00:00:05 ◼ ► The big expensive one with the nanotexture on it with too much SSD space that you're never going to use?
00:00:15 ◼ ► So when I had said in the last couple episodes, I had said that I'd tried one in the store, which is true.
00:00:32 ◼ ► Basically, the app that I was discussing in the member special, one of the feasibility tests I wanted to do required the OLED screen.
00:00:42 ◼ ► So I was like, all right, let me do some kind of Black Friday deal this year and get myself one of the new iPads.
00:00:50 ◼ ► I was going to say, there's not a lot of Black Friday deals on the one that nobody should buy.
00:00:55 ◼ ► But anyway, I realized that, like, you know, once I had it, like, in my office for testing against my, you know, old iPad that has the rock, paper, pencil screen protector on it, I realized that even though the nanotexture is better for the pen input, it is not better than the rock, paper, pencil.
00:01:18 ◼ ► Like, the nanotexture, the screen looked better for images on the screen, for video, for content.
00:01:24 ◼ ► Like, the screen looked better, less fuzzy, less distorted than any of the screen protectors.
00:01:36 ◼ ► So, nanotexture was significantly better, in my opinion, for everything except pencil use.
00:01:43 ◼ ► Maybe you should wait until you record the next episode of ATP before you return products, because here we have a just-in-time toot from Brian who suggests that you check out pen tips at pen.tips for different tips for the Apple Pencil, I think.
00:01:59 ◼ ► I actually had the nanotexture iPad for about 10 days, I think, and I did try both pen tips and the paper-like Apple Pencil tips, because I thought maybe that combination would be better.
00:02:12 ◼ ► So, basically, there's this whole industry out there of third-party Apple Pencil tips, and they have various goals in mind.
00:02:19 ◼ ► The one that comes with the rock, paper, pencil is a metal little ball, like a ballpoint pen.
00:02:27 ◼ ► When I'm using the rock, paper, pencil, screen protector, I just use a regular Apple Pencil tip.
00:03:08 ◼ ► Like, it doesn't feel like it's damaging anything, but it adds a little bit more friction.
00:03:13 ◼ ► Paper-like tip with nanotexture was better than nanotexture alone, but it still didn't even come close to one of the screen films.
00:03:22 ◼ ► So, I instead, I returned that iPad, and I got a nice Black Friday deal from Amazon for the regular kind that was $700 less.
00:03:39 ◼ ► And I just got the new version of the paper-like film, which it still is very difficult to install it perfectly.
00:03:46 ◼ ► But they have this very, like, overwrought kind of amazing system now of, like, you have, like, these different layers of film, and you peel one back, and you peel the other thing back, and you put this thing, and it sticks this thing under it.
00:04:00 ◼ ► I still have, like, one dust spec under it, which is annoying, but that's just life, applying these projectors.
00:04:07 ◼ ► But I will say, the Paperlike 3 Protector is better than everything except nanotexture in terms of how clear the screen is.
00:04:19 ◼ ► And the texture of the Paperlike 3 Protector, along with the Paperlike tip on the pencil, feels fantastic.
00:04:27 ◼ ► So, I would say my quest here is over, and so far, my OLED screen tests have actually gone very well.
00:04:33 ◼ ► Well, that's good, and saving a lot of money coming back to the don't-like-nanotexture camp, at least when it comes to handwriting.
00:04:43 ◼ ► When I had that, like, 10-day span of using it, I was, like, you know, bringing it to the coffee shop and everything,
00:04:55 ◼ ► So, if that was not one of my primary goals, I would probably stick with it, especially given how relatively infrequently I upgrade iPads.
00:05:10 ◼ ► macOS Tahoe 26.2 Beta 3 appears to have fixed the Electron slowdown, as per the Shame Electron website, which reads,
00:05:23 ◼ ► That's the only report about this that I've seen, but it is from the person who was tracking which apps had this slowdown.
00:05:30 ◼ ► And to remind everybody, the deal was that Electron, the web-based framework that a lot of Mac apps use,
00:05:43 ◼ ► And apps were slowly being updated to use a fixed version of Electron that didn't use this private API
00:06:08 ◼ ► Did they just, like, rename the API or something and then make the API that everyone else was calling a no-op?
00:06:22 ◼ ► because whether your app has got the new version of Electron or not on 26.2, it won't have this problem.
00:06:30 ◼ ► Mark Ehrman says that Tim Cook's departure is maybe not quite as imminent as we thought.
00:06:48 ◼ ► A respected publication should only predict the CEO transition date for a company of Apple's scale with a high level of confidence based on people legitimately in the know.
00:06:57 ◼ ► Based on everything I've learned in recent weeks, I don't believe a departure by the middle of next year is likely.
00:07:02 ◼ ► In fact, I would be shocked if Cook steps down in time for the famed outline, frame outlined by, in the time frame outlined, excuse me, by the Financial Times.
00:07:10 ◼ ► Some people have speculated that the story was a test balloon orchestrated by Apple or someone close to Cook to prepare Wall Street for a change.
00:07:23 ◼ ► Editor, if you see someone put in test balloon, correct it to trial balloon because I think it is a more common phrasing of that idiom.
00:07:31 ◼ ► Anyway, I don't know if Gurman's sources are better than the Financial Times when it comes to these type of things.
00:07:48 ◼ ► Now, he's got an out here because he says, he's basically saying, I think it's false that he's going to leave in the first six months of next year.
00:07:58 ◼ ► So it is a very, very narrow claim, but it is a very direct claim, which is that they just blew it.
00:08:07 ◼ ► And, you know, as he says, I would be shocked if Cook steps down in the time frame outlined in the Financial Times.
00:08:15 ◼ ► It's a pretty bold call out from Mark Herman, like to basically say, like, they're lying or they're just wrong.
00:08:24 ◼ ► Again, for authors and the Financial Times is not in the Apple rumors game most of the time.
00:08:53 ◼ ► And, you know, I'm guessing they they really double, triple check their sourcing on this.
00:09:09 ◼ ► He does say that he essentially checked his sources that, you know, I haven't heard anything about this.
00:09:19 ◼ ► If it is actually a trial balloon, it could be that Apple has never planned for Tim Cook to step down in the first six months.
00:09:30 ◼ ► Like, there's still lots of room for both people to be right here, because when you do a trial balloon, you're just trying to soften things up.
00:09:37 ◼ ► That's why it looks, you know, you strategically leak at the Financial Times, you soften things up.
00:09:40 ◼ ► And in your head, in Tim Cook's head, whatever, the plan has always been January 2027, right?
00:09:50 ◼ ► But this is a rare case where rather than just saying, here's what because Grumman does this a lot.
00:10:05 ◼ ► And it's happened once in a while where he would say, like, somebody else said some product is coming out and I think it's not.
00:10:15 ◼ ► I would guess Grumman's sources are not as high up as whoever is speaking to the Financial Times about this.
00:10:23 ◼ ► Grumman's sources, like, look, he has a pretty good track record about a lot of things.
00:10:29 ◼ ► But the things that he has a track record about, I don't think are from sources that seem like they're up at the board level.
00:10:52 ◼ ► I mean, sort of, but, like, the number of people who would have heard that is, I think, a very different number than the number of people who would hear about the specific plans that the FT published about and who would leak to the FT about it and who the FT would trust so much to put four different bylines and publish it like that.
00:11:12 ◼ ► Look, Gurman might be right, but I think he has a lot less support behind him when you actually look at, like, you know, what has been laid out here.
00:11:25 ◼ ► With regard to Windows gaming on Linux and ARM, Tyler writes, Proton, which is the SteamOS adapter layer for playing Windows games, runs in user space.
00:11:37 ◼ ► Apex Legends, which is Electronic Arts, did enable Linux support when the Steam Deck launched, but last year blocked it after deciding it was more trouble than it was worth.
00:11:46 ◼ ► User space anti-cheat is always going to be trivial to circumvent, but Linux users are unlikely to tolerate proprietary kernel anti-cheat.
00:11:56 ◼ ► They don't, people who have a Steam Deck don't even know or care that they're running Linux.
00:12:05 ◼ ► But, you know, there's, I know what they're saying, like, your average person who's, like, building a Linux PC that wants the game on it might be annoyed by having to recompile their kernel with something or add an extension.
00:12:19 ◼ ► So I get the sentiment, but for things like the Steam Deck, that's, I don't think it's a barrier.
00:12:24 ◼ ► Well, either way, Tyler continues, Valve is stuck between a rock and a hard place with no easy solution.
00:12:27 ◼ ► David Gaw writes, Windows 11 on ARM is mostly indistinguishable from Windows 11 on Intel these days for almost everything thanks to reliable x86 emulation.
