00:00:15 ◼ ► And I got it to—I had to send my M2 MacBook Air down the hand-me-down line in the family,
00:00:22 ◼ ► and so I got it to replace that a little bit earlier than planned due to the tariff concerns.
00:00:27 ◼ ► But it is now my new, like, you know, travel, lightweight, mostly, like, train and ferry computer.
00:00:51 ◼ ► the extra USB-C port on the other side for charging on either side, which I often run into,
00:01:28 ◼ ► Yeah, this is the 14-inch M4, non-Pro, non-Max, just like the base M4 with some, you know,
00:01:46 ◼ ► And the rest of the computer is also very good, but it's very good in ways that we all knew
00:01:51 ◼ ► already, you know, which is not, like—I don't mean to gloss over the fact that it's, like,
00:01:56 ◼ ► an incredibly fast, incredibly capable laptop that produces no noise and has infinite battery
00:02:03 ◼ ► Like, those are not small things, but now, like, almost everything Apple produces, you can say
00:02:21 ◼ ► And being, you know, for my upgraded purposes of having the screen be more readable in bright
00:02:31 ◼ ► So it is so good, in fact, I would say I don't think I will be buying any more products that
00:02:38 ◼ ► don't have nanotexture screens if that is available as an option because it is that good.
00:02:56 ◼ ► It is brighter, but it's not so much brighter that it, like, makes just a world difference.
00:03:23 ◼ ► Like, it's not as thin and light as the Air, but it's still pretty darn thin and light.
00:03:30 ◼ ► And again, the battery life is, I mean, granted, it's a brand new battery compared to the Air, which was, you know, a two-year-old one.
00:03:43 ◼ ► And that's because I got the low-spec one, but, you know, it still has a bigger battery.
00:03:50 ◼ ► And if you don't need, like, the super pro processing for that computer, I would strongly recommend you look at it.
00:04:02 ◼ ► And otherwise, I have no qualms with my current M3 Max BlackBook Pro, as I like to call it.
00:04:07 ◼ ► However, I am really looking forward to, because of things that have been happening, which we'll talk about during the show,
00:05:37 ◼ ► First of all, I talked, I believe it was last episode, about wanting an SF symbol for Letterboxd,
00:05:44 ◼ ► And a few people were very kind and reached out with submissions, which was also very brave
00:06:11 ◼ ► So that's going to be in a forthcoming version of Call Sheet, which I hope to push the App Store
00:06:20 ◼ ► I haven't tried this myself because, honestly, I haven't had a need to, thanks to Alice and Ben McCarthy,
00:06:29 ◼ ► But anyways, Underscore was the first of many people to recommend the Custom Symbols app,
00:06:35 ◼ ► which is for the Mac, where allegedly you can drag in any reasonable SVG and it will fart out or toot out, if you will.
00:06:46 ◼ ► Again, I haven't personally tried this, but Underscore gave it two thumbs up, or at least I believe he did.
00:06:55 ◼ ► So you might want to check that out if you're in a similar boat as me, and I will be looking into that whenever it is I need another SF symbol.
00:07:05 ◼ ► Summarizing App Store reviews using AI would not suffer from the same challenge as filtering spam emails.
00:07:15 ◼ ► then any review that is even a tiny bit spam-like will be ignored by the summarization model.
00:07:20 ◼ ► As a result, the only reviews that will get used for summarization are the ones that the model is very confident
00:07:25 ◼ ► are HAM, which I thought was a typo for a second, then I played that back in my head and realized,
00:07:32 ◼ ► Building an email spam filter is a much tougher problem because the end user sees every HAM versus spam decision that you make,
00:07:39 ◼ ► whereas the App Store summarization model does not need to divulge which reviews were used to generate the summary.
00:07:44 ◼ ► That does make it a little bit easier, but the thing with spam filtering, especially Apple spam filtering,
00:07:54 ◼ ► and so only the really good ones will get through, because first of all, that's going to eliminate a lot of the actual good reviews,
00:08:00 ◼ ► because you're getting false positives, and second of all, it does not mean that the spamiest of spam things you've ever seen in your entire life won't get through,
00:08:08 ◼ ► because we've all seen that happen, even Gmail occasionally, like, there'll be literally all caps words spam in the subject line,
00:08:14 ◼ ► and somehow it will get through, so I don't think there's any threshold that these very bad spam filters can be set to that won't let spam through,
00:08:20 ◼ ► so now what you've done is you've eliminated almost your entire pool of data, but still occasionally a bad one leaks through,
00:08:27 ◼ ► Anyway, I think it does make the job easier, so this is a good point, but I have so little faith in the ability to filter spam consistently from anyone,
00:08:37 ◼ ► and especially Apple, because every time I visit my, like, iCloud email and sort through it, the spam situation there is dire,
00:08:44 ◼ ► and yes, I know they're trying not to filter out my spam, but let me tell you, my spam folder is filled with legitimate emails,
00:08:50 ◼ ► and my inbox is filled with spam, so I just, I don't even know where, speaking of setting the dial,
00:08:55 ◼ ► I don't know where to set the dial on Apple's ability to filter spam, but it's not good.
00:09:14 ◼ ► The Journal of Legal Studies, volume 29, number 1, from January 2000, by Uri Gnisi and Aldo Rastecini,
00:09:20 ◼ ► and I guess the summary is, the deterrence hypothesis predicts that the introduction of a penalty that leaves everything else unchanged
00:09:30 ◼ ► We present the results of a field study in a group of daycare centers that contradicts this prediction.
00:09:35 ◼ ► Parents used to arrive late to collect their children, forcing a teacher to stay after closing time.
00:09:46 ◼ ► And, you know, what famous, I'm sure whoever Marco heard it from was someone who heard it from this paper,
00:09:54 ◼ ► I think the debate is probably around any kind of, like, famous paper or famous saying that, like,
00:10:01 ◼ ► There's always kind of a backlash against it to say, well, how representative was that?
00:10:09 ◼ ► But anyway, that's where the phrase comes from, and it is still a good thought technology, as they say,
00:10:21 ◼ ► Apple is going to be teaming up with Anthropic, apparently, for a new AI-powered vibe-coding platform.
00:10:28 ◼ ► Apple is teaming up with the startup Anthropic on a new vibe-coding software platform that will use artificial intelligence
00:10:34 ◼ ► The system is a new version of Xcode that will integrate Anthropic's Claude Sonnet model.
00:10:38 ◼ ► Apple will roll out the software internally and hasn't yet decided whether to launch it publicly.
00:10:42 ◼ ► Last year, Apple announced its own AI-powered coding tool for Swift, for, excuse me, for Xcode called Swift Assist.
00:10:48 ◼ ► The company had intended to roll it out in 2024, but never actually shipped it to developers.
00:10:53 ◼ ► Internally, engineers have complained that the company's own system could hallucinate and even slow down app development.
00:11:10 ◼ ► It's very, it's a very confusing, other than like the potential partnership is like, well, maybe Apple is having trouble creating its own LLM-powered code assistant thing integrated with Xcode.
00:11:21 ◼ ► So they're just going to field test a bunch of different partnerships inside the company until one is good enough to escape.
00:11:26 ◼ ► But anyway, I mean, this, I would throw this in the pile of policy decisions that Apple has made after the whole Apple intelligence debacle last year, basically saying we will, we'll work with third parties much more openly than we used to.
00:12:01 ◼ ► 26% of Americans who participated in a recent survey say they've avoided seeking mental health support due to fear of judgment.
00:12:13 ◼ ► And it's, you know, there's nothing more to be ashamed about mental health support as there is to be about physical health support.
00:12:34 ◼ ► This Mental Health Awareness Month, let's encourage everyone to take care of their well-being and break the stigma.
00:12:41 ◼ ► BetterHelp has over 10 years of experience matching people with the right therapist from their diverse network of more than 30,000 licensed therapists with a wide range of specialties.
00:12:51 ◼ ► And it's fully online, so therapy is affordable and convenient, serving over 5 million people around the world.
00:12:59 ◼ ► If your therapist isn't working out for you, you can easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost.
00:13:21 ◼ ► All right, so we have been talking about last week the App Store rule changes that Apple was compelled to make by a very cranky and justifiably judge.
00:13:35 ◼ ► Reading from The Verge, Apple asked a judge to halt an order forcing it to give up control over App Store payments while it appeals the decision.
00:13:40 ◼ ► In a filing on Wednesday, Apple says the order contains, quote, extraordinary intrusions, quote,
00:13:49 ◼ ► Quote, deriving Apple, depriving, excuse me, Apple of control over core features of the App Store is standing alone sufficient to warrant a stay, Apple says in its motion to halt the order.
00:13:58 ◼ ► The new rules profoundly undercut the integrated iOS ecosystem that this court sustained is lawful, and that is the foundation of user trust and confidence in the App Store.
00:14:07 ◼ ► Yeah, there's a lot of wringing of hands over whether the angry judge's decision about what Apple has to do is going to stay on appeal.
00:14:15 ◼ ► And Apple, of course, is pursuing every possible avenue, including saying, hey, while we're waiting for the appeal, can we just like undo that?
00:14:32 ◼ ► Like, look, what do they expect to happen when you pretty blatantly and maliciously avoid complying with a federal judge's order?
