0:00:00So the masks that I have worn most of the time
0:00:03since the mask era began.
0:00:05I've tried a few different ones, and I ordered back months ago,
0:00:10I got these masks from a company that makes fish and Grateful Dead themed merchandise.
0:00:15And it doesn't say "fish" on it, but it has the Fishman Donut pattern on it,
0:00:23which is that pattern of the pinkish circles on the bluish background.
0:00:27It's in my Twitter background. Fishman Donut?
0:00:30Spell that?
0:00:31Fishman spelled F-I-S-H-M-A-N.
0:00:34It's the drummer John Fish.
0:00:37Anyway, so it's a long story.
0:00:39But this is like a symbol of fish.
0:00:42And it's not an obvious one for people who don't know it.
0:00:44It's like it's a subtle thing that was not subtle,
0:00:47but it's this thing that people who are not fish fans don't recognize as a fish thing.
0:00:51It looks like measles.
0:00:52Right. So anyway.
0:00:53Nothing to the germ theme.
0:00:57So I got a mask featuring this pattern.
0:01:00And yes, it's just the same pattern as my Twitter background,
0:01:02if you want to look at it quickly.
0:01:03I'll make it the chapter art for this chapter.
0:01:05So anyway.
0:01:06Bloody Cheerios.
0:01:07Yeah.
0:01:08And it's a fish thing.
0:01:09Anyway, I don't need to explain what it is.
0:01:11You don't care.
0:01:12But the point is, it's like a symbol of fishness and fish fandom
0:01:16that even many fish fans might not immediately notice it as such.
0:01:20And so it's especially nerdy and only fish fans would know what it is.
0:01:25No regular person would ever know what this is.
0:01:27And I walked my dog every day, even during the pandemic,
0:01:32I would still walk my dog.
0:01:33I would just be careful.
0:01:34I was in the suburbs away from people, walking on the sidewalk.
0:01:37I'd cross the street if someone came the other way, etc.
0:01:39So, you know, careful.
0:01:40But I was still outdoors in public for months wearing this mask.
0:01:45And zero people back at home ever seemed to notice what it was, ever said anything about
0:01:51it.
0:01:52And over the course of a few months, I probably passed a few hundred people.
0:01:55Not a single person said a word.
0:01:57I come to the beach town.
0:01:59Day one, I get two people saying, "Hey, nice mask."
0:02:03And I'm now having people, like as I'm walking my dog, I'm now having people just start talking
0:02:09to me about fish without even asking if that's what it is because they just know.
0:02:14I was petting some cute puppy today and the owner was like, "So you catch the '89 show
0:02:20they aired last night?"
0:02:21And I didn't even bring it up.
0:02:23It's funny.
0:02:24I feel like this is what normal people have with sports fandom that I've never had.
0:02:30The way you can just wear a hat for a sports team or something and you can walk down the
0:02:35street and strangers will be able to have small talk with you about that sports team
0:02:40that you both understand.
0:02:42This is something about normal society that I've never been able to participate in because
0:02:46I've never had anything about sports.
0:02:48I don't have that in me.
0:02:50And so I always felt like this weird outsider, like no one likes the stuff I like.
0:02:55You know, being a nerd, that's part of life.
0:02:57But you know, it's like no one likes the stuff I like.
0:03:00No one understands who I am.
0:03:02And around here, I'm walking around with my fish mask.
0:03:05It's like fish fans seem to be nowhere.
0:03:08When you're the guy who likes fish in the room, you have no support from me in almost
0:03:13any room that you're in.
0:03:14Right?
0:03:15Hey buddy, you gotta hang out on more college campuses.
0:03:17And like around here, it's like they're everywhere.
0:03:22My people are everywhere.
0:03:24It's amazing.
0:03:25Stoners, you mean?
0:03:27I don't know if that's it, but I'm not even one of those.
0:03:30I don't even know if that's it, but there's some significant overlap between those groups
0:03:35for sure.
0:03:36But no, I think it's just like a certain kind of music nerd.
0:03:40And for some reason, I have none of them where I live the rest of the year.
0:03:44And here, it's just everybody.
0:03:46It's amazing.
0:03:47You should get the moo moo.
0:03:49Just go for it entirely.
0:03:50I agree.
0:03:51I would love to see that, please.
0:03:53I can't believe the drummer for the band, is that why the band is named P-H-I-S-H?
0:03:57Is it named after him or is it just a coincidence?
0:03:59It's named after him.
0:04:00His nickname is Fish.
0:04:01His last name is Fishman, but they spell it P-H and he spells it F.
0:04:05I don't know why.
0:04:06I don't think I knew that.
0:04:07It's like Eddie Van Halen with a P-H. Van, P-H-A-L-E-N.
0:04:12Eddie Van Faitland.
0:04:13Yeah.
0:04:14Why didn't he just use F-I-S-H?
0:04:16I don't know.
0:04:17Why is he wearing moo moo?
0:04:18I don't know.
0:04:19Why does it have red blood cells on it?
0:04:20I don't know.
0:04:21We've gone from measles to bloody Cheerios to red blood cells.
0:04:27It's been a journey, fellas.
0:04:29We're only just beginning.
0:04:30All right, so our first stretch goal was me taking over the pre-show audio, which as much
0:04:36as—
0:04:37No one's keeping track of these, are they?
0:04:38We just want to say these things and put out ridiculous numbers that we're never going
0:04:42to achieve and just make stuff up.
0:04:43Someday we're going to hit one of those numbers and someone's going to remind us and we're
0:04:46going to have to do it.
0:04:47That's fine.
0:04:48So the Fisherman—what?
0:04:49Fish Relief Fund?
0:04:50What did you call it?
0:04:51Fishman Relief Fund?
0:04:52Fish Relief Fund?
0:04:53I can't even say it fast.
0:04:54Fisherman's Friend Fund.
0:04:55Yeah, Fisherman's Friend Fund.
0:04:56That's the winter version.
0:04:58Yeah, right.
0:04:59They keep Marco and bad-tasting cough drops forever.
0:05:02Yeah, they do taste like garbage, but they do work.
0:05:05They do work.
0:05:06Anyway, we're going to cut this from the release show.
0:05:10Hi, future Marco.
0:05:11But I just wanted to thank everyone who has become a member because—oh, wait, what do
0:05:16you mean, "oh yeah"?
0:05:17I wasn't even talking about the Hamilton part, you dick.
0:05:21Just everything you say he was saying, "oh yeah."
0:05:23Everything that Gacy says, just cut it right out.
0:05:24It'll make so many people happy.
0:05:25No, I just wanted to say that we reached an undisclosed milestone in membership, and we
0:05:30will keep it undisclosed, but that meant a lot to all three of us, and that's very
0:05:33kind of everyone who has joined.
0:05:35No, this is going to go in the show.
0:05:37This is in the show.
0:05:38This is good.
0:05:39Our members are awesome.
0:05:40We had a lot of them now, and it's really good.
0:05:41We're very happy.
0:05:43Thank you, everybody.
0:05:44You're being awesome, and we're very happy, and we're very thankful.
0:05:47And I'm still working on the bootleg feet.
0:05:49Haven't had a lot of time to work this week for unrelated reasons, but nothing horrible.
0:05:54Just, you know, life got busy, but yeah, we're getting there.
0:05:58Yep, but I just wanted to say thank you very much, because we have been overjoyed, and
0:06:05some of us, namely me, have been flabbergasted by the response, and especially for not really
0:06:11getting a whole lot in return at the moment, and so it is incredibly kind of every single
0:06:17one of you, and we are deeply appreciative of it.
0:06:21So thank you.
0:06:22Also, thank you for proving me right.
0:06:24When we first started talking about doing this, we were trying to argue, as we've mentioned
0:06:30in the past, we each had different bets on how many members we'd get, and so far, everyone
0:06:36is proving me right and not proving Casey right, and I think, Jon, you're still kind
0:06:40of in contention, right?
0:06:43Yeah, no, I think we've exceeded my expectations now, too.
0:06:46Right.
0:06:47Not by a lot, but by a little bit.
0:06:49We're still less than half of your optimistic number, though.
0:06:51That's fine, but by reverse prices are at rules, I still win, so here we are.
0:06:54All right, sure.
0:06:55Well, no, that's not true, right?
0:06:57Because you've guessed over the actual amount, so it's closest without going over.
0:07:01Oh, you said reverse.
0:07:02Oh, you said reverse.
0:07:03I'm sorry, I missed that part.
0:07:04Yes, sorry.
0:07:05Closest without going under.
0:07:06It's double secret probation.
0:07:07Right?
0:07:08What is that from?
0:07:09I know that.
0:07:10You don't get that reference.
0:07:11No, I know that.
0:07:12What is that from?
0:07:13You don't know that.
0:07:14It's from Animal House.
0:07:15Hey, Marco gets a reference.
0:07:16What's going on?
0:07:17I've seen that.
0:07:18I've seen Animal House.
0:07:19Wow.
0:07:20Marco saw a movie.
0:07:21He's wearing a college t-shirt.
0:07:22I actually don't remember liking Animal House very much, but it has been forever since I've
0:07:25seen it.
0:07:26No, it's probably not a good movie.
0:07:28Okay, moving on.
0:07:29Let's start with some follow-up.
0:07:30Hey, guess what?
0:07:31There's no target disk mode in our Macs, which I guess is a bummer, but to be honest, I think
0:07:36I've only used target disk mode a couple of times in my life, so I don't know.
0:07:42Is this a bummer?
0:07:43Yeah, it's a bummer.
0:07:44I mean, look, target disk mode is one of those things that most Mac people never know is
0:07:48there, but the nerds know it's there.
0:07:50And it occasionally comes extremely in handy because what it does, for anyone who doesn't
0:07:55know very quickly, what it basically does is it's been featured in Macs forever, and
0:08:00it allows you to boot up holding down T or Option T or something.
0:08:03John can correct me.
0:08:04And basically, the Mac that you're booting up in target disk mode doesn't boot the OS.
0:08:10Instead, it basically turns itself into an external hard drive enclosure for the drives
0:08:15that are inside of it.
0:08:16And then you can connect a different Mac to it over various cables over the years.
0:08:20That's evolved as the ports have changed over time.
0:08:23The second computer can access the drives on the first computer as if they were connected
0:08:28just via an external enclosure.
0:08:30And so it's a way to boot a hosting computer into a disk read mode so that you can usually
0:08:38transfer its contents to a new computer.
0:08:41So it's great when you're changing, when you've got a new Mac or your Mac is dying
0:08:46and you have to get stuff off of it and it can't boot all the way or the screen is
0:08:49dead and you just want to get stuff off the disk or whatever.
0:08:52And it's a very useful troubleshooting and migration tool to just read stuff over the
0:08:56cable directly.
0:08:57Now in recent times, it is less necessary as you have migration assistant getting better,
0:09:03but it still serves a very nice role.
0:09:06And it's probably still more flexible than migration assistant because you don't have
0:09:12to be doing a migration to do it.
0:09:14If you have a dying laptop, you can put it in target disk mode and connect some of the
0:09:19computer to it and just pull off whatever you want.
0:09:21It just shows up as a disk.
0:09:23And so that's certainly getting complicated over the years as things like full disk encryption
0:09:28have happened.
0:09:29And I would imagine the reason it's different on the ARM Macs is related to that somehow.
0:09:35It's related to the physical security of the data on the disk or something like that.
0:09:39I'm sure they've enhanced it even further, etc.
0:09:42So they probably have good reason for changing it, but it's probably going to be slower
0:09:49and worse the way they're doing it over SMB instead.
0:09:52So I do more in the loss of target disk mode.
0:09:55I don't use it often, but when I do use it, it's really nice to have.
0:09:58Yeah, like when I was saying, you can still do something like this, but instead of exposing
0:10:04it as an external hard drive, it exposes it as a server that speaks SMB.
0:10:08And you authenticate against it, presumably using the credentials that belong to the Mac
0:10:14that you're connecting to.
0:10:15You're doing everything over SMB, and SMB is going to be slower and less feature-rich
0:10:18than directly mounting the drive.
0:10:20And I also assume the reason they're not doing it is because, well, first of all, iOS
0:10:23devices don't have it, and the ARM Macs owe a lot hardware-wise to iOS devices.
0:10:28And second, there may be even more security when dealing with the internal storage and
0:10:33iOS devices than there is with Macs, and maybe this was just the path of least resistance.
0:10:36We'll see.
0:10:37Related to this, by the way, we didn't mention this last time when discussing how the startup
0:10:40process has changed on ARM Macs.
0:10:42There was that session that we linked to last week that I think contained this information,
0:10:45but it's worth mentioning for people who didn't watch it.
0:10:48Marco mentioned not being able to remember what key you hold down when you boot into
0:10:52different things.
0:10:53Command-Option-P-R, the Shift key, hold down R. Oh, no, it's Command-R now.
0:10:57It's very confusing.
0:10:58Apple has unified all of that.
0:11:00For the ARM Macs, you just hold down the Power key, or I guess the Touch ID key or whatever.
0:11:06Well, we're going to talk about that later, I think.
0:11:08The unlabeled button.
0:11:11The one button that's on your computer that's not a mouse button or keyboard thing, the
0:11:14Power key, and that will apparently bring up a little miniature interface that will
0:11:18allow you to select what you want to do instead of having to memorize all these weird key
0:11:21combos.
0:11:22So more arcane knowledge will be uselessly stuck in people's heads forever, and people
0:11:29will just need to know you have to hold down one key, which is useful.
0:11:32There's a bunch of stuff about the new Macs where they can boot more of the OS.
0:11:36That's one of the APFS volume rolls.
0:11:38A miniature OS that has enough of the OS to get something going, including potentially
0:11:45graphs acceleration and stuff.
0:11:47Lots of the other modes you used to be able to boot into, like hardware diagnostic mode
0:11:50or even recovery mode.
0:11:51A lot of the times, it feels worse and slower because it loads limited graphic drivers,
0:11:56or it's not a real GUI at all, or it used to look like classic Mac OS for years even
0:12:00though you're running Mac OS X.
0:12:03This is all going to improve matters by booting something closer to a full-fledged OS where
0:12:09you can run actual stuff.
0:12:10So I welcome this unification, although I'll also miss target disk mode because that was
0:12:15very handy.
0:12:16And mostly the reason it was handy, it was the speed.
0:12:20Directly connecting a hard drive is always faster than connecting to a server, especially
0:12:23back in the bad old days of Apple file, APFS, whatever.
0:12:27I can't remember the acronym anymore.
0:12:28It's been so long.
0:12:29That's it.
0:12:30Yeah.
0:12:31So.
0:12:32Yeah.
0:12:33And just think all those websites that you have to like, whenever you can't remember
0:12:35the key combination and you have to search the internet for Mac recovery key combo and
0:12:41you get these garbage websites that are filled with ads that all you're doing is digging
0:12:45for the one stupid three-word combo in the middle that tells you what you actually need
0:12:49to know.
0:12:50What are all those sites going to do now?
0:12:51Apple's putting them out of business.
