PlayStation 3 is just going into cold storage because I have a dedicated Blu-ray player and

00:02:35 ◼   ► that's the only thing I was using that thing for. And then I have to get my plasma television off

00:02:40 ◼   ► of the stand, leaving the stand empty. And then I have to repopulate the stand by sticking in my

00:02:45 ◼   ► new receiver, putting in the game consoles that I'm going to continue to keep/use as decorative

00:02:51 ◼   ► items. Some of the game consoles are going to become decorative items. I know I could buy an

00:02:57 ◼   ► adapter to like you know connect these. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do. I have the component video

00:03:02 ◼   ► cable for my you know GameCube and Wii and the Wii U with HDMI so I could get adapters for those

00:03:09 ◼   ► things but it's not probably not worth it so I'll probably leave some of them in there as

00:03:13 ◼   ► space fillers and decorations. But really the main task is putting the new receiver in connecting the

00:03:17 ◼   ► the umpteen speaker wires to it and swapping an all new fancy 4k high frame

00:03:23 ◼   ► rate blah blah blah whatever HDMI cables for the old ones which don't support any

00:03:29 ◼   ► of the new fancy stuff and in theory fingers crossed I have all the things

00:03:34 ◼   ► that I need I have the cables I have the receiver I have the blu-ray player that

00:03:39 ◼   ► had a little minor surgery as we talked about in the past episode so the

00:03:42 ◼   ► So preparing the way, if it all goes well,

00:03:46 ◼   ► when the television arrives,

00:03:47 ◼   ► there will be a television stand with all new equipment in it

00:03:50 ◼   ► with no television on top of it,

00:03:52 ◼   ► and they will just drop off the television

00:03:53 ◼   ► and hopefully leave my house,

00:03:54 ◼   ► and then I have to connect the third-party stand

00:03:56 ◼   ► to my television, and we'll see how that goes.

00:03:57 ◼   ► You'll hear about it in the next episode, I'm sure.

00:04:00 ◼   ► (electronic beeping)

00:04:01 ◼   ► - So how is your MacBook Air to pop the stack a little bit?

00:04:05 ◼   ► - All right, so I did a much longer review on the talk show,

00:04:07 ◼   ► but my gist of it here is

00:04:11 ◼   ► It feels strikingly good.

00:04:13 ◼   ► Like when you pick it up or move it

00:04:16 ◼   ► or open it up to use it or close it,

00:04:18 ◼   ► it just feels really good.

00:04:21 ◼   ► It is really fast and it sounds like crap.

00:04:26 ◼   ► - What do you mean it sounds like crap?

00:04:27 ◼   ► - The speakers are garbage.

00:04:28 ◼   ► But everything else-- - Oh, really?

00:04:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, when you compare it to the MacBook Pro 14,

00:04:33 ◼   ► most of the differences where the MacBook Pro

00:04:36 ◼   ► is an upgrade, when you're using them side by side

00:04:39 ◼   ► or when you switch between them,

00:04:40 ◼   ► really notice them. The differences aren't that noticeable in the screen quality, the

00:04:46 ◼   ► promotion, like I don't notice when promotion is not there really. I do very much notice

00:04:52 ◼   ► the speaker difference. It is extremely obvious every time the computer plays any kind of

00:04:56 ◼   ► sound. The MacBook Air speakers are pretty rough when you are used to the MacBook Pro

00:05:01 ◼   ► speakers. They're good in absolute terms compared to other small inexpensive laptops, but compared

00:05:07 ◼   ► to the 14 inch MacBook Pro it's no contest. The speakers on the MacBook Pro are both much

00:05:12 ◼   ► much louder and much better sound quality in general. The MacBook Air speakers sound

00:05:16 ◼   ► like small tinny speakers but everything else in its comparable category and like you know

00:05:22 ◼   ► the PC market and stuff you know it compares very well to those but yeah compared to the

00:05:27 ◼   ► 14 inch it's no contest. However, the way it feels oh my god it feels so thin and light

00:05:34 ◼   ► when you compare it to the 14 inch.

00:05:36 ◼   ► And the difference on paper doesn't seem like

00:05:38 ◼   ► it would be that much, but it matters a lot.

00:05:41 ◼   ► It is extremely noticeable and it just feels fantastic

00:05:45 ◼   ► when you have to pick it up or hold it or whatever.

00:05:48 ◼   ► It's fantastic. - That's awesome.

00:05:49 ◼   ► - So very, very happy with it.

00:05:52 ◼   ► I'm already finding lots of various uses

00:05:54 ◼   ► for now having three computers. (laughs)

00:05:57 ◼   ► But I love it, it's great, and if you are at all

00:06:01 ◼   ► on the fence on whether you might want a MacBook Air,

00:06:04 ◼   ► Go for it. It's great. I did get silver. I think it is the generally the best color that's

00:06:09 ◼   ► available I think right now. It is the most boring color. Well, I wouldn't say that. Space

00:06:14 ◼   ► gray is the most boring color. But silver is certainly a close second in that regard.

00:06:21 ◼   ► It is a boring color but I as I mentioned before I think the the new super dark blue

00:06:27 ◼   ► in practice is very fingerprinty and usually looks just black and I don't I don't love

00:06:33 ◼   ► and the gold I think is nice if you don't have

00:06:38 ◼   ► any other silver aluminum on your desk.

00:06:42 ◼   ► But if you have any other silver aluminum on your desk,

00:06:44 ◼   ► it doesn't quite match it and it looks kind of wrong.

00:06:48 ◼   ► So that's up to you whether that's a problem for you or not.

00:06:52 ◼   ► But yeah, I love this thing, I think it's great.

00:06:54 ◼   ► I did notice they moved the headphone jack

00:06:57 ◼   ► back to the wrong side.

00:06:59 ◼   ► - Oh did they?

00:07:00 ◼   ► You know, from the 2016 dark days,

00:07:04 ◼   ► we had the headphone jack move to the right,

00:07:06 ◼   ► and of course, listeners heard me complain about that

00:07:09 ◼   ► forever on this show, because headphones typically

00:07:12 ◼   ► that have only one ear cup connecting to the wire,

00:07:15 ◼   ► usually that's the left side of the headphone,

00:07:18 ◼   ► and so it doesn't make a lot of sense

00:07:20 ◼   ► to put the headphone jack on the right,

00:07:22 ◼   ► because not only does it intrude into your mouse space,

00:07:24 ◼   ► if you're a right-handed mouse user,

00:07:25 ◼   ► if you have them next to the laptop,

00:07:27 ◼   ► but then also, it has to then wrap around

00:07:29 ◼   ► to the left side of the laptop,

00:07:30 ◼   ► either crossing behind it or in front of it

00:07:32 ◼   ► to get to the left ear cup of a left-wired headphone.

00:07:36 ◼   ► So they moved the headphone jack back over to the left

00:07:40 ◼   ► on the new MacBook Pros when they came out last year.

00:07:42 ◼   ► But it's for some reason staying on the right

00:07:44 ◼   ► for the MacBook Air.

00:07:45 ◼   ► So eh, that's, you know, it's not great.

00:07:48 ◼   ► - That's the same complaint about all the ports

00:07:50 ◼   ► on the MacBook Air.

00:07:51 ◼   ► Like it's got two, you know, the MagSafe

00:07:53 ◼   ► and the two Thunderbolt ports or whatever,

00:07:54 ◼   ► and they're all on the left side.

00:07:56 ◼   ► And it would be nice if there was one port

00:07:58 ◼   ► on one side and one port on the other.

00:07:59 ◼   ► You can see that if they put them on one on one side one of the other people would complain they aren't both on the

00:08:03 ◼   ► Same side, so there's no perfect solution there

00:08:04 ◼   ► I understand that like we're just you don't see the other side of it

00:08:08 ◼   ► But yeah the headphone port being over there seems to be the same

00:08:11 ◼   ► Oh, no, I know it's not on the left is on the right it

00:08:13 ◼   ► Well, so it's like it's part of that whole the left is occupied by all the other ports

00:08:17 ◼   ► So the right is the place with space remaining to put stuff

00:08:20 ◼   ► But it's kind of weird because if you look at the motherboard they they did the thing they've done for many years now and made

00:08:25 ◼   ► the ports modular so if you break a port or something you don't have to replace

00:08:29 ◼   ► your entire logic board you just you know they take off that little module

00:08:32 ◼   ► put another one on but of course you've got to get all the traces and everything

00:08:35 ◼   ► to the place where the thing is so yeah it's kind of a shame that they didn't

00:08:39 ◼   ► flip the thing around but speaking of audio stuff that I missed the part where

00:08:42 ◼   ► you compared the m2 MacBook Air to the m1 MacBook Air speakers I would if I

00:08:47 ◼   ► still had that computer in my possession but I do not

00:08:50 ◼   ► yes but based on your memory though because you're saying all the speaker

00:08:52 ◼   ► sounds terrible.

00:08:53 ◼   ► I would expect that they would sound worse than the much

00:08:56 ◼   ► thicker, more expensive fancy computer,

00:08:58 ◼   ► but I'm wondering how it sounds.

00:08:59 ◼   ► I mean, I guess I have both of them in my house.

00:09:01 ◼   ► I can check it out.

00:09:02 ◼   ► I just honestly never use those speakers.

00:09:04 ◼   ► My son always has his AirPods in or some other headphones in.

00:09:07 ◼   ► But I'll check.

00:09:08 ◼   ► I have both machines.

00:09:08 ◼   ► Let's see if I can check back in next week if I remember.

00:09:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:09:11 ◼   ► I don't want to assign homework because I'm not allowed to.

00:09:14 ◼   ► However, I would love to know that information from you.

00:09:16 ◼   ► But I'm guessing it's probably-- I'm

00:09:18 ◼   ► sure it compares well to its own predecessor

00:09:20 ◼   ► and previous MacBook Airs.

00:09:22 ◼   ► But yeah, in general, this thing,

00:09:25 ◼   ► they're gonna sell an absolute ton of these things.

00:09:27 ◼   ► And I think for the first time,

00:09:31 ◼   ► well, I guess not the M1,

00:09:32 ◼   ► you can say the same thing with the M1,

00:09:34 ◼   ► but there's no longer a cheap but bad option

00:09:38 ◼   ► in the Apple laptop lineup that you shouldn't buy.

00:09:40 ◼   ► There's the 13 inch MacBook Pro that you shouldn't buy.

00:09:43 ◼   ► But that's not that cheap.

00:09:46 ◼   ► So whether you get the M1 MacBook Air,

00:09:50 ◼   ► which is still being sold now,

00:09:51 ◼   ► or whether you get this, they're both amazing computers.

00:09:54 ◼   ► They've done such a great job with this.

00:09:56 ◼   ► And man, the laptop lineup is in such a great place

00:10:00 ◼   ► right now, like again, with the exception

00:10:02 ◼   ► of that stupid 13 inch, which it's not a,

00:10:05 ◼   ► it isn't a bad computer.

00:10:06 ◼   ► There are just much better computers right next to it

00:10:08 ◼   ► in the lineup, but with that sole weird spot,

00:10:12 ◼   ► you really can't make a bad decision in this lineup.

00:10:14 ◼   ► It's just, it's great, all of them are great

00:10:17 ◼   ► and you get to kinda just pick what size and features

00:10:21 ◼   ► and price you want, and it's a great place to be.

00:10:25 ◼   ► And it's especially heartening after,

00:10:28 ◼   ► we had so many kind of dark years there in the middle,

00:10:31 ◼   ► and those times are now very, very well behind us,

00:10:35 ◼   ► and it's a great place to be right now.

00:10:37 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, the one bad decision you can make

00:10:39 ◼   ► is if you get the base model of the MacBook Air

00:10:42 ◼   ► or MacBook Pro M2, because the base models

00:10:44 ◼   ► have slow SSDs with single chip,

00:10:46 ◼   ► and it's probably not that big a deal,

00:10:49 ◼   ► but you should probably get a bigger SSD anyway,

00:10:51 ◼   ► So that's the bad decision you can make.

00:10:53 ◼   ► Don't get ones with 256 gigs of storage

00:10:56 ◼   ► for multiple reasons, but in particular

00:10:58 ◼   ► on this round of things because it is slower.

00:11:00 ◼   ► - I mean, it is, but again, I don't think that's a thing,

00:11:04 ◼   ► really, that's gonna matter to almost anybody.

00:11:06 ◼   ► Really, what you will feel is running out of space.

00:11:10 ◼   ► So the real reason you shouldn't get 256

00:11:12 ◼   ► is that it's just not enough space for comfortable use.

00:11:14 ◼   ► Get 512, and if you can't afford 512,

00:11:17 ◼   ► either wait until you can or get the M1 MacBook Air

00:11:20 ◼   ► because it's still for sale, with that having 512.

00:11:22 ◼   ► - I mean, the M1 MacBook Air is the problem here.

00:11:24 ◼   ► It was like, if you, let's say you have an M1 MacBook Air

00:11:26 ◼   ► and you wanna get an M2 because one is more than two,

00:11:28 ◼   ► or two is more than one, maybe.

00:11:30 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:11:31 ◼   ► And you wanna do that upgrade.

00:11:32 ◼   ► Well, if you get that upgrade and you make the mistake

00:11:34 ◼   ► of getting the base model, it could be that some things

00:11:36 ◼   ► that you do are actually slower on your fancy new computer,

00:11:38 ◼   ► and that's a bummer.

00:11:39 ◼   ► So, you know, it doesn't matter to the general public,

00:11:41 ◼   ► but if you're going M1 MacBook Air to M2 MacBook Air,

00:11:43 ◼   ► continue to be aware, do not buy the base model.

00:11:46 ◼   ► It's too little storage, and the storage is slow,

00:11:48 ◼   ► and they may affect your performance

00:11:50 ◼   ► if you do anything that is somewhat governed

00:11:53 ◼   ► by the SSD speed.

00:11:54 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:11:55 ◼   ► - So going back up the stack, down the stack, whatever,

00:11:58 ◼   ► across the stack, you went to two, not one, but two,

00:12:01 ◼   ► count them, two Phish concerts over the last couple of weeks.

00:12:04 ◼   ► Was this, were both of these in Jones Beach?

00:12:06 ◼   ► - You're forgetting, I also DFU restored my 14 inch.

00:12:09 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot about that.

00:12:10 ◼   ► - That's quite an experience.

00:12:12 ◼   ► So for those of you who don't know the details

00:12:14 ◼   ► of all this stuff, so at some point you might have had

00:12:17 ◼   ► to do this to an iPhone or an iPad.

00:12:19 ◼   ► So there's this process called DFU,

00:12:20 ◼   ► extension for device firmware update.

00:12:22 ◼   ► And this is one of the things where if the OS

00:12:24 ◼   ► on your iPhone or iPad gets really hosed,

00:12:28 ◼   ► like to the point where like it's just,

00:12:30 ◼   ► there's a major problem, it can't boot up

00:12:33 ◼   ► and get updates or whatever,

00:12:34 ◼   ► or where a more common reason you might have seen this

00:12:36 ◼   ► is if you ever wanna downgrade from a beta

00:12:39 ◼   ► back to the previous OS release.

00:12:41 ◼   ► The way you have to do this is you have to put the phone

00:12:44 ◼   ► in this special DFU mode, which basically involves like,

00:12:46 ◼   ► you hold down the power button for a long time

00:12:48 ◼   ► and then the screen turns black and it shows up,

00:12:52 ◼   ► you have to connect it to a Mac and it shows up

00:12:54 ◼   ► in the iTunes kind of interface and it says,

00:12:57 ◼   ► this device is in firmware restore mode

00:13:00 ◼   ► and you have to tell it to restore an update

00:13:02 ◼   ► and the computer controls the whole thing.