00:14:47 ◼ ► Their case is kind of like, okay, so we defied a judge's order, but the thing they made us do after that is way beyond the original order, and we think that's mean.
00:14:53 ◼ ► Like, if you can read their appeal about it, they have many complaints about everything.
00:15:02 ◼ ► It's, you know, part of the process of all these cases and everything is like, when do we decide to even check in with them?
00:15:11 ◼ ► But the very aggressive follow-up from Apple on not just appealing, but also saying, while we're appealing, we don't want this to apply to us is noteworthy.
00:15:22 ◼ ► And with that in mind, we have some news from Riley's friend of the show, Riley Tested, and Delta, Riley's emulator app.
00:15:32 ◼ ► Riley writes, Delta's latest update with our revised Patreon sign-up flow has been approved.
00:15:40 ◼ ► Of course, Apple still requires we offer in-app purchases, so we shoved them away at the bottom of Delta's settings under Alternative Payment Methods.
00:15:50 ◼ ► Literally, an item says alternate payment methods, and it's like a submenu in the support section of settings.
00:16:02 ◼ ► Adding a new screen to Delta to inform users about the differences when using in-app purchase instead of donating directly to our Patreon.
00:16:10 ◼ ► So this is a full screen sheet, and it says in a very large font, you're about to use Apple's in-app purchase system.
00:16:17 ◼ ► Patreon is not responsible for the privacy or security purchases made with in-app purchase.
00:16:22 ◼ ► And then in a body-sized font, any accounts or purchases made outside of Patreon will be managed by the company, quote, Apple Inc., quote.
00:16:30 ◼ ► Your Patreon account, stored payment method, and related features such as subscription management refund requests will not be available.
00:16:41 ◼ ► So I'm pretty sure that's word for word, the Apple scare sheet, but with the words, you know, substituted.
00:16:46 ◼ ► But right down to putting Apple Inc. in quote, like we mentioned last time about the Apple employees being excited.
00:17:00 ◼ ► Patreon will not be responsible for the privacy and security of the purchase made through an outpurchase, but it makes it sound so scary.
00:17:24 ◼ ► Well, and I think it also, like, it highlights just how over-the-top Apple's design and language were.
00:17:31 ◼ ► Like, of course they were going to, you know, be slapped down by anybody who can read, like, the judgment or the regulation.
00:17:40 ◼ ► Like, of course this was Apple, you know, putting a finger in everyone's eye, which they are increasingly doing.
00:17:48 ◼ ► And speaking of being exceedingly aggressive with scare tactics, in the App Store, I think in the EU only, there was a MJ Psy blog post, and we'll link to that.
00:18:01 ◼ ► And there was a screenshot, is a screenshot, of Instacar, which is apparently some, you know, app that you can get in the EU.
00:18:09 ◼ ► And above what you would normally expect to see in an App Store listing, you know, the icon, the name of the app, and so on, and the Get button.
00:18:26 ◼ ► And this is like, this really shows, like, you know, Apple, first of all, they're not over it.
00:18:42 ◼ ► So, what's interesting, so this app, Instacar, as far as I can tell, it seems to be exclusive to the App Store in Hungary.
00:18:48 ◼ ► So, you know, most of us can't view it without some, like, workarounds, but I did verify with some people before the show, like, yes, it is indeed real.
00:18:56 ◼ ► Like, it's so outrageous, like, this thing they're doing, it's so outrageous that I thought for sure, like, that's got to be fake, right?
00:19:07 ◼ ► And it links to, the Learn More links to this giant wall of text that's all, you know, scares about, you know, basically the scare sheet type of language.
00:19:22 ◼ ► They have a lot more pettiness and hostility and just sheer cruelty they can do to apps, and they will keep going.
00:19:34 ◼ ► So, this is a huge block that pushes down the app on its own product page on the App Store.
00:19:44 ◼ ► It's the very top thing on the page, besides, like, the navigation where you can go back.
00:19:51 ◼ ► This is Apple showing, demonstrating, like, if you don't play ball with us, we will penalize you in the App Store in substantial ways.
00:20:02 ◼ ► Or they'll try to, because, like, their, their sort of blindness on this is, like, look, if they do this and they keep doing these banners, it's not going to be too long before people figure out.
00:20:20 ◼ ► Someone will make a TikTok and say, hey, you may have seen this little thing and you might be scared by it.
00:20:24 ◼ ► But, like, don't worry, because these are the apps that charge you 30% less or 15% less.
00:20:48 ◼ ► But I think this is, again, this is showing, like, Apple has a lot more tricks they can pull out of their hat.
00:21:04 ◼ ► Because this is a company that is extremely petty and thin-skinned and vindictive around this point.
00:21:17 ◼ ► And it just goes to show how incredibly desperate they are to protect this revenue stream.
00:21:24 ◼ ► My other favorite thing is the scare sheet that the learn more, the aforementioned learn more link goes to.
00:21:29 ◼ ► It's got, you know, a giant graphic at the top from the App Store about alternative payment options in the App Store.
00:21:48 ◼ ► And just, like, just think, like, you know, we're going to be talking about more about Apple in a little bit.
00:21:52 ◼ ► But, like, wouldn't it be nicer if we could be talking about Apple products in these news cycles?
00:22:16 ◼ ► I don't understand the strategy they are following unless it is truly being done by incredibly short-sighted people who don't understand software, which maybe it is.
00:22:31 ◼ ► First of all, Peter Binks writes, Ubiquiti's other line, Amplify, A-M-P-L-I-F-I, is probably a better fit for people that just want to replace their Google, TP-Link, et cetera, mesh network.
00:22:52 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, I've heard about Amplify, but, like, in the context of what we discussed with Casey and his plans and Marco and his stuff, like, if your goal is to go to Ubiquiti so you can play with all the fancy software that Casey's raving about and this doesn't have that,
00:23:06 ◼ ► then this is kind of like, okay, well, but then now it's just competing with, like, Eero and Google without all the Amplify fanciness.
00:23:21 ◼ ► Like, it's not, you know, I don't have any experience with this thing, but it looks like it is, it definitely is more of a consumer-oriented one.
00:23:27 ◼ ► But I feel like Ubiquiti's sort of brand advantage is, you know, we make expensive feeling, expensive looking, and probably actually also expensive stuff that will be reliable and that has lots and lots of features and configurability.
00:23:46 ◼ ► But if you're going to say, well, we take away most of the expensive feeling and lookingness and some of the expense and also take away most of the cool features, it's like, well, you know, like, it's not their bread and butter.
00:24:03 ◼ ► They didn't seem particularly compelling to me because I'm not in the market for Ubiquiti stuff, but I am in the market for, you know, easy to set up home stuff.
00:24:10 ◼ ► And so far, Eero's been doing it for me, although not that I'm looking to replace my networking stuff anytime soon.
00:24:16 ◼ ► But one of the main criteria that I look at when I look at products, other than, like, brand reputation and feature set and everything, is what size and shape are the access points.
00:24:25 ◼ ► Because from even within a brand, there's not a lot of consistency and people keep changing the size and shape of them.
00:24:32 ◼ ► And it makes a difference because sometimes it's easier or harder to fit these things into your decor and into your home, depending on is it a tall, skinny thing, a low, flat thing, where are the plugs, how does it connect to something, does it have to be hung on a wall?
00:24:56 ◼ ► Yeah, and I would say, too, like, I've said in the past, you know, when talking about, like, you know, HomePods versus Sonos, for instance, like, I generally have found better luck, better experiences, and higher happiness when I'm using a product that is the company's main focus who makes it.
00:25:20 ◼ ► But the reality is Ubiquity is an enterprise networking gear company, and their Amplify home line is not a very high priority for them, it seems.
00:25:32 ◼ ► So it's great that they have it for people who want it, but it does, like, I would generally recommend, like, when possible, get things from a company that does a really good job of that thing.
00:25:47 ◼ ► Colin Robertson writes, I'm a photographer that often shoots real estate, where I regularly provide a floor plan as one of my services.
00:25:54 ◼ ► The app Cubicasa, or Cubicasa, C-U-B-I-C-A-S-A, lets you walk around your house with your phone recording a video.
00:26:03 ◼ ► And in about 24 hours, they send you an accurate enough floor plan one can use for furniture planning.
00:26:18 ◼ ► But it's $15 for what most people would probably consider, like, the, I shouldn't say floor, but, like, the most basic version.
00:26:30 ◼ ► But, again, I can't stress enough, just like the SF Symbols app from before, I haven't personally tried it.
00:26:35 ◼ ► So your mileage may vary, but you might want to just check that out if you're interested in making a floor plan.
00:26:46 ◼ ► Yeah, I've tried apps like that, but no, maybe not the specific one, that use, like, LiDAR on the camera to try to do, like, 3D models of your house.
00:26:52 ◼ ► Not so much tame for a floor plan, but, again, just like to have a rough idea for, like, positioning furniture and stuff.
00:27:01 ◼ ► And if you have lots of furniture or lots of clutter, it has a hard time finding your walls and windows.
00:27:10 ◼ ► Certainly easier than taking out the tape measure and trying to measure all this yourself.
00:27:15 ◼ ► ThunderGodSid, which is a funny username, has decided to do the world service and has created WhatUnifyStuffShouldIBuy.com, which I briefly, briefly looked at.