0:12:52You don't have to go to a website to find out where the power button is.
0:12:56Where is the power button in iMac anyway?
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0:15:05WidgetKit and third party watch faces.
0:15:07What's going on here?
0:15:08I don't know how much we talked about WidgetKit, but it's that SwiftUI way to serialize widgets
0:15:14into a bunch of instructions for SwiftUI so that they can run without your application
0:15:19running and it's what's used to make the widgets in the sidebar and Big Sur and it's very similar
0:15:25to the complications that run on watches.
0:15:27In all those cases, every complication in every widget doesn't have an associated app
0:15:32running constantly behind the scenes to power it because that would be incredibly inefficient,
0:15:35especially on the watch.
0:15:36That's one of the things that WidgetKit does.
0:15:38We also talked about third party watch faces, the ability to vend multiple complications
0:15:43on the new watch OS of the same type.
0:15:45You can basically fill the entire screen except for the little area that has the digital time
0:15:50with a bunch of content that essentially comes from third party apps, but it's not really
0:15:53a third party watch face.
0:15:54Well, a couple of people have noted that there is a private API called underscore clock hand
0:16:01rotation effect in WidgetKit, which doesn't necessarily mean that WidgetKit is intended
0:16:05to make third party watch faces.
0:16:07You can imagine making a widget on your Mac that is itself an analog clock or doing some
0:16:11other kind of animation that uses a clock hand style rotation effect, but it does show
0:16:16at least somebody was thinking about using WidgetKit to make something that looks like
0:16:20a clock.
0:16:22And if Apple was going to make a third party watch face thing, it would probably work similar
0:16:27to complications in that, again, you wouldn't be allowed to have an app running on the CPU
0:16:32all the time powering the watch face because that would be very inefficient.
0:16:35There would have to be some very limited system just like there is for complications for drawing
0:16:39your watch face.
0:16:40So if something is going to eventually mature into third party watch faces, it could be
0:16:44the similar API to what they use for complications.
0:16:47Yeah, which to me is actually very promising.
0:16:50I've been going under the assumption for a while now that they're never going to actually
0:16:54allow custom watch faces, and I still think that's the most likely outcome, but I agree,
0:16:59John.
0:17:00I think if they're going to do it, this is clearly the way they're going to do it for
0:17:03power reasons.
0:17:04Basically, you can give us a SwiftUI archived view or whatever, how are these complications
0:17:09working, I don't know enough about SwiftUI yet to describe it better, but basically you
0:17:14can do it with these rudimentary SwiftUI operations from this preset library of things that we
0:17:21allow clock faces to do.
0:17:24And those are all things that then the OS can do extremely efficiently without calling
0:17:28your code constantly at all.
0:17:31That's probably how they would do it if they were to ever do it.
0:17:34John, tell me about unified memory architecture and a future ARM Mac Pro, if you please.
0:17:39There's not much new information about this.
0:17:41We talked a couple shows ago about how Apple was pushing the unified memory architecture
0:17:45as a way to turn a potential con into a pro by saying, "Well, you know, it's not that
0:17:50we don't support discrete GPUs, it's that our integrated GPUs are so amazing."
0:17:55And like I said, that's mostly true.
0:17:58Like again, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X both use "integrated GPUs" and they're
0:18:06really powerful.
0:18:07So right up to the point where everything up to a real gaming PC you can do with an
0:18:13integrated GPU.
0:18:14So if you're worried that, "Oh, my MacBook Pro won't have a discrete GPU anymore, the
0:18:18graphics are really bad," don't worry about that.
0:18:20The only place you've got to worry, of course, is the Mac Pro where it can have four discrete
0:18:26GPUs, eight discrete GPUs, depending on how you pack them in there, and that's just not
0:18:30going to work integrated.
0:18:31But anyway, the unified memory architecture of sort of having the CPU and the GPU all
0:18:36share memory has advantages.
0:18:37They're closer to each other, it can be faster for a certain operation, so on and so forth.
0:18:40But of course, the disadvantages that you're fighting for memory with the rest of the computer
0:18:43and dedicated GPU memory can have a much wider bus width and other advantages that usually
0:18:50aren't true of the system memory.
0:18:52What I related to this is a bunch of existing technologies that are used to mediate between
0:18:59the CPU and the GPU trying to coordinate with each other and share a pool of memory while
0:19:07also having dedicated memory for dedicated GPUs.
0:19:10One of them is called, this is a fun acronym, Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators,
0:19:17which is CCIX.
0:19:18Let's say Cache Coherent, I get the CC, I for Interconnect, for accelerators is an X?
0:19:25Accelerator?
0:19:26I don't know.
0:19:27Anyway, and it's pronounced C6.
0:19:29If you thought Mac OS X was hard to pronounce, C6.
0:19:32This is not consumer facing.
0:19:35No, no.
0:19:36But anyway, this is an existing standard for doing this type of thing.
0:19:39AMD GPUs also support what they call HSA, which allows the CPU and GPU to share memory
0:19:45while also having their own dedicated memory.
0:19:47The HSA, it's heterogeneous system architecture.
0:19:51There's a bunch of standards for doing this.
0:19:52This is not unknown technology.
0:19:54And as we discussed last time, the easiest thing that Apple could do is just support
0:20:00external GPUs on our Macs.
0:20:01That's totally a thing they could do.
0:20:03Lots of rumors now based on W2C slides not listing discrete GPU support or saying, "Oh,
0:20:07Apple's not going to do that.
0:20:08They're going to do everything integrated," which seems unlikely to me for the aforementioned
0:20:12reasons that you can't put eight giant 100 watt GPUs inside a system on a chip.
0:20:17It's too big.
0:20:19Or that Apple's going to make its own external GPUs, which sure, why not?
0:20:24They're going to make their own cell modems.
0:20:25They're making their own system on a chip.
0:20:26They could make their own GPUs if they wanted to.
0:20:29Still, it seems the path of least resistance would be, "Eh, just stick with AMD and support
0:20:34them on only one model, the big giant Mac Pro."
0:20:37And on every other model, you get a very, very, very fast "integrated" GPU, which is
0:20:41another thing that Apple emphasized in all their sessions.
0:20:44They have this advice in their documentation and in their talks, "Don't assume when the
0:20:49GPU is the integrated GPU that it's the slow one."
0:20:52That's not true for the Apple ones.
0:20:54Apple's integrated GPUs are fast.
0:20:57They're saying it mostly from a programmer's perspective.
0:20:59Don't make assumptions about ... I think they have this attribute that says, "Is low power
0:21:04or is GPU is low power," and I think the Apple ones return true.
0:21:08And they're like, "Yeah, they're low power, but they're also really fast."
0:21:11So don't use low power as a proxy to mean slow.
0:21:15Anyway, I'm still very optimistic about the potential GPU performance on all of the ARM
0:21:22Macs.
0:21:23The only one that's question mark is the Mac Pro, and I think that's probably going to
0:21:26come much later in the transition.
0:21:28So we look forward to seeing what Apple has to offer there.
0:21:31But in the meantime, if you're worried, don't be because ... Well, I said don't be because
0:21:35technologically speaking, Apple can absolutely put a GPU in all their laptops that will more
0:21:40than satisfy your needs, right?
0:21:43The iMac, maybe it's a question mark, but overall, Apple could choose to have wimpier
0:21:49GPUs just because they don't think that's an important area to spend die space.
0:21:55I just don't think they'll make that choice.
0:21:56Based on how good the GPUs are in the fanless iPad, I'm very optimistic about the GPUs in
0:22:02upcoming Macs.
0:22:03Cote: Tangentially related, a few hours ago, Renee Ritchie tweeted kind of out of nowhere,
0:22:08and maybe there was a kerfuffle about this and I just wasn't privy to it, but as far
0:22:12as I could tell, it was out of nowhere, and he writes from Apple, "Over a decade ago,
0:22:17Apple partnered with Intel to design and develop Thunderbolt, and today our customers enjoy
0:22:21the speed and flexibility it brings to every Mac.
0:22:23We remain committed to the future of Thunderbolt and will support it in Macs with Apple Silicon."
0:22:28Which is good news.
0:22:29Eric Meyer Yeah, that was no brainer.
0:22:30Like I said, Thunderbolt is now royalty free.
0:22:32You don't need an Intel chip to do it.
0:22:34USB 4 is basically Thunderbolt 3.
0:22:36Intel is building it into their new CPUs.
0:22:42Everything is completely lined up for Apple to get anything to support Thunderbolt.
0:22:45Thunderbolt 4, interestingly, it doesn't get any faster.
0:22:50I just looked this up because I didn't know what the deal with Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4
0:22:53was.
0:22:54I was confused and thinking USB 4 was Thunderbolt 4, but no.
0:22:56USB 4 is Thunderbolt 3.
0:22:58Not confusing at all, I know.
0:22:59Thunderbolt 4 is just Thunderbolt 3, everything the same speed, but it supports hubs with
0:23:04four ports and has more stringent requirements for cables and other stuff like that.
0:23:08So if you look for something that's Thunderbolt 4, you'll know you're getting a bunch of
0:23:11stuff that's optional on Thunderbolt 3.
0:23:14But yeah, there's no reason Apple can't support all of that.
0:23:18I mean, upcoming iPads could support quote-unquote USB 4, which is actually Thunderbolt 3.
0:23:23It's all lined up for Apple to be able to do that without including an Intel chip and
0:23:27build right into their system on a chip, so it'll be fine.
0:23:30Let's talk more about Apple platform unification and ARM Mac hardware.
0:23:35Upgrade already beat us to it, but I thought this was a good topic that tied into a previous
0:23:39discussion about Apple platform unification, which mostly was we ended up going down a
0:23:42rabbit hole of APIs, the ATP being ATP.
0:23:45But also I was trying to talk about the overall experience of what it's going to be like
0:23:50to use that, what kind of applications will be available to you, and how they all have
0:23:54to live together and work together and seem like a coherent whole and not seem like you're
0:23:58running a bunch of VMs.
0:24:00That's all look like one thing.
0:24:02The flip side of that is what does the hardware look like?
0:24:05We already talked about on the WDABC show that touch Macs are coming.
0:24:10All signs point to that.
0:24:13The first ARM Macs will have touch screens, and if they don't, I think a lot of people
0:24:17will be very surprised because everything in Big Sur and all the APIs and all the other
0:24:23stuff points in that direction.
0:24:25And it just makes sense with Apple's line, but the episode of Upgrade 304 that we'll
0:24:29link in the show notes, Jason and Mike went through even more detail about the stuff that
0:24:34Touch Macs might have.
0:24:40I think Jason also wrote an article about it.
0:24:42I couldn't find the URL of that one, but if we can find it, we'll put that in the show
0:24:45notes too.
0:24:46I thought it was worth summarizing here because I basically agree with everything they said,
0:24:49but just to give all the listeners of this show a heads up, what can you expect from
0:24:55the first ARM Mac hardware aside from it having a touch screen that you will be confused about
0:25:01how to use because you haven't used anything except for a Mac for a long time?
0:25:04Did either of you two listen to the show or read any of those articles?
0:25:07Have you been spoiled?
0:25:08I have listened, but I have not read.
0:25:10I have not.
0:25:11All right, well, you should let Marco go.
0:25:13Marco, describe the upcoming ARM Mac hardware, all the hardware features that it will have.
0:25:18Because I haven't read everything?
0:25:19Yeah, I just want to see if your opinions line up with theirs.
0:25:23Okay.
0:25:24Well, besides the stuff that's been reported of things like changes to the boot process
0:25:29or whatever else, I'm guessing we're going to have really nice thin laptops.
0:25:36Probably at least the lowest end ones won't have fans, and I think we'll have incredible
0:25:42battery life.
0:25:43I do think, I agree, that we're going to have touch screens.
0:25:46I don't think that they're going to have touch screens right away.
0:25:48I really don't.
0:25:49I concur that it will happen.
0:25:51I just don't think it'll happen immediately.
0:25:52I think the reason why they are bringing over iPhone apps from day one, I think there's
0:25:58two reasons.
0:25:59Number one is to give this new platform a vast amount of content, a vast amount of software
0:26:06from day one.
0:26:07But I also think that the reason why iPhone apps will work so seamlessly on the Mac is
0:26:13because they will have touch screens.
0:26:15If you don't have touch hardware, then you have a much larger chance that arbitrary iPhone
0:26:24apps just won't work as expected on Macs.
0:26:26I don't think Apple would want that kind of customer experience.
0:26:30I hear you.
0:26:31Well, you two are both thinking small.
0:26:34Marco's thinking small.
0:26:35Granted, Marco didn't read the article here, but I was listening to them talk about it.
0:26:40I was like, "I hope they talk about this," and then they did.
0:26:42Then I hope they talk about that, and then they did.
0:26:44My visions of this hardware exactly match what they discussed.
0:26:47Casey, you seem like even though you've read all the stuff, you think if that stuff's coming,
0:26:50it's not going to be right out the door?
0:26:54Based on no facts whatsoever, I would suspect that what we see initially, like the very
0:27:01first ones at the end of the year, I think will have something novel about them, but
0:27:06I don't think it will be this masterpiece that Mike and Jason have envisioned.
0:27:13I think that would mean something like, for example, maybe Face ID, which they spoke about,
0:27:17maybe Face ID would be in the laptops right when they're released.
0:27:23That would be something novel and interesting, but not altogether unreasonable.
0:27:29The one thing that I will say that really had an exploding head emoji when I heard them
0:27:35talk about it, which seems so obvious in retrospect, which means it's probably going to happen,
0:27:39is rounded screens in the same way that the iPad and the new iPhones have it.
0:27:44I never would have thought of that in a million years, and as soon as they said it...
0:27:47It's because you don't watch WWDC sessions, that's why.
0:27:50Safe area insets.
0:27:52Mike's doing his homework.
0:27:53If you haven't watched the sessions, a bunch of Mac stuff has safe area insets now, and
0:27:57if you've done iOS development, you know what safe area insets mean.
0:28:00Guess what?
0:28:01Rounded corners are coming to Mac screens.
0:28:03Oh, no, I don't want that.
0:28:05I don't have a particularly negative opinion.
0:28:10In fact, I like the rounded screens on anything I'm using today, but it would be weird having
0:28:13that on a Mac.
0:28:15But I think my vision is that their first release, which they've said would be this
0:28:21fall, and I'm envisioning it as being laptops, but maybe it wouldn't be, but I would envision
0:28:25laptops that may or may not have a wildly different industrial design, but I think will
0:28:31have something novel for sure.
0:28:33And again, Face ID is a great example, but maybe it'd be something different.
0:28:36But I don't think that there'll be a grand departure.
0:28:39Another possibility, although I don't think it would be the case, is like maybe they look
0:28:42the same, but you can optionally include the cellular radio that Marco and I have been begging
0:28:47for for years.
0:28:49It's not earth-shatteringly different, but it's novel.
0:28:52And then I think sometime in 2021, if the world hasn't ended by then, then I think that's
0:28:59when they start to really unleash the crack and start doing really new, interesting, and
0:29:04different—I would normally say novel, but I don't think I want to say that right now—new,
0:29:08interesting, and different stuff.