00:12:37 ◼ ► The best Snapdragon PC laptops deliver solid performance and MacBook-like battery life.
00:12:42 ◼ ► Parallels has supported Windows ARM on Apple Silicon for a couple years now and mostly seems fine.
00:12:55 ◼ ► The one area it does all fall down is, once again, gaming thanks to that absence of high-end GPUs.
00:13:01 ◼ ► So, unfortunately, it's mostly gaming, both PC and Mac, that Apple abandoned with the Apple Silicon transition.
00:13:06 ◼ ► A bunch of people wrote in to say that Windows 11 on ARM on Macs is not that terrible and that Microsoft's latest x86 emulation thing works pretty well.
00:13:18 ◼ ► I believe you still can't boot Macs into Windows 11 on ARM, but you can run it in virtualization.
00:13:23 ◼ ► And the x86 emulation, the latest version, should make most x86 Windows applications run decently on Windows 11 on ARM on your ARM-based Mac.
00:13:49 ◼ ► It just annoys me that, like, I mean, for extremely selfish, entirely selfish reasons, I would love it if the entire Windows PC world moved to ARM.
00:14:04 ◼ ► So I'm impatient to get back to the world where I was, where you could boot Windows natively or run it natively in virtualization and have all Windows software run.
00:14:22 ◼ ► If you want to give a great gift this holiday season, to me, the best gifts are, like, personal
00:14:37 ◼ ► Now, yeah, you've seen those before, but most of the ones you've seen have been kind of, eh.
00:15:10 ◼ ► And it's especially optimized if you want to have an Aura Frame that you buy as a gift for someone else.
00:15:16 ◼ ► You can have it connected to you, and you give it to them, and then you can log into Aura and change the pictures on it remotely.
00:15:23 ◼ ► So this is great if you want to, like, share pictures of, like, your kid with their grandparents, maybe.
00:15:37 ◼ ► So if you're sending it to somebody and you can't be there in person when they open it, it can have, of course, a gift message, gift note, and everything.
00:15:43 ◼ ► And then they open it up, and it's preloaded with your photos that you want to show them.
00:16:01 ◼ ► For a limited time, visit AuraFrames.com and get $45 off Aura's best-selling Carver Matte Frames, named number one by Wirecutter, by using promo code ATP at checkout.
00:16:17 ◼ ► This exclusive Black Friday, Cyber Monday deal is their best of the year, so order now before it ends.
00:16:34 ◼ ► Johnny Ive and Sam Altman apparently did an interview together, reading from Stevie Bonifield, who is writing for The Verge.
00:16:44 ◼ ► In an interview with Lorraine Powell-Jobs, Sam Altman and Johnny Ive said that they are currently prototyping the first mysterious OpenAI hardware product.
00:16:51 ◼ ► When asked about a time frame, Ive said it could arrive in, quote, less than, quote, two years.
00:16:55 ◼ ► Little has been revealed so far about the OpenAI device in development, but it's rumored to be screen-free and, quote, roughly the size of a smartphone, quote.
00:17:06 ◼ ► Adding that, there was an earlier prototype that we were quite excited about, but I did not have any feeling of, I want to pick up that thing and take a bite out of it.
00:17:31 ◼ ► Ive says, there's something about when the design gets so simple and beautiful and, like, playful, for lack of a better word.
00:17:38 ◼ ► I mean, there's not a lot of humor in the products that are being designed and made, particularly in this area.
00:17:43 ◼ ► And I really sense very clearly there's a huge desire for us not to take ourselves quite so seriously.
00:18:04 ◼ ► He's not just, like, talking out of his butt like some other people we've seen in presentations.
00:18:14 ◼ ► And speaking of Sam, I remember in a very early meeting, Johnny said, we're going to make people smile.
00:18:27 ◼ ► And I didn't realize until things started to come together how much that just doesn't exist in the current set of tech companies.
00:19:08 ◼ ► I always think of the MacBook Pros just before the current design, like the last Johnny Ive MacBook Pro case design was really a very pretty case design with the tapers and everything.
00:19:23 ◼ ► You know, it made internal packaging a pain before, you know, to get that outward beauty.
00:19:33 ◼ ► And I feel like I'm just picturing something that's kind of like, I don't know, picture the, like the, because I'm sitting here next to me on the desk, the battery for the Vision Pro, but not shaped like that, not shaped like the sort of rounded rectangular is, but shaped more like the last generation MacBook Pro.
00:19:55 ◼ ► But I can picture a shape that is about the size of a smartphone that has no screen, that is not an egg, that is in fact biteable or looks biteable.
00:20:10 ◼ ► But the impression I've gotten so far is that these two guys are super high on their own supply.
00:20:28 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, he does take a lot of, again, if you watch the interview, he does take a lot of cues from Johnny's demeanor and attitude as sort of the younger, less experienced one, right?
00:20:49 ◼ ► I'm just not convinced that his current interests align with what will make a good product.
00:21:04 ◼ ► But Sam's party line that has gotten him all these gazillions of dollars of investment is disconnected with my assessment of their technology.
00:21:31 ◼ ► But just, he talks about it as if it's like, and therefore, you know, suffice it to say, yada, yada, yada, AGI.
00:21:46 ◼ ► And so, when I hear him say things, like, because they, you know, this interview was like, defer to Johnny on design things and ask Sam about AI stuff.
00:21:53 ◼ ► And he just spins out this tapestry of wonder and it's just, all right, all right, Sam.
00:22:01 ◼ ► Like, and connecting the two, it's like, if you have that, you know, again, that dragon or that genie in the bottle, whatever, it doesn't matter how awesome the egg you put it in is.
00:22:25 ◼ ► Whereas, can Johnny take your, you know, so-so chat GPT caliber voice agent and make people want to use it more than they already are by putting it in a pretty egg that they want to bite?
00:22:41 ◼ ► And, and what is, what is the egg going to do other than like, oh, now I can carry it around with me like my phone, but with no screen.
00:22:47 ◼ ► And so I'm, I'm not sure they're barking up the right tree here, but I am fascinated to see what they produce and, uh, and how the world greets it.
00:22:57 ◼ ► It's all in open AI's court because this product lives or dies based on the thing that lives inside the biteable egg, not the egg itself.
00:23:14 ◼ ► You know, the objective path ahead of them is they're trying to sell, we, I mean, again, knowing nothing, nothing about this thing yet, but they're trying to sell another device that you will carry around that is not your phone.
00:23:38 ◼ ► Uh, there, there, there are all these different attempts so far at like makes AI, but hardware to augment slash compete with slash replace maybe your phone.
00:23:49 ◼ ► And what we've seen over and over again is don't bet against the smartphone because most of those things are, they're, they're, they have a premise that people want to use their phones less or people are tired of their phones.
00:24:04 ◼ ► Um, and so if you're trying to replace the phone and you're trying to issue a, a technological gadget that is going to have great technical performance in some way, like high features, high functionality,
00:24:19 ◼ ► or incredible convenience or miniaturization, whatever it is, you're probably going to lose because the smartphone is going to beat you on all those fronts.
00:24:36 ◼ ► Why did everybody buy the little playdate of AI, which I still can't remember the name of rabbit or one.
00:24:55 ◼ ► Because everybody at that company seemed like an out of touch D bag and their thing didn't look cool.
00:25:04 ◼ ► Well, but I think Ive has a better chance of making something that people will, will be irrationally drawn to just because it's cool or it's cute or it's nice or whatever.
00:25:20 ◼ ► And so that's an area they could like people could choose to buy this thing because it is just cool enough.
00:25:32 ◼ ► But then what happened to the rabbit hour when everyone bought one because they look cool, but it turns out it didn't work very well.
00:25:42 ◼ ► But if, you know, if a billion people buy the, the biteable egg, because it's, they just got to have it.
00:25:47 ◼ ► But then they get it and they realize, oh, this is just chat GPT, chat GPT and a biteable egg.
00:25:52 ◼ ► Well, but keep in mind, like, I think you do have a bit of a blind spot here, John, in that you kind of hate chat GPT.
00:26:16 ◼ ► But the reality is like chat GPT has massive consumer mind share, huge market share in terms of actual AI use.
00:26:23 ◼ ► Like I said, they have a product that people already like and use, but I'm not sure what the hardware is going to bring to that.
00:26:31 ◼ ► They have massive ability to market something because of their huge consumer brand recognition.
00:26:47 ◼ ► One thing we know about Johnny Ives is that he is a very good designer who benefits from a really good editor and collaborator.
