ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► We didn't get to talk about this in the show, but the most important revelation of Casey's video of him sending me the dollar is just how terrible his handwriting is.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Like, my handwriting is bad, but wow.

00:00:09 ◼   ► So here's why it's extra awful. Like, my handwriting is like chicken scratch. I have terrible handwriting, right?

00:00:13 ◼   ► But yours is terrible, but then it has an extra flavor, and the extra flavor is it's terrible and you do unconventional things.

00:00:20 ◼   ► You connect letters in ways that other people don't. So it's not just like you're sloppily drawing the letter shapes.

00:00:26 ◼   ► You decide that two letters should be connected like in ways that are not normal.

00:00:31 ◼   ► So it's just hard to parse.

00:00:33 ◼   ► You're like, "Is this even English letters?

00:00:36 ◼   ► I don't even know what you're—" Boy, bad handwriting.

00:00:42 ◼   ► Marco was saying before the show that he was having a little bit of troubles with the live

00:00:45 ◼   ► stream and I didn't understand why for a moment until you started explaining to me

00:00:49 ◼   ► what's going on and then I realized, "Oh yes, I'm having similar problems but manifesting

00:00:54 ◼   ► themselves in different ways.

00:00:56 ◼   ► So why don't you tell the listeners what's going on?

00:00:58 ◼   ► - Okay, so as you might have noticed,

00:01:00 ◼   ► the tweet that announced that we were going to be live,

00:01:03 ◼   ► the time duration that was in that tweet,

00:01:05 ◼   ► normally it's like, we'll be live in 45 minutes.

00:01:08 ◼   ► You know, usually I try to start the livestream

00:01:10 ◼   ► about a half hour or a little more before recording.

00:01:14 ◼   ► And today, the time interval was seven minutes,

00:01:17 ◼   ► or eight minutes, I forget which one.

00:01:20 ◼   ► And the reason why that took so long to set up,

00:01:22 ◼   ► I was here at 8.30, I was here at the 30 minute mark

00:01:25 ◼   ► trying to get it going and I realized all afternoon

00:01:28 ◼   ► and evening, Hover has been going through this massive

00:01:32 ◼   ► DDoS attack that has taken down, among other things,

00:01:35 ◼   ► their DNS servers.

00:01:36 ◼   ► Marker.org is hosted by Hover, registered at Hover

00:01:40 ◼   ► and I use their DNS.

00:01:41 ◼   ► Marker.org's VPS is what hosts the Icecast server

00:01:46 ◼   ► that powers this live stream.

00:01:47 ◼   ► I basically spent the last half hour trying to,

00:01:50 ◼   ► first seeing if I could get it working just by IP address,

00:01:54 ◼   ► but that was going to be tricky

00:01:55 ◼   ► because of various virtual hosting things.

00:01:57 ◼   ► And then eventually I just created a whole new host name.

00:02:00 ◼   ► Hover didn't register .fms for a while.

00:02:02 ◼   ► I actually don't know if they do yet.

00:02:04 ◼   ► I think they might now,

00:02:05 ◼   ► but for a long time they didn't register .fms.

00:02:07 ◼   ► So ATP.fm is registered at gandhi.net.

00:02:11 ◼   ► So I quickly ran over there,

00:02:12 ◼   ► created a new domain name live.ATP.fm.

00:02:16 ◼   ► Hoped that that propagated in time

00:02:18 ◼   ► to be requested by anybody, and fortunately it did.

00:02:21 ◼   ► I created that name at like 8.40,

00:02:23 ◼   ► and basically moved the whole thing over to that

00:02:26 ◼   ► and it's pointing to the same IP,

00:02:27 ◼   ► pointing to the same server and basically required

00:02:30 ◼   ► only a very quick creation of a new virtual host

00:02:32 ◼   ► on the market.org server to just recognize that host name

00:02:34 ◼   ► and give it the little tiny little HTML page

00:02:37 ◼   ► that basically embeds the audio player.

00:02:39 ◼   ► And that all worked and it was great and there we go.

00:02:43 ◼   ► So now we are streaming from live.atp.fm

00:02:48 ◼   ► instead of market.org, colon, 808080 or whatever it was.

00:02:53 ◼   ► And it actually appears the DNS outage

00:02:55 ◼   ► might actually have just ended, but oh well.

00:02:58 ◼   ► - People are starting to tweet at me saying,

00:03:01 ◼   ► oh your site's down, your site's down, your site's down.

00:03:02 ◼   ► And for a fleeting moment I was like,

00:03:03 ◼   ► oh did I get Fireballed?

00:03:04 ◼   ► That's exciting, or something like that.

00:03:06 ◼   ► And then I thought, no, this was just a link post,

00:03:08 ◼   ► I wouldn't be Fireballed for that.

00:03:09 ◼   ► And then it occurred to me,

00:03:10 ◼   ► oh no, this is a much greater issue entirely.

00:03:13 ◼   ► - I think it really says a lot about

00:03:14 ◼   ► how little I blog anymore,

00:03:16 ◼   ► that my site has basically been up and down

00:03:20 ◼   ► for like the last five or six hours whenever this started.

00:03:23 ◼   ► And I got in total one tweet about it.

00:03:27 ◼   ► Oh, I'm so glad that I have not had to deal with

00:03:31 ◼   ► stuff like that in my various server administration stuff.

00:03:35 ◼   ► That's gotta be hell to deal with, deal with DDoSs.

00:03:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, I can't imagine, especially if,

00:03:40 ◼   ► I mean imagine if you're Hover where you're hosting DNS

00:03:43 ◼   ► for so many people, like that's your business

00:03:46 ◼   ► to some degree and oh God, no thank you.

00:03:49 ◼   ► I'm glad that's not my problem.

00:03:51 ◼   ► I'm curious, for the people in the chat

00:03:53 ◼   ► who are recommending different DNS providers,

00:03:56 ◼   ► I guess I don't know this, I probably should know this.

00:03:58 ◼   ► Isn't your registrar like the top authority?

00:04:01 ◼   ► So like if somebody had a totally empty cache,

00:04:04 ◼   ► suppose my registrar is still Hover,

00:04:06 ◼   ► but suppose I host the DNS somewhere else

00:04:08 ◼   ► like Cloudflare or whatever.

00:04:09 ◼   ► If a new request goes to fetch my DNS

00:04:12 ◼   ► that has no cache information at any stage of the way,

00:04:15 ◼   ► is it first gonna go to my registrar

00:04:16 ◼   ► to see who the NS is and then go to the NS?

00:04:19 ◼   ► So basically, would I have to change my registrar

00:04:22 ◼   ► in order to prevent this from ever hitting me again?

00:04:25 ◼   ► - How would it know to go to your registrar?

00:04:28 ◼   ► - Well, how does it, I don't know.

00:04:29 ◼   ► How does DNS actually work at the very low level?

00:04:31 ◼   ► I have no idea.

00:04:32 ◼   ► - You should read one of the O'Reilly books

00:04:35 ◼   ► on DNS and bind or something.

00:04:36 ◼   ► My vague recollection, and the only way that occurs to me

00:04:40 ◼   ► now as I think about it, which is probably informed

00:04:42 ◼   ► by my vague recollection, is if you've got no information,

00:04:45 ◼   ► you can't start by going to the name server for that domain

00:04:48 ◼   ► because you don't know what the name server for that domain is.

00:04:51 ◼   ► So there's a set of root name servers that handle requests, you know, that shouldn't

00:04:55 ◼   ► handle requests at all because there's so many layers of caching in between.

00:05:00 ◼   ► But if you really started from nothing, there's a set of root name servers for .com and .net

00:05:05 ◼   ► and .whatever.

00:05:06 ◼   ► And I don't know who those root name servers are, and I don't know if there is a more complicated

00:05:10 ◼   ► system in place that makes this old information obsolete because I read this book in the '90s,

00:05:14 ◼   ► but that is my recollection.

00:05:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, and all the people in the chat seem to be supporting

00:05:17 ◼   ► the fact that basically, like, if you don't use

00:05:20 ◼   ► your registrar's name servers, that your registrar

00:05:23 ◼   ► is not involved in looking you up for DNS in any way.

00:05:25 ◼   ► That it goes up through the ICANN and ARIN maintained

00:05:30 ◼   ► master servers and stuff like that, as you were saying.

00:05:31 ◼   ► So, it sounds like I can stick with Hover

00:05:34 ◼   ► for the registration and just move the DNS somewhere else.

00:05:37 ◼   ► So, that's good.

00:05:38 ◼   ► I think I might do that, just to move it

00:05:39 ◼   ► somewhere smaller, basically.

00:05:41 ◼   ► - It's time for you to run your own DNS server.

00:05:43 ◼   ► "Hey, why don't you write your own DNS server?

00:05:45 ◼   ► It's a thing that people have done before."

00:05:48 ◼   ► Just ask those people.

00:05:49 ◼   ► They love it.

00:05:50 ◼   ► - Well, actually, it's funny you bring this up,

00:05:52 ◼   ► and I'm not trying to be funny.

00:05:53 ◼   ► One thing that I've wondered,

00:05:55 ◼   ► and I keep meaning to ask you, Marco,

00:05:57 ◼   ► but I keep forgetting about it,

00:05:58 ◼   ► and this is a perfect opportunity.

00:06:00 ◼   ► When you were building Tumblr

00:06:02 ◼   ► and you were giving people subdomains, weren't you?

00:06:06 ◼   ► Well, maybe not you personally,

00:06:07 ◼   ► but I'm saying Tumblr was giving people subdomains.

00:06:10 ◼   ► How did that work exactly?

00:06:13 ◼   ► - Excellent question.

00:06:15 ◼   ► So the problem, as you know, but our listeners might not,

00:06:19 ◼   ► you know, basically the idea is

00:06:21 ◼   ► if you have some giant web service

00:06:22 ◼   ► and you try to have people like hosted remains there,

00:06:25 ◼   ► so basically pointing their DNS to you,

00:06:27 ◼   ► if they're hosting a subdomain like www.caseylist.com,

00:06:32 ◼   ► they can point that to a CNAME.

00:06:34 ◼   ► And a CNAME can just be like, you know,

00:06:36 ◼   ► hosts.squarespace.net or whatever,

00:06:38 ◼   ► and then that host.squarespace.net can lead

00:06:42 ◼   ► anywhere that Squarespace wants it to.

00:06:43 ◼   ► It could lead to a whole bunch of load balancers,

00:06:45 ◼   ► it can be geographically distributed,

00:06:46 ◼   ► it could be moved around between hosts or servers

00:06:48 ◼   ► if it needs to, it's great.

00:06:50 ◼   ► The problem is that the very root entry,

00:06:52 ◼   ► so like, inside of www.caseylist.com,

00:06:55 ◼   ► if it's just caseylist.com with no www,

00:06:59 ◼   ► that can't point to a CNAME,

00:07:00 ◼   ► that has to be an A record for it to work.

00:07:03 ◼   ► And an A record, it needs to be an IP address.

00:07:05 ◼   ► So you basically have to have a special kind of IP address

00:07:10 ◼   ► that you can route to different servers as needed.

00:07:14 ◼   ► Like if you just have that as a load balancer.

00:07:16 ◼   ► So there are very advanced routing things you can do

00:07:20 ◼   ► to make that not crazy, but they're not easy

00:07:24 ◼   ► and they are limited when you have the IP

00:07:28 ◼   ► instead of like a CNAME.

00:07:29 ◼   ► What we did for the first couple of years,

00:07:33 ◼   ► Tumblr started out at Rackspace.

00:07:35 ◼   ► It started out with one server at Rackspace

00:07:37 ◼   ► and then eventually it grew to three servers at Rackspace,

00:07:40 ◼   ► and then it was like, oh, sh*t,

00:07:41 ◼   ► Rackspace is ridiculously expensive,

00:07:44 ◼   ► we will never be able to afford to scale here,

00:07:46 ◼   ► so we very quickly moved over to what was then called

00:07:48 ◼   ► The Planet, which is now today Softlayer.

00:07:50 ◼   ► We had already started telling people to point their names

00:07:54 ◼   ► at this one IP that we had at Rackspace,

00:07:56 ◼   ► it was just our master server with the load balancer on it.

00:07:59 ◼   ► When we moved to The Planet,

00:08:01 ◼   ► we kept one server at Rackspace for a long time.

00:08:06 ◼   ► it had to be at least two years into Tumblr's

00:08:09 ◼   ► like insane growth where if you had looked

00:08:12 ◼   ► at our DNS help page before like six months

00:08:16 ◼   ► into the service, your domain would have been pointed there

00:08:19 ◼   ► which is many of our very large users being proxied through,

00:08:23 ◼   ► I forget whether it was Squid or, oh crap,

00:08:27 ◼   ► what's that, HAProxy, yeah, so it was either Squid

00:08:30 ◼   ► or HAProxy running on this one Rackspace server for years,

00:08:33 ◼   ► proxying all this old traffic and eventually

00:08:35 ◼   ► they shut that down, I think, but it was years and years

00:08:37 ◼   ► into the service, and then when we were at the planet,

00:08:40 ◼   ► we basically had some kind of floating IP

00:08:42 ◼   ► that their routers could assign to anything

00:08:44 ◼   ► within the data center, and that made that

00:08:46 ◼   ► a little bit easier, and I'm sure with GeoDNS,

00:08:49 ◼   ► you might have more options, I don't know enough

00:08:51 ◼   ► about it to say, fortunately, by the time Tumblr

00:08:53 ◼   ► needed to care about stuff like that,

00:08:54 ◼   ► I was gone and it wasn't my job anymore.

00:08:56 ◼   ► - But that was all for me redirecting my own domain

00:09:00 ◼   ► to Tumblr, right, so how does something.tumblr.com

00:09:04 ◼   ► work, though?

00:09:05 ◼   ► - Well, that's just a wildcard virtual host.

00:09:08 ◼   ► That's like, the web servers just literally

00:09:11 ◼   ► just had wildcard virtual hosts,

00:09:12 ◼   ► and so the PHP app that would get the inbound request

00:09:16 ◼   ► would just look at what the host name was,

00:09:18 ◼   ► and then dispatch it from there.

00:09:20 ◼   ► - That's cheating.

00:09:21 ◼   ► - Why?

00:09:22 ◼   ► - I don't know, I'm just kidding.

00:09:24 ◼   ► I was expecting this super long and involved answer,

00:09:26 ◼   ► and that was super simple and boring.

00:09:28 ◼   ► I'm disappointed.

00:09:29 ◼   ► - Sorry.

00:09:30 ◼   ► - That's all right, I'll forgive you this once.

00:09:32 ◼   ► - All right, we should probably get into follow-up proper.

00:09:35 ◼   ► I think I have all of the follow-up this week,

00:09:38 ◼   ► which is making me very uncomfortable, to be honest,

00:09:42 ◼   ► but we're gonna roll with it.

00:09:43 ◼   ► - If I'm here, Casey, and you're here,

00:09:45 ◼   ► doesn't it make it our follow-up?

00:09:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:09:48 ◼   ► But I am the one who put all of the three bullets

00:09:50 ◼   ► into the show notes, which is, I think, a first,

00:09:54 ◼   ► and I'm not feeling too comfortable with this.

00:09:56 ◼   ► - I mean, in reality, isn't it always

00:09:57 ◼   ► basically Jon's follow-up?

00:09:59 ◼   ► - Basically, but here we are.

00:10:01 ◼   ► So anyway, a friend of the show, Steve Trout and Smith, put up a Twitter poll, I don't

00:10:08 ◼   ► know, a week ago, maybe a little over a week ago.

00:10:10 ◼   ► It says, "Listening to the latest HPFM, I'm curious, did you turn on desktop and documents

00:10:14 ◼   ► iCloud sync in macOS Sierra?"

00:10:17 ◼   ► I did, and I'm happy with it.

00:10:19 ◼   ► Now, Steve is a very prolific iOS developer and hacker, so you have to consider that when

00:10:25 ◼   ► you consider the sort of person that is likely to follow him.

00:10:30 ◼   ► And the poll results as we record, 30% yes and I'm happy with it, 4% yes and I regretted

00:10:36 ◼   ► it, 29% no and the winner, 37% hell no.

00:10:41 ◼   ► Which I just thought was kind of interesting.

00:10:45 ◼   ► So yeah, so thanks to Steve for putting that up.

00:10:48 ◼   ► I don't believe in the official Twitter client, thus I cannot create polls.