0:29:10But Jon, I get the feeling you think they're going to come out of the gate fierce.
0:29:14So what do you think is happening?
0:29:15Well, just briefly on the rounded corner thing, I think I mentioned this in the last show,
0:29:19and Jason mentioned it in an upgrade as well.
0:29:20The original Mac had rounded corners.
0:29:22Not actual physical rounded corners on a CRT, but he would draw black pixels in the corners
0:29:26of the screen to black out that area, right?
0:29:29So it looked like it had rounded corners.
0:29:30So you're saying, "I can't imagine rounded corners on a Mac."
0:29:32That's true.
0:29:33I actually had to look—I remember a couple years ago, I had to look and think, "Wait,
0:29:37are the corners still rounded on the Mac?"
0:29:38And I was shocked to learn that they were not.
0:29:41I just assumed they were rounded, but obviously the radius is going to be bigger.
0:29:47Presumably it's more like an eye.
0:29:48But if you want to know what the radius is going to look like, just take a big CIR window
0:29:50and drag it down to the corner of your screen and see how that radius lines up.
0:29:54Imagine the screen matched that perfectly.
0:29:56That's a good bet.
0:29:57But yeah, no, I think—first of all, there's always the possibility, as we said several
0:30:01shows back, that they do the Intel thing.
0:30:03It's like, "Look, if we want to get our Macs out the door ASAP, we should do as little
0:30:08redesign as possible and just take our existing cases and put ARM stuff inside them and ship
0:30:12them and they'll be boring in that way."
0:30:14And I think the only reason they would do that is time constraints.
0:30:17Like this is how we can get them out the door the fastest.
0:30:19This is the simple, easier first step.
0:30:22But if they do that, which I really hope and think they won't, that's just a time-constrained
0:30:30step to what I think they're shooting for, which is a Mac with a touchscreen with rounded
0:30:35corners on it with FaceTime, with Touch ID, with a cellular modem.
0:30:39Like all the things they list in these articles, there's no reason we're not going to get
0:30:45all of them eventually.
0:30:46This is the new face of Mac hardware.
0:30:51And it would match up perfectly with the iPad.
0:30:55Oh, and one more iPad thing, ProMotion.
0:30:59All the stuff that's available on the iPad, when a Mac is just a bigger and more powerful
0:31:04iPad, you get that stuff "for free."
0:31:06You don't have to do any extra work for ProMotion.
0:31:09iPads already support it.
0:31:10Rounded corners, that's a bunch of OS and software changes.
0:31:12They're already committing to that.
0:31:13Touchscreens, you've got to move controls around.
0:31:15That's all there.
0:31:16Face ID, it's very…
0:31:19Support for things like the Apple Pencil.
0:31:22Remember the DTK that we're not allowed to talk about.
0:31:26Reports tell us that what's inside there is very much like an iPad.
0:31:30Right?
0:31:31iPad already does all of these things.
0:31:33It's like they would have to take it out for you not to get it.
0:31:37Now, does that mean…
0:31:39What are they going to do for things like the Pro Display XDR that does not have rounded
0:31:43corners?
0:31:44You can just do what the original Mac did, but just don't draw on those pixels.
0:31:47Then you can have the same cohesive experience.
0:31:50Maybe on the Pro Displays, obviously, individual applications can choose to draw over those
0:31:53areas and it wouldn't be like some hardware feature that's stopping you from doing it.
0:31:58That I think is the…
0:32:00Apple platform unification is what makes…
0:32:03When you look at a Mac and an iPad next to each other, in the beginning, they looked
0:32:07and behaved very different.
0:32:09I think a year or two from now, they're going to look and behave very similarly.
0:32:13They'll be able to run a lot of the same applications.
0:32:17Their aesthetic design will be similar.
0:32:20They will support all the same input methods.
0:32:22The Mac will be able to have more stuff going on at the same time and be able to have more
0:32:25RAM and more storage and more screen space, more of everything, but not different by nature.
0:32:33Most of the time when you're using an iPad, you'd be using the touch screen, but it
0:32:36supports a trackpad and a keyboard.
0:32:37Most of the time when you're using a Mac, you're using a mouse and a keyboard, but
0:32:40it also supports a touch screen.
0:32:43That's the future of Mac hardware.
0:32:46I don't see any reason for that not to be the future of Mac hardware.
0:32:49Like I said, I think it would be harder for Apple to not implement those features because
0:32:53they're already there.
0:32:54I mean, obviously you need OS support and there's big hurdles to overcome, and that
0:32:57could be another reason.
0:32:58The second reason that Casey's idea of them being boring in the beginning could be true
0:33:02is one, stopgap hardware, but two, software support takes longer than they expected.
0:33:09Lots of times hardware is delayed at Apple because the software isn't ready.
0:33:12So integrating Face ID into Mac OS or integrating cell modem support into Mac OS may take longer
0:33:19and they won't bother shipping the hardware until it does.
0:33:21Hell, I can imagine a Mac laptop with a U1 chip in it.
0:33:25Why not?
0:33:26Like, you know, that's a Mac laptop that someone holds up to do AR stuff, right?
0:33:31Especially if it's a foldable convertible.
0:33:32That was funny.
0:33:33Mike and Jason were also talking about the ideas of convertible Macs that can fold over
0:33:40and be tablets or whatever.
0:33:41Apple I think was the probably the first article I ever wrote for Mac World magazine back when
0:33:45it was a paper magazine.
0:33:48It was an article about just that.
0:33:49It was an article about a Mac that was a laptop, but you could fold it over on itself and then
0:33:54it would run iPad apps, but it was Intel, right?
0:33:56So it would run Mac OS on Intel and it would run iOS apps also on Intel, just like they
0:34:02run in the simulator, right?
0:34:04Because iOS was already running on Intel, so it's no problem having an Intel machine
0:34:10that can run both.
0:34:11Apple went the other direction and made both of them are.
0:34:13But I'm not willing to commit to the convertible yet, although obviously I've had that idea
0:34:19for a long time, but all of that other stuff, all the input methods, all the features, all
0:34:25the aesthetics, I feel like that's going to be the future of Mac hardware, especially
0:34:30on the laptop line.
0:34:32Things get fuzzier with the Mac Pro and the iMac, but if you can envision an iMac as,
0:34:37as we said in the last show, a really, really, really big iPad with way more power, it makes
0:34:44perfect sense to me.
0:34:45Yeah, I do think that that is the eventual end.
0:34:49I'm less convinced that it's the near term, but if I'm Apple and if I'm worried about
0:34:59what people will think about this transition, like if I think I'm concerned that your average
0:35:05consumer is going to be scared off from buying a Mac because of this, which I don't think
0:35:09an average consumer would, I don't think anyone in that category really cares, but take it
0:35:13for a moment that they're worried that the average consumer is going to be pessimistic
0:35:17about this sort of thing.
0:35:19The easiest way to get your average consumer to get over that is to say, "Oh, well look
0:35:23at this new hotness you can get."
0:35:25You can get touch, you can get face ID, you can get all of this stuff that you're familiar
0:35:30with from your iPad or your iPhone, and you can now have it on your Mac too.
0:35:34How amazing is that?
0:35:35I think I said on the WWDC episode, if I'm not mistaken, the number one way to get me,
0:35:43not that I really count in the grand scheme of things, but the number one way to get me
0:35:45to upgrade from this computer I bought a month ago is if there's some sweet new industrial
0:35:51design or some sweet new capability that I don't have now.
0:35:55I don't know if I would ditch the computer that I just bought strictly for a cellular
0:35:59modem, but if it had a cellular modem, and if it had touch, even though I don't think
0:36:04I want touch, but everyone I know who's done it loves it, if it had touch, if it had face
0:36:08ID, all this put together, suddenly I'm going from a computer that I thought I was
0:36:12going to use for years to a computer that I used for like six months.
0:36:16Suddenly I'm on the Marco timetable of laptop upgrades.
0:36:19You remember the last time they did the transition from Intel, whether it was a conscious strategy
0:36:25or not, one of the effects of them essentially leaving the Macs the same but just switching
0:36:29out the guts was a comforting factor.
0:36:31Oh, a Mac is still a Mac.
0:36:32It looks the same as it did, because what was important at that time was our customers
0:36:36really like Macs, don't rock the boat, they're going to be scaled by this transition, sell
0:36:39them something that looks and behaves exactly like it did before, and they will feel comfortable.
0:36:42They won't even know it's running Intel.
0:36:45But today Apple's in a very different situation where most of Apple's customers don't care
0:36:50about the Mac.
0:36:51They don't own a Mac, and they don't care about the Mac.
0:36:54They're the iPhone company, and iPhones and maybe to a lesser extent iPads.
0:36:59So the way to make people comfortable with a new line of Macs is to make them more like
0:37:03phones and iPads.
0:37:04That's what people like.
0:37:05Apple, I don't think, is as worried about disturbing the Mac users.
0:37:09And even on the Mac side of it, Apple is playing catch up here.
0:37:12PCs, quote unquote, PCs have supported touch screens for a very long time.
0:37:17Microsoft itself has a big giant tablet computer that's a giant iPad.
0:37:23If people, you know, it's for the people who are in the market for a Mac, they're aware
0:37:28that personal computers exist and they see what features they have.
0:37:31Windows Hello, the thing, you know, Microsoft Face ID.
0:37:34Those things have been around for a long time.
0:37:36People might use that at work, even if they have a Mac at home, right?
0:37:38So making the new line of Macs, A, more like iOS devices, and B, catching up to the capabilities
0:37:46that PCs have had for years, that's the, you know, quote unquote, safe bet here, not to
0:37:51just keep them the same.
0:37:53Keeping them the same, if it's done at all, would be, you know, again, for expedience
0:37:57and they just need to get them out the door.
0:37:58They didn't have time to send out the fancy ones.
0:38:00But all of those redesigns are more attractive to customers, not less.
0:38:05Like there's no one who's going to be scared away by that.
0:38:07Yeah, we'll see.
0:38:09I'm extremely excited to see what late in this year brings and also scared because I
0:38:15don't want to spend another pile of money.
0:38:16I don't really have the pile of money to spend at this point.
0:38:19If they put out a small fanless laptop, you know you're going to buy it.
0:38:22Like, you know you're going to get it.
0:38:24It's going to have face ID and it's going to have a touch screen and the battery's going
0:38:27to last forever and it's going to be way faster than your door was and you're just going to
0:38:30buy it.
0:38:31And the excuse you're going to make is, oh, well, it's not replacing my big six inch.
0:38:34I still love that one, but I wanted to get this one for my little laptop and then you'll
0:38:37just use that little laptop for everything.
0:38:38Well, I'm going to have a 12 and a 13 inch because remember I bought a 13, not a 16.
0:38:41That's right.
0:38:42Sorry.
0:38:43But yes, now you will, yeah.
0:38:45And it'll be faster than your 13, which will be really sad for you.
0:38:48Yes, it will.
0:38:49I was just today doing some, I'm working on something new.
0:38:55We're hopefully going to talk about that in the post show, but I was working on something
0:38:57new and I needed to plug in a physical device for reasons that are uninteresting.
0:39:01And I had power plugged into my laptop already.
0:39:05I was doing work on the laptop because I was doing it in Big Sur because it's new stuff.
0:39:09And I had power plugged in and then I just grabbed a USB-C to lightning cable and just
0:39:13plugged it in as well.
0:39:15Did you know, gentlemen, how convenient it is to have more than one friggin' port on
0:39:20a laptop?
0:39:21Oh my goodness, it's amazing.
0:39:23That's the only part I'm not optimistic about, about RMAX, the port situation.
0:39:28Because iOS devices are not known for their proliferation of ports.
0:39:32Yeah, that's true.
0:39:33So I'm not sure.
0:39:34One more thing, and again, Jason already beat me to this.
0:39:38I don't remember if he mentioned it on the show, but he definitely wrote an article about
0:39:40it for Macworld.
0:39:42Another factor in potential RMAX hardware is the touch bar.
0:39:47The touch bar, if you squint, can be viewed as a way to bring touch to the Mac without
0:39:52making touch Macs.
0:39:54And we're not big fans of it in the show.
0:39:57Some people hate it, some people love it, but most people are indifferent to it, I feel
0:40:01like.
0:40:03When your whole screen is a touch screen, the touch bar makes far less sense for a bunch
0:40:09of reasons.
0:40:10In all fairness, it makes pretty little sense now, but we still have it on everything.
0:40:16And again, I think I'm on the same page with Jason.
0:40:17You can go two ways with this.
0:40:18One, get rid of it.
0:40:19It's a great time to get rid of it.
0:40:21The hardware is going to be amazing.
0:40:22It's going to be distracting.
0:40:23Apple can save face by just being like, "Look at all this amazing new stuff!"
0:40:26And the touch bar will go away, and if they get asked about it, they'll be like, "Well,
0:40:29the whole screen is touch now."
0:40:30It's a perfect PR answer, where Apple never has to admit that the touch bar never really
0:40:33caught on, or whatever.
0:40:36And honestly, the things that you can do with the touch bar, you can do much more with an
0:40:40entire touch screen.
0:40:41It's not quite the same, because some of the stuff, while you're on the keyboard, is harder
0:40:45to do, even if it's just up a little bit on the screen, but it's not quite the same.
0:40:47The second way they can go is really lean into the touch bar and have a touch screen
0:40:52on your laptop, and then a much bigger, touchable area above the keyboard.
0:40:57Maybe twice or three times the height, sort of an extension of the screen, a second touch
0:41:01screen.
0:41:02But that seems far less likely to me.
0:41:05And for one of the reasons that Jason cited, the way the touch bar works now is the little
0:41:11T-whatever, T1 or T2 chips drives the touch bar, and that's its own little separate-armed
0:41:16computer that runs its own little weird OS that draws the touch bar and does all that
0:41:23stuff.
0:41:24Apple's not good.
0:41:25And that's how it's architected in Mac OS, this whole big second little computer running
0:41:30a thing and communicating to it.
0:41:32They would have to completely re-architect that, because they're not going to put two
0:41:34ARM chips inside the ARM Macs.
0:41:37They're not going to have a big system on a chip and then a smaller system on a chip
0:41:39just to run the touch bar.
0:41:40That would be an incredible waste of resources and power and everything.
0:41:44To do that, if they wanted to run it, they'd have to run it all off of one chip, but that's
0:41:48an entirely different architecture.
0:41:49Nothing would be running Bridge OS anymore.
0:41:51It would be quite an investment.
0:41:53And so I don't think they're going to make that investment to bring the touch bar over
0:41:57unless they have plans to enhance the touch bar.
0:42:00They haven't really enhanced the touch bar.
0:42:02Certainly have enhanced it hardware-wise.
0:42:03It's been more or less the same.
0:42:04And software-wise, you haven't heard much about it lately.
0:42:07So I feel like this is the perfect opportunity for Apple to ditch the touch bar and save
0:42:12face.