00:27:37 ◼ ► But if you wanted at least a starting point with which to, you know, try to figure out what you need to buy, at least that gives you a pretty easy flow by which you can figure this out.
00:27:59 ◼ ► So after I talked about the Ubiquiti stuff last week, a lot of people, a surprising amount of people, were kind enough to reach out and offer either to sell me their leftovers, and I don't mean that in a bad way, stuff that they had recently upgraded away from or whatever the case may be.
00:28:15 ◼ ► They'd offer to sell me them very, very cheap or in some cases just straight up send me stuff, oftentimes because they weren't using it anymore and just wanted it out of the house, which I totally hear.
00:28:34 ◼ ► I wasn't going and seeking long-range access points, but they were offered at a very steep discount, and I couldn't say no.
00:28:44 ◼ ► If you recall, the Eero setup that I had, and I know you aren't looking at my house or a floor plan or anything like that, but if you just imagine a standard two-story rectangle, basically, in one corner of the house, in the front right corner of the house, on the second story, on the top story is the office, and that's where the main Eero was.
00:29:07 ◼ ► Below that and behind it is the living room on the back right corner of the house, if you will.
00:29:16 ◼ ► And then back upstairs, literally in the opposite corner of the house from the office, is the primary bedroom where I had another Eero wireless access point.
00:29:26 ◼ ► So what I've done is I put one of the U6 long-ranges in the bedroom, and so it's in the bottom left corner, or I guess I should say top left corner of the house, if you will, and then one of them in the downstairs living room, which is kind of the bottom right corner of the house.
00:29:42 ◼ ► And that seems fine, although installing it was a little bit of an adventure because none of my networking equipment at this point is Ubiquity except the cloud gateway fiber.
00:29:54 ◼ ► And so because of that, I needed to figure out a way to power the U6 long-range because, Marco, how do pretty much all of Ubiquity's stuff get powered?
00:30:12 ◼ ► So I didn't have any PoE, anything in the house except the cloud gateway fiber, which is all the way up in the office.
00:30:18 ◼ ► So I had to buy two, well, at this point anyway, I had to buy two exceedingly ugly and surprisingly large, but only $18, power over Ethernet injectors.
00:30:30 ◼ ► So you plug this into the wall, you plug data in, and then coming out is a combination of data and power.
00:30:45 ◼ ► It was a little bit fraught because they seem to periodically decide to not realize that there is a wired backhaul to the cloud gateway fiber.
00:30:55 ◼ ► Like, at first it seemed to work, and then one of them fell off, and then the other one fell off.
00:30:59 ◼ ► And I had to, like, do a bunch of rebooting, but eventually they both got convinced that, okay, no, no, no, we're good to go.
00:31:07 ◼ ► The other question I have, which John alluded to earlier, what's the deal with ceiling mounting?
00:31:15 ◼ ► Like, I'm aware that that's the default method, but do people really ceiling mount this in their homes?
00:31:26 ◼ ► But, like, Marco, do you have your – you know, you don't because you have it, like, just mounted on screws on the wall, right?
00:31:31 ◼ ► So I – depending on, you know, where I've put them, I've done every kind of mounting option, including not mounting them and just kind of resting them against things.
00:31:42 ◼ ► I think the antennas in this line are designed for it to be mounted in some form of horizontally.
00:31:49 ◼ ► So whether it's, like, you know, sitting on a table facing up or, more likely, from a ceiling facing down.
00:31:53 ◼ ► That is probably better for antenna performance and to maximize the range and performance and everything like that.
00:32:17 ◼ ► So they're, like, in closets or, like, you know, in – like, at the beach, I have a couple that are, like, in wall areas.
00:32:30 ◼ ► Like, it's kind of – like, it's – like, they're all kind of hidden in or around or under things or in closets.
00:32:36 ◼ ► In my experience, you can kind of have them oriented however you want as long as you're willing to tolerate, like, this is my home.
00:32:58 ◼ ► So with that said, once I got those installed, my beloved topology was looking way better.
00:33:07 ◼ ► If you recall, you can go into the Unify management interface and actually see what is connected to what and where.
00:33:18 ◼ ► It was just everything connected to the cloud gateway fiber because, as far as it was concerned, that was true.
00:33:23 ◼ ► It didn't see any of the switches or access points or anything in between because they weren't ubiquity.
00:33:27 ◼ ► At this point, it was everything wired, you know, was peer to the two wireless access points, and then they had stuff hanging off it.
00:33:36 ◼ ► But I'm wondering if – I'm mostly very happy, but I'm wondering if maybe this was a mistake because now I have a lot more data about the state of my world, and it's telling me that my AP deployment density might need improvement.
00:33:53 ◼ ► So as happy as I am, broadly, I'm wondering if maybe this was too much data for someone as neurotic as me.
00:34:01 ◼ ► You know, this is why I don't have my battery level or my battery amount indicator in the status bar because I don't need a percentage.
00:34:17 ◼ ► I believe it's a U6 Pro incoming from another very kind listener, and I'm probably going to put that in the office, and hopefully that will get me sorted.
00:34:26 ◼ ► I mean, not to say that anything isn't working now, but I can tell that there's a little bit less coverage than I want.
00:34:31 ◼ ► And I used their Wi-Fi Man app, which you can, I think it requires at least one ubiquity access point, but I'm not sure about that.
00:34:37 ◼ ► But you can go around and scan, and it'll show you exactly, you know, how robust your Wi-Fi signal is.
00:34:46 ◼ ► So hopefully a third access point, getting back to the place I was with Eero, hopefully that'll clear me up.
00:34:52 ◼ ► And then John was alluding earlier, well, why do you need a 10 gig connection for your laptop?
00:34:58 ◼ ► Well, my Synology now has a 10 gig Ethernet, a 10 gigabit Ethernet daughter card board thing in it.
00:35:06 ◼ ► And so I am getting a solid 250 megabytes, megabytes, bytes, megabytes per second between my MacBook Pro and the Synology, because the MacBook Pro...
00:35:20 ◼ ► So the Cloud Gateway Fiber has a 10 gig, has one 10 gig port, but then the rest are 2.5s, right?
00:35:30 ◼ ► And then because the TS4 that I have is two and a half gig, that's connected to the, I believe it's only one and two and a half gig port.
00:35:39 ◼ ► And at some point, I will need to get a couple of SFP connectors so I can connect the MacBook and the Synology simultaneously, but I can't at 10 gigs right now.
00:35:55 ◼ ► I'm still not sure how I'm going to handle the office, and it depends on whether I relocate everything somewhere else.
00:36:01 ◼ ► You know, I've been considering, I don't think I've talked about this on the show, but I've been considering moving kind of the Synology and main switch and Cloud Gateway Fiber and all that.
00:36:10 ◼ ► I've been considering moving that into either the garage, which I think is probably temperature not going to work, or potentially the laundry room, which is, I think, a pretty decent place to put all of it.
00:36:35 ◼ ► So then, breaking news, moments before we started recording, another kind listener had sent me two Lite 8 PoE switches, which is, I think, four PoE ports, four non-PoE ports, and a Flex Mini, which is a USB-C or PoE-powered little baby hub, or switch, I should say.
00:37:08 ◼ ► However, I had heard horror stories about getting Sonos to work with Ubiquity, and let me tell you, my brief experience in the span of 20 minutes before I'd run upstairs and record, was that most of those horror stories were mostly accurate, because as soon as I replaced dumb, unmanaged switches with Ubiquity switches, everything was upset.
00:37:29 ◼ ► Now, I think it appears to be that the going advice is to go wireless and wireless only on your Sonos devices.
00:37:39 ◼ ► And it was the case that my two Aero 100s on my desk in my office were connected to a little baby switch on my desk.
00:37:46 ◼ ► The Sonos Arc, which is the main soundbar, was connected to the switch in the living room.
00:37:52 ◼ ► And the Sonos port, which is what powers the porch and as well as takes input from the turntable, that was also connected via Ethernet.
00:38:01 ◼ ► And I knew that I was probably in for a little bit of an adventure, and it appears the moment I switched from unmanaged to the Ubiquity managed switches, everything took a turn for the worse.
00:38:31 ◼ ► But if I recall correctly, part of the reason, a lot of the reason why I started wiring all this stuff was because getting it to play, you know, Spotify or Apple Music or what have you off of Wi-Fi back when I had the Eros was very, very finicky and spotty.
00:38:46 ◼ ► And then with the desktop ones, the two Aero 100s on my desk, one of them would like fall out from time to time.
00:38:53 ◼ ► Now, given that my office is now about as far away from an access point as I can get as I sit here right now, we'll see how tomorrow goes.
00:39:00 ◼ ► But sitting here now, I think I've gotten through it, but it was definitely, like, the Sonos app was pissed.
00:39:16 ◼ ► And if I can get all this squared away, then the next mission is I really, really want to start getting some cameras in and around, well, mostly around the house.
00:39:35 ◼ ► Because, of course, any of the places I want data and power, neither of those things exist at the moment.
00:39:51 ◼ ► But if people have recommendations for cameras, Ubiquity cameras that they really like and or doorbells or what have you, do let me know.
00:40:03 ◼ ► We have a large number of G5 turrets, which have just since been replaced by the G6 turret.
00:40:32 ◼ ► You can route the cable like through the wall behind them or you can route it out the side.