00:10:52 ◼   ► I love seeing the empty space where a poll should be as I browse Twitter.

00:10:57 ◼   ► Sometimes it's not obvious.

00:10:58 ◼   ► Obviously, sometimes you can sense, like, "This must be a poll, but this tweet doesn't

00:11:02 ◼   ► make sense.

00:11:03 ◼   ► Oh well, I'll never see it," and I continue on my way.

00:11:05 ◼   ► Yup.

00:11:06 ◼   ► So this, obviously this is not a scientific poll, whatever, it's just Twitter stuff.

00:11:10 ◼   ► The fact that most people have been scared away from this feature, like I said, if it's

00:11:15 ◼   ► a bunch of nerds following, you know, a nerdy Twitter account, it makes sense that they

00:11:19 ◼   ► would be the people who are reading reviews and becoming, or listening to our podcast

00:11:22 ◼   ► and being scared away from the feature.

00:11:23 ◼   ► So that's why the vast majority are like, "No, I did not enable this feature," and that's

00:11:26 ◼   ► That's why hell no wins because these people are afraid of the future because they've read

00:11:29 ◼   ► scary things about it.

00:11:31 ◼   ► The other possibility is even if the things they read about aren't that scary, they may

00:11:35 ◼   ► be in a situation like me where they know that they're an outlier, that they have a

00:11:40 ◼   ► lot of files or they have some very large files and they think even if it works for

00:11:44 ◼   ► most people, I know I'm at the edge of the envelope here and I probably shouldn't enable

00:11:48 ◼   ► it.

00:11:49 ◼   ► But if you just look at the people who did enable it, most of them are happy with it.

00:11:53 ◼   ► So 4% yes and I regretted it isn't that big a number.

00:11:56 ◼   ► And of course the people who are happy with it,

00:11:58 ◼   ► maybe they're happy with it now,

00:11:59 ◼   ► wait a year to see how happy they are.

00:12:01 ◼   ► Cause you know, all it takes is one thing that goes awry

00:12:04 ◼   ► that you become upset about.

00:12:05 ◼   ► But anyway, it's really difficult to get a read

00:12:09 ◼   ► on these things without an actual study controlling

00:12:14 ◼   ► for all the variables, especially when nerdy people

00:12:16 ◼   ► like us ask about it because it's a self-selecting group.

00:12:20 ◼   ► I wanted to also briefly touch on my headphones.

00:12:24 ◼   ► Last week, we had talked about how my beloved

00:12:26 ◼   ► but ancient and adorably crappy headphones

00:12:29 ◼   ► had kicked the bucket, well, sort of.

00:12:32 ◼   ► They weren't cooperating well with my work laptop with Sierra

00:12:34 ◼   ► which is the laptop that they're pretty much

00:12:36 ◼   ► always connected to.

00:12:37 ◼   ► And I had solicited suggestions for alternatives

00:12:40 ◼   ► and promptly ignored every single one of them

00:12:43 ◼   ► because guess what headphones

00:12:44 ◼   ► spontaneously started working again?

00:12:46 ◼   ► The old crappy, adorable headphones.

00:12:48 ◼   ► - Hey. - I did, yeah,

00:12:50 ◼   ► I was very excited about this.

00:12:51 ◼   ► I did do a PRAM reset, which I didn't have a chance to do

00:12:54 ◼   ► before the show.

00:12:55 ◼   ► Of course, I was shotgunning and just trying everything

00:12:58 ◼   ► under the sun to try to figure out how to make them work

00:13:00 ◼   ► again, and I'm not entirely clear what it was that did it

00:13:03 ◼   ► for sure.

00:13:04 ◼   ► I think I had rebooted it at least once.

00:13:06 ◼   ► - Is that what shotgunning means?

00:13:08 ◼   ► It's like trying two headphones at once?

00:13:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, something like that.

00:13:11 ◼   ► No, it's just the old shotguns.

00:13:12 ◼   ► They spray a bunch of little pellets everywhere.

00:13:14 ◼   ► At least that's my understanding.

00:13:16 ◼   ► Don't email me.

00:13:18 ◼   ► - Now we're gonna hear from gun people.

00:13:19 ◼   ► Yeah, I know, please don't email me.

00:13:21 ◼   ► I'm so sorry, God.

00:13:22 ◼   ► I'm so sorry.

00:13:23 ◼   ► Anyway, so I wanted to quickly cover a handful of options

00:13:28 ◼   ► if you're in a similar scenario

00:13:29 ◼   ► that I heard a lot of responses from.

00:13:32 ◼   ► The first one, the Motorola S305,

00:13:35 ◼   ► these links will all be in the show notes.

00:13:36 ◼   ► Those are the ones I used prior to the ones

00:13:38 ◼   ► that I am currently using.

00:13:40 ◼   ► And I loved them,

00:13:42 ◼   ► except that the battery went to crap pretty darn quickly.

00:13:44 ◼   ► And I used to be able to make it through an entire day

00:13:47 ◼   ► very fast and by, I don't know, maybe six months or a year after getting them, I could

00:13:51 ◼   ► no longer make an entire day with the S305s.

00:13:55 ◼   ► There were a lot of suggestions for the Plantronics Backbeat Fit, which have the behind the neck

00:14:01 ◼   ► head bone, or head bone, wow, the behind the neck brace, if you will, that I had been requesting

00:14:07 ◼   ► because I'm too prissy to have my hair squashed.

00:14:11 ◼   ► But those were also kind of sort of earbuds, and to me, if I'm going to go earbuds, I might

00:14:14 ◼   ► might as well just go AirPods,

00:14:17 ◼   ► potential battery issues be damned.

00:14:18 ◼   ► But those were very, very popular,

00:14:21 ◼   ► very, very popular response.

00:14:23 ◼   ► I was almost going to buy our next set,

00:14:26 ◼   ► which is the Kinevo, Kinevo, Kinevo, I don't know, Kinewa,

00:14:31 ◼   ► BTH260 V2. (laughing)

00:14:33 ◼   ► - It's pronounced As-ah-ee.

00:14:34 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:14:36 ◼   ► - Quino, what was that commercial?

00:14:38 ◼   ► It was some football, but food commercial.

00:14:40 ◼   ► Anyway, point being the Kinevo BTH260,

00:14:44 ◼   ► There is an older version,

00:14:46 ◼   ► I don't recall the model name, number, whatever,

00:14:50 ◼   ► that did not support aptX, but this pair apparently does.

00:14:54 ◼   ► And this is what I was about to buy

00:14:56 ◼   ► when my old Bluetooth headphones came back to life.

00:15:00 ◼   ► Then a lot of people suggested various kinds of earbuds

00:15:05 ◼   ► but with shoulder or neck harness things.

00:15:10 ◼   ► - Those things always look horrible to me.

00:15:12 ◼   ► those always look like the worst of all worlds, basically.

00:15:15 ◼   ► It's like you have this like,

00:15:17 ◼   ► you have the discomfort of earbuds

00:15:19 ◼   ► and all the crappy sound that usually goes along with them.

00:15:24 ◼   ► But you don't have like the tiny,

00:15:26 ◼   ► you know, tiny little size

00:15:27 ◼   ► or wrap around the phone kind of cable.

00:15:28 ◼   ► You still have this big block of battery and crap

00:15:31 ◼   ► that you have to deal with and it's just ew.

00:15:32 ◼   ► Like I don't get why anybody likes those.

00:15:35 ◼   ► Please don't write in.

00:15:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I completely agree

00:15:38 ◼   ► with everything you just said.

00:15:39 ◼   ► There are very, very many different flavors of this,

00:15:42 ◼   ► The particular example I'm putting in the show notes is the LG Tone Pro HBS750, and

00:15:47 ◼   ► again these will be in the show notes.

00:15:49 ◼   ► I completely agree with you.

00:15:50 ◼   ► The thought of having this thing resting on my shoulders yet also having earbuds seems

00:15:53 ◼   ► like the worst of all worlds.

00:15:55 ◼   ► Not for me, but definitely on paper it sounds like it would be good because presumably it

00:16:00 ◼   ► has forever long battery life.

00:16:02 ◼   ► This particular set is also aptX compatible, etc. etc.

00:16:05 ◼   ► The final recommendation, which I'm actually looking into because they just seem very interesting

00:16:10 ◼   ► to me is bone conduction headphones.

00:16:17 ◼   ► The way these work are you have these things that sit pressing against your cheekbones

00:16:22 ◼   ► and they vibrate your cheekbones which vibrates your head and the things inside your head

00:16:27 ◼   ► hopefully kind of in a not dangerous way.

00:16:30 ◼   ► A lot of people wrote in to talk about that and I'm actually looking into that as well.

00:16:34 ◼   ► So the Aftershokz Trekz is an example of that.

00:16:37 ◼   ► That'll be in the show notes too.

00:16:38 ◼   ► So if you're in a similar situation,

00:16:41 ◼   ► you can look at all those or just try to find

00:16:43 ◼   ► an ancient pair like I have and do whatever

00:16:45 ◼   ► magical incantations/sacrifices I did

00:16:48 ◼   ► in order to get them to work.

00:16:49 ◼   ► - So I'm curious, because of my whole inability

00:16:53 ◼   ► to comfortably wear anything in-ear,

00:16:56 ◼   ► I don't really know the answer to this.

00:16:57 ◼   ► I'm curious, for all these really tiny

00:17:00 ◼   ► in-ear Bluetooth things, what do they do

00:17:02 ◼   ► for remote control commands, things like volume

00:17:05 ◼   ► and play/pause and skip back/skip forward?

00:17:07 ◼   ► Do they have buttons somehow for that?

00:17:08 ◼   ► Like how do they do that?

00:17:10 ◼   ► - Well, and that's why the Plantronics Backbeat Fit

00:17:13 ◼   ► are a popular choice, I think,

00:17:16 ◼   ► because they have those bars that rest on your shoulders,

00:17:20 ◼   ► so those orbs that rest on your shoulders

00:17:22 ◼   ► that I presume have, oh, excuse me, I'm sorry,

00:17:25 ◼   ► I'm getting myself backwards.

00:17:26 ◼   ► Let me try that all over again.

00:17:28 ◼   ► So that's why the Plantronics Backbeat Fit is popular

00:17:32 ◼   ► is because they're earbuds,

00:17:33 ◼   ► but with like panels on the outside of the earbud,

00:17:36 ◼   ► if that makes any sense at all.

00:17:38 ◼   ► And so the buttons are on there.

00:17:40 ◼   ► And additionally, on those shoulder harness-y things,

00:17:44 ◼   ► the LGs, and I think a few people had recommended Sonys

00:17:46 ◼   ► that were a similar design.

00:17:48 ◼   ► Those, I think, have the buttons on those little

00:17:51 ◼   ► like shoulder pad things, or whatever they are,

00:17:53 ◼   ► that rest on your shoulder.

00:17:54 ◼   ► So I guess that works for those.

00:17:56 ◼   ► But I can't speak for any like true to form earbuds.

00:18:01 ◼   ► And I did get a lot of recommendations, actually.

00:18:04 ◼   ► And I can't recall which one was the most popular,

00:18:05 ◼   ► but a lot of recommendations for just straight up earbuds that have the cord behind you.

00:18:11 ◼   ► But if I'm going to go that route, I'd rather have like the ones I have today that just

00:18:16 ◼   ► kind of rest on my ears.

00:18:18 ◼   ► I'm not a big earbud fan, although that being said, the more I hear about the AirPods, the

00:18:23 ◼   ► more I think they're going on my holiday list.

00:18:26 ◼   ► Because it sounds like they're the best possible solution in that they have almost enough battery

00:18:32 ◼   ► life if I listen all day long. Oh, JaybirdX2, as all said in the chat. I believe those are

00:18:38 ◼   ► the ones that everyone and their mother had recommended. Anyway, so I think the AirPods

00:18:43 ◼   ► are probably the best bet because if I ever get up for my desk for like any reason, I

00:18:47 ◼   ► can pop them back in the little Tic Tac holder and that'll probably give me enough juice

00:18:51 ◼   ► to get through the rest of the day. So hopefully Santa or the equivalent, I guess, Hanukkah

00:18:58 ◼   ► Harry if you will, will be good to me this year and maybe I'll come up with a set of

00:19:04 ◼   ► those.

00:19:05 ◼   ► Moving on, last piece of follow-up, and this I think will be a little bit more shared.

00:19:08 ◼   ► A friend of the show, Greg Koenig, had written a post earlier today about why your next iPhone

00:19:14 ◼   ► won't be ceramic.

00:19:16 ◼   ► And if nothing else, it's a great post because it includes a screenshot of one of my favorite

00:19:20 ◼   ► movies of all time, The Hunt for Ed October.

00:19:22 ◼   ► But what Greg goes through in this post is why he thinks that this is probably not going

00:19:28 ◼   ► to be a thing.

00:19:29 ◼   ► And if you don't know Greg, he is, I think, a co-founder or one of just a handful of employees

00:19:34 ◼   ► of Luma Labs, and they make the Luma Loop, which is the camera strap I have on my big

00:19:39 ◼   ► camera as we speak.

00:19:41 ◼   ► And that was not comped.

00:19:42 ◼   ► Well, it was a gift, but it was from family.

00:19:45 ◼   ► So somebody paid actual money for it.

00:19:47 ◼   ► It's really great.

00:19:48 ◼   ► I love that thing.

00:19:49 ◼   ► And so Greg manufactures stuff for a living.

00:19:50 ◼   ► That's what he does.

00:19:52 ◼   ► And his point, which he had a very long essay and it's worth reading every bit of it, but

00:19:57 ◼   ► if I were to quickly distill it down, he said, "Apple is a hardware company and machined

00:20:01 ◼   ► aluminum is their primary platform.

00:20:03 ◼   ► At peak production, Apple is manufacturing roughly a million iPhones a day."

00:20:07 ◼   ► So for Apple to bring a whole new long cycle time process online, the sort of thing that

00:20:12 ◼   ► ceramic would require, they would need warehouses with tens of thousands, or excuse me, thousands

00:20:17 ◼   ► of machines already squared away and ready to rock with thousands more machines being

00:20:22 ◼   ► built. The machines that are building the iPhones, there would need to be thousands

00:20:26 ◼   ► of those. And there would probably need to be, those machines would be needing to be

00:20:30 ◼   ► built to add to the collection that's already ready to rock. So in his perspective, there's

00:20:36 ◼   ► no freaking way this is going to happen anytime soon. And it's really worth reading all of

00:20:40 ◼   ► it because I am way oversimplifying it. But you should check it out. We'll put it in the

00:20:44 ◼   ► show notes.

00:20:45 ◼   ► Also it's like in order to get the machines and tooling

00:20:49 ◼   ► and everything set up to produce ceramic iPhone cases

00:20:53 ◼   ► at the scale needed to produce enough iPhones

00:20:56 ◼   ► to meet demand, they could theoretically do it,

00:21:00 ◼   ► but not only would it be like way, way, way more machines

00:21:03 ◼   ► and space and money and people than what they have now,

00:21:06 ◼   ► but the gist of it was like if they were even preparing

00:21:09 ◼   ► for that, you couldn't hide that amount of investment

00:21:12 ◼   ► and effort, like that would take years to build up

00:21:15 ◼   ► if they were gonna do it.

00:21:16 ◼   ► And you would see that.

00:21:18 ◼   ► You would see people talking about it,

00:21:19 ◼   ► noticing it in expenditures.

00:21:21 ◼   ► You'd see sources in the supply chain talking about it

00:21:23 ◼   ► and leaking information or Apple acquiring companies

00:21:26 ◼   ► or staffing up in certain ways.

00:21:27 ◼   ► Basically it's like it would be such a massive undertaking

00:21:31 ◼   ► and just like stuff, money, and people

00:21:33 ◼   ► that they really couldn't hide it.

00:21:35 ◼   ► - They're disguising it as a car development program.

00:21:37 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:21:39 ◼   ► You think all those billions of dollars

00:21:40 ◼   ► are gonna make it a car?

00:21:41 ◼   ► Who would believe that?

00:21:42 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:21:43 ◼   ► So for the past, I think for the past, for a long time now, I think, Apple has to have

00:21:48 ◼   ► been internally looking for their next material after machined aluminum.