0:42:13I hope they don't double down on it and make a much bigger touch bar, because I'm not a
0:42:17particular fan of that.
0:42:19Or if they do, please just put some space between it and the keyboard so we don't accidentally
0:42:22hit the Siri button.
0:42:24Please?
0:42:25Anyway, it just seems like it would be a waste of resources and space and power and just
0:42:30everything.
0:42:31And if these R Max are, as I described with all these features, there's so much cool new
0:42:37stuff that even the people who really love the touch bar, I think, will be placated by
0:42:42how much amazing stuff they get in return.
0:42:44Yeah, I think this also probably-- first of all, I think I'm with you.
0:42:48I don't see them bringing it over if we do get touch screen max.
0:42:54And if this is indeed where we're going, which I think is likely, it certainly does give
0:43:00one possible justification for why the touch bar has not been touched-- sorry-- really
0:43:07much at all since they launched it.
0:43:09It has almost changed zero.
0:43:12Ever since it was unveiled almost four years ago now, almost nothing about it has changed
0:43:18or gotten better, including all the bugs that are still in it.
0:43:22No, that's patently untrue.
0:43:24It got better when it got smaller and we got the escape key back.
0:43:26OK, fair enough.
0:43:27Fair enough when they chopped pieces of it off.
0:43:30That was much better.
0:43:31But the actual functionality in and of the bar itself really has not changed in four
0:43:37years.
0:43:38And it is kind of-- for many reasons, it's baffling why they still ship it because it
0:43:42is so mixed reviewed and it's baffling that it's still required and everything.
0:43:49But yeah, I think this does give them that chance to save phase and say, all right, well,
0:43:53look, the touch bar, it wasn't a failure.
0:43:55It paved the way for touch screen max.
0:43:58Just ignoring the iPad.
0:44:00But we'll let them have this one.
0:44:02It paved the way for touch screen max.
0:44:04And now the whole screen is a touch screen.
0:44:06And they just quietly just don't ever mention the touch bar again.
0:44:10That I think would make a lot of sense.
0:44:12I just did a search in the developer app.
0:44:13I don't think there were any touch bar sessions at this WWDC.
0:44:17And I think the earliest one I could find was from 2017, WWDC 2017.
0:44:21Apple did make a push for third party developers to support the touch bar.
0:44:24Support the touch bar in your app.
0:44:25Here's how you use it.
0:44:26Here's how you can customize the controls based on what's going on in your app.
0:44:29And lots of apps did adopt that.
0:44:30So did Apple's apps.
0:44:31And they showed them off and so on and so forth.
0:44:33But the evangelism surrounding the touch bar has really slowed down.
0:44:37So I mean, it could slow down for a bunch of reasons.
0:44:40One, it could slow down because they're going to double down on it and make a giant super
0:44:43duper touch bar.
0:44:44But two, it could be slowing down because it's just going to go away when the max go
0:44:46touch.
0:44:47Maybe the touch max will be like, what was it, the Nintendo DS where the keyboard is
0:44:53a screen and the screen is a screen?
0:44:56We talked about that when we were in the depths of our keyboard despair.
0:45:00That, oh, they added a touch bar and soon the whole keyboard is going to be glass and
0:45:05it's just going to be a dual screen situation.
0:45:06It seems like they're not going that direction.
0:45:10And luckily, they fixed the keyboard.
0:45:13I can picture in my head, especially the laptops, what these laptops look like.
0:45:17I just see them in my head.
0:45:18I see them.
0:45:19I see them, their shape and their size and just their iPad-ness and all the features
0:45:23they have and the specs and then Big Sur fits right in there and you throw Big Sur up there
0:45:28and you run a bunch of iPad apps on it and it all comes together in my mind.
0:45:33It's starting to really make sense.
0:45:35The iMac and stuff are a little bit different.
0:45:39I'm not entirely willing to believe that the first iMac out the door is going to be, what
0:45:43is it called, Surface Studio Pro, like the big drafting table thing.
0:45:49I don't think Apple is there yet.
0:45:50That would be quite a bold move for the first iMac out the gate.
0:45:53I think they could ship a more traditional iMac without a touchscreen, like no touchscreen,
0:45:58big 27-inch iMac, new industrial design, but with Face ID, no cell modem.
0:46:05The iMac is, I think, going to end up being the more conservative one out of these unless
0:46:08they go full Surface Studio, which I would love, but I feel like that's more of an ask
0:46:13because laptops are their bread and butter and I feel like that's where they're going
0:46:16to concentrate all their effort to wow us out of the gate.
0:46:18Look at this new line of laptops.
0:46:20They are amazing.
0:46:21They do things no Apple laptop has ever done and they're faster than the Intel ones and
0:46:24they have all these features.
0:46:25Like that's such an easy sell.
0:46:28Trying to explain a drafting table iMac is harder, I think.
0:46:35Just ask Microsoft.
0:46:36For artists, sure, it makes perfect sense for them, but for everyone else, they're like,
0:46:40"I'm not quite sure about that."
0:46:42If it doesn't do that, if it doesn't fold down like that, having a touchscreen on an
0:46:46iMac is pointless.
0:46:48That really is ergonomically bad.
0:46:51Even though, yes, I know people still stab at the screen on their iMacs and their kids
0:46:54do too.
0:46:55I understand it makes as much "sense" just because every once in a while I want to dismiss
0:46:58a dialogue with my finger.
0:46:59I get it.
0:47:00I totally get it, but a touchscreen of that size with that kind of digitizer resolution
0:47:05and refresh rate is quite an expense just so you can dismiss a dialogue.
0:47:10So I feel like until and unless the iMac folds down like a drafting table, it's not touchscreen
0:47:17time.
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0:49:08[Music]
0:49:12So there have been some app review changes over the last, I don't know, month or so.
0:49:17And we were aware of this, but we've had so many other things to talk about that we haven't
0:49:20really had a chance to discuss it.
0:49:22And honestly, I haven't even really looked that much into it, so I'm going to need some
0:49:25help from you guys.
0:49:26But one of you, I think John, has put some very helpful things in the show notes, so
0:49:30I will kick off the conversation by reading that, quote, "Two changes are coming to the
0:49:34app review process and will be implemented this summer."
0:49:37This is a quote from Apple.
0:49:38"First, developers will not only be able to appeal decisions about whether an app violates
0:49:41a given guideline of the App Store review guidelines, but they will also have a mechanism
0:49:45to challenge the guideline itself."
0:49:48What?
0:49:49"Second, for apps that are already on the App Store, bug fixes will no longer be delayed
0:49:54over guideline violations."
0:49:55What?
0:49:56"Except for those related to legal issues.
0:49:59Developers will instead be able to address the issue in their next submission."
0:50:03This sounds good.
0:50:05I don't think I've said that about the App Store in a little while, but this sounds very
0:50:08good.
0:50:09Is this not very good?
0:50:10So the thing about App Store rules is that Apple is judge, jury, and executioner.
0:50:16Like, Apple, like, there is no, like, when you make an appeal, like, I understand the
0:50:21process, like, okay, well, we're going to talk, let me talk to your manager, essentially,
0:50:24is what you're asking.
0:50:25But the manager works for the same company as the other employee does.
0:50:29Like, at any time, Apple can make any decision about anything, right?
0:50:33And we know things are enforced inconsistently, and people have different experiences with
0:50:40seemingly similar problems at different times at the same time.
0:50:42Like, it's all very arbitrary and confusing.
0:50:45So when they say, "We're going to have, you know, you have your appeal, but you can also
0:50:51challenge the guidelines," like, well, how does that work?
0:50:56Like, if you appeal and they say, "No, actually, you are in violation of the guidelines," and
0:51:00you say, "Well, I think the guideline is dumb," then Apple will say, "Well, that's the guideline."
0:51:04I mean, like, I don't understand the process by which an individual developer has any hope
0:51:10of changing Apple's mind about what a guideline could be, that they could, you know, they
0:51:15were unsuccessful during the appeal for their app, but then somehow they're going to be
0:51:19successful.
0:51:20There's no jury, there's no judge, there's no impartial third party, there's no, like,
0:51:26you're always talking to the same person.
0:51:27It's like, "Oh, okay, well, argue with me in a different way.
0:51:30Okay, well, now, it's just..."
0:51:32Apple does change its mind in response to developer feedback.
0:51:34This is a process that happens.
0:51:35The App Store rules have evolved over time, but I have a hard time being optimistic about
0:51:40these individual policy changes.
0:51:43Even the stuff that bug fixes no longer being delayed over guideline violations.
0:51:45That's another one of those things that's like a thing that annoys developers, you know,
0:51:49we want to hear that that's not going to happen, but it's still going to happen, right?
0:51:53It's still going to sometimes, and even though they said it wouldn't, right?
0:51:57So I feel like what Apple's saying is, "We're going to do better," which, good, great, I
0:52:01love for them to do better, and I think it's good for them to say that, and they're saying
0:52:04all the right things, but it strikes me as a little bit theatrical to give new venues
0:52:11for you to talk to the same entity and keep pleading the same case and hearing them say,
0:52:15"No, we disagree."
0:52:16I just, I don't know, maybe I'm going to pass the message to them today.
0:52:21Yeah, I don't see how this works any other way.
0:52:24I mean, because you're right, it's not like there is some kind of unbiased third-party
0:52:29arbitration board handling these complaints.
0:52:33Apple is not going to be very likely to override their own guidelines and allow you or everyone
0:52:42an exception if you just make a good case for why it should be, because Apple has their
0:52:47own good case for why it should be, and they're going to say, "Well, you believe you should
0:52:51be able to break this rule, and we've decided you shouldn't be able to break this rule,
0:52:54and in addition, we've decided the rule is valid."
0:52:58People reacted to this pretty positively when they discovered it, but I have a hard time
0:53:04envisioning before we actually get any actual outcomes here from people actually challenging
0:53:08the system, which apparently isn't even in place yet.
0:53:10It says it's being implemented later this summer, so who knows when people can actually
0:53:14start filing such challenges against the rules.
0:53:17But are we really going to get exceptions to the rules?
0:53:21And furthermore, is there a precedent here?
0:53:24If one developer gets them to make an exception for the rule, does that exception apply to
0:53:30all developers?
0:53:31No, of course not, right?
0:53:32So what this could do, if anybody actually gets challenges approved to the rules, it
0:53:39just makes the playing field less level for everybody else, which we already know it's
0:53:44not really a level playing field because big companies and strategically important apps
0:53:48already get a softer hand applied to them for a lot of this stuff than small indie apps
0:53:54do.
0:53:55And as you mentioned so geniously, John, the rules are kind of gerrymandered to allow exactly
0:54:01all the apps that Apple can't really afford not to have, and they can't allow these
0:54:10things for everybody.
0:54:11So what this does is, best case scenario, it gives developers a way to get themselves
0:54:18advantages by bugging Apple a lot, basically, for a rule to be changed, possibly.
0:54:23And so that makes the playing field unlevel for everybody else.
0:54:27So I just, I don't know, we'll have to see how this works out in practice.
0:54:31It doesn't sound as good as what I think people want it to be.
0:54:37Yeah, I think there are, I mean, first of all, pulling back again, this is Apple saying,
0:54:43we are going to make changes to make your life better.
0:54:47So like, forget about the details.
0:54:49Big picture wise, this is a positive thing.
0:54:52Apple is trying to do something to make the app store review process less annoying for
0:54:58developers.
0:54:59You give a thumbs up for that, but it's always difficult because there's only two parties
0:55:01here, and they do have their interests, and this is Apple, this is Apple bending a little
0:55:06bit and saying, okay, we have been holding the line, but we're going to change ourselves
0:55:11now.
0:55:12We're going to be nicer to you.
0:55:13Like the bug fix is not delayed over guideline violations, right?
0:55:17At least now, when Apple says that publicly, when that happens to you, you can cite something
0:55:22that Apple said and say, hey, you're not supposed to be doing this.
0:55:25You said you weren't going to do this.
0:55:26And then they might say, oh, yeah, you're right.
0:55:28Okay.
0:55:29Right.
0:55:30And sometimes they might say, actually, this is one of those exceptions, right?
0:55:31But still, like, mostly positive, but that's the problem with this process.
0:55:35It's very fraught.
0:55:36Like, another thing that real, quote unquote, real court cases have is that usually the
0:55:39public record, you can see the proceedings of the court case, whereas you can't even
0:55:42see other people's radars, right?
0:55:43That's why open radar exists, right?
0:55:44So it's not like you're going to see, speaking of precedent, it's not like you're even going
0:55:47to be able to know, I think, what other people, when they go to challenge the guideline, have
0:55:52said in defense of that guideline, where it's all just a private thing that happens individually.
0:55:57I think, from Apple's perspective, having, you know, can I speak to your supervisor?
0:56:02Can I speak to your supervisor?
0:56:03Supervisor.
0:56:04And then, on another level, to go up, again, it's kind of like going into a fast food restaurant
0:56:09with no shirt, no shoes, and the person at the register is saying, you know, it says
0:56:16no shirt, no shoes, no service, and you say, I demand to talk to your manager.
0:56:19The manager comes out and says, yeah, the sign says no shirt, no shoes, no service.
0:56:22I demand you talk to your manager.
0:56:23And then that person's manager comes out, yeah, the sign says no shirt, no shoes, no
0:56:26service.
0:56:27Can I talk to the CEO?
0:56:28And the CEO says, yep, that's our rule, no shirt, no shoes.
0:56:30Like, you can keep asking again and again if they really believe that's the rule.
0:56:35But having those escalation paths is one more step that developers think they can take before
0:56:43running to the press, which, as we know, never helps, which brings us to A.com.
0:56:47How do rules in the App Store actually change in practice?
0:56:53Does it change because one developer yells about it?
0:56:55Well, maybe if they're Microsoft or Adobe or Netflix or Amazon.
0:56:59Maybe that's how it happens.
0:57:00But really, things in the App Store change when they become a big enough problem for
0:57:05Apple that it is in Apple's interest to change them.
0:57:08It's stopping a lot of apps from being put on the store, or a bunch of developers have
0:57:13the same complaint, not just one of them.
0:57:17That's when things actually change.
0:57:18The only time an individual developer can change things is when that individual developer
0:57:22makes a lot of noise and makes a big press story.
0:57:25And then suddenly that one developer becomes a problem for Apple because Apple hates bad
0:57:29PR.
0:57:30Every company does.
0:57:31Who wants to see your company's name in a bunch of stories going around the web where
0:57:36you are put in a negative light?
0:57:38Oh, Apple's at it again.
0:57:40Their App Store reviews are hurting this developer.
0:57:42The developer is the victim.
0:57:44Apple is the big baddie.
0:57:46That's not a story that Apple wants to see.
0:57:47And that's why I'm saying having another level to escalate gives you one more step before
0:57:51people feel like, "Well, I have no more recourse."
0:57:53I had a thing.
0:57:54I appealed.
0:57:55They rejected it.
0:57:56The other thing is complain to the world about the injustice that has been visited upon me.
0:58:00I, the developer, the hero of this story, I'm trying to do a thing.
