0:00:00All right, we should start by pointing out we have done another members special. Because I'm an idiot
0:00:07and I like getting my feelings hurt, I decided I would roll the dice and see what John and Marco
0:00:15thought about John's of Bleecker Street, which is my beloved preferred pizza institution in Manhattan.
0:00:22And so what we did was we spent a truly absurd amount of money to get Goldbelly to send us
0:00:30two not particularly large pizzas per family and do that overnight from Manhattan to our respective
0:00:37households. And then we cooked them up much like we did with the, I almost said frozen meals but
0:00:41don't call them frozen meals, call them TV dinners. And so they all arrived at our desks at about the
0:00:45same moment. We talked about it on air. I will not tell you if my feelings were hurt or not, but I
0:00:51will tell you that it was an adventure to say the least. And so if you are not a member you can go to
0:00:57ATP.fm/join. You can join for as little as one month, although we'd love for you to stick around.
0:01:03If you join you get access to all the member stuff that's ever happened and we're up to like, I don't
0:01:07know, six-ish episodes I think, something like that now. And so you get access to all that. You could
0:01:13grab them all and then cancel your membership. We're not slimy, we let you do that. You'll hurt
0:01:18our hearts and our feelings, but you can do that. That is allowed. And so, but I think once you check
0:01:24out all the perks you will love it. So please check out ATP.fm/join. Marco, John, anything to add.
0:01:30- If you could imagine what it would be like for Casey to try to convince two New Yorkers with
0:01:38strong opinions on pizza to try his pizza, you can see why this was a good episode. I suggest,
0:01:47if you've been on the fence before about membership for whatever reason, you aren't a member yet,
0:01:52but you like when we argue about non-technical things. - There was plenty of that.
0:01:57- Yeah, even just discuss non-technical things. These kind of member specials and this one in
0:02:02particular, it's a good venue for that. - Indeed. Come for the pizza talk, stay for
0:02:07the bagel talk. And also I would like to point out just one more time, I probably made this point on
0:02:12the special, although I might have forgotten. My birth certificate says state of New York,
0:02:16my friend. Only two thirds of your host, their birth certificate states state of New York,
0:02:22and Marco is not one of them. I'm just gonna put that out there.
0:02:24- Yeah, but which one of us lives here? Oh, that's fair.
0:02:26- Yeah, that's fair. - Oh, that's right.
0:02:27- Yeah, so we're all imposters one way or another.
0:02:29- When's the last time you lived there? You lived in New York, Casey?
0:02:32- I lived in New York, late 80s, I think. - Right, John?
0:02:37- Yeah, something like that. - I go there every year at least.
0:02:40I'm like, Casey, did your parents live in New York when you were born? Or did they just drive there
0:02:45to give birth to you? - Is that a thing that people do?
0:02:49- I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be offended. And to be honest, I started it by
0:02:53throwing you under the bus earlier, but I'm not sure how offended I should be. No, they were
0:02:58living, I believe they were living in Fort Montgomery at the time, which is nearish Newburg.
0:03:02And I was born in Newburg, which is probably, I'm now probably giving away some sort of top secret
0:03:07scam thing. - Yeah, you're not supposed to
0:03:08tell people the answers to your security questions. - Yeah, so there you go, whoopsies.
0:03:11But anyways, but no, they live in New York. - There's nothing in Newburg for any security
0:03:14question to ask about. - I didn't know where any of those
0:03:16places were, so I assume they're all upstate, so nevermind.
0:03:18- Yeah, they're not upstate by most standards, but by both of your standards.
0:03:23- Hold on, Newburg is definitely upstate. - Oh, come on, it's not that far.
0:03:27- Marco lived in Brooklyn long enough to adopt the Long Island definition of upstate.
0:03:31- It's like a two hour drive north. - No, it is. Is it really?
0:03:35- Yes. - No way, a two hour drive from
0:03:38Fire Island? - Everything is a two hour drive
0:03:40when you go upstate. - Yeah, well, we established that
0:03:42frickin' Manhattan is two hours from Fire Island. - That's what I'm saying, yeah, no.
0:03:45- No, no, that doesn't, no, so like, how about this, John's a bleaker, let's just take that as
0:03:49a landmark, let's see how far we are from Newburg, give me a second.
0:03:52- Is this as the helicopter flies, or if you actually have to take roads?
0:03:55- No, no, no, I'm doing this on Google Maps. It's under an hour and a half, 70 miles.
0:04:00- Wait, hold on, at what time of day? - Right now, right now.
0:04:05- At 8 p.m. - It's also 8 o'clock at night,
0:04:07right, on a Monday. - Yeah, try it anytime while the sun's up.
0:04:10- I don't know, man, so you consider like the lake that we used to go to, you consider that
0:04:15like deeply upstate, I assume? - I wouldn't use the word deeply,
0:04:17but it's unquestionably upstate. - I guess to me, I'm not trying to say
0:04:22I'm right, I am not trying to say I'm right, but to me, I feel like anything within a couple
0:04:27of hours of the city is barely upstate. - No, no, no, no.
0:04:31- So where's the dividing line, Harlem? - Philadelphia is within a couple hours
0:04:35of the city, I mean, this makes no sense. - No, okay, no, no, no, okay, okay, that's
0:04:39fair. So where's the dividing line, is it 125th Street, for Christ's sakes?
0:04:41- No. - I mean, it depends on the
0:04:44definition, but you know, and different people have different definitions. The one definition
0:04:47every New Yorker can agree upon is upstate begins north of them, you know, no one thinks they live
0:04:52upstate. However, if you kind of, you know, plot like, you know, the bell curve of like, all right,
0:04:57well, where does upstate really begin to most people's opinions? You know, it certainly begins
0:05:04at least above like, you know, Westchester or Rockland Counties, and possibly even lower than
0:05:09that, depending on who you ask. - So you would, this is gonna sound argumentative,
0:05:14I really don't mean it that way, so you would say Westchester County is, you personally,
0:05:18Marco, would say is or is not upstate? - I personally would say no, but it's like,
0:05:22but it's not the city, like, I would never say it's the city. It's definitely not.
0:05:26And it's not quite upstate, but it's like, it's certainly like a boundary, you know,
0:05:30upstate, it's kind of like the way the atmosphere of the Earth transitions to space.
0:05:36It's not like a clear line. - I think that's reasonable,
0:05:40actually, that's where I'm fuzzy, because I don't get it.
0:05:42- When I was a kid growing up on Long Island, if we visited Marco, where Marco's house is
0:05:46in Westchester, I would say that Marco lives upstate.
0:05:51- Literally everything is upstate, like, I don't take that for anything.
0:05:55- I know, I'm just telling you what the, and I recognize that that's a very limited perspective,
0:06:00like that classic New Yorker cover that shows the map of the United States with the New Yorker's
0:06:04view of it, and it doesn't make sense. And today, I would probably say anything that's above West
0:06:09chester, but I still feel in my bones the idea of, like, going to visit Marco would mean driving
0:06:15upstate. - And certainly,
0:06:16by the time you get, like, once you're more than 20 or 30 miles from the city, I think the argument
0:06:23is, yeah, you're pretty much upstate. - So 20 or 30 miles, you said miles or minutes?
0:06:28- It's just a ballpark, but I'm gonna say, yeah, like, something on the order of, like,
0:06:3120 or 30 miles, I'd say you're upstate. - Well, so now that we got that argument
0:06:36out of the way, I feel like we've accomplished something, so yeah, if you wanna hear more of that,
0:06:39if you wanna hear more of that atp.fm/join, it was an adventure.
0:06:44All right, let's do some follow-up. Apparently, this is the follow-up that will not die. I mean,
0:06:50the follow-up that keeps continuing. Tell me about the latest developments with your
0:06:54Kobo and your e-readers. - I think this is it. I know I say this--
0:06:58- You said that the last two weeks! - I know, I did!
0:07:00I think this is it. All right, so I mentioned last episode, I had switched from the Kobo Sage
0:07:05to the slightly smaller Kobo Libra 2 device, and a couple of people pointed out that Libra 2
0:07:12doesn't support Dropbox, which I didn't know at the time, I'd only used it for, like, a day,
0:07:18and so I hadn't noticed, oh, this feature that I like, this Dropbox feature that the Sage has,
0:07:23the Libra 2 doesn't actually have it, and I was a little disappointed by that, and I thought--
0:07:28- Just a pause. - Right.
0:07:29- Remind me, what was the draw for Dropbox integration? 'Cause that is not something I feel
0:07:34like I have ever wanted on the Kindle, but I have a feeling you're using it for a purpose that I
0:07:40either am not expecting or just not something that I do, so remind me, what's the purpose there?
0:07:45- Well, the main purpose, and the reason it's on the Sage, the Sage supports a stylus where you can,
0:07:49like, draw or take notes on pages, the main reason I think it's there is so you can, like,
0:07:54export your notes that you make into something that's easily accessed elsewhere, but what I use
0:08:00it for is, I have ebooks from various sources that, you know, like, sometimes if you buy,
0:08:06like, not pirated, if you buy, like, an O'Reilly one or something like that, like, sometimes you'll
0:08:10buy an EPUB file, or you'll buy something that is downloadable as an EPUB file without DRM,
0:08:16like, you know, a lot of, like, you know, the, like, tech instructional stuff a lot of times
0:08:19comes this way, I bought a couple of ebooks recently that came that way, and so you'll have
0:08:23an EPUB file, like, all right, how do I read this easily? And you can, you know, drag it into Apple,
0:08:27or Apple Books or whatever, or I can drop it in this Dropbox folder that I just have a Dropbox
0:08:32folder now for the Kobo, and any EPUB files or PDFs, I can stick there, and then I can get them
0:08:37on the Kobo and read them that way, so that's my main use. - So is there, is there no, and I'm
0:08:42viewing everything through the lens of Kindle, 'cause it's the only thing I'm familiar with,
0:08:46with the Kindle, you get, like, a bespoke email address, I think at, like, kindle.com or something
0:08:50like that, and you can email a PDF or an EPUB or what have you to there, and then it will send you
0:08:55an email back and be like, are you sure you wanna do this? - No, no, no, it doesn't, no, well,
0:08:58you can, like, you can, you can, like, give it, like, permitted email address sources to say,
0:09:05like, if I sent it from this, and that's how Instapaper's Kindle integration works,
0:09:08a long time ago, I reverse engineered the Kindle Mobi format, the way they were doing,
0:09:15like, newspaper and magazine periodical support, 'cause they would devise this, like, table of
0:09:20content structure out of it, and so I reverse engineered that, figured out what they were doing,
0:09:24and then did it with Instapaper, so that Instapaper would basically generate, and it still works this
0:09:28way, it would generate a Kindle format periodical file and send it to that email address that you
0:09:35would enter in the Instapaper control panel for, you know? Anyway, it's a little bit tricky with
0:09:39Kindles because, at least back then, I don't know if this is still the case, I think it might be,
0:09:44but back then, Kindles didn't support EPUB, they had their own custom format that was based on the
0:09:48ancient Mobi or Moba Pocket format, and if you, and you could email documents to their service,
0:09:54and it would actually convert them to Kindle format on Amazon's end, and then send them over
0:09:58to Kindle. And Kobo, as far as I know, doesn't need to do that, it seems like the device just
0:10:04natively opens EPUBs without any other effort involved. - But my point is, my point in
0:10:08interrupting earlier was that there exists such a thing with Kobo as well, there's some email you
0:10:13can send things to? - No, so the way Kobo normally, as far as I can tell, I looked for that, as far
0:10:18as I can tell, to send stuff to it electronically, the only way to do it is this Dropbox integration
0:10:23on the Sage, and apparently, the only other way to get stuff on it is to connect it to your
0:10:29computer with a USB cable, and it shows up as a USB storage device, and you can drag files over
0:10:33that way, which is fine, but not great, you know? So anyway, so I posted about this on Macedon,
0:10:38and a few people, including Stefano Castantini, wrote in that there's actually a hack that,
0:10:45I mean, and I use the term hack very loosely, it's very easy, there's this third-party hack app
0:10:51called Nickel Menu for Kobos, and the way you hack this is you connect it to your computer as a
0:10:57drive, and you just put this file on the drive, and when you eject it, the Kobo sees this file,
0:11:04reboots, and so it must have some kind of checking for plugins kind of system, that's how it feels,
0:11:11it feels like an OS plugin that's kind of unofficial, but the Kobo just loads it,
0:11:16and then once you load this plugin, then you have an extra menu on the bottom of your Kobo,
0:11:21and there's a few little incantations you can put in this config file, one of which will enable
0:11:25Dropbox support on the Libre II, and there's also, the Libre II version is super easy,
0:11:31there's apparently a couple other methods you can use for other older Kobos, anyway,
0:11:35all this is to say, in five seconds, I had Dropbox support hacked onto my Libre II by
0:11:41basically sticking this file on the USB drive version of it, and that was it, that's all I had
0:11:46to do, so I'll put the links in the show notes, obviously, when you're installing random hacks
0:11:52from the internet onto a device, it is worth considering, what is the security service area
0:11:58that I'm exposing here, and so what I did for the Dropbox support was, I have a secondary
0:12:04Dropbox account that only has access to one folder, and then I share it with my primary account,
0:12:10so that way, 'cause I figure, if this third-party thing ends up being untrustworthy in the future,
0:12:15or presently, or whatever, what do they have access to? Well, they have access to a handful
0:12:19of ebooks, and that's it, a Dropbox account that has access to none of my other stuff,
0:12:25so the service area, I decided was small, obviously, you can make your own decisions
0:12:29on that, it's still a device on your network and stuff like that, so that's up to you, but
0:12:32I decided this hack was worth it, and now I have Dropbox, and it's great, there's a couple other
0:12:37things that it enables that I don't really need, so I'm just really using it for that.
0:12:41- That's cool, so we'll have some links that Marco provided in the show notes. John, we have all
0:12:46sorts of genuinely interesting news and feedback and whatnot with regard to multiple displays on
0:12:51M1 and M2 Macs, we were talking about, I don't remember when in the episode we were talking about
0:12:56it, we were talking about how the MacBook Air doesn't support more than one external display,
0:13:01and we were trying to theorize whether or not that was Apple being jerks and doing that in software,
0:13:07or is it really a hardware problem or something, so what is the verdict on this, John?
0:13:11- In the context of the 15-inch MacBook Air, people were saying,
0:13:15writing and saying, "15-inch MacBook Air is great, except in corporate environments,
0:13:19people really want two displays, and if the M1 and M2 only support one." So,
0:13:24Mathis Woolworth says, "The M1 and M2 chips only have two display controllers,
0:13:29one for the built-in display and one that can run the external display. The display controllers are
0:13:32not part of the GPU, they are separate bits on the SoC. On the Mac Mini, the internal display
0:13:37controller signal is piped out to a chip that converts it to HDMI, so that's why the Mac Mini
0:13:41has got an HDMI port on the back. The controller that drives the internal display seems not to be
0:13:45able to output display port signals. It seems from die shots that Apple is using a lot of die area
0:13:50for the display controllers." Richard Stevens continues that Hector Martin, who does, Asahi
0:13:56Linux, how do you pronounce that? - Asashi? I think it's Hector Marcan, I believe.
0:14:02- Oh yeah, I love this about Richard Stevens, says Hector Martin, but I think you're right. Anyway,
0:14:07A-S-A-H-I Linux. It's the Linux that runs on your M1 and M2 Macs, right? And they've been figuring
0:14:16out how to tap into all of the hardware features of M1 and M2 SoCs, including the GPUs and display
0:14:24drivers and everything, so they know a lot about these internals. Anyway, Hector had a bunch of
0:14:28tweets that were since deleted, but Richard found them in the Internet Archive. Here's what Hector
0:14:32had to say. "Why does the M1/M2 only support one external display? Because Apple's display
0:14:38controllers are so fancy pants that the M1 Macs has more silicon dedicated to display controllers
0:14:43than CPU cores. They can't fit any more of these on the cheap chips. Compare the display area and
0:14:49the die shot below to the power CPU cores, excluding the L2 cache. One display controller is larger than
0:14:56two power CPU cores combined with enough spare leftover to cover the efficiency CPUs as well.
0:15:02M1 Macs has four of them, plus the internal one, which is on top of the CPUs not annotated in the
0:15:07die shot." So I actually additionally annotated the die shot that's in our little show notes here.
0:15:12We'll try to put a link to the old Twitter thread and the show notes for you to look at.
0:15:16You can see that the display controllers are pretty large, especially when, again,
0:15:20when you compare them to the power CPU cores. Is that performance? Performance, power, whatever,
0:15:25like the good ones, the fast ones, the big ones, right? The efficiency CPU cores are really small.
0:15:31I'm not reading that from the text because in the text it's PCPU and eCPU as abbreviations.
0:15:35It's kind of cheating because like, "Oh, just exclude the cache." Well, you can't really
0:15:39exclude the cache because you're including what looks to be very regular memory region
0:15:44in the display controls. But anyway, all this is to say is this is a hardware limitations
0:15:48of the SOC and Apple decided to make it this way. And one reasonable theory about why they decided
0:15:56to make this way is that the display controls are surprisingly large. When you're budgeting out how
0:16:00much space and therefore how much power and how much cost you have to allocate to all different
0:16:05functionality on an SOC, maybe for your low-end chip you decide, "Eh, two display controllers
0:16:11should be enough." And so you burn almost as much area as half of the power CPU cores. I did it
0:16:19again. Performance CPU cores as you did in the other. Now, it doesn't mean that Apple can't
0:16:25change their mind about that. It could be that having the M1 and M2 both be like this, only
0:16:31support two external displays with two display controllers, has garnered enough complaints that
0:16:36the M3 may make a different choice. We'll see. So stay tuned for that. But anyway, on the M1 and M2,
0:16:41the display support is not Apple artificially limiting you to something. It is a decision
0:16:46Apple made when they designed the M1 and M2 SOC in terms of allocating space for drivers. But
0:16:52that doesn't mean, as we've talked about in many past shows and we will now talk about again,
0:16:56that you can't actually have two displays attached to your M1 and M2. How can that be?
0:17:01So Edward Munn writes and says, "It is possible to get the M1/M2 MacBook Air to support multiple
0:17:05external monitors by using a dock that supports DisplayLink with the correct drivers installed.
0:17:10DisplayLink does have its drawbacks, however. You can only watch DRM content in a browser by
0:17:14disabling hardware rendering. You cannot watch content within the TV app, and a message displays
0:17:18when logging in saying that the screen is being monitored." Oh, besides that! Yeah. I don't know,
0:17:24a lot of people are in this setup and I don't know if these are universal. I think you can use
0:17:29DisplayLink stuff and not see some of these, but anyway, I don't speak for much experience.