00:21:53 ◼   ► Because the machined aluminum age began with the MacBook Air, the aluminum age began slightly

00:21:58 ◼   ► before that, but once they settled on the machined aluminum, they had a nice situation

00:22:03 ◼   ► where so many things they made started as a block of aluminum and these computer-controlled

00:22:08 ◼   ► milling machines would carve out what they wanted.

00:22:12 ◼   ► They do that for so many products and that's good because then you've got

00:22:15 ◼   ► Sort of a solid thing to invest in a thing to become good at they buy all these machines the machines get faster so on

00:22:22 ◼   ► And so forth the part of the thing that Greg was talking about in the post is exactly how long does it take to go?

00:22:27 ◼   ► from raw material to a part and ceramic takes longer than machining aluminum because you got to do the whole

00:22:33 ◼   ► baking process or molding and all sorts of other stuff and anyway

00:22:38 ◼   ► Looking for the next material. There's a lot of research in that like oh, I mentioned last show carbon fiber

00:22:44 ◼   ► some kind of ceramic different things with plastics I

00:22:47 ◼   ► Don't think they've found what their next thing is going to be but surely they are looking for it because they're looking for something

00:22:53 ◼   ► That is like a net win over aluminum. It was pretty great

00:22:58 ◼   ► It has something some good things go for it. It moves away heat

00:23:02 ◼   ► It's easy to machine to high tolerances that you know that it's sort of a known quantity

00:23:07 ◼   ► They can mess with the formulation of the aluminum as Greg points out and not have to replace the machines

00:23:12 ◼   ► Right because they can all still mill they're going to change from six thousand six thousand to seven thousand series aluminum

00:23:17 ◼   ► They could still use all the same machines

00:23:19 ◼   ► But it's got downsides too. It's not radio transparent it bends

00:23:23 ◼   ► Scratchability if you're gonna have a high gloss finish they haven't sorted that out or whatever. So anyway, I

00:23:28 ◼   ► Feel like during all this time and when we're in this aluminum and glass age Apple has to be looking for what the next thing

00:23:34 ◼   ► is eventually presumably they'll find it and

00:23:37 ◼   ► And when they do find it, there is going to be, you know,

00:23:40 ◼   ► a long ramp up into switching over.

00:23:44 ◼   ► I don't think, you know, as this thing points out, if what he's saying

00:23:46 ◼   ► about the time required to manufacture it,

00:23:48 ◼   ► I don't think they can use ceramic unless they solve that problem.

00:23:52 ◼   ► Because time is one of the problems they can't really fix, right?

00:23:55 ◼   ► So if they decided some kind of ceramic combined with some other material,

00:24:00 ◼   ► like ceramic, like he says at the end, ceramic at the outside or something else

00:24:03 ◼   ► inside. If they decided this was the thing because it has more desirable qualities, they have to get

00:24:08 ◼   ► it down to the point where they can manufacture it as quickly and easily as aluminum or within

00:24:13 ◼   ► that ballpark because they're not going to go backwards by like a 2x or 10x manufacturing time,

00:24:17 ◼   ► they just can't sustain that. And I think he's right that if they have made that decision,

00:24:22 ◼   ► there's going to be such a long lead time that, you know, we'll all know about it. But

00:24:25 ◼   ► as discussed last week, like the next one's going to be glass. Glass is a thing they already know

00:24:29 ◼   ► about, they already did with the 4 and the 4s, there's glass in the current phones that,

00:24:32 ◼   ► you know, whatever. That's the rumor. It's not a big change. They've done it before. It's an

00:24:37 ◼   ► existing material. If they were going to do anything with ceramic and the watch was a trial

00:24:42 ◼   ► run, don't even think about it until like after you have two rounds of this glass phone, the

00:24:47 ◼   ► whatever and the whatever S or you know, actually, we're totally off the rhythm now because they kept

00:24:50 ◼   ► the stupid phone the same and realize this is not an S generation. It's actually the 7, even though

00:24:56 ◼   ► it looks the same as the 6s. Anyway, we're all confused now. But yeah, I still think that

00:25:01 ◼   ► somewhere out there in our future is Apple's next material. I remember the liquid metal rumors,

00:25:06 ◼   ► he mentions them as well. They bought that liquid metal company and they had, you know,

00:25:09 ◼   ► they made the sim, I think they made the sim extractor tool have liquid metal. Not really a big

00:25:14 ◼   ► return on investment for that company, but that was another possibility. Can we, can we make,

00:25:18 ◼   ► can we like injection mold metal and come out with a part that has all the fine details already on it

00:25:24 ◼   ► because it's liquid metal and it flows in. It's like plastic, but you get, you know, anyway,

00:25:29 ◼   ► none of those things have won yet. I think the ceramic watch tells us that of all the possible

00:25:34 ◼   ► future materials maybe ceramic had enough promise to say well even if we've eliminated it as a

00:25:40 ◼   ► possibility for our phone we can make a cool watch out of it because as Marco pointed out it's not

00:25:45 ◼   ► an unknown material in the watch world and you know they can give it a try. But the the requirements

00:25:52 ◼   ► for a successor to aluminum on the phone are pretty stringent. And it could be that we

00:25:59 ◼   ► have to go through a whole series of generations of this glass phone before we even look at,

00:26:05 ◼   ► you know, carbon fiber or plastic that doesn't look like plastic or whatever else they're

00:26:10 ◼   ► going to do.

00:26:11 ◼   ► So speaking of phones, have you made it to the Apple Store? I don't recall.

00:26:15 ◼   ► I still have not. I'm solo parenting again, so like I just haven't had time to be running

00:26:21 ◼   ► around and going to stores, I still have not actually made it to the Apple store.

00:26:23 ◼   ► I think I'm going to eventually because my wife is finally starting to look at like watches

00:26:28 ◼   ► and bands and stuff and complaining about the combinations that she would like to exist

00:26:32 ◼   ► that don't and complaining about the sport band colors that seem not to exist anymore.

00:26:36 ◼   ► And so on.

00:26:37 ◼   ► Anyway, that probably means I'm going to end up in an Apple store at some point with her

00:26:41 ◼   ► looking at watches.

00:26:42 ◼   ► And that's probably what will get me there to mess with the phone.

00:26:45 ◼   ► Fair enough.

00:26:46 ◼   ► Fair enough. I'm curious to hear what you think after you go and do it.

00:26:50 ◼   ► So my coworker Jamie has a Jet Black. I have a matte black.

00:26:55 ◼   ► Every time I look at my matte black, I am convinced that it is,

00:27:00 ◼   ► I think in my personal estimation, my favorite iPhone ever. I just think it

00:27:04 ◼   ► looks amazing. And I love it to death. And then for some

00:27:08 ◼   ► reason or another, I'll grab Jamie's phone and then I'll wish

00:27:12 ◼   ► so badly that it was even a half as tacky, as sticky

00:27:16 ◼   ► as Jamie's phone is, 'cause man,

00:27:18 ◼   ► that jet black is so nice to hold.

00:27:20 ◼   ► I still prefer the aesthetics of the matte,

00:27:22 ◼   ► but gosh, that jet black is so nice to hold.

00:27:25 ◼   ► - Have you considered pine tar?

00:27:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, that might be the fix, right?

00:27:28 ◼   ► - I'll tell you what too, so now that we're a few weeks in,

00:27:31 ◼   ► my jet black one, you know how many times

00:27:34 ◼   ► I've looked at the back?

00:27:35 ◼   ► Zero.

00:27:36 ◼   ► I looked this morning, it was upside down on the bib

00:27:39 ◼   ► I was doing, I was getting dressed, and I noticed,

00:27:41 ◼   ► I'm like, you know, how does the back look now

00:27:43 ◼   ► after a few weeks of use?

00:27:45 ◼   ► And I look and it's like,

00:27:46 ◼   ► there's like three fingerprints on it,

00:27:48 ◼   ► but it's not that bad.

00:27:49 ◼   ► And like I hadn't just wiped it off or anything,

00:27:51 ◼   ► this was just like organic discovery

00:27:52 ◼   ► of the back of this phone in the wild.

00:27:54 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:27:55 ◼   ► And like, there were a few fingerprints on it,

00:27:57 ◼   ► and that's fine, and there's a few small scratches

00:27:59 ◼   ► that you can see in certain light,

00:28:01 ◼   ► and they're fine too, and it doesn't matter at all.

00:28:03 ◼   ► But every single time I pick it up and hold it,

00:28:05 ◼   ► which is constantly during the day,

00:28:07 ◼   ► I am so glad it feels as good as it does.

00:28:10 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, I can understand that. I don't know. It's a tough call. I think to be honest jet black or or matte black

00:28:16 ◼   ► It's kind of a win-win. I mean because I think the jet black absolutely wins on on comfort

00:28:21 ◼   ► I think the matte black wins on

00:28:23 ◼   ► Aesthetics personally, although it's a close call

00:28:25 ◼   ► So it's a win-win no matter how you slice it. Yeah, I'd agree with that

00:28:28 ◼   ► Before we move on from the materials that your phone is made of assuming the glass roomers are true and they do the glass thing

00:28:34 ◼   ► What do you guys think is the most likely successor material to aluminum and glass?

00:28:39 ◼   ► - Oh golly.

00:28:41 ◼   ► - Like after that?

00:28:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, like after whatever this next one is,

00:28:45 ◼   ► however long the glass era lasts,

00:28:47 ◼   ► assuming the rumors are true.

00:28:48 ◼   ► Because I have to think that Apple continues

00:28:51 ◼   ► to look for the next material

00:28:53 ◼   ► and they will find that eventually it's not going

00:28:55 ◼   ► to be aluminum and glass forever and ever.

00:28:58 ◼   ► - I don't think we can say for sure,

00:29:00 ◼   ► I mean on an infinite time scale,

00:29:01 ◼   ► but I don't think we can say for sure

00:29:02 ◼   ► that they necessarily have to replace aluminum.

00:29:06 ◼   ► I mean there are certain things in the world

00:29:08 ◼   ► that just end up being made of certain materials

00:29:10 ◼   ► for a very, very long time, just because that makes sense

00:29:13 ◼   ► for physical characteristics or for manufacturing ease

00:29:17 ◼   ► or for cost or availability or scale or whatever else.

00:29:20 ◼   ► Like there are certain things that always end up

00:29:21 ◼   ► being made of that material.

00:29:22 ◼   ► Like airplanes are made of aluminum

00:29:24 ◼   ► because there's lots of reasons for that

00:29:26 ◼   ► and like that's, like there's nothing saying

00:29:28 ◼   ► that that's gonna replace aluminum for airplanes

00:29:30 ◼   ► unless there is, please airplane nerds don't tell me.

00:29:33 ◼   ► Let me believe one thing.

00:29:34 ◼   ► But you know--

00:29:35 ◼   ► - I mean there is, like your airplane example

00:29:37 ◼   ► good one because for a long time, airplanes were made of metal until people started working carbon

00:29:42 ◼   ► fiber into airplanes, into actual airplanes that, you know, like, and so that it's not like they're

00:29:47 ◼   ► all made of carbon fiber now, but that became a viable material for important parts of airplanes,

00:29:52 ◼   ► whereas, you know, in the beginning of our parents' lives that never here didn't even exist,

00:29:55 ◼   ► it wasn't using airplanes at all. And aviation is really slow to adopt new materials, but slowly but

00:30:01 ◼   ► surely, basically over the course of our entire life, suddenly carbon fiber is part of the formula

00:30:06 ◼   ► of making up a plane. I think phones are less conservative than airplanes, and especially since

00:30:12 ◼   ► airplanes have the constraint that they have to transport something, otherwise why they even

00:30:20 ◼   ► exist, whether it's people or cargo, right? But phones, the form factor of a phone,

00:30:24 ◼   ► I mean, in some respects, until it is sending images directly into our brain, it has to have

00:30:30 ◼   ► something that we can look at, assuming we don't go to glasses or something. But everything else

00:30:34 ◼   ► about it, it's kind of up for grabs. Aluminum, if the electronics for a phone fit into something,

00:30:43 ◼   ► the thickness of a credit card, aluminum is not the material for you. Because once you get to

00:30:48 ◼   ► the thickness of a credit card, you can't make that out of aluminum anymore, because it will

00:30:52 ◼   ► bend and stay bent. And so it's a non-starter period, you cannot do it out of aluminum.

00:30:57 ◼   ► If we get to that in our lifetime, which I think is reasonable, we'll be old men, but you can keep

00:31:03 ◼   ► keep making these things thinner and smaller and lighter weight and new screen technology

00:31:08 ◼   ► and so on and so forth, we can get them pretty thin. And once they get to a certain thinness,

00:31:12 ◼   ► you can't use aluminum anymore. And then you probably don't want to use glass because it's

00:31:17 ◼   ► just too fragile. So you have to go to a material that's bendy and bounces back. And you'd probably

00:31:23 ◼   ► want to also go to something that's lighter. It's reasonable to say though, that you could

00:31:29 ◼   ► say in the next 20 years it's aluminum glass, that's it. Or just glass and whatever they

00:31:33 ◼   ► sandwich between it. Is that what you're saying? You can't envision anything in the next like

00:31:37 ◼   ► 20 years or so that's not aluminum glass or some combination?

00:31:40 ◼   ► I mean, I don't really know enough about materials and the science behind them and the status

00:31:45 ◼   ► of current technologies. Like carbon fiber is a great example. That might be it, I don't

00:31:49 ◼   ► know. I know carbon fiber is, right now it's not used in mass quantities in a lot of places

00:31:56 ◼   ► because of various like newness and cost issues and things like that but I don't know enough

00:32:00 ◼   ► about it to know whether that's likely to be overcome in the next few years. I really

00:32:05 ◼   ► don't know. Carbon fiber I think would have many of the same advantages of ceramic in

00:32:10 ◼   ► that I assume it's radio transparent. I assume it can be very thin and light and strong based

00:32:16 ◼   ► on the little I know about it. So it seems like it could be really cool but I don't know

00:32:20 ◼   ► if they can make enough of it. I mean if you think about like where you might see it first

00:32:24 ◼   ► Certainly the iPhone is a very high profit,

00:32:29 ◼   ► very high profile, prestigious device,

00:32:32 ◼   ► but it wouldn't surprise me if you saw carbon fiber

00:32:35 ◼   ► first appear in something lower volume

00:32:37 ◼   ► that could maybe sell for even more,

00:32:38 ◼   ► maybe a MacBook Pro.

00:32:40 ◼   ► Like maybe you see a MacBook Pro lid casing

00:32:43 ◼   ► or bottom casing or maybe even the entire case

00:32:46 ◼   ► made of carbon fiber, I have no idea.

00:32:48 ◼   ► But that would be a place where like

00:32:50 ◼   ► you could actually really use more of a weight savings

00:32:53 ◼   ► and you could charge more and have more of a profit margin

00:32:55 ◼   ► to kind of cover the cost of it,

00:32:57 ◼   ► and you wouldn't need to make as many of them

00:32:59 ◼   ► as you would make with the iPhone.

00:33:00 ◼   ► So I think if they're gonna use something like carbon fiber,

00:33:02 ◼   ► we're probably gonna see it first somewhere else,

00:33:05 ◼   ► not in the phone, but I really have no idea.

00:33:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I was gonna say carbon fiber as well,

00:33:11 ◼   ► but I am not confident in that idea,

00:33:14 ◼   ► because I thought that carbon fiber's

00:33:17 ◼   ► just a nightmare to work with,

00:33:19 ◼   ► and doesn't it like splinter really badly?

00:33:22 ◼   ► or maybe I guess that's fiberglass,

00:33:23 ◼   ► which I am not recommending, I'm just saying.

00:33:26 ◼   ► I just thought it was a nightmare to work with.

00:33:27 ◼   ► - I think carbon fiber does shatter though.

00:33:29 ◼   ► Isn't that one of the problems at hand?

00:33:31 ◼   ► - Maybe that's it.

00:33:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thought exercise for sure,

00:33:35 ◼   ► but I think this is three blind men leading themselves

00:33:38 ◼   ► around in a circle.

00:33:39 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:33:40 ◼   ► You know, I don't, like Marco said,

00:33:42 ◼   ► I don't know anything about materials really,

00:33:44 ◼   ► so I'm not sure what's even reasonable.

00:33:46 ◼   ► What would you say, John?

00:33:47 ◼   ► - I basically agree with all the things

00:33:49 ◼   ► that you touched on.

00:33:50 ◼   ► Like I was thinking the exact same thing as Marco,

00:33:51 ◼   ► in terms of like, that's why I was getting it

00:33:54 ◼   ► with the credit card type thing.