0:58:04And Apple, the villain, tells me I cannot do the thing.
0:58:07And Apple is mean.
0:58:08And let me tell the world about it, right?
0:58:10So the Hey.com thing, we don't want to rehash.
0:58:11It was a couple shows ago where we talked about it.
0:58:13You can look it up on the web.
0:58:14We'll put links in the show notes to see the whole big drama.
0:58:17But one last we left it, Apple had sent a letter to the Basecamp folks and said, "Here
0:58:22are some things you can do to make your app compliant."
0:58:25One of the examples was, "You could consider a Hey.com."
0:58:27Hey is an email app, by the way.
0:58:29"Hey, you could consider having the app function as marketed.
0:58:31An email client that works with standard IMAP and POP email accounts where customers can
0:58:36optionally configure the Hey email service."
0:58:38So that's one of the complaints was people download your app and it does nothing.
0:58:41I forgot the exact quote.
0:58:43You get the app and if you don't have a Hey.com account, the app doesn't do anything.
0:58:46And of course, you can't tell them how to get a Hey.com account in the app.
0:58:50You can't actually give them an account in the app and you can't link them to the website.
0:58:53All these stupid rules, right?
0:58:54So saying someone could download your email app, think it's supposed to be an email app
0:58:57and get it and just be staring at it and going, "I can't use this to read my email."
0:58:59So they said, "Why don't you just make the Hey app into an email app that you can use
0:59:06with any POP or IMAP email server?"
0:59:09And that also happens to work with Hey.com.
0:59:12That would be a way you could put the app on the store.
0:59:15So what Basecamp did in a genius PR move is they said, "We just sent the Hey app 1.0.3
0:59:23to the App Store and it introduces a new free option for the iOS app.
0:59:27Now users can sign up directly in app for a free temporary randomized Hey.com email
0:59:32address that works for 14 days."
0:59:35That's so smart.
0:59:36You can get the app and you can write in the app, you can do a thing, which is get a free
0:59:43thing for 14 days.
0:59:45There's no in-app purchase because you're not actually making a purchase.
0:59:47You can do that all in the app.
0:59:50So now the app does function.
0:59:51If you want to see what Hey is like, you download this app, you do the thing, you get a random
0:59:54temporary email address that lasts for 14 days.
0:59:57The genius of it was announcing that to the world.
0:59:59That's part of their ongoing PR campaign to say, "Here are the mean things Apple's doing
1:00:03to us.
1:00:04And by the way, here's this giant webpage listing other apps that do the exact same
1:00:06thing we're doing but that got approved."
1:00:08The whole PR campaign that has essentially been won by Basecamp in this scenario.
1:00:13By pre-announcing that they have submitted 1.0.3 to the App Store and describing how
1:00:19it works, they're daring Apple to reject them.
1:00:24Now Apple did not say that this would be acceptable.
1:00:29They said, "You can make it an IMAP or a POP client."
1:00:31And Basecamp said, "We're doing this."
1:00:34And they didn't make it a POP and IMAP client.
1:00:36What they did was not one of the example things listed by Apple that Apple said, "Here are
1:00:41things you could do to your app to make it acceptable to us."
1:00:44Basecamp did none of those things.
1:00:45It doesn't mean that the thing they did also wasn't going to be acceptable because Apple
1:00:48didn't give an exhaustive list.
1:00:49They just said, "For example, here are some things you can do."
1:00:52But Basecamp didn't do them.
1:00:54Basecamp did its own thing.
1:00:57The result was Apple approved a 1.0.3.
1:01:01So it's in the App Store.
1:01:03The beef has been settled.
1:01:04I would consider this a massive victory for Basecamp.
1:01:07They essentially bullied Apple in the public sphere into Apple doing what we all think
1:01:12is more or less the right thing, which is let them have their app.
1:01:14It's not the end of the world.
1:01:16It's going to be fine.
1:01:18There are other apps that work like this.
1:01:19The world doesn't end.
1:01:21Apple correctly surmised this is not worth fighting.
1:01:26In reality, the "Hey app," being on the App Store with this trial thing is not a big deal.
1:01:30No, it's not a POP and IMAP client, but what they did is good enough.
1:01:38It fulfills the things.
1:01:39We can say face publicly because what we said in public was, "Oh, you download the app and
1:01:42it doesn't work, and now you download the app and it does do something and we're happy
1:01:44with that."
1:01:45So I don't mind the utility of a randomized email address that works for 14 days is of
1:01:49questionable value.
1:01:50But either way, I think it was fine even before they added that feature.
1:01:56This is one of the ways that is not available to most people to change App Store rules.
1:02:03Make a big stink in the public about it.
1:02:06Be a well-known, beloved company like Basecamp.
1:02:11Be a loudmouth like DHH.
1:02:14Make noise and tell the world about what you think is unjust about what's happening to
1:02:21your application.
1:02:23And then fight with Apple in public.
1:02:26Apple did it too.
1:02:27Apple sent their response to other websites before they sent it to them.
1:02:32Like they said, "We're going to respond to you, but we're also going to respond to a
1:02:35bunch of websites."
1:02:36And the websites got the response even before Basecamp did.
1:02:40But then Basecamp coming back and saying, "In public, we just submitted 1.0.3."
1:02:44And normally, the only people who know this is Apple because who else sees our op submissions?
1:02:47But let me tell you, the public, what we just submitted to Apple so that you know later
1:02:50when they reject us that it's like, man, it was a game of chicken, but it was perfectly
1:02:58lined up, not by any grand plan, but just accidentally, to be right before WWC when
1:03:04Apple wanted this story to go away.
1:03:06And again, honestly, the right thing to do was always just to let the app be in.
1:03:11They followed Apple's existing, not particularly nice rules as best they could, and there are
1:03:16other apps that do the same thing, and the world doesn't end, and someone who downloads
1:03:19the free Hey!
1:03:20app and doesn't figure out how to use it can just delete it, it would have been fine.
1:03:25But in the end, Basecamp won this.
1:03:29And would they have won a similar process if they had appealed – I mean, I think they
1:03:34did appeal the original thing – but if they had challenged the guideline itself, would
1:03:39they have been as successful as they were with a giant public blowup before WWC?
1:03:42I'm going to say no, because a one-on-one conversation with the challenge the guideline
1:03:49committee, that's very easy for Apple to go, "Yeah, no, we think you should do something
1:03:52different."
1:03:53Right?
1:03:54It's much harder for Apple to take that same stance when everything's out in public
1:03:59and someone's making a bunch of noise about it and there's a million stories all over
1:04:02and it's leading up to WWC.
1:04:04So it's an imperfect system that we have, but Marco mentioned an impartial third party
1:04:11or some kind of arbitration.
1:04:13Not that anybody in this situation is impartial, but the third party in this is the public.
1:04:18They are the third stakeholder – developers, Apple, and the users.
1:04:22And the only way users become a stakeholder is mediated through the press.
1:04:27When people find out, "Oh, Apple rejected this app," and someone reads a story and
1:04:31says, "That doesn't seem fair, I would like that app," or "I think that app should
1:04:34be accepted," or "It would be cool," or whatever, enough of those people get worked
1:04:37up from stories they see in the press, that influences Apple because users are stakeholders
1:04:41in this situation and they're the ones who buy Apple's products.
1:04:47That's why I was mentioning the court trials or whatever are usually public.
1:04:51In this case, that's so we know there are no secret tribunals or whatever, but in this
1:04:54case, it's kind of important that this stuff happen in public because without that happening,
1:04:59users have no say in the process.
1:05:01It's just between Apple and developers, and Apple can stomp on developers much more
1:05:06easily in private than it can in public once the users know what's going on.
1:05:10Yeah, I thought it was extremely well executed by the Basecamp folks or the Hey folks, which
1:05:15– why is it all caps?
1:05:17I'm not in love with the name, but I can see why they did it, but all caps?
1:05:21Come on.
1:05:22Anyways, it was so deftly and so well executed.
1:05:28I think if my recollection serves me well, which it almost never does, I think Marco
1:05:33called this move for move before this all shook out.
1:05:38Marco had said, you had said that this is what's going to happen, and that's exactly
1:05:42what ended up playing out.
1:05:43I remember looking at this all happen in real time and being like, "Well, Marco nailed
1:05:46that one."
1:05:47Yeah, you could see as soon as they started making us think about it, you're like, "Well,
1:05:51Apple's not going to like this.
1:05:52They're going to want to make this go away."
1:05:54They've done this a million times before.
1:05:56Whenever there's a big stink, it's very easy for Apple to come up with a face-saving
1:06:00compromise to make the story go away and live to fight another day.
1:06:03And right before WWC, they're very motivated to do that.
1:06:07Yeah, and both companies were.
1:06:09In this case, both companies had taken very strong public stances.
1:06:15Both companies had a lot to lose by backing down to the other's demands.
1:06:21And so they found a way to not back down.
1:06:25They found a compromise that made it sound like both companies were really happy with
1:06:29the way everything went, and both companies were getting exactly what they wanted.
1:06:33And the reality is probably both of them were gritting their teeth the whole time.
1:06:36But it doesn't matter.
1:06:38It let them get out of that conflict without either side really giving ground on the principles
1:06:45that they brought to the public as, "This is what we stand for, period."
1:06:50Yeah.
1:06:51It helps that Apple's... when it was secret, before it was out in public, Apple's reasons
1:06:56for rejecting the app were slightly different than the reasons when it became public.
1:07:01Apple's reasons always started shifting.
1:07:02That tends to happen.
1:07:03Like, "Why am I getting rejected?"
1:07:05You get a bunch of different reasons.
1:07:06So it was like, "Is the most recent reason I was given the real one, or was the first
1:07:10one the real one?"
1:07:12The remedies suggested seemed not to address the reasons the thing was rejected in the
1:07:16first place.
1:07:17It's always so confusing.
1:07:18But by having those different answers, it allows Apple...
1:07:23Apple gave them enough room by giving them examples.
1:07:25And even though they didn't implement any of the examples, they implemented something
1:07:29similar.
1:07:30And so Apple can say, "Yeah, there you go.
1:07:32You changed your app, and we let you in.
1:07:35Everybody wins."
1:07:36And honestly, Basecamp didn't really change their app.
1:07:39They added one minor feature, which must have been a pain to implement.
1:07:42But still, the app itself works the way it always did.
1:07:47I think Basecamp considers the app to be the app for people who have already signed up,
1:07:50and this whole thing that they had to add for the trial is only there to appease Apple.
1:07:55But really, they just wanted their app to be for sale.
1:07:58So success for them.
1:07:59And Apple...
1:08:00Like, you'd have to know what Apple's real reason for rejecting was to know how satisfied
1:08:04they are.
1:08:05I can tell you Apple is not satisfied to have a big public fight and look like the villain
1:08:11and, you know, have this compromise.
1:08:13They would much rather be, you know, everybody loves them and they're coming from a position
1:08:18of strength and developers are clearly in the wrong.
1:08:20That's not what happened here, right?
1:08:22But if you knew in Apple's heart of hearts, if a corporation could be said to have one,
1:08:26what was the real objection here?
1:08:29Was it the fact that they don't get 30% of all, "Hey, subscriptions?"
1:08:32Was it the fact that the app doesn't work when you download it?
1:08:34Like, was it the fact that it doesn't work as a regular email client?
1:08:38Was it misleading to people in the store?
1:08:39Like, if Apple's concerned about misleading apps in the App Store, I have some news for
1:08:42them about other apps they might want to look at before the "Hey, email" app.
1:08:46So they say a bunch of things.
1:08:48It's always so hard to help with the real rejection.
1:08:49So since we don't know what the real objection was, we don't know how satisfied they are
1:08:54with the app as it exists.
1:08:56I feel like they just want it to go away and it's like, "Fine, you can have your app in
1:08:59the store."
1:09:00It makes me wonder how little could Basecamp have done and still gotten the app back into
1:09:05the store.
1:09:06Doing nothing probably wouldn't have worked because Apple would have said, "Well, we're
1:09:08all at an impasse.
1:09:09You didn't change anything about your app."
1:09:10But if they had changed literally anything about their app, like, "We made the icon
1:09:13a different color now.
1:09:14Can we go in?"
1:09:15Apple would be like, "Okay."
1:09:18You changed your app.
1:09:19It's a compromise.
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1:11:32[Music]
1:11:33>> Yakob Rosen wrote, "I will be upgrading my laptop to the new MacBook Pro in a few
1:11:41weeks," which honestly is probably like six weeks ago now but sorry.
1:11:44"I was curious, what are your methods and views on data migration?
1:11:47Do you guys tend to bluntly mirror everything over with Migration Assistant or rather do
1:11:51copy data over by hand, leaving potential trash and unneeded junk behind?"
1:11:56We've covered this a few times in the past but it gets asked constantly so it's worth
1:11:59covering again.
1:12:01As I've said a few times recently, I view basically all of my computers with the exception
1:12:05of the Synology as ephemeral and there's very little, if anything, on any of my computers
1:12:10that I am unwilling to lose at a moment's notice because everything is duplicated somewhere
1:12:15else like code is on GitHub, pictures are on the Synology, I don't know, anything, bookmarks
1:12:22are in iCloud, all that stuff, my mail is in Gmail, all that stuff exists somewhere
1:12:29else.
1:12:30The good side of that is that when I get a new Mac or if I want to reinstall an OS on
1:12:36a Mac or if I want to put a beta OS on a Mac, it's not really a big deal.
1:12:41There's not that much I have to copy.
1:12:43It's all coming over from other places.
1:12:47If you can get to this life, which is not easy, I will be the first to tell you and
1:12:52you oftentimes need like a multi-thousand dollar NAS or hundreds of dollars in web services
1:12:58that you're paying for like online storage each month, but if you can get there, it's
1:13:01amazing.
1:13:03And very quickly, I'm not going to belabor the point now, but two things that I can point
1:13:07you to that will be in the show notes.
1:13:08One, I wrote a post in 2016 about the sorts of things I do before getting rid of a Mac
1:13:14and when creating, or when doing a new installation like settings and things like that, but more
1:13:19recently, last year, at the end of last year, I wrote about Homebrew Bundle, which if you've
1:13:25used Ruby's Bundler, it's basically the same thing but for Homebrew, and it can also do
1:13:29things like Mac App Store apps, it can do GUI apps, and it's basically just a way to
1:13:33just very, very quickly get all of your dependencies installed.
1:13:38And if you haven't tried this or played with this, I really, really recommend it.
1:13:42Marco, last I remember hearing, I thought you were a migration assistant person.
1:13:46Is that still the case?
1:13:47>> Yes, I am.
1:13:48Yeah.
1:13:49I will occasionally, like every few years, I will start my laptop over.
1:13:54I almost never start my desktop over.
1:13:56I think I've started my desktop over like twice ever in Mac land.
1:13:59But yeah, I will occasionally start my laptop over with a clean install and everything,
1:14:03but that's, again, that's rare.
1:14:04That's not the common case.
1:14:05Otherwise, I'm using Migration Assistant.