00:40:37 ◼ ► The only weird thing about them is that they have this little like blob that converts the cable.
00:40:48 ◼ ► It goes into the camera to Ethernet and you can you can like, you know, wrap these things around it to seal it up and everything.
00:40:52 ◼ ► But that means that like six inches away from the camera, you have like what looks like a large like ferrite core thing.
00:41:10 ◼ ► So it depends on, you know, where you're putting them, how you're how you're writing the cables and everything.
00:41:26 ◼ ► But, you know, in for most cases for like a standard home camera, you won't really need that kind of resolution.
00:41:43 ◼ ► I will say a 360 camera is not amazing if you actually want to like, you know, look and see in detail what's going on.
00:41:55 ◼ ► Like if you want to cover a very large area, just in case like, you know, there's some kind of incident that you want to look up footage for later that you don't care that much about the precision of it.
00:42:13 ◼ ► When you put it up in a window or on a monitor, it takes up a huge amount of space to display relatively little of the of the useful information.
00:42:52 ◼ ► Now, when you look at the specs and everything, for the most part, they're all basically the same guts or the same small number of guts.
00:42:59 ◼ ► It's just a question of like what like what physical form do you want the camera to take?
00:43:04 ◼ ► You can get fancy with like the super zoom ones and you know, like, but I don't I don't think it's necessary for almost anybody.
00:43:24 ◼ ► But for the most part, that's pretty like stick with like the turret and the bullet and you're fine.
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00:44:27 ◼ ► If you had to pick like what is my uniform, it is a Mack Weldon v-neck silver t-shirt that I literally wear constantly.
00:44:35 ◼ ► Whenever they release new colors, I buy them because that expands my wardrobe to whatever definition that is.
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00:46:36 ◼ ► So, what I posted, this is something I've been thinking about probably since we started talking
00:47:00 ◼ ► But if I feel like it's kind of like burning a hole in my pocket, that I just need to just,
00:47:12 ◼ ► And if you listen to the show, there's not really anything in the blog post that's going
00:47:16 ◼ ► to be surprising, but kind of the role I see of posts on my blog is like a succinct summary
00:47:29 ◼ ► It takes two seconds to read instead of having to listen to hours and hours of podcasts and
00:47:39 ◼ ► Or, you know, and see our recent episode about our websites, about why it's important for
00:47:56 ◼ ► And in particular, it was spawned by when I was thinking about discussing the DMA stuff.
00:48:00 ◼ ► I always thought about, as I always am, what kind of things should Apple do differently?
00:48:16 ◼ ► And the thing that changed for me is, so many things that I would think about that Apple
00:48:19 ◼ ► should do differently, I would end up running into this dead end and saying, well, but they're
00:48:29 ◼ ► And the more and more I ran into that, the more I thought, like, this is, it seems different
00:48:37 ◼ ► I gave a couple of examples in this post here, but like, I mean, which example did he use?
00:48:53 ◼ ► They need a new operating system even farther back than that, that has memory protection
00:48:57 ◼ ► It's always been these things like Apple needs to do this because they are not doing as well
00:49:13 ◼ ► And in all those cases, it was like, I always had in mind, this is the thing that Apple should
00:49:17 ◼ ► be doing, but I never thought to myself, but of course, Apple is not going to do that unless
00:49:27 ◼ ► Even, even back in the day when we were complaining about, oh, Johnny, I've made these laptops that
00:49:33 ◼ ► I didn't think like the only way they can fix this is to fire everybody who made these laptops
00:49:49 ◼ ► But there's this one class of problems that they've been running into in the past decade
00:49:53 ◼ ► or so that every time I think about it, I'm like, I don't think that's going to ever going
00:50:01 ◼ ► And the more I would think about it, I would say, well, what, what do you mean by new people?
00:50:07 ◼ ► Well, like that, you know, the, if, if those lieutenants who you see in the leadership page who've
00:50:17 ◼ ► It's always been a, you know, how much does Tim Cook delegate or whatever, but in the past
00:50:22 ◼ ► several months and, you know, or six months or a year, it's become increasingly clear that
00:50:32 ◼ ► CEO there, you'd still have the same problem because so many of the worst decisions, when
00:50:36 ◼ ► you run them up the flagpole, you find out, no, Tim Cook, as you would imagine, as CEO,
00:50:42 ◼ ► And when it came time to choose between competing theories about which things to do, Tim Cook
00:50:50 ◼ ► And with the laptops and the keyboards and stuff, like, you know, there's people under him, like,
00:50:58 ◼ ► When the keyboards are breaking and they're having customer complaints, he'd say, what's
00:51:15 ◼ ► At no time during any of those things, like, they need to make a new Mac Pro successor,
00:51:20 ◼ ► that, you know, the file system, the operating system, the ports on the laptops, all these
00:51:29 ◼ ► At no point did I feel this helplessness that somehow you needed, like, leadership change at
00:51:54 ◼ ► so do many people under him, just really seems like it's not going to change unless leadership
00:52:00 ◼ ► And so here's a post saying, like, look, I'm not mad that they're making decisions I don't
00:52:09 ◼ ► But, like, that's not, I'm not saying you didn't make a good Mac Pro, therefore, you need
00:52:16 ◼ ► I'm saying that there are things that Apple has been getting into lately that they just
00:52:23 ◼ ► That, like, this is never going to change as long as Tim Cook is still there because he
00:52:28 ◼ ► has proven that no matter what the people beneath him say and debate and offer or whatever, in
00:52:45 ◼ ► And that's what kind of what I've been hoping for for years is like, OK, well, it seems like
00:52:58 ◼ ► I kind of thought when the DMA thing comes to a head, like, finally, they've been pushing
00:53:03 ◼ ► They think they're they think they can avoid this regulation and here come the regulations
00:53:10 ◼ ► This is going to be the crisis that finally drives them to say, all right, we we we fought
00:53:36 ◼ ► They foisted those laptops on us with no ports on them for so long, for so many years, the
00:53:44 ◼ ► And I feel like the DMA was the crisis point for all of the app store stuff and the rent
00:53:55 ◼ ► That's that's the ballgame now, you know, and, you know, just reinforced by the more recent
00:53:59 ◼ ► U.S. things or whatever, but it's like there is no crisis that's going to happen that's
00:54:05 ◼ ► I thought what they were doing is wrong for a long time, but eventually I essentially lost
00:54:16 ◼ ► And, you know, we touched on it in the in the follow up section, like they're just digging
00:54:28 ◼ ► And I mentioned last week about potentially doing a member special or something on this,
00:54:31 ◼ ► because I think it would be fun to say if you could change stuff at Apple without regard
00:54:34 ◼ ► for like if you could change leadership and get someone in there as like a turnaround artist,
00:54:38 ◼ ► which just sounds dumb when you're saying you're going to turn around the most successful
00:54:42 ◼ ► Like if you could fix the things, the longstanding problems that Apple had get in there and fix
00:55:07 ◼ ► It's like not like Microsoft was bad before, but he had a new plan for the company and he
00:55:26 ◼ ► just hit the specific points, not get too bogged down into argument, reasoning and examples and
00:55:37 ◼ ► Every paragraph, every line is there for a purpose that makes a point and makes I'm trying to make
00:55:42 ◼ ► the specific point that I'm actually making with the words that I chose, not tangential points
00:55:50 ◼ ► And I, you know, I and I knew I would be able to expound on it in the podcast or whatever.
00:56:01 ◼ ► You know, sometimes people complain about when we talk about, you know, complain about Apple
00:56:32 ◼ ► And I made this post, which is probably the most pessimistic and damning post I've ever
00:56:50 ◼ ► And that usually doesn't happen because usually there's just someone out there who says, you
00:56:58 ◼ ► But obviously the circles I travel and are most inclined to and the people who would even
00:57:01 ◼ ► know my site exists, let alone read it, are most inclined to agree with me because there
00:57:05 ◼ ► But yeah, it just seems like Apple is not getting the message on the whole, you know, anti-competitive
00:57:18 ◼ ► And I linked again for the billionth time for the last time I took a run at this topic,
00:57:22 ◼ ► which was the art of the possible post, which was like, look, Apple seems to think if they
00:57:33 ◼ ► But yeah, as it's all come to a head, like they've Apple continues to believe we're just
00:57:41 ◼ ► And no evidence supports that it's not, you know, the on the outside, the people who oppose
00:57:47 ◼ ► them are not having their minds changed, nor are they being strong armed into compliance.
00:57:53 ◼ ► Instead, governments are stepping in and strong army Apple into compliance and still Apple
00:57:58 ◼ ► So yeah, you know, like I don't want to steal Marco's thunder for being like fire Tim Cook
00:58:09 ◼ ► I really feel like we've reached that point where there are so many things, so many important
00:58:15 ◼ ► things that Apple should do differently that I now feel they will not do differently until
00:58:26 ◼ ► surprising, even having been a part of, much less listen to this show, although as we all
00:58:32 ◼ ► But anyways, it was surprising for me to hear you or see you plainly say it's time for Cook
00:58:40 ◼ ► to go because to my recollection, you've come up and towed the line on that on the on ATP.