00:33:56 ◼   ► Aluminum is great, right up to the point

00:33:57 ◼   ► where you start reaching a certain minimum thinness

00:34:00 ◼   ► and then you have the bending problem, right?

00:34:02 ◼   ► 'Cause aluminum is not all about springing back.

00:34:05 ◼   ► And we have a good analogy in the car industry

00:34:10 ◼   ► where for many, many years, cars were made of steel

00:34:14 ◼   ► and then more exotic cars incorporated aluminum parts

00:34:16 ◼   ► which were weird and harder to manufacture.

00:34:18 ◼   ► Don't you remember like when we were kids,

00:34:19 ◼   ► like Audi had aluminum cars and it was like,

00:34:21 ◼   ► but those are a nightmare to do body work on because everyone knows how to do steel and aluminum is harder to work with and

00:34:26 ◼   ► all the sorts of reasons that like

00:34:28 ◼   ► You know mechanics and body repair people will tell you that aluminum cars are pain in the butt

00:34:32 ◼   ► Fast forward to today aluminum is everywhere. It is trickling down the car line. It's not just on exotic supercars anymore

00:34:39 ◼   ► What's on exotic supercars these days?

00:34:41 ◼   ► It's not supercars are essentially entirely made out of carbon fiber like that that konas egg one has carbon fiber wheels for crying out loud

00:34:47 ◼   ► like

00:34:47 ◼   ► And you say okay, that's fine for carbon fiber for exotic cars, but carbon fiber just like aluminum before it

00:34:52 ◼   ► But I feel like we'll be trickling down and like you said on cars very often especially on very expensive fancy cars

00:34:58 ◼   ► It'll be aluminum and steel, but on the lightweight model they will replace

00:35:04 ◼   ► Certain parts with carbon fiber very often the roof the hood things that are thin not really load-bearing

00:35:11 ◼   ► But very large like Marco was saying with the back of a MacBook Pro

00:35:14 ◼   ► and

00:35:15 ◼   ► I mean cars you're not supposed to touch them to anything so they shouldn't be bending but

00:35:18 ◼   ► Macbooks if they make them really thin like think of the current MacBook

00:35:23 ◼   ► that's starting to push the limits of

00:35:25 ◼   ► bendiness if you want to go much thinner and you probably will be able to considering like that the iPhone is probably faster than the

00:35:31 ◼   ► Current MacBook and the iPhone is a really small that a 10 is really small

00:35:34 ◼   ► If you want to go much thinner and you want to make a more lightweight version of that

00:35:39 ◼   ► That's more resilient making the top case of a MacBook Pro out of carbon fiber starts to make sense

00:35:44 ◼   ► And because carbon fiber, I think, is inevitably going to trickle down the automotive ladder

00:35:48 ◼   ► in our lifetime, it's just the way the industry goes, there will be an ever-increasing expertise

00:35:54 ◼   ► in dealing with and manufacturing carbon fiber.

00:35:57 ◼   ► So that's my number one pick for the successor because things will get thinner, it has the

00:36:02 ◼   ► advantage of radio transparency, it's really light, it's really strong.

00:36:05 ◼   ► The difficulty is you can't like machine-find details into it.

00:36:08 ◼   ► It's more of a pain to deal with, but like, hoping that the rest of the manufacturing

00:36:14 ◼   ► industry, starting with aviation and supercars and coming down to regular cars or whatever,

00:36:18 ◼   ► will start to work out the details of a carbon fiber manufacturing process that makes it

00:36:22 ◼   ► viable in a way that it is not now, that makes it viable for manufacturing phones.

00:36:28 ◼   ► Although the chatroom says carbon fiber is not radio transparent.

00:36:30 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:36:31 ◼   ► That may be another thing that they can tackle.

00:36:34 ◼   ► They could always just have antenna lines smoothly etched into the carbon fiber like

00:36:38 ◼   ► they do with the aluminum today.

00:36:39 ◼   ► But anyway.

00:36:40 ◼   ► There we go.

00:36:41 ◼   ► Ceramic antenna lines inside a carbon fiber plate.

00:36:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:36:45 ◼   ► Problem solved.

00:36:46 ◼   ► Ceramic, the reason we were even talking about that is because Apple introduced this really

00:36:49 ◼   ► shiny phone that scratches really easily.

00:36:51 ◼   ► And we're like, "Oh, well, it would be nice if it could be smooth, but also not scratchy."

00:36:55 ◼   ► And then that's how we get into the whole carbon fiber thing.

00:36:57 ◼   ► Oh, carbon fiber shatters in chips and so on and so forth.

00:37:02 ◼   ► All these different properties, I feel like, within the realm of metals and ceramic and

00:37:07 ◼   ► even plastics.

00:37:08 ◼   ► That's my second pick, by the way.

00:37:09 ◼   ► Carbon fiber is my exciting pick.

00:37:10 ◼   ► My boring pick is, as you get really, really thin, you know what?

00:37:14 ◼   ► For something the size of a phone, not necessarily the size of a laptop, or something the size

00:37:18 ◼   ► of a phone, maybe not the big phone.

00:37:21 ◼   ► Plastic has a lot of desirable qualities.

00:37:25 ◼   ► Plastic, we know all about plastic.

00:37:27 ◼   ► It scratches more easily than the hard metals.

00:37:29 ◼   ► It will shatter eventually, but it bends and springs back and can take a beating.

00:37:34 ◼   ► And you've still got the problem of the screen floating out there.

00:37:36 ◼   ► We haven't even been talking about that.

00:37:37 ◼   ► We're mostly just talking about the back of the thing.

00:37:38 ◼   ► I don't see anything other than glass for the front of the thing until the whole thing

00:37:41 ◼   ► is a bendy piece of plastic and then you can't have it be glass at all because the whole

00:37:45 ◼   ► thing is like, you could roll it up or whatever and you can't make that out of glass and then

00:37:49 ◼   ► we just have to accept that it's plastic and they're so cheap that if you get it scratched

00:37:53 ◼   ► up you just go to the Apple store and they give you a new one for 50 bucks or something.

00:37:58 ◼   ► But we'll all be dead then, so don't worry about it.

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00:39:19 ◼   ► There's been a brouhaha.

00:39:21 ◼   ► There's been a kerfuffle.

00:39:23 ◼   ► There's been, I'm out of adjectives.

00:39:25 ◼   ► So there's been a thing.

00:39:27 ◼   ► And Apple and an independent developer are kind of sort of duking it out.

00:39:33 ◼   ► And that's not usually happy for anyone involved, and particularly for those watching from the

00:39:38 ◼   ► sidelines, because oftentimes this has pretty big implications on your own business.

00:39:46 ◼   ► So I'm trying to think, there's so many angles to this story, and I'm trying to figure out

00:39:52 ◼   ► the best way to summarize.

00:39:53 ◼   ► and we'll put links in the show notes to MJ Sai's summary post.

00:39:57 ◼   ► There's two of them and they're really good, Michael Sai's.

00:40:02 ◼   ► But the super, super quick version, and then we'll add details in a moment, is that this

00:40:08 ◼   ► gentleman, Bogdan, and I don't have his last name in front of me, but anyway.

00:40:13 ◼   ► But Pescu.

00:40:14 ◼   ► He had released many apps, maybe, but certainly, undisputedly, was the author of an app called

00:40:19 ◼   ► Dash, which I actually haven't used, which is probably criminal because from everything

00:40:23 ◼   ► missing out. From everything I've ever heard, it is phenomenal. And I don't say that sarcastically.

00:40:28 ◼   ► What do you use? The built-in Xcode documentation like an animal?

00:40:30 ◼   ► No, Safari usually, because I don't trust the built-in stuff search abilities. But anyway,

00:40:35 ◼   ► I, again... Good socks.

00:40:37 ◼   ► Well, yeah. So I will be the first to admit I am missing out on this. And again, I am

00:40:42 ◼   ► not trying to be sarcastic. Genuinely, from everything I've ever heard from anyone who

00:40:46 ◼   ► has ever touched Dash, it is phenomenal. Well, all of a sudden, his developer account got

00:40:51 ◼   ► shut down, maybe. That's a little bit up for debate. But all of a sudden gets shut down,

00:40:56 ◼   ► he kind of tries to talk to Apple, doesn't really get a lot of information out of them,

00:41:00 ◼   ► eventually starts posting about it, so now people, other independent developers like

00:41:05 ◼   ► Marco for example, are starting to say, "Hey, this doesn't feel right, what's going on here?"

00:41:10 ◼   ► Eventually he gets in contact with Apple, things seem to be making forward progress,

00:41:15 ◼   ► then Apple goes to the press and says, "Well, he's getting booted from the App Store because

00:41:20 ◼   ► he's done some really nefarious stuff. Meanwhile, Bogdan is thinking, "Well, I thought we were

00:41:27 ◼   ► still in the midst of a dialogue. What's going on here?" So then he escalates and writes

00:41:32 ◼   ► his own post. Again, links will be in the show notes. He writes his own post that includes,

00:41:36 ◼   ► among other things, a roughly 10-minute phone call, recording of a 10-minute phone call

00:41:40 ◼   ► between him and an Apple representative, which I'm not sure that was the most morally sound

00:41:48 ◼   ► choice but I can understand why I did it. And then since all this has happened, the

00:41:54 ◼   ► armchair archaeologists have been digging into what's going on and whether or not things

00:42:02 ◼   ► are awry. Because it seems to be that the disconnect is, there were two accounts that

00:42:08 ◼   ► were linked in some way, shape, or form. The method of that link and how tenuous that link

00:42:15 ◼   ► was is up for debate, but it seems clear that there is absolutely a link between two different

00:42:20 ◼   ► developer accounts.

00:42:22 ◼   ► And one of the accounts, it seems like everyone involved isn't debating that it was involved

00:42:29 ◼   ► in some kind of shady practices.

00:42:31 ◼   ► Trying to buy good reviews for their own apps, trying to put bad reviews for competitors'

00:42:36 ◼   ► apps, and just generally being shady.

00:42:40 ◼   ► Now Bogdan's perspective is, "Hey, I opened that account for a relative of mine.

00:42:44 ◼   ► I did it using my credit card because in other countries having a credit card isn't necessarily a given, like it sort of is in America.

00:42:52 ◼   ► And after that I walked away. They're the ones that are doing all this nefarious terrible things.

00:42:58 ◼   ► I'm not. I'm just collateral damage here and that's not fair.

00:43:02 ◼   ► So there was some back and forth, like I said, between Apple and he...

00:43:06 ◼   ► Apple apparently wanted him to write a blog post saying basically,

00:43:11 ◼   ► "Hey, Apple just got confused, but we've straightened it out. It's all good now."

00:43:18 ◼   ► And then he allegedly would have been allowed to get back in the App Store.

00:43:22 ◼   ► This is before he escalated with the phone call, and I believe before Apple escalated by going to the press.

00:43:28 ◼   ► So, there's a lot of other avenues here. The armchair archaeologist seemed to have found a lot of different ways that point to all the shady apps actually having been him as well, and not some other relative.

00:43:40 ◼   ► and we can go into that if need be.

00:43:43 ◼   ► But this is one of those situations where

00:43:46 ◼   ► everyone seems wrong, everyone seems right,

00:43:48 ◼   ► and nobody's clear what the real story is,

00:43:51 ◼   ► which makes it very interesting.

00:43:53 ◼   ► And many people have joked that maybe

00:43:55 ◼   ► Serial Season 3 will be about this.

00:43:57 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:43:58 ◼   ► But it's hard to make heads or tails of it.

00:44:02 ◼   ► And I'm not sure if I had to choose sides, who I side with.

00:44:07 ◼   ► And I think the reality of the situation is

00:44:10 ◼   ► I kind of side with both and side with neither all at once, which I know is kind of a cop-out,

00:44:14 ◼   ► but that's really how I feel. So let's start by asking, before we get into our opinions

00:44:19 ◼   ► about this, is that a relatively okay summary? Did I miss any really important points?

00:44:25 ◼   ► I think you got it. I mean, I think your characterization of what Apple wanted him to do in that blog

00:44:29 ◼   ► post is not quite there, but close enough.

00:44:32 ◼   ► All right, Jon, any other thoughts?

00:44:34 ◼   ► I was going to say, some of the—it's not clear—we have the rough timeline of events

00:44:43 ◼   ► from the outside, but because Apple is so tight-lipped about everything, I still feel

00:44:50 ◼   ► like we don't really have their side of the story, and they're never going to give it

00:44:53 ◼   ► to us, right?

00:44:54 ◼   ► So it's kind of like we have the black hole that is Apple, and then we have a leak of

00:44:59 ◼   ► their private communications with this recording, and then we have the discussion from the developer.

00:45:04 ◼   ► Apple's not going to, for instance, like you characterized,

00:45:07 ◼   ► where I was like, "Oh, then Apple went to the press

00:45:08 ◼   ► with this thing that said this thing."

00:45:10 ◼   ► Like, we have no idea if that statement was written

00:45:15 ◼   ► and distributed through the bureaucracy

00:45:17 ◼   ► before that call even took place.

00:45:18 ◼   ► And Apple's not going to clarify.

00:45:19 ◼   ► They're not gonna go, "Oh, by the way,

00:45:20 ◼   ► you may think you've heard this, but really, actually,

00:45:22 ◼   ► they're not gonna tell us."

00:45:24 ◼   ► It's like none of our business,

00:45:25 ◼   ► what goes on inside their company.

00:45:26 ◼   ► And also, I feel like the communication,

00:45:29 ◼   ► their public communication to all the different sites,

00:45:33 ◼   ► if you look at it, my recollection is that it basically,

00:45:36 ◼   ► it doesn't tell you the details to let you know

00:45:38 ◼   ► all the nuances that the developer's blog post went into,

00:45:43 ◼   ► but it also doesn't say anything that is false

00:45:46 ◼   ► from the perspective of Apple with their terminology,

00:45:49 ◼   ► which I'm sure we'll get into later.

00:45:50 ◼   ► Like from Apple's perspective, this is their rule system,

00:45:53 ◼   ► these are the set of rules,

00:45:54 ◼   ► they matched on this particular set of behavior,

00:45:56 ◼   ► they took this action, and that's what they're distributing.

00:46:00 ◼   ► And Apple was basically putting that out

00:46:02 ◼   ► in response to the original kerfuffle about, "Oh no, a developer is getting squished again."

00:46:07 ◼   ► And so I would say that it's difficult to know Apple's side of the story. We can get the

00:46:13 ◼   ► developer's side because the developer not only is free to say whatever he wants to the public,

00:46:18 ◼   ► but seems very willing to say and do whatever he feels like the public, which is fine, but

00:46:23 ◼   ► Apple is totally unwilling to do that. So I still feel like we are all at a disadvantage on the

00:46:27 ◼   ► outside in terms of knowing what the real deal is. Yeah.

00:46:31 ◼   ► I mean, I think trying to figure out all the details

00:46:34 ◼   ► of what happened is not productive for any of us,

00:46:38 ◼   ► possibly even them, because we weren't there,

00:46:41 ◼   ► these are private communications for the most part,

00:46:44 ◼   ► we have seen very little of them.

00:46:45 ◼   ► We don't really know this developer well,

00:46:49 ◼   ► we use his app, but none of us know him

00:46:52 ◼   ► to know for sure how complete he's probably being,

00:46:55 ◼   ► who knows?

00:46:56 ◼   ► And we also don't know if Apple's being complete

00:46:59 ◼   ► and truthful in their statements.

00:47:00 ◼   ► we have no way to evaluate these really.

00:47:03 ◼   ► So all we can really do is try to judge this,

00:47:06 ◼   ► or first we can just ignore it, which is one valid option.

00:47:10 ◼   ► I think the community's initial reaction of,

00:47:15 ◼   ► hey, this looks like a mistake, 'cause this app,

00:47:17 ◼   ► before we knew about the second account

00:47:19 ◼   ► with all the other crazy apps,

00:47:20 ◼   ► we're like, this app is really good

00:47:22 ◼   ► and has lots of legitimate five-star reviews.

00:47:25 ◼   ► What need would this person have to buy fake reviews

00:47:29 ◼   ► or to get suspended?

00:47:30 ◼   ► It seemed ridiculous, and so we were all yelling last week on Twitter, "Hey, this doesn't

00:47:34 ◼   ► look right.