1:14:07>> All right.
1:14:08John?
1:14:09>> I've been Migration Assistant for many, many years and so far it hasn't steered me
1:14:15wrong.
1:14:17I haven't done a fresh one in forever and, yeah, Migration Assistant's been working for
1:14:22me.
1:14:23I have trepidation because I never -- well, last time it was ten years.
1:14:26But it's always so long between times that I do it, I'm like, did I do Migration Assistant
1:14:30last time?
1:14:31Did I use Ethernet?
1:14:32Did I try to do Direct Connect?
1:14:33Did I connect with FireWire?
1:14:35Did I take out my hard drive and clone it to the other one?
1:14:39All those other things go through my mind, but in the end, I usually just end up doing
1:14:42Migration Assistant.
1:14:43I think for this one, I did -- what did I do?
1:14:47Did I do Migration Assistant with -- I think it's a Migration Assistant with an external
1:14:51drive or with a time machine backup.
1:14:53I don't even remember.
1:14:54The point is my Mac is the same everywhere.
1:14:56They're not ephemeral.
1:14:58It's a real lived-in place with stuff everywhere.
1:15:01So I bring the whole thing with me.
1:15:03I need all the stuff.
1:15:04This is only when I'm going from one Mac to another.
1:15:06When I do things like installing Big Sur and stuff, none of my stuff is there.
1:15:10That Big Sur isn't even signed into the same Apple ID.
1:15:12This is all an abundance of caution from being a Mac OS X reviewer.
1:15:17Do not let beta OS's have any access to your real data.
1:15:20And I don't.
1:15:21I don't have multiple Apple IDs.
1:15:22So there I have none of my stuff.
1:15:23I don't even like keeping my other drives mounted.
1:15:25Like I frantically unmount everything as soon as I put it into Big Sur.
1:15:28You don't see those disks.
1:15:29Ignore them.
1:15:30There's nothing there.
1:15:31I do have Big Sur signed into iCloud, which is risky.
1:15:34I will be the first to tell you that your approach is safer.
1:15:36But I also agree that I unmount -- it always asks, well, do you want to mount Macintosh
1:15:42HD, which is my Catalina installation?
1:15:44No.
1:15:45No.
1:15:46No, you do not want to mount that.
1:15:47I do not want that.
1:15:48That should be a member stretch goal.
1:15:51Get Casey to rename his hard drive.
1:15:52I saw it with your Big Sur thing.
1:15:54Everything was called Macintosh HD, and it was called Macintosh HD Big Sur or something.
1:15:58Just rename your hard drive.
1:16:00Give your computer some personality.
1:16:01I know it's a fair rule, but give it a name.
1:16:05What is your actual computer called in the sharing thing?
1:16:07What is your local DNS name?
1:16:10I think it's Casey's My Mac Pro.
1:16:12Casey's My Mac Pro.
1:16:14Casey's My Mac Pro.
1:16:17Casey's My Mac Pro.
1:16:18Yep.
1:16:19It's terrible.
1:16:20It's the worst.
1:16:21If you don't give it a name, we'll come up with a name for you.
1:16:23Like you can have a theme.
1:16:24Like naming your computers.
1:16:26And my suggestion is name your computer and name your boot hard drive the same as your
1:16:29computer.
1:16:30So you don't have to think of one name then and have it themed on something that you like,
1:16:33right?
1:16:34And give it a custom icon if you can convince stupid APFS merge volume thing to accept your
1:16:38custom icon, which is getting very difficult.
1:16:40But I still do it.
1:16:44Casey's MacBook Pro.
1:16:45That's the other one.
1:16:46Yeah, we'll put it on the list of stretch goals.
1:16:48No, it's not even stretch goals.
1:16:49You just need to do that.
1:16:50I don't even know what a good theme would be.
1:16:51Think about it for next week.
1:16:52I'm going to put it in follow up.
1:16:54What has Casey named his computer?
1:16:56I'm not going to do it, Dad.
1:16:57I'm not going to do it.
1:16:58Frank Hertz writes, "Do you all run Ethernet and drill holes and do that sort of thing
1:17:02yourselves?
1:17:03Do you hire people?
1:17:04In order to have my office computer..."
1:17:05Oh my God, as I'm reading this, Jon is literally moving the dock around and writing next week
1:17:11what has Casey named his computer.
1:17:12Don't forget otherwise.
1:17:13It's in there for next week.
1:17:14What has Casey named his computer?
1:17:15Computer's parenthesis S. I'll delete it later.
1:17:18Don't worry.
1:17:19And I'm not going to give Marco a good edit point because I think that's funny.
1:17:21No, I'm leaving that in.
1:17:22As Frank continues, "In order to have my office computers on Ethernet, I've had to stick with
1:17:26coax files so the Verizon router can be in there getting files from coax.
1:17:30Ethernet from Fioswitch would need new cables everywhere."
1:17:33So I think basically what Frank is saying is he was living in my old world where I had
1:17:36coax coming into my router and it had to be the Verizon router because of that and then
1:17:41I had Ethernet to some degree away from there.
1:17:44So now I do have Ethernet coming into my router, so I'm using an Eero because I genuinely do
1:17:52like it, although they did send this to me.
1:17:55But in terms of wiring the house, I have not done so.
1:17:58What I will say, however, is that, and we've talked about this in the past, you can get
1:18:03a Mocha Bridge, which is basically a thing that goes either from Ethernet to coax or
1:18:08the other way, from coax to Ethernet.
1:18:09So I have two of these.
1:18:10I have one in the office and one downstairs in the entertainment center.
1:18:14And what that allows me to do is if you get fancy ones, and I was sent some by a very,
1:18:19very kind listener, if you get fancy ones, they can do near gigabit speeds.
1:18:24And so I tested like a week ago, coincidentally, I tested using fast.com what the speeds were
1:18:32downstairs.
1:18:33So this is Ethernet from the laptop to a hub or switch, I guess actually, then from the
1:18:39switch to the Mocha Bridge through coax to the office, Mocha Bridge to Eero, and I was
1:18:46getting something like 650-ish megabits per second down when I have gigabit service.
1:18:52So it's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot easier than wiring your whole darn house.
1:18:56So in a perfect world, I would have wired the house or had a house that was already
1:19:02pre-wired.
1:19:03But if you're too lazy like me and you don't need a whole bunch of drops, I would really
1:19:07consider looking into a Mocha Bridge or a pair of Mocha Bridges.
1:19:09It can work out quite well.
1:19:11Jon, you have an ancient home, and as you would like to describe it, it is always falling
1:19:16apart.
1:19:17So I assume you have Ethernet only in your office?
1:19:20Jon Streeter So the bad thing about having an old house
1:19:23is I have no earthly idea how to run cables through these walls that are covered with
1:19:27horsehair plaster and, you know, lath and just filled with old newspapers and dead mice
1:19:33and ridiculously large ancient dimensional lumber that honestly I don't want to drill
1:19:39through.
1:19:42Trying to run wire to someplace where it isn't is extremely difficult.
1:19:46The good thing about having an old house is there's lots of holes in it.
1:19:51When it came time for me to run cables, my Ethernet cables, it just so happens that the
1:19:56main places I needed Ethernet cables already had existing fairly gaping holes in my ancient
1:20:02house between them.
1:20:03So someone, you know, the previous owners had already drilled a gigantic hole, presumably
1:20:08for coax cable, to the television area from the basement.
1:20:11You know, the first floor television is right above the basement.
1:20:15And that hole was huge.
1:20:16And so yes, it does have coax going through it to the television, but it also has Ethernet.
1:20:19So I just I ran that myself.
1:20:21Just you know, basically all my wire running has been in the basement, right?
1:20:25The files comes in my basement, and the basement is not it's half finished, but the finished
1:20:30part has a drop ceiling.
1:20:31It's in holes, and the rest of it is not finished.
1:20:33So I basically ran the Ethernet cable myself from the Fios thing.
1:20:37There's a router in there.
1:20:38My Synology is in the basement, and there's a whole bunch of stuff down there.
1:20:41And then from that big cluster of stuff, the Ethernet continues.
1:20:44One of them goes along my basement up to my television.
1:20:47Another one goes along my basement and into my computer room, which is just on the opposite
1:20:52side of a wall from the television.
1:20:54And there's a gaping hole there because it used to be like a three-season porch that
1:20:57they closed in, but they didn't close in on the inside.
1:20:59So I have an easy place to get Ethernet into here.
1:21:02Those are the only places the Ethernet go to my house.
1:21:04They go to my television, and they go to my computer room.
1:21:07Everyplace else is Wi-Fi.
1:21:09I would love to have Ethernet up in the second floor somewhere, but that's what Eero is
1:21:14for.
1:21:15And you know, the only thing we use it up there for is like just sitting in bed looking
1:21:18at the iPad, which is plenty fast for that.
1:21:21And then I do actually have coax going to the second floor because the people who own
1:21:25the house before me ran coax everywhere, including to the kitchen.
1:21:29Remember in the '80s when it was cool to have cable TV in your kitchen?
1:21:33There is a coax cable in my kitchen behind my refrigerator, you know, hanging there just
1:21:39doing nothing because we don't have a television in the kitchen.
1:21:41Yeah, there's coax everywhere.
1:21:43And by the way, the technique for running coax back in the day was, "So the coax is
1:21:47in your basement.
1:21:48Oh, you want it in your bedroom?
1:21:49Let's do this.
1:21:50I'm going to drill a hole through the wall of your house to the outside, and then you
1:21:54shove the coax through there.
1:21:56Then I'm going to bring it up to the second floor, and I'm going to drill a hole from
1:21:59the outside of your house into your bedroom, and I'm going to shove the coax in there,
1:22:02and then I'm going to squirt some silicone caulk into two holes."
1:22:04Let me remind you, when I got my gigabit service done, I had told the guy, "Oh, you know, I'm
1:22:09really sorry, but the ONT is in the back of the house, and my office is in the front right
1:22:13— you know, the opposite corner of the house, literally, upstairs in the opposite corner.
1:22:18You know, I've scoped out, 'Here's where I think you can go through the walls, blah,
1:22:21blah, blah.'"
1:22:22And he listened.
1:22:23He said, "Well, here's the thing.
1:22:25I'm not allowed to drill through any — I'm not allowed to do any sort of interior work
1:22:29whatsoever.
1:22:30So, sorry."
1:22:31I'm like, "Well, what are you going to do then?"
1:22:33So he takes this three-foot drill bit, and I think he was in my office, and pushed that
1:22:39into the wall, and drilled right outside — just drilled all the way to the outside — and
1:22:45ran Ethernet cable around the bottom of the trim of our house, from the back left, if
1:22:50you will, from the back left corner, all the way down and around to the right, and then
1:22:54went all the way up to the second floor, and then, just like you said, sprayed some silicone
1:22:57— or — silicon —
1:22:58>> Silicone, in that case.
1:23:00>> Oh, God bless.
1:23:01I'm going to get this right when I'm dead.
1:23:04But anyways, sprayed some of that stuff in there and called it a day.
1:23:07And it's worked for a year and a half now, so I can't really complain.
1:23:10>> And when we got our house re-sided, I got to fix all of the terrible cables that had
1:23:14been drilled out, you know, and all the siding was off the house, I could finally fix it.
1:23:17So that's — I even — the only one that I —
1:23:19>> Yeah.
1:23:20>> — could really entirely get rid of is the Fios, because that comes from outside
1:23:22of the house, but I cleverly tuck that underneath the new siding.
1:23:27It's — so there's no more holes in my house, which I'm glad about.
1:23:30But yeah, I would love to have Ethernet in more places.
1:23:32My suggestion is, if you're trying to do this, you can run Ethernet yourself.
1:23:35Like it's a very thin light cable.
1:23:37You can have these little clips that hold it on or whatever.
1:23:40But you know, the difficult part is always getting through the walls.
1:23:43Don't try to do that yourself, unless you're very handy, because there's things in the
1:23:46walls that you don't want to hit with a drill, like electrical wires, and even worse, probably,
1:23:52if you survive the electrical wires, plumbing.
1:23:55So yeah, there's lots of terrible failure in those.
1:24:00And here's the thing.
1:24:01Professional electricians obviously are way better at this than random people, but professional
1:24:05electricians are not magicians.
1:24:07Depending on how your house is set up, like there is no physical way to get wires from
1:24:11one place to the other without drilling holes in things.
1:24:12Like that's how the wire gets there.
1:24:14Do you already have conduit in your walls?
1:24:16Right?
1:24:17Probably not.
1:24:18And if you don't, they're going to have to drill holes.
1:24:19It's not magic.
1:24:20And so if you want holes in your house and in your walls, no matter how carefully you
1:24:25fish things, it's a difficult business.
1:24:28Obviously, if you're building your own house, building conduits for all the wires so that
1:24:31you can string new wires in when the new fancy fiber optic stuff comes out in 20 years or
1:24:36whatever.
1:24:37But if you're in your own house, see if you can find weird little holes or little crevices
1:24:43or walls that you won't notice a wire along.
1:24:45You can get pretty far just with some tape and little clips and some wire that is colored
1:24:53in an inconspicuous way.
1:24:55Like with speaker wires, I don't have any place to send speaker wires, but I have surround
1:24:58sound, quote unquote, I have 5.1.
1:25:00The speaker wire is all just out there.
1:25:01I've just hidden it behind sofas or on the mantle behind all the photographs so you can't
1:25:08see it, right?
1:25:09There's lots of ways you can run cable and be less conspicuous.
1:25:13And in the end, you eventually just don't have to care that much, right?
1:25:17What I wouldn't suggest is just stringing it along your floor because you'll trip over
1:25:21it forever and break everything and it'll be terrible.
1:25:23Even if you try to tape it down, that won't work either.
1:25:25So don't do that.
1:25:26But right up until that point, get creative because having Ethernet in places is great.
1:25:31>> Marco, your approach is to just buy a house with it already in there, I assume?
1:25:37>> You can find one.
1:25:38No, my approach is whenever I have access to inside the walls of my house, which is
1:25:43not very often, it's like if you're doing a major renovation, then have them install
1:25:48wiring then because the walls are already open and accessible.
1:25:52Otherwise, what John said is pretty spot on.
1:25:55I think there's an important little lesson in the middle of this, which is find an area
1:26:01where you can run cables, quote, for free.
1:26:04So a basement or attic usually is perfect for this.
1:26:07Because Ethernet cables can be very long and still work fine.
1:26:11And take advantage of that.
1:26:13If you can get from the source room or whatever to either the attic or the basement, then
1:26:19you can run whatever because no one cares what it looks like there.
1:26:23So you can just run it across the insulation beams in the attic or whatever or clip it
1:26:27to the ceiling with wire clips in the basement and then pop up wherever you want it to be.
1:26:33And so that way you are making holes or drilling through way less of the pretty finished part
1:26:40of the house.
1:26:41That's usually a very, very easy way to do it.
1:26:43Or as the coax trick, go outside for part of a run, wrap it around the house on the
1:26:50outside and go back in if there's somewhere you can discreetly hide that.