00:58:57 ◼ ► Like, it's the thing, like, it's the problem with posts like this is they very often read
00:59:11 ◼ ► Like, it just seems like it's just a series of things, a whole bunch of little annoyances
00:59:24 ◼ ► All of those things are a different class of things where you say, like, they should change
00:59:44 ◼ ► And they didn't lose sight of it just once or for a year or with the Mac Pro or on a particular
01:00:00 ◼ ► What I'm saying is I'm now convinced that this will not change until leadership changes because
01:00:04 ◼ ► they've proven it to me over so much time that there's no crisis that will motivate them
01:00:39 ◼ ► It's more of a recognition that I no longer believe things will change without new people.
01:00:47 ◼ ► And it's also like when when I saw this blog post, I was like, oh, my God, John flipped.
01:00:56 ◼ ► Like, I'm like, you know, like in the keep in mind, like in the last few weeks, we've seen some pretty important like Apple fans and Apple defenders and people who have really smart views and measured views.
01:01:09 ◼ ► Like I heard like on dithering, John Gruber and Ben Thompson are both now wondering aloud, maybe it's time for new leadership at Apple.
01:01:17 ◼ ► Like, that's huge for for the types of people who are now either saying aloud, like maybe it's time or who are actually saying, no, it's time now.
01:01:30 ◼ ► And that's that's like a big threshold that has been crossed in only very recent weeks.
01:01:37 ◼ ► Yeah, because it's like in all those cases, it's it's not the sort of knee jerk reaction to particular events, because how many events can we all name that are just so objectionable to get people so angry?
01:01:46 ◼ ► But those are just if you've been in this game for a couple of decades, you're like those things happen.
01:01:54 ◼ ► It's like, but what does it take for you to like stop believing that these things are going to get better?
01:02:07 ◼ ► And honestly, all the discovery in the court cases has really accelerated this, I think, for everybody, because you no longer we always say, well, who knows what's going on inside Apple?
01:02:15 ◼ ► Well, we don't know what's going on inside Apple, but we have actual like literal evidence of some of the things that are going on, actual words from actual people.
01:02:30 ◼ ► So anything you you were able to believe before and it's like, well, here's the people saying the stuff.
01:02:37 ◼ ► And really, I think I honestly, you know, not setting aside whether the wisdom of the court cases and how they're going to turn out.
01:02:44 ◼ ► If you've lived through the Microsoft antitrust trial, you know, these things don't necessarily go the way you think they will, even if you're heavily in favor of them.
01:02:55 ◼ ► And all of it has been in support of the idea of like these people are not going to change.
01:03:00 ◼ ► And, you know, you can look at the there's a number of, you know, counter arguments to this.
01:03:06 ◼ ► People say like, well, Tim Cook is making the company a lot of money and has made the company a lot of money.
01:03:11 ◼ ► He has grown the company tremendously from when, you know, when Jobs died and and Cook really took over like fully.
01:03:24 ◼ ► Apple has, you know, has expanded its dominance in so many ways and has expanded its scale in so many ways.
01:03:39 ◼ ► Like just in terms on as measured by Steve Ballmer metrics, like he's like, I don't know, 100 times better.
01:03:46 ◼ ► So you write in like if you're just looking at those specs, they're of a similar type, if that's what you care about.
01:03:57 ◼ ► He has been a better Steve Ballmer than Steve Ballmer was, but he's still a Steve Ballmer.
01:04:02 ◼ ► I wouldn't call him a Steve Ballmer, but I would say along those metrics of like financial metrics and expansion of the company, he's done amazingly well.
01:04:08 ◼ ► He also, for, you know, in all fairness to Steve Ballmer, Tim Cook also inherited a much more, a much better ship, I think.
01:04:16 ◼ ► But he did like, I don't want to like do a postmortem on maybe we'll end when he eventually leaves.
01:04:20 ◼ ► But I think like if you look at the size of things like Ben Thompson was talking about this and dithering a little bit this week too.
01:04:25 ◼ ► Like the company he inherited had so much going for it, but it had not as many of the things that we currently attribute to Apple.
01:04:33 ◼ ► Like the company that he inherited was not in a position to make as many iPhones as they make now, let alone sell them.
01:04:48 ◼ ► Like I don't have a lot of objections to most of the things that Tim Cook has done with Apple.
01:04:54 ◼ ► It is particular stances and policies and, you know, as I said in the post here, losing sight of the fact that what you're supposed to – what has made Apple successful is doing what nobody else wants to do, which is just concentrate on making great products and have faith that money will come from that.
01:05:10 ◼ ► That's what brought them to where they are today and losing sight of that is a terrible mistake.
01:05:23 ◼ ► Although I will also point out, you know, people often say that, you know, that the scale of Apple today is all because of Tim Cook.
01:05:32 ◼ ► Like, you know, the scale of manufacturing in China, which I'll get back to in a minute.
01:05:35 ◼ ► But like they ascribe all that to Tim Cook because before he was a CEO, Tim Cook was the COO and he was famous for all that scaling stuff.
01:05:44 ◼ ► When people say that, they're usually saying in the context of, well, we need Tim Cook now more than ever because he's the operations person and with all the, you know, possible tariff stuff or instability with China that Tim Cook is the one we need right now, the leader we need right now to get us out of this mess.
01:06:03 ◼ ► And I would point out, like, the CEO has a lot more on their plate as a role than all the operational details.
01:06:13 ◼ ► And Jeff Williams is probably the one who is most responsible for that kind of operational stuff these days.
01:06:43 ◼ ► Right at the beginning, Tim Cook had said in interviews and people said, like, he's not a product person.
01:06:49 ◼ ► OK, well, the outgoing CEO, Steve Jobs, was like one of the world's greatest product people who left in his in his wake one of the world's greatest product companies.
01:07:36 ◼ ► Like he's always been delegating into his various product leads, which is part of why I've got into trouble with like the the bad laptops.
01:07:46 ◼ ► Like at various times he's allowed the company to go in bad directions on product because he can't make the can't and didn't make those calls himself.
01:07:57 ◼ ► And it took a while for like the the you know, the the right compiled debug loop to solve that problem.
01:08:03 ◼ ► That's why you had these big like we're going to revise the laptops and we're going to have the Mac roundtable and say we care about the Mac and we're going to do a real Mac Pro like there had they came to crises, but they were able to resolve them.
01:08:14 ◼ ► And obviously, if you have someone at the very top with better product sense, you don't let that go to a crisis as much.
01:08:22 ◼ ► You just need somebody with who's either more a little bit more engaged or has a little bit more faith in their own taste in that regard to not essentially delegated and delegated as much as he had to delegate it.
01:08:33 ◼ ► Like I to his credit, he delegated and also to his credit, he was able to write the ship several times after running at a ground after after the people he delegated to ran at a ground.
01:08:47 ◼ ► But like now he's the one running at the ground on the whole like stubbornness about all the anti-competitive stuff.
01:08:53 ◼ ► Well, and I mean, look, I can point to a lot of things in the Tim Cook era that show that he made poor decisions.
01:09:22 ◼ ► Simply, number one was like putting Johnny Ive in charge of software design showed a pretty large lack of understanding of software design.
01:09:32 ◼ ► Having Johnny go a little bit too nuts with some of the product decisions of like making things like too thin at the cost of reliability.
01:09:46 ◼ ► We heard many times that Tim had basically abandoned the Mac in favor of thinking the iPad was the future of computing for a few years there.
01:09:57 ◼ ► And the hardware reflected that because, again, he didn't really understand the Mac, which is a pretty big part of Apple's product line.
01:10:05 ◼ ► He also, you know, when the butterfly keyboard thing happened, what we heard from a few different people over the span of that, which lasted, again, way too long, what we heard is basically like that they were too cheap to change the manufacturing line too soon.
01:10:28 ◼ ► I don't know what I heard about the butterfly keyboard is mostly that people kept telling Tim Cook that we're going to fix it this time and he believed them like three too many times.
01:10:37 ◼ ► That's less than like we wanted to get our money's worth out of the line because I feel like he was saying, what do we need to do to fix this?
01:10:51 ◼ ► And maybe he's motivated to believe them because he wants to recoup costs on the manufacturing line for the keyboards.
01:11:04 ◼ ► Bigger picture, iPhone sales have been great, you know, but it's not like, you know, growing anymore.
01:11:14 ◼ ► They spent a long time, tons of talent, billions of dollars trying to make a car, which seemed like a bad idea right from the start.
01:11:25 ◼ ► It seemed like it was all over the place with its goals and all sorts of problems that reflected a lack of, I think, reality on Tim Cook's side.
01:11:46 ◼ ► You can point to, you know, a lot of big and small releases or decisions Apple has made over time that shows that at a big scale, Tim Cook was really weird at product decision making.
01:11:57 ◼ ► And at a small scale, they seem to, very frequently under his leadership, profoundly misread the room or fail to read the room.
01:12:05 ◼ ► For a large corporation that's making a bunch of money, it's easy to overlook all those flubs because you can say, well, they're making a bunch of money.
01:12:16 ◼ ► When you look at how much of the world economy is invested in Apple, like if Apple shares take a hit, that affects like people's retirement funds all across the world, like the amount of money involved in Apple and the effect they have on the global market is not insignificant.
01:12:39 ◼ ► But as Tim Cook grew into that financial state, he did it with two massive strategic risks.
01:12:51 ◼ ► And no one for the last 20 years has said, we should definitely pour more reliance into China.