00:47:35 ◼   ► Can somebody at Apple look into this again or explain this?"

00:47:38 ◼   ► That was the main gist of everyone's demands last week when this blew up.

00:47:41 ◼   ► Well, the reason anyone was talking about it all is because he made an initial blog

00:47:45 ◼   ► post that said, "You might be wondering what happened to the Dash.

00:47:48 ◼   ► Here's the deal.

00:47:49 ◼   ► I'm not sure what's going on, but they said my account is pulled and I can't appeal the

00:47:52 ◼   ► process."

00:47:53 ◼   ► So that's why we knew about it all, because he went to the public and said to explain

00:47:58 ◼   ► why his apps are suddenly not available, right? Because people use his app and it's popular.

00:48:03 ◼   ► And that's the main thing I think we can take away from this entire thing is how the Apple

00:48:09 ◼   ► developer community reacts to it. Because this reaction doesn't happen in a vacuum,

00:48:15 ◼   ► it's in the context of all the past history. So when we all collectively saw this story

00:48:20 ◼   ► from a developer, and the reason we saw it is because we all are in travel and developer

00:48:24 ◼   ► circles online and read developer blogs and, you know, anyway. When we saw that, because

00:48:29 ◼   ► of the past history of App Store rule enforcement and policies that, you know, that don't seem

00:48:38 ◼   ► right to developers, or, you know, the history of conflict, the history of arbitrary decisions

00:48:44 ◼   ► that don't make any sense or that are punitive to developers in ways they shouldn't be or,

00:48:49 ◼   ► honest mistakes or whatever, that context is why we had this reaction. Because it's not this,

00:48:55 ◼   ► this event is not a thing. This event just highlights, "Hey, how does the Apple developer

00:49:00 ◼   ► community feel about Apple and the App Store at this moment in time? Are they inherently

00:49:03 ◼   ► suspicious? Do they give Apple the benefit of the doubt? Do they give developers?" And like,

00:49:08 ◼   ► it so clearly showed that the current context, despite positive changes, is that we will all

00:49:15 ◼   ► readily believe that the giant faceless bureaucracy that is the Apple App Store can and does do

00:49:24 ◼   ► things that are best case mistakes or worst case, just wrongheaded decisions.

00:49:30 ◼   ► So that I feel like was part of it, Margaret, you're right, is that this is a good app and

00:49:35 ◼   ► we kind of do virtue transfer, application good, therefore developer good, which is not

00:49:40 ◼   ► a valid transfer.

00:49:41 ◼   ► but you're like, it just didn't seem like

00:49:44 ◼   ► if you've got a quality app that people like

00:49:46 ◼   ► that you're known for, what reasons do you have

00:49:49 ◼   ► to cheat on reviews or anything like that,

00:49:50 ◼   ► even before we knew that.

00:49:51 ◼   ► But it just seemed like, all right,

00:49:52 ◼   ► and but I really think the most important thing

00:49:55 ◼   ► is that Apple's takeaway from this is that

00:49:57 ◼   ► people, developers still don't trust

00:50:01 ◼   ► that we are going to do the right thing

00:50:04 ◼   ► and that when they see anything that even looks like

00:50:06 ◼   ► one of those past situations where we've been in the wrong

00:50:08 ◼   ► or done something that was not productive,

00:50:11 ◼   ► they will immediately believe it.

00:50:12 ◼   ► So that, you know, they'll know they have made progress

00:50:15 ◼   ► when a similar event happens and the reaction

00:50:19 ◼   ► from the developer community is not immediate suspicion

00:50:21 ◼   ► that Apple has screwed a small developer again.

00:50:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think, you know, to Apple's credit though,

00:50:28 ◼   ► this ability to totally terminate somebody's developer

00:50:32 ◼   ► account is probably used every day for lots of different

00:50:37 ◼   ► fraudulent accounts that are trying, that are, you know,

00:50:39 ◼   ► or conducting fraud or spam or scams or something like that,

00:50:43 ◼   ► they probably terminate developer accounts every day.

00:50:46 ◼   ► And I can't think, I mean, maybe I'm wrong,

00:50:48 ◼   ► please let me know if I'm wrong,

00:50:50 ◼   ► I can't remember a single previous instance

00:50:52 ◼   ► in the eight years of the App Store

00:50:54 ◼   ► where it seemed like someone's developer account

00:50:56 ◼   ► was terminated wrongly.

00:50:57 ◼   ► Has that ever happened that we learned about?

00:51:00 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, the equivalent is like

00:51:02 ◼   ► we're rejecting your update even though

00:51:04 ◼   ► you've got a crash or for some annoying reason.

00:51:05 ◼   ► Yeah, they didn't terminate your developer account,

00:51:07 ◼   ► But effectively, it's the same thing in terms of--

00:51:10 ◼   ► No, I mean, this is more severe.

00:51:12 ◼   ► This is much more severe.

00:51:13 ◼   ► It is.

00:51:14 ◼   ► But see, the reason I think you don't

00:51:16 ◼   ► see people complaining about termination

00:51:17 ◼   ► is because I think you're right.

00:51:19 ◼   ► The termination happens all the time.

00:51:20 ◼   ► But it happens to known bad actors.

00:51:22 ◼   ► And it's part of the cost of doing business

00:51:24 ◼   ► to known bad actors.

00:51:24 ◼   ► Bad actors get their accounts terminated all the time.

00:51:26 ◼   ► They just open a new one.

00:51:27 ◼   ► That's their business, is open up a new account,

00:51:30 ◼   ► do something against the rules for as long as you can.

00:51:32 ◼   ► When your account gets closed, open up another one.

00:51:35 ◼   ► That's their entire MO.

00:51:37 ◼   ► That's the life cycle of the fraudster on the App Store.

00:51:41 ◼   ► And so of course, they're not going to complain about it.

00:51:42 ◼   ► Why would they?

00:51:43 ◼   ► That's just how the system works from their perspective.

00:51:46 ◼   ► So I think this is just-- the legitimate developers have

00:51:51 ◼   ► the review problems or whatever, and they'll get it shut down.

00:51:54 ◼   ► This looks like a crossover of those two worlds.

00:51:56 ◼   ► The world over there, where no one ever complains,

00:51:58 ◼   ► but everyone knows, yeah, you're going

00:51:59 ◼   ► to get shut down in a week or two,

00:52:00 ◼   ► but sometimes they're slow about it.

00:52:01 ◼   ► You can make a lot of money in the meantime.

00:52:03 ◼   ► And then this world over here where it's like,

00:52:06 ◼   ► historically sometimes Apple will reject

00:52:07 ◼   ► your legitimate application and be frustrating or whatever,

00:52:09 ◼   ► but eventually you'll get through it.

00:52:11 ◼   ► Except for the people who are like,

00:52:13 ◼   ► apps of this type are no longer allowed, period,

00:52:15 ◼   ► and they just have to stop development.

00:52:16 ◼   ► That's also very similar in terms of like,

00:52:18 ◼   ► oh, we don't want you to make launcher apps

00:52:20 ◼   ► for a couple of years,

00:52:21 ◼   ► but I don't know, that's a good example.

00:52:22 ◼   ► But where Apple categorically decides

00:52:24 ◼   ► that this type of application isn't allowed anymore,

00:52:26 ◼   ► even though we had previously allowed it.

00:52:28 ◼   ► But this is like crossing over of,

00:52:31 ◼   ► and it's not that much of a crossover

00:52:32 ◼   ► because there is, like you said, everyone agrees there's some kind of fraudulent activity

00:52:36 ◼   ► on an account somewhere.

00:52:37 ◼   ► The argument is whether that fraudulent activity should mean that this other account gets closed,

00:52:42 ◼   ► right?

00:52:43 ◼   ► So this is the meeting of those worlds.

00:52:45 ◼   ► The only question is, is that meeting, you know, is it legitimate to do collective punishment

00:52:51 ◼   ► because the accounts use the same test devices and the same credit card number, which from

00:52:55 ◼   ► Apple's perspective is the only way they have to tell.

00:52:57 ◼   ► They can't see what's on the other side of the computer, right?

00:52:59 ◼   ► So all they have is data and their data says,

00:53:02 ◼   ► same test devices, same credit card number,

00:53:04 ◼   ► same legal entity.

00:53:05 ◼   ► And from a legal perspective,

00:53:09 ◼   ► not from a practical human perspective,

00:53:10 ◼   ► but from a legal perspective,

00:53:12 ◼   ► that's how the Apple ID system works.

00:53:14 ◼   ► That's how developer thing works.

00:53:16 ◼   ► They want information about you to connect to it,

00:53:19 ◼   ► essentially to connect to an entity that they can sue

00:53:21 ◼   ► or that is legally representing.

00:53:23 ◼   ► And so if you use all the same information

00:53:28 ◼   ► used to establish what the entity is for multiple accounts, it's all the same entity. That's the

00:53:32 ◼   ► whole point of you doing this. If Marco has multiple, don't you have multiple things for

00:53:37 ◼   ► your various... But that's... If they were all separate or combined, that's how things work in

00:53:46 ◼   ► the business world. We don't care what physical person is sitting in front of the thing. They just

00:53:49 ◼   ► care what the legal entity is and where the liability lies. Now, the more human side of it is,

00:53:55 ◼   ► What if you do live in a country where it's not easy to get credit cards and you do a favor for

00:53:59 ◼   ► somebody and you are not a lawyer and not thinking about the fact that now you essentially are

00:54:03 ◼   ► legally vouching for the activities of this other account, right? I think Apple would be entirely in

00:54:08 ◼   ► the right and probably totally in their legalese somewhere that says, "Hey, if you use all the same

00:54:13 ◼   ► legal and contact information from multiple accounts, you are legally responsible."

00:54:17 ◼   ► You've essentially absorbed the liability for this other person. It's as if you started a company

00:54:24 ◼   ► And then, you know, your friend came in and wrote all the code, but then you published it as the

00:54:29 ◼   ► legal entity. You're legally responsible, not your friend. It's like, "Oh, I didn't write all the

00:54:32 ◼   ► code. He did it." It's like, doesn't matter. That's not how the law works, right? For the most part,

00:54:36 ◼   ► I'm not a lawyer. And so, in this situation, Apple probably could have just said, "These are the

00:54:43 ◼   ► rules. This is the data. It is irrefutable. You don't argue it. You know, we all agree on the

00:54:49 ◼   ► facts here. And so, therefore, your account is closed." But that's not what Apple did. What Apple

00:54:54 ◼   ► Apple did instead is tried to communicate with this developer to work things out.

00:54:59 ◼   ► Because there, and here's the next question.

00:55:01 ◼   ► All right, so did Apple work with the developer to try to work things out?

00:55:05 ◼   ► Does, do all of us here in the peanut gallery and the Apple developer community,

00:55:09 ◼   ► do we immediately suspect that the only reason they were working it out is

00:55:12 ◼   ► because this person made a blog post?

00:55:15 ◼   ► >> Well, no, this happened beforehand.

00:55:16 ◼   ► So, so here, well, here's, here's what happened.

00:55:18 ◼   ► And this is, I, I think if I can look at this whole situation, if I can point to,

00:55:22 ◼   ► to two things that I would say were like bad moves.

00:55:26 ◼   ► I think one was Apple's bad move

00:55:28 ◼   ► and one was the developer's bad move.

00:55:30 ◼   ► Apple's bad move was when they first started detecting

00:55:33 ◼   ► all of this fraud on the other account,

00:55:36 ◼   ► they did consider the fraud account

00:55:39 ◼   ► and the Dash account to be logically linked

00:55:41 ◼   ► because they both were made by the same credit card

00:55:43 ◼   ► and they both used some of the same test devices.

00:55:46 ◼   ► So they considered that enough of a correlation

00:55:48 ◼   ► to consider them logically linked.

00:55:50 ◼   ► And I think that alone right there,

00:55:53 ◼   ► considering an account logically linked

00:55:54 ◼   ► for the purpose of fraud detection

00:55:56 ◼   ► based on the same credit card being used

00:55:57 ◼   ► and the same device that's being used,

00:55:59 ◼   ► I think that's a reasonable assumption.

00:56:00 ◼   ► And I think Apple was totally fine to do that.

00:56:02 ◼   ► The error that Apple made that I would say

00:56:05 ◼   ► was probably the one big mistake that is Apple's fault

00:56:09 ◼   ► in the way this was handled

00:56:11 ◼   ► is that when Apple detected the fraud on the other account,

00:56:15 ◼   ► they only contacted that account's email address

00:56:20 ◼   ► to talk about and try to fix the fraud issue.

00:56:23 ◼   ► And so when they were issuing the warnings, basically,

00:56:25 ◼   ► they only contacted the fraud one,

00:56:28 ◼   ► not the other one that was logically linked to it.

00:56:30 ◼   ► - But why do you think that's a mistake?

00:56:32 ◼   ► You think it's a mistake because it seems unfair

00:56:34 ◼   ► or whatever, but I think from, you know,

00:56:37 ◼   ► policy-wise, I think it is a reasonable policy to have

00:56:40 ◼   ► that, you know, the, like, who's responsible

00:56:45 ◼   ► for the actions of the account?

00:56:46 ◼   ► Well, the responsibility of the actions of the account

00:56:48 ◼   ► ties back to whatever legal entity,

00:56:50 ◼   ► you know, as we define it as the information you enter

00:56:52 ◼   ► when you make your Apple ID, right?

00:56:54 ◼   ► If that's their policy,

00:56:56 ◼   ► and then they see fraudulent activity,

00:56:59 ◼   ► and then they also have a policy that says

00:57:00 ◼   ► if there's fraudulent activity,

00:57:02 ◼   ► all of the accounts that are tied

00:57:04 ◼   ► to that same legal entity get shut down,

00:57:06 ◼   ► I don't see anywhere where there's any specific need

00:57:09 ◼   ► to carefully communicate with each one of them

00:57:11 ◼   ► to give each one of the connected legal entities

00:57:14 ◼   ► a chance to explain or something.

00:57:15 ◼   ► That is a nice thing to do,

00:57:17 ◼   ► and we all think they should do it in this case,

00:57:19 ◼   ► but policy-wise, like, you know,

00:57:23 ◼   ► as many people pointed out,

00:57:24 ◼   ► if you get shut down by like PayPal or eBay

00:57:26 ◼   ► or anything like that,

00:57:28 ◼   ► like no one's gonna give you a nice phone call

00:57:29 ◼   ► and ask you to like explain yourself to them or whatever

00:57:32 ◼   ► to make sure everyone gets a separate communication

00:57:34 ◼   ► in case they're separate people.

00:57:35 ◼   ► And so like, it's asking Apple to foresee the situation

00:57:40 ◼   ► as described by the developer

00:57:41 ◼   ► that actually it was two different people

00:57:43 ◼   ► and we were just sharing a credit card

00:57:44 ◼   ► and I had no idea what was going on in this account

00:57:45 ◼   ► for years and so on and so forth, whatever.

00:57:47 ◼   ► But I think it is a reasonable policy for a business to say,

00:57:50 ◼   ► this is just how the rules work.

00:57:52 ◼   ► If you don't like it, you, developer,

00:57:54 ◼   ► have made a mistake by legally vouching for someone,

00:57:58 ◼   ► and you have no idea what they're doing.

00:57:59 ◼   ► They're committing fraud over years.

00:58:00 ◼   ► You have no idea about it.

00:58:01 ◼   ► That's your bad.

00:58:02 ◼   ► That's not our bad.

00:58:03 ◼   ► We can just shut them all down, right?

00:58:04 ◼   ► Now, I was getting back to what we thought about this

00:58:07 ◼   ► when we heard about it is like,

00:58:09 ◼   ► why is someone on the phone,

00:58:11 ◼   ► because we heard the phone call that he put up on,

00:58:13 ◼   ► why is someone on the phone

00:58:14 ◼   ► trying to work it out with this person?

00:58:15 ◼   ► Is it because, it's mostly because, you know,

00:58:18 ◼   ► like do we think it's because this is a popular developer

00:58:22 ◼   ► and it's a developer who's popular with other developers

00:58:24 ◼   ► because they make a developer tool, right?

00:58:26 ◼   ► Is that why someone from Apple is bending over backwards

00:58:30 ◼   ► because you know, what makes this one different

00:58:33 ◼   ► versus if this had just been one of those, you know,

00:58:37 ◼   ► fraud developers who got their account closed or whatever.