0:17:34So Edward continues, "Despite these drawbacks, it does allow for a one-cable solution for multiple
0:17:38monitors and charging." And Edward says, "Lastly, I find it amusing that this M2 MacBook Air can
0:17:43natively support a 4K HDR 144Hz monitor or even a 6K monitor, but requires workarounds to display
0:17:51two tiny 1080p monitors." It just goes to show, it's not the resolution or the number of pixels,
0:17:56it's the fact that, hey, are you a separate display that I have to deal with? Then I have
0:18:00to have a display controller for you or I have to do something else. Steve McWee writes, "I have two
0:18:0524-inch HP monitors running off a base model M1 Air using the Wavelength USB 3.0 to HDMI adapter."
0:18:12And finally, Lior Chacade says, "Yes, DisplayLink is an external driver. Yes, it uses screen
0:18:18recording to send data out as data packets over thunderbolts instead of using the Data Display
0:18:21Control Protocol. Yes, docks that support it are less common and more expensive than
0:18:26comparable alternatives, but at the end of the day, it does the job of connecting multiple
0:18:29external displays to M1/M2 Macs." And the reason I think this is relevant is because,
0:18:33in my experience in the corporate world, terrible docks like this that support multiple displays
0:18:39were ubiquitous. They were everywhere. Even before ARM on Mac, everyone had one of these third-party
0:18:45docking things that you would connect your laptop to that would let you have multiple displays,
0:18:49whether it's for your Macs or for your Dell laptops or whatever it was. I don't know,
0:18:53did they all use this DisplayLink tunneling video over USB or was it just a common product?
0:18:59But either way, I think this is the corporate solution to, hey, I've got an M1 or M2 and I want
0:19:04more than one monitor. It's like, well, deal with this. It's a little bit janky, it's a little bit
0:19:09weird. I bet the video quality probably has some compromises as well. I don't know all the technical
0:19:13details, but that's what you have to do. And it seems like for the 15-inch MacBook Air, I assume
0:19:20those limitations will continue to be the case, but maybe for the M3, they'll do something better.
0:19:24Indeed. All right. And then Ryan Maxwell wrote in, "Marco dismissed the idea pretty strongly
0:19:29that Apple would intentionally cripple the MacBook Air to segment the product lines and try to upsell
0:19:33users, which for the record, I agreed with. My first Mac was an iBook G4 and one of the main
0:19:37differences between an iBook and a PowerBook G4 was that the PowerBook supported extending your
0:19:41desktop to an external display. The iBook just supported mirroring. The problem was the iBook
0:19:45G4 was totally capable of supporting extending. It was just a firmware lock. There was a very
0:19:50popular utility that many of us used to unlock the feature. It worked great. I can imagine such hacks
0:19:54are much harder these days. We'll put a couple of links to relevant information in the show notes.
0:19:57Couple of people have this story. Some people thought it was iBook G3 or G4. This is back in
0:20:01the days when the pro laptops were called PowerBooks. It's not that Apple has never done
0:20:05this and they would never do it. It's just not common practice. I mean, giving this example from
0:20:10the days of the iBook and the PowerBook shows how old it was, there's probably a couple more modern
0:20:14examples, but in general, that's not how Apple segments. They segment by designing the M1 chip
0:20:19to display controllers. It's baked into the hardware. It makes a chip smaller, cheaper,
0:20:24lower power, so on and so forth. And Apple hopes that they have struck the right balance between
0:20:29cost and power efficiency and features. Maybe they haven't with the M1 and M2. Maybe they'll
0:20:33change their mind, but that's the point at which they're making the decision. It's not like they're
0:20:38making a chip capable of driving seven displays and they say, "Oh, but seven displays on a MacBook
0:20:43Air, they would never buy our pro products. Quick, we need to cripple it." They tend not to do that.
0:20:47If they do do that, it's a pretty terrible mistake because that means when they were designing the
0:20:51chip, they made the wrong choice. If that's part of their design, that we want to segment the line
0:20:57and give people a reason to upgrade, they would bake that into the hardware because then they
0:21:00would give you a smaller and cheaper chip, two things that Apple cares about, and yes, also more
0:21:05power efficient, which customers care about. Sometimes Apple makes the wrong choice with
0:21:10hardware, but the wrong choice for you might be the right choice for somebody else.
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0:23:05With regard to Final Cut Pro and the iPad, Chris writes, "My one terabyte 13-inch M1 iPad Pro has
0:23:1516 gigs of RAM and virtual memory, so the inability to round to projects is definitely not a hardware
0:23:20issue." For what it's worth, not every M1 iPad Pro has 16 gigs of RAM. They can come with as
0:23:28quote-unquote "little" as 8. And then I don't know what the virtual memory story is on iPad OS. I
0:23:33know that that's a relatively new development but I can't recall the specifics. Jon, do you happen
0:23:38to remember? Yeah, I just want to add that M1, the minimum amount of RAM I believe is 8 gigs. I don't
0:23:43think Apple has ever sold it with less than 8 gigs. So if you've got an M1, you've got 8 gigs
0:23:48and you may have more. The reason I put the virtual memory note in here is because I said it
0:23:52on last week's show and we talked about it again. It's become the sort of colloquial way to talk
0:23:57about this topic. But you know, this is a tech show and I'll hold on to this one as long as I can.
0:24:03iPads have always had virtual memory forever. What they haven't had is they didn't use swap.
0:24:10They wouldn't take things out of RAM and swap them to, you know, flash storage and back. Those are
0:24:15two different things. Virtual memory just means that the addresses that your program is using
0:24:19are not addresses in RAM. They are virtual addresses that are somewhere in a virtual
0:24:24address space and every process gets its own gigantic virtual address space of a given size.
0:24:30And it's like, well how can every single process on the computer have the same address space?
0:24:34Aren't they stomping over each other memory? No, because those aren't the real addresses. Those are
0:24:37virtual addresses and there's a thing, there's a bunch of hardware in there that translates from
0:24:42virtual addresses to hardware addresses. And at that point the hardware and the operating system
0:24:46make sure that two processes don't stomp on each other by using the same physical address. So
0:24:52basically all systems that run Darwin, the core of what was Mac OS X, have and always have had
0:25:00virtual memory. But iOS devices and iPad OS for the longest time did not have swap, which meant
0:25:05that when RAM was getting close to being exhausted they would say, "Oh, don't worry about it. This
0:25:10stuff that's in RAM, I'll write it to 'disk' in a big giant file. And if someone needs it again,
0:25:17I'll go get it from there and to make room for it I'll take something that is in RAM and put it back
0:25:21there." And anyway, doing that a lot is called swapping. That is called the swap file and iPad OS
0:25:27did not have that for a long time but now does support it on certain hardware configurations.
0:25:32I'm not familiar with details just like Casey. We talked about when it rolled out,
0:25:36but I only imagine it will become more prevalent. But the point is it's not a limitation. The big
0:25:42beefy iPads do support swap. I just wanted to be a little bit careful about saying they support
0:25:47virtual memory because maybe I'll lose that battle. Maybe just eventually people will just, "Well,
0:25:51when you say virtual memory you don't mean virtual memory."
0:25:52Yeah, you've lost that battle.
0:25:54I don't think so though because the problem is they've always had virtual memory and there's
0:25:58no other word for virtual memory than virtual memory. They've always had it.
0:26:02But I feel like virtual memory has been supported since the 386. I don't think it's the kind of
0:26:10thing you have to say that modern computers support or don't support. Every computer supports
0:26:14virtual. Most people's fridges probably support virtual memory at this point.
0:26:19Yeah, sure. But there's no other name for it though.
0:26:22It's like saying, "Yeah, my computer supports math." Yeah, most computers support math.
0:26:28I know, but if you were trying to reuse that term, say, "My computer can do addition," it's like,
0:26:32"Well, I don't mean addition. I mean it'll take memory and write it out to persistent storage."
0:26:37I'm like, "Well, that's totally different. Why are you using that term?" Anyway, I would say it
0:26:42doesn't have swap, doesn't use swap, virtual memory with swap. I don't even know how Apple
0:26:46describes this kind of thing, but I just want people...
0:26:48I believe they called it virtual memory swap when they had it on one of those little bubble
0:26:53words on the slide.
0:26:54Some technical person said, "You can't just call it virtual memory. You got to put the
0:26:57word swap." Virtual memory swap, I think that three-word phrase, use that one. That one works.
0:27:01But virtual memory, it's really confusing for me. People say, "Does your iPad support
0:27:05virtual memory?" I'm like, "Yeah, it does."
0:27:07And so does yours, and so do all of them ever.
0:27:10Exactly.
0:27:11And so does your watch.
0:27:12Right, right.
0:27:13And your fridge probably.
0:27:14Yeah.
0:27:15All right, so bringing you back to Final Cut Pro, I thought this feedback was excellent,
0:27:18and I probably should have known this having had a brief window of time when I sort of
0:27:22kind of knew Final Cut Pro, but because my usage was so rudimentary, I never really
0:27:27put this together.
0:27:27So Brendan writes, "As an occasional Final Cut Pro user for over a decade, I'm extremely
0:27:31confident that the lack of round trip has nothing to do with performance whatsoever
0:27:34and everything with the way Final Cut Pro 10 handles project files. It's extremely flexible
0:27:38and allows assets, proxies, and cached renders to be segmented out on different volumes and
0:27:43storage types. That is extremely useful in necessary and professional video editing
0:27:47environments."
0:27:48So I don't see a new project format coming along soon on the Mac side to replace that
0:27:54if it needs to adhere to the current limitations of iPadOS.
0:27:57So in other words, like one of the things, and maybe one of you can have a better explanation
0:28:01here, but one of the things that we needed a lot more years ago was if you're working
0:28:06with these like super high resolution video files, that's really computationally intensive
0:28:10for the computer to do as you're scanning through them and so on and so forth.
0:28:14So Final Cut Pro would make these quote unquote proxy files, which basically means it'll
0:28:18down sample your 4K video to like 720p that it'll use for the purposes of doing the edits
0:28:24and getting everything lined up. And then when you finally did the one true export,
0:28:30it'll go back to the source material and render it in 4K or what have you. And that was proxy
0:28:34media, or I forget what they call it, proxy something or other. And there's all sorts
0:28:38of other things too. And Final Cut Pro will often generate this on its own behind the
0:28:44scenes. And you can be explicit if you so choose and tell it, oh, I want the proxy media
0:28:49to go here. You know, I want the regular stuff to go there and so on and so forth.
0:28:52So, yeah, I think Brendan makes a good point that it is extremely flexible, which is wonderful,
0:28:56particularly if you're working on like a two hour video or something like that. But
0:29:00that might not be so wonderful if you're trying to work within the extreme limitations of iPadOS.
0:29:05See, I don't buy this as a format difference, though, because that's true between Macs as
0:29:09well. If you have a project file that references assets that are all over the place and you
0:29:13give that to somebody else on a Mac and they're on their laptop across the country and they
0:29:17try to open that project, it's not going to work. It's not going to be able to find all the media.
0:29:21Like that's just the nature of the beast. I don't think there's anything particular in iPadOS that
0:29:25prevents access to network storage or whatever. But, you know, again, Apple makes the operating
0:29:30system so they could patch these things. I think if there was a new project format on the Mac,
0:29:35it would of course continue to support that flexibility, probably. And then they could
0:29:39also support it on iPadOS and it would behave exactly the same way as it does on a Mac,
0:29:43where it says, "Oh, you open this project? I don't know where the hell any of this media is.
0:29:46I tried to connect to the server, but it's not accessible on my network. I don't know where it
0:29:49is. Sorry." Like that's the nature of complicated formats like this. So it is another thing to
0:29:56consider that dealing with that on iPadOS may be slightly more difficult because of sandboxing and
0:30:01the inability to mount network drives as far as we know. But, you know, Apple does make the OS and
0:30:08they can make all that possible. So it's still a little bit of mystery. I would love to hear
0:30:11a technical explanation from somebody at Apple of why the project format is different. I would
0:30:17hope they wouldn't say, "Well, you know, the iPad is a little less — like sort of just a vague answer
0:30:23doesn't tell us anything." Because they can't — I don't think Apple can say with a straight face,
0:30:26is kind of the point of this follow-up. I don't think they can say with a straight face anymore
0:30:29that it's a power limitation, especially for the people with like a 16-gig iPad Pro with an M1.
0:30:34And they'd be like, "No, there's no excuse for in terms of horsepower or power." And swap,
0:30:40right? Virtual memory swap, as Apple would say. That's got it all, right? So what's the problem?
0:30:48I continue to hope, fingers crossed, that it is just an updated project format that will eventually
0:30:52come to the Mac. And if and when it does, to Brendan's point, it will have to support all
0:30:55the existing workflows, if they are an essential part of people's business, which I think they are.
0:31:01Indeed. And then finally, I think it was like right in the beginning of the year — I forget
0:31:06exactly when it was — but Dell announced their own kind of knockoff version of the Pro Display XDR.
0:31:13You might remember this because it had a truly enormous webcam that stuck up above the top
0:31:21forehead of the monitor. If memory serves, it had a little drop-down like connectivity port that
0:31:27would come off the bottom of the monitor, which I actually think was kind of cool. But I'm not sure
0:31:31that many share that opinion with me. But anyways, this is a 32-inch 6K monitor, the oh-so-eloquently
0:31:38named the U3-224KB. Well, apparently pricing has been released, and it is $3,200, which normally
0:31:48would make me do a spit-take, but remind me how much your ridiculously overpriced monitors were,
0:31:54gentlemen. Well, are you including the stand? Yeah, don't forget, this comes with a stand. So
0:31:59it's $3,200, comes with a height-adjustable stand, and this thing has, to remind everybody,
0:32:04140 — up to 140 watts of power delivery, a 4K webcam, a huge array of ports, just a ton of
0:32:10ports all over it. It has slightly higher resolution than the XDR. It's 6144x3456 instead of
0:32:17the XDR, it's 6016x3384. Sorry about the way I read that number, just deal with it. There are also,
0:32:25because this is Dell, we'll put a link to the product page, they make a whole line of these
0:32:29monitors, and you can change tons of things about them. This monitor is available in the following
0:32:34sizes in inches, 24, 27, 30, 32, 34, 38, 43, and 49 inches. Well, slow down though, but that doesn't
0:32:41necessarily mean 6K in all the rest. Right, exactly, and it goes up to 8K as well. So those
0:32:47smaller monitors are different resolutions, and the bigger monitors can be different, but I'm saying
0:32:50this is the matrix of different features, so you can't get all the resolutions at all the sizes,
0:32:54obviously, but there's a lot of choices here, like I said, including up to 8K, I think the 8K
0:32:59version is like $4,000 or something. Now, this is not really an XDR quote-unquote replacement,
0:33:04because I don't think any of the combinations of sizes and resolutions support HDR 1600 nits. I
0:33:13don't know if they have mini-LED backlights, but hey, $3,200 for XDR resolution if you don't care
0:33:20about HDR, and you don't mind looking at what is a very unattractive monitor in my opinion,
0:33:26it's a good deal. That's what we were wondering about the whole time. We were talking about this
0:33:30at CES, we were making fun of the looks, we were looking at all the ports, but like, well,
0:33:32how much is this going to cost? And the question was, how much will it undercut the XDR by? And I
0:33:37think $3,200 with adjustable stand is a good price. Like, that is a way better deal than the XDR.
0:33:43Well, I will, I mean, so you know, you said you have a lot of options available here,
0:33:49but none of those options make it super nice as an Apple replacement.
0:33:53There is no option for beauty on this monitor.
0:33:56Yes. But you know, so I think this is a very good deal relative to what else is in the market,
0:34:03which as far as I know is just the XDR, like in this kind of resolution and size class.
0:34:07I don't think there's anything else really. I could be wrong, but I'm not aware of any.
0:34:11I mean, I'm sure there are other makers making monitors with the same panel,
0:34:14but Dell is a reputable brand and you know what I mean.
0:34:17So yeah, but, but I think so for this to be $3,200 and the XDR to be with the stand $6,000.
0:34:24Yeah, this is a really good deal. I would at least though, I would caution people if it's been a
0:34:32while since you've used an Apple computer with a third party monitor, the experience is not always
0:34:39as seamless as you would hope it would, it should be. It's not like the olden days because the olden
0:34:44days things were simpler. We didn't have things like HDR and all these like new DRM schemes for,
0:34:49you know, movie protection and stuff like that. So, you know, on some level, like I am not tempted
0:34:55by this. Obviously I already have the XDR, so that's a huge difference, but I'm not tempted
0:35:00by this because my experiences with my ultra fine LG monitor have been pretty paper cutty in part
0:35:09because the ultra fine is just such a mediocre monitor, but also in part because Apple does not
0:35:15seem to take much effort at all in making the experience good for third party monitor users.
0:35:20And oftentimes as Apple's computers move forward, as the hardware and software move forward,
0:35:28oftentimes it seems like the number of paper cuts that you get by using a third party monitor
0:35:32is increasing over time. So while you are able to save a good amount of money going with this option,
0:35:38you are giving up a lot of niceness and you're setting up for possible paper cut issues that you
0:35:44might not get with a first party monitor. And that's not to say that like Apple is, you know,
0:35:48making the best monitors here. You know, it's just to say the reality of the situation is you're in
0:35:52an integrated environment if you're using this with a Mac and you're going to miss out on some
0:35:56of those integrations. And it might not be, there might be annoyances or limitations by going with
0:36:02this that we don't really know about yet or that you might not be thinking of that are worth
0:36:05considering when you're making a decision. I think a lot of the fault is going to lie with
0:36:10the monitor maker. That's why I was suggesting maybe Dell over somebody else. Cause I think
0:36:13there is like driver software that you might have to install on your Mac to get all the features of
0:36:17this monitor to work. And that's kind of the responsibility of the third party monitor maker.
0:36:23You would hope Apple would work together with them better. But that is, you know, it's like,
0:36:29who's to blame here? Is it Apple because they don't care about making stuff work with third
0:36:32party monitors or is it the third party monitor maker because they stopped caring about the
0:36:36drivers for Mac OS after a few years? Cause they've already made their money in that monitor. They
0:36:39don't care already bought it to give one. I don't, I don't know if this is an example that, you know,
0:36:45puts Apple in a good light, but it is something that happened before Apple sold monitors besides
0:36:52the XDR or even maybe before the XDR the M1 and M2, for example, even though they can only drive
0:36:58one monitor, they can drive the LG 5k I believe. Right. Yeah. And so the LG, LG 5k is a third party
0:37:05monitor. It was the only, you know, Apple retina resolution, third party monitor for a long time.
