00:00:00 ◼ ► So, as mentioned a few times in the past, my kid, for his schooling, uses Chromebooks, like many American children, and everything's on the Chromebook, as we discussed a little bit in our school special.
00:00:11 ◼ ► Obviously, because he is my kid, he is going to pay attention in school to the minimum degree required, and the rest of the time is goofing off on his Chromebook.
00:00:23 ◼ ► Yeah, right? And it's fine because, like, he gets decent grades, and he doesn't cause problems in the class, so the teachers don't care.
00:00:31 ◼ ► Like, I'm sure the teachers all know he's goofing off on the Chromebook, and they just have bigger fish to fry, so, like, they don't bother him, and he doesn't bother them.
00:00:40 ◼ ► So, anyway, the Chromebooks, though, have various, you know, like, school content-blocking and filtering software installed.
00:00:49 ◼ ► Now, what do middle schoolers want to see on a computer? It's nothing harmful. They're not looking up, like, bad adult stuff.
00:00:55 ◼ ► They just want to, like, watch YouTube and play games. Like, that's it. It's all about YouTube and games.
00:01:00 ◼ ► That is, like, the holy grail is, I want to goof off and watch YouTube, or I want to play some stupid web game that, you know, I can make this Chromebook less horrible for myself.
00:01:10 ◼ ► So, my kid has, throughout his middle school career so far, done all sorts of things to try to evade and evade the blocks to the point where even he was, like, running, like, a spreadsheet that was shared between, like, 40 other kids that would, like, link out to unblocked games.
00:01:32 ◼ ► Like, he was, like, he was, like, the moderator, and he was hiring, like, other moderators, trading them, like, lollipops and stuff.
00:02:02 ◼ ► But right from the start, from that one, I told him, like, listen, I know at some point I'm going to get called into the principal's office to talk about this.
00:02:27 ◼ ► Like, he, you know, the teachers at the front of the room, they have some kind of, like, overview of the screens of everyone's Chromebooks in the class.
00:02:39 ◼ ► And so, he would create the layout and give it, like, a big title on the top that would be something relevant to what they were doing.
00:02:48 ◼ ► Like, if they were doing a project on, you know, dinosaurs, it would be a big title on the top that says Brontosaurus, you know.
00:02:52 ◼ ► And then, like, all the links to the games and everything would all be smaller down below.
00:03:00 ◼ ► Too small for old-person teachers to see or when they're scaled in the thumbnail, you can't read it anymore.
00:03:23 ◼ ► I don't know anything about what is available for Chromebooks and how this stuff typically works.
00:03:27 ◼ ► But he's found various workarounds to block web URLs, like, just, like, spam clicking the bookmark.
00:03:34 ◼ ► But often, like, eventually it would just work because it seems like it's doing JavaScript client-side blocking.
00:03:40 ◼ ► So, like, the way he described it and he showed me a couple times, it's like, you can view the page, it loads, and then it seems like there's, like, an onload handler or something that runs.
00:03:49 ◼ ► It's like, after it loads, if it's supposed to be banned, the extension, like, kicks you over to a block page or something.
00:03:57 ◼ ► And he recently, the news tonight was he found out how to get an alternative Google login on the Chromebook because normally you can't log in with, like, your own home Google account so you can maybe watch YouTube.
00:04:10 ◼ ► But he found, this was so perfect, he found that if you go to a certain, like, YouTube page, it tells you you can't log in, and there's a link that says learn more.
00:04:28 ◼ ► So, that's exactly what he did, was what Apple does, which is, like, he clicked on learn more and just poked around until he found a different way to log in with a different login link that was on some header or some footer of some, like, Google support page deep within God knows what.
00:04:54 ◼ ► Like, I love, like, you know, when I was a kid, I was mostly just, like, goofing off on my TI-83 and, you know, slowly infecting the school with good assembly games I downloaded off the internet.
00:05:04 ◼ ► But, like, now, like, I mean, I love that, like, so much about school has changed, but this one thing hasn't.
00:05:12 ◼ ► Like, this is one thing of, like, you give kids technology and they will find ways to goof off and play games.
00:05:17 ◼ ► And whatever you, like, put in place to try to prevent that, they'll find a way around it.
00:05:27 ◼ ► And I'm not going to name this person, but somebody tweeted, Mastodon'd us, whatever you want to call it, and said, listening to episode 637 made me realize that I did, in fact, miss the merchandise sale this year.
00:05:45 ◼ ► As thanks for your honesty, I'm not going to link to your toot, and I'm not going to name you by name, but you know who you are.
00:05:56 ◼ ► We made passing mention of this last episode, and we should talk about it at least briefly now.
00:06:08 ◼ ► Stage Play's performance capture process allows producers, performers, and creators to capture their performances in stereoscopic 3D and distribute them live or on demand.
00:06:17 ◼ ► The Stage Play app, developed for mixed reality headsets like Apple Vision Pro and MetaQuest, enables remote audiences to participate in live entertainment experiences virtually from their homes.
00:06:26 ◼ ► At launch, Stage Play will feature a performance from the Blue Man Group, which was captured in the show's original theater in New York City earlier this year.
00:06:37 ◼ ► Let me tell you, I've seen Blue Man Group live a couple of times in New York, and they are phenomenal.
00:06:49 ◼ ► I'm sure the cost to participate in one of these shows will be prohibitive, which is going to make me a lot less excited.
00:06:59 ◼ ► I mean, I like that they're launching it not just on Vision Pro, but also on the Quest.
00:07:06 ◼ ► On the other hand, people who can afford a Vision Pro can probably also afford more expensive tickets.
00:07:11 ◼ ► But, we mentioned this so many times, just put a camera in the audience, and we mentioned so many times about how things are sometimes shot like plays.
00:07:19 ◼ ► It's not music concerts, but it's, hey, there's a performance on a stage, like a Broadway play or show or whatever, and we'll put a camera in the audience.
00:07:30 ◼ ► I've also seen Blue Man Group in New York, and if I had one, I would definitely try it out to compare the experience.
00:07:46 ◼ ► Yeah, it was, like, I think that's, this is exactly what I hope to see on the Vision Pro.
00:08:08 ◼ ► Oh, and I should also mention, you and I have gone back and forth in a, I believe, a friendly way about whether or not, this was mostly around Metallica, was the most recent time that we had this argument, but about whether or not just sitting a camera stationary on a stage, is that going to be good or bad?
00:08:27 ◼ ► And I don't know if that's what stage play is going to be doing, but I think it stands to reason that that might be what they're doing, just a static stationary camera that you can use to, like, look around.
00:08:41 ◼ ► My assertion is that's not going to be that great, because you're going to be far away from things you want to see, especially in the context of a band, but perhaps as well in the context of a stage play.
00:08:50 ◼ ► And your assertion, Marco, and jump in if I'm misleading anyone, your assertion was, no, let's stop moving about.
00:08:56 ◼ ► Let's just be stationary and give the control, you know, so to speak, to the user to just look around if they want to change their perspective.
00:09:03 ◼ ► And I don't know which one of us is right, but this might be the way in which we find out.
00:09:08 ◼ ► Well, and the thing about stage plays and music concerts is that they are designed to be viewed by people in stationary seats in the audience.
00:09:22 ◼ ► So if somebody places a fixed camera in a really good seat, you know, a few inches up, so it's not going to look in the back of someone's head who happens to be tall, like, you know, just put a camera in a really good seat or above a really good seat.
00:09:41 ◼ ► But, you know, somebody like that, if you put it in a good enough seat, that seat might cost $1,000 or whatever, you know, it might be a hundreds of dollars seat.
00:09:50 ◼ ► And so you're actually seeing it better than most of the people who are seeing it live and paying, you know, $100, $200 for their tickets.
00:10:00 ◼ ► If you imagine, like, a fixed camera in many other, you know, media, it might not be as good.
00:10:08 ◼ ► But these productions are specifically designed to be viewed from a fixed position for the entire time.
00:10:14 ◼ ► It should, theoretically, be really good and really fun, and it should be very similar to actually being there.
00:10:22 ◼ ► Obviously, you know, you will, the play that I saw last week, I made the mistake of purchasing a drink during intermission.
00:10:52 ◼ ► So, if your other market for, you know, seeing a professional play is, you know, you're, and the tickets were a few hundred bucks, because we got, like, you know, we got good seats, so it was a few hundred bucks.
00:11:02 ◼ ► Like, so, you know, if that's your alternative of that kind of price scale, you can sell one of these tickets at InVision Pro for, like, I don't know, $30?
00:11:16 ◼ ► We won't really know until we get some of these made, and we see, like, how are they shooting it?
00:11:27 ◼ ► Like, we don't actually know that yet, but the only way we're going to find that out is by people starting to do it.
00:11:36 ◼ ► Like, if you think of all the things that we've named, setting aside VR entirely, and as people are pointing out the chat room, there's been existing headsets with similar content available for them for ages.
00:11:49 ◼ ► Sometimes your seats are crap, and you don't get a good view, but you can still enjoy the performance.
00:11:56 ◼ ► But then there's also things like, I don't know what you would call these, but, like, when they did the Hamilton thing on Netflix or whatever, that's not shot as if you're sitting in the audience.
00:12:07 ◼ ► Like, there are multiple cameras, and if you watch that Hamilton, I don't even remember what streaming service was on.
00:12:14 ◼ ► Anyway, if you watch that, it has better views of the performance of Hamilton than any person who was sitting in that theater.
00:12:24 ◼ ► Similarly, with music, while there are ones where they have a camera in the audience that are recorded, also there's what is known as concert films, back when you used film, or, you know, concert videos or whatever,
00:12:36 ◼ ► that used multiple cameras, multiple performances over multiple nights, that might have music overdubbed on them or whatever.
00:12:41 ◼ ► And that's an established genre that does not look like you're viewing it from the audience.
00:12:46 ◼ ► If you watch an NFL game on television, today we have things like amazing camera angles with a flying camera and all the things painted on the field,
00:13:04 ◼ ► That looks like a bunch of little ants, and you may be looking at the big jumbotron to see what's going on.