00:13:04 ◼   ► Well, the way that you can restore M1 and M2 based Macs,

00:13:09 ◼   ► they basically have that exact same process

00:13:12 ◼   ► available on them.

00:13:12 ◼   ► Now this isn't the only way you need to restore them

00:13:15 ◼   ► But the issues I was having with my 14 inch

00:13:19 ◼   ► were so weird and seemed like it might be

00:13:21 ◼   ► some kind of possibly like, you know,

00:13:23 ◼   ► firmware level problems that I was having

00:13:25 ◼   ► with some component of it maybe,

00:13:27 ◼   ► I decided let me restore this in the most,

00:13:30 ◼   ► to use a force realism, the most blow away way

00:13:33 ◼   ► that I possibly can.

00:13:35 ◼   ► So I looked up, you know, how to do this

00:13:37 ◼   ► and the process is hilarious because it basically

00:13:40 ◼   ► comes down to like, you know, you turn it off,

00:13:42 ◼   ► connect it to another computer, like to another Mac

00:13:45 ◼   ► with a USB cable and then you turn it on,

00:13:48 ◼   ► holding down these keys and then holding the power button

00:13:49 ◼   ► for a certain amount of time and you do the sequence

00:13:51 ◼   ► with holding down buttons for a long time

00:13:53 ◼   ► and then your laptop pops up as a DFU mode thing

00:13:58 ◼   ► in the other computer you connected it to.

00:14:00 ◼   ► So it's like a giant iPhone that you're restoring.

00:14:03 ◼   ► The process is very, very similar

00:14:05 ◼   ► and it actually worked surprisingly easily and well

00:14:09 ◼   ► and so far, I've only had it this way for about a week

00:14:13 ◼   ► but it seems like my problems may have been solved.

00:14:17 ◼   ► Now, I was having two recent major problems.

00:14:20 ◼   ► One was that I would plug it in sometimes

00:14:24 ◼   ► and sometimes it wouldn't accept a charge

00:14:26 ◼   ► from either MagSafe or USB-C

00:14:29 ◼   ► until I shut it down and restarted it.

00:14:32 ◼   ► That was a fairly recent thing.

00:14:34 ◼   ► That seems to have been a software problem

00:14:36 ◼   ► introduced in Mac OS 12.4

00:14:39 ◼   ► that seems to be fixed in Mac OS 12.5,

00:14:42 ◼   ► which came out recently.

00:14:43 ◼   ► So I've heard from a lot of people who had this issue,

00:14:46 ◼   ► if you had this issue where your computer,

00:14:48 ◼   ► or your recent MacBook Pro wouldn't accept a charge

00:14:51 ◼   ► until you shut it down, update to 12.5

00:14:54 ◼   ► and that seems to be fixing this problem for everybody.

00:14:57 ◼   ► So good luck with that.

00:14:59 ◼   ► It has fixed it for me so far.

00:15:01 ◼   ► But again, it's only been a week.

00:15:02 ◼   ► And then my other problem was it would

00:15:04 ◼   ► kind of not receive FaceTime calls and other weird stuff

00:15:08 ◼   ► until it would restart it and it would work

00:15:09 ◼   ► for a little while and then it would

00:15:10 ◼   ► stop receiving stuff again.

00:15:12 ◼   ► So far, that has been fixed as well,

00:15:14 ◼   ► since I did the DFU blow away thing.

00:15:16 ◼   ► So we'll see if that continues,

00:15:18 ◼   ► but so far, so good on that.

00:15:20 ◼   ► So that's it, it's restored, it's done.

00:15:22 ◼   ► And the restore process, by the way,

00:15:23 ◼   ► what I did was I just created a whole time machine

00:15:26 ◼   ► back up to a USB drive, did the whole restore,

00:15:29 ◼   ► had it restore from the time machine back up.

00:15:31 ◼   ► So I didn't have to reinstall anything.

00:15:32 ◼   ► It brought over all the passwords and everything.

00:15:34 ◼   ► I didn't have to reset up anything.

00:15:36 ◼   ► Everything transferred properly

00:15:37 ◼   ► with that time machine round trip situation.

00:15:40 ◼   ► And so far it's fixed.

00:15:42 ◼   ► So I'm very happy about that so far.

00:15:44 ◼   ► - Speaking of weird iPhone things

00:15:45 ◼   ► that you do with your computer,

00:15:47 ◼   ► when I got the M2 MacBook Air, I was setting it up

00:15:50 ◼   ► and I was using Migration Assistant,

00:15:51 ◼   ► I think we've talked about this before,

00:15:53 ◼   ► how great that program is and how it transfers everything,

00:15:55 ◼   ► how you can change transport method while it's running.

00:15:58 ◼   ► And I did that.

00:16:00 ◼   ► I mean, I connected the two things together

00:16:02 ◼   ► with a Thunderbolt cable

00:16:04 ◼   ► that I'm pretty sure was a Thunderbolt 3 cable

00:16:06 ◼   ► 'cause I think it came with like a Thunderbolt 3 peripheral

00:16:10 ◼   ► that I bought or whatever.

00:16:11 ◼   ► And I plugged it in and I saw the M2 change its connection

00:16:16 ◼   ► and it said this connection has been sampled

00:16:18 ◼   ► to transfer whatever umpteen gigabits per second

00:16:22 ◼   ► that it lists for Thunderbolt.

00:16:23 ◼   ► No, it's great, that's gonna work great.

00:16:25 ◼   ► And then the donor machine, the M1 Macbook Air was saying

00:16:29 ◼   ► like preparing documents and something or other, right?

00:16:33 ◼   ► And it sat on that preparing step for a really long time.

00:16:37 ◼   ► And I'm like, ah, give it a while.

00:16:38 ◼   ► So I gave it like two hours, came back,

00:16:39 ◼   ► it was still in that repairing step.

00:16:40 ◼   ► I'm like, okay, this can't possibly be right.

00:16:43 ◼   ► I'm going from an M1 MacBook Air to an M2 MacBook Air.

00:16:45 ◼   ► They're both pretty fast.

00:16:47 ◼   ► They don't have much stuff on them.

00:16:48 ◼   ► This should progress.

00:16:50 ◼   ► And I noticed that the M1 had a disagreement with the M2

00:16:53 ◼   ► about how they were connected.

00:16:54 ◼   ► The M2 said we're connected by a Thunderbolt

00:16:56 ◼   ► and the M1 said we're connected by Ethernet.

00:16:58 ◼   ► There was no Ethernet involved.

00:16:59 ◼   ► There's no Ethernet involved anywhere in this thing.

00:17:02 ◼   ► And so eventually I just had to give up and cancel

00:17:04 ◼   ► and say, no, stop.

00:17:06 ◼   ► That was a little bit tricky 'cause once you cancel,

00:17:08 ◼   ► the M2 MacBook Air wants to continue

00:17:11 ◼   ► through the setup process.

00:17:13 ◼   ► Like I'm like, you know, do you want to transfer anything?

00:17:14 ◼   ► No, I canceled the migration.

00:17:16 ◼   ► It's like, okay, well let's keep setting this up.

00:17:17 ◼   ► Like, no, no, I don't want to set up.

00:17:19 ◼   ► And eventually I found some way to go backwards

00:17:22 ◼   ► instead of forward, 'cause it just kept bouncing me forward

00:17:24 ◼   ► to, you know, make a user account, do all this stuff.

00:17:27 ◼   ► Like, no, no, I don't want to do any of that.

00:17:28 ◼   ► I think I just restarted or whatever.

00:17:30 ◼   ► Anyway, second time it worked, but just FYI,

00:17:32 ◼   ► if you're ever, 'cause I Googled this while I was waiting,

00:17:35 ◼   ► if you're ever doing a migration

00:17:37 ◼   ► and it seems like it's stuck on some kind of step,

00:17:40 ◼   ► there's no progress bar and it's preparing

00:17:41 ◼   ► to do something for hours and hours,

00:17:43 ◼   ► it's tough for me to say,

00:17:46 ◼   ► "Oh, it's probably not gonna progress."

00:17:48 ◼   ► You just kinda have to know,

00:17:49 ◼   ► are there 17 million files in this

00:17:53 ◼   ► and preparing should take three hours

00:17:55 ◼   ► and I have to wait it out?

00:17:56 ◼   ► Is it like Casey's Synology where,

00:17:58 ◼   ► what was it, like resilvering the drive

00:17:59 ◼   ► or migrating the content took some obscene amount of time

00:18:03 ◼   ► 'cause that's just how long it's gonna take?

00:18:05 ◼   ► You have to kind of know in your gut,

00:18:06 ◼   ► like back in the envelope, like is this a reasonable amount

00:18:09 ◼   ► of time for the job that it's doing?

00:18:11 ◼   ► Because you don't want to be like, well I waited two hours

00:18:12 ◼   ► and if it hasn't progressed in two hours,

00:18:14 ◼   ► I need to just, you know, cut it off and pull the plug.

00:18:17 ◼   ► That might not be true.

00:18:18 ◼   ► You'll never successfully do the thing

00:18:20 ◼   ► if the thing is gonna take actually eight hours

00:18:22 ◼   ► to get through the preparing step.

00:18:24 ◼   ► But this felt like it shouldn't take two hours

00:18:27 ◼   ► to do the preparing step, so I did a second try.

00:18:29 ◼   ► And lo and behold, on the second try,

00:18:30 ◼   ► everything went way fast, the preparing step was over

00:18:33 ◼   ► in mere minutes and it transferred all the data

00:18:34 ◼   ► and everything worked fine.

00:18:35 ◼   ► So word to the wise there.

00:18:37 ◼   ► And also it is possible to opt out of a migration,

00:18:42 ◼   ► to cancel a migration job and not continue with the setup.

00:18:47 ◼   ► Like what I didn't want to happen was,

00:18:49 ◼   ► oh, continue with the setup and make a user account.

00:18:51 ◼   ► And this is stupid and probably means nothing

00:18:53 ◼   ► and probably has no effect on migration systems,

00:18:55 ◼   ► but not behind the scenes.

00:18:56 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, but I really want my son's account

00:18:58 ◼   ► to be UID 501 or whatever,

00:19:00 ◼   ► like the first number that it fixed.

00:19:01 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:19:02 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:19:03 ◼   ► 'Cause it's his laptop.

00:19:05 ◼   ► - And if I make a new user account, like a temporary one,

00:19:10 ◼   ► and then when migration assistant runs,

00:19:11 ◼   ► it's gonna pick 502,

00:19:12 ◼   ► and that's just not the way it should be.

00:19:14 ◼   ► - Like an animal.

00:19:15 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Oh my God.

00:19:16 ◼   ► - Anyway, it is possible to just not create any user accounts

00:19:21 ◼   ► and redo the whole thing.

00:19:22 ◼   ► If it didn't, I might have to DFU update.

00:19:24 ◼   ► I think the only time I ever did,

00:19:25 ◼   ► I don't know if it was called DFU update,

00:19:27 ◼   ► it was like, maybe it was one of my T2 based Macs,

00:19:31 ◼   ► or maybe it was a work Mac or whatever.

00:19:32 ◼   ► I use Apple Configurator 2.

00:19:34 ◼   ► Is that the program you use to do the thing?

00:19:35 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:19:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, I love how it's called Apple Configurator.

00:19:39 ◼   ► I don't know what happened to Apple Configurator one

00:19:40 ◼   ► and why two was always in the name.

00:19:41 ◼   ► But anyway, I did that to a T2 Mac and they--

00:19:44 ◼   ► - It was Discovery D.

00:19:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, and they were, it's not in parentheses.

00:19:48 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:19:49 ◼   ► And the T2 Macs were enough like the modern ARM Macs

00:19:53 ◼   ► that this was the process.

00:19:55 ◼   ► I've never had to do it in an ARM Mac

00:19:56 ◼   ► and hopefully I never will, but fingers crossed there.

00:19:59 ◼   ► I have been updating Ventura

00:20:01 ◼   ► on my little external drive here.

00:20:03 ◼   ► and the Ventura Betas supposedly do update

00:20:06 ◼   ► the like Bridge OS version.

00:20:08 ◼   ► So technically when I boot into my old safe Monterey,

00:20:12 ◼   ► I'm using the new version of Bridge OS,

00:20:14 ◼   ► but so far it hasn't hosed.

00:20:15 ◼   ► I don't know, I haven't learned my lesson.

00:20:17 ◼   ► Remember last time when I hosed myself by updating?

00:20:19 ◼   ► Anyway, I do it for the show.

00:20:21 ◼   ► I gotta get the latest Ventura Beta

00:20:23 ◼   ► and get in there and see what's going on.

00:20:26 ◼   ► - We appreciate your sacrifice.

00:20:27 ◼   ► All right, are we finally at fish time?

00:20:29 ◼   ► Because I am curious how you ended up

00:20:32 ◼   ► seeing two concerts in the span of just a week.

00:20:35 ◼   ► - All right, so, Fish, even though no one likes them

00:20:39 ◼   ► except me, they somehow are able to sell out arenas

00:20:42 ◼   ► and stuff really easily, and--

00:20:44 ◼   ► - It's the same 3,000 people, you know.

00:20:47 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:20:48 ◼   ► I mean, you've gone to two concerts,

00:20:49 ◼   ► now you're seeing how it works.

00:20:50 ◼   ► Hmm, if I go to every concert, I become one of the 3,000.

00:20:53 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:20:55 ◼   ► - Anyway, so they were playing here at a local theater,

00:20:59 ◼   ► Jones Beach in the Long Island region.

00:21:03 ◼   ► I don't think it's actually on Long Island

00:21:04 ◼   ► 'cause I think it's on Cap Tree Island

00:21:07 ◼   ► or Jones Beach Island, anyway.

00:21:09 ◼   ► It's not on Long Island for whatever it's worth,

00:21:11 ◼   ► it's a different island.

00:21:12 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:21:13 ◼   ► But anyway, they were playing two nights in a row there.

00:21:16 ◼   ► And when Fish plays in,

00:21:20 ◼   ► when they play multiple nights in one location,

00:21:23 ◼   ► they don't repeat songs between those two nights.

00:21:24 ◼   ► Like the two shows will be 100% different from each other

00:21:27 ◼   ► in like what songs they play.

00:21:29 ◼   ► Not to mention the fact that they're a jam band,

00:21:30 ◼   ► so even if they would play the same song,

00:21:32 ◼   ► it would be pretty different both times,

00:21:33 ◼   ► but ignoring that fact, they always play different stuff

00:21:38 ◼   ► on different nights in the same place.

00:21:40 ◼   ► And I'd gone to two shows previously,

00:21:43 ◼   ► one last year and one like 10 years ago.

00:21:45 ◼   ► And in both of those shows, they were decent,

00:21:50 ◼   ► but I didn't get a lot of my favorites played.

00:21:53 ◼   ► And I thought, well, here I'm gonna be going to,

00:21:56 ◼   ► 'cause each of those that I went to before,

00:21:58 ◼   ► Those were each three night runs

00:22:00 ◼   ► that I was going to the middle night of.

00:22:03 ◼   ► Well, this time I was going to two nights in a row

00:22:07 ◼   ► of a two night run.

