00:00:12 ◼ ► When you look at it, there's physically not a lot in the thing, and I think the number of things that we're going to cover aren't that big.
00:00:36 ◼ ► So, when we have a brief chat before the show, you know, typically we'll cover any urgent needs and then we'll do pre-flight.
00:00:46 ◼ ► But every great once in a while, there's something funny that happens before we go live, which is never deliberate.
00:00:50 ◼ ► We always try to save that for our beloved members and bootleggers and live listeners, but this time you missed something kind of funny, so we'll have to see if it ends up.
00:00:59 ◼ ► And regular listeners. It's not like our regular show is just like, "Okay, here is the tech news from the day."
00:01:08 ◼ ► Hey, everybody, Apple made a whole bunch of money, but not quite as much money as everybody wanted them to make, but still many billions of dollars.
00:01:15 ◼ ► And we're going to cover this in excruciating detail in our financial analyst segment of today's show, as we always do.
00:01:22 ◼ ► So, they made a lot of money. Now, they made a lot of money with some of their products, but then they also made a lot of money with other products.
00:01:34 ◼ ► They did, and in fact, analysts expect they will make in the future a lot of money with services and with old products and with new products.
00:01:41 ◼ ► So, we'll see. As they make a lot of money over time in different ways, it's going to be very interesting.
00:01:46 ◼ ► We're going to report every single detail. You know, they made a certain percentage more or less money in each of these categories that made them a lot of money this quarter.
00:01:57 ◼ ► Indeed. You know who should also be making a lot of money this quarter? Maybe next quarter is John Siracusa, because this is your last chance.
00:02:08 ◼ ► And it's not a low-stakes scenario. It's not like ATP shirts. Those come back all the darn time.
00:02:14 ◼ ► These ones, these are like a freaking eclipse. They're even less frequent than an eclipse.
00:02:24 ◼ ► We figured it out a few episodes ago, but once every five years, this is your chance to get Hypercritical Shirts.
00:02:32 ◼ ► If you're driving, signal. Use your signal, because you're not a jerk. Use your signal. Pull over to the side of the road and go to hypercritical.co/shirt.
00:02:41 ◼ ► If you're walking, use your signal. Use your signal if possible. Pull over to the side of the sidewalk. hypercritical.co/shirt.
00:03:01 ◼ ► And Declan will be in what grade will he be in? He will be almost done with middle school in five years.
00:03:21 ◼ ► So no matter where you are on the planet, if today is August 12th or an earlier date, you can buy one right now.
00:03:31 ◼ ► Maybe if you're in New Zealand, you can get it or something. But just anyway, August 12th. That's your last chance.
00:03:36 ◼ ► Yeah. And number one, we really encourage you to get this not only to support Jon, but also it's a really good yellow shirt.
00:03:58 ◼ ► That's true. It's a huge risk. And secondly, speaking of cars and what we just talked about, wouldn't it be amazing if people who were walking had turn signals?
00:04:17 ◼ ► Right, so you could do the same thing while you're walking. As long as you don't poke somebody next to you, it'll work just fine.
00:04:29 ◼ ► Well, we need to stop before we get a ton of feedback. I believe Marco said down for left. Isn't it straight out for left and then an L-shape for right?
00:04:40 ◼ ► So you fail your driving test, Marco. Sorry, that new car that you ordered is going to be useless to you now.
00:04:48 ◼ ► Whether you're a majority or a minority, you are very vocal. And we've already covered it. It's covered. We got it.
00:04:53 ◼ ► I mean, look, I love bikists. I am frequently, you know, kind of amateur bikist here when they're in a place with no cars, which is a very different experience than being a bikist in a city.
00:05:07 ◼ ► You've never seen them use a hand signal? I don't know. You didn't spend enough time in the city. You've seen it all the time around here.
00:05:16 ◼ ► That we do here, actually, because, you know, here, like, you know, you're kind of sharing these wide sidewalk road kind of things.
00:05:22 ◼ ► You're sharing them between pedestrians and bikists. And so the bikists are expected to go on the left, ding a bell and say, on your left.
00:05:28 ◼ ► And then, you know, and then the people wander around because they've never heard it before. And, you know, you've got to slam on your brakes. It's a whole thing.
00:05:33 ◼ ► Bikist is definitely a very classic Marco-ism, but it does kind of sound like people who are prejudiced against bikes.
00:05:43 ◼ ► All right, let's move right along. All right, so I have some quick follow up with regard to my beloved Mophie three-in-one charger.
00:05:50 ◼ ► I don't remember when I first started talking about this, but I think was on the show a while back.
00:05:53 ◼ ► Mophie makes a three-in-one charger that's, it's designed for travel, but you don't have to use it that way.
00:06:07 ◼ ► And so there's one spot for your AirPods, there's one spot that has a MagSafe compatible pad.
00:06:37 ◼ ► Well, it turns out they're not perfect, because back in July, MacRumors reported, and a lot of people wrote to me about it.
00:06:42 ◼ ► MacRumors writes, "Beginning in late June, users in Apple's discussions community began pointing out an issue where an iPhone, Apple Watch, or AirPods placed on the charger would fail to get a consistent charge.
00:06:52 ◼ ► The devices would constantly ping as they disconnected and reconnected to the charging source."
00:06:56 ◼ ► Now, I have generally had pretty good luck with the two that I have, although I will say that I've gotten in the habit of unplugging them and then plugging them back in like once a day just to kind of reset everything.
00:07:13 ◼ ► Like using a computer with bad RAM, using a product they asked to unplug and replug every day.
00:07:22 ◼ ► You know, I should have done that. I should have, you're right, I should have done that.
00:07:25 ◼ ► But anyway, the reason I love these things so much is because my Go Pack, which was like 80 gazillion cables and has been shrunken down to basically two of these, a couple HDMI cables and very little else.
00:07:39 ◼ ► Well, as of just a week or two ago as we record, Zag, Z-A-G-G, which is the website zag.com, it's a company that apparently owns Mophie.
00:07:48 ◼ ► They have acknowledged the problem and they have come up with a firmware update kit, which is a little dongle that you plug into the device and then you plug the standard charging cable into the dongle.
00:07:58 ◼ ► You hit the one and only button on the dongle, it flashes, flashes, flashes, flashes, flashes, flashes, flashes, flashes, flashes, flashes.
00:08:02 ◼ ► And then it flashes the firmware inside the 3-in-1 charger and allegedly makes everything perfect again.
00:08:09 ◼ ► And so I've tried this on both of mine and then for one night I used my travel setup here at home, and it all worked no problem.
00:08:16 ◼ ► And when we were traveling last week, which is why the schedule was a little wonky, when we were traveling last week and we were using these things, I definitely noticed for uninteresting reasons, I have a push notification coming to myself when I go to sleep.
00:08:30 ◼ ► I'm very weird about knowing when I'm sleeping, when I'm not. It's a secret Casey weird thing, a secret weird thing Casey does.
00:08:36 ◼ ► So anyways, so I would notice after waking up that at like 2.30 in the morning, "Oh, you just plugged in your charger," which is my cue that I went to sleep.
00:08:45 ◼ ► Or "Oh, you just started charging, you just started charging, you just started charging." And none of that happened overnight after I had flashed the firmware.
00:08:51 ◼ ► So I like to think all is well. Now if you're interested in one of these things, go to zag.com. They do sell them at Apple retail, but go to zag.com and they often have deals on these things.
00:09:03 ◼ ► And if they don't have a deal right now, if you sign up for like their mailing list and then immediately cancel it afterwards, they give you something like a 20% off coupon.
00:09:12 ◼ ► Which if you're talking about 150 freaking dollars, that's a great coupon. So definitely don't pay the $150 that I did.
00:09:19 ◼ ► Definitely don't do it twice over like I did because I'm a dummy. But now I can say without reservation again that these things are real nice and you should check it out.
00:09:28 ◼ ► See this is one thing where you have to be careful with power equipment that you buy. Anything involving converting large or small amounts of power, being plugged in constantly in your house when you aren't home.
00:09:42 ◼ ► You have to really be careful what you buy. Because Mophie is one of the higher end brands here. And I can tell you I have had such mixed luck with all sorts of different charger bricks and charger equipment from different brands.
00:09:58 ◼ ► Including brands everyone loves like Anker. Everyone loves Anker. And they are among the better ones. But I've still had problems with their gear. Just like almost everyone else.
00:10:08 ◼ ► Honestly the only brand I think I've never had a problem with their power adapters is Apple. And as you get older, maybe you get a little more conservative in some of these things.
00:10:19 ◼ ► There are certain things in my house that remain plugged in all the time even when I'm not here. I lean more towards using Apple power adapters for those kind of things.
00:10:29 ◼ ► Because I just don't want to risk it with somebody else. Apple standards for that kind of stuff, for safety, for fire risk, they are super high standards. And not everyone in the business has them.
00:10:39 ◼ ► And the more complicated the product is, when you have a 3 in 1, G based charging mat, that's a complicated product. So the more complicated it is, the larger the risks are.
00:10:51 ◼ ► So this is one area. When you go all the way to the bargain basement, as you know I'm a fan of refurbished Apple devices on Amazon for cheap whenever I need test devices.
00:11:03 ◼ ► And they always come with some total no name USB cable and brick. I always throw those right in the garbage. Because first of all, I don't trust them.
00:11:14 ◼ ► The amount of hacks that are out there that are USB based zero day exploits, I don't want to even risk it with some rando cable from God knows where that came in a refurbished box.
00:11:25 ◼ ► But also, those power bricks, that's not worth possibly burning my house down to use this weird no name power brick.
00:11:32 ◼ ► Again, use stuff from good brands when it comes to things like this. And even the good brands can get it wrong sometimes. It's worth a little bit of thought and a little bit of caution with a lot of these things.
00:11:45 ◼ ► I actually have a related story about this. I have a fire hazard in my house right now. Well, actually it's outside my house because it's a fire hazard.
00:11:52 ◼ ► So as we're traveling last week, we use, I genuinely don't remember what models they are, but they're like 10 year old iPhones as water noises. We use an app, I think it's called Sleep Pillow or something like that.
00:12:04 ◼ ► I forget what it's called. We use an app. Kids have had this since they were babies. It just plays a little rain noise and it helps them tune everything else out.
00:12:11 ◼ ► It's just kind of static white noise, which we're going to talk about this more later. White noise that they go to sleep to.
00:12:16 ◼ ► Well, I noticed that one of the phones that we use for this, which is old enough to have a home button, but it's bigger than the 5 series. It must have been like a 6 maybe.
00:12:25 ◼ ► Anyways, it was in a very, very cheap silicone case or whatever, but it was poking out of the case. I thought, "Oh, that's weird."
00:12:35 ◼ ► So I tried to put the case back on it, but I just ended up squishing the phone a little bit. I'm like, "Oh, that's not good. Oh no. Oh no. This is a poofy battery, isn't it?"
00:12:50 ◼ ► I did not. I did not in this one. I promise I did not put third party RAM in this one. All the other iPhones I put third party RAM in, not this one.
00:12:57 ◼ ► But anyways, so yeah, I was like, "Oh, that's not good." And so here we are in an Airbnb. So I immediately placed the phone outside of the Airbnb, like on the grass or rocks or whatever in front of it.
00:13:07 ◼ ► And the thing is, seriously, as I sit right now, it is sitting on our driveway in front of the house. It's already been rained on twice because I keep forgetting to bring it out of the rain.
00:13:15 ◼ ► Not that I'm going to try to use it anymore, but I need to bring it to Apple or someone to recycle. But what is the official, it's not a poofy battery. What's the term for it? Exploding battery? No.
00:13:30 ◼ ► Yeah, oh, sick burn. But anyways, yeah, it's gotten real bad. Like it was just a teeny, teeny little bit at first and now it's real bad. So probably tomorrow I'm going to take it to the local Apple store and be like, "Please make this go away." Because it is scaring me.
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00:15:51 ◼ ► Jon, you want to tell us about your secret to cropping photos appropriately in the aspect ratio you prefer?
00:15:57 ◼ ► Last episode I complained about having to click a button 16,000 times because the Apple Photos app on the Mac won't remember that I always want to crop my photos to the original aspect ratio.
00:16:12 ◼ ► Yeah, well, you know, it's so accurate. And then we started getting feedback from the show once it was published.
00:16:17 ◼ ► And I was puzzled because I was like, "Oh, one person must not have heard that part of the show."
00:16:22 ◼ ► And then more feedback came and I'm like, "Okay, maybe it wasn't in the final episode, but it was just in the bootleg."
00:16:28 ◼ ► This is on me. I could swear that I talked about this on the show and I could not figure out why my memory was falling.
00:16:34 ◼ ► I must be getting old until eventually the rectives episode came out and I said, "Oh, that's what it is."
00:16:40 ◼ ► I talked about it on rectives, which I had recorded one day before we recorded that ATP, but which gets released after because of the pre-taped call-and-show nature of rectives.
00:16:48 ◼ ► Anyway, I misremembered. I thought I had talked about this on ATP when really I talked about it on my other podcast the day before.
00:16:55 ◼ ► What am I talking about? Everybody wrote in to tell me, "Did you know that you can hold down the shift key when cropping to maintain the same aspect ratio?"
00:17:04 ◼ ► Yes, I know that. And I got told it a lot. That's on me. I thought I had talked about it in the show and I didn't.
00:17:12 ◼ ► Although a couple of people when they were writing it about it, they would throw in some caveats.
00:17:22 ◼ ► A lot of people said, "I understand why you want the features. It's kind of annoying to use."
00:17:26 ◼ ► Well, setting aside its annoyingness, which I'll get to in a second, this doesn't solve the problem for me.
00:17:30 ◼ ► I've known that you can hold down shift to resize and by the way you can do option to resize from the center as well.
00:17:34 ◼ ► But that's weird to do, especially if you're doing it on a trackpad, on a laptop, on vacation.
00:17:39 ◼ ► It's more awkward than just being able to grab the corner and move it. You have to do the modifier.
00:17:43 ◼ ► And the thing that makes it slightly more awkward, even than just having to hold down things at the same time,
00:17:50 ◼ ► is that Photoist implements it such that once you start the drag of the corner of the thing, your chance to hit the shift key has passed.
00:18:00 ◼ ► You can't hit the shift key during the drag like you can in pretty much any modern Mac app that does this.
00:18:06 ◼ ► And that gets to the next point, which is the reason I knew about it, and the reason I think most people know about it,
00:18:16 ◼ ► Lots of people cited Photoshop as sort of like the "oh, I know this because I use Photoshop"
00:18:22 ◼ ► and you might not know it because you just use photos, but it's a convention made by Photoshop.
00:18:27 ◼ ► It's actually way farther back now. Every user interface platform, but especially Apple ones, have a certain culture that's part of them.
00:18:37 ◼ ► And a lot of that culture is set down really early and then just passed on through generations and generations of software developers and users.
00:18:44 ◼ ► And lots of people probably think "oh, the shift to constrain drawing or selecting, that comes from Photoshop."
00:18:55 ◼ ► This feature of holding on shift to constrain either drawing or selection actually dates back to the original Macintosh in 1984,
00:19:11 ◼ ► and you held down the shift key and then you dragged it out, what you would get is a square.
00:19:15 ◼ ► Because it would constrain it to be a square aspect ratio instead of just a loosey-goosey freeform rectangle.
00:19:21 ◼ ► That version of MacPaint and the one that came out in 1985 also required you to hold down the shift key before you click the mouse button.
00:19:29 ◼ ► Because if you waited until after you clicked the mouse button, holding down shift did nothing.
00:19:33 ◼ ► MacPaint 2.0 in 1988 changed that and made it so that when you were drawing the rectangle, you could hold down shift and it would be a square,
00:19:42 ◼ ► and let go of shift and it would not be a square, all the while holding the mouse button down.
00:19:50 ◼ ► So this convention of shift to constrain and the innovation of realizing that maybe people forgot to hit the shift key,
00:19:56 ◼ ► so you should let them toggle it while the drag is in motion, dates back to 1985 on the Mac.
00:20:01 ◼ ► And it is pervasive everywhere. If you don't know about this, if you're a new Mac user, if you don't use a lot of drawing programs,
00:20:05 ◼ ► pick anything that lets you drag out a rectangular shape and try the shift key to constrain proportions,
00:20:13 ◼ ► the option key to resize from center, and there are also often the other modifiers to other interesting things. Try them out.
00:20:22 ◼ ► And as for the photos thing I was asking for, I phrased it as "remember that I want this"
00:20:28 ◼ ► and a lot of people interpreted that to mean like, "oh, just remember the last thing you clicked on and do that for all things going forward."
00:20:34 ◼ ► The proper way to do this would be to have a setting, you know, in the preferences or settings or whatever the hell we're called now,
00:20:41 ◼ ► in photos that says, "hey, when we first bring up the crop tool on a photo that you've never edited for before,
00:20:49 ◼ ► how would you like the aspect ratio constrained?" And the choices would be, you know, all the choices that are there, freeform, blah blah blah blah blah.