00:13:16 ◼ ► Some people prefer, they love the NFL, but they prefer to watch it at home on TV because they feel like they get a better view.
00:13:26 ◼ ► But there's also something to be said about the atmosphere being in the stadium, and that is another place where VR can help because for sporting event, maybe not so much for plays where you're supposed to just be quiet and not be annoying your neighbors.
00:13:37 ◼ ► But for sporting events, being able to turn to your left and turn to your right and see your buddies and feel the energy of the crowd is part of being there live.
00:13:45 ◼ ► Through the magic of networking and VR headsets, that is something that someone could do if it hasn't already been done.
00:13:55 ◼ ► Virtually attending a game with your buddies and, you know, a million other people in, like, instant stadiums, like using, you know, technology from MMOs and stuff where you're in a stadium with 30,000 other people and there's a bunch of these stadiums and you don't know which one.
00:14:07 ◼ ► Anyway, you could simulate that in a headset and know one of those experiences any worse or better than the other.
00:14:13 ◼ ► Like, there's something to be said for being in the stadium seats watching an NFL game.
00:14:21 ◼ ► There's something to be said for concert movies versus sitting in the seats and watching a rock concert.
00:14:27 ◼ ► So I think all of this, like, there's no, I don't think there's any tension between them.
00:14:33 ◼ ► Or, like, I don't know anything about F1, but you've talked before about the million ways you can visualize a Formula One race because there's so much going on at the same time.
00:14:42 ◼ ► Someone mentioned that, too, as a golf thing where you can follow different people on the course.
00:14:45 ◼ ► Like, technology makes all of this possible, including things that simulate, you know, being in person at the Masters where you get a stakeout.
00:14:51 ◼ ► In front of one hole and just hope something dramatic happens versus the concert video version where you can fly around and see everybody.
00:14:57 ◼ ► So I think there is only going to be more of this as time goes on once we get the viewing hardware sorted out.
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00:17:13 ◼ ► All right, we have a bunch of follow-ups with regard to Epic and Apple, and I'm just going to kind of go through this piece by piece, and please, gentlemen, interrupt when you're ready.
00:17:33 ◼ ► In the end, Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this court's injunction, Gonzalez-Rogers says.
00:17:39 ◼ ► She notes that inside Apple App Store chief Phil Schiller advocated for the company to comply with the injunction, but that CEO Tim Cook chose poorly – that's a direct quote – by ignoring Schiller and letting CFO Luca Maestri convince him otherwise.
00:17:54 ◼ ► Yeah, this is, by the way, like, we hadn't had much time to, like, read into much of it before we had last week's show, but Phil Schiller looks pretty good in this.
00:18:03 ◼ ► Like, I've got to say, like, you know, like, I've gotten up his butt a little bit over time with App Store policy decisions, but he looks like a pretty strong voice of reason here compared to the CFO team and Tim Cook, who basically ignored his very valid concerns.
00:18:23 ◼ ► Like, the sentence basically said, you know, Schiller advocated that the company should comply with the injunction.
00:18:45 ◼ ► Yeah, so it's, he comes out looking better than his siblings, but it's, it's kind of, I mean, in the end, it's not his call.
00:18:51 ◼ ► Like, he can, he can suggest, hey, I think we shouldn't do this because I don't think it will go well for us, but it's not his call.
00:18:57 ◼ ► So, I mean, and he is, as Marco has noted many times, has been, what, promoted to the roof, as you're saying, or whatever.
00:19:03 ◼ ► Like, he's got one foot out the door, he cares about this stuff, but he's not running the company, and so, yeah, he's in there saying, why don't, you know, like, the court case is over, why don't we just do what he said?
00:19:13 ◼ ► And by the way, a lot of people wrote in to point this out, and has been emphasized in future, right, and subsequent writing about this topic, but we didn't mention it last time, so we should now.
00:19:22 ◼ ► This case that we're talking about, I said last time, you know, Epic won, they won this part of it, this anti-steering part, but the larger case was like Epic saying, Apple shouldn't be able to have an app store, and the court was like, yeah, no, they can have it.
00:19:34 ◼ ► But, this anti-steering stuff that they're doing, yeah, that's BS, and they have to stop that.
00:19:38 ◼ ► So, you know, Apple, quote-unquote, won the case, except for this, you know, in all cases, it's like, there was 10 counts and 9 counts when Apple's, well, I don't know if counts is the right phrase, but anyway, there's sub-aspects of the case.
00:19:50 ◼ ► The only thing we're interested in talking about here is the one thing that Apple lost, which is you can't stop people from telling their customers about better prices and sending them to external payment things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:20:01 ◼ ► So, that's the part that Apple lost, but they won the whole rest, which was like, Epic was saying, it's no fair that Apple has an app store and can kick us out, and Epic did not win that part of it.
00:20:10 ◼ ► Right. So, I read most of the filing earlier today because I'm a glutton for punishment, and I, you know, I skimmed what I didn't read.
00:20:25 ◼ ► And I, I do overall agree with what Marco said, that certainly all the poll quotes make Schiller look really, really good, but there's definitely other times in this document that he looks not so great, including like changing his story based on new evidence, which is to some degree fair, you know, like obviously as you get more information, you're allowed to change your mind.
00:20:43 ◼ ► And also because like, if they, you know, if they had won this, this sub aspect of the case, like he would have been the naysayer who was trying to make them do something they didn't have to do.
00:21:00 ◼ ► And the general vibe is always like for all parties involved at the Apple executive level of like, essentially, what can we get away with?
00:21:09 ◼ ► Because we saw before there was any lawsuits, what Apple chose to do in the absence of external pressure was what they were already doing.
00:21:23 ◼ ► And Phil was more on the side of, I think we probably shouldn't do that because we were pressing our luck in X, Y, and Z, which is again, not a very strong stride and position of saying we shouldn't be doing this because it's wrong.
00:21:47 ◼ ► Apple hired a group to basically say, how much should we charge for our intellectual property?
00:21:58 ◼ ► And so with that in mind, Apple hired the analysis group purportedly to conduct a bottoms-up study, which, quote, estimated the value of services provided by the Apple ecosystem to developers, quote.
00:22:07 ◼ ► And the whole thesis of the judge's opinion about this was basically they backed themselves into 30%.
00:22:15 ◼ ► And so this group concluded, and this is in the court documentation, that dev tools and services, for those efforts, for the dev tools and services that Apple provides,
00:22:28 ◼ ► For discovery services, which I'd like to come back to in a moment, anywhere between 5% and 14%.
00:22:40 ◼ ► And what I – and I don't want us to get wrapped around the axle about this, but, like, discovery services, 5% to 15%, well, really, 14% of my earnings should go to discovery services?
00:22:55 ◼ ► I mean, even before you get to that, the premise being the – I mean, setting aside charging anything, the premise being, as I've said, Oracle-style pricing, where you usually think of something costing a certain amount of money.
00:23:11 ◼ ► But in the world of enterprise software and other situations where the pricing dynamics are a little bit different, they say, well, there's not really a price.
00:23:21 ◼ ► So it's a percentage of some amount of money that you make, which is a really strange way to price stuff.
00:23:28 ◼ ► It's kind of the way that, like, traffic violations are priced in countries more civilized than we are, where instead of being a $100 fee for speeding, it's a percentage of your income to make it equally –
00:23:38 ◼ ► make the deterrent equally sized for everybody who speeds as opposed to it being ruinous for people who don't have a lot of money and trivial for people who do.
00:23:47 ◼ ► So that's – like, DevTools, it's not X amount of money because, you know, these things that they do, even though there are incremental costs for each additional developer,
00:23:55 ◼ ► they're largely fixed costs for, like, running the app store and creating Xcode and all that stuff where you don't have to create Xcode again for every new developer.
00:24:07 ◼ ► They say, well, if you make a lot of money, we want to make a lot of money, so we would prefer to have some percentage of your income or revenue or whatever.
00:24:19 ◼ ► Because instead of saying, we can't figure out how much to charge because some people have a lot of money, but some people have little.
00:24:46 ◼ ► I don't – I reject the premise that because you made these things and I want to use them or buy them that you deserve a percentage of my income.
00:24:56 ◼ ► And you accept that, oh, look, magically, somehow, the percentage they came up with is exactly the right amount to deter people from using this instead of just using an app purchase.
00:25:09 ◼ ► And out of the goodness of their hearts, they've been running the App Store all this time at breakeven.
00:25:18 ◼ ► So then I forget what page numbers these two final po' quotes were from, and I apologize.
00:25:23 ◼ ► But reading directly from the document, as the 2025 hearing revealed, the analysis group's report did not materially factor into Apple's decision-making process.
00:25:53 ◼ ► Yeah, honestly, like I can't imagine anything Apple could have done because the whole point is like, okay, we've come up.
00:26:01 ◼ ► We've decided to do this, and how can we defend this thing we've decided to do, which is still charge people, even though they do payment outside the App Store?
00:26:12 ◼ ► Well, we need to show that, like, actually, we calculated our costs, and this is about what it is.
00:26:16 ◼ ► And so you make up, but, like, honestly, can you imagine a set of, like, research that they had?
00:26:23 ◼ ► Like, there's just nothing you could have presented to the court to say, well, we looked into our very own thing that we're doing already, and we've decided it's probably going to cost the same amount as we were already charging.
00:26:34 ◼ ► Like, I don't think there's any way, anything they could have done, like, any outside firm they could have hired, any way they could have written down, like, just add up the salaries of the people involved and the time they take or whatever, because it's just, it's a nonsensical thing.
00:26:49 ◼ ► Like, you're starting from a premise that the court essentially rejected, which is that Apple should be allowed to charge anything for this, essentially, which is, you know, why they ended up with a judgment against them here.
00:27:00 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, it's, like, I think if you look back on where Apple goes the most wrong, it's mostly hubris.
00:27:11 ◼ ► Like, historically, like, this is true just as much in the Steve Jobs days as it is now.
00:27:23 ◼ ► It's just, like, they really thought they could get away with totally disregarding this.
