PodSearch

The Talk Show

313: ‘The Sour Grapes Commission’, With Glenn Fleishman

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:20   Well, you know what impresses me about it is the self-awareness.

00:00:23   Oh my god.

00:00:23   Whereas, like, when I was 14, I'm impressed by my own son's self-awareness, too.

00:00:28   I just feel like that is something—it is, to me, a very tangible way that,

00:00:34   generationally, we're improving.

00:00:38   And I think we've always been improved like that.

00:00:39   Like, you know, just to go back 100 years, like, when my grandfather went into the coal mines

00:00:43   after eighth grade, I don't think he was that self-aware about it.

00:00:46   You know what I mean?

00:00:46   Like, I don't think he was like, "Oh, woe is me."

00:00:48   You know, it's like, "Oh, that's what you do."

00:00:50   I never hesitate to bring it up because I know my grandfather—nothing would please him more

00:00:53   to know that I consider hard work sitting in a chair in a basement.

00:00:58   It is.

00:00:58   It's amazing how complicated the world is.

00:01:00   Well, anyway, we're here to simplify it for everybody.

00:01:02   Sure.

00:01:03   Sure.

00:01:05   There was a—we've got a lot to talk about.

00:01:07   There was an Apple event last week, so I feel like that's a good framework for this.

00:01:11   I've got more I want to talk to you about.

00:01:13   But I just did it last week when I wrote about it.

00:01:17   I did it in the order Apple announced this stuff.

00:01:20   Sometimes I don't know what to do if I'm doing, like, my thoughts and observation type posts.

00:01:25   Should I put them in the order?

00:01:26   You know, like, "Hey, what do people most want to hear about?"

00:01:29   Right, exactly.

00:01:30   "What's most important?"

00:01:31   And should I just do them in Apple's order?

00:01:33   And I get it!

00:01:33   It's a whole—so many things, too.

00:01:35   This was like, "Here's a whole crapshoot of stuff that are only a few of which are related."

00:01:39   And a lot of them are very interesting.

00:01:41   Right.

00:01:41   And Apple's stuff is—it's not even like spin, per se.

00:01:45   It's not like, "Oh, don't do it Apple's way because you don't want to let them dictate it."

00:01:49   It's, you know, it's for showmanship.

00:01:50   And they had, like, a whole bunch of stuff.

00:01:52   I mean, like, seriously, like, three products in the first three minutes.

00:01:55   It was like—I mean, the purple iPhone, what are you going to say?

00:01:58   It's purple.

00:01:59   I mean, it is nice.

00:02:00   They sent me one to look at.

00:02:02   It's very nice purple.

00:02:04   I mean, they're so good with color.

00:02:07   I mean, it really is just a very, very nice shade of purple that I personally would never buy.

00:02:14   But, you know, what are you going to say?

00:02:17   I don't blame them.

00:02:17   No, it's gorgeous.

00:02:18   It's gorgeous.

00:02:18   No, I think it's great.

00:02:19   I mean, this was the color event, right?

00:02:21   They're like, "Hey, it's okay to have some colors because we just had a really boring year."

00:02:25   So what if we let you buy some things that are not just a few limited shades of gray and white?

00:02:32   So I, off the record, got to talk to some people at Apple after the event.

00:02:37   And that came up, and they sort of demurred on whether the colors, you know, and, like,

00:02:44   the IMAX and the bright color—I got the impression that that was actually in the works before.

00:02:48   And I just, you know, typical Apple, they don't want to say.

00:02:51   But they completely agreed that it's serendipitous.

00:02:54   That's the thing is that they wouldn't say—they never want to say when they make decisions.

00:02:58   It's like, of all the things they're secret about, their timelines for product decisions

00:03:04   is like the holiest of holies.

00:03:07   But—

00:03:07   That's right.

00:03:08   Yeah, okay.

00:03:08   That's interesting.

00:03:09   Yeah, because they would have been testing—I mean, they're always testing materials,

00:03:11   you know, so to be able to mass produce these colors with these intensities and consistency

00:03:17   on the material choices and blah, blah, blah.

00:03:20   They've been testing it for three years or five years, and they got to a point where

00:03:23   they felt they could actually deploy it.

00:03:25   But right, I mean, they have to build the painting machines and everything,

00:03:28   anodizing machines, everything they do.

00:03:30   Yeah, and they've also clearly got, like, I don't know if it's in Alan Dye's team

00:03:38   somewhere, but there's some team of tastemakers at Apple who are clearly, like, totally wired

00:03:47   into the worldwide sense of what colors are hot.

00:03:50   Oh, interesting.

00:03:52   Right?

00:03:52   Yeah.

00:03:53   You know, and it's—

00:03:54   Is that purple, right?