0:37:11While we were asking for Apple to make one again, other than the XDR. Well, there was the,
0:37:15there was the 4k for a while and then they changed it, which made it slightly less retina E, but
0:37:20there, it was the LGs, the two LGs, the 4k and the 5k. Yeah. I guess the 4k 24 inch was the
0:37:25closer to that, but anyway, the 5k was the big one, right? Until Apple, you know, Apple had the
0:37:29XDR, but until Apple came with studio display and the LG 5k is weird and requires Apple to do some
0:37:35stuff to support that, that Apple did. Like as far as I'm aware, you didn't have to install any
0:37:39LG drivers, right? For the LG 5k. Correct. So, part of that you could say, okay, well,
0:37:45that's not Apple doing it out of the goodness of their heart. It's because the LG 5k is basically
0:37:48the same monitor that was in a 5k iMac and they'd already done the work for that. But the fact is
0:37:53that the, you know, M1, when it first came out, could drive a third party monitor. And Apple had
0:37:59to do some work to make that happen because for people that don't know, we talked about it when
0:38:02the 5k iMac first came out, which was ages ago. The 5k, in fact, Apple bragged about it. That's
0:38:07why we knew about it. The 5k iMac had its special, you know, Apple custom timing controller, cause
0:38:11it's basically like two internal logical displays with like two parallel display stream things going
0:38:18in there and then a controller that synchronizes them. That's how you get 5k resolution over one
0:38:22cable internal to the 5k iMac. Well, that was, that was true at the time. It is a little bit
0:38:27different now, but carry on. Yes. But I, but I think the, even the, the LG 5k today, if you
0:38:32connect it to an M1 over a single cable, it's doing the display stream multiplexing. It's more
0:38:38commonplace now, but Apple had to support that. My point is with the M1, they could have chose not to
0:38:42support it cause none of their monitors do stuff like that, or maybe just the XDR or whatever. So
0:38:47I don't know, again, I don't know if that is Apple making an effort to say, oh, well,
0:38:51since we don't sell any monitors like this, we should make sure the LG 5k works cause it's the
0:38:55only game in town or just saying, well, we already basically did that work for the 5k iMac. So we get
0:38:59it for free. So we might as well do it, but, uh, it is a thing that happened. The Dell ones,
0:39:03on the other hand, especially the 6k thing with the camera and all the ports, I imagine you're
0:39:07going to be relying on, uh, Dell keeping its drivers and software up to date to have all
0:39:13the features of that monitor working. How good is Dell at doing that? Probably better than some
0:39:18random no name brand that you just found online. Right. But maybe not as good as you want it to be
0:39:24to Marco's point, especially years down the line. Yeah. It's, it's still Dell at the end of the day
0:39:29and, and Dell also, you know, they're not going to care nearly as much about how it works on a Mac
0:39:35than they are how it works on their PCs that they sell. So, or other PCs. I thought I saw the word
0:39:39Mac mentioned on the product page, so let me search for it again. I mean, you know, they'll
0:39:43take our money, but you know, you better believe they're not going to like, you know, have amazing
0:39:47driver support if they don't have to. I mean, I'm just happy to see the word mentioned. This monitor
0:39:50is compatible with multiple operating systems, including windows and Mac OS, though are in a
0:39:55circle. I guess one of the other ones, Linux. Uh, but anyway, uh, there, there are at least mentioning
0:40:00it. So they, I think they understand who, who would want a monitor with this kind of pixel
0:40:05density at this size. Uh, there is some possibility that it might be a Mac user.
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0:42:16What do we have to talk about tonight? Well, first we can talk about whether I use this
0:42:23phrase correctly. And I don't, I shouldn't be asking you to, maybe we can get some young people
0:42:26in the chat to weigh in. What I wrote as the top topic here is a WWDC vibe check. My use of that
0:42:34term is in the sense that we are seeing how we all kind of feel about WWDC being two weeks out from
0:42:42it. Is that the correct use of the term vibe check? Do we have any, who are we kidding? There are no
0:42:46young people in that room. I don't know why I'm thinking this. All that matters is like,
0:42:50is our audience old enough to think that we are using it correctly? Whether or not we actually are.
0:42:57Here's the thing. I know young people listening to the podcast, hello out there. We love that
0:43:01you listen to it. Tell your friends to tell your nerdy friends, which is what I always say. Cause
0:43:04if you tell your regular friends, they're going to listen and think it's super weird, but tell
0:43:07your nerdy friends. Anyway, people who listen, people who listen live, like there's a very tiny
0:43:12number of dedicated people who are in our chat room right now who listen to the live stream of
0:43:16this as we record it. And we have to imagine because the number is so small, the, the, uh,
0:43:22the percentage that might be young people, uh, there is probably very low. Yeah. That is probably
0:43:28accurate, but I will say as an official old, I do believe you are using the term correctly. And,
0:43:34and yes, again, I don't know how much stock I put in any of our, yep. Totally, totally. I mean,
0:43:40I do, I do have teenagers, so I feel like I have a leg up on you too, at least, but I can just learn
0:43:44through osmosis by hearing them say things, but well, who's, who's less likely to know about cool
0:43:50slang, like a random, you know, 40, whatever year old or a 40, whatever year old with teenage
0:43:57children. I almost think the people without the teenage children are more likely to get it right
0:44:02because the teenagers will try harder to hide it from you when they're your kids. Oh my God. No,
0:44:06no, you can't help. You'll see when you have a teenager, you can't help but hear them speak all
0:44:11the time and them talk to their friends and they will say things to you using the same language.
0:44:16They talk to their friends, whether they mean it or not. I mean, I mean, look, we, we get some of
0:44:21that now, but like, it's funny, like, like, so going around, you know, my, my kid and his friends
0:44:27going around that group is this, I don't know, I'm sure it came from a YouTuber, but some kind of
0:44:32joke where they are like, you know, what's, you know, nine plus 10, like 27 or whatever, and
0:44:37everyone laughs. It's like, okay. And I don't get it at all. And I'm like, okay, well, I'm already
0:44:42at the point where, you know, the kids are doing stuff that I don't understand at all that, you
0:44:47know, and, you know, every generation goes through this. And like, I'm thinking like, you know, when
0:44:52we start saying things like vibe check, like, I'm already so disconnected from what the young kids
0:44:58are saying and how what they think is funny and whatever references they're making from their
0:45:01YouTube celebrities they follow. There is no way in hell that we're using this term correctly. Like,
0:45:06we're just, we're too old. They're like, we should avoid any, anything that even seems like modern
0:45:11slang. We should just stick with the the the phrases that are licensed for old people use.
0:45:16Yeah. Someone in the chat room says that it's, well, the idea is that you're
0:45:22checking to see how somebody's doing. It's more like checking in with them.
0:45:27I don't know. I'll ask my kids after. Anyway, I've defined the term as we're using it here.
0:45:32If we're using it wrong, at least, you know what I mean, because the goal is communication. Although
0:45:35I will say what I remember on a recent episode, I heard Casey say something that I actually talked
0:45:40to my daughter about that I'm wondering where Casey heard it. He probably heard it from pop,
0:45:44the same place my daughter did with some kind of popular media or like a sitcom or, you know,
0:45:49something that you did that you use the term you are, I don't know, one of my phrases that I would
0:45:57use for it is so on and so forth, et cetera, sort of one of those where you're trying to say,
0:46:02and other things like this, I'm not going to list them all. You know what I'm talking about, right?
0:46:06And the phrase you use is whatever, whatever you say, whatever, twice, whatever obviously was from
0:46:10our generation. We all know about whatever my generation anyway, whatever Gen X is totally a
0:46:14thing, right? Whatever, whatever saying in that particular way, whatever, whatever, whatever.
0:46:18I can't, you know, I've, I heard my daughter say it and I, I talked to her and I said,
0:46:22is whatever, whatever, is that a you thing? Or is that a common like thing among people your age?
0:46:29And, and she said, no, it's not a me thing. It's just a thing that people my age say. And so,
0:46:34you know, took her word for it. And then I heard Casey say it a few times. Like,
0:46:36did I? Yeah. Where did Casey pick up whatever, whatever. So it might be somewhere. I don't think
0:46:42you picked up from your kids. Do either one of your kids say whatever, whatever when relaying
0:46:45a story about something. So it's probably from like, you know, some television show or something
0:46:51like that. And people keep getting down to yada yada and saying, yada yada, like Seinfeld that
0:46:57made up that thing. Yada yada. Seinfeld did not make up yada yada. People Seinfeld popularized it
0:47:01for the rest of the world. It's not the Metro New York area, but rest assured yada yada existed
0:47:06long before Seinfeld. Well, this has been a language corner, but yeah. So let's talk about
0:47:13how we feel about WWDC. However you want to phrase that. How we feel on, since I'm talking, I guess
0:47:18I'll just start. I am excited. You know, I never, I never get any concrete information about anything
0:47:26in any regard from any of the people I know inside Apple, but I can tell you that the, the, now I
0:47:33don't want to say vibe, but I was going to say vibe. The, the impression I get from people. I
0:47:37think we can use vibe. I think we all understand and know how to use vibe. I don't think that,
0:47:41I think that's the thing that predates a lot of teenagers who are alive today. All right,
0:47:44fair enough. The vibe from people inside Apple is that they are like vibrating. Like they are real
0:47:51excited. At least that's, that's the impression I've gotten. I wish I could tell you that I'm
0:47:54being coy and I know exactly what's happening and when it's happening, so on and so forth. I
0:47:59genuinely know nothing, but our sources aren't that good. Yeah, exactly. Here's the thing that
0:48:04you're the people you know, and like the vibe you're getting from people at Apple,
0:48:08they probably don't know anything either, right? That's the thing that a lot of people who are new
0:48:13to the world of Apple might not understand when we're watching some kind of presentation and
0:48:18Apple's presenting something, the vast majority of the Apple employees are just as surprised as we
0:48:23are because they compartmentalize everything. If you don't need to know about project XYZ,
0:48:28you don't know about it. And so it's not like we're watching and they're like, well,
0:48:32every Apple employer already knows this. No, every Apple employee does not know this. So
0:48:35Apple employees are vibrating. There could be coming off the same thing that we are, which is
0:48:39like, we feel like there's something big coming. And they literally don't know what it is because
0:48:43they're not disclosed as they say on the headset or on the car or on the whatever the hell like
0:48:48they don't, they just, they literally don't know. But because they are employees and work there,
0:48:53you can kind of get a feel from, because maybe they know someone who does work on that team
0:48:56or they know someone who knows someone and those people seem happy all the time or they seem
0:48:59frantic all the time. Or yeah, they've been working nonstop for the last two months. Exactly. Like
0:49:04that's the vibe that they're getting that we're not getting. And that is being transferred to us.
0:49:07Yeah. My favorite example of this is, you know, after the Swift announcement in like 14 or
0:49:12whenever it was, um, I was talking to a handful of internal Apple people and of the, I don't know,
0:49:19five or 10 people I spoke to, I think maybe one or two of them was aware that the, that Apple was
0:49:24working on a new language to release at some point. But I don't think a single one of them knew that
0:49:29the Swift announcement was happening that day. So they're sitting there, you know, in the, in their
0:49:33office or whatever, watching the keynote and saying, Oh, that's cool. You know, same time that
0:49:39I'm looking over at John saying, Oh, that's cool. Like they all found out at the exact same moment
0:49:44for something as big as Swift. So, I mean, not literally all of them, but you know what I'm
0:49:47saying? So, uh, whatever, whatever, John, for the Swift, for the Swift example, specifically,
0:49:52that's another example of how, how tricky it is to read the tea leaves at Apple. Um, way back in the,
0:49:59the day, you know, I'd written a bunch of blog posts at Ars Technica, which have since been
0:50:03moved to my own website, talking about Apple's needs for a new programming language. Uh, and in
0:50:08response to those posts, lots of people from Apple either reached out to me, back channel, I talked
0:50:14to them at WWDC, we would have discussions on the topic that I wrote about. Obviously, almost all of
0:50:20them didn't know anything about what Apple would eventually do in this area. Some of them did.
0:50:24Right. And we would have discussions about it. And in hindsight, I can see that a lot of those
0:50:29discussions, you could tell which one of these people that I was talking about this four years
0:50:33before Swift was announced, knew Swift existed or whatever, you know, or like two years, one year
0:50:38leading up to it. That's the way that you can get a vibe from Apple people. The problem is though,
0:50:44tons of stuff is happening inside Apple that never sees the light of day. And so you can have a
0:50:49discussion with somebody that makes you, I totally think from all these discussions I've been having
0:50:53with Apple people, they seem really excited about whatever, smell-o-vision, right? And I really
0:50:58think Apple's working on a smell-based product and it just never sees the light of day. And you're
0:51:02like, Oh, I guess I was wrong about that. And then you have to learn 15 years later that there was a
0:51:05big smell-o-vision project and it got canned because of some internal political turf war,
0:51:10or they decided they weren't going to do smell-o-vision. Or it was catching on fire.
0:51:13Right. Exactly. So the vibe inside Apple reflects a feeling about what might be happening inside
0:51:22Apple, but then there's the question, okay, but what of the things that happens inside Apple
0:51:26comes out of Apple and in what form and when? Another example is the TV stuff. Apple's going
0:51:31to make a television set. And like from what we understand from current rumors and people revealing
0:51:37stuff, some of the technology that was originally made for the project where Apple was going to make
0:51:44a television set, I keep saying television set, because I don't know how to explain this to young
0:51:47people, but like a TV, a big screen that you look at that plays, anyway, ended up in the HomePod
0:51:54of all places because they were working on audio for the HomePod. So the HomePod comes out of some
0:51:59work that was done in the television. There was so much smoke around TV back in the day of just like,
0:52:04Apple's going to make a television set, they're going to do it, it's going to be, and what we
0:52:06ended up getting was the HomePod on the Apple TV and Apple never did make a television set. And
0:52:10we'll see where the car stuff goes. So it's difficult to read, but sometimes like the vibe
0:52:17you're getting, it's a legit vibe, even if Apple never ships any of that stuff in the form you
0:52:21think they're going to. But in this case, I feel like the vibe about the headset is so strong and
0:52:27so lightning focused and so detailed with the rumors that, you know, where there's smoke,
0:52:33there's surely going to be fire eventually. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, again, I'm not playing coy. I
0:52:38wish I knew when I was playing coy, but I'm not. But I don't know. I just feel like based on no
0:52:47facts and just a gut feeling, I feel like there's going to be a lot this year, even if it isn't the
0:52:52headset, I still feel like it's going to be a busy keynote. Obviously the drop of Final Cut Pro and
0:52:58Logic Pro just last week, that could lead Len Creedence to the idea that it's going to be busy.
0:53:05But I don't know. I just, I feel like there's going to be a lot here. And if there's no headset,
0:53:09how can it be busy? Explain that to me. I don't know. I'm not sure. I really don't know. But I
0:53:14mean, there's a couple of examples off the top of my head. It sounds like we're getting an all new
0:53:20watchOS, or for some loose definition of all new, which we may or may not talk about this episode.
0:53:26Yeah, we should be getting widget support on iPadOS. I'm trying to think of other things.
0:53:31Presumably there'll be a lot of improvements to SwiftUI. I mean, this is a developer conference,
0:53:35strictly speaking. So hopefully we'll see a lot of SwiftUI improvements. I'm not sure. I feel like
0:53:41they could fill an hour to an hour and a half with just normal software stuff. I mean, hell,
0:53:47Chris Vanazzo says in the chat, "No new features in macOS." That would need an hour and a half just
0:53:52for applause, right? So that would be a crowd pleaser, but I don't know if it would count as a
0:53:56big, you know, I kind of feel like headset is the obvious one that would make this big. And honestly,
0:54:02if they have the headset, nothing else matters, essentially. Like not that they're not, of course,
0:54:06they're going to have new versions of all their OS's and the new versions will have nice features,
0:54:09but if they have the headset, that alone makes it this, an extremely, like these come rarely.
0:54:16When does Apple introduce new platforms? Not that often. watchOS, tvOS, like they, you know,
0:54:21sometimes they're big, sometimes they're small, but this is so hyped, so long rumored. It's as
0:54:25if they were coming out with the car, right? All you need is that. If that exists in the keynote,
0:54:29it is a big keynote. If that doesn't, it isn't released in this keynote. I think to make it a
0:54:35big keynote, you need a lot of things that currently seem unlikely. I think you would
0:54:39need the 15 inch MacBook era to be announced. You need all new versions of the OS's with more than,
0:54:44with some significant features that people care about. And I think you'd have to probably throw
0:54:47in the Mac pro. That's what it would take to match the headset. And it always comes back to the Mac
0:54:52pro. Honestly, no one cares about the Mac pro, but, but me, but if you're trying to make a big
0:54:57keynote, you need the things people do care about 15 inch MacBook air, all new versions of all the
0:55:01operating systems that people love Swift with the new features, new version of X code. And then you
0:55:05throw in the Mac pro as a, you know, fun kick. If you remember when the Mac pro was announced
0:55:09at WWC, we were all there. I believe, um, the 2019 Mac pro that is. And I think that was like
0:55:16the star of the show in terms of didn't they like leave that to the end, like, despite the fact that
0:55:20nobody buys them or whatever, it is a, it is a glamour product for Apple to roll out because
0:55:26it's big, it's powerful, it's shiny, it's expensive. It's good looking if you like holes.
0:55:30And so I even, I know people think like, oh, nobody cares about the Mac pro. That doesn't
0:55:37make a big keynote. It does. It would, it would add to the bigness of it, but you need all that
0:55:41stuff that I described. And on the other side of the scale, just the headset by itself.