1:26:55Otherwise, for actually doing in-wall work, and actually if you want to do a real in-wall
1:27:02professional job where you have Ethernet jacks as part of the walls and going between rooms,
1:27:08that's definitely something to hire out to professionals unless you are very handy with
1:27:12that kind of stuff yourself.
1:27:13But finding those professionals is tricky.
1:27:17The good thing is that in recent years, a lot of the custom nice house builders, a lot
1:27:24of people demand smart speakers in the walls and stuff like that.
1:27:28Sonos systems run throughout the walls and everything.
1:27:31And so many more of the installers and electricians and things like that, many more of them have
1:27:38developed the skill of running network wire because non-nerds have wanted it for more
1:27:44things.
1:27:45And so that benefits us nerds because when we say, "Hey, can you just run like Cat6
1:27:49or Cat7 cable everywhere?"
1:27:50They're like, "Well, okay, yeah.
1:27:52So do you also want speakers?"
1:27:53"No, no, no, no.
1:27:54I don't want that.
1:27:55Please don't do that."
1:27:56"Oh, how about this smart..."
1:27:57"Nope, don't want that either.
1:27:59I just want these Ethernet jacks in these places."
1:28:02And another tip there, I said Cat6 or Cat7, make them install the highest end Ethernet
1:28:09cable that exists today.
1:28:10Right now that is Cat7 as far as I know.
1:28:14Or as John said, if you can get them to install conduit, which is just a pipe in the wall
1:28:19with like pulls in it, like string pulls.
1:28:21And so when cables change down the road, they can pull a new cable through the existing
1:28:27tubes that are already in the wall.
1:28:30That's a wonderful dream in practice.
1:28:31Good luck finding that.
1:28:32And then good luck, if you can't find it, good luck getting it to work.
1:28:35But anyway, assuming you can never replace the cables easily, obviously make them put
1:28:40in the highest end cables that exist when you do it.
1:28:43When I did my house, that was Cat6.
1:28:46And that was, geez, eight years ago now.
1:28:49And that's still totally fine.
1:28:51I can't do like the full 10 gig speeds in most cases, in theory, but that's fine because
1:28:57I don't yet have any 10 gig equipment.
1:28:59And it's been almost a decade since I did that wiring, and it's fine.
1:29:03So that was the best thing at the time, and it's lasted almost a decade.
1:29:07And it might last longer while still being pretty useful.
1:29:10So that's certainly, get whatever you can get.
1:29:13Today it's Cat7, I think.
1:29:15Whatever is the highest end network wiring, the installer will complain because it's
1:29:20more expensive, the cables are thicker, they're harder to work with, but you'll be happy in
1:29:2510 years when it's still relevant.
1:29:27Finally, this was not strictly speaking in Ask ATP, but one of us spotted it, and since
1:29:33I don't know, it must be John.
1:29:34That's the rules.
1:29:35One of us spotted this and added it, and I think it's a great question.
1:29:39Shahab writes, "What has been your favorite thing to come out of WWDC this year that flew
1:29:43under many people's radar or wasn't featured in the keynote?"
1:29:47For me, it's been the historical stack when long pressing the back button on navigation
1:29:51bars.
1:29:52I don't have a good answer for this yet because I haven't really spent enough time with either.
1:29:57I've spent a fair bit of time with Big Sur, but certainly almost none with iOS 14.
1:30:01In fact, just yesterday I put it on an Aaron's old iPhone 10.
1:30:05So I wish I had a better answer for this.
1:30:07The thing that jumps to mind, though, which certainly is on a lot of people's radar, is
1:30:11the non-fullscreen phone takeovers, when it just shows as a notification dropping down
1:30:19from the top of the screen and doesn't take over the entire darn phone.
1:30:23But I don't have any really good unsung heroes.
1:30:26John, do you have any unsung heroes?
1:30:29My obvious answer is the APFS time machine changes, which definitely weren't in the keynote
1:30:34and didn't even have sessions we found out about afterwards.
1:30:37My other one, going the other direction of things that were actually at WWDC, was I love
1:30:41the iPad cursor session.
1:30:43It's one of those sessions where there's not really much for developers to do.
1:30:46They always try to spin it like, "Here's how you can make your cursors."
1:30:49But it really is mostly explaining the philosophy of time, how Apple did its cursor work and
1:30:53how cursors work in iPad OS.
1:30:55Because once you understand that, then when you're making your cursors, follow our lead.
1:31:00And here's a bunch of rules for you or whatever.
1:31:02I love those sessions.
1:31:03Speaking of the file system, they sometimes have sessions about the file system that are
1:31:09like that, where there's not really anything for you to do.
1:31:12Maybe there's one or two new APIs for doing the APFS clones.
1:31:14But they really just want to explain, "We're the file system team.
1:31:18Here's a bunch of stuff we did, and here's why."
1:31:20And yes, there's always some developer impact angle, but it's really just explaining their
1:31:24reasoning.
1:31:25And those are great.
1:31:26I think those are incredibly valuable because you need to have the low-level sessions where
1:31:29it's like, "Here's how to do this particular programming task."
1:31:32But those high-level ones, explaining a philosophy, those really serve people well to understand
1:31:37when I'm faced with a problem that wasn't discussed at WWDC, what set of values should
1:31:42I use to make decisions about how to handle it?
1:31:44If you watch that iPad cursor session, you'd know where Apple is coming from with cursors
1:31:48on the iPad.
1:31:50And hopefully, when you're making your cursor, even if they didn't address your specific
1:31:53need, you can say, "Well then, what would Apple do in this situation?
1:31:57How does this fit into their philosophy?"
1:31:59I highly recommend that session if you want to take a look.
1:32:01And by the way, one more thing.
1:32:03I know we were talking about Mac hardware, but software-wise, pretty much everything
1:32:08they said about the cursors for the iPad thing is applicable to the Mac.
1:32:11The Mac's cursor support is very much like it was in Next Step because that's where it
1:32:15came from, and it's very much like it was in Mac because that's where Next got it from.
1:32:19It hasn't changed a lot.
1:32:20The iPad cursor system is sort of the next generational leap in basic cursor control.
1:32:27You can't take it exactly as it is and just slap it on the Mac and say, "Done," because
1:32:30the Mac is a different environment.
1:32:31But many, many of the ideas, technologies, lessons, everything about it, I can imagine
1:32:36coming to the Mac in the next year or two, if not sooner.
1:32:40Marco.
1:32:41I haven't had a lot of time to look into many of the sessions yet, unfortunately, because
1:32:45life has been very busy for me recently.
1:32:47But I think so far, what I'm most excited to look into are the split view changes and
1:32:54all the new stuff in SwiftUI.
1:32:56It's not quite under the radar in the sense that everyone was talking about the SwiftUI
1:33:00stuff, but stuff like the lazy stacks that basically I had to make much more performant
1:33:07lists and tables and stuff like that.
1:33:10And the split views having really finally a native three-column mode and how that reacts
1:33:15between the Mac and iPad and phone, I'm very interested in diving into that.
1:33:20Cool.
1:33:21All right.
1:33:22Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Linode, and Bombas.
1:33:25And thank you very much to our members who support us.
1:33:27Go to atp.fm/join to join us, and we will talk to you next week.
1:33:31Now the show is over.
1:33:36They didn't even mean to begin.
1:33:38'Cause it was accidental.
1:33:40Oh, it was accidental.
1:33:42John didn't do any research.
1:33:45Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
1:33:49'Cause it was accidental.
1:33:51Oh, it was accidental.
1:33:53And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
1:33:59And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
1:34:09So that's Casey, Liszt, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.
1:34:13And T. Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
1:34:20It's accidental.
1:34:23They didn't mean to.
1:34:26Accidental.
1:34:28Tech podcast.
1:34:30So long.
1:34:33I feel like I can give you the long, drawn-out story and put the punchline at the end.
1:34:41But I'll pull a Hamilton and put the punchline at the beginning.
1:34:44Skip, skip, skip. Go ahead.
1:34:46I'm the damn fool that's considering shooting vignette.
1:34:50And in other words, I'm...
1:34:52You're so living in 2015.
1:34:53I know I am. It's so bad.
1:34:55I am really, really genuinely considering...
1:34:59What is the official Silicon Valley...
1:35:01Sunsetting.
1:35:02Sunsetting. Thank you. Sunsetting vignette.
1:35:04No, that's for Destiny weapons.
1:35:05Oh, God. Oh, God. I've awoken the beast.
1:35:08So anyway, I'm thinking about...
1:35:10You thought fish was bad. You entered Destiny territory now.
1:35:14I was having fun this episode, but it's all taking a turn.
1:35:17Actually, it's the same. You're trying to think of the Silicon Valley euphemism for when they're getting rid of a product and they're trying to make it seem nicer.
1:35:24They're using the term in exactly the same way in Destiny.
1:35:26They're getting rid of things in the game, but they don't want people to be mad about it, so they're literally calling it "sunsetting."
1:35:31They learned about watching you, tech industry.
1:35:34Oh, Dad.
1:35:37Alright, so anyway, let me kind of set the stage.
1:35:40Oh, wait, hold on.
1:35:41And thank you very much to our members who support us.
1:35:43Go to ATP.FM/join to join us.
1:35:45You really need to just write down, like, the spiel.
1:35:48You had the spiel down for seven years, and now there's been monkey wrenches thrown into it.
1:35:53We're just going to put it in a document and we'll workshop it together.
1:35:58Yes, I'm going to put it in the middle.
1:36:01Editing works wonders.
1:36:03Oh, God.
1:36:04Remember when I made you say "Bullsiri"?
1:36:06Alright, moving on, gentlemen.
1:36:10So here's the situation.
1:36:12For a while, ever since Vignette was released, it had in, I'll call it extreme circumstances, but not necessarily that extreme.
1:36:23It had some memory management problems.
1:36:25I don't know to this day what I was doing wrong.
1:36:28I don't doubt I was doing something wrong, but I don't know what I was doing wrong.
1:36:31But it was having some memory management problems.
1:36:33You should rewrite it and go.
1:36:35Well, it's funny you say that. I did rewrite pretty much the entire crawler using NSOperation.
1:36:44And I actually feel like it's pretty good.
1:36:47And so I feel like that may be fixed, and that's actually sitting in TestFlight right now.
1:36:53And that's been a lingering issue that's been really frustrating, and I haven't really, really narrowed down what the root cause is,
1:37:02other than just plain using too much memory.
1:37:04But again, I've spent a lot of time on instruments.
1:37:07Nothing has jumped out at me. It's my fault.
1:37:09It probably is my fault, but it's not clear to me where or how it's my fault.
1:37:13Meanwhile, for at least the last six months, Facebook has been deeply unreliable with Vignette.
1:37:21And one thing that I've found that seems to work for a lot of people is, and this sounds nuts,
1:37:28I will be the first person to tell you it sounds bananas,
1:37:31but if somebody reports, "Oh, Facebook is just not working for me,"
1:37:36I'll tell them, "Switch from Wi-Fi to cellular or vice versa and try it again."
1:37:41And like eight or nine times out of ten, it all starts working.
1:37:44I have no idea what that's about.
1:37:46My current theory is some sort of caching with the URL session subsystem.
1:37:50So also in TestFlight is a build that cranks the caching down.
1:37:54So maybe that maybe would fix the problem, but it's been lingering for forever.
1:37:58And I can never reproduce either of these problems, so for the life of me, I'm just shooting blind.
1:38:04I don't know what I'm doing, in so many ways, but particularly around these two bugs.
1:38:08Then about, I don't know, a month ago maybe, Twitter got rid of non-Auth access to profile photos.
1:38:17So it used to be that you could go to a special URL, and it was not like some super hacky thing.
1:38:23It was just you had to know what the URL was.
1:38:25But you go to this URL, and I think for any Twitter user, if I'm not mistaken, even ones that were protected,
1:38:31you could at least get their profile photo. And that was it.
1:38:35And that worked for me up until about a month ago, and now they've killed it.
1:38:40And there's not a lot of really great ways to work around that, work around Twitter.
1:38:47One thing I could do is start, instead of crawling the web to get this stuff,
1:38:52I could start registering my app as an actual Twitter app, so it has its own authorization token or what have you.
1:39:00Now this is different than having a user log in.
1:39:03The users would still not log in, but the app would be known to Twitter.
1:39:07And then I believe, I haven't looked at this in a little while, but I believe I get 900 profile requests in a 15-minute window.
1:39:13Which is okay, but you could have 900 Twitter contacts in a single contact list.
1:39:19Like I have people writing me saying they have 10,000 contacts, which I think is friggin' crazy, but it is what it is.
1:39:25So that's not really a sustainable solution.
1:39:29Meanwhile, while all this is going on since day one, the contacts framework has some very, very interesting API limits.
1:39:37And I feel like you've run into this, Marco, with audio stuff if I'm not mistaken.
1:39:41But you can only save but so many contacts to the contacts database in so much time or else it gets angry at you and tells you no, no more.
1:39:51Okay. Now is this documented anywhere? Of course not. That would be way too simple.
1:39:56So that's always, that hasn't caused problems often, but it does occasionally cause problems.
1:40:02So all of that is to say the app is kind of feeling, even to me, like it's creaky and fragile and I'm not really proud of it anymore the way I was when I first released it.
1:40:15Now I have a couple of options where to go from here.
1:40:19I could like go all in on it. And I could start doing like login to Facebook, login to Twitter, maybe at that point login to LinkedIn, which is a very popular request.
1:40:31Because once I'm doing like this OAuth login dance for these services, then it opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of much less hacky, much more reliable crawling of profile photos.
1:40:43So that would fix a lot of problems. But it's, I just don't want to do that.
1:40:48Like it feels, it's not gross, but it just feels gross. Like especially since I started marketing it on how it's all about privacy because you don't have to give your credentials to anyone, including me.
1:40:57I really don't want to do that, but it is a solution to my problem.
1:41:02But the other solution to my problem is just to friggin kill it.
1:41:05And sitting here now, not having heard your opinion from the two of you, that is what I'm leaning toward.
1:41:12And part of that, and a not small part of that, is because I have three different things that I think I want to build that are brand new.
1:41:21And one or two of them in particular would be, it would be very good if I could do that by the time iOS 14 is out.
1:41:29Because they're using new iOS 14 things.
1:41:32So I'm looking at my summer, and what I probably should be doing is doing these vignette fixes and updates and improvements.
1:41:41But what I want to be doing is the new hotness and the new ideas and seeing if those stick.
1:41:46And vignette is making money. It is definitely making money, but it's not making a large amount of money.
1:41:52And it's not making enough money that I feel like I would be really shooting myself in the foot to remove it from sale.
1:42:00So that is many words to say, I think I want to sunset it and I think I want to put it to bed.
1:42:06Tell me if I'm wrong. Marco, let's start with you.
1:42:09Alright, so first of all, I agree with you, you probably, probably should kill it, but we'll get to that in a minute.
1:42:16The one thing to consider here is that you're not being forced to adhere to a certain timeline of making this decision.