00:20:55 ◼ ► And you could also have a choice that says, "do nothing and accept the existing ratio."
00:20:59 ◼ ► Which brings me to this next bit of feedback, something I didn't know about photos on iOS but also photos on Mac.
00:21:05 ◼ ► This is from Jack Brown. He says, "on iOS, if you choose a viewfinder aspect ratio other than 4x3,
00:21:12 ◼ ► the new ratio is kept as the default when cropping those photos, with freeform still the default 4x3 shot."
00:21:17 ◼ ► So first of all, I knew this was there vaguely, a vague memory in the distant past, like I knew where to find this once he said this.
00:21:24 ◼ ► But I don't know if most people change this. If you go to the camera app on your iPhone and look for an upwards facing chevron at the top middle of the screen,
00:21:33 ◼ ► tap that, and then it reveals like the toolbar of items, then the second circle from the right in the toolbar says like 4x3 or something similar in it, 4 colon 3 or whatever.
00:21:42 ◼ ► Tap that and pick an aspect ratio and it changes, you know, the viewfinder aspect ratio.
00:21:47 ◼ ► Basically like what proportion is the image on my phone screen when I'm moving it around trying to frame the shot I'm going to take.
00:21:54 ◼ ► So if you pick anything other than 4x3 and you take that picture, then if you open that picture in photos on the phone or photos on the Mac and presumably the iPad as well,
00:22:03 ◼ ► it won't be freeform, it will be the aspect ratio of the viewfinder. Which is really weird.
00:22:09 ◼ ► I guess it considers it like, oh you've kind of already cropped it because it takes the whole picture.
00:22:13 ◼ ► If you put it on square, if you put it on 1x1 or 1 colon 1, it will take a square photo, but when you open that photo in photos on the Mac,
00:22:20 ◼ ► you'll see that it actually took a normal rectangular photo but it just cropped to the square thing.
00:22:26 ◼ ► That doesn't help me at all either, but it just goes to show that this is a more complicated situation than you might think.
00:22:30 ◼ ► Because if you set Oh Force It To Original all the time and you opened one of those photos that was shot in square,
00:22:35 ◼ ► some interpretation of the idea of original could mean like, oh but the photo was originally 4x3 and you cropped it to square with the viewfinder,
00:22:42 ◼ ► so original should be 4x3 and not square and by cropping now all of a sudden you've screwed up.
00:22:47 ◼ ► Anyway, I would trust the people who implement this feature to do something vaguely intelligent about it.
00:22:52 ◼ ► For example saying hey if there is no existing crop, stick to original, but if there is an existing crop like square, stick to that one.
00:23:03 ◼ ► And do you want to tell me about the crop macro that you have been shown, discovered, created, I'm not sure the lineage here.
00:23:12 ◼ ► So this is Jason, Jason Snally heard our episode last week and was like, you know what, I can solve this problem using computers.
00:23:20 ◼ ► And the solution to the problem. So if photos was scriptable or shortcutable or whatever we call modern Mac applications that can be automated
00:23:29 ◼ ► with using some Apple technology like Apple script or shortcuts, you could make it so that every time you go to crop a photo it automatically selects original for you.
00:23:38 ◼ ► Photos is not particularly scriptable, but computers can do things. And so Jason Snally used his computer to do a thing.
00:23:46 ◼ ► He used a program called Keyboard Maestro, which we will link in the show notes, which is a tool that says even if your app is not automatable, we will find a way to automate it.
00:23:55 ◼ ► And how does it do it? Through the magic of screen scraping. That's right. Jason has made a Keyboard Maestro action that does a series of steps
00:24:04 ◼ ► and looks for the part of the photo's UI by using a bitmap. To build this you take a screenshot and say, see this part on the sidebar where it says original, I want you to click there.
00:24:14 ◼ ► And so Keyboard Maestro looks for a region of the screen that is roughly like that screenshot with some fuzziness and will click on the thing for you.
00:24:23 ◼ ► So I have it bound to command shift C. And so instead of hitting C to crop, I can hit command shift C, which will then basically hit the C key for me, wait for the sidebar to appear, look for the word original and click on it.
00:24:35 ◼ ► Very silly, not a great solution, requires owning Keyboard Maestro and keeping it running all the time.
00:24:41 ◼ ► Keyboard Maestro is amazing because it can do things like this when nothing else can help you, when your app is not scriptable.
00:24:47 ◼ ► I'm trying to do an A-Team thing, but I don't know the original words well enough to parody it well. Just Google for the A-Team intro and you'll see it.
00:24:55 ◼ ► So thank you Jason for that. We will link that action in the show notes. So if you want to go buy Keyboard Maestro, you can use Jason's thing.
00:25:02 ◼ ► I renamed his action, I renamed it Crop Aspect Original because that's what goes through my head all 16,000 times I do it. Crop Aspect Original.
00:25:12 ◼ ► So check it out. It binds to command shift C, but only when Photos is the front most application.
00:25:23 ◼ ► Excellent. And then since the Photos problems never end, I think it was two episodes ago you were talking about how you really really wanted to, or maybe it was the same episode.
00:25:33 ◼ ► It's the same episode. It was the two things I wanted to change in Photos for this year.
00:25:36 ◼ ► Oh there you go. So you were saying how you really really really wanted to be able to kick off a detect faces run, if you will.
00:25:43 ◼ ► Well a friend of the show, Gee Rambo, wrote in to say "I did some quick spelunking and found two potential workarounds for the Photos analysis issue John was reporting.
00:25:52 ◼ ► Apple's implementation seems to rely on Duet, activity scheduler, a daemon that manages background execution.
00:26:00 ◼ ► There's an API to force a given activity to start immediately, but in order to invoke it one would have to disable SIP, what is it? System Integrity Protection, in order to attach LLDB to DASD, the Duet Activity Scheduler daemon, and call some Objective-C method.
00:26:17 ◼ ► However, or pass some Objective-C message. However, I also found a defaults flag that disables this intelligent scheduling, which we will put in the show notes.
00:26:24 ◼ ► Defaults write com.apple.photoanalysisd. Photoanalysis core duet scheduling disabled. Bool? Yes.
00:26:31 ◼ ► That doesn't guarantee analysis will start right away though, as the daemon may still run some internal heuristics before it decides to actually start the analysis.
00:26:38 ◼ ► There are probably more defaults tags that could be tweaked in LLDB or launch control shenanigans that could be done, but that's about all the time I have for today.
00:26:48 ◼ ► And Guy also had a link that we'll put in the show notes for more about the scheduling system, and this is running XPC activities on demand by Bryce Palkin, and we'll put that in the show notes too.
00:26:58 ◼ ► Yeah, so this is obviously going above and beyond, like disabling System Integrity Protection and attaching a debugger to the running instance of your program,
00:27:06 ◼ ► hopping into that memory space and just calling a method that you found by looking at symbols, all to try to kick off, you know, basically it's the equivalent of the button that says,
00:27:15 ◼ ► "Do the analysis now, please," but of course that is still mediated, as Guy says, by, you know, the system itself could have some sort of rules that says, "Oh, I'm not going to run quite yet," or whatever.
00:27:25 ◼ ► This is really something that Apple needs to solve. Obviously there's no, well, so far it doesn't seem like there's no really easy way to do this.
00:27:31 ◼ ► I wouldn't want to disable the duet scheduling thing because I don't know, like, I get that it stops using the intelligent scheduler, but what replaces it?
00:27:39 ◼ ► Is it any kind of scheduler? Is it just unscheduled entirely? Like, debugging this is hard enough without messing with things, so I appreciate the digging into this, but I would be too afraid to do any of these things because once you've done this,
00:27:52 ◼ ► I'd always be wondering, "Have I screwed up my photo system in some way that now all the advice I see online doesn't apply to me because I messed it up and I don't know how to undo it?" I'm not as daring as he is.
00:28:02 ◼ ► And then, can you explain to me, I'm asking not only to prompt the next section of the show, but I'm genuinely curious, can you explain to me how non-destructive photo editing works for photos? Because I don't think I understand this.
00:28:16 ◼ ► So this is something Marco brought up, like, why not use another app to do all your cropping? And I was like, well, you know, when you do the cropping in photos, it's non-destructive, whereas if I was to use some other app to crop, even if that app itself was non-destructive, then I have the problem of, okay, now you've done your cropping, how do you get those now cropped up?
00:28:31 ◼ ► How do you get those now cropped photos into photos while preserving the non-destructive crops? So that's tricky. But as I said on the show, I do edit things with external editors within photos. Photos has like an editing system where when you're in edit mode, you can hit the little three dots in a circle menu, very clearly labeled, very easy to find.
00:28:50 ◼ ► It's kind of like the little eyes in a circle that Apple loves these days. And it will say edit in, and it will list any of the apps that can be editors for photos. So edit in Pixelmator, edit in, what's the other one that I use, Raw Power, right?
00:29:03 ◼ ► Those editors that work with photos, most of them, all the ones that I tried, but I don't know if it's all of them, you'll go to edit them, and it will pop up a UI that is owned and controlled by that app, and you can use that app's tools to do things.
00:29:15 ◼ ► For example, I use Pixelmator Pro to do a content-aware fill kind of thing to erase people and expand the background because it works way better than anything in the photos app.
00:29:24 ◼ ► And after you've done all those changes, you say, "Okay, I did my changes," and you click basically save in that UI that popped up. Most of them will say, "Hey, do you want me to preserve these edits in a non-destructive way when I go back to photos, or do you want me to bake them in?"
00:29:38 ◼ ► And I always say, "Preserve the edits," because when you go back to photos, you'll see the edit that you made, like, oh, you erased a person, and you see that in the picture, but photos still, still maintains the original.
00:29:48 ◼ ► So you can always say, "You know what? Revert to original," and there's your original photo with those edits gone from it.
00:29:53 ◼ ► So you can do that. You could also do that for cropping, but that little three dots open in external editor is a pretty slow process because you basically have to launch the other, a little miniature version of the other program.
00:30:03 ◼ ► I don't know if it's a plug-in or a bundle. I don't know how it works, probably through XPC or something, but it's not as fast as just hitting C to crop because you've got to hit return to edit, and then probably use keyboard maestro to assign a keyboard command to edit in Pixelmator Pro because there's no keyboard shortcut assigned to it.
00:30:17 ◼ ► Anyway, it will be slow and extremely clunky, and when you're trying to whip through a thousand photos, the last thing you want to do is be waiting for your thing to launch an app and then quit out of it and save and all this other stuff.
00:30:29 ◼ ► So I do use those editors, and we'll put links to a whole bunch in the show. There are a lot of ones that people recommended. I think we'll probably link to Pixelmator Pro, Photomator, which I think is a cut-down version of that that's mostly for editing photos, darkroom, lightroom, etc.
00:30:42 ◼ ► A lot of the apps like Raw Power and I think Photomator take advantage of the fact that Apple lets third-party apps access the photos' photo library.
00:30:51 ◼ ► You could just use, for example, Raw Power and never touch Apple Photos because it sees your iCloud photo library. It can read and write that. You don't need to use photos at all.
00:31:02 ◼ ► It's kind of like music where they have third-party apps that can read your music library on the phone or apps that read and write your calendar on your phone.
00:31:10 ◼ ► There's one calendar that's run by the system, but you can use third-party apps to get that data. The same is actually true of photos.
00:31:15 ◼ ► So a lot of these apps, if you like them, you can just use them and not use photos. But I do like a lot of the features in photos.
00:31:22 ◼ ► I do my photo books there, and I have albums and the shared albums they use and all that other stuff.
00:31:27 ◼ ► So I will probably continue to use photos while branching out to non-destructive apps to do fancy editing operations.
00:31:34 ◼ ► But for cropping, I really don't want to have to leave photos for that. I just want it to work better there.
00:31:39 ◼ ► That makes sense. And we'll put a bunch of apps that we believe support this in the show notes. There will be a bunch of apps.
00:31:48 ◼ ► Or apps that you could use as alternatives. A lot of people are recommending Lightroom and Lightroom Classic as just like, "Hey, just stop using photos and do all your photos in Lightroom."
00:31:56 ◼ ► So we'll put links to those in there as well. I think going totally out of the Apple ecosystem is definitely not what I want to do at this point with 170,000 photos.
00:32:04 ◼ ► But that is more of a lift. But these apps that don't ask you to leave, but just say, "Hey, you can use this other app instead of or in addition to photos," that's actually pretty neat.
00:32:14 ◼ ► And then Marco, if you wouldn't mind in the future dropping in "We are the champions" on my behalf right here, please, while we discuss how very right I am about how the one true way to be in your home is to have some sort of audio playing in the background.
00:32:29 ◼ ► Wait a second. I'm supposed to be collecting the being right points here because the last episode when we talked about this, we were like, my question was, what do you think the breakdown of people in the world is?
00:32:37 ◼ ► Do you think more people are like Casey or more people are like me? And I said, well, you know, based on what we have on the show here, like what percentage do we think?
00:32:45 ◼ ► And we all threw out numbers. And I believe I said 70/30. I said 70/30 or maybe even 75/25. But I'm going to say because I said 70/30 first, that that was my, you know, my marker. And what did it come out to be, Casey?
00:32:57 ◼ ► It was 70/30. So basically you're claiming you're right, even though you're wrong. Got it.
00:33:09 ◼ ► Nice. Either way, I am pleased to see that most of the world agrees with me that you need to have something. You got to have something playing my word. You have to have something. Silence is evil, man. No good.
00:33:19 ◼ ► So this was the tricky thing about the survey. And I waited a while to post it up because I was trying to figure out how to phrase it. I think I mostly did OK, although there are some.
00:33:29 ◼ ► There were some holes that you can tell you did OK if people don't have tons of questions. One of the things that I. So here, let me read the question. It's too late now. Is that surveys closed and about 4500 people answered it.
00:33:38 ◼ ► So although the numbers stopped changing after like 500 people answered it, see previous episodes, we discussed this anyway. The question was, when you are home alone or otherwise not worried about bothering anyone else, do you prefer to have some kind of audio playing?
00:33:53 ◼ ► And then in parentheses, this audio can be anything. A TV, the radio, music, audio, audio books, podcasts, whatever.
00:34:01 ◼ ► The whatever tries to cover all my bases there, but I still had people say, does white noise count? And I should have included that because enough people enough people said, does white.
00:34:09 ◼ ► I feel like white noise falls under the category of whatever. And I kept saying audio. White noise is audio.
00:34:14 ◼ ► Maybe people have questions about it. The second thing people asked, and I'm not quite sure how I would have clarified this. They said, does do headphones count?
00:34:22 ◼ ► And my answer is yes. Yes, headphones count like it doesn't have to be in the air because that would fall into the category of are not worried about bothering other people because if you got headphones in and they're not open air headphones like Margot's obnoxious things, you don't have to worry about bothering other people.
00:34:35 ◼ ► Because the question is that the reason I wanted to say home alone or not worried about bothering people because that's such a confounding factor because it's like, well, I prefer to have X playing.
00:34:44 ◼ ► But when the house is full of people, either it's too noisy or I wouldn't want to annoy them or we can't agree on what to play or some people find it distracting even though I don't or whatever.
00:34:55 ◼ ► So just eliminating all that as a variable and say, let's say you're in a scenario where you don't have to worry about other people because they don't care or you have headphones or you're the only one home.
00:35:08 ◼ ► Obviously the people who follow me on Mastodon are not a random sample of the population, but you know, there you have it.
00:35:33 ◼ ► Have you noticed that for the past few years, the majority of data breaches and hacks you read about have something in common?
00:35:40 ◼ ► Hackers absolutely love exploiting vulnerable employee devices and credentials, but it doesn't have to be this way.
00:35:53 ◼ ► In this world, phished credentials would be useless to hackers and you can manage every OS, even Linux, from a single dashboard.
00:36:00 ◼ ► And you can get employees to fix their own device security issues without creating more work for IT.
00:36:07 ◼ ► The good news is you don't have to imagine this world. You can just start using Collide.
00:36:12 ◼ ► Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and it ensures that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.
00:36:22 ◼ ► Visit collide.com/ATP to watch a demo and see how it works. That's Collide spelled K-O-L-I-D-E.
00:36:53 ◼ ► Yeah, so now is the time. If you were an ATP member and were on the CallSheet test flight, well, be gone with you.
00:37:08 ◼ ► Actually, I genuinely do have to talk about that in a minute because there's a lot to be said about that.
00:37:25 ◼ ► It could be the first episode someone listens to them. Like, what the hell is CallSheet?
00:37:28 ◼ ► No, you're right. No, no, no. I agree with you. I'm just saying usually I'm good about this.
00:37:33 ◼ ► Anyways, CallSheet is an app for iPhone and iPad that lets you look up movies, cast members, crew members, TV shows, and trivia information about them.