0:55:46Yeah, that's fair, but I don't know. I, I I've been talking a long time, but suffice to say,
0:55:51I get the feeling that whatever it is, it's going to be a big year, which is why I really hope that
0:55:57the three of us get to be there. So Apple call us, we'd love to hear from you. Um, but no, I,
0:56:02I think it's, I think it's going to be big and, and I don't, I think that would be excellent
0:56:07because I don't feel like the last couple of years have been bad by any means, but I think just a
0:56:12really firing on all cylinders kind of year would be pretty, pretty awesome. I'm excited. You know,
0:56:19I'm, I'm a little bit nervous for, as a developer that like, I'm about to have my summer, you know,
0:56:25ruined in the best way. You know, the same way it's like, you know, like, like the Jonathan
0:56:29Colton song about, you know, you're, you're in everything the nicest way. Like when you have
0:56:32a kid, it's like, oh, you ruin everything in the nicest way because you, you know,
0:56:35you disrupt my life in a huge way. But you know, you're my kid and I love you. I it's,
0:56:40forgive the horrendous summarizing of this, you know, art form. Um, I feel like this is,
0:56:46this might be like that for developers in the sense that like, whatever plans we had for this year
0:56:51are probably about to be derailed in a pretty big way by the headset. You know, it seems by all
0:56:57accounts, it seems like the headset is being announced at this event. Uh, and there's going
0:57:03to be a developer story to it because obviously why else would they announce it if that'd be quite
0:57:07a move at a developer conference to be like, here's a brand new brand new platform, a sweet solution.
0:57:12You can make web apps for it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Um, so anyway, yeah, you can, you can program it
0:57:17only with Siri. Oh gosh. I would quit the business. Anyway. Um, so I think our, our plans are, are
0:57:28going to be disrupted if our plans weren't, you know, wait for the headset, it's going to be
0:57:31disruptive. And I think it's going to be in a very exciting way. Um, I don't know what the headset
0:57:39will be. I don't know what the headset chances are on the market, but you know, when I, when I use
0:57:45the existing VR headset hardware that exists, you know, on the market today, the limited amount I
0:57:50have used with it, although, you know, with the exception of the Oculus, whatever two that we have
0:57:55upstairs, um, I'm super uninterested in it and it kind of gives me motion sickness a little bit.
0:58:02I don't, it doesn't work optically well with my eyes for whatever reasons. It just, there's a lot
0:58:08of like minor paper cuts or major paper cuts with it. And I don't find the games that interesting.
0:58:12But Apple is full of really smart nerds. And many of them have apparently decided that what they
0:58:21have is something special and worth shipping for Apple in a pretty high profile way. So
0:58:27I'm, I'm optimistic. I'm tend to be optimistic that whatever they have is probably pretty good
0:58:34because I trust them to make that call and they call it right most of the time.
0:58:39So whatever they have, you know, we can look around the market and we can be super
0:58:44unexcited about all the other VR headsets out there and also trust Apple to say, you know what,
0:58:51if they're this excited about something like this and they're thinking and they're releasing it now,
0:58:55there's probably something there. It's probably really good in at least some ways for at least
0:58:59some uses and possibly more. So, you know, otherwise they wouldn't be releasing it.
0:59:04You know, Apple holds back on a lot of stuff. So we, we can be fairly sure that what does get out
0:59:10there, especially a new platform in a high profile release like this is bound to be,
0:59:14they've done their homework. They've probably built something really cool. And it's probably
0:59:19going to be really exciting when we see it. So that's why I'm, I'm very interested, not in the
0:59:24VR or AR or XR space in general. I'm very interested in what the heck did Apple do here?
0:59:30Because I trust them to, if they're, if they've gotten to this point, it's probably something
0:59:36really exciting and really good. Now, how many other people will think so and will be willing
0:59:40to spend $3,000 and, you know, deal with the whole, you know, butt mounted battery situation.
0:59:45Who knows? We'll see when we get there. But again, I trust them to have gotten this right.
0:59:49If they do that, I don't think that'll be a thing to deal with, by the way. I think that'll be a
0:59:52feature that everyone will say, oh, of course they did it. I mean, we've all discussed all the
0:59:56reasons. It's just that once the product comes out, all the reasons we've discussed suddenly
1:00:00become like concrete and people say, I always thought it was a good idea because the headset
1:00:04weighs less and you can swap batteries and so on and so forth. But right now everyone thinks it's
1:00:08dumb. Right. And then the whole rest of the industry will change to butt batteries and
1:00:11they'll be like, well, of course, this is the obvious design. We didn't copy Apple.
1:00:14Exactly. Right. It was obvious we didn't copy Apple at all. I mean, Apple's not going to be
1:00:17the first one to use a battery pack, an external battery pack, a bunch of other people. Not in
1:00:20any way. I do feel like for this, for the headset, again, I get the vibe that it's coming this year.
1:00:26If it's not, I think a lot of people will be disappointed. I think it's, you know, whatever,
1:00:30like it would quote unquote justifiable. It's like, well, Apple never announced anything.
1:00:33That was all on you. It was just rumors. But anyway, the good thing that I hope the headset
1:00:38will do is provide cover for every other product. And I know this is not the way it works inside
1:00:45Apple, but like it's plausible that there could be enough internal communication to let the other
1:00:54products that are announced every day, every day, we see all the new versions of the new OS,
1:00:58the new version of Swift updates and frameworks, the new version of Xcode,
1:01:01gives them some cover to not feel like they have to press, press, press to get their exciting feature
1:01:08out the door ASAP, even if it's buggy, because the headset is just going to block out the sun
1:01:12at WWDC. Right. And so a lot of times at WWDC, I feel like I feel some groups are pressing. They're
1:01:18like, we really need to wow them in the keynote and they show something and we are wowed, but then
1:01:23we realize like, Oh, this is even, isn't even in the build, the beta build at WWDC. It'll be coming
1:01:30in the later build. And when it does come, it's buggy and unfinished and it just ends up being
1:01:34frustrating and disappointing. And it's like, you don't need to try that hard ship what you're
1:01:39actually ready to ship. Like, I don't want to see anything in any of the other sort of platform
1:01:43stuff that isn't in the WWDC beta, because I feel like the headset provides them cover to be more
1:01:50relaxed with their, uh, you know, with, with their choice of what to include and what to save for a
1:01:57future release in the ideal world. I would have liked, you know, Apple to have the forethought to
1:02:02say, Hey, uh, you know, back in 2022, Hey, WWDC 2023, we're going to ship the headset.
1:02:09So everybody else, when you're planning your new releases for the new versions of all the different
1:02:13OSs, everybody takes a snow leopard, right? That didn't happen. Like that's that they don't have
1:02:18that kind of coordination. They can't tell the future that far in advance. It's foolhardy to try
1:02:22to make plans like that. I do think it would be wise for them to give each platform a snow leopard
1:02:27once in a while, we've talked a lot about macOS not being annual if they could get the bugs out of
1:02:32it, but it's just too big of a company to be that coordinated and making plans that far in advance
1:02:39about software releases and releases and headset. Most of, you know, part of the reason you can't
1:02:44make that plan is that all the other groups aren't even probably disclosed on the headset if they
1:02:47don't have to be, uh, or subsets of them are because only some people who work on tvOS now
1:02:52have to know about the headset, not all the people. And certainly the people who work on tvOS hardware
1:02:56probably don't need to know about anyway, it's very compartmentalized to the detriment of Apple
1:03:01internally. I feel like sometimes, and this is kind of one of those cases that we just assume
1:03:05that despite the fact that if the headset does launch a WWDC, it will provide cover for lots of
1:03:11other OSs. The only thing that helps them with is what I just described, which is okay. Now,
1:03:17maybe they don't have to press, maybe the higher levels of the org chart can cannot press to have
1:03:22the Xcode team, you know, push out some feature of Xcode that is buggy and going to cause the
1:03:27app to crash all the time. They'll say, we'll just save that to next year. It's fine that you
1:03:31don't have it. And they won't know that's because the headset is coming, but only like the people
1:03:35seven levels off the org chart who are disclosed in the headset do know that. And they let those
1:03:39things travel downhill. This, I know this sounds Byzantine and complicated, but honestly, this is
1:03:44the way it works in big companies, especially ones like Apple that have everything compartmentalized.
1:03:48This is whole, that's why reading the tea leaves is a thing. That's whole kind of game of telephone
1:03:53of like what gets prioritized, what gets given money and why by people who at various points in
1:03:59the chain don't know, have all the information available. They just know what the people above
1:04:02them tell them and what the people below them send back and feedback, but they don't, nobody
1:04:06has the whole picture until you get pretty high in the org chart. And it makes it very difficult to
1:04:10act in a coherent manner. It's an, Apple has an amazing job of it to be clear as a company,
1:04:14they speak with one voice, their, their marketing, their PR makes it seem like they are a coherent
1:04:20mass, but internally it's lots of little kingdoms moving in all sorts of different directions,
1:04:24pushed and pulled by forces they can't see and don't understand for the most part.
1:04:27Yeah. We can put that slogan in there and they're recruiting material.
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1:05:39So collide with a K, Collide. K-O-L-I-D-E.com/ATP. Collide.com/ATP. Thank you so much to Collide
1:05:48for sponsoring our show. So in terms of like the overall, like what I expect from the other
1:05:57platforms, you know, it's hard when in a new platform year, like what we have most likely
1:06:04here with the headset launching, this is a year as John mentioned, like this doesn't happen often,
1:06:07this is a year of a new platform. What tends to happen with Apple when a new platform is being
1:06:12developed is a bunch of talent is pulled from other teams to work on that new thing. And
1:06:17obviously that doesn't, it doesn't all just happen in one year. But what has probably happened here
1:06:22is probably a bunch of people from other OSs and other projects in the company have probably been
1:06:28spending a lot of time recently working on the headset. And so I would expect based on that for
1:06:34not only this year, but also last year to have been somewhat slow. And I would say that's kind
1:06:38of the case, you know, that being said, Apple's a bigger company now than they used to be. And they
1:06:42are able to maintain things on multiple fronts better than they used to be. They're still not
1:06:46great at it, but they're way better than they used to be. But anyway, so I would expect this to be a
1:06:51somewhat slow year for the other platforms. But that being said, in terms of like what is actionable
1:06:59for developers to do with the headset right now, I think, you know, we're gonna see version 1.0 of
1:07:07this OS, we're gonna see version 1.0 of the SDK and version 1.0 of all the frameworks and the UI
1:07:13and everything else. On some level, it's very exciting and very disruptive to our customers,
1:07:18as I was saying earlier. But also, there might just not be that much for us to do yet on it.
1:07:24You know, first of all, I don't know when they plan to actually ship this thing to us. But that's
1:07:30gonna itself be a pretty big limitation. Like there's gonna be a lot of things where we want
1:07:35to develop something for this, but we kind of can't until we have one. Or we can only do preliminary
1:07:40work maybe in some kind of simulator or something until we get one. Or maybe, you know, maybe Apple
1:07:45will use the new developer center that they built, they opened up last year, to like, you know,
1:07:50invite developers out by invitation only, come out to the developer center in, you know, July and
1:07:56August, and you can sign up for like, you know, a one day slot to use the hardware and test your app
1:08:02on it. You know, they did that with the watch. So, you know, and they had like the whole dev kit
1:08:06situation with the transition to Apple silicones, like they've done stuff kind of in this ballpark
1:08:11before. So I'm guessing that kind of thing will happen, you know, whether it will be open to
1:08:16many developers is a different question. You know, I'm sure some developers will get invited.
1:08:21You know, I don't know if it will be like, anybody can sign up kind of thing. I think it'll be more
1:08:25likely, you know, don't call us, we'll call you. That's much more likely just for scale. But anyway,
1:08:31so I don't expect there to be a ton for developers to do on the headset yet this summer, because
1:08:38presumably, we won't have them yet. We won't have access to them yet. And we probably will have a
1:08:44very early SDK. So and so it's going to depend a lot on what you do. Like if you if you make an app
1:08:51or or choose to make an app, that is really a great thing in AR VR, then you're going to have
1:08:59maybe a busier time. If you make, say a podcast player, you know, it might not be that important,
1:09:05like, it might just be all right, find a way to show a UI. But otherwise, everything else is the
1:09:10same. And and if the stories are accurate about like, you know, them being able to run iPad apps
1:09:15and little windows, it might not be that much work at all for developers to get their apps to at
1:09:20least run on the thing. And then, you know, once we have physical access to them, then we can maybe
1:09:24worry about, you know, making it good in the thing. Secondly, if we don't have physical access to them,
1:09:29neither do our customers. And so again, it's like, there's only going to be so much we can really
1:09:35do until this thing is out in the market, or at least widely available to developers. So that's
1:09:41going to hold back some of that. So I would, I would also hope that there is some nice to haves
1:09:47on the other platforms. This is what we're gonna get to in a second. And I think, based on the
1:09:52rumors and everything so far, that seems fairly plausible. And also just based on you know, what
1:09:56Apple has done, even when their teams have been busy doing other stuff, you know, on new platforms,
1:10:02whatever, they do tend to have decent iOS releases. You know, Mac OS, oftentimes, you know, is last
1:10:09priority and doesn't get much. And frankly, that's often a good thing. Because when, when they,
1:10:15when they touch Mac OS, without a ton of effort behind it, they tend to break things and make them
1:10:19worse. So, you know, that's, it's good for Mac OS to not have not have a lot of updates when they're
1:10:25busy. So, but iOS, I think is, is likely to have some decent quality of life stuff there. That,
1:10:33you know, even if there isn't some kind of massive, you know, SDK overhaul, some kind of massive new
1:10:39language or framework or anything else, like, even in the absence of those really big updates,
1:10:44there tends to be a bunch of nice small stuff with new iOS upgrades, both as customer facing
1:10:49features and on the on the developer SDK and a lot of little like quality life improvements,
1:10:53little new APIs, little, you know, single little modifiers for Swift UI, or, hey, here's a new view
1:10:58container that makes things easier for you. You know, stuff like that, that tends to get there
1:11:02and never release. So I'm expecting that for iOS. And then I think what we're about to get to is,
1:11:08I'm actually very excited and interested to hear that there's pretty strong rumors that WatchOS
1:11:14is getting substantial updates. Do we want to talk about that now?
1:11:18So yeah, this is reported in Bloomberg, what was this last month, I believe in late April,
1:11:23I believe it was a Mark Gurman piece that talked about how Apple is to upgrade its watch operating
1:11:29system with a new focus on widgets. And so Mark writes, as part of WatchOS 10, Apple is planning
1:11:35to bring back widgets and make them a central part of the interface. The new widget system on the
1:11:39Apple watch will be a combination of the old WatchOS Glances system and the style of widgets
1:11:43that were introduced in iOS 14 on the iPhone. The plan is to let users scroll through different
1:11:47a series of different widgets for activity tracking, weather, stock, tickers, calendar
1:11:51appointments, and more, rather than having them launch apps. The new interface will be reminiscent
1:11:55of the Siri watch face, which was introduced in WatchOS 4, but it will be available as an
1:12:00overlay for any watch face. It's also similar to widget stacks, a feature in iOS and iPadOS that
1:12:04lets users pile many widgets into one and scroll through them. As part of the overhaul, Apple is
1:12:09testing the idea of changing the functions of some of the watch's buttons. Currently,
1:12:12press the digital crown, launches the home screen. For the next version of WatchOS,
1:12:15Apple may have that open up widgets instead. And it is worth noting that apparently the Watch
1:12:21App Store has fewer than a million monthly users in the whatever region they were going to through
1:12:26some court proceedings. Apple disclosed versus 101 million on the iPhone, so literally 100 times more
1:12:33people using the iOS App Store than the WatchOS App Store. I can't say I'm surprised. But yeah,
1:12:38I mean, I think the idea of widgets on the watch is appealing. I don't know if I'm quite
1:12:46as enthusiastic as you are, Marco, but I will say that even as someone who has only dabbled
1:12:54in watch development, one of the things that makes watch development very tough, particularly
1:12:58for things like complications, is that you have extraordinarily little time as a developer to run
1:13:04code that will update information on a complication and other things like that. And so if widgets were
1:13:11given more flexibility and more time to update themselves, such that they're getting updated
1:13:17more than what feels like three times a day, I know that's not literally the case, but that's
1:13:21what it feels like sometimes, that I would be more enthusiastic about. Like when I look down at my
1:13:26Carrot weather widget, and it's not, excuse me, complication, and it's not Carrot's fault,
1:13:32oftentimes it is clearly behind, especially on spring or fall days where the temperature can
1:13:39vary pretty dramatically from morning to afternoon. A lot of times I'll look and my watch will say,
1:13:45"Oh, it's like 40 degrees outside," but I can tell it's easily 20 degrees more than that.
1:13:50And so I think what I'm most potentially interested in is if there is either a better API,
1:13:59which presumably there would be, and I'm going to give you a chance here Marco in a second,
1:14:02but a better API to make this work a little better or be easier to do on the developer side,
1:14:08but more importantly, just to have a little bit more ability to make the watch feel alive rather
1:14:16than something that occasionally wakes up and then goes immediately back to sleep again. Marco,
1:14:21does any of that make sense? Yes. And I think you've identified a couple of the key parts of
1:14:28both why I'm excited for this and also why some of the issues I've had with WatchOS in the past
1:14:34and present. So Apple has a long history going back to, I believe the first major version of this
1:14:41that we saw in modern day was dashboard for macOS. A long history of these views that you can get
1:14:49where you have to go to the view or you look at a view of something and at that point, when you're
1:14:56looking at it, the app is asked, "Hey, update this data." And in the meantime, maybe it shows a
1:15:00placeholder or stale data and then the new data pops in like a second or two later. And from a
1:15:06user point of view, that sucks. It's terrible when you look at something on your watch or in the old
1:15:12dashboard interface on the Mac or different places like that, or the old today screen or the today
1:15:17widgets on iOS, you would seek out this information, you would go to it, or you would look at it.
1:15:24And then at that point, the system would ask the app, "Oh, hey, update this." And the reason why
1:15:30it was built that way was that the systems for various reasons over time, there weren't the
1:15:36system resources or they were chosen not to be spent this way to have those apps constantly
1:15:41running in the background, being able to update their data whenever they wanted. In the case on
1:15:46the watch, the watch has always been extremely power constrained. And that dictates everything
1:15:52about it. It's a very small battery and a very small device. And they really can't make the
1:15:56battery any bigger. It's already most of the device. So it's like, you got to deal with what
1:16:00you got here. And that dictates everything. That dictates the slow processor the watch has relative
1:16:08to the phone. Everything is about space and power and minimizing drain on that battery.
1:16:14**Matt Stauffer** Speaking of that, there are rumors that they're going to actually change the
1:16:17SOC, not just change the number, but actually change. And I don't see the rumors around three
1:16:23nanometer really confusing because I know TSMC is ramping up on three nanometer, but the lead times
1:16:29are such that I can't figure out when Apple will ship a product fab done TSMC's three nanometer
1:16:36process. But I also can't imagine the watch SOC being substantially better without going to a new
1:16:43process. I don't know what the current process is. Is it actually the same process size as the
1:16:48good five nanometer that the phones are? Or is it?