00:27:00 ◼ ► Then when Johnny didn't have as much editing in the Tim Cook era and he kind of got, you know, too much control and not enough pushback on things, his designs weren't as good in terms of becoming actual products.
00:27:27 ◼ ► Certainly, Sam Altman is going to is a different type of personality than Ive has, I think, collaborated with before.
00:27:35 ◼ ► But I can see them having a very high likelihood of making something that looks cool and that people will irrationally want to buy because it looks cool and that can be marketed very well.
00:27:46 ◼ ► Now, is that going to be enough to overcome all of the headwinds against it in terms of trying to compete with the smartphone and being a whole separate thing to buy and everything?
00:27:56 ◼ ► Honestly, probably not that those are some pretty large forces against you, but maybe they can make something cool.
00:28:07 ◼ ► Like he really just seems to be deferring to Johnny a lot of these things rather than being an editor or his own strong force or whatever.
00:28:18 ◼ ► We talked about this last time they did that intro or whatever, how they were trying to say, oh, phones, you know, they're they take too much of our time and attention.
00:28:29 ◼ ► They likened they likened to using modern, not just phones, but like modern software to like walking around in Times Square where things are blinking in your face and there's lots of things that making demands of you.
00:28:38 ◼ ► And they want it to be they want to make a product that's more calming and chill and relaxing and not just constantly demanding stuff for you.
00:28:45 ◼ ► So, again, a screenless thing that you just talk to in a pleasing way and they want it to know everything about you.
00:28:53 ◼ ► And like that's why they spin off into like it, like, you know, a human level, intelligent, personal assistant that knows everything about you and can do all your things for you.
00:29:06 ◼ ► But in this particular one, Sam either forgot to stay on message or is pushing back a little bit because they kept asking him like, you know, he kept mentioning the phone and he's like, well, you know, don't get me wrong.
00:29:30 ◼ ► So for someone who's trying to say we use our phones too much and they're too upsetting, Sam could not stop gushing about his iPhone, his iPhone in particular.
00:29:37 ◼ ► And granted, Johnny's right there and he's buttering out by saying the iPhone is the greatest thing ever made.
00:29:44 ◼ ► Probably the part that Sam is talking about, the big before and after moment, had less to do with the industrial design of the original iPhone and much more to do with the software that was on it, which Johnny had, I'm assuming, almost nothing to do with.
00:30:06 ◼ ► There's some somewhat insufferable stuff about how wonderful San Francisco was in the beginning.
00:30:10 ◼ ► But once you get through that, well, they, you know, just see how many times Sam says that he loves his iPhone.
00:30:23 ◼ ► And this is like, and of course, you know, lots of that social media stuff has a lot of unintended consequences.
00:30:38 ◼ ► They're the three of them have three subtly different messages that they want to put out.
00:30:56 ◼ ► But it just, as I've said in the past, it seems weird to me that they would wait for the egg to do that and not just, you know, put it in chat GPT 5.1 or whatever they're doing.
00:31:05 ◼ ► And by the way, a brief aside, just to give my bona fides or however you pronounce that of using chat GPT.
00:31:14 ◼ ► I was, for reasons that annoy me, my, well, one of my banks updated all of our account numbers.
00:31:22 ◼ ► So anything that had any kind of like auto pay on a credit card or whatever, you know, direct, you've got to go into all those things and enjoy finding where you can change the auto pay or delete and add a new one.
00:31:40 ◼ ► And I was doing it and you, during the course of doing it, you will encounter pages that are like, okay, you're lucky enough that we have an edit screen, which is rare.
00:31:50 ◼ ► But they had an actual edit screen and here's a text field and it's got a bunch of like asterisks in it or something like a little asterisks.
00:32:16 ◼ ► Because I just wanted the JavaScript code that would like stop the thing that forbids copy and paste.
00:32:22 ◼ ► And ChatGPT gave me a bunch of JavaScript to put into the console, all of which I looked at and understood.
00:32:37 ◼ ► At the time, I know there's Chrome extensions that explicitly, like I have autocomplete everywhere on that, you know, stops websites from forbidding autocomplete.
00:32:49 ◼ ► And I don't know if stop the madness has a Chrome extension as well as a Safari extension.
00:32:58 ◼ ► The reason I'm in Chrome is when I'm doing bank stuff, I have no confidence that banks' websites work in Safari.
00:33:05 ◼ ► It's been a long time since I can remember going to a bank's website that didn't work in Safari.
00:33:18 ◼ ► It does not know everything about my life, nor is there a clear pathway to it knowing everything about my life forever.
00:33:31 ◼ ► And as you pointed out, Marco, it's vaporware in a situation where there are hundreds of millions of people using a product that they like, but he never wants to talk about that.
00:33:38 ◼ ► He wants to talk about the product that doesn't exist that would be cool if it did exist.
00:33:42 ◼ ► And I agree, it would be cool, but how about just concentrating on the product that you've got and make that one better?
00:33:51 ◼ ► There's a hype gap between what he talks about and the products his company is shipping.
00:33:55 ◼ ► All right, with regard to the Apple N1 Wi-Fi chip, apparently it makes the older Broadcom chips look kind of stinky.
00:34:05 ◼ ► Ookla, the folks behind the speed test app and website, have analyzed about five weeks' worth of users' testing data to get an idea of how the iPhone 17 lineup stacks up to the iPhone 16.
00:34:17 ◼ ► While the N1 isn't at the top of the charts, Ookla says that Apple's Wi-Fi chip, quote,
00:34:21 ◼ ► delivered higher download and upload speeds on Wi-Fi compared to the iPhone 16 across every studied percentile and virtually every region, unquote.
00:34:28 ◼ ► Ookla noted that the N1's best performance seemed to improve scores most of all in the bottom 10th percentile performance tests,
00:34:43 ◼ ► Ookla found that the Pixel 10 Pro series slightly edges out the iPhone 17 download speed,
00:35:14 ◼ ► Several weeks ago, we were thinking about why the cameras are situated the way they are in the back of the phone
00:35:27 ◼ ► maybe the triangle camera cluster helps keep a stable perspective when switching lenses as the user zooms in.
00:36:11 ◼ ► Reading from 9to5Mac from October, the Financial Times reports that the British government did indeed withdraw its initial worldwide order,
00:36:21 ◼ ► The Financial Times says the UK government has issued a new order to Apple to create a backdoor into its cloud storage service,
00:36:30 ◼ ► Back to 9to5Mac, the White House has suggested at the time, had suggested at the time, that Britain was completely abandoning its attempt to force Apple's hand.
00:36:37 ◼ ► Now that it has obtained protection for US iCloud users, however, it seems that pressure has been removed.
00:36:43 ◼ ► Financial Times continues, members of the U.S. delegation raised the issue of the request to Apple around the time of Trump's visit,
00:36:52 ◼ ► However, two senior British government figures said the U.S. administration was no longer leaning on the U.K. government to rescind the order.
00:37:00 ◼ ► I'm disappointed to be exactly right to doubt the previous government statements about this and to also doubt their follow-through, but there you have it.
00:37:08 ◼ ► They declared victory when there was none, and the U.K. government still wants something stupid,
00:37:13 ◼ ► and so I'm not sure what Apple's going to do here, but I don't think they're going to be any more particularly inclined to backdoor iCloud just for U.K. citizens.
00:37:34 ◼ ► PACA makes performance apparel from alpaca fiber, one of the world's most sustainable natural fibers.
00:37:41 ◼ ► Their best-selling hoodie is what I'm wearing right now because it's kind of cold tonight, and I need something a little bit cozy, and that's what the PACA alpaca hoodie is.
00:38:14 ◼ ► Each PACA hoodie is handcrafted in Peru by artisans who stitch their name into the tag, their personal signature of quality and care.
00:38:22 ◼ ► And it's made sustainably and ethically from traceable alpaca fiber, which supports the communities and artisans in Peru who bring it to life.
00:38:29 ◼ ► Over 100,000 people have already picked up the PACA hoodie, so, honestly, it's pretty great.
00:38:40 ◼ ► Right now, during PACA's Black Friday slash Cyber Monday sale, you can get 30% off with the purchase of three items or more.
00:39:15 ◼ ► Yeah, I put this in here because the Mac Pro, you got all this fun about my Mac Pro potentially going bye-bye.
00:39:23 ◼ ► German writes, Fitness Plus, the company's app-based Peloton Rival, remains one of its weakest digital offerings.
00:39:33 ◼ ► Still, Fitness Plus has enough loyalty for its small fan base, hi, that Apple can't simply shut it down without a backlash.
00:39:39 ◼ ► And given how inexpensive it is to operate, there's little incentive for a nearly $4 trillion company to pull the plug, especially if such move would generate negative headlines.