00:22:09 ◼   ► So I figured my odds of hearing my favorite songs,

00:22:12 ◼   ► or at least some of them, are way higher if I do that.

00:22:15 ◼   ► So let's do it, what the heck?

00:22:17 ◼   ► Let me see what it's like.

00:22:18 ◼   ► I've never been to two concerts in a row,

00:22:19 ◼   ► like two days right in a row.

00:22:22 ◼   ► Never done that.

00:22:24 ◼   ► Never been to Jones Beach at all anyway,

00:22:26 ◼   ► and I heard it was a great venue.

00:22:27 ◼   ► Tiff went there when she was younger and she loved it and everyone else said it's a great

00:22:31 ◼   ► venue so...

00:22:32 ◼   ► It is a great venue.

00:22:33 ◼   ► I thought, "Let's do it, what the heck?"

00:22:34 ◼   ► It wasn't that expensive and, you know, when I was arranging logistics, because there's

00:22:38 ◼   ► a question of like, "How do you get from Fire Island to Jones Beach?"

00:22:42 ◼   ► Yes, I asked you this in Slack and you ignored me, I guess, for this very moment.

00:22:46 ◼   ► It looks like you could just kind of take a boat and just zip over.

00:22:52 ◼   ► And theoretically one could do that and in fact I asked the water taxi company, "Hey,

00:22:56 ◼   ► Can we just get a boat like all the way there?

00:22:58 ◼   ► And the answer is yes, we could,

00:23:01 ◼   ► except there's apparently a five mile an hour speed limit

00:23:03 ◼   ► most of the way and it would take like three hours.

00:23:05 ◼   ► - Oh cool.

00:23:06 ◼   ► - So not an option anybody would actually want to do.

00:23:08 ◼   ► And you can't drive there because A,

00:23:13 ◼   ► you would have to drive over part of Fire Island,

00:23:14 ◼   ► which you can't really do,

00:23:15 ◼   ► and B, you really can't do it in the summertime.

00:23:17 ◼   ► So even people with driving permits

00:23:20 ◼   ► cannot drive on the island in the summer

00:23:21 ◼   ► 'cause there's too many people everywhere.

00:23:24 ◼   ► So anyway, the way you get to Jones Beach from Fire Island

00:23:27 ◼   ► is you have to take the ferry from Fire Island

00:23:30 ◼   ► back to Long Island, that's a half hour on the boat,

00:23:34 ◼   ► then have somebody, you or a car service,

00:23:37 ◼   ► somebody drive you from there to the concert venue.

00:23:40 ◼   ► Then eventually drive back from the concert venue

00:23:43 ◼   ► back to the ferry terminal, but oops, it's too late

00:23:45 ◼   ► because you get back at like 1230 at night

00:23:47 ◼   ► and there's no more ferries.

00:23:48 ◼   ► Then you just take a water taxi back to Fire Island.

00:23:51 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:23:52 ◼   ► So that's how you get there.

00:23:54 ◼   ► And anyway, so when I was scheduling all that stuff,

00:23:57 ◼   ► I just scheduled it to do two nights in a row.

00:23:59 ◼   ► I'm like, hey, can you do this Tuesday and Wednesday night

00:24:01 ◼   ► please at the exact same time?

00:24:02 ◼   ► Yes, okay, good.

00:24:04 ◼   ► So it was great.

00:24:05 ◼   ► And I was very pleased.

00:24:07 ◼   ► The two shows I saw, I think were very good shows.

00:24:12 ◼   ► And I'm still in the process of listening back

00:24:14 ◼   ► and kind of judging them with some distance

00:24:16 ◼   ► compared to my previous shows,

00:24:18 ◼   ► but I think they were my favorite shows that I've been to

00:24:21 ◼   ► by a pretty big margin.

00:24:23 ◼   ► They were great performances, this is a great tour,

00:24:25 ◼   ► this is a great part of the tour,

00:24:27 ◼   ► and my plan of seeing both nights of a two-night run

00:24:31 ◼   ► did pay off, I did hear a lot of my favorite songs,

00:24:33 ◼   ► and especially many that I hadn't heard

00:24:35 ◼   ► in the previous two shows that I went to.

00:24:37 ◼   ► - Good.

00:24:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, so it was a great success.

00:24:39 ◼   ► I'm now getting more accustomed to it.

00:24:41 ◼   ► This was also, I was very impressed

00:24:45 ◼   ► by Jones Beach as a venue.

00:24:46 ◼   ► Like, I got kinda like the expensive old man seats,

00:24:50 ◼   ► but in this case they were actually very good

00:24:52 ◼   ► because they were very central,

00:24:54 ◼   ► but it was like you had these little like boxes

00:24:56 ◼   ► you could just walk out of and like walk down

00:24:59 ◼   ► this open aisle to like this limited bathroom area

00:25:02 ◼   ► and stuff so it was very convenient

00:25:03 ◼   ► for like what old people actually want

00:25:04 ◼   ► which is like I want a good amount of space around me

00:25:06 ◼   ► and I want to be able to get in and out quickly

00:25:08 ◼   ► and I need easy access to a bathroom.

00:25:10 ◼   ► So it was great for all those things.

00:25:13 ◼   ► So I was very, very happy about that.

00:25:15 ◼   ► - I know why Billy Joel takes a helicopter.

00:25:18 ◼   ► - To the bathroom?

00:25:19 ◼   ► No, so to get to and from his Long Island home

00:25:23 ◼   ► to Madison Square Garden.

00:25:24 ◼   ► You read that article?

00:25:25 ◼   ► Oh.

00:25:25 ◼   ► He flies out to Madison Square Garden for his concert.

00:25:28 ◼   ► He's a helicopter.

00:25:28 ◼   ► He sings his song, makes whatever million dollars,

00:25:31 ◼   ► and goes back on the helicopter to his house.

00:25:33 ◼   ► None of that surprises me.

00:25:34 ◼   ► I hadn't heard that, but I'm not surprised at all.

00:25:36 ◼   ► Because you can imagine, like, if you're out there

00:25:37 ◼   ► and you're a Long Island beach house,

00:25:39 ◼   ► and you want to get to Madison Square Garden

00:25:40 ◼   ► and back for one night--

00:25:41 ◼   ► Oh, forget it.

00:25:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:42 ◼   ► Geographically, you look like, oh, that doesn't seem that bad.

00:25:45 ◼   ► But logistics-wise, even if you have someone driving you

00:25:48 ◼   ► in a fancy car or whatever.

00:25:49 ◼   ► It's just a nightmare, but the helicopter's zoop real quick.

00:25:52 ◼   ► - So how long did it take just ballpark to get there

00:25:56 ◼   ► and then later to get home?

00:25:58 ◼   ► - If I include the time on the water

00:26:00 ◼   ► and then walking back to my house from the boat.

00:26:02 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:26:03 ◼   ► Let me see, probably-- - Like door to door.

00:26:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, like 30 there, 40-ish there.

00:26:09 ◼   ► Yeah, about an hour and a half each way.

00:26:10 ◼   ► - I mean, that's not a short evening,

00:26:13 ◼   ► but it's not a completely egregious trip.

00:26:16 ◼   ► - No, it really wasn't that bad.

00:26:18 ◼   ► - If you'll allow me, who did you go with?

00:26:22 ◼   ► - I went with two different groups of people

00:26:23 ◼   ► because I don't know anybody in my friend groups here

00:26:27 ◼   ► who liked them enough to go to two nights in a row.

00:26:30 ◼   ► So--

00:26:32 ◼   ► - Can I just tell you for the record?

00:26:33 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:26:34 ◼   ► - I do not think I would actively enjoy a fish concert,

00:26:38 ◼   ► but if we lived closer,

00:26:39 ◼   ► I would absolutely go to one with you.

00:26:41 ◼   ► And maybe I would enjoy it, maybe I wouldn't,

00:26:42 ◼   ► but I would go to one for sure.

00:26:44 ◼   ► I mean, come on, you know, you gotta try it.

00:26:45 ◼   ► But anyway, so who did you go with?

00:26:47 ◼   ► Anyone that we would know?

00:26:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, so night one I went with some local guy friends.

00:26:52 ◼   ► And I told them, I'm like,

00:26:53 ◼   ► "Look, don't listen to Phish beforehand."

00:26:55 ◼   ► 'Cause they were both familiar with them in a concept,

00:26:57 ◼   ► but they hadn't been to a concert.

00:26:58 ◼   ► I'm like, "Look, don't listen beforehand."

00:27:00 ◼   ► So I'm like, "I know what's gonna happen.

00:27:01 ◼   ► "You're gonna listen, you're gonna realize you hate them,

00:27:03 ◼   ► "and then you're gonna cancel."

00:27:04 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:27:05 ◼   ► So don't, just don't listen beforehand.

00:27:07 ◼   ► But fortunately, they both liked it.

00:27:10 ◼   ► I don't know if they liked it.

00:27:11 ◼   ► They certainly, I don't think,

00:27:12 ◼   ► would have gone for two nights in a row,

00:27:13 ◼   ► but they both liked it.

00:27:14 ◼   ► and then the second night Tiff joined me

00:27:17 ◼   ► with another friend as well.

00:27:19 ◼   ► So Tiff even volunteered to come with me

00:27:23 ◼   ► for one of the nights and had a good time.

00:27:27 ◼   ► - See, that's what I'm saying.

00:27:28 ◼   ► I bet, you know, it's like, as an example,

00:27:30 ◼   ► I really don't care for baseball.

00:27:32 ◼   ► It's just not my thing.

00:27:32 ◼   ► I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not my thing.

00:27:34 ◼   ► But going to an actual baseball game

00:27:37 ◼   ► is an entirely different experience

00:27:39 ◼   ► that is quite delightful.

00:27:40 ◼   ► I would never seek out fish or a fish concert,

00:27:43 ◼   ► I bet you I'd have a great time at a Fish concert,

00:27:45 ◼   ► 'cause why, how can you not?

00:27:46 ◼   ► It's live music, it's hard to have a bad time at live music.

00:27:48 ◼   ► And I am very pleased that Tiff seems

00:27:51 ◼   ► to have had an okay time.

00:27:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's, I feel the exact same way.

00:27:54 ◼   ► Like, I've, I'm not a sports person, as you all know.

00:27:57 ◼   ► However, and I would never choose to watch sports on TV,

00:28:01 ◼   ► or follow what's going on in sports,

00:28:03 ◼   ► like on the internet or anything.

00:28:04 ◼   ► However, if my friends are going to a sports game

00:28:07 ◼   ► and they invite me to go with them,

00:28:09 ◼   ► and the logistics can work, I will say yes.

00:28:11 ◼   ► because I actually like live events sometimes

00:28:15 ◼   ► and it's a totally different experience

00:28:18 ◼   ► when you are there live, like in the sports circle,

00:28:21 ◼   ► cheering on with all the other people

00:28:22 ◼   ► about the sports teams, like that's all great

00:28:25 ◼   ► and it's a big group energy experience

00:28:28 ◼   ► and you pay attention, you get into it,

00:28:30 ◼   ► eat the crappy food for the thousand dollars.

00:28:32 ◼   ► Like it's the whole experience and I get the appeal of that

00:28:36 ◼   ► even if it's an activity or a band or whatever

00:28:40 ◼   ► that I wouldn't normally get that into

00:28:41 ◼   ► or follow outside of that experience.

00:28:44 ◼   ► So yeah, so most people don't listen to fish

00:28:48 ◼   ► as much as I do when they're just working

00:28:50 ◼   ► throughout their day, but if you bring most people

00:28:53 ◼   ► to a fish concert and you provide them

00:28:55 ◼   ► with enough chemicals to make their brain happy,

00:28:58 ◼   ► they will usually enjoy it. (laughs)

00:29:00 ◼   ► And there's a whole lot of people who listen,

00:29:03 ◼   ► some of my friends are on it, I'll be playing fish

00:29:05 ◼   ► and they'll be like, yeah, I would like this

00:29:07 ◼   ► if I was high right now, but not now.

00:29:09 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:29:10 ◼   ► And like, okay, I understand that.

00:29:11 ◼   ► If that's, you know, you don't have to like them

00:29:14 ◼   ► as much as I do in order to enjoy them

00:29:16 ◼   ► in that kind of context.

00:29:17 ◼   ► But, you know, I happen to like them so much

00:29:19 ◼   ► that I wanna listen to it all the time.

00:29:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, and so since Tiff volunteered

00:29:24 ◼   ► to go to a fish show with you, quid pro quo Clarice,

00:29:28 ◼   ► what are you gonna do now?

00:29:30 ◼   ► - I hope it doesn't come up.

00:29:31 ◼   ► I offered to go to the Her Dave Matthews Show

00:29:33 ◼   ► with her earlier this summer.

00:29:35 ◼   ► - Oh, yeah, but she was smart and said no.

00:29:37 ◼   ► - Well, yeah, fortunately there were enough other people

00:29:40 ◼   ► in that group that my company was not required.

00:29:43 ◼   ► But I would, look, I would do it, and you know what?

00:29:47 ◼   ► I don't like Dave Matthews, but again,

00:29:49 ◼   ► I would probably be fine at the concert.

00:29:52 ◼   ► I can't guarantee that I would love it,

00:29:54 ◼   ► but I would at least enjoy myself at a concert.

00:29:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's how I feel about Phish.

00:29:58 ◼   ► Like, I don't know if I would go leave the event saying,

00:30:02 ◼   ► holy crap, that was the night of my life.

00:30:04 ◼   ► But it is okay to go somewhere, experience something,

00:30:07 ◼   ► and say, that was fun.

00:30:08 ◼   ► Maybe not something I wanna do every day,

00:30:10 ◼   ► but that was fun.

00:30:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, you probably wouldn't buy the poster.

00:30:12 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:30:13 ◼   ► We are brought to you this week by businesscards.io.

00:30:17 ◼   ► This is a digital business card

00:30:18 ◼   ► you keep in your Apple Wallet.

00:30:20 ◼   ► You can simply show your card to someone,

00:30:22 ◼   ► and they can access your digital business card

00:30:24 ◼   ► with all your information,

00:30:25 ◼   ► and also send you back their information if they want to.

00:30:27 ◼   ► So businesscards.io supports your content information,

00:30:30 ◼   ► social media profile links, embedded video, custom links,

00:30:34 ◼   ► and all of this is right there in your Apple Wallet,

00:30:37 ◼   ► and even your Apple Watch wallet.

00:30:39 ◼   ► And so the advantages of this are obvious.

00:30:41 ◼   ► So first of all, you can't forget

00:30:42 ◼   ► your business cards at home.

00:30:43 ◼   ► So even if you're at an event somewhere,

00:30:45 ◼   ► you don't have to worry, did I forget my cards?

00:30:47 ◼   ► You always have your card with you.

00:30:48 ◼   ► And suppose maybe you don't have any cards made yet

00:30:51 ◼   ► and you're at an event and all of a sudden

00:30:53 ◼   ► somebody wants your info, you can go to businesscards.io

00:30:55 ◼   ► and in five minutes you can have an account set up

00:30:57 ◼   ► and make brand new cards right there

00:30:59 ◼   ► all from the event you're at.

00:31:00 ◼   ► You can be sharing your card with people in five minutes.

00:31:03 ◼   ► And suppose your phone number or your email changes.

00:31:06 ◼   ► You don't need to throw away all your old cards

00:31:08 ◼   ► and get new ones printed.

00:31:09 ◼   ► Just update it on the site.