1:16:52**Matt Stauffer** It might still be seven. I mean, because the watch SOC, the CPU in the watch,
1:16:58I don't know about the whole SOC, the CPU cores in the watch have not changed in three years.
1:17:03**Matt Stauffer** I think the whole SOC has. I think people who looked at the die shots that
1:17:07not much has changed for a long time.
1:17:10**Matt Stauffer** Yeah. So it's using a three year old processor. And so that's not fun. Yeah,
1:17:14I think the series six, seven and eight, they're all the same chip.
1:17:17**Matt Stauffer** So the rumor is this might be a new chip. And I think if it uses a
1:17:22smaller process size than the previous one, that could give Apple a little bit of headroom to
1:17:28change some of the things you just described.
1:17:29**Matt Stauffer** Yes, because that's the thing. Like with watch OS, since its beginning,
1:17:34it was all about conserving, extremely aggressively conserving the resources on the watch,
1:17:40because there's not much to go around. So that impacts the way apps have been built from the
1:17:45beginning in various ways. But the gist of it is what Casey said, that your app, you don't always
1:17:53run. Like if you're not being actively used on screen, with very few exceptions, you're not
1:17:58running. And so if you rely on a third party app that has say a complication that you're looking
1:18:03at, say, you know, carrot weather, you know, a good weather app, you know, you're looking at,
1:18:07you know, whatever the complication is on the screen, like, that app is only being woken up
1:18:11in the background every so often to, you know, fetch new data from the internet, update the data
1:18:16in the app and, you know, update the complication, you know, data. And it tells the watch, hey,
1:18:23over these next, you know, six hours, here's the hourly forecasted display from this time to this
1:18:28time show this from this time to this time show this, etc. It gives us this timeline of updates.
1:18:32And during that entire time, the watch may not and probably won't ever ask the app, hey, refresh,
1:18:39give me give me give me new data here. So what you're looking at when you when you look at watch
1:18:45complications, you are looking at a series a timeline of pre rendered data that is that the
1:18:52app has provided during some like three second long window, it was allowed to run in the background
1:18:57a few hours ago, possibly. And and there's a certain limit on how many times per day can do
1:19:01that the app servers can send push notifications to request an update, but those aren't always
1:19:06obeyed. It's more it's like, it's a request, not a guarantee, like, please give me some time,
1:19:10I have some new stuff, I would like to show it. And the and the watch can say, okay, or the watch
1:19:16can say, I don't know what you're talking about and just walk away. And so there's all these
1:19:21limitations. And the widget system on the iPhone was built the same way. If you were making watch
1:19:28complications, you know, a couple of years ago, then when widget came out, it was like, oh,
1:19:31this is clock kit, just, you know, slightly different and with swifty, why, which made a
1:19:35lot better. But that that that idea of when you swipe over when you view a widget on the iPhone,
1:19:42that app is not running. And this is why again, like there's there's also some rumors with iOS 17
1:19:47of possible interactive widgets. And I and this kind of flies in the face of this, because it's
1:19:52kind of questioning like, well, what is what would that mean? And I think it would be very limited
1:19:56if that if there's a thing but anyway, because, again, widgets on iOS work that same way. And
1:20:03then actually, they later then brought that widget system back to the watch and replaced clock kit,
1:20:08which was based on widget kit was based on the ideas of clock kit, but did it better with Swift
1:20:12UI, then they redid the new complication system using widget kit because it was better. Anyway,
1:20:18so they brought it back full circle anyway. So on iOS, you know, you have widgets, those apps aren't
1:20:24running, it's the same thing where they are periodically asked for updates. And the app gives
1:20:30the gives iOS a timeline to say, all right, show this from this time, this time, etc. And again,
1:20:35same thing applies this, the that app servers can send a push notification requesting an update,
1:20:39it may or may not be obeyed, there are there's there's limits, there's throttling, etc.
1:20:44On iOS, there's, you know, one set of limits on the watch, it's way more aggressively throttled.
1:20:49And there's way less opportunity for apps to update their complications on the watch.
1:20:54So anything they do, first of all, it makes perfect sense to bring that system more to the watch.
1:21:00Because it does what the watch needs. It gives a timeline of updates without having to have all
1:21:06these apps running in the background drain the between the very, very tiny battery in the Apple
1:21:10Watch. So it makes sense to have this be more built into the system. That being said, if there's
1:21:17no other major advances, like more frequent background updates, more, you know, a more robust
1:21:24system to request updates, higher limits on how much CPU time or memory those processes or
1:21:29extensions can use when they're updating. Without other changes like that, it's going to be a fairly
1:21:36limited system. And it's not going to enable a lot of what people would expect or want. So I hope
1:21:43when they bring this over, assuming they have to, I mean, I'm sure it's too late now, whatever they
1:21:47have decided to do, that's it. But I hope they have, when they have presumably brought this over,
1:21:52I hope it has come with some increases in those limits or some, you know, less aggressive
1:21:58throttling, some more frequent updates being permitted or something. And all of that, I think,
1:22:06will be a great thing once they establish it. Because when you look at the way the watch works
1:22:10now, apps on the watch still suck. They just suck less than they used to, way less. I mean,
1:22:16they used to be horrendous with, you know, WatchKit 1. That was rough. But, you know,
1:22:22they're still very limited. They're still way more limited than iOS apps. And it makes it very hard
1:22:30as a developer to make a great watch app experience that will match what our users expect. As a result,
1:22:36it's kind of unfair. You know, like, I don't use a third party weather widget on my, as a
1:22:42complication on my watch. Because third party apps, even the best written ones, like Carrot,
1:22:48Carrot's a great app. Even the best written weather apps on the Apple Watch cannot update
1:22:55their complications as often or as reliably as Apple lets theirs update. So I use Apple weather
1:23:01complications on my watch, even though they're less good, because they work better and more
1:23:06consistently. And that's not to say anything against the developer of other apps. They can't
1:23:11do anything about it. It's out of their hands. So, and I know this, like, because I have my own
1:23:16custom little complications, don't do anything useful, but I just kind of use them for cosmetic,
1:23:21you know, things on my own face. And I know that occasionally they just stop getting asked to
1:23:25update. And I can't do anything about it. So the whole system is pretty, it's pretty limiting for
1:23:31third party developers. So what I'm hoping, if they're moving this to the system from a developer
1:23:36point of view, I hope those limits get get raised in a big way. And maybe they maybe they don't need
1:23:42the new processor, maybe not. I hope not because I would like them to be available on all the
1:23:46existing install base. But hey, we'll see what happens. And then as a user of watchOS,
1:23:51the honeycomb screen has always been a huge failure. I anytime you have to go to that screen,
1:24:00you've lost. And it's going to that screen. It's like trying to plug in a micro USB cable.
1:24:06It's like, I know I'm going to be I'm going to spend way too long staring at these tiny icons
1:24:09trying to find the app that I want. And whatever I tap on whatever I guess is this alarm or timer,
1:24:14whatever I guess is going to be wrong the first time and maybe the second. And so it that's created
1:24:19is terrible. You can change it to a list if you want by a long pressing. But the list is terrible
1:24:25in different ways. It's first of all, it's just too long. There's all these different built in
1:24:29features, many of which you can't turn off that you know, you need some way to access. So that
1:24:34whole system could use a rethink. It's a hard problem. I get you know, they're trying to cram
1:24:4040 apps onto a two inch screen like yeah, it's that's that's a tough problem. But
1:24:46there is room for improvement in the way they've done it now. So if the rumor is correct, that they
1:24:52are actually re implementing or rethinking large parts of how users interact with apps on the watch
1:24:58at all. That's a very good thing too. And then finally, I would say the the rate of adoption of
1:25:07third party apps among non nerd people on the watch is really low. And and I mean, this is just
1:25:15anecdotal. But you know, look around people in your life who have Apple watches. We've talked
1:25:19about that on the show before. How many of them even know that you can change the complications?
1:25:27Ask around, look around, see how many people in your life use an Apple watch face that even has
1:25:31complications. And then see how many of those are on the default. And it's a lot. It's most of them.
1:25:36So the watch has a lot of functionality that is just that people just don't know about. And you
1:25:44can't blame them because the way to access this functionality is often really hidden or convoluted.
1:25:50Or on the phone. Yeah, or on the phone, which I mean, fortunately, they have been moving a lot of
1:25:54that off. Like I recently I tried to edit like, what metrics were shown in different workout modes.
1:26:01And that used to be phone only. And now it's watch only. Now you have to like hit the little
1:26:06like dot menu on the workout and go in there and edit stuff there. It took me a while to figure out
1:26:11like, first I was looking all over the phone app for it. Couldn't find it anywhere there. I'm like,
1:26:15well, crap, did they just remove customization of workout faces. And then eventually I found it in
1:26:19the in the watch app, but it took me a while. And I and that was like, I know this feature is probably
1:26:25still here somewhere. And I know roughly where to look at it. And I'm a computer professional.
1:26:29And it took me a long time to figure it out. So there's a lot of stuff like that on the watch.
1:26:34There's a lot of functionality in the watch, much of which people would really enjoy if they knew
1:26:39it was there or if they knew how to do it. And it's it has a massive discoverability problem.
1:26:44And a lot of stuff is super clunky about it once you do figure it out. So there's a lot of room
1:26:48for improvement there. I'm really excited that they're that they're tackling this because in
1:26:52most for most of the last three to five years, it has seemed like the watch is not well staffed.
1:27:00Like it seemed like when WBC comes comes and goes every year for the watch. It has seemed a lot like
1:27:06man is do they have like more than four people working on this entire OS like because they you
1:27:12know, they do good work, but it's just really bits and pieces come out every year like it's not it
1:27:17not a lot comes out from the watch from watch OS every year. It's a very it's kind of like tvOS
1:27:21like you get a couple of things here and there but it's a very very small set of new features
1:27:25every year. And so it has seemed under invested in in the last you know, X years. This suggests
1:27:32that they have actually put a lot of effort into it this year. So that's exciting to me as well.
1:27:36I'm really looking forward to hopefully the watch having like major major updates in usability or
1:27:43in app capabilities or app structure or whatever it is. I hope they actually deliver on that.
1:27:48I hope it's really good. And I would also hope still maybe the more you put a widget like
1:27:55architecture into the watch. I think the the easier that makes it for them to offer third
1:28:02party watch faces as an option. Yeah. Now whether I know I know happen eventually whether yeah,
1:28:07whether they are doing it, whether they will choose to do it, whether they will permit it.
1:28:12These are all very different questions. But from a technical point of view using widget kit or a
1:28:19widget kit like system with some pre-built parts makes a lot of sense for enabling for the structure
1:28:26to enable third party watch faces because then you don't have to have a third party process running
1:28:31constantly on the on the watch. You can again just wake it up periodically. You can you have you can
1:28:36define certain pieces that you have to use like all right well you have to use this digital face
1:28:42of this size and it has to be in this location or you can choose to use these specific analog
1:28:48watch hands and they have to be in this location. You know whatever it is if they wanted to dictate
1:28:52certain parts of it and certain requirements to say all watch faces must be able to do X, Y, Z or
1:28:57must use pieces X, Y, Z in this way. They could do that really well with with with widget kit
1:29:03technically speaking and practically speaking. So it seems like the the most apparent and obvious
1:29:08way to enable third-party watch faces based on the tech stack we know of today is with widget kit.
1:29:13So bringing widget kit to watchOS in a bigger way yeah that makes a lot of sense for maybe maybe
1:29:18maybe enabling this either now or in the future. I hope it's now. If it isn't now and I know it
1:29:23probably isn't I hope it's in the near future because I still want third-party watch faces
1:29:26and this is just such a such a clear like you know I wouldn't necessarily call anything easy
1:29:31but this is actually a straightforward and and dare I say obvious way to offer them you know
1:29:36using this kind of architecture. So anyway I'm looking forward to this and and I hope
1:29:41I hope this is an exciting year for watchOS. So imagine this it's WWDC we're you know we're
1:29:47watching the video since it's a fantasy we're all sitting next to each other for the first time
1:29:51since 2019. We're watching the video together and Kevin Lynch comes on the video and says
1:29:58I only have one thing to tell you about the watch communication between the watch and the phone
1:30:03is reliable now and then walks away. That's not gonna happen. Is that enough is it'll never happen
1:30:08but Marco is that enough to make this a classic like just favorite WWDC of all time? Oh no because
1:30:15I would first of all I don't think it's possible second of all I wouldn't I wouldn't believe them
1:30:19and I think the the way the way to fix phone to watch communication is to get rid of it
1:30:24like the way the way to fix it is to give me the same controls that I have on URL background
1:30:31download sessions and URL communication which you most you have most of it already give me the same
1:30:36background download abilities and APIs on the watch that I have on the phone let it let it
1:30:40download like let background download start immediately and and let them run over wi-fi
1:30:46and not over bluetooth to the phone. That's what like there's a there's a number of points in that
1:30:51communication stack that are either unreliable or ungodly slow and again this is all in the name of
1:30:56saving power like you can see why they did it but I think a lot of those decisions they might have
1:31:03made sense seven years ago maybe they make less sense now or maybe they're not as necessary now
1:31:08as they used to be and the those decisions really hold back apps and and so again I hope they like
1:31:16just let my app initiate a background-able download that will run over wi-fi and start
1:31:23immediately. That's it I can do it on iOS I can do it on all other Apple OS's. Well I don't I don't
1:31:31think Mac OS supports background downloads anyway I can do it on most other Apple OS's. I can't do
1:31:37it on on the watch and that really holds stuff back to the point where I had to make a breakout
1:31:43game in my app so that you would keep the screen on like that the whole reason I had to make a
1:31:48game in my watch app in my podcast app while you download a file is so that you have something to
1:31:53do that will keep the screen on so I don't have to rely on the background downloads when you want to
1:31:57download something right now before you go out for a run or something and you don't want it to be
1:32:01cancelled for no reason or to never start for no reason so please Apple make that stuff better but
1:32:07anyway I will complain a lot less about that if I have custom third-party watch faces. No that's
1:32:13fair. So John pulling on this thread a moment what is your I don't care about anything else that
1:32:18happened this was a great WWDC I assume new Mac Pro? I mean yeah well I'm not really expecting
1:32:25that because of the rumors although I do have a brief aside about something that Marco talked
1:32:29about how people don't know don't customize their complications on their watches they don't know
1:32:35they can do it and the interface of doing it is clunky and it's lots of things on the watch are
1:32:39non-discoverable and when you were describing that I thought this is another place where
1:32:45it seems like Apple is I mean we don't know because we don't know what they're doing but
1:32:50it seems like they're behind where everyone else is zooming forward with their large language
1:32:53models one of the things that current large language models that are out there right now
1:32:57are really good at doing is exactly this task which is a voice interface to describing what
1:33:03you want your the complications in your phone screen to be like you can go to one of these
1:33:08large language models right now and say make me a web page in the lower left corner put a picture
1:33:12of a sun in the lower right corner put a counter that counts up every second and like you could
1:33:16actually describe the functionality of the widgets and it will do it like how easy would it be for a
1:33:20well-trained large language model to say I want the weather in the upper left the date in the
1:33:25lower left and then continue a conversation said no I want the date to be the day of the week plus
1:33:31the the month in the year or I don't want the year like those type of conversations you can have them
1:33:36with large language models right now and the canvas that they're painting on is like anything
1:33:41you can ask for more or less it'll try to do it with varying degrees the problem space of picking
1:33:47which widgets you want to picking out from a fixed set of widgets to appear in a fixed set of location
1:33:52with a fixed set of options large language models would eat that for breakfast the problems are one
1:33:57apple seems not to be on that train with everyone else as far as we know because they haven't
1:34:02announced anything in that area two their existing thing that you can talk to Siri sucks balls and we
1:34:06know that and then you know three I don't think this is the type of thing that apple can uh you
1:34:13know say oh well they're popular we're rolling out this year you know like it's again as hard
1:34:18enough as we don't know what's going on but like it seems like apple is behind everyone else on
1:34:23this so you can't expect them to surprise watch os 10 is out and it's got a large language model that
1:34:30you can talk to and I guess this ties into what Marco was saying too is even if you could like
1:34:33you don't run the large language model on the watch right so now it has to do network communication oh
1:34:38no the sky is falling batteries being destroyed and I get that like like it's true of what Marco
1:34:43was asking for I want my downloaders to start now and on wi-fi it'll kill people's watch batteries
1:34:46but it's like but they want that to happen when they're down they you know it's the balance
1:34:50between which would you rather have your podcast literally never downloads and it frustrates you
1:34:53to no end or we burn part of your battery downloading your podcast like you have to pick one
1:34:57you can't like there's no way to get the podcast on your watch without burning battery so either
1:35:01you want it and you're willing to sacrifice the battery for it and you don't and the same deal
1:35:04I think with talking to your watch and setting up with a large language model and setting up your
1:35:08complications maybe as a one-time tutorial that you guide people through when they're setting up
1:35:13their watch and they have a conversation with it and during the course of the conversation the
1:35:16watch face forms in front of their eyes is a great way to a show people that's possible and b
1:35:23let them know that they can do it in a way that doesn't involve them poking their fingers at the
1:35:26screen trying to find the interface because I have the same frustration I'm not familiar with watch
1:35:29os because I don't wear an apple watch and anytime I want to do anything in watch os I don't know
1:35:33where it is I don't know how it works I can't figure out what things are supposed to be touching
1:35:36or what even what the vocabulary of gestures is to do stuff large language models would destroy
1:35:42this test they're so good at it it's such a narrow problem space and you can talk in a free form
1:35:46manner and apple's speech to text actually works pretty well so once you get over that hurdle and
1:35:52you can throw that text to a large language model running somewhere on an apple server that it can
1:35:56communicate with that is a I think a really good use of current technology for you know talking to
1:36:04things and the problem space of dealing with any kind of ui on a two-inch screen that's on your
1:36:11wrist yeah and on the point of large language models by the way this is obviously you know a
1:36:18huge question is like we're in the the this like you know boom time of this new generation of ai
1:36:25capabilities what's apple gonna do with wtc with them and and I think unfortunately the answer is
1:36:31probably nothing there is nothing because they like that's not what apple does like apple does
1:36:36stuff you know more slowly than that in a lot of areas and I mean they they could if they were on
1:36:40the ball on this and were were sort of ahead of the curve or even you know even with everyone else
1:36:45they could have stuff to announce the wtc but that whole part of the org seems dysfunctional now again
1:36:50because we don't know what's going on for all we know they've been working on large language
1:36:52model stuff for seven years and they're about to roll it out and wow us but it certainly seems like
1:36:56that's not the case no I think what's more likely is look apple apple knows that again these are
1:37:02smart people they know that the eyes of the world are going to be upon them and expecting
1:37:08ai announcements and so I think what they're going to most likely do is brand some things as ai
1:37:16that are not actually using this new generation of of technique and it's just using you know the
1:37:21the previous generation you know like you know what we used to call machine learning you know