00:39:48 ◼ ► The division is getting new management, with Apple Health head stumbled aside, adding Fitness Plus to her portfolio.
00:39:55 ◼ ► But both she and the group that now reports the service is cheap at EQ, both she and that group will now report the service is cheap at EQ.
00:40:01 ◼ ► With that new arrangement in place, the service will be under fresh pressure to improve results.
00:40:08 ◼ ► Yeah, you know, I haven't used Fitness Plus in a while, which is kind of damning given the support.
00:40:15 ◼ ► And typically, as I've said many times in the past, there's a service called Beachbody.
00:40:33 ◼ ► You can just get the fitness videos in a shoe, the supplements, and the pre-workout, and all that other junk that was really gross.
00:40:45 ◼ ► And typically, Aaron and I will go back and forth going through several programs that they have.
00:40:52 ◼ ► And usually, after I finish, like, an eight-week program on that, I'll do a couple of weeks of Fitness Plus to kind of, like, have a palate cleanser.
00:41:08 ◼ ► There's also some news that CNN was pulling out of News Plus because they've got their own pay offering for news stuff.
00:41:21 ◼ ► But it seems like a very Apple-style fitness offering with no real bad parts about it, if you like what they're offering.
00:41:39 ◼ ► News Plus, on the other hand, has always seemed weird and un-Apple-like because it's filled with terrible ads.
00:41:45 ◼ ► And the app isn't very good and it's in that, you know, thing we talked about last week of Apple not really being known as a web-first company.
00:41:55 ◼ ► So News Plus is an app that lets you read things that are also available on the web, but you're not really reading them on the web.
00:42:02 ◼ ► But there are Apple News URLs, so you can read them on the web, but it will launch the app.
00:42:10 ◼ ► Like, I still appreciate News Plus for the purposes of this show because I've subscribed to the Apple One bundle.
00:42:17 ◼ ► But it lets me read, like, the Wall Street Journal without subscribing to the Wall Street Journal because they get the Wall Street Journal articles.
00:42:22 ◼ ► But even that is such a weird dance of, like, you know, find the Wall Street Journal article, it's behind a paywall, and then use the share sheet to open an Apple News, which isn't available.
00:42:33 ◼ ► Anyway, it's confusing and annoying, but it does let me read things that I otherwise would have to pay separately for.
00:42:41 ◼ ► But every time I look at Apple News Plus, I'm like, I can't believe people would open this.
00:42:44 ◼ ► This would be, like, their main news source because it's filled with all the worst ads that you see on the web.
00:42:54 ◼ ► It's just, I don't know, it's so important that out in the chat room, fitness services surely have a lot of churn because, you know, people are dedicated to working out and then, you know, fall out of the habit and then go back and forth, you know.
00:43:08 ◼ ► But it's, I mean, it's the type of thing, the thing that always annoys me about Apple or the current Apple anyway.
00:43:15 ◼ ► Like, let's say, you know, they don't put numbers behind this or whatever, but you might think, oh, well, as long as it's, as long as the money that it brings in exceeds the money that it costs to run it, they'll keep doing it.
00:43:27 ◼ ► But that's not the way a company Apple-sized seems to think, which is, it's not worth our time unless it's going to make us this amount of profit.
00:43:35 ◼ ► Merely being profitable is not sufficient to stay alive, which, you know, again, I think certain things you should do because you think they're an important part of your product before they're not getting to the Mac Pro.
00:43:47 ◼ ► But just like, Apple Fitness Plus seems like an offering that fits in with their online service offering and it is very Apple-like and clean and doesn't have anything gross in it and is a good version of the thing that it's trying to be.
00:44:00 ◼ ► So as long as it's, even if it was losing a little bit of money or breaking email, I would still keep doing it.
00:44:05 ◼ ► But I will also be disappointed it goes away, despite the fact that I've never done Apple Fitness Plus and it doesn't appeal to me at all.
00:44:14 ◼ ► Yeah, and just very, very, very quickly, what I like about it is, first of all, the trainers are, you know, the bubbly, happy Apple trainers you would expect.
00:44:24 ◼ ► Like, they're men and women, they're all different shapes and sizes, and they're really, really enjoyable.
00:44:30 ◼ ► And they're not all American, there's a bunch of Brits, I'm pretty sure there's other nationalities as well that I'm not thinking of, but they're really, really good at what they do.
00:44:42 ◼ ► So if you have an Apple Watch, then your rings will show, assuming you're doing a workout on your Apple TV, your rings will show right there on the TV and update live as you're doing your workout.
00:44:56 ◼ ► Additionally, if you pause the workout on your watch, it will pause playback on the TV, which is really neat.
00:45:07 ◼ ► And again, the workouts you can do, like a five-minute core up to, I think they might have a 40-minute something or other, but they have up to like 30-minute HIIT and strength workouts.
00:45:18 ◼ ► I haven't done, like I said, I haven't done them in a few months now, but I really do like them, and I really think they're really, really well done.
00:45:23 ◼ ► They're very pretty to look at, they're nicely executed, they're accomplishable by people of varying fitness levels, and they always have one person that's like, not remedial, but you know, not working quite as strenuously.
00:45:42 ◼ ► I don't know how strong of a position Apple's services are in besides the taxes and fees.
00:46:08 ◼ ► They won Oscar, they win Emmys, it is, it buffs the brand, whether or not it makes money.
00:46:15 ◼ ► Yeah, and like the other services that we, like the other kind of content services, News Plus, Arcade, and then Fitness, I don't think they do that much.
00:46:27 ◼ ► Like, we almost never hear about them, it doesn't necessarily mean anything, but like, we don't hear that much about them, but I think it's important for Apple, if they're trying to sell their bundle and their subscription, what they're trying to say is, hey, everybody, come sign up for Apple One, and you get all this cool stuff.
00:46:46 ◼ ► And I think in that context, having a fitness service is actually more important than how many people actually end up using the fitness service.
00:46:56 ◼ ► So even if not that many people are using it, I hope Apple can see, like, in the bigger picture, it's nice.
00:47:11 ◼ ► And a lot of people will pay for it, because they're like, yeah, you know what, if I get the, if I spend the extra six bucks a month to get this whole bundle, compared to the pieces I was going to buy separately, I'll get these few other things.
00:47:51 ◼ ► Like, it's trivial, so I hope that they can see in the big picture, like, having the service, even if it doesn't get amazing numbers of direct usage, it does provide a net benefit that might be bigger than that.
00:48:28 ◼ ► So HTX Studio answered or tried to answer the question, is fast charging killing the battery a two-year test on 40 phones?
00:48:38 ◼ ► Using six iPhone 12 models, the channel set up a system to drain batteries from 5% and charge them to 100% over and over again.
00:48:48 ◼ ► Another set of iPhones underwent the same test, but with charging initiated at 30% and stopped at 80%.
00:48:55 ◼ ► I forget the specific hardware they used, but they had a combination of hardware and software that would work together to have the phone tell the hardware,
00:49:07 ◼ ► Anyway, going back to Julie, the results suggest there's minimal additional battery drain from fast charging,
00:49:15 ◼ ► There's such a weird way to test this, you know, because it's kind of like, I guess you would describe it as like integration testing or a system testing,
00:49:22 ◼ ► because they're, you know, they're charging phones, as you noted, like automating the charging of phones.
00:49:31 ◼ ► Like they, you know, this lithium ion battery manufacturers are well aware of the, you know, limits of their batteries and how they behave under various scenarios and whether fast charging and slow charging and yada, yada.
00:49:50 ◼ ► You care how your phone performs in the phone is the battery and the thing that converts the voltage and the charging system and the software and the operating system and the case and the heat dissipation and like a million other variables.
00:50:02 ◼ ► But even there, it's like, okay, well, where were these phones while they were being charged?
00:50:13 ◼ ► Like it's just, it's all sorts of other variables that affect your phone when you're charging it.
00:50:20 ◼ ► Like there's so much, but like they're just sort of rediscovering the same things that the battery manufacturer could have told them,
00:50:28 ◼ ► which is that fast charging is not as good as slow charging, but the difference isn't that big.
00:50:31 ◼ ► And the battery manufacturers, I'm sure, pride themselves on narrowing that gap further and further because they want to sell a battery to phone makers that can tolerate fast charging without hurting the battery.
00:50:49 ◼ ► And this is just sort of proving that out with modern phones of saying, yep, fast charging hurts the battery more, but the gap isn't that big.
00:50:56 ◼ ► And, you know, the conclusion of the video is what we always say about this, which is like, unless you really need to pinch those pennies on resale and you think your battery life is going to fail, just use your phone.