00:38:19 ◼ ► And yeah, so I actually hit the go button on this very, very, very quietly on Saturday.
00:38:30 ◼ ► And I wanted to make sure that at least one person, that would be me, tried the in-app purchase.
00:38:41 ◼ ► Because on Saturday, I might still have the time to do an expedited review on Sunday potentially.
00:39:00 ◼ ► It was very funny actually because I said on Mastodon, "Oh, it's coming tomorrow!" I said on Sunday.
00:39:13 ◼ ► There was nothing wrong with that, but I think everyone kind of freaked out a little bit on my behalf thinking that was an accident.
00:39:19 ◼ ► And for the most part, people who haven't released an app on the App Store, there's no other way to do it.
00:39:25 ◼ ► There is no way to say it's going to be out at 9 and then click a button and everyone sees it at 9.
00:39:38 ◼ ► It launches, then it doesn't show up in search for a while, and it doesn't show up in Australia for a while.
00:39:51 ◼ ► But it's been on the store for a while. You're just waiting for it to spread to everywhere.
00:39:55 ◼ ► So that on Monday at 9, if anybody anywhere in the world searches for CallSheet, hopefully, fingers crossed, they'll find it.
00:40:01 ◼ ► Although I have to say, two days to get into App Store search may not be sufficient in some cases.
00:40:12 ◼ ► And there is a mechanism, before everyone writes in, there is a mechanism that you can tell the App Store,
00:40:32 ◼ ► If you hold for developer release and you hit go, I think the going is a little bit faster.
00:40:37 ◼ ► But the problem is with the App Store is that it's usually pretty timely for almost everyone.
00:40:48 ◼ ► Does it work for the search if it's a brand new app, though? That's what I'd be worried about.
00:40:51 ◼ ► And that's the thing, there's a lot of squishiness in that, there's a lot of usualies and a lot of probablies.
00:40:55 ◼ ► And so if you want to launch an app and make a big splash and you've timed press and stuff like that,
00:40:59 ◼ ► you don't want to take those risks. So it is better usually to hit the button the night before.
00:41:14 ◼ ► and if there's going to be any press or any yelling about it on social media or anything,
00:41:30 ◼ ► You want any press, any buzz you generate, you want someone who's searching for it to find it no matter what.
00:41:36 ◼ ► So usually you don't need to put it that far ahead of time, but the smart people all do.
00:41:42 ◼ ► And also for a brand new app that has never been on the store, that's the worst case scenario for the search index.
00:41:48 ◼ ► If you're launching version 2.0 and you haven't renamed your app, you're probably good,
00:41:57 ◼ ► you really want to get that out there because we have no visibility into or control over when things appear in search,
00:42:03 ◼ ► which you would think, doesn't it appear in search as soon as it's on the store? No, absolutely not.
00:42:26 ◼ ► then sometimes maybe Americans can search for it, but people in the UK can't or vice versa. It's just a mess.
00:42:32 ◼ ► So I had actually intended on doing all this on Sunday, but I had gotten home from our trip on Saturday
00:42:38 ◼ ► and I was championing it a bit to just make sure this is all functional, good, it works, etc.
00:42:44 ◼ ► So I had done it on Saturday, quietly, and then like I said, a bunch of people found it.
00:42:53 ◼ ► but I didn't want to, I replied to as many as I could, but I didn't want to publicly say,
00:42:57 ◼ ► "Don't worry, it's there, but don't tell anyone because obviously then everyone will go looking for it."
00:43:03 ◼ ► So anyway, I appreciate all of you who are looking out for me, but it was deliberate, I promise.
00:43:07 ◼ ► So yeah, so the press was far and away the best press response I've gotten from anything I've done.
00:43:17 ◼ ► It has been extremely kind. I was bracing for impact from a couple of spots, particularly on Mac stories,
00:43:25 ◼ ► because I know how much Jon and Federico love their iPads, and I was bracing for impact on the iPad support and call sheet,
00:43:33 ◼ ► I was going to ask about that because I don't think I've actually even tried it on the iPad. What is it like?
00:43:42 ◼ ► The reason I bring this up is because I've wanted the app on my Mac several times, and I'm like, "I should just run the iPad version of it,"
00:43:47 ◼ ► which then I have two things. A, I can't do that because I have an Intel Mac, and B, I was like, "Did KC even allow it to be run on the Mac?"
00:43:54 ◼ ► Well, we should talk about that. I will probably forget, so try to keep me honest, but we should talk about that later.
00:43:58 ◼ ► But no, it is on the iPad, but I have no iPad-specific affordances. I have done nothing to it specific for the iPad,
00:44:15 ◼ ► Well, so here's the thinking on that, and I'm being convinced that my thinking is wrong.
00:44:21 ◼ ► I mean, you could write a Mac app if you want, but I'm just saying, checking the checkbox is easier.
00:44:25 ◼ ► Well, that's the thing. So on TestFlight, I was like, "Who cares? It's TestFlight. Everyone knows it's garbage."
00:44:38 ◼ ► I didn't think I wanted to also introduce a subpar Mac app, because it just seemed like it was too much subpar stuff,
00:44:51 ◼ ► I have heard people that were doing it on TestFlight, but I didn't have the time, really, before I wanted to launch,
00:45:01 ◼ ► And so my thought was, "The iPad was bad enough, but I think it's required. I'll let it go on iPad."
00:45:27 ◼ ► The reason I think you didn't see a lot of pushback about this in reviews is because it's clearly,
00:45:31 ◼ ► the phone is where everyone's going to use it. You're on the couch, you've got your phone.
00:45:43 ◼ ► I don't think a subpar iPad version really matters that much at all, especially for 1.0.
00:45:58 ◼ ► "Oh, but if we put it on the Mac, what if someday we want to make money from them by making a Mac version?"
00:46:03 ◼ ► No, that I don't think I care about. Remind me of this, but I don't think I care about that.
00:46:06 ◼ ► So for whatever it's worth, my podcast app, which is not really something that many people want on their iPads or their Macs, but for whatever--
00:46:16 ◼ ► All right, for whatever it's worth, right now, my Mac use and my iPad use are roughly tied.
00:46:50 ◼ ► Yeah. There's occasionally some weird bugs where on the Mac version, it will crash if you use this one API
00:47:07 ◼ ► Yeah, but for the most part, I think what your app is doing, it's pretty much showing information and lists and images and stuff like that.
00:47:14 ◼ ► That should be fine. I can't off the top of my head come up with any major problem you'd run into.
00:47:19 ◼ ► But it is, once you go onto a platform, whether it's-- even if it's just leaving that thing on on the Mac,
00:47:41 ◼ ► I thought when I was going into it, I thought, "This is great. I don't have to do anything.
00:47:56 ◼ ► Whenever there is a bug or a shortcoming, they will either email me about it or leave a mediocre review saying,
00:48:06 ◼ ► So you will run into occasional downsides of it, but overall, I would say it is worth doing.
00:48:15 ◼ ► Once you have your iPad app situated, just check the box and let it run on the Mac too.
00:48:27 ◼ ► I did an interview. I keep forgetting to look up when it was, but it was a month or two ago.
00:48:35 ◼ ► We talked for 90 minutes or something like that, and then it was cut down in a good way to about 30 minutes.
00:48:41 ◼ ► And that's a video interview, so if you want to see me talking at my normal podcasting desk
00:48:48 ◼ ► however, you can actually watch me talk and gesture and articulate with my arms and so on and so forth.
00:48:56 ◼ ► No, that's true. In this one, I believe the closet door was closed, but it is currently open.
00:49:38 ◼ ► And then somebody pointed out to me that Florian Inocente at iGeneration, which is a French blog apparently,
00:49:56 ◼ ► There were some curmudgeons that were yelling at me about how I'm offering software for rent,
00:50:04 ◼ ► If only there were some podcast episodes they could listen to where you talked about this.
00:50:13 ◼ ► First of all, if your app is not free, flat out for everyone forever, there's always going to be complaints.
00:50:22 ◼ ► they don't want to keep paying for something on a regular basis, and they're going to complain.
00:50:29 ◼ ► if you were to explain to them the reasoning, which is, look, I'm building this on a third-party API,
00:50:34 ◼ ► and though that API is free right now, that could change, and if it changes, I could be on the hook for a lot of money.
00:50:48 ◼ ► So I feel like if you explain that, they'd be like, oh, I didn't realize your app used an API,
00:50:52 ◼ ► or I didn't realize your app used an API and it was free, but it may charge in the future.
00:50:56 ◼ ► Of course, there will still be some people who will say, well, it's free now, so you should make it free.
00:51:09 ◼ ► I'm not saying that you don't need to answer every single one of these people, but if you were to.
00:51:17 ◼ ► Because look, the reality is, anything you put out there that people want that is not free, you'll get some complaints.
00:51:21 ◼ ► And there are a lot, look, every time we talk about this, we'll hear from a handful of people who are like,
00:52:13 ◼ ► their numbers are dwindling and frankly they are not going to be your customers anyway.
00:52:17 ◼ ► So you are better off serving the people who are going to be your customers as best as you can.
00:52:32 ◼ ► They are sort of in the old model where you buy new versions and they cost you a certain amount.
00:52:41 ◼ ► So for the people who don't want to pay subscriptions, there are still places you can go,
00:52:45 ◼ ► but in the same way that Casey's choices don't dictate the choices of everybody else's,
00:52:51 ◼ ► your preferences as a consumer also don't dictate the choices of every software developer.
00:53:04 ◼ ► but the people who are willing to pay a subscription have different choices than you do.
00:53:26 ◼ ► it's not really. Like, you know, Microsoft Office is subscription, Photoshop is subscription,
00:53:33 ◼ ► The only things that aren't are either things that are sort of intentionally reactions to that,
00:53:38 ◼ ► like, you know, affinity not being subscription is sort of a competitive differentiator
00:53:41 ◼ ► against one of the main competitors, which is Photoshop and where other Adobe apps there are,
00:53:46 ◼ ► or their apps like mine that are, you know, dinky little things that aren't a big deal.
00:54:05 ◼ ► You know, the handful of people that I did answer who were the ones that were not jerks
00:54:09 ◼ ► and clearly seemed to be willing to have at least a modicum of a conversation about it,
00:54:13 ◼ ► I totally understand their point. Like, I'm not, as a user, I'm not in love with subscriptions either.
00:54:18 ◼ ► Like, I'm kind of tired of them too, but I had to take off the user hat and put on the business hat
00:54:22 ◼ ► and I don't think that there's any way I could offer this app other than subscriptions,
00:54:29 ◼ ► And, you know, people would say, well, what about like a really, really expensive one time purchase?
00:54:33 ◼ ► And I was, as soon as I said to them, look, I don't want to end up in a Twitter or Reddit scenario.
00:54:42 ◼ ► Not everyone bought it, but you know, at least, at least now I have prior art to point to, you know.
00:54:50 ◼ ► Although speaking of software costs, when I was looking up the differences in MacPane 1.0 and 2.0 and everything,
00:54:55 ◼ ► I had occasion to, because I was looking at the pages with the version history, had occasion to see the price again.
00:55:00 ◼ ► And in 2023 dollars, the combination you can get MacPane and MacWrite in a single box, that was 553 dollars for those two programs.
00:55:12 ◼ ► I would pay it once to get the best word processor for the Mac and the best Paint program, like the only word processor and Paint program,
00:55:19 ◼ ► If you paid that 553 dollars in 1984, guess what? 2.0 came out in 1988, four years later.
00:55:38 ◼ ► But practically speaking, you'd eventually get a new Mac and eventually the operating system would be upgraded.
00:55:43 ◼ ► And eventually the old version of MacPane that you got wouldn't even run on the new Mac, on the new version of Mac operating system that you had.
00:55:50 ◼ ► And then you'd quote unquote have to buy MacPane 2.0, because MacPane 1.0, 1.5, like stopped running.
00:55:58 ◼ ► Although I did find out that MacPane 1.0 broke really fast because I'm using like, you know, what is it called?
00:56:04 ◼ ► InfiniteMac.org, those various websites to run emulators and plus MiniVMAC on my local Mac to double check all this stuff.
00:56:10 ◼ ► And MacPane 1.0 does not like to run on operating systems and simulated Macs that are much newer than like the 128 or the 512.
00:56:20 ◼ ► Right? Very quickly, version 1.5 came out in 1985 and that one had more legs. So anyway, the old model had its problems too.
00:56:28 ◼ ► But you know, people like what they like. And so seek out software that offers the pricing model that you prefer.
00:56:34 ◼ ► But know that the landscape is changing and you may be hopping from island to island as the water rises around you.
00:56:42 ◼ ► I would say also Casey, like when you talk about the price, this is both, you know, I saw a little bit of this like in your blog post or even in the app UI.
00:56:51 ◼ ► You are very kind of apologetic about the price. You're very careful to introduce people to it.
00:57:01 ◼ ► But the way you approach the price when you're talking about it is along the lines of, here's the app.
00:57:13 ◼ ► When you like that, that kind of that, that, but there that shift in attitude suggests that this is a downside.
00:57:27 ◼ ► And then you then, you know, you have to pay like, you know, change the button to an and no, it's a fair point.
00:57:33 ◼ ► I mean, I would flip it around entirely and say the app is X dollars for Y and Y dollars for X.
00:57:49 ◼ ► And by the way, I know we talk so much about pricing and I hadn't kept track of what you had decided.
00:57:54 ◼ ► I like this set of things. I like one dollar a month. It's really simple. I like nine dollars a year.
00:58:00 ◼ ► So I think that I think eventually through all this hemming and hawing, we came up with what I think is a pretty good.
00:58:18 ◼ ► And you're trying to be friendly with the searches and then having the trial if you decide to do it with enough time decided.
00:58:30 ◼ ► And if you have if you have, you know, a dollar a month lying around for this task, if this is worth a dollar a month to you, you will throw that money in a second.
00:58:38 ◼ ► Not have to use the IMDb app. Like when I was trying to like, you know, post I was going to say tweet, but whatever, post about it on the various social media networks on launch day.
00:58:46 ◼ ► I launched the IMDb app again just to remind myself what it was like and took a bunch of screenshot of the various interstitials that it threw in my face.
00:58:52 ◼ ► Like, does it want me to sign up for a streaming service because it threw like Netflix logos in my face?
00:58:56 ◼ ► I'm like, what the hell is this? And I went back and looked at the screenshot and it's like, it's not that evil.
00:59:01 ◼ ► What it was trying to say is, hey, you can tell the IMDb app which streaming services you subscribe to.
00:59:07 ◼ ► So it knows like just like you can and just watch, which is integrated with Casey's app.
00:59:11 ◼ ► So it knows which ones to recommend to you. I'm like, OK, that's a good feature IMDb app.
00:59:15 ◼ ► What's not good is when I launch the app, when I want to look something up to throw a full screen thing in my face telling me that feature exists.
00:59:23 ◼ ► That I don't like because at that point I'm so angry I just want to get to the search box so I can type something that I dismiss without reading it anyway.
00:59:29 ◼ ► Yeah. So yeah. So anyway, just own your pricing as like, here's the app and this is what it costs.
00:59:37 ◼ ► Like that's it. Like, look, that's what Apple does. Apple, when Apple introduces a new billion dollar thing, they come out and say,
00:59:43 ◼ ► here's here's this good thing and here's what it costs. That's it. Well, they say, well, Apple gets to say starts at.
00:59:49 ◼ ► Oh, you can say that too, Casey. You could say it starts at one dollar a month. That's true.
00:59:52 ◼ ► No, it starts at whatever. No, it starts at like, you know, 80 cents a month or whatever. Right.
00:59:59 ◼ ► Well, whatever. You can do the starts out. You could say if you want the blacked out logo, though, it's another fifteen hundred dollars.
01:00:05 ◼ ► Portia option price. That's Portia for sure. But yeah, it's funny you bring up all this pricing stuff, too,
01:00:19 ◼ ► But one of the misses on my part is when I was setting up the pricing for the four different IAPs,
01:00:24 ◼ ► I said to Apple, you know, here's the price I want compute the equivalent across the planet.
01:00:30 ◼ ► And they said, sure, we're happy to do that. And there were four countries that I've become aware of so far that I'm aware of so far.
01:00:38 ◼ ► I'm trying to figure out if I can find them real quick. Maybe not. But there were four countries. Sweden was one of them.
01:00:43 ◼ ► I want to say Japan was another where apparently the yearly cost was either the exact same or more than the monthly cost.
01:00:53 ◼ ► It was Sweden, Japan, Vietnam and Canada. Surprisingly, I need to look into this, but I don't know how this happened.
01:00:59 ◼ ► Like it was not delivered weird. Right. And maybe it was user error. Darned if I know how. But it could have been.
01:01:05 ◼ ► So I think it makes sense to me because here's the thing when you I don't know exactly how this works, but I do know that pricing is abstracted where you pick like a what are they called tiers.