1:37:24these terms and I know these terms are you know oftentimes fake and shifting around over time but
1:37:30they I think they might just you know show off stuff that is using that kind of technique
1:37:35and say this is ai powered you know just because those are the buzzwords that people expect at the
1:37:39day the rumors surrounding the like siri and the headset I seem to recall reading something
1:37:45somewhere that was like a supposedly inside dirt on like that the headset team didn't really want
1:37:51to use siri but like that's what's available to them they're kind of like wanted to go their own
1:37:55direction because siri sucks so bad they're just like well we you know I don't know if they want
1:37:58to use large language models maybe that predates that but like they know they have a problem here
1:38:03because they the headset is similar like the interface to it is more limited than it is on
1:38:08a phone ipad or mac so you have to figure out how do I manipulate things I don't know the whole
1:38:12cameras looking at your fingertips and so on and so forth but it's a harder problem right it's
1:38:15harder than just using a pointer or cursor you know or touching the screen with your fingers
1:38:18you can't do that with a headset so let's use the voice assistant that our company already has
1:38:23oh but that voice assistant is bad so well you don't want the headset to be bad people working
1:38:28on the headset is that we want the headset to be good and we do need something that's going to
1:38:31listen to us and so I kind of agree that they're like as they promote siri and the headset maybe
1:38:37they'll have a new suffix siri ai seri I mean I don't know how they'll go that far but like
1:38:42maybe they'll just say hey siri's in your headset too and everybody loves siri and look how amazing
1:38:47it is you can talk to it and make little vr apps as the rumor was or whatever but like
1:38:51yeah this is another one of the benefits of the headset the fact that it blots out the sun I
1:38:56think it can blot out the fact that apple doesn't really have anything to show uh for it uh
1:39:01regarding large language models wt which is fine they got a whole headset and a new platform isn't
1:39:06that exciting I think they can get away with it this year next year when we come to wc next year
1:39:11regardless of how the headset turns out maybe next year it's finally just shipping to people
1:39:14or something next year apple needs to start having some kind of answers with large language models
1:39:19because I think they've proven they're useful in enough context and like the reason I gave the you
1:39:24know setting up the complications on your watch uh you know watch screen uh problem space that is
1:39:31a limited domain where large language models can excel in in ways that siri absolutely has not
1:39:37because you have to know how to talk to siri and in the special way that siri understands and even
1:39:41when you know sometimes it does ridiculous things that that don't make any sense whereas large
1:39:46language models don't work that way again if you've never tried one go go to one right now and
1:39:51ask it to do something with a limited problem domain or even with a not particularly limited
1:39:55one like I said asking it to make a web page for you or something it's really good about having a
1:40:00conversation with you and understanding what it is you want as long as it's you're talking to it
1:40:04about something that was able to train itself on it's out there in the world and apple can absolutely
1:40:09find a large language model and train it on enough data to understand watch os complications yeah
1:40:16one thing by the way like in in terms of like wwdc you know hopes and dreams here one thing I I would
1:40:23love to see I I don't know if it'll be this year it'll more likely be next year but I would love to
1:40:30see apple make available to developers through apis on the phone some large language model
1:40:38capabilities that they have optimized like crazy to run on their hardware so for instance you know
1:40:42the the stable diffusion algorithm for image generation apple actually I think I believe it
1:40:48was that one apple actually contributed to the open source project or whatever to optimize it
1:40:53for running on apple silicon max and or apple silicon in general and so and then that that
1:40:58kind of enabled people to make iphone apps with it I would love them to do more of that that kind
1:41:03of thing of like and and build it into the os so that we don't have to download like each app you
1:41:08know a good example of this right now is if you want if you want to transcribe sound into speech
1:41:15into text apple has actually shipped an api to do this for a number of years now it's called
1:41:21something like sf speak synthesizer the pro or speech recognizer whatever there were a number
1:41:26of problems with it number one because I've been trying to do features like this in overcast for
1:41:30years you know one of the biggest clearest examples of where I could use this is like
1:41:34when you do clip sharing and overcast to be able to show as part of the video clip the text you
1:41:41know many apps like tick tock you know they do this they have this built in now this is a common
1:41:46thing and I need to do it at some point and in the past this was limited by a number of factors number
1:41:51one was in the past I don't know if this is still the case that api to use apple's built-in speech
1:41:58to text api your app had to request and get access to the microphone even if you were feeding it audio
1:42:06that was not from the microphone so I could not as a podcast app feed the pre-recorded audio that
1:42:13I downloaded to my podcast app through their text-to-speech system or their speech-to-text system
1:42:18until I prompted the user for microphone access and that alone was enough for me to say I'm not
1:42:22using this feature because I'm not going to ask my users who are all you know educated nerds
1:42:28for permission to access their microphone in a podcast app because there's no reason I would
1:42:33need that except to be creepy and like spy on them with ads and stuff like okay so I don't even want
1:42:38the appearance that I might be doing that I don't even want the ability to access their microphone I
1:42:42don't want I don't I don't even want that to be possible in my app so that alone ruled it out but
1:42:48also you know it was it was using older style you know models and and things to to do the speech-to-
1:42:55text conversion and it wasn't very good in my testing like I made a couple of test prototypes
1:43:00granting myself microphone access just to see like you know how good is this and it was bad and it
1:43:06was it was too bad to ship so I didn't ship it well whatever however many months ago open ai
1:43:12released their whisper model and whisper is really massively better it's not a small difference it is
1:43:19way more accurate and there there is a project called whisper.cpp where some guy has done
1:43:25amazing work in like transforming this this thing that you would otherwise need a whole bunch of
1:43:29python to run into a very simple c++ wrapper that you could make ios and other apps with and it runs
1:43:36fine on apple stuff and I tried that and I built a prototype with that and it was super easy to use
1:43:41and and and the downside of using whisper oh there's two main downs number one if you use the
1:43:47large models that have like larger vocabularies and more accuracy it's just too slow to run on
1:43:52an iphone number two these models are huge to download like the the base model that provides
1:44:00like okay accuracy decent speed is something I think it's something like 70 megs and then if you
1:44:07want something more accurate it goes into like multiple gigs very quickly and this is just it's
1:44:13untenable to run that in the way I would want to run that would be you know stuff like transcription
1:44:18of what you're listening to you know there's lots of things I could do with that if it was fast and
1:44:22and you know inexpensive computationally to run that but if I had to download like a two gig model
1:44:28you know as part of the app to do those features or whatever that's that's not going to fly
1:44:33and if it's going to be super slow it's not going to fly well they could build in some medium-sized
1:44:39model into the os if they wanted to and they could use it themselves for their own speech to
1:44:43text stuff and then make that available to developers they could also for instance optimize
1:44:47that model you know the reason why the whisper dot cpp doesn't run very quickly on iphones one of the
1:44:53reasons is because apple has not done their work to optimize that one the way they did with the
1:44:57stable diffusion also they the the way these models usually work you if you're running in
1:45:03the background you don't have access to the gpu or the neural engine as far as I know but you
1:45:09definitely can't run you can't run ml models on the gpu if your app is in the background
1:45:13you can only it it makes your app only use cpu based computation and that makes them way slower
1:45:19to run in many cases and this is the case for whisper and whisper dot cpp only ever uses the
1:45:24cpu it doesn't have any access to the hardware acceleration besides you know cpu raw stuff and so
1:45:30this makes it slower than it than it could be so if apple actually wanted to offer a really great
1:45:35dictation to speech api or just you know speech text api they could massively improve the the api
1:45:44they've already offered for years by using this new kind of technique a new kind of model like this
1:45:48optimize it let it run on the acceleration hardware ship it ship a base model with the os
1:45:54and all of a sudden every app could have really easy access to speech to text that's the kind of
1:46:01thing that i think is more likely for apple to offer with these new ai techniques sooner
1:46:07than having them offer some kind of like full-blown customer facing you know quote ai powered feature
1:46:13i think it's too soon for that and and that's that's kind of less appley to do that kind of
1:46:17thing the customizing watch face is a great example of how apple would do it it's not like
1:46:21you can have arbitrary conversations with the thing like they would be very narrowly constrained and i
1:46:26know the large language models out there now are supposedly constrained but they're it's more like
1:46:30everything except for these five or six things they try to keep them away from whereas this would be
1:46:34you can discuss nothing except for watch faces and i feel like that is easier especially if they
1:46:39train the model themselves right um which again costs money and you know regarding the the the
1:46:45speech text thing and the size of them and everything there's a reason large language
1:46:48models are called large language models they use tremendous amounts of storage and tremendous
1:46:53amounts of memory and tremendous amounts of compute not just for the training which is itself
1:46:57huge because obviously you're grinding through tons and tons of data but even just for the part
1:47:01of it where it runs the the inference part of it where it does its thing even that takes a
1:47:06substantial amount of of power and resources which is why i was saying the watch would have to be
1:47:10communicating with the server obviously and then even just communicating with the server would be
1:47:14taxing for the watch and drain the battery and so on but not to mention the servers yeah well i mean
1:47:20the servers yeah but again to be that incredibly constrained to just be doing watch faces it's what
1:47:26we talked about a while ago and the people have actually implemented uh large language models
1:47:30sitting in front of essentially the functionality exposed by siri or like you know limit functionality
1:47:34that's already on the watch the watch can already pick complications and configure them and put them
1:47:37in places on the faces it's just a question of translating from speech to text and from text to
1:47:43what is this text telling me to do and then oh actually i i the watch have apis for doing all
1:47:49the things you're asking for it's a very constrained problem space which is miles from like what
1:47:53microsoft did was like here's bing you can talk to it about stuff good luck yeah but like ultimately
1:47:59i what i want to see from apple in the ai age really is make a lot of this cool tech available
1:48:08on device for for on device use by apps that are not communicating with their own servers
1:48:14that can just run everything locally and apple has you know with the exception of of having
1:48:20what seems like organizational or cultural trouble with ai machine learning techniques and
1:48:28people in general um that that's a that's a large issue they need to they need to figure out if they
1:48:33haven't yet and so far it seems like they haven't but what they have resource wise is they have all
1:48:39these supercomputers in everybody's pockets that have amazing hardware and software capabilities
1:48:44and and they care a lot about privacy and things running on device whenever possible and everything
1:48:51and that's that's a level of sophistication and an amount of resources that their competitors don't
1:48:57have so i i hope apple leans into that and i think this is this is how they're going to ultimately
1:49:02tackle you know quote ai leaning into on device stuff as much as possible and and and if they do
1:49:09that themselves they will most likely do it in a way where there is an api for developers to
1:49:14hook into or use those same capabilities in our apps that's what i'm hoping to see from apple in
1:49:20this new age of these new styles of ai it is you know cool on device capabilities that run quickly
1:49:27and locally that don't need you know us to as you know a developer of one app we don't need to go
1:49:33train our own models we don't need to uh you know go run a huge server farm or have our own you know
1:49:39open ai tokens that we have to use and figure out how the heck to pay for like i want to see what
1:49:45what apple can deliver us on device that they will maintain they will train they will update it over
1:49:52time they will make it faster over time and let us build on top of it and they have a very strong
1:49:58history of doing that in other in other areas so i i think this is what they will ultimately do
1:50:03whenever they get their act together on ai and and we don't know when that will be and it probably
1:50:08won't be all at once i'm hoping to see little hints of it this year even that i think is
1:50:13optimistic but we'll see and then maybe next year or the year after maybe we'll see big stuff
1:50:18and that's that'll be exciting they're already doing all that it's just a question of what
1:50:22letters they put on it they used to put the letters m and l right now and now we're saying
1:50:26the letters a and i what we mean is exactly what apple has been doing which is they they do provide
1:50:31you a bunch of models you can use like that text-to-speech one that you were saying you know
1:50:34and they do improve it over years they do make it run fast in the heart but they've done all of that
1:50:38but like yeah but but no but the stuff that you have now there's better stuff apple that uses not
1:50:43the m and the l but it uses the a and the i and it's all this you know right we obviously there is
1:50:47there are different techniques to doing this and the current technique that lots of other companies
1:50:51are experimenting with is better than what apple is doing so what we want is apple do what you've
1:50:57been doing with all the things you used to call ml keep doing that we love frameworks we love you
1:51:02making it fast on your hardware it's just that there's a new thing that does everything you've
1:51:05been trying to do but better not everything but certain things it does better so please give us
1:51:10access to that in a way that makes us not have to worry about it and i do think that they will do
1:51:14that and i just got done saying the larger models are too big you know they're just way too big to
1:51:18even run at all and even like phones or even big mac sometimes that's why you have to communicate
1:51:22over the network but that's today like those things change like part of what makes that
1:51:26tractable is just a march of progress but part of it is also companies like apple deciding that it
1:51:31is important for their socs to be good at doing this and that can really knock down these things
1:51:36that's the reason the socs we have today are so good at doing the things they do so good at image
1:51:40processing so good at you know doing the kinds of computations that has to be done on a phone on a
1:51:46mac or whatever those special process processes for video encoding and decoding and you know the
1:51:52the neural engine all that stuff was developed because apple said these these types of functions
1:51:58are useful to do on a phone or on a mac or whatever and we want to do them in low power
1:52:02or what i think that will come for large language models as well i don't think we're going to you
1:52:07know models that currently run that require hundreds of gigs of ram to do inference are
1:52:10going to run on your phone anytime soon but i think there will be a meeting in the middle of
1:52:14like you were saying margo cut down versions of these things limited problem space and and to be
1:52:19clear with the limited problem space you're like oh there's no way they can never limit a large
1:52:22language model enough it'll always be scary i'm thinking of the scenario when you were talking
1:52:25about configuring the complications it never answers back the only thing it does in response
1:52:31to you talking to it is show you what it thinks you're asking for as you're screening your
1:52:35complications and basically says you know is this okay you know press okay or say okay or like
1:52:41it never talks back to you it just does what you and it there's no way for you to accidentally
1:52:47have your watch insult you or something or there's very few ways perhaps watch insult you
1:52:51by arranging complications i guess each of each complication was a letter it could spell out a
1:52:55naughty word or something and someone figured out how to do it but like it's really limited problem
1:52:59space we just but basically what we're just asking for is you know the promise of siri
1:53:03well large language models are currently delivering on a lot of that promise i can have a conversation
1:53:09in text with a large language model and get it to do useful things that reflect what i'm asking you
1:53:15no it doesn't know anything about facts no it has no understanding of anything no i can't ask it
1:53:18questions and trust its answers but i can ask it to arrange a bunch of complications on a watch
1:53:23screen and the good thing about that is i'm the one who gets to say you did it correctly or you
1:53:27didn't and if you didn't i could say no the upper left should be carrot weather and not apple's
1:53:32weather widget and maybe and maybe it still fails to understand me or whatever but the result is
1:53:37okay well fine i'll do that one manually or whatever but the point is like trying to do that
1:53:41through siri now is laughable like you can't you know people people would never try to do that
1:53:46they're they're lucky when they can talk to their watch to reply to a text or something and that's
1:53:49only like nerds who have practiced that whole thing whereas large language models seem so much
1:53:54more flexible about understanding the foibles of our language and and eventually doing what we want
1:53:58and so i really do hope that again not this year probably but that eventually becomes one of the
1:54:03things they start rolling out uh if not as a as a way to interface with tiny screens or headsets
1:54:11then at least as something that we can expect our powerful max to be able to do right because i would
1:54:15love to be able to say things to my mac to do drudgery without having to open up a web browser
1:54:20go to one of these large language models type a bunch of stuff in and all that thanks to our
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1:54:39everybody we will talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin
1:54:50because it was accidental oh it was accidental john didn't do any research marco and casey
1:54:59wouldn't let him because it was accidental it was accidental and you can find the show notes at
1:55:08atp.fm and if you're into twitter you can follow them at c a s e y l i s s so that's casey list m
1:55:21a r c o a r m anti-marco armin s i r a c u s a syracuse it's accidental
1:55:41all right so i wanted to talk to the two of you i wanted to kind of invoke the brain trust
1:55:50perhaps call the diamond dogs together and see what you two thought about pricing for call sheet
1:55:56we talked about this i i don't know when it was i think it was a little bit last week i think it
1:56:00was a little bit uh a few weeks before that but i'm getting knock on wood getting really close to
1:56:06sending this to the app store which means i really need to lock down my pricing schedule for like a
1:56:10better word um well you need to lock down your initial pricing sure you can always change yes
1:56:18that is true um and so i think what i've landed on as a general scheme and then we'll talk about the
1:56:25different options therein um i think what i'm going to do is you get to use the main screen
1:56:33which shows you like popular stuff in your country or really your language popular stuff in your
1:56:37language new stuff in your language um you know so that would generally be you know new stuff in
1:56:41english for me and popular things in english um and sort of kind of american-based when it's english
1:56:48but not always it's complicated doesn't matter but anyways um you can do all that in that you can do
1:56:54you can you can tap through that whenever you want and and there's no real limit there so
1:56:59hypothetically if you can six degrees of kevin bacon yourself to the information you want
1:57:03that'll take a while but you can you can do that for free always but to search i think i'm going to
1:57:11have a daily limit of something to the order of five maybe ten searches at most that's so many
1:57:18what do you do that's too many is it okay have one or two like okay well let's shelve that shelve
1:57:24that for a second put it in the parking lot we'll come back to that because no that is something i
1:57:28want to discuss i didn't realize that that was too many so i want to discuss that like hold on a
1:57:31second so some number of searches per day and then after that it's tough nuggies you know subscribe
1:57:36or get out of here wait until tomorrow and i feel like in general that is the right approach and and
1:57:45and that's what i think i want to go with but if you disagree either of you we can talk about that
1:57:49in a second then the second question becomes you know assuming we have this some amount of free
1:57:54searches per day and then you have to subscribe all right well what does subscribing mean
1:57:58and i think when we first talked about this we had concluded kind of as a threesome that somewhere to
1:58:04the order of eight dollars a year seems like a reasonable price for this sort of thing and i
1:58:09think i feel pretty good about that but there's two other options on the table that i think would
1:58:13be additive not a replacement one of them is do i offer a monthly option and if so how expensive