00:51:21 ◼ ► And that means your phone's battery is going to be in worse condition after two years than it wouldn't have been otherwise.
00:51:26 ◼ ► But like, what's the alternative to change your entire life around babying the battery?
00:51:31 ◼ ► You can be aware, you know, if you're a tech nerd, you can be aware of the things that batteries like and don't like.
00:51:54 ◼ ► I'm using it by like using the AI tools in the browser and then, you know, maybe copying and pasting and stuff like that.
00:52:08 ◼ ► Zapier is how you break the hype cycle and stop all the copying and pasting and put AI to work across your company for real.
00:52:21 ◼ ► They can do things like streamline their rev ops, streamline their marketing, integrate with sales, help HR and IT issues and so much more.
00:52:31 ◼ ► Like if I was trying to integrate this into my company, that's where I would start with those kinds of tools.
00:52:45 ◼ ► With Zapier's AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to any workflow.
00:52:52 ◼ ► You connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to the tools that your team already uses.
00:53:10 ◼ ► So you can have AI-powered workflows, agents, chatbots, or whatever else you can orchestrate it all with Zapier.
00:53:53 ◼ ► Marco, now that you run a restaurant and have a staff, has that affected your tipping culture or tipping preferences, etc., when you dine at other restaurants?
00:54:14 ◼ ► Workers in restaurants usually are paid below minimum wage as their base salary because they're expected to make more in tips.
00:54:21 ◼ ► And then that should push them well above the minimum wage in a good restaurant and hopefully at least above it in, you know, kind of a – in like a slow, inexpensive one maybe.
00:54:34 ◼ ► When you are a server at a restaurant, you generally don't stop moving during your shift.
00:54:44 ◼ ► And if you're a good person, you kind of have also the burden that you have to bring up the average from the bad people.
00:54:53 ◼ ► So this includes both, you know, people who don't tip very well, which there are a lot of them, and people who are just kind of jerks.
00:55:12 ◼ ► Just I want to make sure that I'm doing what I can to make this person's day a little bit better because there are a lot of people doing the opposite.
00:55:25 ◼ ► Also keep in mind, too, like the kinds of things servers get blamed for or praised for oftentimes are not the fault in either direction because the server is like the face of the restaurant to the customer for the most part.
00:55:40 ◼ ► Like that's – the server is usually the only employee that the most customers are interacting with or maybe a host up front for a minute, and the server is the rest of it.
00:55:51 ◼ ► Now, the praise, great, you know, good for them, but they also will get the blame for things like if the food is slow to come out, which is not their fault usually.
00:56:02 ◼ ► Or, you know, if the food tastes good, that's also not the server's fault in either direction, you know.
00:56:09 ◼ ► Servers get a lot of people who, you know, blame them a lot or are rude to them, treat them like subservient humans.
00:56:34 ◼ ► You know, I wouldn't – even when I had not that much, if I couldn't afford the tip, I wouldn't go to the restaurant.
00:56:47 ◼ ► Even before we owned the restaurant, it's kind of like in a very, very small form of altruism.
00:57:08 ◼ ► I'm going to try to give this person some of that luck, make their day a little bit better.
00:57:18 ◼ ► And so, I'll go 50% maybe for like a restaurant I like a lot or like unless it's like, you know, $1,000.
00:57:33 ◼ ► For those of you out there who can tip well, I suggest you do because chances are if you have that kind of resources yourself, chances are giving that money to the server, they'll make better use of it than you will.
00:57:45 ◼ ► It'll mean more to them than it means to you, and you're making the world a little bit better place, and you're making up a lot for all the people who don't do that because it's a tough job.
00:57:55 ◼ ► They really work their butts off, and I think it's the right thing to do if you can do it.
00:58:04 ◼ ► No, I mean, I don't go out to restaurants that much, but I tend to tip like pragmatically for like delivery food.
00:58:25 ◼ ► I was tipping fine before, but like now, you know, like Marco level tips because it's like I don't want you to go out of business because you're close by to my –
00:58:32 ◼ ► you just opened, you're close by to my house, you deliver to my address, you're prompt, your food is good.
00:58:37 ◼ ► I don't know how many other people are going there, so hopefully this will keep you going.
00:58:51 ◼ ► It's hard to believe, but in the place that I live, some places have their own – we just had some of it tonight.
00:58:55 ◼ ► Their actual own delivery where people – probably the kids of the people in the restaurant – deliver whatever.
00:59:07 ◼ ► And I tip like – I was at a sit-down restaurant and I tip, you know, basically saying, please stay around.
00:59:24 ◼ ► I think COVID lockdown has probably changed my tipping culture to be extremely generous tipping for people I'd never see in person on top of the delivery fee for delivery food.
00:59:39 ◼ ► I know Marco tries to use packages rarely, if at all, a stance that I find admirable but not exactly pragmatic.
01:00:11 ◼ ► And then I just this week adopted Swift – it's a first-party project, but it's one that you have to bring in using Swift Package Manager.
01:00:30 ◼ ► But there's another one that Apple does wherein they have different data structures, and I needed an orderable dictionary for something that's coming out fairly soon.
01:01:06 ◼ ► But generally speaking, I've come to land on Marco's side of things, which is I avoid it if reasonably possible.
01:01:14 ◼ ► Not because I think my code is necessarily better or anything like that, but I feel like having 100% ownership over everything that happens in the app is something to aspire to, to the degree that you can using SwiftUI and UIKit and so on and so forth.
01:01:28 ◼ ► And so, generally speaking, if I can just write whatever I need to write, and especially if I have any interest in writing the thing I want to write, generally speaking, I'll just do that.
01:01:39 ◼ ► Now, I could have written an orderable dictionary, but I didn't have any interest in it, and it wouldn't have really served any useful purpose.
01:01:49 ◼ ► But generally speaking, I'm not an absolutist about it, but I do generally try to avoid it now.
01:02:07 ◼ ► You know, it comes from experience of third-party code having bitten me in the butt much of the time that I have used it.
01:02:28 ◼ ► So, if it's – so, for instance, I will discuss it for – in a few minutes, I'm going to be talking about how I had to switch an S3-compatible provider to a different S3-compatible provider on Overcast backend.
01:02:52 ◼ ► But I wrote it a few years back because I just needed some kind of, like, S3-compatible basic IO library.
01:03:00 ◼ ► And everything out there for PHP that I could find was these, like, you know, usually the official Amazon one or some third-party one that's just, like, this absolutely massive, giant library with hundreds of files, all this complexity that I didn't really need.
01:03:26 ◼ ► And just literally a few – like, two weeks ago, I had to look at that code and be like, all right, I have to modify it slightly to be compatible with this other service.
01:03:42 ◼ ► And then I found what I was doing slightly wrong that one service tolerated and the other service didn't.
01:03:51 ◼ ► And meanwhile, that code, because it's so small and I've written it entirely myself, number one, it is just lighter on the servers.
01:04:06 ◼ ► So if any part of it has to change or if I have to debug a problem, I know all the code.
01:04:11 ◼ ► And it's small enough that even if I have to look at it again, you know, three years from now, when I've definitely – you know, it has definitely fallen out of my L3 cache by then in my mind.
01:04:24 ◼ ► So that's the kind of benefit that I tend to go for when I have a library that I could use someone else's or I can write my own.
01:04:36 ◼ ► So like the main third-party library I use on the servers is the Stripe API because dealing with like, you know, Stripe stuff – like I know I don't offer Stripe descriptions for the app, but I do use Stripe to sell my ads on the website.
01:04:50 ◼ ► And so – and dealing with Stripe for that, like it's super easy to use their API and for me to – or for me to use their SDK rather.
01:04:57 ◼ ► And for me to not use their PHP SDK would be a decent amount of work with the feature set that I use.
01:05:08 ◼ ► And that's something that's like – Stripe has proven over time that their SDK is very trustworthy and very low needs.
01:05:17 ◼ ► I don't – like one thing I would not enjoy is if the copy of it that I had needed to be updated frequently.
01:05:30 ◼ ► I think it was something like eight years ago maybe, nine years ago, seven years ago, something like that.
01:05:51 ◼ ► But that has not been the case for things like S3 libraries or things like a lot of the iOS side stuff.
01:05:57 ◼ ► And frankly, on the iOS side, I really don't frequently have a need for third-party code.
01:06:03 ◼ ► Usually the kind of code I'm writing on the iOS side is custom code that only I could write because it's like – it's integrating stuff within my app to other stuff within my app.