01:01:18 ◼ ► So you can. But most people don't because they don't want to have to do exchange rates in their head.
01:01:21 ◼ ► And if you pick a tier, Apple adjusts them for you as the currency fluctuates at some interval. I don't know what they do.
01:01:27 ◼ ► Occasionally they send an email that tells me they're adjusting things and like whatever. But the thing is, the tier for your yearly like that's a different number.
01:01:34 ◼ ► You're picking the US dollars number and that maps to all sorts of weird numbers across the world.
01:01:40 ◼ ► And I think that big number match maps differently than the smaller monthly number. Like it's not a linear thing like this. They want to hit.
01:01:46 ◼ ► I don't know how they do it, but I think they like sort of bin them into these little buckets. And I think your small monthly number ends up in like a bucket that's that's less than the.
01:01:56 ◼ ► But then your big number ends up in a bucket that's greater. And then you end up the math doesn't end up working like that's that's difficult to do.
01:02:02 ◼ ► But like Marco said, you can actually go in there and just fix it manually. But yeah, which I plan to do. I just haven't had the chance yet.
01:02:12 ◼ ► Going back to our analyst discussion earlier. Yeah, that's exactly right. Using this, you can make money.
01:02:17 ◼ ► But yeah, no, I've been really, really pleased with the response. Sales, it's pretty early to tell, especially since everyone who has bought is in a one week free trial.
01:02:26 ◼ ► Oh, no, you won't know for a week. Right, exactly. I'm looking at App Store Connect. I've never done a subscription app before and look at App Store Connect.
01:02:34 ◼ ► Sales seem OK. They don't seem, you know, stellar. But you get to see that they started the trial, though, right?
01:02:41 ◼ ► It seems that way. Yes. Again, I've never looked at App Store Connect for subscription stuff, but it seems that I am getting a vague notion for how many people have started the trial.
01:02:51 ◼ ► And, you know, I'm not displeased with the numbers I'm seeing, but especially given that the press was really complimentary and I was very thankful for it.
01:03:00 ◼ ► It is not as good as I would have hoped. So we'll see. Well, keep in mind, many of the people haven't hit their free limit yet.
01:03:08 ◼ ► Yeah, that's true. Like, you know, a lot of people will download this app and then, you know, they might not have any questions about people, movie and TV shows right that second.
01:03:16 ◼ ► You gotta wait for a couch incident. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like this, I think it's gonna be kind of a slow burn here, you know, because you have to first wait for people to have couch incidents where they all of us, "Oh, I can look it up in this new app I downloaded the other day."
01:03:28 ◼ ► And they have to remember that they got the new app. Right. And remember what it's called and find it on their phone. And so, you know, what you're gonna do here, you're gonna build patterns of usage.
01:03:38 ◼ ► And so I think it's gonna have a surprisingly gradual build. But the good thing is once somebody is in the habit of going to call sheet for this information, not IMDB, not the web, once you build that habit, that habit is very unlikely to change over time.
01:03:56 ◼ ► So it is gonna, I think, be a slow build up to get people in, but then I think they're gonna stick around for a long time.
01:04:02 ◼ ► So I think you're gonna be in a good spot, but it might not be visible like this week, but maybe, you know, maybe like in a month after people have had more time to, you know, have a couch incidents and actually use it and then surpass their free try or their free limits.
01:04:16 ◼ ► Then maybe you'll start to see like, "Oh, now it's actually, you know, this is decent numbers."
01:04:21 ◼ ► Yeah, and Mike and I talked about this on analog. We recorded yesterday, but in, as I think Mike called it, the ATP time warp or something like that, which is accurate, that episode won't be out until Sunday.
01:04:32 ◼ ► We'll put a link in the show notes with a note that it's, you know, gonna 404 for a while.
01:04:36 ◼ ► But anyways, we talked about this a bit. And I think what was something that occurred to me when I was talking to Mike, if memory serves, is that I've been programmed for all my other apps and for years of following people like Marco, you know, pre-subscription time.
01:04:48 ◼ ► I've been programmed that the way the App Store works is you make all your money in the first, you know, three days or week or what have you, and then you make nothing after that.
01:04:56 ◼ ► And so I think part of my kind of more morose for Lauren point of view right now is because I'm still like, that's so internalized, I'm trying to break my brain away from that.
01:05:07 ◼ ► And I think you're right, Marco. I think there's a lot to be said for this being a much slower burn, certainly compared to my other apps and maybe just in general because of the nature of this app.
01:05:15 ◼ ► But it's hard for me to remember that. And so if this is a slow burn, then I'm actually sitting pretty good right now.
01:05:22 ◼ ► But if I'm judging it by, you know, the immense cliff in the good way and then the cliff in the bad way, then it's okay. It's not bad, but it's not great either.
01:05:33 ◼ ► But it's certainly done better than the prior two apps, which is good. And not a terribly high bar, but good nonetheless.
01:05:39 ◼ ► And, you know, all told, I think I did a bad job of verbalizing this on analog and Mike very justifiably called me out on it.
01:05:47 ◼ ► But I am really proud of this. Like, I don't think the app is perfect, but I think it's a pretty damn good app.
01:05:52 ◼ ► And there's plenty of places that I'd like to improve it. My issues -- geez, how many GitHub issues do I have right now?
01:05:58 ◼ ► I have 45 GitHub issues, almost all of which are enhancements. There are some bugs for sure, but almost all of those are enhancements I'm planning.
01:06:06 ◼ ► And so I have plenty of work that I'd like to do on this app. And I really think that it's a good app that I think is well considered.
01:06:18 ◼ ► I think it's in a pretty good spot. Again, not perfect, but it's a pretty damn good spot.
01:06:24 ◼ ► And I'm really proud of it. And I really think that if you, a listener, give it a shot, you will probably like it too.
01:06:31 ◼ ► I've had a lot of people write on Mastodon in various amounts of rudeness to say, "Oh, I wanted nothing to do with this app.
01:06:39 ◼ ► It was a total waste of my time. And then I tried it, and it turns out it's great, and I totally just subscribed."
01:06:46 ◼ ► Thank you for that backhanded compliment. But no, I genuinely think that it's a really good app that will serve more people than you would expect.
01:06:57 ◼ ► I think if you're kind of sitting on the fence or just snubbing your nose at this and saying, "Oh, this isn't for me," give it a shot.
01:07:03 ◼ ► It doesn't hurt. You don't have to even sign up. There's no subscription required until after your first 20 searches.
01:07:10 ◼ ► And in fact, one of my favorite pieces of feedback that I got were a handful of people saying, "Oh my God, I installed the app, and then it ran."
01:07:21 ◼ ► There were no prompts. There's no permissions. There's no nothing. It's just, "Here's the app."
01:07:27 ◼ ► What about Bluetooth? What about local network? What about this? What about location services? What about this? What about that?
01:07:34 ◼ ► Turn on notifications, please. I'm amazed at the number of apps that beg me to turn on notifications.
01:07:43 ◼ ► So just a very obscure follow-up. Fujifilm has a new app for their cameras. They redid the whole app, and it's compatible with the ones I got.
01:07:53 ◼ ► So I downloaded the app and set it up. The Fujifilm app will not let you progress and use the app's core functionality.
01:08:01 ◼ ► And it's stuff like pulling pictures off the camera, using a remote shutter to remotely display the camera's display so you can use the phone as a shutter.
01:08:09 ◼ ► Basic camera app stuff. It will not let you do those things until you allow full-time, including background, always location access to it.
01:08:27 ◼ ► But the Ooby screen, the out-of-box experience, in Microsoft terms, the setup screen process going through there,
01:08:48 ◼ ► Yeah, they were too busy looking at your screenshots. Anyway, but again, when you look around the app ecosystem, that's every app.
01:08:58 ◼ ► Every single app. I mean, it's not usually that egregious. And again, Apple, for the love of God, reject that app. That's your job at the app store.
01:09:06 ◼ ► Why do they have to give full-time background location access always for an app that is supposed to be about getting pictures off your camera and showing a live shutter?
01:09:15 ◼ ► That's ridiculous, and that is a failure of App Review at the highest level. That's so egregious.
01:09:20 ◼ ► Anyway, sorry. But the thing is, when customers are complimenting your app for not having all that BS, it's because the rest of the app ecosystem is that bad now.
01:09:33 ◼ ► There is so much garbage. There is so much harassment of users for constant permissions to creepy private stuff that the app really doesn't need or at least shouldn't be asking for yet.
01:09:44 ◼ ► That is such a thing now. It's so ubiquitous that your app really does stand out if you just respect people and don't barrage them with permission dialogues on a first launch.
01:09:58 ◼ ► That does make you stand out, and that's a very good thing. But yeah, honestly, I think, number one, I think this is absolutely the best app you've made yet.
01:10:07 ◼ ► Number two, I think it is by far the most likely to succeed long-term because it has the broadest market.
01:10:14 ◼ ► Your previous apps have been a little more specialized for selling if you have this particular need. This app, a lot of people need this app, and a lot of people could benefit from it.
01:10:23 ◼ ► So I think if you keep the marketing up, and by the way, the press that you got is great. First of all, that's wonderful.
01:10:33 ◼ ► But the biggest marketing channel you have is this show. Not in terms of raw audience, the combined audiences of all those press outlets is larger than our show's audience.
01:10:45 ◼ ► But the rate of conversion that you get from a press article about your app to downloads of your app is not nearly as high as you would think.
01:10:55 ◼ ► I've been doing this a long time, and it's wonderful getting press. There's a lot of benefits to it besides immediate downloads, but the immediate download number is never that great.
01:11:05 ◼ ► It's never what you think it'll be from press, even from big press. That's just the reality of the market.
01:11:11 ◼ ► But you're building here. You're building long-term. You're building word-of-mouth advertising. You're building over-the-shoulder kind of advertising, experiential advertising.
01:11:21 ◼ ► That's what you're going to build over time with this app, because people are going to download it, maybe remember to use it, maybe then actually use it, and they're going to be like, "Oh, that's fast. That was nice."
01:11:33 ◼ ► And then next time they have a couch incident where they need to know who that guy is, they're going to go back to that app maybe.
01:11:38 ◼ ► And over time you're going to build that habit with them. And that's going to be how this app succeeds.
01:11:43 ◼ ► I don't know what your expectations are, but I really do think this is going to succeed. Unless you have totally unreasonable expectations, I think this will do well over time. It just might take a little bit to get there.
01:11:56 ◼ ► Well, and it's funny you bring that up. I actually just today did something I've never done before. Spoiler alert. I have purchased some podcast advertisements.
01:12:09 ◼ ► I know a guy who knows a lady, and so I was able to purchase a couple of spots on the incomparable. I don't know exactly when they're running.
01:12:21 ◼ ► And a couple of spots on downstream, because my thought process is downstream is industry people and people who really care about streaming media and stuff like that.
01:12:28 ◼ ► And the incomparable is pop culture. And so although I think that the incomparable probably has a fair bit of crossover with this audience, I thought it doesn't have 100% crossover.
01:12:39 ◼ ► And I'm willing to throw a little bit of money at it. And then downstream I think probably has considerably less crossover with our audience and is more likely to have an audience outside of my own.
01:12:52 ◼ ► You know what I mean? That was very clunky the way I described that, but hopefully that makes sense. And so there's going to be a couple of spots, I believe this month, on both shows.
01:13:00 ◼ ► And we're going to see how that goes. And I have no idea if it's going to work. I've never advertised any of my apps before. And so I'm going to give it a shot.
01:13:07 ◼ ► And I also reached out to the Maximum Fund people to see if it's as hilariously unaffordable as I expect to sponsor the Flop House.
01:13:17 ◼ ► They have not gotten back to me yet, but I suspect it will be gazillion dollars or maybe seven gazillion dollars, which I will not spend. But it can't hurt to ask the question.
01:13:26 ◼ ► So I'm trying new avenues. And something that occurred to me as we were recording Analog, which Marco, you just said the exact same thing, the addressable market for this app is arguably anyone who watches television or movies.
01:13:40 ◼ ► Which is basically everybody's. - It's hard to capture that market, but you can be reasonably sure that whatever marketing and reputation you build, that part of the funnel is not going to be your limiting factor.
01:13:57 ◼ ► You can love my app. Someone can go around their whole family and say, "Oh my god, you gotta try Overcast." And most of their family is going to be like, "What are you talking about? I used the podcast app." Or, "What's a podcast?" So it's a much narrower appeal.
01:14:11 ◼ ► Your app, CallSheet has significantly more appeal in that area. Any random person around someone who's using it, if they like it enough to mention it or if the person oversees it or if whoever says, "Oh, who's that guy? Oh, it's that one guy!"
01:14:28 ◼ ► And they look it up, they're probably in a conversation with someone else or there's someone else on the couch next to them. So that's why I think you're going to do well over time. It's going to take a while to get there.
01:14:39 ◼ ► I would also suggest, in terms of maximizing your ad spend, App Store search ads are probably better than podcast ads for what you're looking at.
01:14:53 ◼ ► Yeah. So first of all, when you go sign up for App Store search ads, do the advanced, don't do the basic. Because the problem is, the advanced is the kind that used to be the only kind. I very briefly tried to use basic and when I saw what it took away, what kind of controls it took away, I backed right out.
01:15:11 ◼ ► Because I have enough experience with advanced to see, like with advanced, you can see every single keyword and phrase and stuff that it thinks your app is relevant to that it will match it to and you kind of have to babysit it.
01:15:24 ◼ ► Because like, you know, for my LLC, which we'll get to in a little while actually, my LLC name for Overcast is Overcast Radio LLC. This was stupid.
01:15:34 ◼ ► The reason why is that New York already had an Overcast LLC when I went to register. So I had to like add some other word to it. And I, when I was when I was in that stage of the app development, which was very, very, very early on, I briefly had the idea, what if I, you know, what if one of the features of the app would be like, it could play podcasts like radio.
01:15:55 ◼ ► And of course, everyone else has done this since then. And it doesn't work. And nobody actually wants that. But you know, it's like, Oh, what if you could just play, you know, put on a station, it would just play it.
01:16:02 ◼ ► So I briefly thought, how about I call it Overcast Radio to make it like forward looking like it isn't just about podcasts, it's going to replace radio. So my company name is Overcast Radio LLC. I don't know how the hell to change it.
01:16:12 ◼ ► So the what I really should do is call it Overcast Podcast App LLC, because that's how App Store search works. And I keep meaning to change it to that. And I just haven't yet for whatever reason.
01:16:23 ◼ ► I don't even know if Apple will let me change it as far as I know they won't but I think maybe if you email them who knows. Anyway, because my name is Overcast Radio LLC, even though my app does not mention radio anywhere in the text anywhere in the title anywhere in the keywords,
01:16:37 ◼ ► any, there's it doesn't mention radio anywhere else. But because that keyword is in the company name, Overcast gets matched by search ads to radio type searches, radio ads, and as you know, police radio scanners, this is this is way off what I'm going for.
01:16:55 ◼ ► So, you know, the problem is the so when you do the App Store basic search ads, you lose a lot of the controls that allow you to tell them not that not that not that not that because their search is really dumb.
01:17:10 ◼ ► And their their matching algorithms are really rudimentary and really very stupid. So to maximize your effectiveness of your dollars of search ads, you have to tell it what not to match you to and you have to get it you have to go in there periodically and say, Oh, I spent you know, 45 cents matching to, you know, free police scanner like okay, let me let me you know, X that out so I don't I don't get you know, more of those in the future. That's I'm not gonna spend my money there.
01:17:37 ◼ ► So, but so that's why I recommend doing the advanced so that you actually get those controls, because you you will need them if you really want to maximize what it's you know, how your money is spent. But the good thing about App Store search ads is that you can see then how much you're actually spending to acquire people you it actually tells you that.
01:17:56 ◼ ► So that helps you make first of all, it helps you know how much to spend on ads. But then that also helps you. It helps you see your return. And then it helps you kind of figure out you know, if you need to make a future pricing decision, or future product decisions like you can figure out like, well, what does it cost me to acquire a user and to keep that user over time.
01:18:17 ◼ ► So that's why I recommend App Store search ads with with podcast ads. And I say this as somebody who makes a lot of my living from podcast ads, although decreasingly so. But but you know, rapidly decreasingly slow. But anyway, please, atp.fm slash join,
01:18:34 ◼ ► or slash sponsor, either one is fine. Let's be honest, slash join is better at this point, I think. But anyway, but you know, podcast ads, when you have a smaller budget, it's much harder to have the impact that you want. Because a lot of you know, spoken ads like this, like most forms of advertising depends on repetition to really like stick in people's minds.
01:18:55 ◼ ► So if you only have the budget to buy one podcast ad, don't buy a podcast ad, like you might get some return, but it's not maybe nearly as much as if you bought like, four podcast ads, like, you know, every week for four weeks, like that's, that's a much more effective marketing plan,
01:19:10 ◼ ► than just buying one and have it be one off. And that's it, because people won't remember it nearly as well. But, you know, so so I would also podcast ads because again, because of things that are actually very good about the podcast medium.