1:58:23is that and currently i'm leaning toward offering a monthly option for either a dollar or a dollar
1:58:29fifty i'm not really sure what what feels right there now that would be kind of considerably more
1:58:35than the yearly option so i want to know your thoughts when we get there when i stop talking
1:58:38in just a second um but i think for sure i want a yearly option the question is do i do a monthly
1:58:44option and if so how much and then the other question is do i do a something like a lifetime
1:58:50unlock i think using the word lifetime is a is a dire mistake and i wouldn't phrase it that way but
1:58:56maybe a one-time unlock if i go this route at all and i'm currently i think i'm against it because
1:59:02i just think that it sets me up for failure and even if i'm leading leaving a little money on the
1:59:08table i just it makes me nervous promising anything that far out like that that just
1:59:14makes me feel a little uncomfortable so that's kind of where where things sit right now and
1:59:21i am curious what your thoughts are now marco you jumped all over me justifiably you know i'm not
1:59:25i'm not upset you jumped all over me a second ago we're both of you really about five free searches
1:59:30per day so talk me down from five which what should the number be marco i'd say one or two
1:59:35i mean that that's that's tricky though it is look again it's tricky but and and there's a question
1:59:41of like what defines a search that's a big question if you search and you mistype it and get
1:59:47no results does that count as a search yeah so the way it's currently implemented it's not in the test
1:59:51plate yet but the way it's currently implemented in a branch that i have going right now is that
1:59:56you can strictly speaking type however many searches as you want during the day but the
2:00:00moment you click your time to click the moment you tap on a result then that counts as a search and
2:00:06now you've lost one of your one of your searches yes that sounds good i would also you know the
2:00:10branding of this i would say you know you've like you call it something like free searches so like
2:00:16you've you've you have one free search left today and then when you hit the end you've used up you've
2:00:21used all your free searches today you can buy buy the subscription and get unlimited searches you
2:00:25know that kind of that's how i would phrase this you have free searches and then you have this
2:00:29paywall that gets you more searches i'm speaking of free you're doing a free trial right well that
2:00:34was my initial thought but now that i have this whole free search thing i don't i feel like it's
2:00:38kind of redundant yeah i don't know that you necessarily need a free if you have this here's
2:00:42what you need you need to have what you need to have uh the goal is someone needs to use the app
2:00:48enough to like it and and that is the tricky part so the use it enough to like it like just a single
2:00:57use instance like i was watching one tv show and we had a question on the couch about what was this
2:01:01person in that one instance of use that has i feel like that one instance uses has to be successful
2:01:08and enjoyable without any pay crap in their face and you're like okay but how many searches is that
2:01:14and that's why i think that picking the searches is tricky 10 is too many right because no one's
2:01:18going to burn through 10 a day 10 is enough for a single couch instance and maybe you'd use the app
2:01:22once every few days um but one is too few because for a single couch instance like no one will ever
2:01:28get the point to like the app because they'll be like i used it for two seconds and then it
2:01:32threw a paywall in my face and i hate it that's why the free trial is good because the free trial
2:01:36period is unlimited and that allows the free trial period to be this is the time when you get to like
2:01:41the app because it's unlimited it's a free trial everything's open full access to everything but
2:01:46that door closes and that allows it takes the pressure off your number of you know searches
2:01:51per day to allow people to get to like the app they're supposed to get to like it during the
2:01:56free trial and then the paywall sole purpose is to gently remind people that they can pay to get
2:02:02that experience that they previously had if you don't do a free trial you have to somehow thread
2:02:07the needle of like how much will let people use it enough so they'll like it but like because
2:02:12because i think some people will never go above one search per couch incident or whatever you know
2:02:17like they'll just they'll just use the app forever for free to say i you know i don't do this often
2:02:23when i do do it i look it up and again what you just described i can do as many searches as i want
2:02:26until i find the result that i want and then i tap on it and i get my answer i put the phone down
2:02:30never look at it again they might not even know you have a paywall with your limit of one and
2:02:34other people in a single couch incident go through 75 searches because they're like what was this
2:02:39person what was that search for this person i think the person's name was a sticker and they're
2:02:42tapping through results and they're doing all sorts of things and they will be incredibly
2:02:45frustrated by a limit that's like one or two but if you have the free trial you can be like look
2:02:50you had the you had your salad days you got to use the app you got to see all the features you got to
2:02:55you know and then it's just a question of how long is the free trial it would kind of be nice if the
2:02:59free trial only started like when they you know when they had their first big usage scenario um
2:03:06but yeah a free trial would hypothetically start upon subscribing so you subscribe yeah you get
2:03:12your one week or whatever and then then you're charged i don't know i i hear what you're saying
2:03:17i don't disagree with it but i feel like especially if i were to crank the limit from five to like two
2:03:22or three then i i i maybe i'm wrong but i feel like at that point you have gotten at least a vague
2:03:30enough notion to know okay no no this is all right and if you want to try again tomorrow try it again
2:03:34tomorrow i don't i don't love the idea of both a free trial and the search limit but but that is a
2:03:42weak opinion held loosely see this this is getting very complicated like i i almost think like
2:03:47john's right like you know you you want to give people a chance to like the app of course so
2:03:53that's making me now revisit like what if instead of just instead of having anything per unit of
2:03:58time per day per month what if it was a higher limit that was a single view so for instance
2:04:03you get 10 free searches after that you got to pay that's it like because then you could make
2:04:07the number higher and you can give people more chance to get to know the app you could display
2:04:13it more easily in the ui it's very it's much clearer to people what the limit is some people
2:04:18take a while to come around to pay for stuff though like some people need to be convinced
2:04:21that there is actual utility they may like the app and they may say oh that i found that app useful
2:04:25but they haven't come around to the idea that i like it enough to pay for it and that's where the
2:04:30doling out a small amount that periodically is better than the big buck even if it's a big bucket
2:04:35of 100 once they burn through that 100 and they like the app they may not be ready to pay still
2:04:40but if they'll but if there's one doled out each day after that they'd be like you know what i do
2:04:45keep coming back to this is the same reason so many people including me eventually paid for the
2:04:48new york times because it's like they have a bunch of free ones and i don't think i want to pay for
2:04:52the whole thing but you know what over the course of months weeks years you realize i'm more sick of
2:04:58of running out of my free articles of the new yorker or whatever than i am sick of paying for
2:05:02the new yorker and then eventually you do it and obviously the numbers here are way smaller than
2:05:06the new yorker the new york time subscription or anything like that but it does take people's time
2:05:11to come around if you slam that door closed you use your 150 free searches and that's it forever
2:05:15and ever and ever they're you're giving up the opportunity for them to eventually come around
2:05:20because they're just going to delete the app yeah i guess yeah because it's just it's tricky because
2:05:25like you you don't you don't want to make this too complicated you want to keep it so that people
2:05:30know that there's a limit they know when they're going to hit it and then when they hit it they're
2:05:36they're not they don't say screw you and delete the app and you know so i i get what you're saying
2:05:42john i mean i i just think once we get into you have x per day they recharge per day and then you
2:05:48can start a free trial that asks that lasts x amount of time then then you're paying me eventually
2:05:53after that and by the way you have an annual or monthly like that's a lot of complexity for this
2:05:58pricing model for a very simple app i i mean a lot of the apps i see on the app store are exactly
2:06:03like that like i know i i'm i've been subjected to prompts and screens described in this exact
2:06:09scenario and as a customer i tend not to get hung up with understanding what it is that saying the
2:06:14customer all i know is can i use the app when i want to and if i can't how much money would i
2:06:20have to pay to make it happen and then the final thing is will i be able to use the app in the
2:06:25future should i just delete it now i don't actually understand or know or try to parse
2:06:29the text about what their scheme is and what the limits are and what the whatever all i know is
2:06:33i can't do what i want now why is that and how can i make it go away and is this a permanent
2:06:37situation and i feel like that's how most people interact with this like they don't have to actually
2:06:41understand your business model well but that's even more reason to to me to say look it's either
2:06:47you pay or you don't you know and this is what marco was saying a moment ago like if you don't
2:06:50want to pay i'll i'll give you a little sip you can just make it a paid up front app like an old
2:06:54person well yeah i mean but if you don't if you don't pay i'll give you a little sip of it each
2:06:59each day and if you pay then that's that and then we're we're good here as long as you keep paying
2:07:03you get as much as you want and and i i like marco was saying i don't disagree with you in principle
2:07:08but i i i couldn't put my finger on what felt gross about it and i think it's what marco said
2:07:12is that just feels too complicated like either you're paying me or you're not there's no in the
2:07:16middle you know there's no free trial it's either you're paying me or you're not you really want to
2:07:20use this app free trials are insanely popular for a reason though that's true all right and you can't
2:07:25you can't overlook that they're everywhere they're everywhere i think they do really work and i know
2:07:31it does complicate things it does especially for an app your apps your app is different in that it's
2:07:36not like it is very situational you're probably not going to use this app while you're you know
2:07:41commuting on the subway right it's it's when you're on the couch it's when you're watching
2:07:45the show or when you're discussing a show like it's it's not a general purpose app so you don't
2:07:50have that many opportunities for engagement and when you do have the engagement the value of your
2:07:55app is it's there when people need it and if it's like oh they go to look it up and you're and your
2:07:59app you know gives them the Heisman they're not going to come back it needs to like i said it
2:08:04needs to prove value it needs to say i wanted an answer i got an answer and the app was pleasant to
2:08:10use and this is the thing i find myself doing frequently so we'll see now here's the other
2:08:14thing that i'm sure people listening are probably thinking and we've discussed as well the audience
2:08:19for your app at least initially is not the same as the general public it's going to be able to
2:08:23listen to your podcast and know about the app no one knows about this app except for people who
2:08:26read your blog and listen to your podcast or are related to them because it's not out yet but that
2:08:31is a ready-made customer base and that customer base has totally different values has a totally
2:08:36different idea of the of the exchange going on here they might be buying it because they're a
2:08:40fan of yours because they've heard us talk about it so much the general public is coming from a
2:08:46totally different perspective so you know i feel like and i think it's reasonable to like this app
2:08:51has nothing to do with atp it is a general purpose app that anybody who watches television and movies
2:08:55can use the question is do you want to design this app to be optimal for the people who listen to atp
2:09:02or to be optimal for the people who have no idea what atp is or who you are and those are two very
2:09:06different designs unfortunately what makes you say that like what what's the difference because the
2:09:10people who are listening to atp they have different desires out of the app their their impetus to buy
2:09:16their their motivation to buy is so incredibly different for people who have no idea who you
2:09:21are you know what i mean like it's just they're totally different but they're very they're limited
2:09:25they're small in number and so like you could just say i'm just going to set them aside and i'm going
2:09:30to build this app for the general public uh because you know practically speaking the people who just
2:09:35want to be the app buy the app because they're curious about the app that casey made or because
2:09:39they want to have more context for the next episode of atp they listen to that's not a market
2:09:43that's going to sustain the development is that you know what i mean yeah everyone else is and
2:09:48the everyone else you know the design for them often involves the gross stuff that you find
2:09:53unappealing and complicated and i base that on all the apps that i download in the app store that
2:09:57have those types of models that they're you know complicated and unappealing and gross feeling yeah
2:10:02i mean i i i'm not sure i see a free trial is this make or break thing that you seem to because and
2:10:08and maybe it's because i'm too myopic in the way i operate but like i i think a free trial is useful
2:10:15if it's the sort of thing where that's the only way i can try the app but this kind of
2:10:21homegrown alternate approach i think gives me kind of what a free trial like i i view them
2:10:26i view them as equivalent even though they're not literally equivalent i view them as equivalent
2:10:31spiritually equivalent where i either need a free trial to prove its worth or i need to you know
2:10:37distribute little sips of the app to prove its worth and it seems it seems redundant to have
2:10:42both to me but i don't know maybe maybe i've got this all right if you give them the sip like i
2:10:47think the main thing when you give them the sip is to make sure it's clear to them this is not the end
2:10:52that you should not delete this app because even though you i'm not letting you do this search now
2:10:56at some point in the future that i'm going to tell you about tomorrow next week in an hour whatever
2:11:01you will be able to use the app again and by the way if you don't want to see this nag screen here's
2:11:05the subscription or whatever because that's what you're trying to stop is i've hit a paywall delete
2:11:10this app that is you know because you never get that person back they're not going to redownload
2:11:13it or whatever they have no you know and so that's that's what you're trying to avoid and free trial
2:11:18let's the idea of the free trial is they get to try it with but they've all functionality and
2:11:23hopefully fall in love with it and then when that door closes eventually they you know they say oh
2:11:28i really did like this app or i did find myself using it a lot yeah i mean i again i hear you but
2:11:33i i feel like that's the whole point of this i'm gonna say five searches a day maybe that number's
2:11:38wrong but i feel like that's the whole point and so i i don't know i i it it feels currently like
2:11:45it's like i said like it's redundant and i don't love it and and you know for what it's worth when
2:11:50you tap on um when you tap on like a search i'm gonna send you to i'm just gonna put this in in
2:11:56slack um i don't think we're gonna put an image in the show notes um but when you when you tap on the
2:12:02like search area what what you're seeing that i'm putting in slack right now that's not in the
2:12:07context of search it's just you know the the the one view in and of itself but this would be in
2:12:13where the search results and stuff would be is like a kind of mini paywall that says hey you
2:12:18got to keep going or wait you know another few hours in order to get you know whatever more
2:12:23searches um and and that would show and then what what i haven't mentioned to you guys is the way i
2:12:29currently have it is if you think about the area on the on the or if you think about the the the
2:12:35main screen and how there's a little magnifying glass that slides in from off screen on the right
2:12:41as you're drilling into things um when you're in free mode to the left of that magnifying glass i'm
2:12:48trying to generate an image real quick so give me a second i'm stalling for time but uh to the
2:12:52left of that magnifying glass there's a really obnoxious red banner at the bottom that says
2:12:58you have one search left today i think marco made a good point earlier it should say one
2:13:02free search left today yeah but anyways it's written right now you have one search left today
2:13:06subscribe now to you know remove limits or whatever i i can wordsmith that however i want
2:13:11but yeah but what i'm driving at is there's this big ass banner right at the bottom saying hey
2:13:17this is your situation you've got you know whatever however many searches left and then
2:13:21you're gonna have to subscribe in order to you know get more yeah i think you could i mean this
2:13:27all makes sense and i think the ui you are conveying all the information you need you might
2:13:31you could actually do a fun kind of i don't know if this is an underscore esque thing but it makes
2:13:34me think of him uh kind of like where you know you have uh you know whatever you have uh one
2:13:39free search remaining and then you use it and then someone goes to try to do another search and you're
2:13:43going to show up the paywall on the paywall screen have a button that says can i just have one more
2:13:48search and you press it and then your app says okay and it lets you do it i don't know again this
2:13:53is a lot of complexity just the one just a one-time extra that i get i i come down with
2:13:58marco i i don't want it this complicated that's not complicated that's fun that's surprising delight
2:14:02what i'm basically saying is the thing that i do don't tell anybody but the thing i do with the
2:14:06the atp sales that we have when we sell merchandise um i always tell the the uh the
2:14:11listeners that the end date is one day before it actually is well because that helps you know
2:14:16resolve things like what time zone does it end in like that's that's the real reason exactly i
2:14:21don't avoid all those issues the reason people don't say oh i thought the sale was supposed to
2:14:25end today but it's not i don't have to deal with time zones the end date is always one day later
2:14:29and that the having the limit be one you know having one extra in reserve that you give people
2:14:35one time it's not like you can always ask for one more forever and ever but just having the one time
2:14:40extra that's another enticement to eventually buy because all this app was nice to me i was
2:14:45thinking about buying can i just do this one last search oh yeah you can then the paywall is really
2:14:49down and no you don't get to ask for one more forever and ever like a like a two-year-old right
2:14:53that's the type of thing you can do to soften this to make it more to make it less likely they delete
2:14:58the app immediately all right here's i've i've been thinking about it i played with the app i
2:15:02saw your paywall screen in slack i i think this is where i'm landing you get five or ten free
2:15:10searches single time use and then one per day after that well that's interesting then when they
2:15:18hit that one you show your your screen i will workshop the hell out of the screen for you don't
2:15:23ship it the way i know you i know as soon as i said searches every day what is the everyday
2:15:28phrase there for us anyway yeah we'll work out the screen but it's yeah this is by no means the
2:15:34final screen this is very yeah you get five or ten five or ten searches up front for free then one a
2:15:40day free searches then you hit the screen subscribe to continue after that one a day and i like how
2:15:47you said you know or wait x hours to get you know your next free search like that's great
2:15:51and you're then you have your two options i'm killing you're kind of killing me even offering
2:15:57two options monthly and yearly well okay we'll get there we'll get there yeah but yeah you offer your
2:16:02subscription option parenthesis uh and that's it and there's no free trial you get your one per day
2:16:09after you've used your five you know single use ones that's it you one per day that's it you hit
2:16:13this and you go forward if you want that i think that gives people enough time to get to know the
2:16:18app with it with their five or ten you know stock free ones that aren't timed and then it gives them
2:16:23that little out to keep them in the door um on the way if they want to keep them after they keep
2:16:28going after that um but it but you know i think any more than one per day and you will have the
2:16:35the limit that like you know which i was saying earlier with like how many incidents per couch
2:16:39event are we are we going to even be using this app every day so so i i think that's probably
2:16:44your best balance i i think that if you went with that model i think the initial bucket should be
2:16:49more generous just because that's the following i think a little bit more than 10 would be because
2:16:55you really you want to give people more time to fall in love with the app and some people hit it
2:17:00after 10 some people it will take them three months to go through 10 some people go through
2:17:0310 and one couches in it so it i you know and it's because it is finite at one time it's not like you
2:17:09have to worry about it recurring no one's going to live forever off of your free bucket of 20 instead
2:17:13of 10 it's just giving people more time to use the app enough that they are convinced that it's the
2:17:19type of thing they want to pay for or at least not delete so for the sake of discussion i'm not sure
2:17:24this is the right answer but you get 20 searches for free then once that bucket is up be that in
2:17:31an hour or in a year after that you get one freebie a day and if you if you use that one freebie