00:58:39 ◼   ► You think Apple in all those cases for fraud

00:58:41 ◼   ► is on the phone with each one of them saying,

00:58:42 ◼   ► "Oh, let me hear what you say about it.

00:58:44 ◼   ► Oh, we'll try to get you your account back.

00:58:45 ◼   ► I don't think that's happening.

00:58:47 ◼   ► And the reason we think that is part of the anger

00:58:49 ◼   ► of like the old app review guidelines that were like,

00:58:51 ◼   ► never run to the press, that doesn't help.

00:58:53 ◼   ► Remember that old one that I think they've removed

00:58:55 ◼   ► since we're moved from the guidelines.

00:58:57 ◼   ► That was Steve Jobs style snarky,

00:58:59 ◼   ► we don't like it when you bad math us

00:59:01 ◼   ► in public type of thing.

00:59:02 ◼   ► That's where the root of all of this is coming from.

00:59:05 ◼   ► And the root of this coming like when we see this,

00:59:06 ◼   ► at least me specifically, when I see this,

00:59:08 ◼   ► I think Apple is bending over backwards,

00:59:11 ◼   ► A, because they're trying to be nice,

00:59:13 ◼   ► but B, a little bit, because this person made a blog post

00:59:17 ◼   ► and presented their side of the story

00:59:19 ◼   ► and Apple feels like this is, you know,

00:59:22 ◼   ► they don't like looking bad.

00:59:23 ◼   ► They don't like looking like,

00:59:24 ◼   ► they don't wanna be the bad guy,

00:59:25 ◼   ► but in cases where they do something like close an account

00:59:28 ◼   ► and they just never hear anything about it

00:59:29 ◼   ► and nobody blogs, Apple, you know, feels okay about it.

00:59:32 ◼   ► It's like, I guess we weren't the bad guy.

00:59:33 ◼   ► So like the removing of don't run to the press

00:59:36 ◼   ► is removed partly because it recognizes that like,

00:59:38 ◼   ► that's the only way Apple has to tell

00:59:40 ◼   ► whether something they've done might've been inadvertently

00:59:45 ◼   ► meaner than they would want to be, right?

00:59:48 ◼   ► The only way they can tell is if there's public outcry,

00:59:51 ◼   ► 'cause they don't know every single developer or whatever.

00:59:53 ◼   ► Like you can't ask the entire infrastructure at Apple

00:59:57 ◼   ► to know every single app and to know what Dash is

01:00:00 ◼   ► and how popular it is and that this is a good person.

01:00:02 ◼   ► I can't do that for every, it's too much, right?

01:00:04 ◼   ► And so I think this signal, the public outcry

01:00:08 ◼   ► and complaining on Twitter and other developers

01:00:10 ◼   ► looking at it askance and thinking maybe it's something

01:00:12 ◼   ► weird here, is actually an important feature of the system

01:00:15 ◼   ► as it currently exists, quote unquote, working.

01:00:18 ◼   ► And I'm glad that guideline was removed by saying

01:00:20 ◼   ► don't run to the press because I think it's an essential

01:00:21 ◼   ► part of the process at this point.

01:00:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, unfortunately it is.

01:00:25 ◼   ► But anyway, so back to what happened here.

01:00:29 ◼   ► I honestly don't wanna spend a whole lot of time on this

01:00:30 ◼   ► 'cause I think it's not very productive.

01:00:32 ◼   ► So I think if we can summarize basically,

01:00:36 ◼   ► I think Apple, I disagree with you on them

01:00:40 ◼   ► and notifying multiple accounts.

01:00:42 ◼   ► I think if they're going to shut down an account

01:00:44 ◼   ► which is a severe action, they should notify it beforehand.

01:00:47 ◼   ► And so after the termination and the first round

01:00:51 ◼   ► of blog posts, somebody from Apple called the developer

01:00:55 ◼   ► and the developer recorded this,

01:00:56 ◼   ► which in California is illegal.

01:00:58 ◼   ► The developer's in Romania where it's legal.

01:01:00 ◼   ► The gist of it was that the Apple guy was trying

01:01:04 ◼   ► very hard to work this out.

01:01:05 ◼   ► You can tell that they wanted to work this out.

01:01:07 ◼   ► Apple wanted to make sure that the correct story,

01:01:11 ◼   ► in their opinion, was told.

01:01:13 ◼   ► So they suggested maybe he could write a blog post.

01:01:16 ◼   ► And they basically wanted two key facts

01:01:20 ◼   ► to be in the blog post.

01:01:21 ◼   ► These accounts were linked,

01:01:22 ◼   ► so Apple was not mistaken to suspend it.

01:01:25 ◼   ► There was fraud in the linked account,

01:01:26 ◼   ► and he was working with Apple to unlink the accounts

01:01:30 ◼   ► and get back on the App Store.

01:01:32 ◼   ► And they went over this back and forth a few times,

01:01:33 ◼   ► and it sounded like the developer was not very happy

01:01:37 ◼   ► about the phrasing of this,

01:01:39 ◼   ► about the part that Apple didn't make a mistake.

01:01:41 ◼   ► And then he says he submitted this draft post,

01:01:44 ◼   ► which he later posted on his website,

01:01:45 ◼   ► he said he submitted that to them.

01:01:47 ◼   ► You could tell on the call though,

01:01:48 ◼   ► that again, there was definitely friction.

01:01:51 ◼   ► He definitely did not seem happy

01:01:53 ◼   ► about what he was being asked to agree to.

01:01:57 ◼   ► And then a few days later, Apple tells the press,

01:02:00 ◼   ► this was indeed justified,

01:02:02 ◼   ► there was lots of fraud on this account,

01:02:03 ◼   ► we tried to work it out with the developer,

01:02:05 ◼   ► but couldn't reach a resolution.

01:02:06 ◼   ► and that's it.

01:02:08 ◼   ► And so I think if you can, if you kind of try to like

01:02:12 ◼   ► connect the dots between those two things,

01:02:14 ◼   ► it seems like he and Apple couldn't agree

01:02:17 ◼   ► on what he was going to, how he was going to present

01:02:20 ◼   ► these facts of the case or how he was going to word things.

01:02:23 ◼   ► It seems like Apple most likely got whatever he submitted

01:02:27 ◼   ► to them, decided this was not going to be resolvable

01:02:31 ◼   ► or was not, basically decided negotiations were over

01:02:34 ◼   ► and this was not going to work out.

01:02:36 ◼   ► and then the statement to the press is basically

01:02:37 ◼   ► them shutting the door.

01:02:39 ◼   ► You know, we're only hearing part of a phone call.

01:02:41 ◼   ► We're not hearing what was before or after

01:02:43 ◼   ► this part of the call.

01:02:44 ◼   ► We're not part of, we don't know any of the communication

01:02:46 ◼   ► that happened separately from this call.

01:02:48 ◼   ► So things could have been more tense and hostile

01:02:51 ◼   ► than what's shown here, and what's shown there

01:02:53 ◼   ► is slightly tense and hostile from the developer.

01:02:56 ◼   ► So I don't know if Apple was in the right or wrong

01:03:01 ◼   ► to close the door on this when they did,

01:03:04 ◼   ► but that certainly seemed like that is what happened.

01:03:07 ◼   ► And based on the two conflicting attitudes

01:03:10 ◼   ► in the phone call, I think that's very likely the case.

01:03:15 ◼   ► That they just decided this was not going to be resolved,

01:03:17 ◼   ► that they were not gonna reach agreement,

01:03:20 ◼   ► because from Apple's point of view,

01:03:23 ◼   ► they wanna make sure that they control the narrative here.

01:03:26 ◼   ► And it was very clear from that recorded call,

01:03:28 ◼   ► from the Apple rep on that call,

01:03:30 ◼   ► Apple wanted to make very sure that everyone knew

01:03:32 ◼   ► that they didn't just like slip up

01:03:34 ◼   ► and suspend an innocent account,

01:03:36 ◼   ► that there was fraud that was linked to this account.

01:03:40 ◼   ► And so they wanted to make very clear

01:03:43 ◼   ► that that was the story that got out,

01:03:44 ◼   ► that the facts were very clear, Apple did not just mess up,

01:03:48 ◼   ► because that would be really bad if they just messed up

01:03:51 ◼   ► and suspended an account that had no connection

01:03:53 ◼   ► to any problems whatsoever,

01:03:55 ◼   ► 'cause that is a very severe action.

01:03:56 ◼   ► And clearly, running the App Store in eight years,

01:03:59 ◼   ► and this is the first time we're hearing

01:04:00 ◼   ► of bad developer account suspension,

01:04:02 ◼   ► clearly they do a pretty good job

01:04:04 ◼   ► and they're pretty careful most of the time

01:04:06 ◼   ► when taking that action.

01:04:07 ◼   ► So they clearly wanted to make sure that fact was out there,

01:04:10 ◼   ► that there was indeed real fraud,

01:04:13 ◼   ► it was indeed linked to this account,

01:04:15 ◼   ► and that basically that they were gonna unlink the accounts

01:04:19 ◼   ► and let this developer move forward.

01:04:21 ◼   ► So I think they were actually being very reasonable there,

01:04:24 ◼   ► and through whatever reason,

01:04:26 ◼   ► whether it was communication or attitudes

01:04:28 ◼   ► or whatever it was, they couldn't work it out.

01:04:31 ◼   ► And that sucks.

01:04:32 ◼   ► And there was a good post today on,

01:04:35 ◼   ► that Rene Ritchie wrote, I think, on iMore,

01:04:37 ◼   ► that was basically like, how do we move forward from here?

01:04:40 ◼   ► And the gist of it was basically like,

01:04:43 ◼   ► look, we all know the facts now,

01:04:44 ◼   ► like let's just, like Apple should just reactivate,

01:04:47 ◼   ► hit the good account, just reactivate that account.

01:04:49 ◼   ► Like that's how we move forward,

01:04:50 ◼   ► is like everyone basically suck it up,

01:04:53 ◼   ► stop talking about it, and just reactivate the account,

01:04:54 ◼   ► because that's best for everybody.

01:04:55 ◼   ► 'Cause like the other side of this is like,

01:04:57 ◼   ► This is a great app and it's out of the store

01:05:00 ◼   ► for this reason that probably shouldn't have happened

01:05:03 ◼   ► or at least this app and this account

01:05:06 ◼   ► probably didn't deserve it,

01:05:07 ◼   ► assuming the developer's telling the truth

01:05:08 ◼   ► and this was some relative and not just him

01:05:10 ◼   ► with a different account.

01:05:12 ◼   ► And secondly, this really sucks for the customers

01:05:14 ◼   ► of this app because if you bought this app like I did

01:05:16 ◼   ► in the Mac App Store, you can't even redownload it.

01:05:19 ◼   ► Like when the developer account is suspended,

01:05:21 ◼   ► the app is gone.

01:05:22 ◼   ► It doesn't show up in your purchases tab,

01:05:24 ◼   ► it doesn't show up in searches, it is gone.

01:05:26 ◼   ► you can't redownload it.

01:05:28 ◼   ► And that sucks if you bought it.

01:05:30 ◼   ► So it does kinda suck the way things are left now,

01:05:34 ◼   ► even though I can look back at what Apple did,

01:05:37 ◼   ► and I think Apple was in the right based on just

01:05:41 ◼   ► the little bit that we can know

01:05:44 ◼   ► and the little bits and pieces that you can pick up.

01:05:47 ◼   ► I think Apple did pretty much the right thing

01:05:48 ◼   ► the whole way through here, with the exception of

01:05:50 ◼   ► not notifying all the accounts before termination,

01:05:52 ◼   ► but besides that, I think Apple was in the right,

01:05:54 ◼   ► and they seemed to handle it very well.

01:05:56 ◼   ► and they seemed to put in way more effort.

01:05:58 ◼   ► I mean, the guy on the phone was saying

01:06:00 ◼   ► that Phil Schiller was personally involved

01:06:02 ◼   ► in trying to get this solved, and I believe that.

01:06:04 ◼   ► Knowing the way these things work, I believe that.

01:06:07 ◼   ► And so the fact that you could have somebody

01:06:09 ◼   ► like Phil Schiller trying to get this fixed

01:06:11 ◼   ► and Apple devising this way that they can resolve this

01:06:13 ◼   ► and get back in the store and presenting it to the developer

01:06:16 ◼   ► that sounded very reasonable, it really did seem

01:06:19 ◼   ► like Apple was going above and beyond

01:06:21 ◼   ► to try to fix this, and they really didn't need to.

01:06:24 ◼   ► It's nice that they did, and I hope

01:06:26 ◼   ► that if I ever am on the wrong end of this,

01:06:27 ◼   ► I hope they do the same thing for me.

01:06:29 ◼   ► But it's really, really above and beyond.

01:06:31 ◼   ► They didn't have to do this.

01:06:32 ◼   ► They didn't have to give this guy away back in.

01:06:34 ◼   ► They didn't have to call him and offer this kind of,

01:06:37 ◼   ► you know, this kind of like olive branch,

01:06:39 ◼   ► and say, all right, look, if you can just agree

01:06:41 ◼   ► to these few statements, then you can get back in.

01:06:43 ◼   ► But they didn't need to do any of that,

01:06:44 ◼   ► and they did it all.

01:06:45 ◼   ► They really obviously wanted to solve this in a decent way.

01:06:49 ◼   ► And again, through whatever reason,

01:06:52 ◼   ► they could not reach agreement with the developer

01:06:55 ◼   ► on something that I think, honestly,

01:06:58 ◼   ► I think the developer made a huge mistake

01:06:59 ◼   ► in the way that he handled that,

01:07:00 ◼   ► and I think he should have just said

01:07:02 ◼   ► what they wanted him to say

01:07:03 ◼   ► because it wasn't bad or incorrect.

01:07:06 ◼   ► - So from outside of this, again, looking at like,

01:07:08 ◼   ► oh, when we all heard the story, what did we all think,

01:07:10 ◼   ► and what does that say about how we view Apple?

01:07:13 ◼   ► Now, sort of at the conclusion of this,

01:07:15 ◼   ► I think Apple kind of got a positive result here,

01:07:20 ◼   ► because in the beginning, we're all like,

01:07:24 ◼   ► oh, Apple's doing something bad in the App Store again.

01:07:26 ◼   ► And we've seen that story so many times

01:07:28 ◼   ► and we're immediately suspicious, right?

01:07:29 ◼   ► By the end of it, especially for any developer

01:07:32 ◼   ► who was paying enough attention to like read all the details

01:07:35 ◼   ► that we just discussed and read the blog post,

01:07:36 ◼   ► by the end of it, I think most legitimate developers

01:07:40 ◼   ► come away thinking, if this happens to me,

01:07:44 ◼   ► it seems like Apple will give me a legitimate chance.

01:07:48 ◼   ► Because first of all, I think most developers understand

01:07:53 ◼   ► that the developer made a mistake here.

01:07:57 ◼   ► Like not a mistake, but like that essentially

01:07:58 ◼   ► by tying himself legally to the other account,

01:08:02 ◼   ► he is essentially responsible for it, right?

01:08:05 ◼   ► And I'm hoping that most developers would understand that.

01:08:08 ◼   ► Like that if you use your credit card number

01:08:10 ◼   ► and your test device, maybe that's not obvious to anybody,

01:08:12 ◼   ► but after the story, I guess it is.

01:08:14 ◼   ► So maybe before the story you could say no,

01:08:15 ◼   ► but now understanding that like,

01:08:17 ◼   ► you know, you see that they were tied to that.

01:08:19 ◼   ► And yet, despite that, Apple made an effort

01:08:23 ◼   ► to try to make things right.

01:08:25 ◼   ► And I think that whole thing is comforting to developers

01:08:29 ◼   ► who feel like, you know, legitimate developers

01:08:31 ◼   ► who would never do anything wrong like that.

01:08:33 ◼   ► But they're like, if I find myself in this situation

01:08:36 ◼   ► where I have unintentionally gotten myself entangled

01:08:39 ◼   ► in the way that I did, either I didn't understand

01:08:41 ◼   ► or I trusted somebody that I should never trust,

01:08:42 ◼   ► which you know, this happens to everybody, right?

01:08:45 ◼   ► Will I just be SOL or will Apple be reasonable with me?

01:08:51 ◼   ► And with the exception of the fact that it's not clear

01:08:54 ◼   ► that Apple would have been engaged at all

01:08:56 ◼   ► if he hadn't quote unquote run to the press,

01:08:59 ◼   ► which really just means post on his own personal blog

01:09:01 ◼   ► and have a popular app.