00:27:29 ◼ ► Like, you know, first they thought they could get away for a long time with, you know, very anti-competitive behavior as their, you know, market and influence and control over the economy grew.
00:27:44 ◼ ► Like, if there was ever an opportunity for them to give an inch or keep it all, they chose keep it all every single time.
00:27:53 ◼ ► And by the way, that's another instance where Phil came out looking pretty good because he did – you made the joke about App Store breaking even because it's something that Steve Jobs said early on before the App Store was even launched, I think.
00:28:03 ◼ ► But at some point, very early in the App Store is in history where it seemed like it was clear that it was going to be real popular.
00:28:10 ◼ ► I think Phil had an email that we saw in a court case that was like, hey, you know, after we start – we break, like, a billion dollars in revenue per year or something through the App Store, should we think about maybe, like, lowering our percentage or something?
00:28:22 ◼ ► Or, like, it was basically like, once the App Store gets really big, maybe we should change the rules.
00:28:26 ◼ ► And that gets to what you were saying, Marco, of, like, as they went from a small fish to a big fish, it's easy for it to, like, creep up on you and say, yeah, we were behaving as if we're this tiny fish.
00:28:39 ◼ ► And Phil was saying that at such an astronomically low number, like, they hadn't reached it yet, but it's like, when we get to a billion, we should probably have different rules.
00:28:48 ◼ ► We're going to sail way past a billion and never have a second thought about this decision, Phil.
00:28:55 ◼ ► So Apple's response, we'll put – there's a bunch of different, like, Verge links and whatnot.
00:29:00 ◼ ► But Apple's response, Apple's senior director of corporate communications, Olivia Dalton, sent a statement to The Verge that reads, we strongly disagree with the decision.
00:29:14 ◼ ► Then additionally, I think it was the day after this broke, Apple did officially update its app review guidelines from the email that they sent to developers.
00:29:25 ◼ ► The app review guidelines have been updated for compliance with the United States court decision regarding buttons, external links, and other calls to action in apps.
00:29:31 ◼ ► These changes affect apps distributed on the United States storefront of the App Store.
00:29:47 ◼ ► Although the update was, like, in typical fashion, it was kind of like a text diff where it's like, section 3.1.2a no longer says x, y, and z.
00:29:58 ◼ ► It was like a sentence description of, like, each section and what they, it used to say, you know, we no longer require this.
00:30:06 ◼ ► You can't, like, it was, and people are trying to, like, parse it by looking at the original text and looking at this and then doing a text diff.
00:30:11 ◼ ► And there was lots of questions going on, as we'll see in a second, about, okay, but, like, what are the rules now?
00:30:24 ◼ ► Ryan writes, at least how this is written right now, it seems like there's no mandate to link out.
00:30:31 ◼ ► In other words, a Stripe Apple Pay button can be directly in the app, or the entire paywall could be a web view with a button right there in it.
00:30:41 ◼ ► Gruber wrote in his post, this does not mean apps can now use alternative payment processing in-app.
00:30:46 ◼ ► It doesn't even mean apps are no longer required to offer Apple's IAP in-app for purchases and subscriptions.
00:30:52 ◼ ► All it means is that apps in the U.S. for now, but Apple really ought to make this worldwide, but I suspect Tim Cook wants to fight this on appeal in federal court, which he does,
00:31:00 ◼ ► are free to inform users about offers available on the web and to link to those offers on the web.
00:31:09 ◼ ► And I think that, I think Gruber is right about this as far as I can tell, but honestly, with app review, who even knows what, who even knows, again, what app review will actually do.
00:31:17 ◼ ► But the thing is, like, that's what people, even if you have to link out, the prohibitions that were the most egregious were you couldn't even tell people anything about pricing.
00:31:26 ◼ ► Like, you couldn't say, hey, you know, here's an app purchase, which Apple makes us put in, but you can get it for 15 to 30% less if you click this link.
00:31:51 ◼ ► It would be better if, like, Ryan Jones suggested, you could just do it inside the app with the web view or whatever, because then people wouldn't even know.
00:31:58 ◼ ► I mean, this, the reality is, like, this whole thing about, like, the rule, I mean, this is one area that I agree with Apple, I think.
00:32:06 ◼ ► The idea of drawing the distinction of, like, well, you can't have payments in your app, but if you link out to the web browser and do it there, that's so different.
00:32:19 ◼ ► You can make a, you know, a one-click link now, you know, with, now that you don't have one unsigned link that can't include, like, any tokens or anything.
00:32:40 ◼ ► It could even have a one-click payment option like Apple Pay or ShopPay or Stripe's link thing.
00:32:48 ◼ ► You can have a one-click payment there, and then it can redirect you back to URL that launches you back into the app.
00:32:58 ◼ ► You just have, like, a couple of weird screen animations between each direction to get there.
00:33:07 ◼ ► But, like, there is no difference business-wise between this being in the app and having the app kick you over to the browser and kick you back into the app.
00:33:17 ◼ ► Especially if you're allowed to use WebViews in the app because then you literally won't leave the app.
00:33:25 ◼ ► Like, I think what this – what we've been arguing all this time is really that apps should be able to use their own payments if they want to.
00:33:37 ◼ ► I think that is a distraction and not a meaningful distinction to the actual use of these apps in practice.
00:33:46 ◼ ► And I think we will very much see a lot of these, like, again, like, you know, simple one-click things.
00:34:01 ◼ ► But the more common case will be you'll be kicked over to a page that has ShopPay or StripeLink or something where, like, you already probably have that logged in.
00:34:15 ◼ ► But, like, I think what we're going to see here is if – again, if this sticks, which that's a huge if.
00:34:33 ◼ ► That's when we always see the worst behavior and typically mediocre products from Apple.
00:34:47 ◼ ► But when they give themselves an advantage, like, you know, some form of technical or policy lock-in, we see them getting complacent.
00:34:56 ◼ ► And we see them releasing mediocre things or, you know, letting things linger forever, kind of unaddressed or, you know, non-competitive options.
00:35:05 ◼ ► Apple being complacent in areas that they don't have to fairly compete in results in crap products and crap experiences.
00:35:12 ◼ ► Right now, Apple Pay, in my opinion, is not the best way to pay for something on the web.
00:35:21 ◼ ► I think it's way better than Apple Pay because, in my experience, it is way faster and more reliable.
00:35:29 ◼ ► How many times have you tried to use Apple Pay and it's like, you have to update your billing address for some reason, even though you've put it in 10,000 times.
00:35:45 ◼ ► So, like, Apple will actually be forced to compete in areas that, like, maybe they were class-leading at one time, but they have no longer, they no longer are class-leading.
00:35:57 ◼ ► And they've been able to be complacent because they had technical or policy lock-in that allowed them to be complacent.
00:36:22 ◼ ► So, I think one of the many ways that it will actually be better for Apple if they lose some of this control by force,
00:36:31 ◼ ► I think one of the ways this will be better is it will drive them to improve their products to become more competitive.
00:36:42 ◼ ► So, I think overall, I mean, I've been saying for a long time, I'm glad that our friends and other podcasts,
00:37:01 ◼ ► But it's very encouraging now to see that many other people on many other podcasts and publications
00:37:13 ◼ ► Because time after time, we keep seeing Tim Cook making decisions that really seem to be about short-term profit
00:37:25 ◼ ► And I think the long-term strategy is when Apple makes better solutions and better products,
00:37:32 ◼ ► they make more money from their products because more people buy them because they're more competitive and they're better.
00:37:38 ◼ ► So, I think it is the best long-term strategy not for Apple to create more areas in which it can be complacent and get mediocre,
00:37:53 ◼ ► So, I actually think this will be good for Apple to have this control forcibly taken away from them.
00:38:19 ◼ ► we'll return Fortnite to the App Store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic.
00:38:37 ◼ ► If Apple does this thing that we want them to do, then we will deign to bring Fortnite.
00:38:59 ◼ ► Again, what I was just saying, they should care because having Fortnite on the iPhone increases the value of people having iPhones.
00:39:09 ◼ ► Like, it could come out as a net win from them because now suddenly you have an iOS with Fortnite back in it.
00:39:21 ◼ ► I guarantee you no, because he has shown time and time again he sees zero value in a software ecosystem for his devices.
00:39:41 ◼ ► Like, they really do not respect third-party developers developing stuff for their platforms.
00:39:58 ◼ ► But you look at what your top execs have literally said and have shown up in court and stated themselves or have now shown up in discovery and documentation.
00:40:20 ◼ ► They see no value for our apps to exist on their platform except what they can extract directly from fees, which is honestly scarily incompetent for the leaders of computing platforms.
00:40:36 ◼ ► I feel like what you're trying to say is they don't see as much value as developers do or as most outside observers do, which I totally agree with.
00:40:44 ◼ ► No, their argument is literally that developers have, like, a free ride if we're not paying them.
00:40:52 ◼ ► What they're saying is that we would benefit from the services they're provided without paying what they feel like is an adequate amount of money to pay for those services.
00:41:03 ◼ ► I mean, to be clear, I disagree with their position entirely, but I think you're making it a little bit more extreme than it is.
00:41:09 ◼ ► Honestly, you are making it what you hope it is, but what they actually say is very different.
00:41:15 ◼ ► You haven't brought me the receipts, as the kids say, to show me the statement that is that extreme.
00:41:47 ◼ ► And if this area goes all the way to the top, then they need new leadership at the top.
00:41:50 ◼ ► That's actually an idea I have for a future potential member special, but I might bring it into the main show.
00:41:57 ◼ ► He has said that, oh, or yes, he did say publicly, oh, I am going to, or we, Epic, is going to bring Fortnite back by way of the Swedish Epic Games Apple App Store account.
00:42:15 ◼ ► So Tim wrote, we have conversed with Apple on the topic and we will use our Epic Games Sweden account to submit Fortnite to the U.S. App Store.
00:42:22 ◼ ► We created this account last year to launch the Epic Games Store in Fortnite in the European Union, and Apple required an EU domiciled account.
00:42:30 ◼ ► So since that's sitting there and that hasn't been banned from the App Store, like the American one was, apparently that's their backdoor.