00:31:10 ◼   ► It's really easy.

00:31:12 ◼   ► And of course, because this is all digital,

00:31:14 ◼   ► you have other advantages too.

00:31:16 ◼   ► You have statistics and access stats.

00:31:18 ◼   ► So you can see, you know, with traditional cards,

00:31:20 ◼   ► you have no visibility into what people do with them.

00:31:22 ◼   ► With digital business cards from businesscards.io,

00:31:24 ◼   ► you can get access to stats on each of your cards

00:31:27 ◼   ► from the dashboard, so you know if someone

00:31:29 ◼   ► actually uses your card.

00:31:30 ◼   ► And then unlike traditional printed business cards,

00:31:32 ◼   ► when you show your digital business card to someone,

00:31:34 ◼   ► they can send you back their info if they want.

00:31:37 ◼   ► And all those contacts that you gather

00:31:39 ◼   ► are available in your dashboard at businesscards.io.

00:31:42 ◼   ► You can quickly do things like export them

00:31:44 ◼   ► to your CRM of choice.

00:31:46 ◼   ► There's lots of different integration possibilities there.

00:31:48 ◼   ► So visit businesscards.io and sign up for a trial today

00:31:52 ◼   ► and save 15% on your subscription price

00:31:54 ◼   ► with the coupon code ATP.

00:31:56 ◼   ► Once again, that's businesscards.io

00:31:59 ◼   ► and save 15% on your subscription price

00:32:00 ◼   ► with coupon code ATP.

00:32:02 ◼   ► Thank you so much to businesscards.io

00:32:04 ◼   ► for sponsoring our show.

00:32:06 ◼   ► - Oh my word, well we have had an eventful couple of weeks

00:32:11 ◼   ► for nothing going on in the world.

00:32:14 ◼   ► So we actually don't have all that much follow up this week,

00:32:18 ◼   ► which is extremely surprising to me.

00:32:19 ◼   ► We could have recordings that are like two days apart

00:32:23 ◼   ► because of odd scheduling conflicts or whatever,

00:32:24 ◼   ► and have a mountain of follow up.

00:32:26 ◼   ► We've had two weeks and we have almost no follow up,

00:32:28 ◼   ► but let's power through.

00:32:29 ◼   ► - Everyone's on vacation, that's fine.

00:32:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, we're always on vacation in California.

00:32:33 ◼   ► But anyways, Fletcher O'Connor's custom domain email.

00:32:36 ◼   ► This was an Australian fellow that wanted to do, you know,

00:32:39 ◼   ► some sort of custom domain for his email.

00:32:41 ◼   ► And we were trying to figure out

00:32:42 ◼   ► what can you do about that?

00:32:43 ◼   ► And Mark Voss writes that the .au domain

00:32:48 ◼   ► is now available for registration.

00:32:49 ◼   ► And that namespace is not well polluted yet.

00:32:53 ◼   ► Brendan Reagan writes, there's also .id.au.

00:32:56 ◼   ► However, there are some rules there.

00:32:57 ◼   ► To use that, you must A, match a person's legal name,

00:33:01 ◼   ► first name or family name.

00:33:02 ◼   ► B, have an acronym or abbreviation of the person's

00:33:05 ◼   ► legal name, first name or family name,

00:33:06 ◼   ► or C, be a nickname of the person.

00:33:08 ◼   ► It seems kind of flimsy to me. - Wait, hold on.

00:33:10 ◼   ► - This seems super flimsy, but that's the rules.

00:33:12 ◼   ► - A nickname, that could be a lot of things.

00:33:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, but here we are.

00:33:17 ◼   ► And a lot of people wrote in and said,

00:33:18 ◼   ► and I'm making up the specifics here,

00:33:20 ◼   ► but oh, I am, you know, kclist.email or whatever,

00:33:24 ◼   ► and apparently a lot of those weird top-level domains,

00:33:28 ◼   ► like .email, for example, they can cause real big

00:33:31 ◼   ► validation problems with forms, like online forms

00:33:33 ◼   ► that aren't the best or aren't the most modern

00:33:36 ◼   ► at doing validation.

00:33:37 ◼   ► So using .email, I'm not even sure if that's a thing,

00:33:40 ◼   ► I presume it is, using .email or an equivalent

00:33:43 ◼   ► can be not so great because you might end up

00:33:45 ◼   ► having to have a different alias that's at .com or something

00:33:49 ◼   ► in order to just pass through form validation.

00:33:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's one of the worst problems

00:33:53 ◼   ► you can run into because at that moment,

00:33:55 ◼   ► you wanna sign up for the thing,

00:33:57 ◼   ► you wanna create an account on the system or whatever,

00:33:59 ◼   ► and it says, please enter a valid email address.

00:34:02 ◼   ► Assuming it's not trivial client-side validation,

00:34:07 ◼   ► let's say you're not a web developer,

00:34:09 ◼   ► assuming you can't get around it, what do you do then?

00:34:12 ◼   ► You either have to have another address,

00:34:14 ◼   ► like I said, I have another,

00:34:16 ◼   ► what's the point of having your own domain

00:34:17 ◼   ► if you have to have this second email address?

00:34:19 ◼   ► Anyway, that's a mess.

00:34:20 ◼   ► Or you're in the position where you're trying

00:34:23 ◼   ► to contact the website somehow, get to a human,

00:34:26 ◼   ► to say, hey, I'm trying to sign up

00:34:28 ◼   ► for an account on your website,

00:34:29 ◼   ► and it tells me my email address is not valued,

00:34:31 ◼   ► but I assure you it is, I'm emailing you from it right now.

00:34:34 ◼   ► That's like-- - Good luck with that.

00:34:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's a super advanced level

00:34:39 ◼   ► of corporate bureaucracy penetration.

00:34:41 ◼   ► Trying to get to a human

00:34:42 ◼   ► who is going to answer that question,

00:34:44 ◼   ► there's no good website for that.

00:34:47 ◼   ► Like, if you're trying to do a google.com,

00:34:49 ◼   ► some Google property, forget it,

00:34:50 ◼   ► you're never gonna get a human.

00:34:51 ◼   ► And if you're trying to do some dinky little website

00:34:53 ◼   ► that was made, you know, seven years ago by a teenager

00:34:56 ◼   ► who has since moved on, you're not gonna get through that.

00:34:57 ◼   ► Like there's no situation where I can imagine

00:34:59 ◼   ► that going smoothly.

00:35:00 ◼   ► And then you're just like,

00:35:01 ◼   ► well I can't create an account of this thing.

00:35:03 ◼   ► And it just makes you feel so bad about your, you know,

00:35:06 ◼   ► your fancy custom domain that you were so happy about.

00:35:08 ◼   ► Two seconds, I'm gonna have one address

00:35:10 ◼   ► and it's gonna be a domain that I own

00:35:11 ◼   ► and I'm gonna unify on and I'm gonna own my identity

00:35:13 ◼   ► and I can't use it.

00:35:14 ◼   ► Even if you can't use it on just two places,

00:35:16 ◼   ► it really sucks.

00:35:18 ◼   ► So please, people, fix your form.

00:35:20 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know why I'm even saying this,

00:35:21 ◼   ► we're still, how many decades into the web,

00:35:24 ◼   ► we're still in a situation where they say,

00:35:25 ◼   ► oh, enter your phone number here.

00:35:27 ◼   ► Don't enter hyphens, we can't handle that.

00:35:28 ◼   ► It's like, just remove the hyphens!

00:35:31 ◼   ► Oh my God, that's still a thing.

00:35:32 ◼   ► And every time I see that, I'm like, really?

00:35:34 ◼   ► 2022, please enter digits only?

00:35:37 ◼   ► Really?

00:35:38 ◼   ► Absolutely boggles my mind.

00:35:41 ◼   ► I mean, people who aren't programmers,

00:35:42 ◼   ► maybe think that's just normal or whatever,

00:35:43 ◼   ► but there never was a reason for that,

00:35:45 ◼   ► and there continues to not be a reason for it,

00:35:47 ◼   ► and yet it still exists.

00:35:48 ◼   ► - Hey, by the way, have you noticed,

00:35:51 ◼   ► I keep noticing this, I've occasionally recently signed up

00:35:55 ◼   ► for some new website or whatever,

00:35:57 ◼   ► using the Sign in with Apple option

00:35:59 ◼   ► where it can hide your email address,

00:36:01 ◼   ► where it sets up a forwarding alias

00:36:03 ◼   ► and then it forwards to your real address.

00:36:05 ◼   ► In, I think I've done this three times in the last few months

00:36:08 ◼   ► and in all cases, all three times,

00:36:11 ◼   ► right after the sign up form,

00:36:13 ◼   ► the website has kicked me to a secondary form

00:36:15 ◼   ► where it's like, all right, what's your real email address?

00:36:17 ◼   ► - Oh, really?

00:36:18 ◼   ► - And it won't let me proceed

00:36:19 ◼   ► until I give it an actual email address

00:36:21 ◼   ► that's not the relay one.

00:36:22 ◼   ► It's like, well then what the heck did I just do that for?

00:36:23 ◼   ► Like what's the point of all this stuff?

00:36:25 ◼   ► Now they have two of my email addresses

00:36:27 ◼   ► and I lose the, and now I have to figure out

00:36:30 ◼   ► how do I ever log in here again?

00:36:31 ◼   ► Like it's just, leave it up to the web to ruin everything.

00:36:36 ◼   ► - Everything.

00:36:37 ◼   ► - Speaking of ruining everything

00:36:38 ◼   ► and web authentication and accounts,

00:36:40 ◼   ► it's one of the things that struck me

00:36:42 ◼   ► about the various passkey demos that Apple did at WWDC,

00:36:46 ◼   ► right, 'cause they're showing the cool passkey things

00:36:48 ◼   ► they were placing for passwords or whatever.

00:36:50 ◼   ► And I think in all the demos that I've ever seen,

00:36:53 ◼   ► They have a sample, a toy app,

00:36:55 ◼   ► just to show what the authentication flow looks like.

00:36:58 ◼   ► Since you don't have to pick a password,

00:37:01 ◼   ► there is no account creation screen where they say,

00:37:03 ◼   ► enter your password and then confirm to enter the password.

00:37:05 ◼   ► That doesn't exist anymore.

00:37:07 ◼   ► But there is still a place,

00:37:09 ◼   ► at least in this demo application,

00:37:11 ◼   ► where it says, enter, and they have on the demo,

00:37:14 ◼   ► enter a username.

00:37:15 ◼   ► And as we've discussed on past shows,

00:37:17 ◼   ► no one should ever be prompted to enter a username.

00:37:20 ◼   ► a username as in something that's not an email address,

00:37:23 ◼   ► or maybe it is an email address.

00:37:25 ◼   ► It's that situation where it's like,

00:37:27 ◼   ► your username could be an email address,

00:37:29 ◼   ► but it might not be, or it has to be an email address.

00:37:30 ◼   ► But anyway, in the bad old days,

00:37:32 ◼   ► they made you pick usernames,

00:37:34 ◼   ► since you'd have to be like JSmith1234,

00:37:36 ◼   ► you'd have to remember that you were JSmith1234,

00:37:39 ◼   ► but if you forgot your username,

00:37:41 ◼   ► the forgot password flow,

00:37:42 ◼   ► they also had a forgot username flow

00:37:44 ◼   ► where you'd put your email address.

00:37:45 ◼   ► It's like, just use the email address as the username.

00:37:47 ◼   ► Almost everybody got on that page,

00:37:48 ◼   ► but still occasionally you have to pick a username.

00:37:50 ◼   ► So anyway, in the Paskey thing, the demo they show,

00:37:53 ◼   ► they keep showing enter a username,

00:37:54 ◼   ► and the people would enter like a username

00:37:55 ◼   ► with like their first name, space, last name.

00:37:57 ◼   ► It reminds me of the original Apple ID system,

00:37:59 ◼   ► where your Apple ID could be capital J, John,

00:38:03 ◼   ► capital S, Smith, with a space between them.

00:38:06 ◼   ► That could be your Apple ID.

00:38:07 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:38:09 ◼   ► My original Apple ID was not an email address.

00:38:11 ◼   ► It wasn't, you know, my first and last name,

00:38:13 ◼   ► but it wasn't an email address, it was just a string.

00:38:16 ◼   ► It was a username, and eventually Apple forced everyone

00:38:18 ◼   ► to change to email addresses.

00:38:19 ◼   ► So even if we get to the mythical future of pass keys

00:38:22 ◼   ► where no one has to remember passwords anymore

00:38:24 ◼   ► and authentication's great, we still have the problem

00:38:26 ◼   ► of okay, but who are you, right?

00:38:29 ◼   ► Should I enter my email address?

00:38:30 ◼   ► What if I wanna hide my email address?

00:38:32 ◼   ► Like that all still exists, and the thing

00:38:33 ◼   ► that Marco was encountering is like,

00:38:35 ◼   ► oh, so you're signing with Apple

00:38:36 ◼   ► and hiding your email address.

00:38:37 ◼   ► Well, we can detect that you're doing that,

00:38:38 ◼   ► and we don't like it, we want your real email address,

00:38:40 ◼   ► so please enter that here.

00:38:41 ◼   ► You know, people can do whatever they want

00:38:43 ◼   ► on their websites, like their authentication flow

00:38:45 ◼   ► can support whatever features they want it to support,

00:38:47 ◼   ► And if they say, "Hey, you can't get through the flow

00:38:49 ◼   ► "without giving us a real email address

00:38:50 ◼   ► "and we can auto-detect ones that look like

00:38:52 ◼   ► "they're the fake Apple ones,"

00:38:54 ◼   ► then that's what they'll do.

00:38:54 ◼   ► So I do kind of fear that even if we defeat passwords,

00:38:58 ◼   ► the username monster is still out there

00:39:00 ◼   ► waiting to eat us all.

00:39:01 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:39:03 ◼   ► - Well, for what it's worth,

00:39:04 ◼   ► I will bring up Fastmail one more time.

00:39:07 ◼   ► They didn't sponsor this episode,

00:39:08 ◼   ► but hey, I would love some free Fastmail.

00:39:10 ◼   ► - You should put your referral link in the show notes, Casey.

00:39:12 ◼   ► - I should put my referral link in the show notes.

00:39:14 ◼   ► - I feel like I should have a referral link

00:39:15 ◼   ► for someday when I go off Gmail.

00:39:16 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:39:19 ◼   ► But anyways, they do a similar like massed email thing.

00:39:21 ◼   ► And I will admit, it's not as straightforward

00:39:24 ◼   ► as the way it works with Apple,

00:39:25 ◼   ► where you just say,

00:39:26 ◼   ► "Yes, I would like a massed email right now, please."

00:39:29 ◼   ► But it's pretty straightforward to do it on their website.

00:39:32 ◼   ► And that ends up giving you just like two random words

00:39:37 ◼   ► that, and I think a numeral that you use as an email address,

00:39:41 ◼   ► but it's at your domain.

00:39:43 ◼   ► So it's like two random words,

00:39:44 ◼   ► with a couple numbers @caseylist.com.

00:39:46 ◼   ► And that's a lot less obvious, I suspect,

00:39:49 ◼   ► to a vendor or whatever, to a website,

00:39:52 ◼   ► than the Apple alias that basically everyone is sharing,

00:39:55 ◼   ► or the same Apple alias format that everyone is sharing.