01:09:02 ◼   ► Like with the exception of that,

01:09:04 ◼   ► what I still think is a concern,

01:09:05 ◼   ► like, hey, what about my obscure app?

01:09:06 ◼   ► Nobody loves my app like they love Dash.

01:09:08 ◼   ► When I post on my blog, nobody will even notice.

01:09:10 ◼   ► Maybe I would still be SOL, right?

01:09:12 ◼   ► But with the exception of that caveat,

01:09:14 ◼   ► I think Apple's actions are essentially reassuring

01:09:17 ◼   ► legitimate developers that Apple will try to be reasonable.

01:09:22 ◼   ► And what Marco said is like,

01:09:24 ◼   ► if the goal of this developer was to be able to continue

01:09:29 ◼   ► his business, his business of selling software

01:09:31 ◼   ► and his popular application, he made bad choices.

01:09:34 ◼   ► You can decide, do you wanna be right and be like righteous

01:09:39 ◼   ► and be like, I refuse to admit to even any kind

01:09:42 ◼   ► of wrongdoing or being linked or Apple's being on for,

01:09:44 ◼   ► or do you just want your account back?

01:09:46 ◼   ► Because they weren't asking him to say anything

01:09:47 ◼   ► that's not true, they weren't asking him to take blame

01:09:50 ◼   ► for anything that he doesn't have blame for,

01:09:51 ◼   ► they were 100% believing his story,

01:09:53 ◼   ► taking it at face value, saying, okay, great,

01:09:56 ◼   ► you gave an account to somebody else or whatever,

01:09:58 ◼   ► we're gonna get your account back.

01:10:00 ◼   ► All we want you to do is to make it clear,

01:10:02 ◼   ► like Margaret said, that the facts of the situation

01:10:05 ◼   ► were what they were, there was a reason for Apple

01:10:07 ◼   ► to do what it did, and that everyone involved,

01:10:09 ◼   ► like, not to make it seem like Apple made a terrible mistake

01:10:13 ◼   ► but we all worked it out, and then have Apple come out

01:10:15 ◼   ► of it, which I think is totally reasonable,

01:10:17 ◼   ► and he made bad choices if his goal

01:10:19 ◼   ► was to get his business back.

01:10:20 ◼   ► He could have gotten it back,

01:10:22 ◼   ► doing things that are reasonable, telling the truth.

01:10:25 ◼   ► They were allowing him to write whatever he wanted

01:10:27 ◼   ► as long as he hit those two key points,

01:10:29 ◼   ► which everybody involved in the conversation agreed on,

01:10:31 ◼   ► and he didn't do it.

01:10:32 ◼   ► Did he not do it because he was just too proud or stubborn

01:10:35 ◼   ► or thought he would end up coming out of it looking bad

01:10:39 ◼   ► or whatever, who knows?

01:10:40 ◼   ► But if his goal was to get his business back, he blew it.

01:10:43 ◼   ► But I still think outside of this,

01:10:46 ◼   ► that most developers, you know, Marco can answer

01:10:48 ◼   ► 'cause he's obviously the only one with an application

01:10:50 ◼   ► on the App Store of any significance

01:10:52 ◼   ► that's specifically tied to him and has long experience.

01:10:55 ◼   ► Do you feel reassured by the outcome of this

01:10:58 ◼   ► that Apple would be reasonable

01:11:00 ◼   ► if you found yourself in this situation?

01:11:02 ◼   ► Or is it neutral or do you feel worse

01:11:04 ◼   ► that you didn't realize this could happen

01:11:07 ◼   ► but now you think it could happen to you and you'd be screwed?

01:11:09 ◼   ► - No, I mean, I think you nailed it.

01:11:11 ◼   ► The reason Apple cared so much about this

01:11:14 ◼   ► was because they know how bad it would be

01:11:18 ◼   ► if it appeared that they were capriciously

01:11:21 ◼   ► suspending developer accounts for no reason.

01:11:23 ◼   ► That would be terrible for their reputation

01:11:26 ◼   ► among developers.

01:11:27 ◼   ► They knew how important it was to make sure

01:11:29 ◼   ► that the official story here, which was true,

01:11:32 ◼   ► was that Apple did not make a mistake

01:11:34 ◼   ► in detecting this fraud and suspending this account.

01:11:37 ◼   ► That was not a mistake on their part.

01:11:38 ◼   ► They did not mess up.

01:11:39 ◼   ► They were not being capricious.

01:11:41 ◼   ► They actually detected real fraud

01:11:43 ◼   ► and on a linked account that was really linked

01:11:45 ◼   ► in a way that is substantial,

01:11:48 ◼   ► and so they wanted that story to be true,

01:11:50 ◼   ► that this was not just them being wrong.

01:11:52 ◼   ► And again, the way they handled it,

01:11:54 ◼   ► as I said, I think they handled it very well,

01:11:57 ◼   ► better than they had to,

01:11:58 ◼   ► and so because of those two things,

01:12:00 ◼   ► yes, I feel good about this.

01:12:03 ◼   ► You can say, as a developer working on the App Store,

01:12:07 ◼   ► there's always a certain minimum level of App Store BS

01:12:10 ◼   ► that everyone has to put up with,

01:12:11 ◼   ► mostly around the reviews and the policies

01:12:13 ◼   ► and everything else, but it really,

01:12:16 ◼   ► in the grand scheme of things,

01:12:18 ◼   ► that BS tends to be most of the time

01:12:21 ◼   ► consistent and easy to work within for most developers.

01:12:26 ◼   ► And it's a known quantity.

01:12:28 ◼   ► It's not usually capricious or dangerous,

01:12:32 ◼   ► about to kill your business at any moment,

01:12:33 ◼   ► unless you're doing things really close

01:12:34 ◼   ► to the edges of the rules, which most people aren't

01:12:37 ◼   ► and don't need to.

01:12:39 ◼   ► For the most part, Apple as a gatekeeper does pretty well,

01:12:44 ◼   ► as gatekeepers go.

01:12:45 ◼   ► The whole concept of a gatekeeper to begin with

01:12:47 ◼   ► is problematic, sorry Merlin,

01:12:50 ◼   ► it is challenging to get that right,

01:12:53 ◼   ► and there's always going to be dysfunction and problems

01:12:55 ◼   ► by having any gatekeeper,

01:12:56 ◼   ► but if you're going to have a gatekeeper,

01:12:58 ◼   ► I think Apple does a pretty good job of it,

01:13:01 ◼   ► possibly even a very good job of it.

01:13:03 ◼   ► And as a developer on these platforms,

01:13:07 ◼   ► I am reassured by this story,

01:13:09 ◼   ► that Apple really does care to get things right

01:13:11 ◼   ► and to make sure that they're doing right

01:13:13 ◼   ► for the community as much as they can.

01:13:14 ◼   ► So I consider this a positive thing as a developer.

01:13:18 ◼   ► I consider it a bit of a pain in the butt

01:13:20 ◼   ► as a customer of Dash, but otherwise,

01:13:23 ◼   ► I consider it a positive thing as a developer.

01:13:25 ◼   ► - That's why you should never buy your Mac apps

01:13:27 ◼   ► in the Mac App Store.

01:13:28 ◼   ► Once again, we learned that lesson.

01:13:29 ◼   ► - Exactly. - If it's available

01:13:31 ◼   ► outside the Mac App Store,

01:13:32 ◼   ► buy it outside the Mac App Store, you'll just be happier.

01:13:34 ◼   ► Which is a problem for Apple.

01:13:35 ◼   ► It's ironic that this is exposing.

01:13:38 ◼   ► You know, like this is something they can fix.

01:13:40 ◼   ► Apple in turn is like, oh, when we suspend

01:13:41 ◼   ► a developer account, shouldn't we still allow

01:13:43 ◼   ► the L apps to be downloaded?

01:13:45 ◼   ► They can fix that internally.

01:13:46 ◼   ► That seems like something they, you know,

01:13:47 ◼   ► if they cared about the Mac App Store at all,

01:13:48 ◼   ► that they would fix.

01:13:50 ◼   ► But yeah, it's kind of sad that it's,

01:13:52 ◼   ► they're kind of highlighting the problems

01:13:54 ◼   ► with the Mac App Store by doing the right thing

01:13:56 ◼   ► and detecting fraud and canceling accounts.

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01:16:27 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:16:29 ◼   ► - So Marco, tell us about Dropbox.

01:16:33 ◼   ► - Mm. (laughs)

01:16:36 ◼   ► Here's the thing.

01:16:37 ◼   ► Dropbox is making questionable choices in recent times.

01:16:43 ◼   ► There was a thing a couple weeks back

01:16:46 ◼   ► where Dropbox was basically discovered

01:16:49 ◼   ► to be hacking the Mac accessibility apps database.

01:16:53 ◼   ► This is actually, I believe it's fixed in Sierra,

01:16:55 ◼   ► but basically, Mac OS X has a certain separate security level

01:17:00 ◼   ► for accessibility-related apps,

01:17:02 ◼   ► and this allows apps to see way more system events,

01:17:07 ◼   ► things like capturing keyboard input and stuff like that.

01:17:10 ◼   ► Basically, if you are an accessibility app,

01:17:11 ◼   ► you can basically see and intercept and track

01:17:15 ◼   ► everything happening on the system.

01:17:17 ◼   ► Things that are considered secure,

01:17:18 ◼   ► you can still, you have access to them,

01:17:21 ◼   ► whereas most apps would not be able to do things like

01:17:24 ◼   ► log every keystroke that's ever typed in,

01:17:26 ◼   ► things like that, right?

01:17:29 ◼   ► And so Dropbox, in order to achieve certain features

01:17:33 ◼   ► or something, Dropbox was forcefully injecting itself

01:17:37 ◼   ► into the list of apps, using a prompt to prompt you

01:17:42 ◼   ► for your password that looked like the system password box.

01:17:46 ◼   ► - No, no, it was the system password box.

01:17:48 ◼   ► That's why I put this thing in the show notes.

01:17:49 ◼   ► - Was it? - It was, yeah.

01:17:51 ◼   ► - Oh, okay.

01:17:52 ◼   ► - So like, I had this, before Marco started getting

01:17:56 ◼   ► cranky about Dropbox, I had an item in the notes

01:17:58 ◼   ► is actually still below there about Dropbox's accessibility

01:18:01 ◼   ► quote unquote hack.

01:18:02 ◼   ► Because the first stories about this were like,

01:18:05 ◼   ► so this is the observed behavior,

01:18:07 ◼   ► whichever one agrees is crappy.

01:18:08 ◼   ► The observed behavior is Dropbox,

01:18:11 ◼   ► it wants you to turn on accessibility,

01:18:14 ◼   ► but if you say no, it will, you know,

01:18:18 ◼   ► and take it out, the next time it comes up,

01:18:20 ◼   ► it will just try to put itself back.

01:18:22 ◼   ► Like if you go to the system preferences and remove it,

01:18:24 ◼   ► right, and then you just reboot, like it'll be back again.

01:18:26 ◼   ► And so that is user hostile behavior,

01:18:28 ◼   ► because the user disabled it, and then unbeknownst to them,

01:18:32 ◼   ► maybe you just launch it again and it puts itself back.

01:18:34 ◼   ► And so the question was among the people

01:18:36 ◼   ► who first saw this behavior,

01:18:37 ◼   ► who were probably not programmers

01:18:39 ◼   ► or particularly technical, was like,

01:18:42 ◼   ► it must be saving my admin password,

01:18:44 ◼   ► because I entered my admin password

01:18:46 ◼   ► to allow it to do this stuff,

01:18:47 ◼   ► but then when I went to system preferences and turned it off,

01:18:49 ◼   ► the only way they could be possibly

01:18:51 ◼   ► turning it back on automatically,

01:18:53 ◼   ► which is this user hostile behavior that they observed,

01:18:56 ◼   ► is that it must have saved my admin password,

01:18:58 ◼   ► which would indeed be horrible.

01:19:00 ◼   ► But anybody who knows anything about, you know,

01:19:03 ◼   ► Mac OS X or whatever the hell it's called now,

01:19:06 ◼   ► and Unix or whatever knows, like,

01:19:07 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:19:08 ◼   ► they would never save your password.

01:19:10 ◼   ► That is the stupidest possible way

01:19:12 ◼   ► to get the thing they want.

01:19:13 ◼   ► Because once you've entered your admin password,

01:19:16 ◼   ► they don't need your admin password anymore, right?

01:19:19 ◼   ► And so, yeah, so they don't save your admin password,

01:19:22 ◼   ► which would be, and you can't totally discount it,

01:19:24 ◼   ► because we all hear about these websites

01:19:25 ◼   ► saving people's passwords in plain text.

01:19:27 ◼   ► So never overestimate the security intelligence

01:19:31 ◼   ► of people writing code.

01:19:32 ◼   ► But Dropbox is a big company and it's really hard for me

01:19:34 ◼   ► to believe that they do something like that.

01:19:35 ◼   ► They don't.

01:19:36 ◼   ► - Honestly, I would have believed that.

01:19:39 ◼   ► By the time I read the story, it was already discovered

01:19:41 ◼   ► that they weren't actually saving their password,

01:19:42 ◼   ► but I would not rule out that they would try.

01:19:45 ◼   ► - Well, but they wouldn't though.

01:19:47 ◼   ► It's a matter of competence because Dropbox has a lot

01:19:49 ◼   ► of money and they have smart developers, right?

01:19:51 ◼   ► And the reason I think that--

01:19:51 ◼   ► - It's not a matter of competence.

01:19:53 ◼   ► It's a matter of respect.

01:19:55 ◼   ► No, no, no, it's a matter of competence

01:19:57 ◼   ► because to do the thing they want to do,

01:20:00 ◼   ► which we all agree is use a hostel,

01:20:01 ◼   ► they don't need your password more than once.

01:20:03 ◼   ► Once they enter it, like what they actually did

01:20:05 ◼   ► is they just make setuid executable.

01:20:07 ◼   ► Like everybody knows that.

01:20:08 ◼   ► Anyone who's done any Unix hacking,

01:20:09 ◼   ► like as soon as you've got root access,

01:20:10 ◼   ► the first thing you do is make setuid executables,

01:20:13 ◼   ► setuid shell so you can get back.

01:20:14 ◼   ► Like it's just like you've given them your main password.

01:20:18 ◼   ► They're like la-da-da, do-do-do,

01:20:20 ◼   ► check the setuid bit on these CHO,

01:20:23 ◼   ► now I have setuid root executables done and done.

01:20:26 ◼   ► They don't need your password anymore, right?

01:20:28 ◼   ► And so that is what they use.

01:20:32 ◼   ► And it doesn't matter,

01:20:33 ◼   ► every time you give an app an admin password,

01:20:34 ◼   ► you are essentially saying,

01:20:36 ◼   ► by giving you this admin password,

01:20:38 ◼   ► you now have free reign of the whole system.

01:20:39 ◼   ► Not just momentarily, but because once I give it to you,

01:20:42 ◼   ► you can immediately make a setuid executable as whatever.

01:20:45 ◼   ► And just like, it's all over.

01:20:47 ◼   ► And the system integrity protection protects against that

01:20:50 ◼   ► because it's like, oh, even with root access,

01:20:51 ◼   ► You can't modify these files or whatever.

01:20:53 ◼   ► But anyway, there's that.

01:20:56 ◼   ► So there was competence.

01:20:58 ◼   ► Like, the best way to do this user hostile behavior

01:21:01 ◼   ► is not to store their passwords.

01:21:02 ◼   ► You're like, they're smart.

01:21:02 ◼   ► They're not going to do that.

01:21:04 ◼   ► And they're going to do it the smarter way

01:21:06 ◼   ► to do this user hostile behavior, right?

01:21:08 ◼   ► The second aspect of the part that's the hack part is like,

01:21:11 ◼   ► once you have that access, it still

01:21:13 ◼   ► doesn't mean you have to go directly to the SQLite database

01:21:15 ◼   ► and start mucking with it.

01:21:16 ◼   ► Because that's like using private APIs.

01:21:18 ◼   ► It's like, Apple's like, you don't

01:21:19 ◼   ► know what the structure of our database is.

01:21:20 ◼   ► just because you look in there and see a bunch of tables

01:21:22 ◼   ► and columns and think you know how to hack it,

01:21:24 ◼   ► that's not a public API, that's not guaranteed.