01:19:24 ◼ ► It's really hard to know the direct response rate of those ads for an app. You know, the reason why podcast ads say, hey, go to whatever slash ATP use coupon code ATP for 10% off your first purchase is so that way the sponsor knows how many people heard the ad and how many new customers they got through that ad.
01:19:42 ◼ ► It's direct response advertising. That's why this has been so popular with podcasts over time, because they can then attribute they can say, Well, it turns out, you know, the ATP does really well for something like Squarespace. So they're willing to spend more money with us.
01:19:55 ◼ ► And I still have to do the guesswork of all the people who went and didn't use the link or didn't type in the code or forgot there was a code or didn't go to the landing page. So it's not you know, that it's not the the perfect knowledge that you know, search App Store search ads have.
01:20:09 ◼ ► Right. Yeah, but it's at least closer. It's very hard to do that for an app. Like you can you can make a custom link and have it add a tag and like, but no one does that. No one remembers those links. It's Yeah, it's not that that's that's going to be above your pay grade for this app.
01:20:23 ◼ ► So really, what what you should do here is the most money that you spend acquiring people should probably be with App Store search ads, or at least the first money you spend. Well, I mean, you know, whatever you've whatever you've already committed to fine. I'm not saying I'm not saying back out, but I am saying Yeah, definitely start buying search ads now, because that you know, you'll have you'll have data in a day of how much you're spending and what you're being matched to what keywords you're being matched to.
01:20:49 ◼ ► And you'll be able to see, you know, you'll you and you'll be doing just very quickly, like, all right, well, this bid, I got, you know, I got to raise this bid to 50 cents or whatever for this keyword or, or I'm not getting shown enough. And when I when I when I'm when I'm buying IMDB, I'm not being shown enough there. So I need to either increase my bid or bid on something else, you know, you can start getting those getting that data very quickly in a pretty tight feedback loop.
01:21:11 ◼ ► Then you can finally see, like, you know, if it turns out that you end up making, you know, like, whatever, whatever percentage of your downloads result in that, you know, five or $10 value somebody might have for you, you know, as long as they stay subscribed, which could be actually much higher than that over time. But, you know, suppose suppose you're like, all right, well, 5% of downloads result in a purchase.
01:21:34 ◼ ► I don't know what your number is going to be there. I don't know if that's high or low. I have no idea because that varies a lot per app and you know what the offering is. But then you can then you can go and say, all right, well, if it only cost me, you know, 50 cents or, you know, five cents or one cent to acquire a user. Okay, now I have numbers I can work with that, you know, you can you can start doing the math and figuring out what works for you. So buy App Store search ads.
01:21:59 ◼ ► Yeah, it's on the to do list. I was clicking around as you were talking. And I went and landed on, you know, search ads.apple.com. And I was, you know, I'm not reading because I'm trying to listen to you, but I found a start now button, I clicked it. And then the piehole said, No, you can't do that. Because it was an advertising domain.
01:22:32 ◼ ► I know. I know. We talked about when Apple came out with this, like you could buy searches against your competitors apps and stuff like that. And it would show you at the bottom. Remember that whole thing?
01:22:39 ◼ ► I don't think I don't think there are search ads on the Mac App Store. But there I know this from searching for my own apps. When I search for my own apps on the Mac App Store, other people, other competing apps come up. So they must be putting my app name in their keywords.
01:22:56 ◼ ► When the App Store first launched, in the early days, you were not officially allowed to put other apps' names in your keywords field. Because the keywords field in App Store Connect is not shown to the public.
01:23:10 ◼ ► Apple uses it in search indexing. And I think they've used it less over time as people have spammed the crap out of it.
01:23:15 ◼ ► But again, Apple search algorithms are really dumb and really rudimentary. So they do still use that kind of stuff as far as I can tell.
01:23:21 ◼ ► And everyone started putting their competitors' names in their keywords field. Everyone did that.
01:23:27 ◼ ► And you could complain. You could say, look, they're not supposed to be doing this, or it's my trademark, or whatever. You could do all that.
01:23:33 ◼ ► And mostly your complaints would be ignored because the App Store is not policed nearly as much as we often want it to be in the ways we want it to be.
01:23:41 ◼ ► And this is one of those ways. Anything that's considered App Store optimization, it's kind of the wild west. And you can kind of do whatever you want, and Apple mostly won't have a problem with it.
01:23:54 ◼ ► Because everyone else is doing it too, and worse, including Apple itself in many cases.
01:24:00 ◼ ► So you might have to do some of that stuff, depending on what you're being matched with and everything, or how you're ranking. You might have to start doing some of those things that are a little bit icky sounding to a pure mind.
01:24:13 ◼ ► But the App Store does that to you over time. I mean, look, I even converted to the screenshots that show different shaped iPhones in the-- rather than just being screenshots.
01:24:23 ◼ ► I even converted to that recently. There are certain things that you don't want to do, and then eventually-- the title of my app was Overcast Colon Podcast Player for a long time.
01:24:36 ◼ ► Until they added that subtitle field, which no one uses, and they still make their app called something, whatever, colon keyword spam. That's just the App Store.
01:24:45 ◼ ► You gotta go full Amazon product name for your app. Overcast Podcast Player, Audio Sound, I don't know, it's so hard to come up with those titles.
01:24:55 ◼ ► Free Podcast, Not Police Radio. I will say, I don't put my competitors' names in my keywords field. My keywords field is like, podcast, podcatcher, free podcast, free download, that kind of stuff.
01:25:09 ◼ ► I do, however, bid on their names in App Store search ads. Because A, there's nothing wrong with that, B, they do it to me, and C, that's expressly allowed by Apple.
01:25:19 ◼ ► Like, Phil Schiller expressly said, "We want people to do this." And I think when you are buying yours, you should absolutely bid on IMDB as your top bid.
01:25:28 ◼ ► And it tells you, when you type in a keyword into the App Store, in the search ads buying thing, it'll tell you these little colored bars that kind of indicate roughly how popular that is, and then roughly how strong your bid will be against other people's bids.
01:25:45 ◼ ► And my bids are almost all in the red. It's like, "Your bids are weak, don't even bother." But I put them in anyway, and then I get downloads.
01:25:52 ◼ ► So someone's clicking on them, and I'm winning some of those auctions. And that's not because I'm super cheap, it's because it's literally like, to get it in the green for some of my keywords, it would be like $5 per tap.
01:26:07 ◼ ► Like absurd amounts of money that I could never justify. But anyway, buy search ads, and be aggressive with what you bid on, the keywords you bid on, all that stuff. Be aggressive, be totally blatant, bid right against your competitors, and see how it does.
01:26:25 ◼ ► Yeah, that is the plan. Again, I've never done any advertising, much less App Store search ads or anything like that, but it is absolutely the plan. And I will probably be needling you with questions about this over the next few days.
01:26:39 ◼ ► But to go back quite a bit, I keep dancing around this, but I wanted to make this point, which I think I talked about on Analog as well. But when I had the idea of tying access to the test flight to membership, to be completely forthright, the only goal I had in doing that was juicing our member numbers.
01:26:59 ◼ ► I really thought it was a win-win. I'm giving the members something that they wouldn't have otherwise, and they're giving me money I wouldn't have otherwise. So I thought everyone's happy.
01:27:10 ◼ ► And that was really the only purpose in having the members have access to the test flight.
01:27:16 ◼ ► Well, as it turns out, having a test flight that had quite a few more people on it than would otherwise have been there was really great. And I really owe the members that used the test flight a debt of gratitude, because I really think the app is better for having been used by way more people than would otherwise have used it.
01:27:41 ◼ ► Because I think you can have different groups of people in App Store Connect, and my friends and family group is something to the order of 50 to 100 people. I forget exactly how many are in there right now.
01:27:51 ◼ ► But the members test flight was quite a bit more than that, and that really, really helped make this app better.
01:27:59 ◼ ► And one of the very obvious ways is there were international people. And granted, I had a handful of people from other countries in my friends and family list, but there were way more, in way more countries on the members test flight.
01:28:14 ◼ ► And they came up with legitimate problems or tweaks or things that I should change. And I do think the app is far, far better for it.
01:28:22 ◼ ► So if you are a member, whether or not you joined for the test flight, I really appreciate you using the app via test flight, and I appreciate those of you who did report feedback.
01:28:34 ◼ ► I appreciate those who maybe reported feedback and never heard anything back from me, because there was a lot of it. But it did make the app better, and I read all of it.
01:28:41 ◼ ► And I'm really, really thankful for all of you members that took the time to do any of these things, because I genuinely think the app is better for it.
01:28:49 ◼ ► With that said, I think it was a build or two ago, I did expire all the old builds in test flight.
01:28:57 ◼ ► So I think I might have left the most recent one, I don't recall, but I expired either all of them or all but the most recent one for the members test flight.
01:29:07 ◼ ► Now, to the best of my knowledge, that means you cannot install it again, but if it's already installed, you're clear to use it for up to 90 days from when the build was posted.
01:29:18 ◼ ► And so I'm thinking to myself, "Oh God, here we are again with the slow burn. I had a week delay from free trials. Now I've got three months delay from all of the test flight people, many of whom I'm assuming will wait until they can't use the app anymore in order to switch over to the paid one."
01:29:34 ◼ ► But it turns out, and Marco is the king of this, I am but the court jester by comparison, but it turns out, procrastination wins the day, and let me tell you why.
01:29:44 ◼ ► It turns out that when I was working on it, on the test flight builds, I really, really wanted to add some sort of detection that, "Oh, if you're in test flight, you get the whole thing for free."
01:29:56 ◼ ► Or, "Oh, for a while there I had a way in which you could go into settings and insta-buy the app. You didn't have to go through the whole flow."
01:30:03 ◼ ► And the reason I wanted to do all these things is because the way test flight works is it deliberately shortens the real world time that a subscription takes.
01:30:12 ◼ ► So if you have a year subscription, it takes a day or a month or a week. I forget exactly how long it is. It doesn't really matter.
01:30:19 ◼ ► But what I got from test flight users was constant questions, and I don't blame them because I would ask the same thing.
01:30:24 ◼ ► "Dude, why do I have to buy it every single day? And you can't face ID, you have to enter your damn password. It's such a pain in the hindquarters.
01:30:31 ◼ ► Why do I have to do this every day? This sucks." Well, yeah, it does, but I've got other bigger fish to fry.
01:30:37 ◼ ► I'm genuinely sorry that it's a pain in the butt, but I've got other things to worry about right now. I'm sorry I can't do anything about it.
01:30:43 ◼ ► Well, I had a bunch of people write to me and say, "Oh, thank God! I don't have to do the stupid nag every single day!"
01:30:48 ◼ ► So my negligence and my procrastination has saved the day. And so a lot of test flight users have been kind enough to purchase the full board version of the app.
01:30:58 ◼ ► Just so they don't have to repurchase it every day. So thank you to all of you, and I'm sorry for you being nagged.
01:31:12 ◼ ► But I assume someone else has reported this, right? Because it's ridiculous. Is there any kind of reasoning there? Or is it just like, "Oh, it's always been that way, sorry about it."
01:31:20 ◼ ► It's probably... So the whole way that the sandbox purchasing environment works over time has always been really hacky.
01:31:28 ◼ ► And it used to be a lot worse. It used to be that sometimes you would get into a state where your sandbox environment purchase on your phone would not be able to complete a purchase.
01:31:38 ◼ ► And it would put up the box, the random system modal alert, every so often saying, "You gotta enter your password to complete this purchase!" or whatever.
01:31:47 ◼ ► And it would say environment sandbox in brackets. And it would pop that up. It would ruin a phone.
01:31:52 ◼ ► You would have to reformat and restore your phone to get to have this stop. It was awful.
01:32:01 ◼ ► So the current system is a lot less bad, but it's still very bad. It's still based on a pile of hacks, I think. That's kind of how it feels.
01:32:13 ◼ ► I usually recommend for test flight builds, disable all purchasing. Because it's not worth the many, many hassles about it.
01:32:21 ◼ ► Do all your purchase testing internally. And then when you give it a test, just have a flag that makes everything free or blocks out the purchase screen or whatever.
01:32:29 ◼ ► Yeah, and like I said, for a long time when I wasn't actively testing my very late in my build process rejiggered purchase flow,
01:32:39 ◼ ► I just had a button in settings that you could go into and instantly buy the app. It wouldn't ask you for the purchase. It would fake it on my end.
01:32:45 ◼ ► And I will probably put that back for the handful of people who are listening that do have the test flight still.
01:32:54 ◼ ► But yeah, so it was a royal pain in the butt for test flight users and now that pain in the butt is now the stick.
01:33:02 ◼ ► Or maybe it's the carrot, depending on how you look at it, that is compelling people to go ahead and buy the paid version, which is pretty great.
01:33:08 ◼ ► But genuinely I wanted to thank all the ATP members one more time. It really did make the app better and thank you for that.
01:33:14 ◼ ► Yeah, and congrats on the launch. This is a really big deal. You put a lot of work into it. It shows. And it looks like it's going to be successful.
01:33:23 ◼ ► I think it's going to be very successful. Hey, everyone out there, go buy the app. Make me write.
01:33:34 ◼ ► And also I want to say that the, I don't know what your original plan was or whatever, but I'm glad that you took the time you did to pick this set of features for 1.0.
01:33:43 ◼ ► Because you could have launched before this. Like there are features that are in this that didn't necessarily need to be there.
01:33:54 ◼ ► Like it is. It didn't have to have this many features, but because it does. It's really it's really a fleshed out 1.0.
01:34:01 ◼ ► It's not like a 1.0. It's not like a skateboard, as they would say, or an MVP or whatever.
01:34:08 ◼ ► Yeah. You'd be glad you don't know about the business knowledge. It's talking about like a minimum viable product is not like a pile of wheels or whatever.
01:34:15 ◼ ► It's a it's not a car either. It's a skateboard because it rolls. It's got four wheels.
01:34:27 ◼ ► It has a good set of features, not every feature you could possibly imagine, but you could have launched with less than it would have been, quote unquote, OK.
01:34:34 ◼ ► And you could have waited, you know, another six more months and be way more full feature.
01:34:37 ◼ ► But the set of features in here now definitely covers like most of the common needs that people want with a couple extra things thrown in there.
01:34:45 ◼ ► So I'm glad that you waited as long as you did, because it seemed like you were kind of anxious to launch just like months ago.
01:34:50 ◼ ► And I was like, I was probably probably need some more features. But I think you did the right thing.
01:34:54 ◼ ► Took your time, added those features in there. As it turns out, as you were important to them, they didn't take that long to add.
01:35:00 ◼ ► And they add so much value to the app, like being able to look it up on just watch, you know, or even the little thing we're talking about before of showing.
01:35:06 ◼ ► The popover of what time the movie would end, which maybe shouldn't be a popover, but still like stuff like that.
01:35:12 ◼ ► That's in your one point. No, that's in your very first version. Right. And so you have and you already have a big list of things that you want to add.
01:35:21 ◼ ► And, you know, as I do this more and more, I'm no underscore, but I am getting better at it and I feel like I'm getting better at it, which is great.
01:35:29 ◼ ► You know, you never want to be bored in your job and you never want to feel like you're not improving.
01:35:37 ◼ ► You only got like, what, like 63 more apps to catch up on? Something like that. Yeah. I'm sure it'll be any day now.
01:35:42 ◼ ► Very quickly, a couple of other notes. First of all, if you are looking to purchase the app or subscribe, I should say, one of the things I did, which I didn't know if Apple was going to complain about it, but surprisingly, they said not a peep.
01:35:54 ◼ ► If you are going through the purchase flow, the first screen you see says, oh, you can do it monthly or you can do it yearly.
01:36:01 ◼ ► And under the two options, you can choose between, there's text that says more purchase options.
01:36:05 ◼ ► If you liked the work that I do, if you like me, if you think I'm a kind of okay guy, you can hit more purchase options.
01:36:17 ◼ ► So what that means is for instead of paying $9 a year, you can pay $20 a year or your local equivalent or $50 a year.
01:36:30 ◼ ► I am not expecting anyone to do that. Some people seem to have done that, and I am extremely thankful for all of you that have.
01:36:37 ◼ ► But you can elect to do that. And I'm pretty sure you can go in and manage your subscription and change to it during your free trial if you fancy doing that.
01:36:43 ◼ ► So something to look for. Very quickly, since this is a nerd podcast, I put this at the bottom of my blog post, but a few things that I think are kind of funny.
01:36:51 ◼ ► Total commits in GitHub, 727. The first commit was the 30th of January, 2023. The build for the App Store was done on the 27th of July, which is 178 days or about six months between the two.
01:37:03 ◼ ► According to clock on the command line, 14,232 lines of Swift, 673 lines of text or XML or Markdown for a total of just shy of 15,000 lines of code.