00:42:48 ◼ ► This, now he goes from being Trumpish to being more lawyerish because he says, we have conversed with Apple on this topic, which could be a true statement.
00:43:00 ◼ ► But those two things do not combine to equal, therefore, Fortnite will appear on the App Store because those are, yeah, that's, we'll see what happens here.
00:43:19 ◼ ► It's clear Apple has already decided that they have weighed benefits of having Fortnite on our platform and the detriment of Epic being annoying.
00:43:35 ◼ ► So trying to move quickly here, there's a litany of people that have come out of the woodwork and said, ooh, ooh, there's a business opportunity here, which there is.
00:43:42 ◼ ► So very quickly, Epic Games has decided they're going to set up web shops for iOS developers.
00:43:47 ◼ ► Reading from Mac Rumors, Epic Games today announced plans, this is on the first, for Epic Games Store web shops, a feature that will allow developers to launch digital storefronts that are hosted by the Epic Games Store.
00:43:59 ◼ ► The Epic Games Store will charge developers a 0% fee for the first $1 million in revenue they collect per app per year.
00:44:13 ◼ ► Epic Games also says that players that spend in Epic web shops will be able to accrue 5% Epic rewards on all purchases.
00:44:22 ◼ ► Stripe, as was foretold, I'm pretty sure I brought this up last week, Stripe has said, well, let me just read from The Verge.
00:44:28 ◼ ► Payment processing platform Stripe just added a way for iOS developers to accept payments by linking outside their apps, dodging Apple's commission fees.
00:44:35 ◼ ► Stripe has published a guide that shows developers how to accept transitions outside an app using Stripe checkout.
00:44:40 ◼ ► In the sample video, you can see someone preparing to buy digital fruit with in-app currency, but instead of showing a transaction page inside the app,
00:44:53 ◼ ► This is functionality Stripe already had, but they quickly put together a little guide and says, look, we already, this is the thing we already do.
00:45:02 ◼ ► With sample code, their doc, I mean, I'd skimmed their doc super fast, but it looked good.
00:45:09 ◼ ► So page reading from The Verge, Patreon is planning to submit an update to its iOS app that will let creators accept payments outside of Apple's payment system.
00:45:21 ◼ ► Last year, Patreon said it was forced to switch to Apple's in-app purchase system, which applied a 30% fee to all new memberships purchased in the app or else risk, quote, being removed from the app store, quote.
00:45:31 ◼ ► I will say, though, you know, on, you know, everyone is rushing to, you know, take advantage of this.
00:45:36 ◼ ► And if you already have a business that can do this, that can take advantage of this quickly, great.
00:45:50 ◼ ► But if Apple wins any kind of appeal or some other injunction, I don't know how these things work in that kind of detail.
00:45:56 ◼ ► But the second Apple doesn't have to do this anymore, they will close that door shut and cut everybody off if that happens.
00:46:07 ◼ ► Like, if I was, like, you know, an investor, I wouldn't invest in a company that relies on this.
00:46:37 ◼ ► So just keep those conditionals there, because you might need to, you know, turn off one of those feature flags if this thing goes the other way.
00:46:45 ◼ ► Then friend of the show, Riley Tested, writes, I just submitted a new Delta update without all the external payment restrictions.
00:46:52 ◼ ► And then on The Verge, you can see some of the details of the scare screen, which we've talked about in the past.
00:46:59 ◼ ► I mean, we can go into this more, John, if you want, but I feel like we've covered this before.
00:47:20 ◼ ► I just put this here instead of earlier, because Riley specifically mentioned the scare screen, and we've talked about it before.
00:47:25 ◼ ► But we learned more about the origins of the scare screens from, I think this is from like the discovery process or something during the case.
00:47:33 ◼ ► Apple chose to iterate on the scare screen with the goal of dissuading users from continuing on the web.
00:47:37 ◼ ► The pop-up included a paragraph of text and employees discussed using scary language to warn people off.
00:47:42 ◼ ► Raphael Onak, a user experience writing manager at Apple, instructed an employee to add the phrase external website to the screen because it sounds scary, so execs will love it.
00:47:54 ◼ ► Another employee gave a suggestion on how to make the screen even worse by using the developer's name rather than the app name.
00:48:07 ◼ ► When he finally saw the screen for approval, he asked that another warning be added to state that Apple's privacy and security promises would no longer apply out on the web.
00:48:22 ◼ ► If your job in the company is to make this screen and your bosses have told you we want to discourage people from going outside of the app to make payments, how scary can you make this scare screen?
00:48:37 ◼ ► So there they are, being dutiful employees, saying, well, we need to, we want it to be truthful, but we also want to phrase it in a way that is as scary as possible.
00:48:46 ◼ ► So we're not going to lie or make up stuff or whatever, but saying external website instead of just website, ooh, it's scary.
00:48:56 ◼ ► And then this one I thought was great because it's like using the developer's name rather than the app name.
00:49:03 ◼ ► Like the app store, if you go to the app store, you see any app that's available, you can see what the app is called, but you can also see the name of the developer.
00:49:09 ◼ ► But not using the app name in the message is scarier because people don't know the name of the company that makes their app.
00:49:15 ◼ ► Like even now, whenever it's like, my wife is always saying, what is this charge from, you know, Boingo Co?
00:49:21 ◼ ► And I'm like, I don't know, probably software because like I bought, you know, app XYZ.
00:49:27 ◼ ► I might not even know what the name of the company is, but it shows up as a charge from the company.
00:49:31 ◼ ► So, I mean, just off the top of the head of the people who are listening, do you know the names of all our companies?
00:49:42 ◼ ► So, put the company name in the message because if someone sees a message that says, you know, as the message says, we have a screenshot here.
00:49:49 ◼ ► Any accounts or purchases made outside of this app will be managed by the developer and then in quotes, call them scare quotes if you want, test it tech.
00:50:05 ◼ ► That is clearly a documented, conscious decision by Apple employees to make the message scarier while obscuring it.
00:50:13 ◼ ► It annoys me in various instances of in-app purchase where you don't have enough characters to say something sensible.
00:50:21 ◼ ► But this entirely reveals that like, you know, Apple could say, we're not trying to scare people away.
00:50:47 ◼ ► Like, how much effort has been spent making their products more competitive in these areas compared to how much effort they spent on this intentionally degrading it so that it would be as uncompetitive as possible of an alternative?
00:51:01 ◼ ► This is what these people, this is what was encouraged by their higher-ups and by the company culture.
00:51:09 ◼ ► I hate to tell you, like, they are telling you right here, this is what they think of you.
00:51:40 ◼ ► And, like, speaking of effort, they put in so much effort in DMA compliance to essentially make it as difficult and unappealing as possible.
00:51:49 ◼ ► But this part of the company that is responsible for complying with these judgments that they don't want to do in the first place is absolutely doing everything it can, doing a tremendous amount of additional work.
00:52:00 ◼ ► To make it so that all the alternatives that they're being mandated to do are as unattractive as possible.
00:52:08 ◼ ► But here is documented evidence from inside the company that it's not – that's just not just a side effect of, you know, what happened.
00:52:16 ◼ ► This is all part of why I say it's better for Apple if they get cut off from this drug they're addicted to.
00:52:24 ◼ ► Look at how much this has corroded and destroyed their priorities of things like user experience.
00:52:59 ◼ ► Unfortunately, they're not true to the spirit of the company, which is we're supposed to make products that people love.
00:53:07 ◼ ► And the whole time, he has been – I don't know if it legally qualifies as misleading the shareholders.
00:53:14 ◼ ► But I would certainly say BSing the shareholders in terms of the whole services category.
00:53:30 ◼ ► And so they've been kind of BSing the whole industry and the whole – the shareholders and being like, oh, they're making all their money from services.
00:53:36 ◼ ► But it really comes down to these two large chunks of fees that are possibly in a precarious spot right now.
00:54:00 ◼ ► Then you have this other area where they're really doing a lot of harm, all for short-term numbers.
00:54:06 ◼ ► It's short-term, quick-hit numbers that I think are worse for the products and the company long-term overall.
00:54:14 ◼ ► So I hope we get leadership in there that cares a lot more about the products and the long-term strategy of the company because Tim Cook does not.
00:54:26 ◼ ► So reading from MacRumors, Spotify has updated its iPhone app in the U.S. with out-of-app pricing and subscription options for its premium plans.
00:54:33 ◼ ► Spotify users in the U.S. can now view pricing information for its individual duo, family, and student plans directly in the iPhone app.
00:54:39 ◼ ► And there are buttons that lead to Spotify's website where users can complete the payment process.
00:54:43 ◼ ► Spotify shared the following statement, quote, in a victory for consumers, artists, creators, and authors.
00:54:50 ◼ ► After nearly a decade, this will finally allow us to freely show clear pricing information and links to purchase, fostering transparency and choice for U.S. consumers.
00:54:58 ◼ ► We can now give consumers lower prices, more control, and easier access to the Spotify experience.
00:55:03 ◼ ► There's more work to do, but today represents a significant milestone for developers and entrepreneurs everywhere who want to build and compete on a more level playing field.
00:55:13 ◼ ► The reaction to this from developers and users alike is essentially celebration because users want to pay less money, right?
00:55:24 ◼ ► And I put screenshots in here of what it looks like on Spotify, because I think it's an interesting thing that may become standard if this turns out the way it is.
00:55:31 ◼ ► It's a button in the app, but it's got the little box with an arrow pointing out of it.
00:55:34 ◼ ► Not the not the not the shadow pointing out, but like an arrow pointing up into the right to essentially say by clicking this, you know, it's the open and new window glyph, essentially the open and new window icon, but on a button to let you know, oh, you're going to be sent to a web page where you'll do some payments and we'll check you back here.
00:55:51 ◼ ► And I wonder if that if that will become standardized across all these apps that the people will come young people, maybe if this becomes standardized and sticks, they'll become they'll start associating that icon, not with open and new window, but instead with pay.