01:21:27 ◼   ► It's the same reason they don't want you using private APIs.

01:21:29 ◼   ► You're not supposed to even be looking at that stuff.

01:21:31 ◼   ► We reserve the right to change that at any time.

01:21:33 ◼   ► So that is the quote unquote hack part of it

01:21:35 ◼   ► is that don't directly access our databases

01:21:38 ◼   ► behind the scenes, we provide APIs.

01:21:40 ◼   ► You have to use those.

01:21:41 ◼   ► You can't just go sneakily find what the underlying storage

01:21:44 ◼   ► is and directly mess with it.

01:21:45 ◼   ► So that is, I don't know why they were doing it that way.

01:21:48 ◼   ► Maybe it's the easiest way to secretly do it

01:21:50 ◼   ► behind the scenes, but it's terrible.

01:21:51 ◼   ► And they were signing themselves up for a maintenance headache

01:21:53 ◼   ► because it's like once you use a private API like that,

01:21:56 ◼   ► whether you know it or not, you're now on the hook

01:21:58 ◼   ► to track every little change Apple does to their internals

01:22:01 ◼   ► instead of just tracking their API diffs.

01:22:02 ◼   ► Because at any moment, in any point release,

01:22:05 ◼   ► they could totally change the structure of that database,

01:22:07 ◼   ► and your app will blow up, and it's totally your fault

01:22:09 ◼   ► because you've screwed things up.

01:22:10 ◼   ► So that, I would say, is the best example

01:22:13 ◼   ► of them doing something that's not a good developer practice.

01:22:16 ◼   ► But the initial story about them changing your password

01:22:19 ◼   ► was totally a misunderstanding of the fact that they don't need your passport. They

01:22:27 ◼   ► would never do that because it's dumb. They have everything they need and more.

01:22:31 ◼   ► Right. All right. So anyway, however they were doing it, Dropbox was really inappropriately

01:22:37 ◼   ► hacking the TCC database, the accessibility database, to inject themselves forcefully

01:22:43 ◼   ► even if you remove them.

01:22:44 ◼   ► So that to me is like offense number one for this is not good and they're eroding trust

01:22:53 ◼   ► that I have in them and the ability and the willingness I have to run their software on

01:22:57 ◼   ► my computer and give them access to literally everything on my computer.

01:23:01 ◼   ► And then…

01:23:02 ◼   ► Although before we move on from that, their defense of this as LinkedIn I think probably

01:23:06 ◼   ► have the hackers news link that the developer talks about.

01:23:09 ◼   ► Their defense is actually plausible as a—I mean, you can still say this is not socially

01:23:15 ◼   ► acceptable behavior, especially among tech-savvy users, but I can see where a company like

01:23:20 ◼   ► Dropbox can get into a situation where it thinks this is the right thing to do.

01:23:23 ◼   ► And it's basically that when you install an application, if they have these one-time

01:23:27 ◼   ► prompts that you answer "the wrong way."

01:23:30 ◼   ► You didn't understand what the hell it was, you just hit cancel or whatever, and now you

01:23:33 ◼   ► don't have some kind of finder integration that you expected from Dropbox, right?

01:23:38 ◼   ► It can be a legitimate support issue that enough people click the wrong box on that

01:23:42 ◼   ► one-time setup thing, and they're like, "DropBox doesn't work."

01:23:46 ◼   ► When I see it on my friend's computer, there's these little badges or these little whatever.

01:23:49 ◼   ► Whatever features accessibility is providing, it's not working.

01:23:52 ◼   ► DropBox is broken.

01:23:53 ◼   ► And I can imagine that being a popular support request, and that they have to walk people

01:23:57 ◼   ► through, "Oh, go to the thing, go to accessibility, click the little lock icon to basically re-enable

01:24:03 ◼   ► and then the sort of cutting the Gordian knot solution

01:24:07 ◼   ► becomes, you know what, users can't handle this.

01:24:10 ◼   ► It's too complicated, they don't understand

01:24:12 ◼   ► what we mean by accessibility,

01:24:13 ◼   ► they don't wanna type in their min password,

01:24:14 ◼   ► they're scared by it, why don't we just,

01:24:17 ◼   ► like if they ever enter their min password,

01:24:19 ◼   ► put a little insurance, but let's bury some set UID

01:24:21 ◼   ► root executables in our bundle.

01:24:23 ◼   ► And as soon as they enter a min password,

01:24:25 ◼   ► put them there, and you know what,

01:24:26 ◼   ► if it accidentally gets turned off by a point release

01:24:28 ◼   ► or an OS update or whatever,

01:24:30 ◼   ► so we won't hear from people saying,

01:24:32 ◼   ► "Hey, Dropbox is broken again.

01:24:34 ◼   ► Why don't we just turn it on?"

01:24:35 ◼   ► Like it's paternalistic.

01:24:36 ◼   ► It's like, they won't even know we do it.

01:24:38 ◼   ► We'll do it behind the scenes.

01:24:40 ◼   ► They won't see any UI.

01:24:41 ◼   ► It will cut down on our support requests.

01:24:43 ◼   ► That I think is the head space that they get into.

01:24:45 ◼   ► It's not particularly nefarious.

01:24:46 ◼   ► They're just trying to solve a support problem,

01:24:49 ◼   ► but they eventually, they wrap themselves up

01:24:51 ◼   ► in knots to where they think

01:24:52 ◼   ► they're actually doing people a favor by doing this.

01:24:55 ◼   ► Whereas we all realize you've gone too far

01:24:58 ◼   ► in the hopes of like, let's make it a smooth experience

01:25:01 ◼   ► most users at the expense of being sneaky. And it's the wrong thing to do, but I think

01:25:06 ◼   ► it is not done because they are malicious or bad developers. I think it's actually done

01:25:10 ◼   ► because they're trying to make the experience better for everybody. Like, "Why don't we

01:25:15 ◼   ► just solve this? Why are we bothering users with this crap? Why don't we just make Dropbox

01:25:19 ◼   ► — people just want Dropbox to work like Dropbox. We have the technology. We can just

01:25:23 ◼   ► make it work." And that's, I think, where they went wrong in that feature.

01:25:26 ◼   ► - I mean the thing is like if you're going to,

01:25:28 ◼   ► basically it's the attitude that a lot of developers

01:25:33 ◼   ► and platform owners have of like,

01:25:35 ◼   ► we know better than our users,

01:25:38 ◼   ► so we're just gonna do it for you.

01:25:39 ◼   ► Or we're gonna do things the way we think are right for you

01:25:43 ◼   ► and you just have to go along for the ride

01:25:45 ◼   ► because that's gonna be best for you.

01:25:47 ◼   ► And there's a place for that and there's lots of places

01:25:50 ◼   ► where that is the most pragmatic or the correct solution

01:25:53 ◼   ► or position to take.

01:25:55 ◼   ► But as a user, I wanna make sure that whatever software

01:26:00 ◼   ► I am granting that level of control to,

01:26:03 ◼   ► I wanna make sure that I agree with their judgment

01:26:07 ◼   ► in general and their technical abilities

01:26:10 ◼   ► and their way of doing things.

01:26:12 ◼   ► And if I start doubting somebody's judgment

01:26:16 ◼   ► or integrity or skill, then I don't want them

01:26:21 ◼   ► making decisions for me and doing things behind my back

01:26:23 ◼   ► and having access that I don't believe that they need

01:26:27 ◼   ► and things like that.

01:26:28 ◼   ► That becomes a trust issue, it becomes a security issue,

01:26:31 ◼   ► and lots of other potential problems.

01:26:34 ◼   ► So my problem with Dropbox here is

01:26:37 ◼   ► that accessibility hack, I think, shows poor judgment.

01:26:41 ◼   ► I think that is irresponsible the way they did that.

01:26:44 ◼   ► So did Apple, which is why Apple made it impossible

01:26:45 ◼   ► by putting the accessibility stuff

01:26:47 ◼   ► into system integrity protection in Sierra.

01:26:49 ◼   ► And Apple is one such, you know,

01:26:52 ◼   ► Apple is one of these companies too,

01:26:53 ◼   ► or Apple, in many ways, Apple's implied position

01:26:57 ◼   ► is basically we know best, we're gonna do this for you,

01:26:59 ◼   ► and you're not gonna have control.

01:27:01 ◼   ► And if you're an Apple customer or user,

01:27:03 ◼   ► you have to basically decide,

01:27:07 ◼   ► do I trust Apple with this control,

01:27:10 ◼   ► and do I generally agree with their judgment

01:27:12 ◼   ► in order to give them this control happily without problems?

01:27:16 ◼   ► And a lot of people who don't like Apple products,

01:27:18 ◼   ► who don't use Apple products,

01:27:20 ◼   ► the reason they don't use Apple products

01:27:21 ◼   ► is because they don't wanna give Apple that control,

01:27:23 ◼   ► They don't agree with Apple's decisions in those areas.

01:27:25 ◼   ► Or they don't trust Apple to have that level of ability.

01:27:28 ◼   ► And that's fine, right?

01:27:29 ◼   ► And my issue here with Dropbox is they make decisions

01:27:32 ◼   ► like this, they also, in their beta channel,

01:27:35 ◼   ► which is still in beta, granted, but in their beta channel,

01:27:38 ◼   ► they recently quote tested a toolbar that was injected

01:27:42 ◼   ► into Finder windows, which is like,

01:27:44 ◼   ► show this giant toolbar, which it looked like malware.

01:27:47 ◼   ► Like it was injected in the bottom of the window.

01:27:49 ◼   ► And it's like, no, that's not okay.

01:27:52 ◼   ► Why? Who thought that was a good idea?

01:27:55 ◼   ► - Well, but that's just a bad feature

01:27:56 ◼   ► being rolled out to the beta.

01:27:57 ◼   ► I mean, everyone, you know, you try it out on a beta user

01:27:59 ◼   ► and all your users go, "Oh, that's awful," right?

01:28:01 ◼   ► But like the specifics of injecting,

01:28:04 ◼   ► we'll eventually get to this, I think, later,

01:28:05 ◼   ► but like the origin of Dropbox

01:28:08 ◼   ► is that it was basically a hacksy on the Finder

01:28:10 ◼   ► to do all the little badges and the icons.

01:28:11 ◼   ► Like that is the product we all fell in love with,

01:28:14 ◼   ► is was the one that didn't like literally inject itself

01:28:16 ◼   ► into the Finder process to do this,

01:28:19 ◼   ► like the worst kind of hack,

01:28:20 ◼   ► the worst kind of totally unsupportable,

01:28:22 ◼   ► unsupported hack. And I think a lot of the reason, I mean, that's the app we came to

01:28:27 ◼   ► to to start using. And we liked it. And we like the badges. We like, you know, they

01:28:32 ◼   ► gave you some reassurance, green checkmark, it's synced little blue thing. It's not like

01:28:35 ◼   ► right. That's that's Dropbox. If they didn't have that feature, it would have been a

01:28:39 ◼   ► lesser product. And because the people who did it were clever enough to get it done in a

01:28:45 ◼   ► way that didn't suddenly cause the finder to be crashing left and right, and were able to

01:28:50 ◼   ► chase Apple as they updated the Finder and keep it working and so on and so forth to the point

01:28:55 ◼   ► where Apple eventually said Dropbox is so popular and badging things is a thing that people actually

01:29:00 ◼   ► want to do. We're going to add an official API for this. They finally did the hacksies pass in the

01:29:05 ◼   ► grass thing that I talked about all those years ago. It's like, look at what people are using.

01:29:09 ◼   ► If you don't want them to use a disgusting hack to use this feature, make an officially supported

01:29:14 ◼   ► API. And I'm pretty sure, I'm sure people will send his email if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure

01:29:19 ◼   ► that Dropbox did eventually adopt that official API rather than continuing their hack. Because

01:29:24 ◼   ► Dropbox doesn't want to do that hack. They would love to have a supported API. Presumably,

01:29:28 ◼   ► if the supported API does everything that Dropbox needed to do, of course they would adopt it. And

01:29:33 ◼   ► I think they have in the later versions. That's not really the system working. But during all

01:29:40 ◼   ► that time, we were all like, "Yay, badges on Dropbox icons is great." So it's not so

01:29:45 ◼   ► so much that they added a hack for this is that you could say,

01:29:48 ◼   ► the fact that someone thought this was

01:29:50 ◼   ► an aesthetically pleasing and appropriate UI,

01:29:53 ◼   ► it shows poor judgment,

01:29:54 ◼   ► which I'm on board with you there, right?

01:29:57 ◼   ► That it looks like,

01:29:57 ◼   ► I think of like those Internet Explorer toolbars,

01:29:59 ◼   ► you know, they're like, yeah, the DIE, just like,

01:30:02 ◼   ► that shows poor judgment.

01:30:03 ◼   ► But the fact that it's not a,

01:30:06 ◼   ► the fact that it's injected, it's like, well, you know,

01:30:09 ◼   ► Dropbox was founded on ill-advised code and injection,

01:30:13 ◼   ► which is probably not on the wall in their headquarters,

01:30:15 ◼   ► but it might as well be.

01:30:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, fair enough.

01:30:17 ◼   ► Anyway, so Dropbox, in my opinion,

01:30:19 ◼   ► has shown poor judgment recently

01:30:21 ◼   ► and questionable technical decisions.

01:30:23 ◼   ► There's some performance issues.

01:30:27 ◼   ► Dropbox appears to monitor all file system activity

01:30:31 ◼   ► in some way, not just in their folder,

01:30:33 ◼   ► but in the whole system.

01:30:34 ◼   ► - So I have some things to say about that as well.

01:30:36 ◼   ► - Okay, go ahead. - I know you've

01:30:37 ◼   ► complained about this.

01:30:39 ◼   ► They've been doing that for frickin' ever.

01:30:41 ◼   ► From the very beginning, DBFS of Enti

01:30:43 ◼   ► has been there slurping from the FS events fire hose

01:30:45 ◼   ► and being just as un-fungs has always been.

01:30:47 ◼   ► This is not a new thing.

01:30:48 ◼   ► Like whether it's ill-advised or not,

01:30:50 ◼   ► it's like maybe not from the very, very beginning,

01:30:52 ◼   ► but for many, many years,

01:30:55 ◼   ► if you were to look at top and see DBFS events

01:30:57 ◼   ► the grinding up your things,

01:30:58 ◼   ► especially if you had a slow spinning disk,

01:31:00 ◼   ► and especially if you have a small number of cores,

01:31:03 ◼   ► that is not a new development.

01:31:04 ◼   ► Now you can say a preponderance of things

01:31:07 ◼   ► have been bothering me about Dropbox,

01:31:09 ◼   ► and all of a sudden I noticed

01:31:11 ◼   ► that it's eating up my CPU cycles,

01:31:13 ◼   ► and they shouldn't be drinking from the FSEvents Firehose,

01:31:15 ◼   ► and they should be using the officially supported FSEvents

01:31:18 ◼   ► API and doing the diffs themselves

01:31:20 ◼   ► and so on and so forth.

01:31:21 ◼   ► That is a legit complaint, but it's not new.

01:31:24 ◼   ► So I think for you personally,

01:31:26 ◼   ► thinking about why you're at the end of your rope

01:31:28 ◼   ► about Dropbox, that can be a contributing factor,

01:31:31 ◼   ► but just because you may have become aware of it recently

01:31:33 ◼   ► doesn't mean it's not something

01:31:35 ◼   ► that has been a constant for many years.

01:31:36 ◼   ► - That's fair, totally fair.

01:31:38 ◼   ► But anyway, so with these problems

01:31:42 ◼   ► that I'm finding with Dropbox,

01:31:44 ◼   ► I started thinking, could I remove Dropbox from my life?

01:31:48 ◼   ► Could I switch to something else

01:31:50 ◼   ► for the roles that I use Dropbox for?

01:31:52 ◼   ► And how difficult would that make my life

01:31:55 ◼   ► in working with other people, basically?

01:31:57 ◼   ► And this is an interesting exercise.

01:32:00 ◼   ► I started realizing that a lot of the way I work

01:32:05 ◼   ► and the software I use is tied very closely

01:32:08 ◼   ► to Dropbox right now.

01:32:10 ◼   ► And I don't even use it as much as a lot of people I know,

01:32:12 ◼   ► like a lot of geeks I know, they put like all their photos

01:32:16 ◼   ► in Dropbox, all their like text everything,