01:37:15 ◼ ► 102 beta builds, and the first screenshot, which we will link to in the show notes, is hilariously basic. And that I took on the 3rd of February.
01:37:29 ◼ ► I think your app is a good advertisement for Swift UI because one of my Mac apps, Switch Glass, has almost the same number of lines of Swift code as yours.
01:37:39 ◼ ► And substantially fewer features and less UI. And where is all that code? It's not in the Swift UI view, although my Swift UI view is fairly girthy, as the kids would say.
01:37:48 ◼ ► I don't like the slang. Anyway, it's all the stupid App Kit code, because when you do anything with App Kit and UI, you're making all these outlets and actions and it's so barbaric, like, you know, not declarative, right?
01:38:02 ◼ ► So the fact that you have that many screens and that many features and networking code and all sorts of other stuff that my app doesn't have, and we're within a couple thousand, I think I'm like 12 or 13,000 lines of Swift and you're at 14, you're a great advertisement for Swift UI.
01:38:16 ◼ ► Indeed. So yeah, I think that's all I have for now. I appreciate you talking to me about it. If you want to check it out, there will be links in the show notes, don't you worry.
01:38:25 ◼ ► But you can go to www.caseless.com/calsheet and that is my blog post. And if you click the title of that blog post, it will push you over to the App Store.
01:38:34 ◼ ► I'd love for you to check it out. Even if you don't think it's for you, like I was saying earlier, even if you don't think it's for you, that's okay. Check it out. What's gonna hurt? It's free. You don't have to subscribe. There's no harm done. Go ahead and check it out. I think you'll like it.
01:38:47 ◼ ► Oh, actually, it's funny you bring that up. Maybe we can talk about this in the after show, but I did get callsheetapp.com and there was all sorts of agita earlier today trying to figure out how to do redirects with that, which is uninteresting.
01:39:17 ◼ ► Like, it could literally be like, you know, callsheet.butt and it would be fine. Like, you'd still, it wouldn't matter at all.
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01:41:16 ◼ ► All right, let's do some Ask ATP. Nate Silva writes, "Casey, congratulations on publishing Call Sheet and the well-deserved great reviews you're getting."
01:41:23 ◼ ► Thank you so much. "I've noticed that Call Sheet is published by Limitless LLC. Is there a reason you chose to use an LLC?
01:41:30 ◼ ► So, I'm going to take a stab at this. I am not a lawyer. I have only been doing this for a handful of years, not nearly as long as Marco.
01:41:36 ◼ ► Marco is probably the right person to listen to, but I've got the floor, so here we go.
01:41:40 ◼ ► An LLC here in America is a limited liability corporation, I believe, and basically what that means is for the purposes of legal liability,
01:41:52 ◼ ► I, Casey List, have some amount of protection. And as long as I keep my finances separate, the company finances separate from my finances,
01:42:00 ◼ ► the worst thing that can happen, I am not a lawyer, I am not a lawyer, I am not a lawyer,
01:42:04 ◼ ► the worst thing that can happen is the company's finances could be drained, but I personally will not lose all of my money
01:42:10 ◼ ► if something bad happens because of the work that I do. And so, yes, it is something I recommend.
01:42:15 ◼ ► In Virginia, it was extremely easy to set up an LLC. It was extremely cheap and extremely straightforward.
01:42:21 ◼ ► I was able to do it all by myself. I definitely recommend it. Marco, can you add the color commentary and/or clarifications to that, please?
01:42:29 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the gist of my understanding as well. Again, none of us are lawyers or accountants, so take this with a grain of salt.
01:42:35 ◼ ► And, you know, definitely it's worth consulting with a lawyer and an accountant when making this decision. However, at least in the U.S. and most states,
01:42:45 ◼ ► and possibly all states, it is a state construct, so check with your state with, you know, specifics of it, but like at least in New York,
01:42:54 ◼ ► having an LLC is fairly easy and inexpensive. So, you know, what it takes to have one is you got to register it and you got to fill out a form every couple of years to basically renew its registration.
01:43:07 ◼ ► Every couple of years? I was going to ask you, what is it for both of your states, what is the burden? And for Massachusetts, it's annual and substantial.
01:43:29 ◼ ► Yeah, they get it in other ways. Don't worry about that. But yeah, so it depends on the state, but it is something like $25 every two years. It's something like that in New York.
01:43:56 ◼ ► I am going through a scam service, but even accounting for like 500% markup, it's more.
01:44:00 ◼ ► Oh, God. Well, anyway, all you have to do here is you have to register, you have to have like, you know, it's good to have like either a lawyer or an accountant file a paperwork for you the first time just so you don't mess anything up.
01:44:13 ◼ ► But in most states, this is a fairly simple thing. And then you go to your bank, once you have the forms from the state, you go to your bank and say, "I need a bank account for this, please."
01:44:22 ◼ ► And then you just have every transaction that is for the company go through that bank account. And then when you want to take money out to pay yourself, you take it out of that bank account and put it in your personal bank account.
01:44:39 ◼ ► Yes, oh, definitely not. Like, you never purchase anything for personal use from that account. Like, you know, that account has its own debit card or credit card. You buy things on that that are for the business. Only buy things for the business on that.
01:44:51 ◼ ► Like, you know, keep everything nice and separate. And then by doing that, what Casey said, you know, you have a pretty large amount of like limited liability. That's what the LL stands for in the sense that like, yeah, if somebody wants to sue Overcast, they don't get to take my house.
01:45:08 ◼ ► You know, they can take Overcast assets, you know, in the worst case, but they wouldn't get to take all of my personal assets. So it's a way to like cover your butt in a fairly easy way.
01:45:20 ◼ ► And as long as you follow the relatively simple rules of operating it separately from your other stuff, it isn't hard to operate an LLC, or expensive if you're not in Massachusetts.
01:45:32 ◼ ► And so it is, it's worth looking at like anything that's going to be like an app that's going to be possibly making real money. I would suggest having an LLC.
01:45:42 ◼ ► And then the second thing is, if you think your app might someday be sold to somebody else, it is much better to have it be on a separate Apple ID than your personal Apple ID.
01:45:56 ◼ ► Because Apple has since devised some weird like app transfer wizard things. Some of them, they've had limitations, like I believe, I don't know if this is still the case, but previously, if your app had ever used iCloud or any iCloud based service, it could not be transferred using this mechanism.
01:46:12 ◼ ► But anyway, it's awkward and it's a lot easier if someone's going to buy your app, it's a lot easier to say, you're buying the LLC and its assets, and here's the Apple ID for that LLC.
01:46:26 ◼ ► It's a whole different developer account, a whole different Apple ID, totally separate from your other stuff.
01:46:30 ◼ ► Again, it's part of the reason you make these separations, if you're going to make an app that might make real money and that might be sold someday or whatever.
01:46:38 ◼ ► It's to make those outcomes easier and to limit the risk to your personal stuff, the business stuff seeping in too much.
01:46:50 ◼ ► Goodness, these fees in Massachusetts, which Jon has put in the chat, they're kind of a lot.
01:46:56 ◼ ► They're very high. And the burden, it's onerous. To fill out the paperwork yourself is annoying and you'd be afraid you screwed up, which is why you pay for these companies.
01:47:03 ◼ ► They're companies that will do it for you, right, for some fee on top of this, so I pay even more on top than not to deal with it.
01:47:08 ◼ ► Look at the fee structure. There's stuff you have to do every year and everything costs hundreds of dollars.
01:47:16 ◼ ► And forget about the one-time cost. The recurring annual cost just to maintain the LLC, a basic LLC, is just very... anyway.
01:47:23 ◼ ► There's a reason the nickname for my state, for those people who don't live in the US, is Taxichusetts.
01:47:37 ◼ ► Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, it's a drop in the bucket and I just consider it a cost of doing business and, you know, there it goes.
01:47:44 ◼ ► But anyway, just to chime in for the LLC, yes, I do have an LLC and I don't understand all the things that it's supposedly doing for me, but my understanding is just like the two of you said,
01:47:53 ◼ ► is like if someone uses my application switcher and it burns down their house and they sue me for millions of dollars, even if they win, all they can get is all the assets of Hypercritical LLC.
01:48:06 ◼ ► So they cannot take my house, they cannot take all the money from all my savings accounts and the money that my kids are going to use to go to college or anything like that.
01:48:15 ◼ ► They can only take the very meager assets of my LLC, which is not worth suing me over, so don't bother.
01:48:24 ◼ ► Yeah. And from what I understand, it's basically like however much is in the checking account of that LLC.
01:48:33 ◼ ► It's whatever money you keep in the business, which is usually not a ton of money for most people.
01:48:39 ◼ ► That's one thing I did save money on, so I got a separate bank account for the business and a separate debit card for the business and a separate credit card for the business and it's all registered to the business.
01:48:48 ◼ ► It's like, oh, it's a business account. And I found one that's a bank that's local to me that has no fees for anything.
01:48:56 ◼ ► It's like as long as you have under like 500 transactions a month, I'm like, don't worry.
01:49:19 ◼ ► And I pay zero dollars for this account in exchange for having a credit card that I use for business expenses and a debit card and checks that I never use.
01:49:33 ◼ ► And so the trick is to get all that and not have it have your name on it or not be, you know, you have to have a legal entity that it can be in the name of.
01:49:42 ◼ ► Yep. And then a final note, at least here in America, for tax purposes, it's different depending on the flavor of your LLC, but mine, oh shoot, I forget what it's called.
01:49:57 ◼ ► So my taxes, anything that Limitless LLC makes is effectively Casey List money from a tax perspective.
01:50:08 ◼ ► We're not, you're not going to say we're not real businesses because we are, but we're intentionally like, it's a pass through for tax purposes.
01:50:19 ◼ ► If you have a company and you want to have multiple partners and employees and salary and, you know, and having to deal with like healthcare for your employees, like a, you know, quote unquote real business accounting and taxes get way, way more complicated.
01:50:33 ◼ ► Whereas if you know, you have basically a single employee company, that's just you, the LLC will give you legal protection while not over-complicating your accounting or your taxes.
01:50:45 ◼ ► And obviously that stops working if you want to have a company with multiple employees and everything or whatever.
01:50:49 ◼ ► But if you're still in this sort of easy mode where you're not planning on doing that, having a pass through simplifies things greatly.
01:50:56 ◼ ► Jan Ogenyemi, I'm so sorry, writes with all that empty space in the Mac Pro, would it be feasible for Apple to just slap a huge heat sink on the processor and overclock it by 30 or 40% over the standard ultra?
01:51:09 ◼ ► That way there would be a performance difference between the studio and the pro call it the ultra turbo.
01:51:18 ◼ ► So I'm assuming the person who wrote this doesn't have a lot of experience overclocking PCs, but overclocking in general, it's not as simple as like, well, if you turn up the clock speed, it'll produce more heat than you just have to get rid of that heat.
01:51:30 ◼ ► Although that alone is much harder than you would think, because it's not like, oh, we can get rid of as much heat as we want.
01:51:37 ◼ ► The problem, especially with modern CPU's is that heat is concentrated in a tiny little area.
01:51:42 ◼ ► So no matter how big a heat sink you put on it, all the heat is emanating from this tiny little rectangle and it has to spread from that rectangle quickly elsewhere to get the hell out of there before it can get to your big giant heat sink or fan or whatever evaporative cooler, whatever.
01:52:03 ◼ ► Well, I mean, compared to the size of like a heat sink that's like eight inches on the side or something, right, or some kind of evaporative cooler or even a water cooler, like getting the heat out of that little tiny area is the difficult part.
01:52:13 ◼ ► But but anyway, heat is not your big problem here because we do have things that can get that heat out pretty quickly.
01:52:31 ◼ ► One is how fast can your transitions actually switch? Because transistors don't instantly change from one state to another.
01:52:37 ◼ ► They have some sort of transition time and you have to make sure all of your transistors involved in your CPU or GPU or whatever can switch as fast as you want them to switch successfully getting from one state to the other.
01:52:49 ◼ ► The second thing is you need signals to be able to propagate from point A on the chip to point B on the chip.
01:52:58 ◼ ► But at the speeds we're talking about, multiple gigahertz, there is actually transit time for signals to travel.
01:53:04 ◼ ► And if you clock it too high, by the time the next clock comes, the signal hasn't propagated from where it needed to, from where it started to where it needs to get to by the next clock cycle.
01:53:15 ◼ ► There's all sorts of things that will literally stop the thing from functioning correctly if you clock it too high.
01:53:26 ◼ ► You can get lucky because some people, this is why overclockers are looking like CPUs that are "good for overclocking" where they're manufactured in such a way that the defect rate is low and that you know there's actually a lot of headroom.
01:53:38 ◼ ► That's why they do things like cool it with liquid nitrogen because in this case, cooling really is our limiting factor.
01:53:43 ◼ ► So we'll cool the thing with liquid nitrogen, which is a silly stunt or whatever, and then see how fast it will go.
01:53:48 ◼ ► And even being cool with liquid nitrogen, you can't make it go like 800 percent faster or whatever because eventually it just stops working.
01:53:56 ◼ ► But what you're looking for is a chip where, let's say you're either not on the bleeding edge, which Apple usually is, especially with the upcoming 3nm stuff or whatever,
01:54:04 ◼ ► it's a design that has sort of all the bugs worked out of it because all it takes is one dark corner of your chip to be a little bit iffy.
01:54:11 ◼ ► And if that part of the chip, the transistors there are a little bit wonky because the masking was all kind of screwed up and it works fine, but it only works at the binned clock speed plus like 2 percent.
01:54:23 ◼ ► The rest of the chip has 5 or 10 percent headroom, but because that part of the chip doesn't, your whole thing doesn't work.
01:54:29 ◼ ► So it would be cool. They could probably overclock it a little bit and extract some extra heat, but 30 to 40 percent is probably not realistic,
01:54:39 ◼ ► especially when we moved 3nm and Apple is the very first customer in the world to be using these chips from TSMC.
01:54:45 ◼ ► Also, when you think about the market of the Mac Pro, and by that I mean the Mac Studio PCI breakout box, it seems like, you know,
01:54:55 ◼ ► whatever the number would be that they could actually achieve reliably for the overclock would probably be maybe more in the order of like 10 or 15 percent.
01:55:04 ◼ ► And I don't think the buyers of this machine would be willing to buy something that might be like a little bit very slightly less reliable than the regular version of the chip.
01:55:18 ◼ ► You know, because overclocking, the problem is like it's kind of a risk game. You roll the dice, like you see, oh, can I push it a little bit higher?
01:55:25 ◼ ► And then you run, you know, some like massive stress test thing to see, like put as much stress on the CPU as possible.
01:55:31 ◼ ► Like, does it crash? Does it keep running? Like, let's see. And can you push a little bit higher? And maybe you got to raise the voltage a little bit.
01:55:38 ◼ ► And, you know, and what you typically end up with is having to have rapidly rising power and heat to get relatively decreasing gains after that point.
01:55:52 ◼ ► And so that's not a good point, by the way. As you increase clock speed, the heat output does not increase linearly.
01:55:58 ◼ ► It's like a square of these. So, you know, if you increase the clock speed by, I can't do the math in my head, but like, you know, if you double the clock speed, you are way more than doubling the heat generated.
01:56:09 ◼ ► Yeah, it's you need way more cooling, not just a little bit. You know, you don't just need 10 percent more cooling. You need like three times the cooling.
01:56:16 ◼ ► And if you see like that, what is the parabola look like? You know, the parabola graph you must have done in school with like, you know, an exponent of two.
01:56:23 ◼ ► The slope goes up real, real fast. So it doesn't take long before you're saying I am now producing infinite heat.
01:56:29 ◼ ► It becomes unfeasible way faster than you think, which is why people use, you know, liquid nitrogen. You're like, these are liquid nitrogen that must be overclocked by 8,000 percent. No, it's like 150 percent.
01:56:39 ◼ ► And like, typically, you know, like John was saying, like, you know, what kind of what chips people look for when overclocking. Usually you're looking for, you know, some kind of, you know, Intel or AMD, whatever, where they sell a pretty wide range of chips, you know, of speeds, of clock speeds within a certain, you know, family of chips.
01:56:57 ◼ ► And maybe you buy one of the lower clocked ones, assuming you could probably push it higher, you know.
01:57:01 ◼ ► And that's not how Apple sells the, you know, Apple silicon CPUs. There are no clock speed options. It's just one. It's like, here, we made this one. We've designed the entire chip to work at this one ideal speed range.
01:57:15 ◼ ► And that's the one everyone gets. That, you know, you can't pay more to get the next, to get like the faster one. It's just you have this one chip.
01:57:23 ◼ ► And so I would imagine there actually might not be as much headroom as you think, in the sense that, like, they've set these parameters for good reasons.
01:57:33 ◼ ► They, if they could push a bunch of them higher, they probably would, but they're not. And there's probably good reasons for that.