01:13:06 ◼ ► They knew it from the start, and they decided for various reasons, maybe it was necessity for a while, but it probably hasn't been necessity for a long time if they actually made the right investments earlier.
01:13:25 ◼ ► And now Apple is very vulnerable in key areas because Tim Cook took way too much of a risk with over-reliance on China.
01:13:45 ◼ ► But on that front, this is a case where I would say it's kind of like the butterfly keyboard, but even more so because I feel like, yeah, he's done that.
01:13:53 ◼ ► He went to China because it was at the time the only option, and he invested heavily in it, and it led to Apple's success that it has today.
01:14:00 ◼ ► But if I had to pick a single person to both recognize when Apple needs to start diversifying away from China and to execute that, I'd pick Tim Cook.
01:14:09 ◼ ► He's the best positioned person to fix his own mistake because this is what he's the best at.
01:14:16 ◼ ► And, you know, we have some items that may be in future shows, but Apple is trying to fix it in various ways, like trying to say that every new iPhone they sell next year is going to be not made in China.
01:14:27 ◼ ► Every new iPhone they sell in the U.S. is going to be not made in China to avoid tariffs and stuff like that.
01:14:31 ◼ ► But anyway, like I agree with you that it was it was a risk and they went too far and they took too long.
01:14:39 ◼ ► But I would pick him as the person to fix this problem because I think this is the kind of problem that he does see and does recognize and is not digging in his heels and saying, no, we're never going to manufacture any place except for China.
01:14:55 ◼ ► So that's why as much as that concerns me and bothers me and as a huge problem as it is for Apple, Tim Cook is the best equipped person to fix it.
01:15:02 ◼ ► I don't know that I agree because I think we see that Tim Cook is not great at evaluating long term risks.
01:15:18 ◼ ► Like I said, I think he prioritizes the long term profits because that China investment is decades long and it was it gave so many profits.
01:15:47 ◼ ► Jason went through and, you know, ran the numbers of like basically what percentage of Apple's profit, not revenue, what percentage of Apple's profit is likely to be tied to the Google search default deal and app store revenue.
01:16:07 ◼ ► I believe the ballpark he came up with is possibly like a third or a quarter of their profit.
01:16:15 ◼ ► What that means is that Tim Cook has over the last, you know, 10 years, whatever it's been by pushing the services narrative, which, as I mentioned last episode, I think is a misnomer.
01:16:30 ◼ ► You know, they want to tell you that all this money is from Ted Lasso, but a huge chunk of this money is from fees and commissions they collect based on their market position.
01:16:39 ◼ ► And so I think it should be called fees or maybe like, you know, commissions and services would be a better, you know, a more accurate title for this category of revenue.
01:16:48 ◼ ► And when you look at, you know, fees and commissions, like, well, those can be a little precarious because why are they getting this, you know, big Google default search deal?
01:17:14 ◼ ► And developers tolerate this giant tax that they put that kind of strangles the market and constrains what we can build and constrains the type of business that can even exist in the modern computing world.
01:17:26 ◼ ► Those are all the hallmarks of if you look throughout time, you can say like, yeah, they built their own platform.
01:17:31 ◼ ► Well, but the railroads built their own tracks and the power companies built their own power lines.
01:17:36 ◼ ► Many utilities and critical infrastructure companies are either regulated or literally taken over by governments because once they get so large, they start to serve such an important role to all of commerce that the private companies who own them would abuse them in a regular unregulated system.
01:17:56 ◼ ► That's why you have things like the AT&T breakup, all the phone lines that were everywhere.
01:18:03 ◼ ► And so they could say, well, we demand whatever terms we want on the phone lines across all of America.
01:18:11 ◼ ► You look at any large infrastructure or platform in history before the era of the personal computer, and that's how things worked.
01:18:20 ◼ ► Monopolies would occasionally develop and governments would step in to regulate them because they became so big and society became so dependent on them in such a large scale that regulation was necessary to prevent the owners from being abusive and putting too large of a tax on society.
01:18:38 ◼ ► The Apple and Google duopoly has really put this in a position of like, yes, this is obviously something that needs to be regulated by the government for all of those reasons that all those things in history were always regulated.
01:18:52 ◼ ► So what Tim Cook has done, he's led his company into a huge risky position with China and a huge risky position of having a huge chunk of his profit and much of their growth as a company, as a stock, is now relying on these incredibly precarious revenue sources that both are likely to be regulated down or out of existence and also have nothing to do with making the product better for the users.
01:19:23 ◼ ► The problem is Apple's incentives now, and this has been this way for a while under Cook, the incentives are shifting away from making the right decision to make great products.
01:19:44 ◼ ► And I love like the comparisons that we've been hearing with the App Store ruling and the in-app purchase stuff.
01:19:52 ◼ ► The comparison we've been hearing have been saying things like, you know, well, if Apple like loses all of this money from the App Store and almost with the presumption that, of course, they're going to lose.
01:20:00 ◼ ► Like, of course, once people can link out to the web to make purchases, of course, they're going to lose 100% of their App Store revenue.
01:20:06 ◼ ► The reason people say that is because the idea that Apple might just compete is so remote and laughable to us now.
01:20:14 ◼ ► They have put themselves in a position where they're super dependent on risky conditions that Tim Cook himself built and the company now relies on.
01:20:25 ◼ ► And all of that is not with aligned incentives towards making the products better for the customers because, you know what, where else they can get growth?
01:21:12 ◼ ► I think knowing what Cook knew when he took over Apple, I think he did exactly what he should have done.
01:21:19 ◼ ► I think the problem is that either he didn't realize the error in his ways, particularly with regard to China, or he didn't realize quickly enough.
01:21:28 ◼ ► So that now, with this madman at the helm of the United States again, now Cook needs to figure out how to work around that.
01:21:38 ◼ ► And I would have hoped that he would have already had one to two to ten backup plans ready to rock, you know, such that a switch just needs to be flipped.
01:21:49 ◼ ► I know it's not actually that simple, but it sure seems like I have only heard in the last couple of years that, oh, we're talking about Indonesia and we're talking about India and all these other places where we can assemble iPhones.
01:22:03 ◼ ► And I feel like Cook firing on all cylinders would have perhaps fired up these alternative approaches years before when the oh, crap moment happens.
01:22:16 ◼ ► Well, we'll see if he follows through on the supposed rumor that, I don't know if it was rumor or just flat out stated, which is like, hey, the next iPhone that we sell, like in September, every one of the ones that we sell in the United States will not be built in China.
01:22:31 ◼ ► And if he does pull that off, that shows that there was lots of forethought and planning because that's not the type of thing you do.
01:22:41 ◼ ► So if they can if they can actually pull off, oh, we got a new administration somewhat surprisingly and suddenly selling things made in China and the United States is undesirable.
01:22:52 ◼ ► So for our next phone, we're just going to make them all in Brazil and India and Vietnam and Malaysia or whatever, like no phone sold in the U.S. will say made in China on it.
01:23:10 ◼ ► But like that is a difficult problem in that like there's no obvious alternative and building up alternatives is expensive and time consuming and is probably going to take just as long as the buildup in China did.
01:23:23 ◼ ► But yeah, like it's it's not like he didn't think about it or didn't have backup plans.
01:23:29 ◼ ► And it's not like it's you know, we all agree that like this is a fairly unprecedented dramatic term of events policy wise in this country, because as you noted of the new administration being ridiculous and still still he's finding a way to navigate that.
01:23:43 ◼ ► Like this is what I think Tim Cook is actually the best at, even if he goes a little bit too long and too hard and too heavily into China.
01:23:55 ◼ ► It's all the other stuff that like it was like what Marco was saying, like making making decisions that aren't trying to make the product better.
01:24:03 ◼ ► Like putting the cart before the horse or whatever the phrase is like I put this quote from the Ambrosia software page is the sort of the centerpiece of my post.
01:24:11 ◼ ► I don't even know if it's a real quote, because who knows, it would probably be in a different language anyway.
01:24:14 ◼ ► But virtue does not come from money, but rather from virtue comes money and all other good things to man.
01:24:20 ◼ ► The idea is you if you chase money, if you try to do the thing that's going to make you money, you'll fail.
01:24:28 ◼ ► You need to try to do the thing that makes good products, that makes your customers happy, that makes people want to buy your stuff.
01:24:45 ◼ ► You have to try to be a company that makes things people want and have confidence that if you just do that and to Tim Cook's credit, he has followed through on that philosophy from Steve Jobs for just years and decades.
01:24:58 ◼ ► Like even like stuff like the car program, do the thing that you think is going to make a great product that people really want.
01:25:46 ◼ ► But yeah, I give him a lot of leeway to pursue attempts to, you know, to pursue virtue where
01:26:05 ◼ ► And we can name like it's not hard to name the places where Apple, as led by him, is clearly
01:26:31 ◼ ► over the last few years exploded with disruption and promise and development and excitement
01:27:00 ◼ ► doing what I believe Ben Thompson suggested a few months back of just like just be a better
01:27:06 ◼ ► Like, you know, be like have all these things run on the iPhone through extension points or
01:27:15 ◼ ► you can replace a web browser like that would actually have been a better path in the path
01:27:19 ◼ ► But all those specifics aside, like the fact is Microsoft missed mobile and that really hurt
01:27:33 ◼ ► I don't see any evidence that they are able to do it in any reasonable reasonably competitive
01:27:57 ◼ ► Yeah, but they spent a whole bunch of time and money on larks that really didn't have much
01:28:11 ◼ ► No, it's it's more like it's more like Apple was they were willing like he was willing to
01:28:18 ◼ ► But because he has such terrible product sensibilities, they just picked the wrong ones.