2:17:37tough nuts either wait another day or pay me yeah i actually i kind of like that and i still think
2:17:42you should have a free i still think you should have a free trial but whatever i i think i'm
2:17:47team marco on that one i i disagree john also thinks we need to offer our t-shirts in 17
2:17:51different options every time and i'm the one who's like can we just do like two or three people love
2:17:55it people love it and it's even it even works with cotton bureau's new model nails we're not even
2:17:59penalized for doing it all right all right well i'll think about the free trial although current
2:18:04my current thinking is marco's right all right so i i actually really i didn't think about this
2:18:08high well it's not really hybrid but i'm gonna call it the hybrid approach um i actually think
2:18:12this this makes a lot of sense and i think it's reasonably easy to digest that's the thing i'm
2:18:16worried about and that's that's what i keep coming back to with the free trial is i think it's adding
2:18:20a layer of complexity that just isn't helpful and so um i like this because it seems pretty
2:18:25straightforward you got your bucket once you use it you get one a day after that tough nuts
2:18:29uh all right so i think it's just as complicated as all the schemes you were describing as
2:18:33complicated but again i say that the people who are using this app do not need a mental model of
2:18:38this system they just need to know how do they feel about what the app is putting in front of
2:18:41their face and doesn't make them want to pay money like that's the level people are operating at when
2:18:45they're poking at their phone they are not trying to suss out your monetization model and and how
2:18:50you've structured things so i don't think that's a concern at all but if that was a concern the
2:18:54thing you just described is just as complicated as everything else we've described i mean maybe
2:18:59well and also like some people will suss it out some people will complain some people will be
2:19:04you know will be you know bounced off and they won't go through with it because they'll think
2:19:07it's too ridiculous those are only going to be the listeners of our podcast though the regular
2:19:11people just do not know who they would complain to assume case it doesn't exist and is just a giant
2:19:16application mill somewhere like they think apple made all the apps like that's not the people who
2:19:22complain are so much more like i was gonna say sophisticated but so much more in tune with how
2:19:26the world actually works than the the most of the people who are just poking at their phone screen
2:19:32yeah fair enough but all this is to say like you know you're not going to please everyone no matter
2:19:35what you do don't sell yourself short like don't rip yourself off trying to please everyone like
2:19:40if some if you hear from people who are like well 20 free searches is really not enough for my needs
2:19:46like you know it's fine like two then then they should they should pay you if they say that's why
2:19:51i'm saying they say i used that up in one couch incident a you know they heard listen to the show
2:19:54because they said couch incident and g it's like okay but like fine you are you are outside the
2:20:01bell curve 20 for one couch incident is way higher than you know so i'm sorry but i'm not
2:20:08you can't configure the app for the outliers that's what you're just trying to find them no and and if
2:20:11anybody uses it that heavily they should be paying for it that that is exactly like that is the kind
2:20:15of user that like okay then that makes sense you have you have heavier needs for this you should
2:20:20be paying for it simple as that you know because this is not a free app this is a this is an app
2:20:25that has limited free functionality that is really a subscription priced app and there's nothing wrong
2:20:30with that and people will there will be people who will try to make you feel bad about that
2:20:34but don't because that's life this is what modern software is you have you know you have to keep it
2:20:38up it's yeah modern software is ongoing revenue in some form because you because people expect
2:20:44ongoing updates i'll just use imdb one star all right good luck with that all right so so tell
2:20:51me if i'm if i'm bananas to say that monthly should be an option i i like it i think it's
2:20:57good i think it's a lower number on the screen i think marco was saying should yearly be an option
2:21:02no no i well no i i mean i i i think if there's only going to be one it should be yearly but
2:21:09i think i'm okay with two but what i think i think what you want so i mean look cynically speaking
2:21:14not everyone who signs up for a year will use it for a year so you kind of want to push more
2:21:20people towards the yearly if you want to maximize money um so there's there's that to consider
2:21:24i would suggest if you're going to offer both monthly and yearly which i think i'm okay with
2:21:31price them in such a way that people who do math will go for the yearly yeah and that that argues
2:21:36for uh not making it 150 because that makes the math harder for people right like like you know
2:21:41so if you made it you know a dollar a month eight dollars a year that's pretty good like in terms
2:21:46of that will drive people people can do that math in their head real fast right there or or make it
2:21:51two dollars a month and make it ten dollars a year you know something like that whatever whatever it
2:21:54is like make it so that people can clearly tell oh i should really go for the year and because
2:22:00that's really what you want if i care about that but i think the smaller number for monthly
2:22:04is is a smoother on-ramp for people who say i don't know if i want this eight dollars worth
2:22:10correct then after three months of paying monthly they'll be like oh this is dumb i should just pay
2:22:13for annual maybe yeah but ultimately like you you want this screen you want most people who
2:22:20choose to subscribe to go for the longer term one for lots of reason number one you'll make more
2:22:24money from people who abandon it early number two those people will be reminded only once a year
2:22:30instead of 12 times a year that they are subscribing to your app and every time someone's
2:22:33reminded they're subscribing to your app by one of those emails from apple saying these are about to
2:22:37renew that's a chance for them to cancel it so you you don't want to have to bother people with that
2:22:42every single month if they're willing to pay for a year at whatever price that is so ideally you
2:22:46want yearly customers more than monthly customers so that you know because you'll you'll both make
2:22:52more from them you know in terms of the abandonment and then you'll the ones that don't abandon it
2:22:56you'll keep them longer probably so yearly is probably better for you so yeah i would price it i
2:23:03think if if your yearly price is going to be eight bucks i think a dollar a month is a good price for
2:23:08the monthly if you're i i would maybe push yearly to be 10 bucks but that's it's not that big of a
2:23:14difference i know that you're going to have trouble asking for 10 bucks because it's you
2:23:18and you you keep thinking you keep talking yourself down and giving yourself you know pay cuts well
2:23:24it's it's it's just i i mean i honestly if it were no it is up to me but if it were up to me and i
2:23:31felt like you know i could get away with whatever i wanted then i think i i think ten dollars a year
2:23:36is reasonable in like ten dollars a year and like one or maybe two dollars a month but yeah i think
2:23:41that a regular person would look this and be like no that's way too much money and that's what gives
2:23:47me pause those people are going to say that no matter what these prices are it could be 10 cents
2:23:52a month they would say that yeah maybe i i don't know i i feel like i feel like keeping it under 10
2:23:58is it feels like i can just i it can it can be an impulse buy it under ten dollars even on a yearly
2:24:06basis which is bananas because if you go out to eat and get a soda it's like 250 and that literally
2:24:13is pissed away in the span of six hours but i mean i do this on the on the consumer side i do the same
2:24:19thing and i'll look at a 10 plus dollar an app or a dollar a year nap and i'll be like do i really
2:24:24need this so i feel like the most i can get away with per year is nine dollars and when i see those
2:24:30ten dollar apps you know what i do i usually go for the free trial and see if i like it oh
2:24:34if you're going to go with eight or nine bucks then yeah i'd say i i would say it in order to
2:24:41maximize the best ratio of monthly to yearly um i'd say a dollar a month eight dollars a year and
2:24:47you don't think that a dollar fifty is because i mean the only the only reason to do more than
2:24:52a dollar and less than two is just to eke out a little bit more from the monthly people which
2:24:56maybe that's dumb anyway because i'd be strictly speaking i'm if they if they stay for a year which
2:25:01is a big if then i'm making more with a dollar a month than i am eight dollars a year but i don't
2:25:05know it it just it doesn't make sense to make it one one fifty or two dollars or something i mean
2:25:13you could you could try look and this is the kind you can play with this over time you can actually
2:25:16you can change prices all the time like people don't need to have a comprehensive history of
2:25:20the pricing of your app in their head well i thought for subscriptions though got a little
2:25:23dodgy because then you have to like get the permission or something like that you know
2:25:27better than me mark i don't know if you can change you can actually increase the the subscription of
2:25:32existence but i'm just thinking of like for going forward for new customers for setting aside what
2:25:36existing customers do you just like retire one and start another subscription and like and just keep
2:25:41it going but not have it be purchasable in the app so like like there's there's ways to do it like
2:25:44yeah you just have multiple subscriptions at different price points like you can change like
2:25:48recently you know the whole the disney plus mechanic they added you can increase the price
2:25:54of an existing subscription and bring those users along but i believe they have to you have to give
2:25:59them some amount of like the system gives them some kind of notice and i think they i don't think
2:26:04they have to opt in but they have a chance to opt out so you know that's that kind of runs a risk of
2:26:08loss there so you know ideally you don't need to change these prices but you can change these prices
2:26:14yeah so but yeah i mean look i mean a dollar fifty a month is not bad i just think a dollar a month is
2:26:19an easier it's a it's a more obvious sell it lets the screen look nicer like you you have more design
2:26:24options in terms of your biggest markets like the us where it's going to be a nice even number you
2:26:28can you cannot even show the decimal points like you know like so you have options there actually
2:26:34no you can't because it's gonna it's gonna say do the new tiers have even like one dollar exactly or
2:26:40is it still in 99 cents i thought so i thought they do i that's why i have it i got a double
2:26:45check i think you're right yeah yeah because i that's why i have it currently is literally eight
2:26:50dot zero zero and either one dot five oh or one dot oh oh you know um it's because i i was thinking
2:26:56about it and and i was listening to um uh shoot uh thoroughly considered earlier today and they
2:27:02were talking a lot about you know the 99 cent thing and i feel like you know having the round
2:27:08number i feel like that just feels nicer yeah and and that's that's partly why i don't want to go
2:27:13all the way to 10. i could be convinced to go nine but i don't think i want to go all the way to 10
2:27:17because that just even 999 i mean that's effectively the same damn thing nine nine feels like 10 like i
2:27:23think that's why i keep going back to eight as instead of like if you're going to be below 10
2:27:28eight's a really good number yeah and that's kind of where i that well that that's kind of where i
2:27:33am too so all right so i think we all then i'm asking not telling we all agree that about eight
2:27:37dollars a year sounds about right and you marco you were pretty perturbed about the monthly idea
2:27:43but have you come around on that or we still not loving it i think i i mean look i obviously i i
2:27:48don't have a lot of data here i have my app that is yearly only but that's a little bit different
2:27:54in the sense that my subscription is not gating access to core features of the app so it's a very
2:27:59different mechanic um you know in your case this like you need to convert as many people as
2:28:05possible because anybody you don't convert with this paywall as john said is likely to abandon
2:28:09usage of the app completely you and then you make nothing from them you know in my in my case if
2:28:14they don't like my my you know premium subscription they can just keep using the app for free and yeah
2:28:18i make money from the ads from them so you know it's a very very different scenario in your
2:28:23scenario i think it does probably make sense to to have monthly and yearly especially because the
2:28:28monthly is a cheaper way in the door i don't think you need free trials uh but i could be wrong i
2:28:33haven't i haven't used them in the app store so like as a as a developer so i'm not sure you know
2:28:38how the conversion rate would be different it does introduce a level of conceptual complexity for the
2:28:43customer uh it introduces complexity to the screen that being said i don't think it introduces
2:28:50meaningful complexity to your implementation you know that's a flag you set on the in-app purchase
2:28:55and then and you know you whatever validation you're doing server side or whatever like it
2:28:59makes that a little more complicated to account for but for your purposes it almost doesn't matter if
2:29:03somebody's in a trial or not like you're just trying to make money from them long term you
2:29:06don't really care if you know this search came from a trial user versus this one came from a
2:29:11paying user yeah it's not i i already have support for it in my kind of facade in front of storekit
2:29:17too it's it's generally fairly straightforward unless you're trying to figure out how much time
2:29:21is left in the trial and or how you know when the trial expired then it becomes a little bit
2:29:26interesting but i think i could support the trial if i wanted to i just don't think i want to
2:29:31um and because again i just feel like it's more complicated but yeah it is um but john where do
2:29:36you come down on both monthly and yearly i think you should definitely have both the other thing
2:29:41that's interesting about monthly which i thought i've i've been thinking about if i should message
2:29:49this in app at all but certainly i'll talk about it on the show is that if you're a kc list
2:29:54superfan you could do monthly and if you stick with it then you're giving me an extra you know
2:30:00what three four dollars a year and now i don't think that that's necessarily going to be what
2:30:04anyone would choose to do except like five of you who i whom i love dearly but um but it is it is
2:30:10another way to kind of have an implicit tip jar without actually putting in a tip jar which i kind
2:30:16of like yeah i mean there will be some amount of that for sure i don't know if it'll if it'll be
2:30:22enough to make that have to dictate any choices you make about the pricing of the monthly um
2:30:26it's that's probably not a massive factor in determining the price yep all right so it sounds
2:30:34like the brain trust has concluded a batch of of non-renewable tokens up front or i shouldn't say
2:30:41tokens of searches up front somewhere in the order of 20 ish i think i'd still go 10 frankly but go
2:30:48ahead i don't i'd still go with free trial i mean there's no consensus here this is not decision
2:30:53making by committee i have opinions marco has opinions but casey you get to decide you can do
2:30:58whatever you want yeah yeah no i hear you if you're trying to get me and marco to come to
2:31:02the consensus is not going to happen no no no not necessarily i i'm just trying to to for as much my
2:31:07own benefit as the listeners i'm trying to get kind of the brass tacks where where did we all
2:31:12where did we all individually land and and if there is something that vaguely smells like a
2:31:16consensus what does that look like and it sounds to me like you know again something to the order
2:31:22of 10 to 20 free searches and then one a day after that i i think it sounds like we all agree that
2:31:29monthly and yearly is not such a terrible idea a little bit of disagreement as to whether it should
2:31:34be a dollar a dollar fifty or two dollars do you think i could go all the way to two on monthly
2:31:39you could try it i mean i i'm not sure i mean having having something begin with a one like
2:31:44one dollar a month sounds like nothing to a lot of people like that that that is a really good
2:31:49sounding and looking thing a dollar fifty is a little more complicated as john said it makes
2:31:54the math a little bit less likely to end up with the yearly purchase but ultimately that's that
2:32:01still looks really cheap two dollars is really cheap but it doesn't look as cheap as a dollar
2:32:06fifty so you know i i think there is a lot of benefit like psychologically visually in getting
2:32:13that that one one point something a month that that is i think very attractive and then yearly
2:32:20eight maybe nine dollars i don't know i feel like the the the delta between 12 monthly installments
2:32:28and one eight dollar installment you know i feel like that that's quite a lot of savings for the
2:32:34yearly subscription right that's what you want you want people to be going to the yearly yeah i know
2:32:40but i feel like what i want to do is make it like nine dollars a year but i still think that i agree
2:32:45with what you're saying earlier i feel like there's some weird divide between eight and nine
2:32:50that you would expect to see between nine and ten but i feel like it feels cheap in a in a
2:32:56happy way whereas nine does not feel cheap in a happy way it feels like it's getting it doesn't
2:33:00feel cheap at all really it feels like it's getting expensive and the thing what you have
2:33:03to consider here is you know it's it's easy to look at these numbers and be like well geez i'm
2:33:09setting this up so early and if i make this nine instead of eight i'm going to make x percent more
2:33:13money yeah but if the conversion rate is affected even a little bit by these pricing differences
2:33:20you can quickly erase that margin so if you know if if you convert a decent number more people
2:33:27at eight than you would at nine you will make more money total at eight yeah and and it's and it
2:33:33doesn't take that many more people to make up that kind of difference and the same thing is true of
2:33:38the monthly level you know whatever it is like if you're setting it at you know a dollar fifty a
2:33:43month versus two dollars a month i think you'll get way more people in at a dollar fifty than you
2:33:48would at two and therefore i think i think you'd make up that difference in volume but you know
2:33:54this is the kind of stuff that it's it's one thing to to have these kind of gut feelings this is how
2:33:58we think it is it's really hard to know in advance and it's even harder to be able to make this kind
2:34:04of decision without just testing it and then being willing to like you know change the pricing in the
2:34:11cumbersome ways that we have to do that yeah one final thing we didn't talk about much but i'm
2:34:16curious both of your opinions um maybe we'll start with john do i do some sort of one-time only you
2:34:22know like standard style in-app purchase i'm going to call it a lifetime unlock during this
2:34:27conversation but i would not refer to it that way like a i would refer to it as like a one-time
2:34:30purchase or something do i do a lifetime unlock no no hey i agree that's where i've landed too
2:34:37but tell me why i mean because that you can always roll it out later and you can roll it out to
2:34:42people who have already paid you a bunch of money but just don't want to deal with it anymore but
2:34:46really love the app and are willing to pay a lot and have had time to fall in love with it but
2:34:49i don't see how anyone is going to see this app use it enough without doing one of the subscriptions
2:34:57to decide they want to pay a price that's going to be worth your while for our one-time unlock
2:35:01to keep it in your back pocket save it for three years from now from this app when this app is
2:35:05wildly successful but all the power users are so pissed about paying subscriptions that you can
2:35:09100 then we can talk about it again but now absolutely not so for many reasons the you know
2:35:16whatever even if you didn't call it lifetime unlock that's how people will perceive it they
2:35:21will perceive this as i buy this and now i quote own it and they're going to a expect that it will
2:35:29work forever which b involves you updating it over time because when we build modern software
2:35:36we're building it on quicksand it there is no such thing as software that stays working forever
2:35:40without updates anymore especially ios software accessing a web service like this there's so many
2:35:46moving factors here like that's so you know you're building on quicksand this is going to require
2:35:49constant updates you know not like every day but you know at least every couple of years like
2:35:54suppose you suppose you worked on this decided you know this app's kind of done and abandoned it
2:35:59and people were and you wanted people to still be able to use it you would have to put it in
2:36:04a certain amount of time every couple of years just to keep it working on the latest versions
2:36:08of of ios and the latest devices so you know there there's going to be some degree of maintenance
2:36:13over time so you need ongoing revenue from people it's simple as that you need some way to make
2:36:21money from ongoing use of your app to fund ongoing updates of your app which is what everybody
2:36:26expects you to have so you're not going revenue simple as that if you don't if you don't have ads
2:36:31then it's that's it like that's those are two options that we know about or you know creepy
2:36:37user data which you don't want to do and i don't blame you so so like that's it like you have to
2:36:41make ongoing revenue from your app somehow to justify continuing to update it so the and and
2:36:47lifetime any kind of lifetime or flat rate or however you would brand it it it gives users the
2:36:53impression and the expectation that and the entitlement that they will feel that they deserve
2:37:00access to this app for an indefinite period of the future because they paid to unlock it they paid to
2:37:04own it but that's not the reality of the modern software environment they can't own it they can't
2:37:09like have it forever without ongoing work from you so it's better to not even try to sell that
2:37:14to people don't even sell them on the idea of that anymore because that doesn't exist for an ios app
2:37:19yeah all right brain trust is spoken i appreciate it fellas
2:37:26(beep)