01:06:12 ◼ ► I don't have a lot of these like orthogonal problems that I can have one library import to totally solve a problem for me.
01:06:19 ◼ ► And if I, for some reason, need something smaller, like give me a function to calculate the tangent between these two triangle points, I'll just ask ChatGPT.
01:06:38 ◼ ► So like I don't have a lot of needs for things that are larger than that, that a third-party library might even exist for.
01:06:47 ◼ ► I come from the web development world and I – ever since the web had any libraries at all to speak of, they have constituted the vast majority of the code.
01:06:57 ◼ ► Like even if you think back in the jQuery days, you'd throw jQuery and then write a paragraph of code.
01:07:15 ◼ ► Even when I'm using a framework that I wrote myself, still the vast majority of the code is third-party code because of CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, one of the original package management, open source things.
01:07:29 ◼ ► You know, I would build my web frameworks on top of libraries, on top of CPAN modules because that's just the way things were done.
01:07:36 ◼ ► So both client-side and server-side in the web, libraries made up the vast majority of code.
01:07:44 ◼ ► It's just we think of it differently because it's like, well, there's the operating system and there's all the frameworks that lead up to the Pinnacle framework, which is UIKit or AppKit or whatever.
01:07:55 ◼ ► But underneath that is frameworks on top of frameworks on top of frameworks on top of libraries on top of the operating system.
01:08:03 ◼ ► But anyway, the vast majority of the code that makes up, quote-unquote, your app is almost certainly not your code.
01:08:08 ◼ ► It's, you know, the operating system and the frameworks, even though it's all first-party.
01:08:12 ◼ ► So I'm very used to the idea that what I'm doing is writing on top of a mountain of someone else's code.
01:08:20 ◼ ► I did enjoy my career as a web developer having the source code to all of that code that I'm writing on top of, which is not true on Apple platforms.
01:08:35 ◼ ► That said, part of the reason we like Apple's platforms is the first-party stuff on frameworks provides you a lot of stuff.
01:08:42 ◼ ► So you're like, it's not like it is in, you know, Perl or, you know, to make the extreme case, like Node.js, where doing almost anything requires importing a jillion libraries, right?
01:08:57 ◼ ► Just use that first-party top-level framework and do a lot of stuff without ever having to go anywhere to a third-party thing.
01:09:12 ◼ ► The only third-party libraries that you use in hyperspace, one library is for, I don't know if you've looked at the UI,
01:09:18 ◼ ► but I do like a thing that imitates like the path bar in the Finder, kind of, where it shows like the,
01:09:24 ◼ ► I had to represent a folder hierarchy without, I didn't want to use a path with slashes because that's not user-friendly if you're not Unix.
01:09:33 ◼ ► It shows like, you know, a folder icon, a folder name, and then like a little, you know, arrow or whatever.
01:09:41 ◼ ► I don't know what it's called in the Finder, but they show you a path without making it a Unix path.
01:09:47 ◼ ► And that requires, you know, making a little image and some text and doing truncation and doing wrapping of the images and the text with truncation.
01:09:55 ◼ ► And I wanted to do a thing where if you moused over the truncated ones, it would expand them so you could see the full name on them
01:10:10 ◼ ► And then after I implemented myself, I think, I forget if it was after 1.0, but I think it was, I found a third-party library that did exactly that.
01:10:25 ◼ ► But I am more than happy to use a third-party, you know, Swift Package Manager package that does re-flowable, like, collections.
01:10:34 ◼ ► But honestly, Apple really needs to up their SwiftUI game to sort of reach parity with, like, UIKit and AppKit with, like, their collection views, you know?
01:10:42 ◼ ► SwiftUI does not have very robust collection views that would make my life a lot easier if they did.
01:10:52 ◼ ► It deleted all my code, all my stupid custom view layout thing or whatever, and just imported that package and used it.
01:11:13 ◼ ► And there's a third-party library from a well-known Swift developer teacher in the Swift community who did, like, a fun library to do fun graphics.
01:11:26 ◼ ► All of the stuff that touches files, that's all my code on top of Apple's frameworks, Unix APIs, all that other stuff.
01:11:35 ◼ ► So no frameworks for any of the actual functionality, just a framework for a UI layout and a framework for an Easter egg.
01:11:41 ◼ ► And then in Swift Glass, Switch Glass, actually in all of these, I'd use, well, not in Hyperspace because Hyperspace does an app purchase because it's free download.
01:11:55 ◼ ► If you do a paid up front Mac app and you just write it naively, your app does nothing to make sure that someone actually paid for it.
01:12:11 ◼ ► You have to write some code that says, oh, and by the way, when you're running, make sure someone didn't just copy this to another machine.
01:12:26 ◼ ► And so there are third party libraries that will check to see that you have the Mac app store receipt and that it's valid and signed and so on and so forth.
01:12:47 ◼ ► And I use that to make it so that my app cannot be naively copied to another Mac and run in my paid up front app.
01:12:54 ◼ ► Obviously, with hyperspace, where it's in-app purchase, the whole in-app purchase system handles that.
01:13:05 ◼ ► And then it, in turn, uses other packages that are also open source, like Swift crypto and stuff like that.
01:13:21 ◼ ► And, you know, the reason I gave the layout example is, like, even if I've already written all the code for it, is that code like the core competency of my app?
01:13:43 ◼ ► And then I will be praying for the day when Apple sort of Sherlock's that library and says, oh, you don't need that library anymore because we built it into Swift UI.
01:13:50 ◼ ► And then I'll be able to delete that dependency and just use Apple's first party implementation.
01:13:55 ◼ ► Nathan writes, I've been thinking about the subfolders in the applications folder, and I'm curious about your thoughts.
01:14:00 ◼ ► I know it might seem a bit unconventional, but I've noticed some apps acting strangely, others refusing to launch, and some just refuse to budge from the root of the applications folder.
01:14:09 ◼ ► I use Spotlight and Alfred, but I've always felt like my applications folder could be more organized and user-friendly.
01:14:26 ◼ ► This is something I have never once thought about, do not think about, will not think about, do not care about.
01:14:41 ◼ ► Cue the line that I cannot remember from the intro from the Fellowship of the Ring movie.
01:14:54 ◼ ► I used to arrange all my applications into beautifully arranged subfolders with their own custom icons in classic Mac OS.
01:15:10 ◼ ► You could put them, mostly, wherever you wanted, with exceptions of certain things having to do with the operating system.
01:15:43 ◼ ► It's going to hold over from the next days when you can have local applications, user applications,
01:15:52 ◼ ► And Apple itself has subfolders in the application folders that they put applications in.
01:16:02 ◼ ► But, as Casey was expressing in his Casey way, the culture on Mac OS X is that applications go in the applications folder.
01:16:16 ◼ ► If you've ever tried to run an application from, like, a disk image or run it from the downloads folder,
01:16:44 ◼ ► But anyway, what has happened is that the culture on Mac OS of applications just expecting to be in the applications folder
01:17:27 ◼ ► So I think it's bad that they can't, but some of them do get cranky when they run outside there.
01:17:34 ◼ ► Like, I have a games subfolder in my applications folder, and there are a bunch of games.
01:17:47 ◼ ► But if you're nervous at all, or you have any application that looks like it's misbehaving,
01:18:04 ◼ ► But most people don't care where their applications are and don't want to organize them.
01:18:23 ◼ ► I recall an old hypercritical episode in which John said he will always be better than his children in video games.
01:19:07 ◼ ► typically games that rely on old platform game mechanics in the 2D world that we grew up in.
01:19:30 ◼ ► where you like jump through like difficult scenarios that you make up in a 2D platforming kind of world.
01:20:22 ◼ ► And like, he will spend hours getting good at them and building the skills and getting the muscle memory.
01:20:27 ◼ ► And like, so he's starting from a better place already because he's not only younger than me,
01:20:35 ◼ ► But then also, he has so much practice with the games, and he'll go and do the research,
01:20:41 ◼ ► And so like, any game that we play, he will know everything about it before I've even seen it.
01:20:58 ◼ ► Or games that are so simple, like Ultimate Chicken Horse, that it doesn't really matter.
01:21:14 ◼ ► But yeah, if we're actually playing against each other, he's better than me in every possible way.
01:21:22 ◼ ► I don't remember if I said this on the hypercritical episode, but I hope I did, which is-
01:21:34 ◼ ► I don't remember if I explained something that would have helped you two, which is that as you get older and your kids get older,
01:21:51 ◼ ► The reason I said that I will always be better than them is because what I will have is wisdom and treachery and also the psychological barrier of being their dad.
01:22:08 ◼ ► You have to use what you have, which is life experience and the ability to ruthlessly betray and be sneaky and use your wisdom and experience.