00:39:59 ◼   ► So as an example, like one of them on mine

00:40:02 ◼   ► is like fuzzy.koala1234, basically,

00:40:05 ◼   ► you know, or something like that.

00:40:06 ◼   ► - And then you can never remember what that is,

00:40:07 ◼   ► if you ever have to go through

00:40:08 ◼   ► the forgot password flow, right?

00:40:10 ◼   ► - That's true, but first of all,

00:40:11 ◼   ► I have all this in one password.

00:40:13 ◼   ► And second of all, they have a, not a dashboard,

00:40:14 ◼   ► They have a page in settings where you can look at all of them and it tells you whether

00:40:19 ◼   ► or not they're active, when the last message was, three months ago, two months ago, yesterday,

00:40:23 ◼   ► et cetera, and then you can go in and edit it and so on.

00:40:25 ◼   ► So it really, really is pretty slick.

00:40:28 ◼   ► So I will put my referral code in the show notes, but it's www.caseless.com/fastmail.

00:40:34 ◼   ► Just for you, just to make it nice and easy.

00:40:38 ◼   ► >> Make that URL shorter if you get off the triple W dot.

00:40:41 ◼   ► >> Oh, would you stop?

00:40:42 ◼   ► I don't want to hear it, Dad.

00:40:43 ◼   ► Leave me alone.

00:40:44 ◼   ► Oh, you stop it. I'm an old man. What do you expect from me? Anyway, moving right along,

00:40:50 ◼   ► Chris Church writes with regard to BMW subscriptions, "If you paid 400" – this is pounds, that's

00:40:57 ◼   ► fake money, right? That's not real, is it? It's weight. Anyway, "If you paid 400 bucks

00:41:01 ◼   ► for heated seats at time of purchase, you would not need to pay a subscription to use

00:41:05 ◼   ► them." BMW said this on the BBC, "Where heated seats or any feature available in the

00:41:10 ◼   ► the connected drive store have been purchased

00:41:11 ◼   ► when a customer vehicle is ordered,

00:41:13 ◼   ► no subsequent subscription or payment is necessary."

00:41:16 ◼   ► The subscription model enables customers

00:41:18 ◼   ► to try these features later as opposed to paying upfront.

00:41:20 ◼   ► This means that the hardware to facilitate these features

00:41:22 ◼   ► will be built into all models,

00:41:23 ◼   ► which makes sense from a manufacturing perspective

00:41:25 ◼   ► as it makes for fewer hardware configurations.

00:41:28 ◼   ► I still really wanna hate all of this,

00:41:30 ◼   ► but it does make a little bit of sense to me.

00:41:34 ◼   ► - Only for features that they can build in,

00:41:37 ◼   ► like eating the cost.

00:41:38 ◼   ► Like again, they're not gonna build in the V8

00:41:39 ◼   ► when you pay for the V6 and you unlock the two cylinders,

00:41:42 ◼   ► so that doesn't make any monetary sense.

00:41:44 ◼   ► Apparently, seat heaters are cheap enough to include

00:41:46 ◼   ► that it doesn't really add an impact,

00:41:47 ◼   ► but for example, leather seats is not something like that.

00:41:52 ◼   ► They put cloth over it, and if you pay extra,

00:41:54 ◼   ► you can rip the cloth off underneath this leather.

00:41:56 ◼   ► There's a narrow window of features that can work like that.

00:42:00 ◼   ► I'm still not quite sure how it works

00:42:03 ◼   ► in terms of reselling,

00:42:05 ◼   ► and not having to pay for it upfront

00:42:08 ◼   ► makes it feel a little bit better,

00:42:09 ◼   ► But then I almost feel like, okay, well,

00:42:11 ◼   ► if you want me to unlock it later,

00:42:13 ◼   ► can't I just do the same thing as I would have done

00:42:15 ◼   ► when I purchased it, as opposed to paying

00:42:17 ◼   ► $12 a month forever so my steering wheel can be warm?

00:42:22 ◼   ► I mean, maybe, again, due to the math,

00:42:24 ◼   ► but I just feel like even if the math works out

00:42:26 ◼   ► that it is actually less expensive to do that

00:42:27 ◼   ► than to pay $400 for the heating steering wheel,

00:42:29 ◼   ► it just feels worse to pay $12 a month

00:42:31 ◼   ► for your heated steering wheel,

00:42:32 ◼   ► which is separate from the $18 a month for a heated butt.

00:42:35 ◼   ► - But the other nice thing about this is,

00:42:37 ◼   ► So I buy presumably a white BMW and I decide I want to sell it to one of you knuckleheads.

00:42:45 ◼   ► Well, that would never happen for many reasons, one of which being it being white.

00:42:49 ◼   ► But nevertheless, in this fantasy world, can you imagine selling a car to John?

00:42:52 ◼   ► No.

00:42:53 ◼   ► Oh my God.

00:42:54 ◼   ► No, I would.

00:42:55 ◼   ► I don't need any more oil stains in my driveway.

00:42:56 ◼   ► Thanks.

00:42:57 ◼   ► No BMWs here.

00:42:58 ◼   ► Oh, too soon.

00:42:59 ◼   ► Actually, I don't think that ever leaked oil.

00:43:01 ◼   ► That might be the only thing it didn't do.

00:43:02 ◼   ► That's not true.

00:43:03 ◼   ► Your BMW is leaking oil right now.

00:43:05 ◼   ► There is no BMW that doesn't leak oil.

00:43:08 ◼   ► It's one thing you learn from YouTube

00:43:09 ◼   ► and car rebuilding channels, BMW's leak oil

00:43:12 ◼   ► is impossible for BMWs not to leak oil.

00:43:16 ◼   ► - I don't know if it leaked.

00:43:16 ◼   ► They definitely spent oil by fuel.

00:43:18 ◼   ► - I mean, maybe when it's brand new, it's not gonna leak,

00:43:20 ◼   ► but eventually BMWs will get oil leaks.

00:43:22 ◼   ► They leak oil from everywhere.

00:43:24 ◼   ► - I mean, doesn't everything leak eventually

00:43:26 ◼   ► on an infinite time scale?

00:43:27 ◼   ► - I hope I don't.

00:43:29 ◼   ► - No, but I think in the useful lifetime of a car,

00:43:32 ◼   ► it's not a given that all the seals

00:43:34 ◼   ► that are supposed to keep oil in will die

00:43:36 ◼   ► and need to be replaced on like a frequent basis

00:43:39 ◼   ► like they do with BMWs.

00:43:40 ◼   ► It's the reason they have a reputation.

00:43:41 ◼   ► I don't know what it is.

00:43:42 ◼   ► I don't know why their gaskets don't work as well

00:43:44 ◼   ► as other people's or whatever, but there we go.

00:43:48 ◼   ► - Moving on.

00:43:49 ◼   ► If I sold my hypothetical white BMW to anyone,

00:43:51 ◼   ► it doesn't have to be, it doesn't matter who it is,

00:43:53 ◼   ► let's pretend I'm selling it to Marco

00:43:54 ◼   ► because of the two of you, that he's my only hope.

00:43:58 ◼   ► I sell my BMW to Marco and because apparently I live

00:44:01 ◼   ► in a place that doesn't have winter supposedly,

00:44:02 ◼   ► even though that's not true.

00:44:04 ◼   ► I didn't option a heated seats or heated steering wheel,

00:44:08 ◼   ► but Marco living in a place that indisputably has winter,

00:44:11 ◼   ► he would like those things.

00:44:12 ◼   ► Well, what's nice about the setup is he can go

00:44:15 ◼   ► and pay either a one-time fee or a monthly fee or whatever,

00:44:17 ◼   ► and get the heated seats and heated wheel

00:44:19 ◼   ► that I never bothered paying for.

00:44:21 ◼   ► So there is something to be said for this.

00:44:23 ◼   ► I think there is a way you can look at this,

00:44:26 ◼   ► that it's not absolutely disgusting,

00:44:29 ◼   ► but it sure feels a little gross

00:44:31 ◼   ► the way it was originally presented to us.

00:44:33 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:44:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where like,

00:44:37 ◼   ► some nerd somewhere made a good argument for this

00:44:40 ◼   ► on nerdy principles in the company.

00:44:42 ◼   ► Just like what we're talking about now.

00:44:44 ◼   ► Here are some reasons that kind of academically

00:44:47 ◼   ► seem justifiable, but at no point did anybody

00:44:50 ◼   ► with any kind of like, you know,

00:44:52 ◼   ► read the room kind of sensibilities

00:44:54 ◼   ► get this idea passed then before it went out.

00:44:56 ◼   ► Because, you know, this, yes, there are

00:45:00 ◼   ► Some cases where you can say,

00:45:02 ◼   ► well, that actually would be useful.

00:45:04 ◼   ► But that is so far outnumbered by the negativity,

00:45:09 ◼   ► or outweighed I guess by the negativity

00:45:12 ◼   ► of this getting out in the world in the first place,

00:45:14 ◼   ► and what we talked about last time of like,

00:45:16 ◼   ► it's not a very luxurious experience

00:45:18 ◼   ► that would be on brand with a luxury car company

00:45:21 ◼   ► to feel like you're being nickeled and dimed

00:45:23 ◼   ► for something that you don't have to be.

00:45:24 ◼   ► Now that being said, if the option exists

00:45:26 ◼   ► to pay the 400 bucks up front

00:45:28 ◼   ► and not be nickel and dimed over indefinite time span,

00:45:31 ◼   ► that is better, but this is still, I think,

00:45:34 ◼   ► it's just, this is a PR fumble,

00:45:38 ◼   ► that whatever they're gaining in utility or revenue

00:45:41 ◼   ► is not worth the cost of the PR.

00:45:44 ◼   ► - I do wonder also, I don't know the details of this,

00:45:46 ◼   ► I'm sure we'll find out, but if you pay up front

00:45:48 ◼   ► the $400 for the heated seats,

00:45:50 ◼   ► and then you sell the car to someone,

00:45:52 ◼   ► do the heated seats come with it,

00:45:53 ◼   ► or does that person then need to begin a new subscription

00:45:56 ◼   ► as if the heated seats weren't already in the car

00:45:58 ◼   ► because that heated seat was tied to your purchase

00:46:01 ◼   ► and your identifier, you know what I mean?

00:46:03 ◼   ► The other thing about this is,

00:46:04 ◼   ► like I said, there's a narrow range of features

00:46:07 ◼   ► that this works for,

00:46:07 ◼   ► 'cause if they're gonna build it into the car anyway

00:46:09 ◼   ► and just enable it later,

00:46:11 ◼   ► you can do that with stuff that's basically software,

00:46:14 ◼   ► and things that are cheap enough that you can include them

00:46:17 ◼   ► and it's not too expensive, but that's it.

00:46:19 ◼   ► There's tons of, almost all the options

00:46:21 ◼   ► in the options sheet don't fall into that category.

00:46:23 ◼   ► They're the type of thing that someone needs to pay for

00:46:25 ◼   ► and they're not just gonna give you for free

00:46:27 ◼   ► and it's not possible to unlock them.

00:46:29 ◼   ► Better brakes, better wheels, the leather interior,

00:46:31 ◼   ► the wood trim, right?

00:46:33 ◼   ► Even things like that, the nicer headlights,

00:46:35 ◼   ► those are hardware things.

00:46:37 ◼   ► I know Tesla's done it where they've given you

00:46:39 ◼   ► the bigger battery 'cause they couldn't get

00:46:40 ◼   ► the smaller ones in stock and the software

00:46:42 ◼   ► locked out the battery.

00:46:43 ◼   ► You remember when they were doing that with the 3s?

00:46:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, but that's not a common thing.

00:46:47 ◼   ► That's a temporary operational shortage kind of thing.

00:46:50 ◼   ► That's not something that's a feature.

00:46:52 ◼   ► - Right, but it made people cranky about it

00:46:54 ◼   ► because it's like, well, I know you, you know,

00:46:55 ◼   ► I didn't pay for the, you know, 100 kilowatt, whatever.

00:46:59 ◼   ► What are the batteries measured in?

00:47:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, it doesn't matter.

00:47:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, anyway, I didn't pay for the 100.

00:47:03 ◼   ► - Chigawatt.

00:47:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, I paid for the 60,

00:47:06 ◼   ► but I know you had to put 100 in

00:47:07 ◼   ► 'cause you didn't have any 60s, but like, whatever.

00:47:10 ◼   ► You know, in some ways, like, well, okay,

00:47:11 ◼   ► well now I'm getting worse mileage.

00:47:14 ◼   ► Now I'm getting less distance on a charge

00:47:16 ◼   ► 'cause I'm hauling around this big battery

00:47:17 ◼   ► that I can't use all of, but it doesn't feel good.

00:47:20 ◼   ► This is a story with some person who got the 100,

00:47:23 ◼   ► Look this up, it's really annoying.

00:47:25 ◼   ► What is the unit?

00:47:25 ◼   ► Kilowatt hour, I believe.

00:47:27 ◼   ► - They had the 100 unit, or excuse me,

00:47:29 ◼   ► they had a car with a 60 unit battery,

00:47:31 ◼   ► and because of Tesla, it got replaced

00:47:34 ◼   ► with a 100 unit battery, and at the time,

00:47:37 ◼   ► I guess Tesla did not lock them out,

00:47:39 ◼   ► and I think they was--

00:47:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, there was a mistake on Tesla's part.

00:47:41 ◼   ► They didn't do the lockout.

00:47:42 ◼   ► It's kilowatt hour.

00:47:43 ◼   ► They got the 100 and it wasn't locked out, right?

00:47:45 ◼   ► And so like, oh well, you know, whatever.

00:47:47 ◼   ► A bank makes a mistake in your favor,

00:47:49 ◼   ► collect $200, right? - Yep, yep, yep.

00:47:51 ◼   ► And then this person drove the car like this for some substantial period of time.

00:47:55 ◼   ► And then Tesla realized his mistake and said, "Oh, never mind."

00:47:58 ◼   ► And then the software updated it back down to 60.

00:48:02 ◼   ► And that just doesn't feel good.

00:48:03 ◼   ► Oh, that's a terrible move.

00:48:04 ◼   ► Right.

00:48:05 ◼   ► So this is an example of brand management.

00:48:07 ◼   ► If you want to manage the brand to make people feel good to have a Tesla, if you make this

00:48:12 ◼   ► mistake as Tesla, "Oh, we forgot the software, lock it out," just eat it.

00:48:15 ◼   ► Just let that person have the 100 kilowatt hour battery for the rest of the life of their

00:48:18 ◼   ► car.

00:48:19 ◼   ► but just eat it because the ill will,

00:48:23 ◼   ► even just from that one customer,

00:48:24 ◼   ► the ill will that that customer's gonna feel,

00:48:26 ◼   ► let alone like when the person puts their story on the web

00:48:29 ◼   ► and people talk about it on podcasts or whatever,

00:48:31 ◼   ► it's not worth it.

00:48:31 ◼   ► You already lost the money on that battery.

00:48:34 ◼   ► You already put a bigger battery in there.

00:48:36 ◼   ► That bigger battery costs you more money

00:48:37 ◼   ► and you had to put it in there

00:48:38 ◼   ► because you didn't have any smaller ones.

00:48:40 ◼   ► Just eat it.

00:48:41 ◼   ► Like I don't understand why these companies don't,

00:48:44 ◼   ► like it's not as a policy.

00:48:46 ◼   ► It's the same thing with the Mehears story

00:48:47 ◼   ► as the Apple store.