01:28:23 ◼ ► They picked R&D projects that seemed really cool to, I guess, Johnny Ive and maybe Mike
01:28:30 ◼ ► I don't know who I don't know how the like it seemed like Tim had a profoundly bad product
01:28:39 ◼ ► And meanwhile, here is this huge new world of tons of opportunity and development and potential
01:28:47 ◼ ► And they're just not competitive at all in that world because they didn't take it seriously
01:28:59 ◼ ► But I do think the strategy as articulated last WWC, I think the strategy actually is a good
01:29:04 ◼ ► They just have utterly failed to execute that strategy, which is kind of an important part
01:29:10 ◼ ► So like but like the idea like so setting aside like, oh, do you just want to be a platform where
01:29:16 ◼ ► The idea of, you know, to recap the Apple intelligence strategy is like, look, Apple has all this
01:29:27 ◼ ► If we can leverage all of that as the platform owner, we can do a more private, more secure
01:29:48 ◼ ► And this is a more privacy focused thing where we're not scraping up all your information
01:29:58 ◼ ► So they have a good idea and a good strategy and they were late with it and they haven't
01:30:03 ◼ ► But on on the AF front, like I feel like the AF front is kind of like all the other things
01:30:16 ◼ ► not not too many things related to AI actually run afoul of the the core rot at the center
01:30:25 ◼ ► of Apple that I'm saying is not going to change the leadership changes with the one exception
01:30:28 ◼ ► of the thing that you mentioned about, like, well, why don't you just become a better platform
01:30:32 ◼ ► That's where you start touching the the third rail of Apple leadership, which is like, oh,
01:31:00 ◼ ► And our new strategy is we're the best hosts for other people's AI stuff because ours sucks.
01:31:07 ◼ ► But if it was their strategy, everyone would be looking at it and saying, oh, well, who's going
01:31:10 ◼ ► to plug their LLM into your phones if they have to give you X percent of their money or
01:31:22 ◼ ► But I think this is going to prove long term to be important enough and that Apple has such
01:31:39 ◼ ► But they're like they're going to end up, I think, having to spend a lot of it to acquire
01:31:44 ◼ ► or merge with a good AI company because I don't see any sign that they can do this themselves.
01:31:49 ◼ ► Whatever that costs them, you should deduct that from what you think of Tim Cook's expertise
01:32:06 ◼ ► This is Apple's Diet of Worms by Joan Westenberg, who is a writer that I was not previously
01:32:22 ◼ ► A company once defined by joyful provocation by thinking different is now defined by its
01:32:43 ◼ ► It has the resources to adapt, the talent to reinvent, the reach to still shape the culture.
01:33:01 ◼ ► If you don't like my matter-of-fact writing style, then you want a more flowery approach.
01:33:27 ◼ ► I feel like that's kind of like the return and triumph of the Newton project is essentially the iPhone.
01:33:32 ◼ ► It's like finally we have the technology to do what we tried to do way too early because the Pepsi guy told us to.
01:33:42 ◼ ► There's a couple of fun pieces of Apple-related, Apple-adjacent media that I wanted to call people's attention to.
01:33:49 ◼ ► A lot of people have been talking about these over the last week because, hey, guess what?
01:33:54 ◼ ► First of all, the Search Engine podcast, which I don't currently make a habit of listening to, but on the occasions I listen to it, I always really enjoy it.
01:34:02 ◼ ► They did an episode on the Dave and Buster's anomaly where it was discovered that if you do a voice message, like an iMessage where you're just recording your voice, you're not doing transcription, mind you.
01:34:16 ◼ ► You're just recording your voice and sending a wave, so to speak, or wav over your iMessage.
01:34:23 ◼ ► Then if you say the words Dave and Buster's, the recipient would never receive that audio file, which is bananas.
01:34:30 ◼ ► And they go through and talk about what was going on and eventually figured it out or had a pretty good theory about it.
01:34:37 ◼ ► And then friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, was listening to this, apparently stopped listening to it and did some spelunking in order to figure out what he thought the situation was.
01:34:47 ◼ ► And that is a much more technical write-up, but also excellent, so I wanted to call that to people's attention.
01:34:57 ◼ ► I'm pretty sure this is where I got it from, but there's a conversation between Patrick Collison and Johnny Ive.
01:35:11 ◼ ► And for all of the things that I blame on Johnny Ive, of which there are many, including but not limited to the butterfly keyboard, he's really smart and really good at what he does in the broad scheme of things.
01:35:29 ◼ ► I don't know, like Johnny Ive, obviously his resume is, you know, basically, you know, will never be equal probably in terms of how important, like he's amazing work, right?
01:35:41 ◼ ► But every time I see him talk, I'm like, yeah, this is why I wouldn't let an unencumbered Johnny Ive anywhere near a product that I wanted to make.
01:35:50 ◼ ► Because he's got amazing talent and he's got great ideas and he's got good instincts, but he's also got some really bad instincts and ideas.
01:35:58 ◼ ► I feel like, I don't know if that has changed about him as he's aged or that was always like that and he was always constrained.
01:36:18 ◼ ► All right, maybe I should have saved that for after this next segment, but I don't have too much to say about it.
01:36:24 ◼ ► We should try to at least plow through it real quick because I promised we would last week.
01:36:35 ◼ ► Backblaze, a loss-making data storage business mired in lawsuits, sham accounting in Brazen, Brazen, Brazen?
01:36:45 ◼ ► Reading from this post from Morpheus Research, which we'll talk about who they are in a second.
01:36:58 ◼ ► I did look and they are not currently slated to sponsor again, or at least I didn't see them in the docket.
01:37:17 ◼ ► In October 2024, two former senior employees filed a suit against Backblaze, alleging accounting fraud, inflated projections, and whistleblower retaliation.
01:37:26 ◼ ► One lawsuit was filed by Backblaze's former vice president of investor relations, James Kaisner, while the other was filed by former senior director of financial planning and analysis, or FP&A, Huey Hall.
01:37:35 ◼ ► To keep its stock price afloat, Backblaze pressured employees to certify inaccurate financial statements, according to former director of FP&A Hall.
01:37:43 ◼ ► Throughout our investigation, we found Backblaze's track record reveals a management team lacking transparency and willing to take aggressive and possibly illegal steps to create an illusion of financial performance to support their own exit liquidity.
01:37:54 ◼ ► After extensive research, we believe the evidence justifies a short position in shares of Backblaze.
01:38:02 ◼ ► And Morpheus research may profit from short positions held by others. Ding, ding, ding.
01:38:05 ◼ ► This report represents our opinion, and we encourage all readers to do their own due diligence.
01:38:11 ◼ ► I am way outside my depth, to be completely honest with you, so take everything I'm about to say with copious amounts of salt, but this smelled kind of fishy to me.
01:38:21 ◼ ► In the sense that people who want, people who wish for Backblaze to perceive badly say, hey, Backblaze should be perceived badly.
01:38:33 ◼ ► How short-selling works is essentially you are betting that a stock price will go down, and there's always the two sides of this.
01:38:39 ◼ ► It's like, okay, well, if you are betting that a stock price will go down, and by the way, short positions have, like, an unlimited downside, practically, so you better hope it doesn't go up.
01:38:52 ◼ ► You obviously want it to go down, but also, when you pick which company to short, you're looking for companies that you think will go down.
01:38:59 ◼ ► So it's not like, oh, you just pick a company out of a hat and say, I'm going to get a short position on them, and then I just trash talk them, right?
01:39:07 ◼ ► No, you look for the company that you think is going to go down, and then you explain to people, we've got a short position on company X because we think it's going to go down, and here's why.
01:39:19 ◼ ► You know, there is always, if you're running a company, you're always like, these short sellers, they just latch on to us, and then they say terrible things about us because they just want the stock price to go down, and everything they're saying is wrong, and it's not true.
01:39:32 ◼ ► Tesla always does that, or whatever, oh, it's all, anyone has complaints about the company, it's just short sellers trying to make the stock price go down.
01:39:40 ◼ ► They're out there trying to find a company that they think the price is going to go down, and they do research on them, and they say, look at this company, they have lots of problems, and I think their stock price is going to go down.
01:39:48 ◼ ► So, you know, again, I'm no financial expert, but be aware that both of those forces are in play whenever there is a short position, and the things you just read are very clearly from a company that probably honestly thinks that the stock price is going to go down.
01:40:05 ◼ ► Yeah, like, so it's probably, like, it is a huge grain of salt, like, even bigger than Casey said, like, the fact that, like, yes, like, they, like, not only do they need the stock to go down, the more the stock goes down, the more money they'll make.
01:40:21 ◼ ► So, so they, they directly financially benefit from if everyone else makes the stock go down, too.
01:40:31 ◼ ► So, it is, like, it is a pretty, it's a pretty biased position to try to take their advice.
01:40:38 ◼ ► However, it does indicate, like, yeah, there's, there's some shenanigans going on in this company.