01:22:22 ◼ ► I hope I also said this, which is maybe I didn't foresee this, which is like that we would be interested in different games.
01:22:29 ◼ ► So there are games that my son plays that I have never played and have no interest in, and presumably he's better than me in them.
01:22:34 ◼ ► But I still think that if I did play those games and was interested in them, that I would still beat him.
01:22:40 ◼ ► For the games that we both play equally, I must rely on my wisdom and treasuring to defeat him.
01:22:52 ◼ ► I think I'm mostly better just because I make better decisions, which is most of what being good at first-person shooters actually is.
01:22:59 ◼ ► But because his reflexes are so much better than mine, I really have to outthink him to sort of level that playing field.
01:23:13 ◼ ► All I do is like half of my YouTube watching is learning things about like Destiny videos.
01:23:21 ◼ ► Now that I'm playing Ark Raiders, I'm just constantly watching Ark Raiders videos to learn things.
01:23:28 ◼ ► And I don't expect him to be better than me in the games that I'm playing and he's not, for example.
01:23:35 ◼ ► The caveat should have been always better than my kids in video games if we both play the game.
01:23:42 ◼ ► And on that note, recently I was over a friend of mine's house and he suggested that we play.
01:24:05 ◼ ► Song Pop is all one word, capital S, capital P, and then a space and then the word party.
01:24:20 ◼ ► You just want to like, I just want to pick a playlist and play the game with these songs.
01:24:35 ◼ ► You should play it on the phone because using the Apple TV remote is a massive disadvantage because it sucks.
01:24:41 ◼ ► You all hear the song start playing immediately and you have four buttons on the screen.
01:25:07 ◼ ► Well, that's just because like, you know, in the same way that like when we were growing
01:25:14 ◼ ► And then a lot of times they would be ported to the home consoles, but they still acted like
01:25:25 ◼ ► This is like all the Apple Arcade games that were like, you know, ports from regular app store
01:25:48 ◼ ► And so there, if you're incentivized to keep people playing your game, then you're going
01:26:17 ◼ ► It's, you really, it's really struggled to find a playlist for like a round of the game
01:26:30 ◼ ► When you play with strangers, you get to sort of pick like, I'd like this to be the playlist
01:26:42 ◼ ► I crush pretty much everybody in Billy Joel because the odds of you getting another big,
01:26:57 ◼ ► And I unlocked a bunch of 80s things, including like movie soundtracks and TV show themes.
01:27:03 ◼ ► Although sometimes the TV show themes, they'll play a portion that didn't play at the beginning
01:27:10 ◼ ► Like you should, I know the songs are longer, often longer than they were at the beginning
01:27:17 ◼ ► I thought actually a good engagement mechanic might be that the fish playlist starts out
01:27:23 ◼ ► Well, no, the fish won't be hard because I don't, I'm not sure if humans choose the excerpt.
01:27:31 ◼ ► It's like, if they don't, if you randomly choose an excerpt from a fish song, I think even you
01:27:36 ◼ ► I mean, there's a lot of them that, you know, once they kind of go off in the wilderness
01:27:55 ◼ ► The most fun part is like when, especially when you're playing with like strangers online,
01:27:58 ◼ ► they'll play one and it's clear nobody in the, in the game, in the lobby or whatever has
01:28:03 ◼ ► any idea, but then they'll sing the lyric that is the title and then everyone picks it.
01:28:09 ◼ ► That makes me think that it's not, that, that it's not human curated because you should
01:28:13 ◼ ► never pick a snippet that has the title in like where they say the title of the song with
01:28:28 ◼ ► This is a poor implementation of it, but if you have Apple arcade, you get it for free.
01:28:31 ◼ ► And it's an interesting quote unquote video game to play with your kids because there is
01:28:36 ◼ ► very often not that much overlap between the world of your cultural references and the world
01:28:52 ◼ ► And what he is doing in it is basically like trying to beat his best times through the level in like a speed
01:29:00 ◼ ► Now, when I, as a, you know, as an old person see this game and I see the way he is speed
01:29:07 ◼ ► running it, he, I it's, you know, it looks like kind of a regular shooter, but he's basically
01:29:13 ◼ ► flying through it because he's like doing these like crazy speed run jumps and jumping and soaring
01:29:35 ◼ ► But like the graphics are like intentionally retro, but for a time that wasn't retro to
01:29:41 ◼ ► Well, my favorite thing is like the, the, the font used throughout the entire UI is that
01:30:02 ◼ ► But like, when you look at this game, you're like, I have no idea what's going on here.
01:30:08 ◼ ► Like this is, and like, you know, besides this, he'll play, he'll play those kind of like grinding
01:30:24 ◼ ► the ultra sword, but to get the diamond sword, I have to get 5 million of these bags of rice.
01:30:36 ◼ ► And then I see games like this, but I'm just like, he's in, he's doing things that are like
01:30:56 ◼ ► He also, there's like all, there's all these like clickers now that are basically that same
01:31:00 ◼ ► He was just telling me about one the other day, like one of the, one of the many, oh, it was
01:31:08 ◼ ► And that's like, it just, it sounds exactly like all of those games, but it's like, I just
01:31:22 ◼ ► I don't know if you two know, but they, they keep making doom games and they are very much
01:31:29 ◼ ► I knew that they were putting, well, not they, but people were putting doom on all sorts
01:31:37 ◼ ► There have been many, many doom games since the original doom and they keep making them
01:31:49 ◼ ► I don't, I, there's, it's not quite as speed runny as it seems to be, but, uh, he might
01:32:10 ◼ ► This week on overtime, we're going to be talking about, should we ever be forced to put away
01:32:24 ◼ ► You can join if you want to listen to that and everything else we do for members exclusively,
01:33:35 ◼ ► So I just did an Overcast update a few days back that adds the number one customer requested
01:34:01 ◼ ► A very, very long time ago, there's been support basically since the beginning of podcasting
01:34:05 ◼ ► for images to be embedded in the MP3 files because MP3s themselves support images being embedded
01:34:14 ◼ ► So you had your podcast image that was specified in the feed as a URL, just an image URL on the
01:34:27 ◼ ► And in many podcast players, if you would play a podcast with an embedded image, that image
01:34:38 ◼ ► Now, a long time ago, that actually caused me a problem with Overcast early, early on in
01:34:43 ◼ ► the development because the wonderful now, I believe now, totally over podcast Core Intuition
01:34:51 ◼ ► by our friends Daniel Jockett and Manton Reese, Core Intuition was one of my test shows a thousand
01:34:56 ◼ ► years ago, and they used to embed a lower resolution version of their main image as they
01:35:14 ◼ ► Now, the result of this was when playing Core Intuition back then, it would quickly pop in
01:35:22 ◼ ► a worse version of the main image because that was the embedded image because it had to be
01:35:33 ◼ ► And even that, I had to, like, develop, basically, I did something where, like, I resized both
01:35:39 ◼ ► images down to, like, 16 by 16 pixels and measured the differences and, like, how different these
01:35:56 ◼ ► You're probably ruining a lot of people's subtle jokes where they change, like, one letter in
01:35:59 ◼ ► the title of their name as a joke artwork, but you replaced it with the real artwork because
01:36:05 ◼ ► Well, the good news is the embedded artwork feature of the MP3 spec and of podcast apps
01:36:13 ◼ ► Now, the world has moved on since then, and Overcast still supports that and has the entire
01:36:31 ◼ ► And just to be clear, the distinction we're making is chapter images are a different thing
01:36:39 ◼ ► there is a artwork image embedded in the MP3 file saying, for this episode, this is the
01:36:44 ◼ ► So, over the last few years, it's become fairly common, especially for larger podcasts who have
01:36:51 ◼ ► production staffs and designers on staff and stuff, larger podcasts will often have individual
01:37:00 ◼ ► And what they do is Apple Podcasts added support, I think a couple of years ago at least,
01:37:10 ◼ ► So, in the feed, it's just another URL, and the feed has to download it, or the client has
01:37:19 ◼ ► And the advantage of this is that you can show them before the episodes have been downloaded.
01:37:24 ◼ ► So, if you're presenting like a list of episodes that have not yet been downloaded, all those
01:37:33 ◼ ► And it's kind of nicer for like the rich display of podcasts now with big budgets and all these,
01:37:45 ◼ ► So, for a long time now, my number one feature request has been support for these episode
01:37:56 ◼ ► So, first of all, the scope and the scale that you're dealing with now is Overcast is hosting
01:38:13 ◼ ► You're going now from the potential of a podcast having one main image to 2,000 episode images,
01:38:26 ◼ ► Now, the most obvious way to do this is just ignore them on the server side and just have
01:38:50 ◼ ► Now, the very first thing I had to do was build an all-new downloader for Overcast because
01:39:05 ◼ ► So, the downloader was kind of tightly bound to one-to-one relationship between episodes
01:39:20 ◼ ► But refactor the downloader and design it such that a podcast can have more than one file
01:39:54 ◼ ► Because keep in mind, the world of podcasts is all about ad tech in all of its forms now.