00:48:48 ◼   ► A good Apple store and a good person in charge

00:48:51 ◼   ► of whoever makes decisions on Apple,

00:48:52 ◼   ► or knows when to just eat it, right?

00:48:54 ◼   ► To just make the customer happy and just eat it.

00:48:56 ◼   ► It's not policy, it's not tell all your friends

00:48:58 ◼   ► you can come in and get this cool thing done.

00:49:00 ◼   ► Tesla will replace your battery

00:49:01 ◼   ► and forget the software cap,

00:49:02 ◼   ► but like, that's not, you're not changing your policy,

00:49:04 ◼   ► but on a one-off basis, no one to just say,

00:49:08 ◼   ► our bad, let's make it right for you.

00:49:11 ◼   ► This is not a new policy,

00:49:12 ◼   ► we're making an exception in your case.

00:49:14 ◼   ► The person will be happy,

00:49:15 ◼   ► and you haven't bankrupted the company

00:49:16 ◼   ► by causing a flood of people to come in

00:49:18 ◼   ► and try to get the batteries replaced.

00:49:20 ◼   ► - Do you remember when Amazon displayed to the world

00:49:25 ◼   ► that they had a remote delete capability for Kindle books

00:49:28 ◼   ► and which book they deleted?

00:49:30 ◼   ► - No, I don't remember this at all.

00:49:31 ◼   ► - This was amazing.

00:49:32 ◼   ► So there was--

00:49:34 ◼   ► - Oh, it was 1994, right?

00:49:35 ◼   ► - Yes. (laughs)

00:49:37 ◼   ► In 2009, Amazon, there was a copyright issue

00:49:40 ◼   ► with the copy of 1984 that they had

00:49:43 ◼   ► and they remote deleted it from Kindle's.

00:49:45 ◼   ► - Oh my gosh.

00:49:46 ◼   ► - Of all books, that one.

00:49:48 ◼   ► - That's why you should always DRM crack all your eBooks.

00:49:52 ◼   ► - We are brought to you this week by Instabug.

00:49:56 ◼   ► Building and maintaining mobile apps is not simple.

00:49:58 ◼   ► Bugs, crashes, and performance issues

00:50:00 ◼   ► can be a nightmare for developers like me.

00:50:03 ◼   ► What if you could not only detect and dissect these issues,

00:50:05 ◼   ► but also get a holistic understanding

00:50:07 ◼   ► of your app's performance?

00:50:08 ◼   ► With Instabug, finally you can.

00:50:11 ◼   ► Through comprehensive bug and crash reporting,

00:50:13 ◼   ► performance monitoring, and real-time user feedback,

00:50:16 ◼   ► Instabug gives you the visibility

00:50:18 ◼   ► you need to build top quality apps.

00:50:20 ◼   ► You can observe and fix issues like UI hangs, slow app

00:50:24 ◼   ► launches and screen loads, network failures,

00:50:26 ◼   ► and anything else that may be affecting your user experience.

00:50:30 ◼   ► You can get a quick read on their impact on your users

00:50:32 ◼   ► and access all of the granular data relevant to the issue

00:50:35 ◼   ► in seconds so you can prioritize, assign, and debug

00:50:39 ◼   ► before your next update is released.

00:50:41 ◼   ► It only takes a minute to integrate Instabug's SDK

00:50:44 ◼   ► into your app, and it fits right into your workflow

00:50:46 ◼   ► with integration for things like Jira, Slack, Trello,

00:50:50 ◼   ► GitHub, Zendesk, and many more.

00:50:53 ◼   ► You can stop flying blind on your mobile app issues

00:50:55 ◼   ► and try Instabug today.

00:50:57 ◼   ► Go to instabug.com and get the visibility you need

00:51:01 ◼   ► to start delivering superior app performance

00:51:03 ◼   ► and better user experience.

00:51:05 ◼   ► That's instabug.com.

00:51:06 ◼   ► Thanks to Instabug for sponsoring our show.

00:51:10 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:51:12 ◼   ► Moving right along very, very quickly,

00:51:15 ◼   ► I spoke about last week the Mophie three-in-one charger

00:51:20 ◼   ► thing that I was planning to bring on vacation,

00:51:22 ◼   ► which I did, it worked well.

00:51:24 ◼   ► And I lamented the fact that it's 150 bucks

00:51:26 ◼   ► for each of them.

00:51:27 ◼   ► Steve Stutz, Stutz, Stutz, wrote that you can actually

00:51:31 ◼   ► get these from Zag, which is in contrast

00:51:34 ◼   ► to what Apple says on their website,

00:51:35 ◼   ► which it says only at Apple.

00:51:37 ◼   ► But anyway, you can get it from Zag,

00:51:38 ◼   ► and if you're willing to sign up for their email newsletter,

00:51:40 ◼   ► then you can save a whole bunch of money

00:51:42 ◼   ► and get like a coupon code or whatever

00:51:43 ◼   ► for a whole bunch of percentage off.

00:51:44 ◼   ► So if you're looking to get something,

00:51:47 ◼   ► specifically this three-in-one thing,

00:51:48 ◼   ► I will put a link in the show notes,

00:51:49 ◼   ► you might wanna check that out.

00:51:50 ◼   ► Moving right along, Vern Johnson writes,

00:51:52 ◼   ► "In your most recent episode,

00:51:54 ◼   ► "you talked about EU regulations mandating USB-C

00:51:56 ◼   ► "for all phones and covered it well, thanks.

00:51:58 ◼   ► "What I haven't heard anybody online discuss

00:51:59 ◼   ► "is how this will keep Apple from selling

00:52:01 ◼   ► "fewer expensive previous year models of phones in Europe

00:52:04 ◼   ► "once the requirement goes into effect.

00:52:06 ◼   ► It seems that this might adversely affect consumers by giving them only the choice of

00:52:10 ◼   ► the newest phones that include USB-C. Your thoughts?

00:52:12 ◼   ► I thought it was a very interesting point. I still don't see a way in which this is definitely

00:52:18 ◼   ► going to be the case. Like, I just don't see Apple being coerced into putting USB-C in

00:52:24 ◼   ► iPhones. Now, they may say, "Oh, we have decided now that the iPhone will be USB-C," and mean

00:52:30 ◼   ► but I really don't see them not fighting this

00:52:35 ◼   ► or including like a stupid adapter thing

00:52:37 ◼   ► like they did years ago for I think micro USB.

00:52:39 ◼   ► I don't know, do you see this happening?

00:52:41 ◼   ► - I mean this is flying in the face

00:52:43 ◼   ► of the real Tim Cook doctrine,

00:52:44 ◼   ► which is keep selling the same products

00:52:46 ◼   ► so as long as you possibly can.

00:52:47 ◼   ► But I think, I mean I don't know the details of the law here

00:52:50 ◼   ► but it's plausible that it won't apply to them

00:52:52 ◼   ► because they're not new models, right?

00:52:54 ◼   ► So the thing will be like all new models

00:52:56 ◼   ► introduced after such and such a date.

00:52:58 ◼   ► - That's a good point.

00:52:59 ◼   ► - Interesting thought experiment that changes in regulation

00:53:03 ◼   ► that especially that have to do with hardware

00:53:06 ◼   ► could be written in such a way that it thwarts

00:53:10 ◼   ► Apple's ability to do what it loves to do,

00:53:12 ◼   ► which is make a product and then just continue to sell it

00:53:16 ◼   ► and move it down market, down market, down market

00:53:18 ◼   ► until it becomes the cheapest one to sell.

00:53:20 ◼   ► The same thing, manufacture the same thing for years

00:53:22 ◼   ► and years, it makes sense from a being counter perspective

00:53:25 ◼   ► because you've got really good at building whatever it is,

00:53:27 ◼   ► the iPhone, I was gonna say the iPhone 6,

00:53:30 ◼   ► but that's a little bit too old, but right.

00:53:32 ◼   ► The iPhone 11 or the XR or whatever,

00:53:36 ◼   ► you really get the manufacturing process down,

00:53:38 ◼   ► you got the parts available, the quality is really good,

00:53:40 ◼   ► and you can just keep making that same phone

00:53:42 ◼   ► until it just becomes an unviable product.

00:53:44 ◼   ► And during all those years, it's pure profit

00:53:48 ◼   ► because you've already recouped the cost

00:53:50 ◼   ► of all the tooling and all the other stuff, right?

00:53:54 ◼   ► But if they ever did require some change

00:53:56 ◼   ► that had to be across the entire line,

00:53:59 ◼   ► that would really mess up their strategy.

00:54:00 ◼   ► It would be the old Steve Jobs strategy.

00:54:02 ◼   ► What he loved to do was say,

00:54:03 ◼   ► "We have a new idea," and it's, you know, whatever it is.

00:54:06 ◼   ► It's that our laptops are made of aluminum.

00:54:08 ◼   ► And now, starting today,

00:54:10 ◼   ► the only laptops we'll sell are aluminum.

00:54:12 ◼   ► And those plastic ones, forget it.

00:54:14 ◼   ► We're not gonna continue to sell those

00:54:15 ◼   ► for the last three years.

00:54:15 ◼   ► You're never gonna see them again.

00:54:16 ◼   ► We erased them from our website.

00:54:18 ◼   ► We pulled them off our store shelves.

00:54:19 ◼   ► It's all aluminum.

00:54:21 ◼   ► That is not the way Tim Cook operates,

00:54:23 ◼   ► But I think the EU thing won't affect Apple in that way.

00:54:27 ◼   ► Right, and you also have to figure,

00:54:28 ◼   ► if Apple really sees this as something that is inevitably

00:54:32 ◼   ► coming down in the future, they probably

00:54:35 ◼   ► have some idea of a time scale of when they might really

00:54:38 ◼   ► 100% have to commit to it.

00:54:40 ◼   ► And so if the iPhone--

00:54:42 ◼   ► let's see, what are we on?

00:54:43 ◼   ► 14 now-- if the iPhone 15 next year comes out,

00:54:47 ◼   ► and that's the one with USB-C, they

00:54:48 ◼   ► might be thinking, all right, well,

00:54:50 ◼   ► we'll start USB-C next year.

00:54:52 ◼   ► And we won't really have to do it for a few years,

00:54:54 ◼   ► so that'll give us enough time for it

00:54:56 ◼   ► to filter through the lineup.

00:54:57 ◼   ► They also might be thinking, you know,

00:54:59 ◼   ► if something happened where the old model of phone

00:55:04 ◼   ► couldn't fill its role as being the cheaper one

00:55:08 ◼   ► for a little while, that's already happened once before.

00:55:11 ◼   ► That happened with the iPhone 5.

00:55:13 ◼   ► And the reason why the iPhone 5C came to be,

00:55:16 ◼   ► or at least one reason the iPhone 5C came to be,

00:55:19 ◼   ► is that the iPhone 5, when it was like the new model,

00:55:22 ◼   ► it had that dark gray color that was like almost black.

00:55:25 ◼   ► And remember it chipped along all the edges

00:55:27 ◼   ► and it really did not age well.

00:55:30 ◼   ► So what we heard from a bunch of different rumor sources

00:55:32 ◼   ► was that one of the reasons the 5C existed

00:55:35 ◼   ► is that that finish on the iPhone 5 was just,

00:55:38 ◼   ► it turned out to be so expensive and not durable enough

00:55:41 ◼   ► that they couldn't use that really effectively

00:55:44 ◼   ► to beat the cheap phone in subsequent years.

00:55:46 ◼   ► So one of the reasons they made the 5C was because

00:55:50 ◼   ► their flagship phone of year X really wasn't gonna be

00:55:54 ◼   ► a good cheap phone in year X plus one and X plus two.

00:55:57 ◼   ► So they just designed a new phone that had cheaper specs

00:56:01 ◼   ► and that was it.

00:56:02 ◼   ► So if they really had to do something like that today,

00:56:05 ◼   ► they could.

00:56:06 ◼   ► Worst case scenario, if there's a mandate,

00:56:08 ◼   ► they have to move everything over to USB-C

00:56:10 ◼   ► in a couple of years, well the iPhone 15,

00:56:13 ◼   ► whatever that comes out with USB-C will have

00:56:15 ◼   ► a certain case design that will accommodate that port,

00:56:18 ◼   ► and they can always just make a cheaper version

00:56:20 ◼   ► of that case design with cheaper guts

00:56:22 ◼   ► and sell that as the new, cheaper model.

00:56:25 ◼   ► So there are different ways around this.

00:56:27 ◼   ► They probably won't need to do any of those things.

00:56:29 ◼   ► They probably can just wait it out

00:56:30 ◼   ► and just wait 'til USB-C flickers throughout the line

00:56:33 ◼   ► and it'll kinda just solve itself.

00:56:35 ◼   ► But they certainly have options if they need them.

00:56:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't think they've forgotten

00:56:38 ◼   ► how to make new products.

00:56:40 ◼   ► They just tend not to do it unless they really have to.

00:56:42 ◼   ► Although the story you're saying about the,

00:56:44 ◼   ► Was that the one with the chamfered edge?

00:56:46 ◼   ► - Yes, it was the first one with the chamfered edge.

00:56:48 ◼   ► - Or as Johnny I would say, what did he say, chamfered?

00:56:51 ◼   ► - Yes. - Instead of chamfered.

00:56:52 ◼   ► Anyway, it reminds me of one of the,

00:56:55 ◼   ► well I don't remember which one,

00:56:56 ◼   ► one of the Johnny I've, like,

00:56:58 ◼   ► Love from Apple divorce articles or whatever,

00:57:01 ◼   ► or maybe it was the Tripp Knuckle book.

00:57:03 ◼   ► Anyway, there was a bit where someone was telling a story

00:57:06 ◼   ► about being in the design studio

00:57:07 ◼   ► and someone was presenting a design

00:57:09 ◼   ► and someone in the meeting brought up

00:57:11 ◼   ► how expensive it would be to manufacture

00:57:14 ◼   ► the design that was being shown.

00:57:16 ◼   ► And they got chastised and got evil looks

00:57:18 ◼   ► from the design group because it was basically like,

00:57:20 ◼   ► under the Johnny Iverzine,

00:57:22 ◼   ► that's just not something you did.

00:57:23 ◼   ► Was like, during the design process,

00:57:25 ◼   ► you didn't bring up unseemly things

00:57:27 ◼   ► like how much it's going to cost to manufacture

00:57:29 ◼   ► or how difficult it would be to do it

00:57:30 ◼   ► with precision and quality control.

00:57:32 ◼   ► And that's how you end up with--

00:57:33 ◼   ► - Why not?

00:57:34 ◼   ► - A thing.

00:57:35 ◼   ► Yeah, and that's how you end up with a phone

00:57:37 ◼   ► which has like that chamfered edge that Johnny really loved

00:57:40 ◼   ► and you talked about it so much in that presentation.

00:57:43 ◼   ► And it turns out to be one of those type of,

00:57:45 ◼   ► I don't know the details, but apparently if this,

00:57:48 ◼   ► one of those manufacturing details that

00:57:50 ◼   ► even after you've been making the phone for a year,

00:57:53 ◼   ► it's still expensive and hard to do.

00:57:54 ◼   ► Like it doesn't, it's not like it was one of those things

00:57:57 ◼   ► where you, oh, we'll get the hang of it,

00:57:59 ◼   ► we get the machine set up right,

00:58:00 ◼   ► and then it's just, we bang them out after that, right?

00:58:03 ◼   ► Or like, no matter how we manufactured,

00:58:05 ◼   ► it's just not durable, whatever the problem may be.