01:40:48 ◼ ► I 100% believe almost everything that they say there, like, these are problems with the company, because these are problems that lots of companies have.
01:40:57 ◼ ► The people at the top just wanted to get their money and cash out, and people, you know, fibbing about how well the company's doing and trying to hide how it's doing badly.
01:41:19 ◼ ► So, Backblaze initially responded to Ars Technica, and Patrick Thomas, Backblaze's VP of Marketing, said the report is inaccurate and misleading, based largely on litigation of the same nature, and a clear attempt by short sellers to manipulate our stock price for financial gain.
01:41:51 ◼ ► They basically say, yeah, there were some bad things going on, but, you know, we hired third-party people to check out our accounting, and we've been cleared of all wrongdoing, and we're doing great, and I know there's problems.
01:42:05 ◼ ► The short sellers' description is not the whole truth, and Backblaze's everything is going great is also not the whole truth.
01:42:12 ◼ ► But anyway, I just, you know, if you wanted to see the company's response, they have one.
01:42:23 ◼ ► One of the quotes that MJ quoted was, however, linked financial results do confirm that the company lost about $50 million in 2024 and about $60 million in 2023.
01:42:45 ◼ ► B2 is now more than half the business, and the APRU for B2 customers is $645 versus $159 for the computer backup customers.
01:42:54 ◼ ► Additionally, Cornchip writes, Backblaze doesn't break out profitability by product division anymore.
01:43:04 ◼ ► The cost of revenue largely comes from the B2 side because S3-compatible object storage intensely competes on price per gigabyte, whereas computer backup competes on perceived trust, UI, etc.
01:43:21 ◼ ► One is the one we're always talking about, which is like get Backblaze, put it on your Mac, and have your Mac be backed up over the cloud for an unlimited amount for each Mac for a very low price.
01:43:31 ◼ ► And the other thing is B2, which is like S3, which is like, do you have some data you want to put in the cloud?
01:43:43 ◼ ► It's like, who has the cheapest price per gigabyte that gives you the performance and durability that I need?
01:44:00 ◼ ► If our durability and latency and throughput things meet your needs, maybe you should go with that.
01:44:05 ◼ ► And that's a very different business than here's some software that you put on your Mac to back it up to the cloud.
01:44:13 ◼ ► Like I said, they're not even a sponsor anymore, although they should be because I still think they're good.
01:44:36 ◼ ► But anyway, the thing about backup services, if Backblaze goes up in a ball of flames and the company goes under and the CEO loots the company and just falls to ashes or whatever, oh, well, I'll pick a different backup service.
01:44:51 ◼ ► And, you know, even though it's sealed with an encryption key, technically that encryption key, you're sending it that could be sent.
01:44:59 ◼ ► Like, there is the thing of like, look, if you really think this company is like bad news and has been infiltrated by hackers or the CEO is trying to steal all your data and sell it, then, yeah, you should stop.
01:45:10 ◼ ► What I see, even if I take the short seller's word 100%, like everything they say is 100% true, it's just a company with a bunch of people who are trying to make money and not doing well at it and want to get out with their golden parachutes and are lying about how well they're doing.
01:45:26 ◼ ► They really want to crack open all my files and look at it because that's their path to riches.
01:45:33 ◼ ► They're not even there's not even rumors that they're like trying to train AI and all my files and stuff.
01:45:39 ◼ ► So I'm like, if that was the rumor, I would say maybe pull your stuff out of Backblaze.
01:45:43 ◼ ► But even if you take 100% of the worst things people can say about Backblaze, from what we know now, I would say keep using them until they go out of business because they are the best at what they do in terms of price and performance.
01:46:04 ◼ ► I think they should sponsor the program again because I highly recommend them because honestly, if they go away and die, I don't know what I'll do.
01:46:14 ◼ ► There are alternatives to Backblaze is just so low cost, fire and forget, low effort on your computer and they update it and the people who wrote their software know what they're doing on Mac OS.
01:46:30 ◼ ► I'm still going to keep being a Backblaze customer because, I mean, look, the company's finances, like honestly, you know, I know this might sound a little bit callous, but like the company's finances are not my problem.
01:46:41 ◼ ► And so if they've worked this out, if they are still in business, fine, it's I don't need to know their finances.
01:46:49 ◼ ► And if it becomes your problem because they go out of business, you'll just you'll, you know, try Arc or another service or you'll try Crash Point.
01:46:55 ◼ ► Like you'll go to a competitor because it's not like it's not like like I have invested all my what system am I using for my family photos?
01:47:05 ◼ ► If a backup service goes away, delete all your data off it, hopefully delete it all, and you start backing up to a new service.
01:47:45 ◼ ► This week on Overtime, the bonus topic for members will be about SSD longevity and long-term data storage and how we do that and some interesting new developments on SSDs.
01:49:14 ◼ ► This is a topic I began a few weeks ago, and we basically just got through Ubiquity and stopped because it was so long.
01:49:27 ◼ ► But what failed was I had connected an SFP third-party module to get 10 gigs out of one of the switches over Ethernet.
01:49:53 ◼ ► Anyway, what connects all of these network things together is a whole bunch of network cable, of course.
01:50:06 ◼ ► So I have – long-term listeners might know that I have tried in the past to crimp my own ends onto network cables and have failed every single time.
01:50:18 ◼ ► I thought that got a lot better since I did it in my high school home, you know, in the late 90s.
01:50:39 ◼ ► Like, you know, I took a bunch of measurements of, like, how long does this cable need to be?
01:50:48 ◼ ► And I got Cat 6A for, you know, the important runs, Cat 6 for, you know, like the kind of sub-runs.
01:51:12 ◼ ► So that's – however, at one point – so there is an ATM in the restaurant because, you know, you're on an island.
01:51:27 ◼ ► And I realized it was because one of the wires that I thought was no longer in use and had cut was, in fact, the ATM's Cat 5 wire.
01:51:56 ◼ ► So I got one of these kind of generic brand cable crimpers to crimp on Cat 5 or Cat 6 ends onto Ethernet cables.
01:52:40 ◼ ► But then when you had to do the restaurant, you had to do it so many times that eventually you got good at it.
01:52:47 ◼ ► But I'm glad you were forced by your hasty cutting of the ATM to practice it a whole three times before you did it successfully.
01:53:13 ◼ ► So this was, at this time, I had not yet decided that I was going to replace the cameras, like, this year.
01:53:24 ◼ ► It would be a lot easier if I did the cameras now as I'm working with all these wires and as I'm tearing all this stuff out.
01:53:31 ◼ ► So I decided, like, kind of halfway through the spring, I'm going to also replace the cameras.
01:53:36 ◼ ► There were a number of camera mounting points where I had to run wires through holes that went, like, from the inside of the building to the outside of the building or through thick walls in the building where the hole was drilled by, you know, some previous technician years ago to only be the diameter of a wire.
01:54:10 ◼ ► But some of them, that would have been so incredibly destructive or impractical or impossible that I was like, you know what?
01:54:17 ◼ ► I really, if I'm going to use this cable, I'm going to have to, like, you know, either use a cable that's already there because they were all these, like, ancient Cat 5 or Cat 5e cables.
01:54:30 ◼ ► I'm like, I don't, I'd rather run new cable, like, run brand new, nice Cat 6 or, you know, 6A cable.
01:54:35 ◼ ► But, you know, so I was like, I could run it through these holes or they were, more commonly, they were coax wires in the hole.
01:54:47 ◼ ► So I would do things like, you know, tape the, you know, cut off the coax, tape the wire to it and, like, kind of pull it through, you know.
01:55:03 ◼ ► Number one, I learned with practice and not even that much practice, I actually was able to start doing them more consistently and more reliably to the point where now most of the ones I do, I get right on the first try.
01:55:30 ◼ ► And the best thing I learned, though, is all this time using my trusty Cable Matters cable, it matters a lot when you're using a high-quality cable.
01:55:42 ◼ ► It makes it a lot easier to crimp the ends on because the wires in it are themselves higher quality.
01:56:11 ◼ ► I still use them because most of the time, I could still keep one of the stock ends on.
01:56:16 ◼ ► So I would just cut off one end of the cable, run it through wherever I had to run it, and then put my own custom end on the other end.
01:56:32 ◼ ► Like, because I wasn't, I mean, look, at the end of the day, it was not that much cable.
01:56:36 ◼ ► It's not like I'm wiring up a whole office building where, like, the cost would be a significant difference.
01:56:46 ◼ ► And so it actually ended up being fairly easy to still use stock cables for almost everything and just cut off one end of some of them to get them into funny places.
01:57:00 ◼ ► Did you verify that, remember, John, do you remember when we talked years ago about how there's, like, two different internal wiring mechanisms?
01:57:31 ◼ ► And in looking at the diagram, so I am team whatever the big picture in the instruction manual of this thing is.
01:57:55 ◼ ► When we last covered this, it was like one of them was meant to be backward compatible with like regular phone lines.
01:58:02 ◼ ► Well, you can go find that episode of ATP, because we linked to the Wikipedia page and the explanation.
01:58:07 ◼ ► And we talked about that thing, but it was so long ago, I don't remember which was which.
01:58:14 ◼ ► And so I think, I'm pretty sure, I am looking at this diagram, I'm pretty sure I was B.