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00:56:35 ◼ ► And they bundle it and they buy it and they sell it and they make it easy for anybody to go and find.
00:56:39 ◼ ► This can be things like your home address, your phone number, your family members names, like really creepy stuff that you don't want to be that easy to find in two seconds on the Internet.
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00:57:58 ◼ ► The original person who had asked about it was Ryan Budish, who writes, I get what Marco was saying.
00:58:03 ◼ ► Cloud gateways are the routers and you need switches, access points, and some kind of POE or power over Ethernet, which may or may not be built into the switches.
00:58:09 ◼ ► But I think Marco was someone who has a hobby of putting networking equipment into homes and restaurants, was perhaps slightly underestimating the complexity of the Ubiquity offerings for someone with less experience.
00:58:19 ◼ ► For example, they offer seven, excluding the rack-mounted enterprise and large scale, cloud gateways, 15 access points, not including the enterprise outdoor mega capacity or bridging offerings, and 14 or more switches, not counting any of the rack-mounted switches like the one that Marco was telling Casey to get.
00:58:35 ◼ ► For a technically-minded homeowner who probably has more than the average amount of Internet-connected devices but is running neither a restaurant nor an enterprise from their home, how should they evaluate the 1,470-plus different combinations of routers, switches, and access points?
00:59:06 ◼ ► And I think the products – I think you can actually look at them and, for the most part, be pretty sure whether something is for you or not.
00:59:34 ◼ ► Most of their offerings, you can pick the lowest one that fits your, like, physical needs.
00:59:45 ◼ ► Because for the most part, like, the higher-end stuff, these things scale from Casey's house to sports stadiums.
00:59:58 ◼ ► The existence of the higher-end and more specialized products doesn't necessarily make it harder to know what you can get.
01:00:04 ◼ ► I would suggest the only area that I think it really – where you really don't know is when you look at the APs, the wireless APs.
01:00:36 ◼ ► So it depends on, you know, your price sensitivity and how many you're going to be buying.
01:00:45 ◼ ► I've used a mix of lights and long-ranges and pros in my various installations over time, and they've all been fine enough for my needs.
01:00:54 ◼ ► The options that seem to change the most often are the cloud gateways, a.k.a. the routers.
01:01:01 ◼ ► And, again, it mostly comes down to, like, how much processing grunt do you want and what form factor do you want it in?
01:01:13 ◼ ► So, you know, if you need built-in hard drives to serve as a video camera recorder, you probably know that, too.
01:01:20 ◼ ► So most of it comes down to, like, how big do you want the internal storage, if any, and how much processing power do you want?
01:01:41 ◼ ► So there's a lot of different options, but that's because they serve a lot of different markets.
01:01:50 ◼ ► But, you know, hey, if you want more help, we're happy to keep getting this question every, like, you know, year or two of, like, what Ubiquiti stuff should I buy?
01:02:02 ◼ ► John hit the nail on the head with the main shortcoming of Ubiquiti in the home networking market.
01:02:10 ◼ ► I hope you do spend some time discussing this because Marco's short answer in episode 636 was insufficient.
01:02:14 ◼ ► Just buy a, quote, cloud gateway, a.k.a. router, and one or more access points that may also be routers.
01:02:19 ◼ ► I recently bought five of the Unify Express cloud gateways thinking I could just one-to-one swap my Google Wi-Fi 2017 mesh devices.
01:02:34 ◼ ► The setup experience was worse because it might see the new devices as I plug them in, but then it would just sit forever on configuring.
01:02:40 ◼ ► I ended up having to reconfigure the network from scratch multiple times, but the performance issues never went away.
01:02:50 ◼ ► I hope you cover this topic again and that Marco tries a little harder to get into the beginner's mindset to the extent possible.
01:02:57 ◼ ► I do need to replace my nearly decade-old Wi-Fi equipment eventually, and Ubiquiti is still in the running.
01:03:04 ◼ ► I'm going to give a brief, very fast, hopefully not too inaccurate overview that people will yell at me about it no more.
01:03:10 ◼ ► But this gets to one of the things, like I think maybe where this person went wrong is they have a Google Wi-Fi network, which I assume is a mesh network, and they were just trying to replace it with a Ubiquiti one, like one for one, as they said, which I'm not sure whether it will work or not.
01:03:29 ◼ ► We talk about mesh networks and Wi-Fi all the time, and I'm not sure people, I mean, I don't know, maybe everyone listening to this podcast knows the difference.
01:03:40 ◼ ► Back in the old days, you'd have a Wi-Fi access point in your house, and if your house was really big and the Wi-Fi access point wasn't centrally located, there were rooms in your house that got bad signal.
01:03:50 ◼ ► Mesh networking was an attempt to help with that, and that would let you have a place in your house where you have Wi-Fi, and if you had bad signal that was far away from the place in your house where the Wi-Fi thing was, you could put another Wi-Fi thing.
01:04:04 ◼ ► And the reason that would help is because you, your device, your phone, your laptop, or whatever, would talk to the Wi-Fi thing that you are close to.
01:04:11 ◼ ► And like a relay race, that thing would say, oh, I just, I got someone over here talking to me, and it would send its signal to the next thing that's closest to it, and so on and so forth, until it eventually gets back down to the one router that's connected to your internet.
01:04:26 ◼ ► You talk to this point, this thing talks to that point, that thing talks to that point.
01:04:31 ◼ ► It's a series of devices that all see each other, configure each other, and then you just wander around the house, and the Wi-Fi access points tell your device, oh, it looks like you're going into that room over there.
01:04:39 ◼ ► You should probably talk to this access point because it's closer to you, and then your phone would say, okay, and it would talk to that access point.
01:04:44 ◼ ► And whatever access point you're pointing, you're talking to, you talk to it, and it passes on to the next one, the next one, hop, hop, hop, until it gets to where it's going.
01:04:56 ◼ ► It actually extends your signal better than like repeaters and other stuff like that because if you need to reach some other point, you just buy another one of these things, and you plug it in somewhere, and then it sort of self-configures.
01:05:07 ◼ ► My question for both of you, which I don't actually have the answer to because I'm not researching Ubiquiti like you two are, is does Ubiquiti have mesh networking nodes?
01:05:16 ◼ ► And most of the access points can also support like a mesh uplink, which is basically you give them PoE, but they don't have to be connected to the network.
01:05:26 ◼ ► However, this is where I will say if you need wireless meshing, like if you cannot run network cables to each AP from the central source, don't bother with Ubiquiti.
01:05:47 ◼ ► If you're going to be doing that kind of meshing where like, you know, you have basically repeaters, and I know the mesh people get really sensitive when you say repeaters because that's something else sort of technically maybe, but like.
01:06:13 ◼ ► When I see you guys talking about Ubiquiti stuff, I definitely see that Ubiquiti is, I didn't know if it was just not possible or they were just leaning heavily into it.
01:06:21 ◼ ► But like to clarify, when Ubiquiti, if you buy like wireless access points, say you bought one of them, like either your router has a wireless access point in it, some Ubiquiti things do, or you buy a wireless router and another access point.
01:06:34 ◼ ► What Ubiquiti expects sort of like the default of Ubiquiti thing is, oh, well, of course, that other part of your house slash office slash stadium.
01:06:45 ◼ ► Just take the Ethernet drop that's in that room and plug in another Wi-Fi access point.
01:06:49 ◼ ► And what that means is like that Wi-Fi access point would be in the far part of your house where you get bad signal and your device would talk to that.
01:06:57 ◼ ► It would send your signal along the Ethernet wire that's attached to it and is probably powering it back to the router.
01:07:03 ◼ ► It wouldn't say, oh, I got to find some other access point and wirelessly talk to it and they can talk to the next one and hop, hop, hop.
01:07:15 ◼ ► You run Ethernet to all over the place, every place you need an access point, like in hotels, in stadiums, in offices.
01:07:26 ◼ ► So whatever access point you're near, you go wirelessly to the access point and then you're all wired back.
01:07:31 ◼ ► The reason people love mesh networks for home is people don't have Ethernet in every room in their house most of the time.
01:07:40 ◼ ► And all you want to do is plug something into power in the wall and you'd be like done and done.
01:07:46 ◼ ► And Ubiquiti's products are often so far from that that you can't even plug them into a wall unless you get a power over Ethernet adapter because they take all their power from the Ethernet cable that they expect you to be plugged into.
01:08:03 ◼ ► But the home-focused products like Eero and apparently Google Wi-Fi and Orbi and all those other ones are so focused on the home case, they're like, nobody has Ethernet all over their house.
01:08:17 ◼ ► And they also include dedicated radios just for doing the, I think they call it the backhaul or whatever, just for doing the between node communication.
01:08:28 ◼ ► And then when your signal hits an access point, it's got another radio whose sole purpose is to talk to whatever is the nearest mesh node to send your signal hop, hop, hop on its way back to the one router that's actually plugged into Ethernet.
01:08:40 ◼ ► And that is like, I actually don't know if Ubiquiti's routers have like separate, I mean, they all have, or if they're APs rather have separate radios for that wireless backhaul.
01:08:54 ◼ ► So they, they might be able to just like, you know, use one for that, but this, that is not a market that Ubiquiti focuses very much on.
01:09:01 ◼ ► I think that was one of the upgrades in Eero was like, they used to have multiple radios for like 2.4 and 5 or whatever, but then they did an upgrade a couple of years back.
01:09:08 ◼ ► It's like, actually, we're going to add a whole other radio just for the backhaul instead of reusing any of the other radios and that helped the performance.
01:09:15 ◼ ► Yeah. So I would say like, if, if you are having wireless linking between APs, if you cannot wire them all back to the home switch, just stick with the consumer stuff, stick with Google and Eero.
01:09:33 ◼ ► Like it's like they have all the technology and it seems like it should be possible than the rest.
01:09:37 ◼ ► Just like the reason I want to ask about this is because I think a lot of our listeners are just like, oh, I just have a home setup and they might already have one of these mesh ones.
01:09:54 ◼ ► Like I just saw recently a video showing the, the dream machine, a little R2D2 trash can thing.