00:58:07 ◼   ► But like, when I read that, I was like,

00:58:09 ◼   ► the idea that you'd be in a design meeting

00:58:12 ◼   ► and someone would bring up something unseemly like money

00:58:15 ◼   ► and they would get, you know, dirty looks.

00:58:17 ◼   ► Like I understand there could be like a brainstorming part

00:58:19 ◼   ► where it's like there's no bad ideas,

00:58:20 ◼   ► let's just talk over this through or whatever,

00:58:21 ◼   ► but I feel like when you say design,

00:58:24 ◼   ► you have to include all the factors.

00:58:26 ◼   ► And you know, two of those big factors

00:58:28 ◼   ► are manufacturability and cost.

00:58:30 ◼   ► I'm not saying they should drive everything,

00:58:32 ◼   ► I'm not saying those should be dominant

00:58:33 ◼   ► otherwise you're just making a bunch of ugly plastic crap

00:58:35 ◼   ► and I would not include the iPhone 5C in that

00:58:37 ◼   ► because the iPhone 5C was an amazing phone

00:58:39 ◼   ► on the outside anyway, the insides were kind of crappy.

00:58:42 ◼   ► But that's the challenge of design.

00:58:44 ◼   ► If you say, okay, well I'm gonna make an amazing thing,

00:58:47 ◼   ► but I don't want anyone to talk to me

00:58:48 ◼   ► about money or manufacturability,

00:58:50 ◼   ► you're not a designer.

00:58:51 ◼   ► And I'm not saying Johnny Ive does that.

00:58:53 ◼   ► Like he does care about manufacturability

00:58:54 ◼   ► and how things will be put together or whatever.

00:58:57 ◼   ► But if that story is to be believed,

00:59:00 ◼   ► the idea that the design group didn't wanna hear

00:59:02 ◼   ► about money in any stage of the design process,

00:59:05 ◼   ► I feel like that's kind of ridiculous,

00:59:07 ◼   ► because we're gonna put diamonds along all the outside

00:59:10 ◼   ► and someone brings up money and they say, shh,

00:59:11 ◼   ► We're in the brainstorming phase.

00:59:12 ◼   ► No one talks about it.

00:59:13 ◼   ► There's no bad ideas here.

00:59:14 ◼   ► I'm like, no, diamonds around the outside is a bad idea.

00:59:16 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:59:17 ◼   ► You need to include that.

00:59:19 ◼   ► I mean, in theory, they have so much expertise.

00:59:21 ◼   ► That's why that person is in the room,

00:59:23 ◼   ► the manufacturing expert who says,

00:59:25 ◼   ► here's why that would be expensive to make.

00:59:27 ◼   ► And the other thing about that,

00:59:29 ◼   ► with all these stories from the innovations

00:59:32 ◼   ► that Apple's done in manufacturing,

00:59:33 ◼   ► is very often that person will be in the room and say,

00:59:35 ◼   ► you can't do that, it's too expensive, right?

00:59:37 ◼   ► And then the job of Apple as a business is to say,

00:59:39 ◼   ► okay, let's find a way to make it economically feasible

00:59:44 ◼   ► to do unibody aluminum CNC machined cases.

00:59:49 ◼   ► I know it's too expensive now,

00:59:51 ◼   ► what would it take to make that not expensive?

00:59:54 ◼   ► Let's now solve that problem.

00:59:55 ◼   ► Let's put millions of dollars into a company

00:59:57 ◼   ► that builds these tools.

00:59:58 ◼   ► Like, can we get on the other side of this

01:00:00 ◼   ► after a decade of making these things or whatever,

01:00:02 ◼   ► where we become experts at it where it is,

01:00:05 ◼   ► we can do it in a way that doesn't break the bank

01:00:08 ◼   ► Also, we get the design things that you know

01:00:10 ◼   ► That's why it has to be part of the conversation and you have to listen to that person when they tell you it's too expensive to

01:00:15 ◼   ► Do you have to say okay now here's another problem. We have to solve it apparently with the chamfered edge

01:00:19 ◼   ► They didn't do that

01:00:20 ◼   ► They said we're just gonna do it anyway

01:00:22 ◼   ► And it turned out it was either more expensive or not as durable or both and then they had to retreat from it

01:00:27 ◼   ► That's that's not a win in my book

01:00:29 ◼   ► Soluble apps rights you asked whether the order of addresses and contacts matters it definitely

01:00:35 ◼   ► Does when you send email to a group in mail as the first address is always chosen

01:00:40 ◼   ► I had to add a feature to my app to change the first address. That's bad

01:00:44 ◼   ► Going through contacts and deleting all the emails and then re-adding them in the right order like you can't reorder them

01:00:52 ◼   ► But apparently the first one is important. This is really bad. Like maybe this is not Apple's fault

01:00:58 ◼   ► Maybe it has to do with whatever that vCard spec is doesn't include this but hmm

01:01:02 ◼   ► Just I don't know how you get into like the vCard spec

01:01:05 ◼   ► version 2, let alone version 3 or 4,

01:01:07 ◼   ► whatever the heck number we're on,

01:01:08 ◼   ► and not think about the fact that you support

01:01:10 ◼   ► multiple email addresses but don't

01:01:12 ◼   ► support any kind of prioritization or ordering,

01:01:14 ◼   ► or sort of stealth do.

01:01:15 ◼   ► But I don't like it.

01:01:18 ◼   ► I know we're talking about features being added

01:01:21 ◼   ► to contacts.

01:01:21 ◼   ► It's not an exciting feature.

01:01:23 ◼   ► But I would like that sometime in the next decade or so,

01:01:26 ◼   ► now that we've got shared photo libraries.

01:01:28 ◼   ► This is going to be my new thing.

01:01:31 ◼   ► prioritize multiple elements in contacts.

01:01:34 ◼   ► - Then Sharif Hasabo writes,

01:01:36 ◼   ► "The preferred target when you message someone

01:01:37 ◼   ► "is actually based on how the message thread was created.

01:01:39 ◼   ► "If the thread was originally sent to the iCloud address,

01:01:42 ◼   ► "it will suggest that first."

01:01:44 ◼   ► - This is not a happy solution.

01:01:45 ◼   ► I heard from a couple of people who said,

01:01:47 ◼   ► "Yeah, I had the same problem.

01:01:48 ◼   ► "My solution was I deleted the thread with the person."

01:01:51 ◼   ► So if you go to messages and you see your spouse,

01:01:55 ◼   ► their face, and the thread that you have ongoing with them,

01:02:00 ◼   ► if this is to be believed, if that thread was started

01:02:04 ◼   ► by you sending a message to your spouse's phone number,

01:02:07 ◼   ► forever, when you type your spouse's name in an auto-complete

01:02:11 ◼   ► it will auto-complete to their phone number.

01:02:13 ◼   ► And so you can fix that by just deleting the thread,

01:02:16 ◼   ► but I don't wanna delete a literally years long thread

01:02:18 ◼   ► with like my son to just to delete,

01:02:21 ◼   ► lose all those messages, delete entirely

01:02:23 ◼   ► and start a new one with his Apple ID.

01:02:26 ◼   ► But apparently that is the only solution

01:02:27 ◼   ► that people have told me that they tried

01:02:29 ◼   ► and actually worked.

01:02:30 ◼   ► So Apple, get on that.

01:02:31 ◼   ► We are sponsored this week by Linode,

01:02:35 ◼   ► my favorite place to run servers.

01:02:36 ◼   ► Visit linode.com/ATP to see why so many developers like me

01:02:41 ◼   ► choose Linode for hosting our projects.

01:02:44 ◼   ► I run a lot of servers, I have run a lot of servers,

01:02:47 ◼   ► I will run a lot of servers, all my various projects,

01:02:50 ◼   ► and I've been with a lot of different hosts

01:02:52 ◼   ► and I've stuck with Linode the longest.

01:02:54 ◼   ► You know, they've been serving developers

01:02:55 ◼   ► for projects both big and small since 2003,

01:02:58 ◼   ► and I've been with them for I think about a decade now.

01:03:00 ◼   ► And it's just a great thing to be a limited customer

01:03:03 ◼   ► because you have everything at your fingertips

01:03:05 ◼   ► you might need from a hosting company.

01:03:06 ◼   ► From the basic server compute instances

01:03:09 ◼   ► to things like specialty needs,

01:03:11 ◼   ► GPU plans, high memory plans, and other services now.

01:03:15 ◼   ► They have things like block storage as a service.

01:03:17 ◼   ► They recently launched a managed database service.

01:03:19 ◼   ► So this is fully managed databases

01:03:21 ◼   ► for MySQL, Postgres, and Mongo.

01:03:23 ◼   ► Redis is coming later this year

01:03:25 ◼   ► and they have everything you would expect

01:03:26 ◼   ► from managed database services.

01:03:27 ◼   ► You have simple, fast deployment, redundancy,

01:03:30 ◼   ► secure access, backups.

01:03:32 ◼   ► It's everything you would want from a managed database.

01:03:35 ◼   ► They have all that at Linode now

01:03:36 ◼   ► with their managed database service.

01:03:38 ◼   ► And it's just great, you know, at Linode,

01:03:40 ◼   ► you have great support if you need it,

01:03:42 ◼   ► and it's all an incredible value.

01:03:44 ◼   ► This is their key.

01:03:46 ◼   ► Value is not something that is that fun to talk about.

01:03:49 ◼   ► I'm telling you, Linode has the best value in the business,

01:03:51 ◼   ► and that's why I went with them in the first place,

01:03:54 ◼   ► and that's one of the biggest reasons

01:03:55 ◼   ► why I've stuck with them all this time,

01:03:57 ◼   ► because I don't know how they offer what they offer

01:04:00 ◼   ► and why no one else does,

01:04:01 ◼   ► but the fact is they're the best value in the business

01:04:03 ◼   ► and they have been the entire time I've been with them.

01:04:05 ◼   ► So Linode makes cloud computing fast, simple,

01:04:08 ◼   ► and affordable so you can focus on your projects,

01:04:10 ◼   ► not your infrastructure.

01:04:11 ◼   ► Go to linode.com/atp, create a free account there,

01:04:15 ◼   ► and you get $100 in credit.

01:04:17 ◼   ► Once again, linode.com/atp,

01:04:20 ◼   ► new accounts get $100 in credit.

01:04:22 ◼   ► Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my stuff

01:04:24 ◼   ► and for sponsoring our show.

01:04:26 ◼   ► [ Music ]

01:04:28 ◼   ► All right, that's it for follow-up,

01:04:30 ◼   ► and since not all that much is going on these days,

01:04:32 ◼   ► we thought we'd clear the decks with some Ask ATP.

01:04:36 ◼   ► Bell Demose writes, "I've had a jobby job

01:04:38 ◼   ► as an iOS developer for a while now

01:04:40 ◼   ► and recently started thinking about creating my own app

01:04:42 ◼   ► on the side. I frequently listen to podcasts

01:04:44 ◼   ► and use Reddit and Twitter. As such, the types of apps

01:04:47 ◼   ► that seem most interesting for me to build are Twitter clients,

01:04:49 ◼   ► podcast players, and Reddit clients.

01:04:51 ◼   ► However, it seems like it's next to impossible to compete

01:04:53 ◼   ► to compete with the likes of Tweetbot, Overcast, and Apollo.

01:04:57 ◼   ► These apps have been in production for years.

01:04:59 ◼   ► As such, they have numerous complex, competitive features that would take new developers several

01:05:03 ◼   ► years to build.

01:05:04 ◼   ► By the time said features are built into the new apps, the existing apps will have gained

01:05:07 ◼   ► even more new features.

01:05:08 ◼   ► Assuming that the new apps can even catch up to their competitors in terms of features,

01:05:12 ◼   ► then they need to be marketed differently before seeing any downloads.

01:05:14 ◼   ► Is it too late to have a successful indie app as a new entrant to a market with well-established

01:05:19 ◼   ► indie apps?

01:05:20 ◼   ► And should iOS developers instead focus on advancing their careers and their jobby job?

01:05:23 ◼   ► I actually went back and forth with Abel on this a little bit, and I pointed out, I don't

01:05:28 ◼   ► remember, I want to say it's Aviary, which is a new-ish Twitter client, and I believe

01:05:35 ◼   ► there was a new version that just came out in the last week or two.

01:05:38 ◼   ► I have not personally used it, but it seems fairly impressive from what little I've seen

01:05:43 ◼   ► of it.

01:05:44 ◼   ► And that's just come out in the last year or two.

01:05:46 ◼   ► So that is an example of something where you could make something brand new or have a different approach to something old and

01:05:53 ◼   ► And it might work, but I do understand the general gist of what what what is being said here

01:06:00 ◼   ► I mean Marco when you wrote overcast there were plenty of podcast players in the world and yet somehow you made it work

01:06:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean certainly, you know, there are different times and there are different different times when it's easier or harder to get these markets

01:06:12 ◼   ► However, it's worth remembering that Apollo

01:06:16 ◼   ► was not the first Reddit app,

01:06:18 ◼   ► not the first big Reddit app.

01:06:21 ◼   ► Tweetbot was not the first big Twitter client,

01:06:24 ◼   ► and Overcast was not the first podcast app.

01:06:27 ◼   ► And there were many apps in these categories

01:06:30 ◼   ► before each of these three examples were present.

01:06:34 ◼   ► Whatever you use might seem dominant to you now,

01:06:38 ◼   ► but I don't know what Tweetbot has as market share

01:06:42 ◼   ► relative to every Twitter user.

01:06:45 ◼   ► I don't know what Apollo has in terms of market share

01:06:47 ◼   ► and relevant to everyone who uses Reddit,

01:06:49 ◼   ► but I can tell you that Overcast's market share

01:06:51 ◼   ► among everyone who listens to podcasts

01:06:53 ◼   ► is something like 1.5%.

01:06:56 ◼   ► So that's 98.5% of everyone who listens to podcasts

01:07:01 ◼   ► who could be looking for something else.

01:07:04 ◼   ► Yes, it's hard to get a lot of this market,

01:07:10 ◼   ► and marketing is difficult and expensive now

01:07:13 ◼   ► because there's so much competition.

01:07:14 ◼   ► But when I started Overcast,

01:07:18 ◼   ► before I wrote a single line of code,

01:07:20 ◼   ► I made a notes document,

01:07:23 ◼   ► which I think it wasn't even in notes at the time,

01:07:25 ◼   ► I think it was in task paper,

01:07:26 ◼   ► 'cause Apple Notes was not the way we know it today,

01:07:28 ◼   ► it was the old version that sucked with the Markerfelt.

01:07:30 ◼   ► And what I've, I sketched out like other big apps

01:07:35 ◼   ► at the time, Apple Podcasts, I believe Downcast,

01:07:39 ◼   ► which is what I was using at the time,

01:07:40 ◼   ► Pocket casts, I think that might be it.

01:07:43 ◼   ► Oh, and Instacast, those are the four

01:07:45 ◼   ► that I considered the big podcast apps at the time.

01:07:49 ◼   ► Well, Instacast doesn't even exist anymore.

01:07:52 ◼   ► To tell you how much this market can change

01:07:54 ◼   ► in not that much time, and the dynamics certainly,

01:07:59 ◼   ► right now, if I were making that list today,

01:08:01 ◼   ► Apple Podcasts would still be there,

01:08:03 ◼   ► but my biggest competitors are not Instacast

01:08:06 ◼   ► or Downcast or Pocket Casts.