01:57:41 ◼ ► Also, these are massive chips. You know, when you're looking at the, you know, the Ultra or even just the M1 Max, but especially the Ultra, this is such a large chip.
01:57:51 ◼ ► I haven't overclocked in a very long time, so all my knowledge could be super outdated and not relevant to modern chips.
01:57:57 ◼ ► But I would expect with that much chip, with that much surface area, with that many transistors, I would expect that as you push things past their spec, the likelihood of you having a problem, I think, would be higher than the old days where you were overclocking this little tiny Celeron thing.
01:58:15 ◼ ► Like, I would guess that these massive, you know, multi-core, you know, all-on-one giant die kind of chips that Apple's making here, I would guess you actually don't have the headroom that you think you do.
01:58:28 ◼ ► Yeah, I think the overclocking is a little bit trickier, because keep in mind that with modern chips, but especially modern SOCs, System-on-Chip like we have now, there's multiple clock speeds going on there.
01:58:37 ◼ ► The GPU is not running at the same clock speed as the CPU, and all of them are on some kind of clock speed curve in response to heat, so heat is a factor, and having better cooling can let you stay at higher clock speeds for longer, but different parts of the chips are running at different clock speeds anyway.
01:58:51 ◼ ► And unlike the situation where you don't have an SOC, like a thing common in PC overclocking or whatever, is to choose like your memory speed independently from your CPU speed when you're overclocking, I don't think you have that kind of flexibility with an SOC, because the RAM is right there on the package.
01:59:06 ◼ ► And I'm not sure if you could overclock the GPU, but underclock the CPU, but increase the speed of the RAM. I don't actually know the mechanisms you'd have to use to overclock this, but to your point about Apple picking the speed, like whenever they bin these, whenever they say, "These chips will run at this speed, and these chips have a broken GPU core, so they're the cheaper ones," or whatever, they do all this binning, Apple could choose to say, "We're going to put only the ones that can run 10% faster in the Mac Pro," but it would be even more expensive, because every time they do that,
01:59:35 ◼ ► they say, "Okay, only the very best ones go in the Mac Pro, guess how many of the very best ones there are?" Way, way fewer. And the Mac Pro already costs so much money, so you think, "Okay, it would just cost 10% more to get 10% more clock speed," no.
01:59:47 ◼ ► Again, because your yield's like, how many of the, you build them all, and you think, they have to pick some number, it's like, "Okay, 80% passed the bar for Mac Studio use. How many passed the bar for 10% more than that? Okay, 1%."
02:00:01 ◼ ► And now figure out how much you have to charge for that one. It's like, "Okay, 80% of our chips are suitable in the Mac Studio, 1% of our chips are suitable for the Mac Pro."
02:00:09 ◼ ► Granted, it's good that the Mac Pro doesn't sell many, so maybe they could still make it work, but the more you bin it, the more you say, "I will reject any SoC unless it can run at X gigahertz," and you find out, "Okay, that's like one in 10,000."
02:00:20 ◼ ► Now it becomes way more expensive to put that in something because you have to maintain your 10,000 of those chips just to get one of those. So yeah, overclocking is a fun thing to do as a hobby on PCs, and I think Apple probably has a little bit of thermal headroom to push it on the Mac Pro, and still stay within a reliability envelope, but they have chosen not to, mostly because it's just one more thing to make the Mac Pro expensive.
02:00:44 ◼ ► It's not that big of a benefit. It would be a single-digit percentage if that, and now you're making an already expensive machine even more expensive and rare. Even if you could qualify it and say, "It passes all of our reliability things. We've tested it the same way as everything else, and this one can go 5% faster," it's probably not worth it.
02:01:02 ◼ ► What you want from the Mac Pro, as we've said before, is twice as many cores. That is way more valuable than the same number of cores, but 5% faster.
02:01:11 ◼ ► Even, I was just thinking too, another big reason for them not to offer that kind of thing is it would also then kind of dilute the Mac Studio, which they probably sell a whole lot more of.
02:01:23 ◼ ► Right now, they have these compact names for these chips. M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra. They have these nice, short, compact names. They're very simple. They're reasonably easy for people to understand.
02:01:49 ◼ ► Yeah, I know, right? It's not a perfect system that we have now, but the more variations they add, it'll start to seem, first of all, it'll be more confusing, and people won't necessarily know what they're buying or why they should buy it.
02:02:01 ◼ ► But also, then, imagine if, might that actually hurt the Max Studio in the sense that the Max Studio would then have the reputation of, "Well, yeah, it says it has the M2 Ultra, but it's not the really good M2 Ultra."
02:02:19 ◼ ► And it kind of is, but the way you think, like, it's not, like, the cooling in the Ultra can absolutely handle that SOC in the M2 generation.
02:02:29 ◼ ► But, yeah, you could get a couple more percentage if you put a bigger cooler on it, but that's, like, yeah, it's just not, that kind of distinction, they would never get another name like the M2 Turbo for 5%.
02:02:39 ◼ ► Like, the Ultra is not a 5% difference from the Max. It's a big difference. It's literally two Maxes in there, so I don't think you'd get a new name for 5%.
02:02:47 ◼ ► Edward Corcoran writes, "What text editor are all three of you using these days? I've used TextMate for around a decade based on Marco's recommendation.
02:02:56 ◼ ► A few MacOSes ago, TextMate started loading really slowly due to some checks on unsigned code.
02:03:04 ◼ ► I also started using TextMate forever ago, I think, because of Marco, and also noticed it takes a freaking eternity to start.
02:03:12 ◼ ► I have no idea if this unsigned code thing is true or not, I have no idea if Macromates can or can't fix it, but that at least explains, potentially explains, why this thing has become just intolerably painful to use.
02:03:22 ◼ ► Yeah, by the way, thank you, Edward, for pointing this out. I didn't know why TextMate launches so ungodly slowly.
02:03:28 ◼ ► I just assumed, you know, I have, you know, I usually have a bunch of windows and it saves all those and restores them, so I just figured, like, oh, I guess for some reason this is taking a very long time.
02:03:37 ◼ ► I will say it hasn't been a problem for me because TextMate is always running. Like, I will hide it, you know, the command H, I'll hide it if I'm not actively using it, but it's always running.
02:03:49 ◼ ► So the only time I ever actually launch it is in the relatively infrequent case where I reboot my computer.
02:03:54 ◼ ► Then when it comes back up, I'll have to launch it at some point, and I do notice, god, it's taking forever to launch.
02:04:02 ◼ ► So I don't really have a problem that I need to move away from it very suddenly based on that.
02:04:14 ◼ ► I still just use TextMate. Well, the thing is, I only use TextMate for, like, ephemeral, like, quick things because I'm using Visual Studio code for web development to the small degree I do any, and I'm using Xcode for everything else.
02:04:27 ◼ ► So it's very unusual. I'm in anything else to begin with. Usually I just need, like, a place to drop something briefly.
02:04:34 ◼ ► But I use TextMate and I just wait an eternity for it to open, which is not the rightest answer.
02:04:39 ◼ ► And I could use Visual Studio code, but I view, I perceive Visual Studio code more like an IDE and less like a quick and dirty text editor.
02:04:54 ◼ ► Yeah, like, and so I'm also, I'm all TextMate still, although, I mean, you know, I write most of my code in Xcode.
02:05:02 ◼ ► Like, most of my code writing is not web development. I very rarely need to do anything to my web code.
02:05:07 ◼ ► And thank God for that because I hate it. But that's not TextMate's fault. I just hate web programming these days and server work and stuff.
02:05:17 ◼ ► Things that are not, you know, things that are more like note based, I will usually just keep in Apple Notes.
02:05:27 ◼ ► And then, you know, sometimes things that I'm like kind of working on an idea, oh, how, you know, what if I do this, this or this?
02:05:43 ◼ ► That being said, my general purpose text editor is still TextMate because, again, once it's launched, the performance is fine.
02:05:53 ◼ ► A long time ago, I did a brief experiment. I think this might have even been during the build and analyze days.
02:05:59 ◼ ► I did an experiment where I tried out whatever like the two newish text editors at the time were that everybody was using.
02:06:08 ◼ ► They were, I spent a few time, a few, you know, a little while with each one, you know, a few days with each one or whatever to, you know, getting to know them.
02:06:33 ◼ ► And what I came to after that experiment was once TextMate stops working for me for whatever reason, there's plenty of great options out there that I will gladly look at and try out and I'll switch to one of them.
02:06:46 ◼ ► So as long as you're willing to tolerate the long, long time at TextMate, if that's still your favorite one, then there's not a lot of reason to move away from it right this second.
02:07:06 ◼ ► So the reason I put this question in Ask ATP is one of those ones we answer every few years just to check in.
02:07:11 ◼ ► And I think checking in, we're finding out that none of us have changed, myself included.
02:07:23 ◼ ► All my Mac OS X articles, all my development and work that I've done in my entire career as a web developer.
02:07:29 ◼ ► The exceptions are I use Xcode's editor for doing my Mac apps, mostly because Xcode's editor, it's integrated with the IDE.
02:07:48 ◼ ► I do still occasionally copy and paste either the entire contents of files or sections of text into BB Edit when my fingers become frustrated by something that I would like to do, that my fingers know how to do in BB Edit.
02:08:07 ◼ ► I'm like, I don't want to bother clicking around that stupid find or replace interface for something complicated when I know I could get this done in two seconds in BB Edit.
02:08:15 ◼ ► And so I will occasionally pull text out, put it into BB Edit, do a thing to it, bring it back.
02:08:23 ◼ ► Like I'd realize this when I install BB Edit like on my wife's account or on my son's laptop or whatever, and I launch it on their account.
02:08:35 ◼ ► I realize I can't use BB Edit in its default mode anymore because I've spent literal decades customizing it.
02:08:48 ◼ ► Like I can't tell anyone, oh, do this in BB Edit because for all I know, I'm telling them to do a key combination that is not the default.
02:09:11 ◼ ► The only other text editor I've ever really used in my life is Emacs, which I started using on Unix systems in the 90s.
02:09:22 ◼ ► And I install it because I don't want to use VI. I'll use VI if I have to, but I don't like it.
02:09:42 ◼ ► But I also have weird aliases that I made in 1993, like EMAL to edit my dot alias file.
02:09:51 ◼ ► I know it's weird, but it's four characters long and my fingers type it before I can even think about it.
02:10:03 ◼ ► Like writing, just, you know, scratch pad writing metadata for my apps in the Mac App Store.
02:10:12 ◼ ► Just everything is in BB Edit with the exception of Mac development and a couple of weird command line things.
02:10:18 ◼ ► And BB Edit is still maintained and launches fast and gets new features and new versions all the time. I highly recommend it.
02:10:46 ◼ ► I mean, I always just type VI and get in and out as fast as I can so I don't really want to hang around in there.
02:10:50 ◼ ► Yeah, anyway, but yeah, I think if I were to be forced to move today, I think I would look at two alternatives right away.
02:10:59 ◼ ► Number one, I would absolutely look at BB Edit because it is by far, like, first of all, I think it's the only other, like, really Mac native great modern text editor that exists, besides TextMate, which again is aging.
02:11:18 ◼ ► And then I would also check out Visual Studio Code because everyone says, like, it's amazing for working with, you know, stuff.
02:11:25 ◼ ► Like, the most common thing I'm doing in my non Xcode, non Apple Notes text editor, it's usually PHP.
02:11:32 ◼ ► That's usually what I'm writing, or at least a shell script, but, you know, usually PHP.
02:11:36 ◼ ► And so something that could actually have some kind of, like, code, you know, reading integration, autocomplete, that kind of stuff, I should probably be looking at that in reality.
02:11:48 ◼ ► But I've never used VS code at all, and I've only used BB Edit very briefly, so I can't really say for sure, but that would be where I would look.
02:12:10 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the thing. It's different. It is Electron, but it's the only Electron app I can think of that isn't a pile of garbage.
02:12:19 ◼ ► I mean, I don't know if I'd want to throw, like, a, you know, a 500 megabyte log file on it, like I routinely do to BB Edit, but--
02:12:25 ◼ ► Yeah, I would expect it to crumble. Like, BB Edit, you can put any-- you can throw anything in BB Edit, and it will read. I know that.
02:12:33 ◼ ► And, yeah, and BB Edit does have things where I can kind of make it cry when I try to soft wrap a log file that's, you know, seven million lines long, like, literally seven million lines.
02:12:46 ◼ ► Yeah, kind of like Marco was saying, I leave BB Edit running all the time. It is just always running.
02:12:50 ◼ ► And, knowing me, I end up having a lot of windows open in it, and-- because I just leave them open.
02:12:55 ◼ ► Because BB Edit is-- another great thing that BB Edit does is, if you quit BB Edit, it doesn't nag you about anything.
02:13:01 ◼ ► It doesn't say, "Oh, but wait, you've got unsaved changes, and this is an untitled document, and you never saved it."
02:13:09 ◼ ► So, when I relaunch, everything is back exactly where it was, including all your untitled windows, all your edits.
02:13:14 ◼ ► It's just-- so, like, why would I-- I never quit it, but even when I reboot and I relaunch it, everything is back, including all my untitled windows and all my unsaved changes.
02:13:26 ◼ ► And, this is a thing you can't transfer to other people. It's kind of like weird Emacs people.
02:13:33 ◼ ► Because mine is just-- I have literal decades of finger muscle memory for these weird things that I do.
02:13:38 ◼ ► Like, I do data processing in BB Edit. I'll take a big file full of things, rattle off a bunch of regular expressions with my weird keystrokes, which, honestly, I couldn't even tell you what they are, but my fingers know what they are.
02:13:48 ◼ ► Which is like, copy matching lines sub-expressions into new document, sort lines into new document, unique lines, copy matching lines into new document.
02:13:56 ◼ ► It's kind of like using-- remember, you don't remember this, but channel operations in Photoshop, I know I've mentioned it several times in the show.
02:14:02 ◼ ► Before Photoshop had layers, and in Photoshop before version 3, they didn't have layers.
02:14:08 ◼ ► So, if you wanted to do anything, you would do an operation, and the result of that operation would be a modified-- basically a new window.
02:14:19 ◼ ► So, if you're like, I want to combine this image with this image using the multiply command.
02:14:29 ◼ ► And you would just proliferate these windows. Well, in BBEdit, I do data processing by selecting the contents of windows and running regular expressions about them.
02:14:38 ◼ ► And BBEdit has a feature that says, I'll do the thing that you asked, and I'll either put the matching lines in the new window, matching sub-expressions, things that don't match the thing in a new window.
02:14:47 ◼ ► And so, you get a series of windows where you're sort of winnowing down and processing the data.
02:14:51 ◼ ► And then, of course, you can run scripts against them. You can write a Perl script and run it with the menu command.
02:14:55 ◼ ► And I do. I wrote Perl scripts to intelligently quote-aware smart wrap things in the way that I want.
02:15:01 ◼ ► You just select a region, hit a key combo that my fingers know but my mind doesn't that will do the thing that I want.
02:15:07 ◼ ► That's not going to be your experience by using BBEdit. That took me decades to build up.
02:15:14 ◼ ► But it's worth it to me to not move from BBEdit because if I moved elsewhere, I'm going to have to recreate all that stuff.
02:15:22 ◼ ► It would be like recreating my .emacs file elsewhere, although I don't have a giant .emacs file. It's a reasonable size.
02:15:27 ◼ ► But my BBEdit setup is just too Byzantine. And most text editors have most of the features, but not all of them.
02:15:34 ◼ ► And what you really need is an escape hatch, which is like, look, if the editor doesn't have this, can I just write something in Perl, in Python, in shell script, in Swift, in language of my choice,
02:15:48 ◼ ► Most text editors have a way to do that. I have to re-implement all of my things to work with the new text editor.
02:15:53 ◼ ► So, someday, someday, sorry Rich, but someday Rich Segal is going to die, hopefully before me because he's older than me.
02:16:03 ◼ ► He could retire, but I think death is the only thing that's going to stop him from developing his application because he's very dedicated.
02:16:10 ◼ ► He's very dedicated. And I thank him for it, but someday the BBEdit train will come to an end and, like Marco, I'll have to pick a new text editor.
02:16:19 ◼ ► And at that day, I'll probably be so old that I won't be able to recreate all of my old setup and I'll just become, I don't know what I'll become, I'll just become less capable on the computer.
02:16:29 ◼ ► I remember when I could do this in BBEdit, but BBEdit's gone now, so all I can do is write a Perl script.
02:16:35 ◼ ► So I'm looking up the links for the show notes and I look up the TextMate link, which is macromates.com, and I went and I thought, you know, what does their blog have to say about any of this?
02:16:55 ◼ ► In episode 379 of ATP, both Marco Arman and John Siracisa describe noticeable delays and stalls after upgrading to Mac OS 1015.