01:39:59 ◼ ► Now, you know, fortunately, it can't do quite as much as it can on the web because of the
01:40:05 ◼ ► But any little bit of information you give these, you know, big ad networks that are now
01:40:30 ◼ ► And maybe they can, like, bind two different IPs to your, you know, data profile if they're
01:40:49 ◼ ► again to, you know, to make sure that you keep downloading it so they can keep tracking
01:40:52 ◼ ► you as you go throughout your life and as you move to different IPs in different locations?
01:41:01 ◼ ► So you have to design any kind of feature like this with privacy, like, significantly in
01:41:16 ◼ ► What happens if the URL doesn't change, but somebody replaces the image on their server?
01:41:28 ◼ ► Like, there's, when you think about what actually has to happen here to do this well, it's not
01:41:34 ◼ ► So I refactor my downloader to download the images directly from the publisher so that way
01:41:40 ◼ ► my servers wouldn't have to deal with millions more images and whatever that might mean.
01:41:49 ◼ ► I run it on, you know, in the iOS simulator on a test account that has a handful of podcasts
01:42:11 ◼ ► So it turns out that one thing that, you know, 5x5 feed now has is they specify images.
01:42:23 ◼ ► Per episode, even if there never were images per episode for like a very old podcast, they
01:42:41 ◼ ► So then I had to go, all right, now re-index things with the consideration that maybe you
01:42:49 ◼ ► shouldn't count an image as being an episode image if it's been used before in the same
01:43:04 ◼ ► But then in a later test, I learned that that breaks dithering because dithering uses different
01:43:15 ◼ ► So every episode, so you'll have like, you know, eight episodes of dithering in a row that
01:43:25 ◼ ► You need to be storing them based on their content, not based on their name or anything.
01:43:29 ◼ ► So then you can say, when you download one, you can say, oh, I can discard this because
01:43:44 ◼ ► Then I'm like, all right, well, this thing references this block or, you know, then you can
01:44:19 ◼ ► So as you are scrolling a list of episodes that you don't have downloaded yet, those are having
01:44:25 ◼ ► And if you make the iPhone download an image from a publisher, you have to be very, very
01:44:32 ◼ ► careful not to do anything with that image that might load it into memory and blow up the
01:44:44 ◼ ► I mean safe that it won't exceed the memory limits of the phone or cause a huge amount of
01:44:50 ◼ ► So like there was, there used to be back in the day, I remember Jason and Mike were joking
01:44:55 ◼ ► about this, that like at some point, I think one of them accidentally published the upgrade
01:45:06 ◼ ► And because Apple's image part processing frameworks can read it, Overcast was dutifully reading
01:45:13 ◼ ► Maybe it was just a chapter or whatever it was, it was reading it, but it was incredibly
01:45:19 ◼ ► And while that, I think, yeah, it was while that chapter was playing, the interface would
01:45:33 ◼ ► And so I have all these things in place that like use certain image IO functions on the
01:45:46 ◼ ► And if it's not like, you know, JPEG paying, you know, if it's not one of like the simple
01:45:58 ◼ ► So then I get to the problem of like not being able to see them in scrolling lists without
01:46:05 ◼ ► And I'm like, oh my God, I have to thumbnail them server side and put them behind a CDN.
01:46:20 ◼ ► It's downloading it from my CDN and my CDN is doing like my servers are doing the resizing
01:46:24 ◼ ► and sticking them on the S3 compatible storage thing and being served through Cloudflare.
01:46:42 ◼ ► Again, on the thumbnail in front, I just ran across this because I was looking at some,
01:46:46 ◼ ► some code for an app that you will never guess because it has nothing to do with thumbnails,
01:46:54 ◼ ► Thumbnailing code that I think its pitch was, it never has to have the full big image in memory.
01:47:05 ◼ ► without ever reading and putting into, without ever expanding sort of like on, you know,
01:47:30 ◼ ► Like, cause you know, every, every few years, either some new API will come out or somebody
01:47:34 ◼ ► will find some new, you know, method or they'll run like some little benchmark and make a blog
01:47:38 ◼ ► post about it saying this, this method, you know, changes images this much faster or whatever.
01:48:02 ◼ ► And it, you know, that takes weeks to start like filling the back catalog, doing all the
01:48:20 ◼ ► Now the, the object service I was using to store it because it was way cheaper than S3 and it
01:48:32 ◼ ► Almost every web hosting thing has their own S3 compatible block storage kind of thing.
01:48:36 ◼ ► And so I was putting it there because it was, it was very inexpensive and I put Cloudflare
01:48:45 ◼ ► Well, it turns out I created my Linode object storage bucket on their like legacy version of
01:48:54 ◼ ► And now they have, but they have buckets that have high limits, but the one I hit had a
01:49:15 ◼ ► You can start getting four or three hours whenever you try to write any new images to it.
01:49:32 ◼ ► And I have to, and I'm, I was literally like about to release that bill to the app store.
01:49:39 ◼ ► Now I have to delay this again because I hit Linode object storage is a old limit for the
01:49:48 ◼ ► So then I took another week to slowly migrate all of those 50 million things to Cloudflare
01:50:00 ◼ ► R2, which is Cloudflare's S3 clone for, for their block storage, move, change all the code
01:50:06 ◼ ► and overcast to point to that and to make sure that all the, all the stuff works to actually
01:50:13 ◼ ► Do all that, all the image URLs change, everything like, did you look up what the limits are for
01:50:50 ◼ ► Some podcasts I listened to have changed their, like their main, you know, the, the artwork,
01:50:57 ◼ ► And I just, I wish I could just like, like custom artwork, kind of like custom icons in the
01:51:15 ◼ ► I could do that if I really cared that much, but I mean, there's, there's some, there's
01:51:18 ◼ ► enough problems to dealing with podcast RSS feeds that I don't want to add another layer
01:51:29 ◼ ► Well, so it's shipped and other than people saying, I hate this because different, everyone
01:51:35 ◼ ► I mean, for the most part, well, and there's also, by the way, there's the massive like UI
01:51:39 ◼ ► question of where and when these images get displayed during playback or not during playback.
01:51:47 ◼ ► So where I'm displaying them now is if you are viewing an individual podcast screen and
01:51:54 ◼ ► you're seeing its list of episodes, they will show there and they will show during playback
01:52:07 ◼ ► But if you have a playlist or a widget, a context where you're seeing episodes from different
01:52:18 ◼ ► I'm showing the regular podcast artwork there, like the main show artwork there, because my
01:52:23 ◼ ► rationale there is like in a context where you need to distinguish podcasts from each other,
01:52:44 ◼ ► I even I played with briefly, I played with like having in a mixed podcast context, like a
01:52:50 ◼ ► playlist, having the regular podcast artwork show with the individual episode artwork in some
01:52:55 ◼ ► form, like maybe like I tried having the regular podcast album art as a little tiny inset
01:53:01 ◼ ► thing, like on the lower right corner of the main, but it was just it just looked cluttered
01:53:20 ◼ ► And then every single one of these details was like was harder and more cumbersome and time
01:53:28 ◼ ► But this was this I thought was an especially long saga for something that seems so simple.
01:53:35 ◼ ► I don't want to go too deep into this for a bunch of different reasons, or at least not
01:53:40 ◼ ► But one of my most frequent requests was the discover screen on call sheet, the main screen
01:53:46 ◼ ► you land on those things like popular movies, popular TV shows, new movies, new TV shows.
01:54:04 ◼ ► And so just finished rolling out in the last 24 or 48 hours is the ability to turn on or
01:54:11 ◼ ► off each of those sections, which a lot of people have been asking for for a long time.
01:54:15 ◼ ► And then I am mostly done with implementing the ability to rearrange those sections, which
01:54:30 ◼ ► And I kept kicking the can, kicking the can, kicking the can, kicking the can, because I
01:54:36 ◼ ► And then when I finally told myself, stop being a baby and do it, it actually wasn't that bad.
01:54:42 ◼ ► It was not without peril for sure, but it was one of those things, unlike what you're describing,
01:54:50 ◼ ► And I'm kind of mad at myself for kicking the can, but there are definitely been times that