01:08:08 ◼   ► My biggest competitors are Apple, Spotify,

01:08:10 ◼   ► and Google podcasts.

01:08:12 ◼   ► So things change over time.

01:08:14 ◼   ► And anyway, so what I did when I made this list

01:08:16 ◼   ► was I wrote down each of these apps, what their advantages were

01:08:22 ◼   ► over what I was going to build, what their disadvantages were,

01:08:25 ◼   ► and why somebody might choose their app instead of mine,

01:08:29 ◼   ► and why somebody might choose my app instead of theirs.

01:08:32 ◼   ► And I went through and I took screenshots of all these apps.

01:08:33 ◼   ► And I had these folders that had like,

01:08:35 ◼   ► here's each of these apps, their list screens,

01:08:38 ◼   ► They're now playing screens, they're podcast view screens,

01:08:41 ◼   ► they're directory screens.

01:08:43 ◼   ► And I did some basic, just market surveying,

01:08:46 ◼   ► market research of like, what's out there?

01:08:49 ◼   ► And then that helped me figure out,

01:08:51 ◼   ► first of all, do I have a chance here?

01:08:53 ◼   ► Are there any openings here to do things differently?

01:08:56 ◼   ► And can I do that?

01:08:59 ◼   ► And how will my app differentiate itself?

01:09:02 ◼   ► And how can I market that?

01:09:03 ◼   ► Where can I reach people?

01:09:05 ◼   ► If you have good answers to those questions,

01:09:08 ◼   ► there is still room for new stuff.

01:09:11 ◼   ► I think what you have to realize is that

01:09:14 ◼   ► everyone wants things a little bit differently.

01:09:16 ◼   ► This is why, I mean look, there's a to-do app

01:09:20 ◼   ► that ships with every platform of everything

01:09:22 ◼   ► for the last very long time, and yet,

01:09:25 ◼   ► to-do apps are a healthy category of products.

01:09:28 ◼   ► And the reason why is because everyone is only ever

01:09:31 ◼   ► about 75% satisfied with their to-do app,

01:09:33 ◼   ► and everybody wants something a little bit different

01:09:34 ◼   ► everybody else. And so there's basically an infinite market for to-do apps. See also

01:09:39 ◼   ► weather apps. There's certain categories, note-taking apps, there's certain categories

01:09:43 ◼   ► where people just want different things and they have different priorities and if you

01:09:48 ◼   ► can make something that appeals to some people, that's enough to differentiate you.

01:09:53 ◼   ► Now in cases of these specific categories, you know, I'll address Twitter and Reddit

01:09:58 ◼   ► first. I would say don't make a Twitter app because Twitter as a company is all over the

01:10:03 ◼   ► of the place with its relationship with developers,

01:10:06 ◼   ► and the feature set of what people expect

01:10:09 ◼   ► from a Twitter client is just massive.

01:10:12 ◼   ► So I would not, I would stay away from that if I were you.

01:10:15 ◼   ► Reddit, you still have a pretty large feature set.

01:10:19 ◼   ► I've heard from Christian Selig who makes Apollo

01:10:21 ◼   ► on a podcast recently, I forget which one, sorry,

01:10:24 ◼   ► but I've heard that Reddit's actually pretty good

01:10:27 ◼   ► with its API and it's pretty good towards developers,

01:10:30 ◼   ► so that's something worth looking at for sure.

01:10:33 ◼   ► And podcasting, I think there's so many different ways

01:10:37 ◼   ► people want to listen to and organize

01:10:40 ◼   ► and discover their podcasts.

01:10:42 ◼   ► And I get feature requests and design complaints

01:10:46 ◼   ► all the time that I'm not gonna do

01:10:49 ◼   ► because it doesn't fit within my vision

01:10:51 ◼   ► or it wouldn't work well in my app or whatever.

01:10:53 ◼   ► And so there is a lot of room there

01:10:55 ◼   ► for doing things a little bit differently.

01:10:58 ◼   ► And one of the best examples of that is Castro.

01:11:02 ◼   ► If you look at what Castro did, they still are operating.

01:11:06 ◼   ► I don't know if they're super active anymore,

01:11:07 ◼   ► but they still are operating.

01:11:10 ◼   ► And Castro had a totally different take on organization.

01:11:14 ◼   ► It was more of this kind of like inbox queue kind of system

01:11:17 ◼   ► with this triage mechanism.

01:11:19 ◼   ► And that's something that I still get feature requests

01:11:22 ◼   ► every week or so from somebody who used to use Castro,

01:11:26 ◼   ► is now using Overcast for some reason,

01:11:27 ◼   ► and wants more of those features to be in Overcast.

01:11:31 ◼   ► And some of that kind of fits with what I'm doing.

01:11:33 ◼   ► A lot of it doesn't.

01:11:34 ◼   ► Some of it I will never do as well as Castrated

01:11:36 ◼   ► because you kind of have to like specialize your app design

01:11:38 ◼   ► to do that really well.

01:11:40 ◼   ► So there's all sorts of different ways

01:11:41 ◼   ► people might choose to use this.

01:11:42 ◼   ► Now, on the technical side, by starting new,

01:11:47 ◼   ► you have a number of major advantages.

01:11:50 ◼   ► So first of all, you can learn from everyone else's mistakes

01:11:53 ◼   ► in the past.

01:11:54 ◼   ► There are certain things that other apps have done

01:11:57 ◼   ► that their developers probably have talked about

01:12:00 ◼   ► somewhere before that weren't worth the time

01:12:03 ◼   ► or that ended up being big headaches down the road.

01:12:05 ◼   ► So you can learn not to do those things.

01:12:08 ◼   ► There are certain things that you can just do

01:12:11 ◼   ► in much less code than the previous entrants did

01:12:14 ◼   ► because the APIs are different now.

01:12:16 ◼   ► There are newer, easier APIs to use.

01:12:19 ◼   ► And then finally, you have no legacy.

01:12:22 ◼   ► You have no existing audience

01:12:24 ◼   ► and you have no legacy code base.

01:12:26 ◼   ► If I were to start a brand new podcast app today,

01:12:30 ◼   ► I wouldn't just rebuild everything that's in Overcast

01:12:33 ◼   ► exactly the way I built it the first time.

01:12:34 ◼   ► I would do things differently and I would do fewer things.

01:12:38 ◼   ► There are certain features I wouldn't do at all.

01:12:41 ◼   ► - Such as?

01:12:42 ◼   ► - Streaming I wouldn't do.

01:12:44 ◼   ► It causes a lot of weird issues.

01:12:47 ◼   ► In this era of dynamic ad insertion, it's even weirder.

01:12:50 ◼   ► I would not do streaming at all.

01:12:52 ◼   ► There are certain kinda like back end changes

01:12:55 ◼   ► I would definitely do differently.

01:12:57 ◼   ► I might not even do sync.

01:12:59 ◼   ► I wouldn't do a website.

01:13:01 ◼   ► I would probably not even run servers.

01:13:03 ◼   ► There's a lot of things I would do differently.

01:13:06 ◼   ► There are certain options I wouldn't have.

01:13:08 ◼   ► I wouldn't have the dark mode override.

01:13:10 ◼   ► That's a massive pain in my rear end.

01:13:12 ◼   ► Certain things I just wouldn't do.

01:13:14 ◼   ► But if you're starting new, you can do only the easy things.

01:13:19 ◼   ► You can cherry pick.

01:13:21 ◼   ► You can use AVPlayer and not do all my sound processing stuff.

01:13:25 ◼   ► And that saves you a ton of time.

01:13:26 ◼   ► You can use SwiftUI, and Swift is the back end,

01:13:29 ◼   ► and Cloud Kit, Cloud Kit didn't exist when I started.

01:13:32 ◼   ► I probably would have based it on Cloud Kit if it did.

01:13:35 ◼   ► There are so many advantages you have by starting new

01:13:39 ◼   ► and because you don't have an existing audience

01:13:42 ◼   ► that have been using your app for all this time,

01:13:44 ◼   ► nobody will complain about some feature not being there

01:13:48 ◼   ► that they just got taken away from them

01:13:50 ◼   ► because you're starting fresh.

01:13:51 ◼   ► So you can start with iOS 16,

01:13:53 ◼   ► you can start with a basic feature set

01:13:55 ◼   ► and you can add from there

01:13:56 ◼   ► and you can differentiate in ways

01:13:58 ◼   ► that the other entrants in the market can't or won't do.

01:14:01 ◼   ► So for instance, a pretty big part of Overcast

01:14:05 ◼   ► is its playlist organization system.

01:14:08 ◼   ► And you can have multiple playlists.

01:14:10 ◼   ► One of the reasons Castor was able to do what it did

01:14:13 ◼   ► with its triage system is that it didn't have that.

01:14:15 ◼   ► It had like this one main inbox kind of thing,

01:14:18 ◼   ► or this one queue thing, and forgive me

01:14:20 ◼   ► if I'm getting details where I never actually

01:14:22 ◼   ► really used it myself,

01:14:23 ◼   ► besides just looking at it for two seconds.

01:14:25 ◼   ► but they were able to structure their app in a way

01:14:28 ◼   ► that I literally can't do that in Overcast

01:14:31 ◼   ► without massive structural changes.

01:14:32 ◼   ► So there's stuff like that, that you have freedom

01:14:38 ◼   ► when you're starting new that existing entrants won't do.

01:14:41 ◼   ► Other things, so for instance,

01:14:42 ◼   ► I am not in the Reddit community, I don't use Reddit.

01:14:46 ◼   ► I don't use TikTok for much except occasional viewing.

01:14:51 ◼   ► I barely use Instagram.

01:14:54 ◼   ► If you can integrate with these services

01:14:56 ◼   ► in ways that I can't,

01:14:58 ◼   ► you have a differentiating factor there.

01:14:59 ◼   ► You can do social features that Apple would never do,

01:15:03 ◼   ► or that I would never do.

01:15:04 ◼   ► So there's lots of room to address these problems

01:15:09 ◼   ► in ways that the other entrants

01:15:12 ◼   ► either can't, won't, or at least haven't.

01:15:15 ◼   ► And so there's always room for that.

01:15:17 ◼   ► There might not be a ton of room,

01:15:19 ◼   ► there might not be a ton of money to be made there,

01:15:21 ◼   ► But when the markets are this big,

01:15:24 ◼   ► even a very small percentage of it, that can be a business.

01:15:29 ◼   ► - The difficult part of all this is kind of like,

01:15:31 ◼   ► I want to make an app that's like the apps that I like.

01:15:36 ◼   ► So I listen to podcasts and Reddit or whatever.

01:15:38 ◼   ► You have to really kind of be honest with yourself

01:15:41 ◼   ► about expectations, right?

01:15:43 ◼   ► How many apps have you made?

01:15:44 ◼   ► How complicated an app have you ever made before?

01:15:49 ◼   ► do you think you can make an app that will be good enough to get any percentage of the

01:15:55 ◼   ► market in a very crowded market in a complex problem space?

01:15:59 ◼   ► Not that these are particularly complex, but let's say, pick a Mac where it's easier to

01:16:04 ◼   ► pick an example.

01:16:05 ◼   ► I'm going to make a Photoshop competitor.

01:16:06 ◼   ► Boy, that's tough.

01:16:09 ◼   ► There's a lot of graphic editor apps, and there are ones that are less complicated than

01:16:12 ◼   ► Photoshop, but even the less complicated ones are pretty complicated.

01:16:15 ◼   ► Image editing is not simple.

01:16:17 ◼   ► If you do make a simple image editor that's basically like the equivalent of MS Paint,

01:16:20 ◼   ► I'm not sure there's a market for that or if there is, it's a different market than

01:16:23 ◼   ► Photoshop.

01:16:27 ◼   ► Just because I love using Photoshop, I love using Pixelmator, I'm going to make an app

01:16:31 ◼   ► like that.

01:16:32 ◼   ► I've never made an app before, I'm going to try it.

01:16:34 ◼   ► Be careful about, I like watching baseball, therefore I'm going to be a major league basketball

01:16:38 ◼   ► player.

01:16:39 ◼   ► Be careful what you choose to build and be honest with what you can expect to make on

01:16:45 ◼   ► your first outing or second outing or whatever.

01:16:48 ◼   ► Because it's not easy.

01:16:49 ◼   ► You only hear from the successful people.

01:16:51 ◼   ► You don't hear from Marco and his podcast app.

01:16:53 ◼   ► You don't hear the 50 people who tried to make podcast apps

01:16:56 ◼   ► and did and put them on the app store

01:16:58 ◼   ► and you can use them to subscribe to an RSS feed

01:17:02 ◼   ► and hit play and make a playlist

01:17:04 ◼   ► and no one hears about those apps

01:17:05 ◼   ► because they did what they did just fine

01:17:07 ◼   ► but they didn't have anything to differentiate them

01:17:09 ◼   ► and it just ends up being too much to add all the features

01:17:13 ◼   ► that would differentiate them.

01:17:15 ◼   ► So yeah, especially when you're looking at like,

01:17:19 ◼   ► all these things that interest you, like pick one.

01:17:22 ◼   ► Don't try to make a podcast Reddit Twitter client, right?

01:17:27 ◼   ► It's too much in a single application.

01:17:29 ◼   ► Even just doing one of those is very difficult.

01:17:31 ◼   ► And then when you do the market research,

01:17:33 ◼   ► like Marco described,

01:17:34 ◼   ► like looking at what the competitive landscape is

01:17:36 ◼   ► and thinking about what you have to offer there,

01:17:39 ◼   ► that should give you an idea of like,

01:17:42 ◼   ► All right, if I did this successfully, could it work?

01:17:45 ◼   ► And now let me look at what I've signed myself up for.

01:17:48 ◼   ► Okay, so I'm gonna make an app that's like X, Y, and Z.

01:17:50 ◼   ► Oh, and by the way, it has to look nice and be nice

01:17:52 ◼   ► and be bug free and have good performance.

01:17:53 ◼   ► And it's tall.

01:17:55 ◼   ► I don't wanna be discouraging,

01:17:57 ◼   ► but I feel like in some ways it's easier to make,

01:18:01 ◼   ► an app for organizing your model train parts

01:18:04 ◼   ► than it is to make a Twitter client, right?

01:18:06 ◼   ► Or a Reddit client even.

01:18:08 ◼   ► Because how many apps are there

01:18:09 ◼   ► that organize model train parts?

01:18:11 ◼   ► probably not that many.

01:18:13 ◼   ► And if you're super into model trains

01:18:14 ◼   ► and you have a really good idea about how

01:18:16 ◼   ► you would like to organize your parts,

01:18:18 ◼   ► you have unique insight and you have a market

01:18:23 ◼   ► that doesn't have as many competitors.

01:18:25 ◼   ► And even if your app is a little bit janky,

01:18:27 ◼   ► it could be one of two or three model train part

01:18:32 ◼   ► organizing applications in the entire app store

01:18:34 ◼   ► and the other two haven't been updated in five years.

01:18:36 ◼   ► And that gives you a big advantage right out of the gate,

01:18:39 ◼   ► as opposed to a Twitter client or a Reddit client

01:18:42 ◼   ► or a podcast player where there is tons more competition

01:18:44 ◼   ► and that competition is active and experienced

01:18:47 ◼   ► and the ones that are left alive are probably pretty good.

01:18:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, I would say too, building on that a little bit,

01:18:52 ◼   ► you said that on the Mac that a Photoshop replacement