01:10:06 ◼ ► Right. It's got, it's got a wifi in it and it's a router and it has a tiny bit of storage with an SD card slot, but it's not, it's not a,
01:10:19 ◼ ► Anyway, that's, I think this is an important clarifying point for people who are dying to get a ubiquity stuff because it seems like they haven't quite reached that far down to the consumer realm for people who absolutely need mesh networking.
01:10:31 ◼ ► Yeah. And to be clear, they do offer that, but it's not very good and it's not, it's not going to be meaningfully better than what Google and Eero are doing for that.
01:10:44 ◼ ► And, and certainly it's not, you know, it's not going to magically be better than Google and Eero, you know, substantially in those areas.
01:10:53 ◼ ► It's designed, it's designed for people who are going to be wiring every AP back somehow to the home switch.
01:11:00 ◼ ► And that, so what I would get to answer the question out of today's lineup, what I would suggest for a typical home full of a nerd, you know, but other people who tolerate the nerd.
01:11:08 ◼ ► I would say your router choice right now is the Cloud Gateway Max or the Cloud Gateway Fiber.
01:11:17 ◼ ► That's another thing to know about Ubiquity is that it turns out we are not the only people who like them.
01:11:31 ◼ ► What you need to know about Ubiquity also is that if you go on Amazon to buy their products, they are usually sold for above retail price on Amazon by third parties.
01:11:42 ◼ ► You can also get them from other retailers, like B&H Photo is a Ubiquity retailer, and so sometimes I'm able to get stuff from there if Ubiquity doesn't have it or if it's, you know, it might be faster from B&H for me because I'm in New York and they're in New York.
01:11:55 ◼ ► But for the most part, they don't have that many other first-party retailers that sell things at MSRP.
01:12:16 ◼ ► So anyway, so going back to the question, what I would suggest, Cloud Gateway Max or Cloud Gateway Fiber for the router right now of the current lineup.
01:12:24 ◼ ► If you want an inexpensive PoE switch, the Ultra switch, like just one word, Ultra, it's an eight-port switch that has two different options for AC adapters, 60-watt and 210-watt.
01:12:44 ◼ ► And then for the APs, you can use the U7 Lite and get, you know, two or three of those for a typical American house.
01:13:32 ◼ ► And in general, the U7 line of wireless access points is not nearly as, not physically sturdy, but like computationally sturdy, for lack of a better way to describe it, as the U6 line.
01:13:47 ◼ ► Yeah, I know our friend Stephen Hackett had that problem with the U7s when he put them in his house.
01:13:51 ◼ ► For that reason, I bought all U6s for the restaurant, even though I have U7s here in the house I'm sitting in talking to you through right now.
01:13:57 ◼ ► But I figured, like, you know, just in case, let me stick with the U6s because, you know, I don't need all of the fancy, like, Wi-Fi 6, 6 gigahertz radios that the U7 added.
01:14:13 ◼ ► And that is, you know, sometimes Ubiquiti will have, like, one product that has, like, a little bit flaky software.
01:14:30 ◼ ► I don't know how many of those issues remain because, again, I'm only using it in one place.
01:14:42 ◼ ► Do you happen to know, just off the top of your head, what the major noteworthy differences are between the light and regular and pro editions of the Access Point?
01:15:06 ◼ ► You know, you put a bunch of pros because that's, like, when you're going to have a lot of clients on, like, you know, talking to an AP, you need to, like, you know, share a bunch of bandwidth and do a lot.
01:15:23 ◼ ► Now, if you care a lot about your Wi-Fi transfer speeds, if you want to, like, run a speed test from your brand new, you know, iPhone that has Wi-Fi 7 or whatever, you want to run that speed test and you want to get, like, you want to max out what you can get.
01:15:40 ◼ ► If you want to do that, yeah, you're going to want the pro probably because that's going to have, like, the most radios.
01:15:58 ◼ ► I've been, you know, talking with Stephen about doing this in fits and spurts in the house and properly wiring the house for Ethernet.
01:16:07 ◼ ► The way it exists today or existed last week, spoiler alert, is that I had an Eero Pro 6, I believe, in the office running as a main router.
01:16:16 ◼ ► Then, by way of a Mocha bridge that converts from Ethernet to coax and then another one on the other end, I had an Eero Pro 6 in the primary bedroom working as a wireless access point.
01:16:39 ◼ ► And Stephen had said to me, you know, I really recommend the Cloud Gateway Fiber in Stephen's experience.
01:16:46 ◼ ► He had originally bought the Cloud Gateway Max that you had recommended and he found that he was having trouble saturating.
01:16:53 ◼ ► One direction of his connection to the internet, he found the throughput was not as good on the Cloud Gateway Max.
01:17:07 ◼ ► And so one of the benefits of having my apparatus, which this is a term I stole from Merlin, is that one of my 350 Docker containers is a thing called changedetection.io.
01:17:21 ◼ ► And what you can do is you can self-host a thing that will basically just ping away at other websites and tell you when they change.
01:17:26 ◼ ► And over the last several releases, it's also gotten a feature where it sees that, oh, you're looking at a product page for something.
01:17:34 ◼ ► And it will parse out, you know, without you having to provide regex or anything like that, it'll parse out what the product is, how much it costs, and whether or not it's in stock.
01:17:47 ◼ ► Like, I run this myself because it's not very computationally intensive, and I have Docker set up and squared away, so it's no big deal, right?
01:17:54 ◼ ► But you could, and I genuinely don't know how much it costs, but you can get a hosted version of this where you have them host all of this for you.
01:18:02 ◼ ► But I have something like 20 or 30 different web pages that I monitor on this, none of which are really critical in the grand scheme of things, but it is nice if you have a place where it will tell you when something changes.
01:18:12 ◼ ► And so I put the Cloud Gateway Fiber on there, and I tweaked it so that it'll check every, like, 10 minutes or something like that instead of the, like, once or twice a day that I would for most things.
01:18:22 ◼ ► And sure enough, in combination with Pushover, which I've talked about many times in the past, which is a mechanism by which you can send yourself text messages, excuse me, push notifications, and it has an API that a lot of different open source projects, you know, integrate with.
01:19:03 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm telling you, change detection.io, for something like the Switch 2, it's not enough because that's just, like, bananas demand.
01:19:38 ◼ ► Yeah, like, I didn't care that much to get it on launch day, but, like, I'll try to get one when it comes out.
01:19:52 ◼ ► So, anyway, so I got the Cloud Gateway Fiber, and let me just jump straight to the end.
01:19:59 ◼ ► The worst part about the Cloud Gateway Fiber, which you warned me about, which Marco warned me about, which Stephen warned me about, is now I need all of my networking equipment to be ubiquity.
01:20:08 ◼ ► I need all of it to be ubiquity, and I don't want to spend that kind of money all in one shot, because I like being married.
01:20:14 ◼ ► So, I don't know what the future holds for me, but I'm, like, itching, because I need switches and wireless access points.
01:20:34 ◼ ► So, anyways, so I go to install it, and what I did, which I don't think was the right choice in retrospect, what I did was I just pulled the Ethernet cord that goes into the Eero that comes out of the ONT, the fiber optic, you know, ONT.
01:20:47 ◼ ► I pulled that out of the Eero, and I plugged it into the 10 gigabit port on the Cloud Gateway fiber, and basically told it, go.
01:21:05 ◼ ► And let me tell you, there's a lot of switches to fiddle with, and it is reasonably user-friendly.
01:21:09 ◼ ► I am not a networking guru by any means, but it was reasonably straightforward to figure out.
01:21:15 ◼ ► But then once I got it squared away, and, you know, it was talking to the Internet, which was also a nice surprise, because my recollection of doing this with Fios in years past was that you had to, like, go on Verizon's website and tell them to, like, basically kick the ONT to allow a different MAC address to connect to it.
01:21:41 ◼ ► But anyways, but I did notice, after connecting my laptop physically to the router or to the Cloud Gateway fiber, first of all, depending on what I was doing, my laptop was getting 100 megabits per second.
01:21:54 ◼ ► And I've narrowed that down to, I believe that was a bad old Ethernet cable, so that was my own fault.
01:22:04 ◼ ► Now, I have a symmetric gigabit connection, and consistently, I was tapping out at 250 megabits, as though I was being speed-limited somewhere.
01:22:15 ◼ ► And eventually, I did enough tagging and Googling and duck-duck-going and whatnot that somebody had said, change the WAN connection from the 10 gigabit Ethernet jacks, receptacle, whatever you want to call it, a port.
01:22:37 ◼ ► First of all, how freaking cool is it that you can tell the Ubiquity, I would like the internet to come in over there, please, rather than on this port.
01:22:47 ◼ ► So, before I actually committed to moving the port, because the management is mostly via the web, and it appears to me to be via Ubiquity's website, it, I guess, proxies or what have you, or establishes some connection between your local device.
01:23:07 ◼ ► Which is mostly nice, but a little unnerving in a case like this, where, you know, what if I lose the connection to the internet?
01:23:20 ◼ ► And, by the way, another thing you could try that you probably didn't immediately assume would be very good, the iOS app.
01:23:28 ◼ ► And it can also, the iOS app can connect directly via Bluetooth to most of the new routers.
01:23:47 ◼ ► I tell the, you know, the management interface, I would like the WAN to come in on port one, reconnect it, and everything's right as rain.
01:23:57 ◼ ► The place where I think I screwed up is I did not tell the Eero to go into bridge mode before doing all this.
01:24:06 ◼ ► I think, in retrospect, what I should have done is before I pulled the internet connection away from the Eero, I should have said to the Eero, go into bridge mode.
01:24:14 ◼ ► And then, basically, immediately cut off the internet and throw it into the cloud gateway.
01:24:24 ◼ ► Because the only way you manage the Eero is through their iOS app, and it's a similar thing to what we were just describing, where you go to the iOS app.
01:24:44 ◼ ► Eventually, with enough patience, which is not something that comes naturally to me, it did seem to figure itself out, and everything was all well and good.
01:24:53 ◼ ► Now, again, some of that, I think, was my fault by perhaps choosing the wrong order of operations.