02:17:03 ◼ ► I've been struggling with this issue myself and I've found several system operations that can cause delays, which I will detail below, and then the author does.
02:17:10 ◼ ► So imagine my surprise as John is talking and I look to see the most recent blog post on this website and sure enough, it literally begins in episode 379 of ATP.
02:17:23 ◼ ► I remember this now, like I had forgotten about this, but I did see this when the author wrote it, when Alenka wrote it, like I did see this back then, but yeah, I had forgotten today about this.
02:17:37 ◼ ► 379 was May 21 of 2020 and in the after show we talked about life at home status updates because COVID.
02:17:44 ◼ ► I will say that TextMate, it really has not gotten a lot of love in many, many, many years, but it does still work.
02:17:59 ◼ ► In all likelihood, it will continue to work for years until some OS change breaks it on Apple's side.
02:18:10 ◼ ► He's not the sole developer to be clear, but it's his baby and I do think that when he finally gives it up, I hope he finds it a new home, but boy, talk about a legacy code base.
02:18:23 ◼ ► This is a code base that's been substantially rewritten many times over, but here be dragons.
02:18:34 ◼ ► That's not really a reason not to use something. I think the safest option would probably be VS Code because that seems to be...
02:18:49 ◼ ► All their editors have come and gone. It's competitive. Oh, Alpha is better. You can extend it using Tcl and people are like, "What the hell is Alpha? What's Tcl?"
02:18:57 ◼ ► There have been so many competitors. Adam, the more recent... I was thinking, "What, you're using VS Code?" Adam, TextMate.
02:19:05 ◼ ► Those editors come, they flare up people's interest, they leave. BBE is still there. It is the rock.
02:19:16 ◼ ► Although I think VI is a lot easier for other people to take on the mantle of, frankly, compared to something like BBE.
02:19:22 ◼ ► But still, I think the way I look at it is, I don't want to invest such a key part of my work habits.
02:19:41 ◼ ► And I think BBE Edit is one of those top picks. I think that will stick around as long as Rick Siegel wants to be a programmer or is able to be a programmer.
02:19:49 ◼ ► I think it will stick around as long as possible, and then for a few years even after that.
02:19:55 ◼ ► But again, TextMate really has not been worked on much in recent years, and it's still fine as well.
02:20:04 ◼ ► I don't know if it's fine. I definitely got some Casey vibes with both of you saying, "Yeah, it takes forever to launch. Once it gets running, it's okay."
02:20:12 ◼ ► And the thing is, when you look at something that's made by a big company, that can go both ways. If it's made by a big company and it's successful, and it's core to their business interests in some way, then it's probably going to stick around for a while.
02:20:25 ◼ ► I don't think Microsoft is going to discontinue Excel and PowerPoint for quite a while. I think those are pretty safe investments for your time.
02:20:33 ◼ ► Whereas VSCode, it seems like that's serving them pretty well. I think that's probably the most likely to be long-lived out of all these options that I see in the market today.
02:20:52 ◼ ► If they have a leadership change, or if they start having a bunch of bad quarters, and they've got to start making cuts or whatever, there's always risks of that at big companies too.
02:21:00 ◼ ► We'll see what happens with all this stuff. I think either BBEdit or VSCode are both pretty safe options for a long time, hopefully.
02:21:10 ◼ ► Wow, it looks like Alpha made it to Mac OS X. I didn't even realize that. Someone did Alpha Coco as a project to rewrite Alpha for Mac OS X based on the Coco framework.
02:21:19 ◼ ► I don't know how old this page is, but no one remembers Alpha except for really old-school BBEdit users.
02:21:25 ◼ ► The funny thing too is that the ones that I tried when I was looking for a textmate replacement, first of all, I can't remember either of the names. One of them was Brown.
02:21:36 ◼ ► No, it wasn't out yet. It was before that. One of them, I think, began with an S, and it was really popular at the time.
02:21:43 ◼ ► No, I tried that way earlier. All of its configuration was in one giant text file that opened up in the editor, and it was a big pain in the butt.
02:21:51 ◼ ► Yeah, I think I know the editor you're talking about. I'm not sure you have the name right, but I know what you mean.
02:21:55 ◼ ► It was cross-platform, but I think this was even pre-Electron, though. I tried that one, and there was a-- Sublime?
02:22:09 ◼ ► I can't remember what it was. This was probably around 2010. I tried both of those, and they were fine, but now I'm not-- I never hear of anyone using those anymore.
02:22:23 ◼ ► Yeah, VS Code has kind of blotted out the sun for those type of editors, because once you have Microsoft funding you, it's tough to compete with that as a small dev team.
02:22:32 ◼ ► And I never would have guessed at the time that these new ones I was trying out to replace TextMate, I never would have guessed TextMate would outlive them.
02:22:43 ◼ ► T.J., wasn't the original VS Code-- I thought that was a fork of Atom, actually, if I'm not mistaken.
02:22:50 ◼ ► Yeah, I think VS Code is derived from that lineage in some way. Either Atom or Sublime or something like that.
02:22:56 ◼ ► All those editors are kind of the same, but VS Code has definitely gone its own way and is now incredibly full-featured. Probably maybe a little bit too full-featured.
02:23:18 ◼ ► I'm going to be lying in bed tonight, I'm going to be like, "Oh, Espresso!" or whatever. Something like that.
02:23:23 ◼ ► Maybe it wasn't. Espresso is an editor, it was a web editor. I figured it was derived from--
02:23:37 ◼ ► I really got to figure out, I got to go back to my history, I guess if it was Build and Analyze, I got to find whatever episode it was so I can find the--
02:23:57 ◼ ► Yeah, I do have a local--yeah, 5x5--yeah, Dan's taken a whole bunch of his stuff offline, but I have a backup of everything.
02:24:07 ◼ ► Plus we can all agree, as we close, that Emacs is indeed better than VI. Bye, everybody!
02:24:13 ◼ ► I do not agree to that, thank you very much. VI kicks butt. Anyway, thank you so much to our sponsors this week.
02:24:20 ◼ ► Squarespace, Collide, and Green Chef. And thank you to our members very much for supporting us directly.
02:24:35 ◼ ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
02:24:46 ◼ ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
02:24:57 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at atv.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
02:25:12 ◼ ► So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental.
02:25:32 ◼ ► Tech podcast so long. I gotta find this. Search your archives. Search for Sublime, 'cause wherever you find Sublime, you'll find the other one.
02:25:46 ◼ ► I doubt that word is common in show notes other than when you're talking about the editor.
02:25:50 ◼ ► So while Marco's looking for that, so we were traveling last week, as I had mentioned a couple of times on the show.
02:25:56 ◼ ► And we were traveling just a couple of weeks before that, actually, when John and I were concurrently on separate beach vacations.
02:26:03 ◼ ► Separate, but at the same time. And when we were at our beach house, something happened that I was absolutely disgusted by and then forgot about it.
02:26:18 ◼ ► And what had happened was I had, because I'm me, brought a travel router, as we talked about last episode, I believe, or maybe the episode before.
02:26:33 ◼ ► And I had plugged the travel router into the router that was at the place, both at the beach and at the Airbnb.
02:26:42 ◼ ► And I plugged the travel Apple TV into the TV, etc. And so on both of these TVs, which I forget what brand the TVs were.
02:26:56 ◼ ► But they were both Roku powered TVs. So they use all the Roku software to do all their stuff.
02:27:07 ◼ ► I believe that they were both designed to be on the Internet because the idea is if you're a guest in these Airbnbs or whatever, then you could watch Prime Video or what have you on the TV.
02:28:06 ◼ ► And as I'm watching, and I don't remember if I was watching something. I'd seen before something new, but when I went to the other, a little banner comes up on the bottom like tenth or maybe fifth of the screen.
02:28:18 ◼ ► And I wish I had taken a picture of it or a screenshot or what have you. I didn't think of it at the time.
02:28:34 ◼ ► I am watching something on an Apple TV that I provided, but these TVs are creeping on the video I'm watching, scanning the video I'm watching, doing some sort of like f***ing Shazam for video or something like that.
02:28:51 ◼ ► And figuring out what I'm watching and then are advertising to me, oh, you can watch this other places. How gross is that? That is so gross.
02:29:02 ◼ ► Not only is that so gross, but that's not even a very good sales proposition. You're already watching it.
02:29:14 ◼ ► I just want you to go elsewhere. So I know you love to talk about TV. This is a big thing in the television industry, has been for many, many years, and it is a trend that is only increasing.
02:29:23 ◼ ► And that trend is television companies realizing that they can't make money selling televisions. They need to make money some other way.
02:29:29 ◼ ► And so some of these sort of pioneer brands that you've mentioned like Vizio, TCL, Roku, a lot of these brands used to make televisions, but now don't anymore.
02:29:44 ◼ ► Yeah. Now that someone else makes the hardware for them and they resell it. But what is Vizio actually selling? They're selling a software platform.
02:29:52 ◼ ► And what does a software platform do? It watches what you're watching and sells that information to other people.
02:30:01 ◼ ► And the number of companies that are still willing to manufacture television sets has been shrinking and sort of a race to the bottom where the less premium, let's say, companies that make cheaper televisions that you would see at lower price retailers, they're still out there cranking them out.
02:30:19 ◼ ► But there's a very dwindling number of companies that do that with names that you might not even recognize if you're not into the television space.
02:30:25 ◼ ► And they're resold often under other brand names, but those companies that are reselling them are just adding the, I'm going to say the spyware to the television sets.
02:30:34 ◼ ► And you'd be like, oh, that's bad. I want to stay out of this market. I'm going to buy a good TV.
02:30:38 ◼ ► Well, the latest developments are that even the quote unquote good television makers are like, I don't know if there's money in making better screens anymore.
02:30:46 ◼ ► LG, have you heard of LG? They make fancy OLED televisions. They're very popular. They're very highly regarded.
02:30:52 ◼ ► LG even is like, I don't know about this whole trying to make the picture quality better thing. It seems like a loser business.
02:30:58 ◼ ► Can we stop making panels and instead do what Vizio does and just spy on everybody and sell software and sell the information that does that?
02:31:08 ◼ ► And like Sony and these other high end companies that want to sell thousand dollar televisions, all of them are looking at Vizio and saying,
02:31:15 ◼ ► LG Display, I think has lost money for the past year, has not just made enough profit, but have literally been losing money.
02:31:24 ◼ ► And Vizio, their profits are going up because they don't make those sneaky televisions anymore. They just make the spyware.
02:31:29 ◼ ► And that's a great business. You also see the company that will give you a free television set as long as you agree to have underneath the television a long skinny display that shows ads, like an ad banner.
02:31:41 ◼ ► You get the TV for free, but you have to basically see an ad banner underneath it in a separate screen.
02:31:48 ◼ ► And if you cover that screen, the television turns off or whatever. This is where televisions are going, where it's like the lucrative business is spying on what everybody's watching and selling it.
02:31:57 ◼ ► And only the losers make screens. And it's like, but somebody's got to make the screens. And there's like a bunch of, you know, you know, bargain based manufacturers like, yeah, yeah, we turn out the cheapest television sets we can using whatever the most economically feasible technology is.
02:32:10 ◼ ► Which would be like a cheap LCD with terrible viewing angles and black levels. Yeah, we'll make a million of those. We'll make them in really big sizes. We'll sell them to you at Super Bowl Sunday for $250 and we'll spy on everything you watch for the rest of your entire life.
02:32:22 ◼ ► And Sony's over here trying to make $4,000 television sets with Samsung displays in them. And they're not making any money. And Vizio is like, haha, you losers, we just spy on everybody.
02:32:32 ◼ ► It's really got me worried because like having that be a market, fine, but having that market become the only market, the only way you can buy, kind of like how you can't buy a dumb TV now, you can only buy smart ones.
02:32:44 ◼ ► Soon I fear it will be, you can only buy a television with a crappy screen that spies on you. And that's literally your only choice. So I'm like Sony hold strong.
02:32:54 ◼ ► We may have lost LG. LG may be deciding, yeah, we're not going to try to make better screens anymore. That business sucks. And that will mean no more, you know, no more advancement in OLED technology from LG.
02:33:04 ◼ ► And it'll leave basically only Samsung in the entire world trying to make screens that have better picture year over year and selling those screens to Sony and itself. It's depressing.
02:33:14 ◼ ► So yeah, you have seen a glimpse of the future with that Roku. And by the way, you know, that's not a new thing. These things have always been spying on everything that you watch. They're just now being more blatant about it.
02:33:23 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. And actually I have a corollary, like ethical question for you. So this Airbnb that I was staying in for a couple of nights last week, it was a little teeny tiny cottage off of Lake Wong Paw Pack.
02:33:36 ◼ ► It was probably 600, 900 square feet or something like that. It was, you know, two beds, one bath, a little teeny tiny kitchen and a little teeny tiny living area.
02:33:45 ◼ ► Well, in a closet was their like cable modem or what have you, and an Eero, which I was like, oh, that's cool. I'm happy to see that.
02:33:54 ◼ ► And for a fleeting moment, I thought rather than plug my travel router into the Eero, which is what I ended up doing.
02:34:04 ◼ ► And so I'm double-natting, but that doesn't matter because nothing is inbound. It's no big deal. But you know, it's not as direct as I would want it to be.
02:34:12 ◼ ► What I did was, or what I considered unplugging the Eero and replacing it temporarily with my travel router.
02:34:21 ◼ ► And the reason I didn't was because I noticed that they had a camera mounted on the external portion of the house to see the front door.
02:34:30 ◼ ► And I also noticed that they're like mini split system, you know, the thing that John should be doing to his house, their mini split system had what appeared to be a wifi icon on it.
02:34:38 ◼ ► So it appeared that there is some sort of remote control or at least monitoring for the mini split.
02:34:44 ◼ ► And I had a feeling that if I unplug their router, you know, obviously the wifi network information is going to change and all of these things will die and the Airbnb actual owners will probably poop themselves.
02:34:55 ◼ ► And so I didn't do it. Is that what did I make the ethically correct choice or is it Yolo? You know, who cares? Unplug it if you want to.
02:35:02 ◼ ► You made the practically correct choice because you know, sometimes when you unplug the router that is actually connected to the ISP, the ISP is like, Oh, I don't know what the hell this new router is. Call our customer support line.
02:35:12 ◼ ► I know it's not like that in most places, but I would never risk that because then you're without internet access and you have to admit to the people who you were renting the house from that you screwed it up.
02:35:20 ◼ ► That's great about breaking their cameras. I don't want to A, B, B internet and B have to explain that I was messing around stuff.
02:35:26 ◼ ► That is totally fair. But leaving that aside, let's assume, which I wouldn't be, but let's assume I could, I could guarantee that the internet would come back.
02:35:37 ◼ ► As long as you can successfully put it back the way it was. If you screw up your own internet when you're there, that's your own problem.
02:35:42 ◼ ► The problem arises because A you'll be without internet and B you will refuse to be without internet. So then you will have to go crawling to the owner and say, I screwed up your internet.
02:35:57 ◼ ► I would, I would say any kind of rental situation, you're better off not messing with it. Like that's, that's not for you to mess with.
02:36:03 ◼ ► Do you feel like it was inappropriate for me to hang my travel router off of the Eero or is that acceptable in your mind?
02:36:10 ◼ ► That I think is fine, but I think as soon as you start attaching things to their network or modifying their network in such a way that you're running the risk of causing problems, at that point you become a thousand percent liable for anything that happens as a result.
02:36:35 ◼ ► You would, you would mess with it if it didn't work though. That's the thing. It's like, it's like, okay, this wifi is so bad it might as well not even exist. And then suddenly you're very willing to mess with it. You're like, it's already broken. I can't possibly make it work. It already doesn't do the thing it's supposed to do. So that's when you get in there and start trying to find where the router is and you find it locked in a shed and then you cry.
02:36:54 ◼ ► It would have to be so bad that I also couldn't use the built in LTE 5G connections on my phone. So I would rather just use my phone and tether to it with a laptop than deal with someone's bad wifi if my phone works well at all. Now if you're somewhere where you don't have reception.
02:37:12 ◼ ► Of course, of course we would all just to use love to use the phone, but of course your vacation house is in a place with no signal. So that's not an option either. Yeah, that, that becomes a problem then. So yeah, that made you look, you gotta do what you gotta do. Like internet connectivity is a, is a basic need. It's like, it's like, well, if the toilets broken, you know, you're not going to just not flush the toilet all weekend. Like you'll make it work similarly. Yeah. Like if there is no internet connectivity, you're going to do what you got to do as a nerd to make it work for you and your family. But including finding neighbors with unprotected wifi, which I remember way back in the day when we were, we were going to my home.
02:37:41 ◼ ► We were going to my long island vacations. The houses didn't even have wifi, but some of the neighbors did and some of them didn't have passwords. So we would sit like in the room closest to them or go in the backyard against the fence to get signal. Yeah. You gotta do what you gotta do.