1:42:24There is no rush for you to decide. Like, you don't have to decide right now, kill it, or work on it all summer.
1:42:30Like, that's not your only options. You know, you have many other options.
1:42:35The one that I think you should probably pick from like the most pragmatic point of view is leave it in the store, but just don't work on it anymore.
1:42:47Now I know that you probably don't want to actually do that. What you probably want is like a clean break to either make it awesome, something that you can be really proud of,
1:42:54like you just said you're having problems with that right now, or just totally remove it and it's gone forever and that way you don't have to feel bad that people are getting something that's maybe not your best work anymore or something like that, right?
1:43:07So the reality is that you do have this third option of just leave it there and don't work on it for a while.
1:43:13Whether you want to take it is up to you, but that is an option.
1:43:17That is an option, but to briefly interrupt you, I don't love that option because it is currently in the store saying it works with Twitter and it doesn't. It just plain doesn't.
1:43:27Now I could put in a little update to pull the Twitter out, for example, but I feel like I'm not literally stealing people's money, but I kind of feel like I am, you know what I mean?
1:43:36So at the very least, if I were to leave it in the store, which is an option, you are correct, I would need to do maybe a day's worth of work in tearing out the things that just plain don't work and rejiggering the way it's presented in the store and stuff like that.
1:43:50Yeah, so the other things to consider here are the environmental, the macroeconomic conditions that you're in right now. And I'm not talking about the virus. I'm saying you created Vignette right before iOS 13 came out that had that built-in feature to share people's content photos with everyone automatically.
1:44:11You finished it really fast to get it out there before that WDC and so it had a nice summer where the system had not Sherlock its main functionality. And you got a great amount of sales and it went really well.
1:44:27So for the initial amount of effort you put into it, it paid off well. Now as you go, it's kind of like a peak oil kind of thing where you got all the easy money out of it already. As you go further, it's going to get harder and harder to advance the app in meaningful ways.
1:44:47Because all the low hanging fruit is picked. So now you're faced with these much larger things of like deeper service integrations, authentication logins, registering as an API client and becoming like a whole app for these other third party services, which by the way is a terrible business to be in if you can avoid it.
1:45:06You don't want to have to rely on these third party servers and their logins for your business. That's a terrible idea. It puts you in a terrible spot. They change and shift their rules all the time. You're never going to be a priority for them.
1:45:20So that's not a good idea in general, but if you can help it to not be one of those. So anyway, to make the app move forward at all or to even maintain its functionality as you have conditions like Twitter messing up their, the method you're using and stuff like that, and Facebook being unreliable.
1:45:38To fix those things or to potentially even fix those things requires a ton of effort on your part to dramatically change the way the app works, to dramatically expand its problem set and add many more screens and possible error conditions and everything else.
1:45:57So it would dramatically expand and bloat the app. It would add way more to your workload to extract marginal more money out of an already mature product that is kind of in coasting mode right now, like marketing wise and business and PR wise.
1:46:13It doesn't make a lot of sense to do all that work unless you think there would be a huge upside on the other side of it. And there probably won't be because in the meantime, your Sherlocking has continued and these functionality, the share my avatar functionality is slowly spreading throughout people's usage.
1:46:33And so the need for this is going down over time, not up. So for you to be investing a huge amount of effort to what would probably result in a marginal increase in sales in an environment where demand is probably going down over time, that's not smart.
1:46:53So I suggest you either leave it as is and maybe just like kind of don't mention Twitter in the description anymore. Don't promise something that you can't. So just like remove some of those mentions of that.
1:47:08Or just take it off the store and move on because no one's forcing you to keep working on this. Like you don't have to feel guilty about that decision. You have new ideas you want to work on, work on them.
1:47:23Because first of all, you have probably more potential upside financially and professionally. You have more potential upside from working on something new right now than from making like a point update to vignette that you have to break your back over to actually do all this crap.
1:47:40And that only a small handful of its users will even notice or care about. So you really should, if you have something else that you'd rather be working on, which you said you do, then that is a better place to spend your time right now.
1:47:55So the only question is what you do with vignette, whether you let it coast or whether you kill it. But working on it significantly I don't think is a good idea.
1:48:03And I think you're right. I do want to hear John what you have to say. But something I didn't state in my kind of opening monologue is that I don't see this difficulty really changing.
1:48:13And by that I mean I don't have any leverage over Facebook, over Instagram, over Twitter, over anyone else. And so really at any moment they can pull the rug out from under me or pull the football away from me.
1:48:25And there's nothing I can do about it. And that's already sort of happened. And I'm looking down this tunnel of this happening over and over again. And I just don't think I want to be on that treadmill.
1:48:36I don't think I want to deal with that. It's not fun for me. It's not great for my users. It's kind of crummy for everyone involved.
1:48:44And because of that, that's another big reason why I'm really strongly considering just being done with it and just pulling it from the store.
1:48:52But John, what are your thoughts?
1:48:55You fell victim for one of the plastic blunders. You and Marco already just said it. The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this never write an application that relies on third party APIs.
1:49:06There's other ones like this. This is a silly thing. But if you're making an application that has certain aspects to its functionality that make it more difficult to maintain over time, the bar gets raised for how successful that product needs to be.
1:49:28So the two big categories, that's not even the biggest one. The biggest one is never write an application with a server side component, Marco.
1:49:36Because to sustain a server side component, both its complexity and its cost, you need a much higher level of success than a wad of code that lands on somebody's device and runs.
1:49:48You could also say, like the other examples, never write an application that has a huge amount of creative content. So you say games, aren't those ideal? No third party APIs.
1:49:58And it all runs locally. I'm not going to make a network based game. It's going to be a local puzzle game. It just runs and it's fine. It's like, oh, now you have creative content.
1:50:07And you think, oh, well, I just need some artwork and some sound. And then eventually you realize how much work that is.
1:50:13Maybe some magazine articles.
1:50:16There are certain categories of applications that have attached to them this huge amount of hidden baggage.
1:50:23It doesn't mean that they're bad to do. Like the best applications, to get back to server side component, Overcast is as good as it is because of the server side component.
1:50:31The server side component adds value. But you have to make sure you're in a situation where I'm going to put in the work and I'm going to spend the money and the time to do and add the complexity to do this thing.
1:50:43Because it will make my app more valuable and customers will see that value and give me more money. You need that part to connect.
1:50:51So if you can do the big game with a huge amount of creative content, or God forbid, you're going to do a network based game with third party API integration and a huge amount of creative content, it better be a pretty big hit game.
1:51:02Or you better be getting paid a lot by Apple to put it into Apple Arcade or something like that.
1:51:06And third party API stuff, it's the same deal. As you noted, to quote another thing from an old SNL sketch, you've got to ride the snake.
1:51:16And the snake is Facebook. They're a bad snake. Or Twitter or any of the other APIs. Like you said, at any moment they can go away.
1:51:24Now the normal version of this for applications is, oh, Apple is going to release a new update every year or so and that could break my app and that's a pain in the butt.
1:51:32But users I feel like are much more accepting of on a yearly basis when the new OS comes out, maybe some of my old apps don't work with it immediately and maybe some never make it to the new OS.
1:51:41They're grumpy about it, but they're less grumpy than just some random day of the week all of a sudden the app that they just paid for stops working for an invisible reason that they can't detect because Twitter changed its API.
1:51:50And then you're scrambling to be like, oh, I've got to change my app to chase its API because Twitter's not going to consult you when they change their API.
1:51:57Facebook's not going to consult you. And what if it's just flaky on a particular day and what if they add these invisible limits?
1:52:02Like tracking Apple's OS changes, at least you get a WWDC and you know it's kind of on a yearly cadence.
1:52:07But third party API stuff is, you know, and again, the server side stuff, it's like now you have to keep the server up and keep it running and networking problems and just, yeah.
1:52:16So anytime you're considering an idea for an app, think about how much invisible baggage is attached to this particular kind of application and don't, you know, don't bail on it because of that, but make sure that you factor that into your equation and see if it balances out with, I expect this many customers and I'm going to charge this price.
1:52:36And if I get this amount of success, does that offset the baggage vignette probably made sense as kind of like an app that you would make for a moment in time and be useful to a bunch of people.
1:52:49And it was priced, what was the price? It was like $2.99 or something for the online.
1:52:52$4.99.
1:52:53Yeah. So that's that. I think it all matched up for what it was.
1:52:58Right. But as an app that you're going to maintain for years and years across OS updates, across API changes, that doesn't seem sustainable.
1:53:06Again, unless unless you have a steady stream of fairly significant, a significant percentage of income based on like you have the big burst and then after that it goes down.
1:53:15If it's gone down to a trickle, you're not it's not worth investing more time to maintain that trickle.
1:53:20Right. It's the app has done its job like learn learn from underscore like he's got a million apps and he mercilessly cuts them loose when their time is over.
1:53:27Right. Vignette is very much like a sort of single serving underscore style application.
1:53:35You know, you'll know you'll know when it's time to invest more time and energy into a particular application.
1:53:42Maybe it has a service side component. Maybe it does rely on third party APIs, but you'll know based on customer response, based on your own enthusiasm for developing it.
1:53:50Your own enthusiasm fed by customer response. Right. Like it won't be a mystery when it's worth time to invest more money versus when it's not right.
1:53:59And I feel like if you if you're leaning in the direction of not continuing it and you have new ideas, it's no brainer.
1:54:04Go for the new ideas as for whether you actually pull vignette or just take functionality out of it. That's up to you.
1:54:09I don't know what the steady trickle of income is compared to the amount of effort you put in.
1:54:14But I think for the two tiny apps that I made, I was very conscious of one of the reasons I haven't written maps is because I'm so conscious of the potential maintenance cost of any application that my apps are intentionally very simple because I'm the only maintenance cost I'm willing to endure is the yearly Apple maintenance cost of their going to be less and new hardware.
1:54:33And I got to get my stuff working. That's enough for me. I've been resisting adding features to switch glass for a long time, both because I don't want the features and because it's like, look, yeah, I can add this features.
1:54:43And it'll be fun. And I could rewrite it all using the new Swift UI. I could do all sorts of stuff. But it's like, but is that going to give me any amount of new customers?
1:54:52No. Do you want do I want those features personally? No. So don't do it. Let it lie. And my things don't talk to any servers, don't rely on third party applications, don't have a server side component.
1:55:03Again, not saying that's what you should shoot for, but that feature set matches up with the meager amount of income they get. So I'm happy with them and I will continue to maintain them because I need to run them all the time. But vignette seems like the equation tipped a while ago.
1:55:18Yeah, I think so. And the thing is, I don't have a large support burden, but I have enough of a support burden. I'm getting like a handful of emails a day and some of them are very nice.
1:55:35Very, very nice. Like, hey, you know, I really tried this and it didn't work for some reason. I'm not really sure why. Is there something I can do to fix it? But most of them are, I don't understand why I paid for this. Give me my money, which, of course, is wonderful because up until sometime soon, I can't give them their money. I have no mechanism for doing so.
1:55:53The best thing I can do is point them to that page on Apple's website that says, here's how you get a refund for an IAP, you know, in an app purchase and whatever. So I think the support burden, and I don't even answer all of these emails, but I answered more than I probably should bother answering.
1:56:08And that kind of drags me down. And I'm not really that proud of it anymore. I was when it was new, but it's already gotten creaky. It's already showing its age at all of a year and change. So even though you could make a strong argument to just let it sit in the store or, you know, make whatever small tweaks I need to make so that I don't feel embarrassed by it and then let it sit and just chill in the store.
1:56:32And that would probably make me at least a little bit of money, but I don't really feel comfortable with that. And I don't think it really does anyone any good. It doesn't do users much good. It doesn't do me much good.
1:56:47And, you know, the numbers coming in, you know, the checks coming in from Apple are not completely weight, like it's not nothing, but it's not enough to really justify the kind of stress that I feel like I'm carrying by keeping it out there, which is why basically I had already decided to kill it.
1:57:11And it was just a matter of, are either of you guys going to give me some really strong reason not to? And it sounds like neither of you are providing that, which is fine. That is totally fine.
1:57:20And, you know, a couple of people in the chat have said, and I don't want to get specific about it, but the trickle from Vignette is considerably less, considerably less than what membership is now providing. So that's even more reason in my mind to just kill it.
1:57:34Kill it. Look at it this way. It's not like, you know, a death of this app that's like a source of mourning. You're clearing your plate to work on stuff that you're excited about.
1:57:44Yeah. And the nice thing about Peekaview, which I am still proud of, and it's not perfect either, but I think it's much closer to perfect than Vignette is, but Peekaview, even though it's, I think, responsible for considerably less income, that only relies on Apple APIs.
1:57:59And that doesn't mean I will never have to do updates. In fact, I think there's a couple I'm going to have to do for iOS 14, but it's not, it's much more like Switch Glass than it is like Vignette. You know what I mean?
1:58:08Where I'm not beholden to all of these other entities that are massive, and I'm not even on their radar. It's not, you know, it's not like I'm on their radar, but they just don't care about me. I'm not even on their damn radar.
1:58:18So the more I think about it, the more I think it just needs to go away. And I would think by the time this episode is posted, if not soon thereafter, it will probably be gone.
1:58:29All right, thanks gentlemen. I really genuinely appreciate it. That was, that was very helpful to make me feel like I'm not totally bananas.
1:58:35Not totally.
1:58:37Is there something happy we can talk about? Yeah, not totally. Not for this reason anyway, right?
1:58:40Should have talked to us sooner. I didn't know I was having all these problems. We could have advised you to ditch it earlier.
1:58:44Yeah, and I probably should have, to be honest.
1:58:46We're such good friends.
1:58:47Yeah, but like having, having support emails and having crash reports and the API is changing and then, but you haven't changed the app like that. I can imagine that being stressful.
1:58:55That's the last thing that you want is to know that like the app that was working before because of no fault of your own, they just changed their API. Now all of a sudden your app is broken and you have to either scramble to fix it or live with knowing that it's broken. That's terrible.
1:59:07Yeah, get rid of it. It served its purpose. It did very well. It had a wonderful life. Send it to a farm upstate.
1:59:13Well, and to that end, like I, part of the reason I hadn't killed it yet was I really thought that this whole NS operation based spider, you know, re-architecture, I really thought that was going to fix a bunch of my problems.
1:59:27But then like actually Instagram may be broken with what's in the store right now. I don't remember, but it's fixed in test flight.
1:59:35And then Twitter, when, so Instagram was broken briefly and then Twitter was broke, is broken and like the combination of all of these things put me over the edge and made me just think it's just, it isn't worth it. I just don't think it's worth it.
1:59:49So that's where I'm currently sitting. And like I said, sometime probably tomorrow or the day after I will just pull it from the store.
1:59:55Farewell vignette. We knew you something. I don't know. I don't know how this.
2:00:00We hardly knew you.
2:00:01There you go. Don't hire me for any funerals.
2:00:04Goodness. I haven't seen it.
2:00:07Just got to wait for Shakespeare to come on Disney+.
2:00:10[beeping]