01:25:07 ◼ ► So it'll tell you not only what devices are using, what, you know, so much and so on bandwidth, but also what applications.
01:25:13 ◼ ► And I see that Netflix is like, and this is early on, you know, right within a couple hours of installing, Netflix is like the third most used application.
01:26:00 ◼ ► So the problem I have with this is that it has all sorts of incredibly cool, really snazzy like topology graphs.
01:26:24 ◼ ► So you can see the dots going from Verizon to the cloud gateway fiber and then flowing into my MacBook or whatever the case may be.
01:26:29 ◼ ► Do you feel like you're watching the actual audio move and audio hijack when you see them in the dots?
01:26:37 ◼ ► The problem, though, is that I have something like 55 devices connected to the cloud gateway fiber, and they're all flat because they're all either on a non-ubiquity switch or they're hanging off the Eros.
01:27:01 ◼ ► So if you're looking to get rid of somewhat modern Unify equipment on the cheap, let me know.
01:27:15 ◼ ► But if you, the listener, happen to be wanting to get rid of something, do let me know.
01:27:19 ◼ ► Marco, if you would like to send me something and pad it with ubiquity access points a la Kindles, do let me know.
01:27:26 ◼ ► I will say, too, like, you know, when you are looking at that kind of, you know, switches and stuff like you, I suggest getting one really good switch.
01:27:36 ◼ ► But then, like, your, like, leaf node switches, so to speak, like the ones that you put, like, with your TV and stuff, those can be the cheap, like, little flex switches that are just PoE powered and have, like, you know, maybe four or five ports on them and usually cost, like, 40 bucks.
01:27:49 ◼ ► Like, those can be really inexpensive switches because you would still get all of that management and introspection features, you know, of ubiquity.
01:27:59 ◼ ► You know, they don't have as much, like, throughput and they don't have as many features, but, like, all of the stuff that you're talking about, you just need it to be a ubiquity switch.
01:28:13 ◼ ► So, like, you don't need every switch in your network to be some, like, $300 powerhouse.
01:28:21 ◼ ► You can just have, like, one good one and, you know, kind of fueling them all, and that's kind of all you need.
01:28:28 ◼ ► Yeah, so I'll put in the Slack, and if I remember, I'll put in the show notes, but to be honest, I'll probably forget, and there's not much to look at.
01:28:33 ◼ ► But if you look at my topology, it's a frigging mess because it's just everything is microscopic because it's one, you know, exceedingly wide list of 50-some devices.
01:28:48 ◼ ► There's so many things to fiddle with, but I don't feel like I've had to fiddle with them for the most part outside of this WAN problem, which admittedly shouldn't be a thing.
01:28:57 ◼ ► Like, it should work just fine the way I initially started, but at least I had an easy solution, and I could take care of that on my own.
01:29:07 ◼ ► Not only just the internet traffic, but, like, there's all sorts of different graphs and things you can look at.
01:29:12 ◼ ► When you go to the devices, instead of, like, some very good-looking but kind of funny, like, line art that Eero uses, you get, like, full-color pictures that are, like, accurate to all of these random devices that I have in my house.
01:29:25 ◼ ► Like, they have the pictures of each individual synology and mostly auto-discovered the right one.
01:29:33 ◼ ► If you're the kind of person that wants to, like, tweak and fiddle with knobs and just play around, oh, it's so great.
01:29:47 ◼ ► Which, speaking of, I don't want to belabor the point, and I do think we need to move on, but one of the things that somebody, it might have been Steven, pointed out to me is there, if you go to design.ui.com, you have to upload something as a floor plan.
01:30:05 ◼ ► But you can draw out your floor plan, which I have done, and you can draw out, if you set a scale, so this wall is 20 feet or whatever the case may be,
01:30:14 ◼ ► You can draw out a floor plan of your house, and I found an app called, what is it called?
01:30:24 ◼ ► But if you want to do a single place, you know, like your house and nothing else, then it's free to do that.
01:30:33 ◼ ► But once you start adding more places, you have to pay for it, and it's pretty expensive because it's mostly a professional tool.
01:30:37 ◼ ► But I used that to LiDAR scan the house, and there were a couple of small problems with it, but for the most part, it was great.
01:30:43 ◼ ► And it took a lot less time than, you know, measuring everything and so on and so forth.
01:30:47 ◼ ► And it's probably not perfectly accurate, but for the purposes that I'm trying to accomplish, it's more than enough.
01:30:58 ◼ ► And I'd like to get another one done at some point, but I'm both too cheap and too lazy.
01:31:10 ◼ ► And I have—I, like, did web archives of the listing for the house when it was up for sale from 2008.
01:31:25 ◼ ► But the point is, you can drop access points, wireless access points, and if you tell this design tool what the material of your walls is, is it metal, is it wood, is it drywall, et cetera, it will make a colorful map of approximately what your Wi-Fi coverage will be based on where you're placing what items.
01:31:49 ◼ ► And in fact, neither of these links might—or pictures might go in the show notes because it's a little bit of—don't be creepy.
01:31:53 ◼ ► But imagine there's a floor plan of the house, and you're seeing, like, green and yellow and red and so on and so forth.
01:32:04 ◼ ► And so I don't have any cameras yet, but that's one of the things I do plan to do eventually.
01:32:14 ◼ ► Unless Ubiquiti wants to sponsor us, never, ever get their equipment because you'll send all of your money to Ubiquiti.
01:32:49 ◼ ► If you are a digital hoarder like me, you want to, you know, have as much free disk space as possible.
01:32:56 ◼ ► And there's tons of apps out there that will, like, find duplicate files and then tell you to pick which ones you want to delete.
01:33:06 ◼ ► So Hyperspace does that for you because it finds files that have the same contents and it makes them so they're sharing a single instance of those contents on disk instead of each having their own private copy.
01:33:18 ◼ ► Before I even had a name, I talked about it on the show that I'm thinking of making this app.
01:33:22 ◼ ► And the title of that episode was An Incredibly Dangerous App because it is, in the end, an app that modifies a bunch of people's files.
01:33:35 ◼ ► And here comes my app, this app that knows nothing about them, and says, yeah, I'm going to mess with those files.
01:33:45 ◼ ► I made it not do a lot, like a lot of the most difficult things that it could possibly do.
01:33:52 ◼ ► I knew there was a potential risk in terms of, like, people are going to get the app and be like, you know, all my files are in iCloud Drive.
01:34:03 ◼ ► But my plan was always launch with a safe feature set, get the thing out there to a bunch of users.
01:34:09 ◼ ► Because even though I had a really good, really big beta test with ATP members, in fact, as part of a membership promotion thing we were doing.
01:34:19 ◼ ► There is nothing like giving the app to regular customers who are not listening to a tech podcast.
01:34:24 ◼ ► You get so much better results and feedback and everything from that than you do with the beta test.
01:34:31 ◼ ► One of the best decisions I think I made for CallSheet, and I've said this before, but I want to say it again, was opening that up to the ATP members made CallSheet so much better.
01:34:41 ◼ ► And even though, you know, this was the perfect, like, I'll scratch your back, you'll scratch mine kind of situation.
01:34:54 ◼ ► And then the members got access to something that was kind of not illicit, but, like, cool and hidden and secret.
01:35:02 ◼ ► And I was not convinced I had made the right choice when I opened it up to ATP members.
01:35:06 ◼ ► And I am so very glad and so very thankful for anyone who spent time looking at it and issuing bug reports and so on.
01:35:12 ◼ ► So if there is another app, which is sitting here now, I have zero plans for anything else at the moment.
01:35:20 ◼ ► And I just want to thank the members that did participate one more time, because it was great.
01:35:26 ◼ ► But there is a difference between beta testers and regular users, especially for an app like mine, because an app like mine doesn't exist just on its own with its own data or with, like, in your case, with the movie database behind it or whatever.
01:35:42 ◼ ► And if you're a beta tester, you very quickly learn, well, I kind of have to either, like, have it configured not to really do it or I'll get rid of all my duplicates and I can't really be a good beta tester anymore.
01:35:53 ◼ ► So most beta testers, I imagine, are rerunning it in the mode where it doesn't really do the final step of the thing.
01:36:01 ◼ ► Like, the variable that I needed in the mix here was regular users using it on their real data for real.
01:36:09 ◼ ► And you just need real users to do that because you don't want testers to use it on their real data for real.
01:36:13 ◼ ► Because once they do, they're like, well, I can no longer test your app unless I, like, somehow manufacture data.
01:36:24 ◼ ► I need people to run it on their data to find out where all the problems are on their real data and their real experience at real customers' hands.
01:36:33 ◼ ► And I did a blog post about this because recently I rolled out a version 1.3 of Hyperspace.
01:36:40 ◼ ► And 1.3 marks the end of a journey that started with 1.0 at launch where I was slowly adding back all the features that I didn't launch with.
01:36:52 ◼ ► Like, when I was running it locally, I could just turn off all the restrictions and it could just have access to everything.
01:36:59 ◼ ► So the three big classes of things that I described in my blog post was, number one, packages, which is a thing that most people don't even know about.
01:37:23 ◼ ► It's a folder that looks like a file and inside that folder are a bunch of other files and certain packages have certain structure.
01:37:40 ◼ ► Your Apple Photos library, it's called, it's like a .photos library file name extension.
01:38:27 ◼ ► They're not used to, as I say in the blog post, cracking them open and digging around in the guts.
01:38:32 ◼ ► So, if anything went wrong with reclaiming one of these files and my error message directs them into one of their packages, they'd be like, I don't, what the heck is this?
01:38:49 ◼ ► So, I wanted to wait until I got most of the, you know, major problems worked out not doing packages.
01:38:57 ◼ ► So, version 1.1, that was about a little less than a month after launch, I added support for packages.
01:39:15 ◼ ► Everybody who had all their folders in iCloud Drive was like, this app is useless to me.
01:39:28 ◼ ► And it turns out it won't even tell me how much space I can save because it totally ignores cloud storage.
01:39:35 ◼ ► And I had to deal with them and required using a bunch of Apple's APIs, which actually went better than I expected.
01:39:46 ◼ ► That includes iCloud Drive, some versions of Dropbox, OneDrive, all the other things that use the file provider extension.
01:39:52 ◼ ► And then finally, in version 1.3, which is the very end of April, I supported library directories.
01:39:59 ◼ ► In your home directory, you'll see a directory called library, which I think is hidden by default.
01:40:03 ◼ ► So, maybe you'll only see it if you unhide it by switching the flag from the terminal or if you just look in terminals there.
01:40:09 ◼ ► Anyway, the reason Apple hid the library directory is because for years, people would go on a Mac, open their home directory, see a folder called library, and like, what the hell is this?
01:40:18 ◼ ► And they would just like either start rummaging around in it and throwing stuff out or they would try to delete the whole library folder.
01:40:36 ◼ ► But I had been avoiding that directory and the library directory that's at the top level of your boot volume because there's super important stuff in there and it changes really often.
01:40:47 ◼ ► Any running application or any running background process is very likely messing with stuff inside your library folder.
01:40:56 ◼ ► And if you screw up the stuff in there or corrupt it or damage it, applications could start crashing or have problems.
01:41:14 ◼ ► It's, you know, there's lots of sort of, you know, non-user serviceable parts inside library directories.
01:41:19 ◼ ► That was the one I saved for last, even though I think it is one of the biggest sources of data that you can get back.
01:41:28 ◼ ► All these things, packages, cloud stories, library storage and libraries, they're all disabled by default in settings.
01:41:34 ◼ ► So I'm probably going to have to add a fact item that says, hey, it didn't find a lot of data.
01:41:39 ◼ ► And I say, well, if you go to settings, you can turn this switch from this switch to this switch.
01:41:42 ◼ ► You know, every one of these switches, even though the version 1.3 has all these features and will do all of them, they're off by default because I want the default experience still to be the safest for people who don't know the details.
01:41:53 ◼ ► But if you do know the details, if you're the type of person who immediately hits command comma to see what the settings are, turn on the settings that you want.
01:42:00 ◼ ► I even put in settings for like, you can go inside packages, but you can refuse to reclaim from inside them.
01:42:15 ◼ ► Version 1.3 doesn't seem like a big deal, but this was always my plan from the beginning.
01:42:23 ◼ ► I'm not going to say feature complete because I've still got more stuff on my to do list and more features that I'm going to add.
01:42:27 ◼ ► But this is what I had in mind as like, as I said at the end of this, this is kind of what 1.0, quote unquote, should have been.
01:42:34 ◼ ► But it was I would feel I wouldn't have felt as safe doing 1.0 with this feature set in it.
01:42:40 ◼ ► And in retrospect, I'm glad I didn't because, boy, I fixed so many bugs at every stage.
01:42:45 ◼ ► I was fixing bugs and all of those bugs contributed to like the most dangerous thing, the library directory being as safe as it is.
01:43:22 ◼ ► And if you're really brave, toggle on libraries and see how much more data you can find.
01:43:26 ◼ ► I'm really glad that you haven't had the, you know, oh, I've lost all my family photos and it's all your fault feedback as yet.
01:43:33 ◼ ► Yeah, like I said, mostly just got the one-star reviews, which I'm glad the developer replies were in there because they're like, you know, one-star doesn't do photo libraries.
01:43:40 ◼ ► And then I would release version 1.1 and I would say, oh, I just released version 1.1 and it does support photo libraries.
01:43:46 ◼ ► And you're just sitting there waiting and you're just hoping the person will notice that they gave a one-star review for a feature that your program didn't have.
01:43:52 ◼ ► And then a week later, you added that feature and you're like, come on, notice the review, revise your review.
01:44:43 ◼ ► I think it was something like, you know, name a movie you've seen or reply with a movie you've seen a million times.
01:45:00 ◼ ► And so I went to my favorite, you know, GIF repository app, which is written by my friend Jelly.
01:45:14 ◼ ► Well, maybe Blue Sky doesn't want to take a GIF either from GIF wrapped or just in general.
01:45:18 ◼ ► I know what I'll do is I'll go to GIF wrapped and I'll copy the URL and I'll put that in.
01:45:27 ◼ ► And I didn't know if maybe it was because of some, like, weird GIF wrapped URL or something like that.
01:45:31 ◼ ► So I realized what I want is, or I felt like I wanted at the time, is I want to be able to put a repository of all my GIFs on some publicly accessible web page so that I could just grab a public, you know, world accessible URL for them at any point.
01:45:48 ◼ ► My friend Steve has something like this on his own website that he uses from time to time.
01:45:57 ◼ ► And now that I've had, now I've added another new shiny hammer to my tool, to my tool belt, which is Cloudflare and Cloudflare pages, because that's what I used for the call sheet web presence.
01:46:15 ◼ ► Well, I can, you know, put a bunch of GIFs in a folder, put that on GitHub and connect Cloudflare to that GitHub account or GitHub repository, and maybe that would work.
01:46:25 ◼ ► And then I thought, well, but, you know, I need to, apparently there's no mechanism by which I can parse out or read a list of files in the file system using any of the, like, Cloudflare APIs.
01:46:44 ◼ ► But, you know, for just, when I'm trying to just whip this together real fast, there was no obvious answer to that.
01:46:56 ◼ ► And so I was like, all right, well, maybe what I can do is, well, I don't know what I should do.
01:47:03 ◼ ► And around the same time I was thinking of it, I had this, like, nebulous thought in my mind.
01:47:09 ◼ ► Just make a list of all of the GIFs and store that as, like, JSON or something like that.
01:47:44 ◼ ► And then finally, I got to the position that, oh, I've got all of my GIFs in Cloudflare,
01:47:51 ◼ ► But, hey, since we're already vibe coding my way through this entire self-assigned project,
01:47:56 ◼ ► what if I had it generate some sort of, like, web front end where it's just put all the GIFs
01:48:20 ◼ ► Within the span of a couple of hours, which, granted, maybe I could have done this in less
01:48:27 ◼ ► But in a couple of hours, I had a pretty decent-looking web-based GIF repository, and it was
01:48:41 ◼ ► But I also genuinely believe that it would have taken a lot longer for me to do it because
01:49:03 ◼ ► None of this story is that remarkable in and of itself, but this was the first time for me
01:49:15 ◼ ► And let me tell you, there are only a handful of times that I really get that jolt of feeling
01:49:53 ◼ ► Now, and we can come back to it in just a second, but in contrast to that, I have started
01:49:58 ◼ ► down the path of adding just a link to Letterboxd in, or I'm sorry, John, Letterboxd in Callsheet.
01:50:14 ◼ ► Well, the mechanism by which I have all these links, it's a SF symbol, and it's a bit of text.
01:50:26 ◼ ► There is an envelope, but there's no, you know, three overlapping circles, which is the Letterboxd
01:50:33 ◼ ► So I dug up, I think I might have asked it to just make one, and it didn't work at all.
01:50:54 ◼ ► And it took for freaking ever to get it to the point that the SF symbols app would even
01:51:08 ◼ ► Probably, but I needed to, because of other uninteresting reasons, it would be incredibly
01:51:30 ◼ ► So like, it sucked in whatever this, you know, bespoke SVG was, but it doesn't appear to be
01:51:38 ◼ ► And I haven't gone back to try this again in the last couple of days, because I've been
01:51:42 ◼ ► In fact, I've been busy with Peek of View, which we're going to come back to in a moment.
01:52:11 ◼ ► subscriptions in the tech world, there are two subscriptions that you need to buy before everything
01:52:34 ◼ ► But I am on the precipice of doing YouTube without ads because they have the new cheaper plan.
01:53:01 ◼ ► My daughter knows what the Geico Gecko is for like the one week before I turned off ads
01:53:07 ◼ ► Well, the thing is, I really played myself because I didn't turn it off or I didn't, you know,
01:53:25 ◼ ► like a day between every three attempts because it's like, dude, I ran out of compute on this
01:53:33 ◼ ► Well, because I don't think I genuinely don't think the 20 bucks will get me over the edge.
01:53:39 ◼ ► Oh, no, I probably won't help you with this here, but like it's it's it's absolutely worth
01:53:44 ◼ ► Like when you when you have something that's very limited like that, you avoid using it
01:53:55 ◼ ► But like once something is unlimited, you start finding more opportunities to use it and the value
01:54:04 ◼ ► So this is the kind of thing where like if you ever have any reason to ask ChatGPT things,
01:54:10 ◼ ► you should probably pay for the plan because then you can use it in all sorts of ways that
01:54:33 ◼ ► So as a final note on this, if you, the listener, are capable of making a approximately square
01:55:16 ◼ ► But anyway, but no, the real thesis of this whole story though, is that if it's not something
01:55:22 ◼ ► that you really, really, really care about, like this GIF repository that was just me goofing
01:55:26 ◼ ► off and in this SF symbol thing, I do really care about it, but it either would have worked
01:55:37 ◼ ► I've been, I've been really surprised how much I enjoyed just vibe coding my way through
01:55:44 ◼ ► And even though it was frustrating, a lot of that obviously is my own fault, but the SF symbol
01:55:54 ◼ ► Depending if you are a vibe coding prescriptivist or descriptivist, I've heard lots of people
01:56:00 ◼ ► push back against our past discussion and other discussions that don't involve us at all about
01:56:20 ◼ ► I think like the person who coined the phrase has said something about like, you have to not
01:56:29 ◼ ► Like that's, that's, that's all, I mean, all you care about is whether it works or not.
01:56:32 ◼ ► But anyway, if you're about to email us and tell us that what Casey did, isn't really vibe
01:56:36 ◼ ► coding, I would say that I think the phrase vibe coding is currently in the early stages of
01:56:41 ◼ ► evolving, uh, and like so many things in the world, what the inventor of the phrase wants
01:56:56 ◼ ► I would just say, I think this is, this is a fluid situation as they say, and vibe coding
01:57:03 ◼ ► Either we'll fade from a vocabulary and we will laugh at ourselves for using this phrase
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