00:03:55   That purple is a hot color.

00:03:57   It is.

00:03:57   It's not glaring.

00:03:59   Right.

00:04:00   It is a very big color this year.

00:04:02   And they're so good at that.

00:04:04   And then the other companies just follow.

00:04:06   Like, I know that there's a hundred different things that Samsung copies from the iPhone

00:04:11   with their phones, but like, the colors for their devices, it's like preposterous.

00:04:15   Like, remember when Apple, the big thing was the rose gold, you know, and rose gold everywhere.

00:04:21   And then, like, everything from Samsung came out rose gold, but not beforehand.

00:04:25   It was—anyway, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

00:04:28   Purple iPhone.

00:04:29   Purple iPhone.

00:04:30   Podcast subscriptions.

00:04:32   This hits closer to home for me, at least, because, you know, I do a podcast.

00:04:37   I actually do a podcast that is subscription-paid based.

00:04:41   Yeah, yeah.

00:04:42   I don't know.

00:04:45   What'd you think about it?

00:04:45   Well, you know, it's tricky.

00:04:49   I mean, Patreon exists was what somebody said when this came out.

00:04:52   And I think podcasting now is more business models than it used to.

00:04:55   So it's easier to—it's easier to get money from people who want to give you money to

00:05:01   support what you're doing and/or to get, you know, extras, like additional episodes

00:05:05   or special events or whatever.

00:05:07   And I think, you know, Jason Stull wrote a very thoughtful thing about it.

00:05:10   I kind of defer to him on that because he's been, you know, he's part of and is running

00:05:14   subscription things for a lot of different networks.

00:05:17   Right.

00:05:17   Or multiple networks.

00:05:19   And I think there's this—podcasts are now multimedia, multi-format, multi-place things.

00:05:27   So if you're a supporter of somebody's thing, a podcast may be the center of it, but

00:05:32   then there may be all kinds of other stuff.

00:05:34   There might be videos, downloads, live events, a Discord, merchandise, physical and digital.

00:05:40   So it's a whole, I think, successful podcasters or successful entrepreneurs of their brand

00:05:48   may still have the podcast at the center, but that's not what provides them the most

00:05:53   value in the sense of why people become members, because they can listen to the podcast often

00:05:57   for free or get most of the podcast for free.

00:05:59   So that, you know, Apple's—I think what Apple has done is they've unlocked a really

00:06:05   easy way for people who have not yet investigated it or haven't built a big enough audience

00:06:11   to, you know, dive into Patreon or into one of the other, you know, kind of roll your

00:06:16   system kind of things, like Ben Thompson does, or, you know, there's lots of networks you

00:06:21   could join—or not networks, but I'm like, you know, Libsyn and all these different hosting

00:06:24   systems.

00:06:24   Pete: And Memberful is a big one too, that a lot of people in our sphere use.

00:06:29   Brian: Yeah, and it's great, right?

00:06:31   So there's all these different things you could be part of or do it.

00:06:33   So if you haven't done that yet, this is probably huge, and there's probably, you

00:06:36   know, 200,000 podcasts where they might go, "Oh, maybe I should enable this and occasionally

00:06:41   record an extra episode, and maybe it'll bring in, you know, $500 a month."

00:06:45   I just wonder if it's useful to people who have a big audience, you know, this is kind

00:06:51   of the question about, like, Substack.

00:06:55   Substack was kind of, you know, "Oh, it's a newsletter service," and it was like,

00:06:58   "Oh, they're kind of getting a lot of big names," and it's like, "Oh, now they're

00:07:01   paying advances to people and doing these deals," and they raised a bunch of money

00:07:04   and suddenly newsletters are super hot and everybody wants in on it, even if the market

00:07:08   is only going to be, I don't know, a few billion dollars a year, and there's, I don't

00:07:11   know what the upside is for it.

00:07:12   But so podcasts is an existing market, the advertising side is actually relatively small,

00:07:16   it's growing very quickly still, but it's only in the hundreds of millions of dollars,

00:07:20   and I think the big market there is for all the stuff, you know, especially like when

00:07:25   live events come back or even online events where actually, you know, people have figured

00:07:28   out how to get a thousand people to pay to come to a one or one and a half hour, essentially,

00:07:33   podcast taping with video.

00:07:34   So there's, that world is growing maybe faster, but again, if you already have a podcast with

00:07:41   the audience that makes it worthwhile to, you know, that's bringing in enough money from

00:07:46   ads and other sources, then is Apple's solution anything?

00:07:49   So I feel like it's a great way for them to try something out, and it's kind of the,

00:07:53   um, a long tail solution.

00:07:55   I don't think the big head there of people doing really, really well already are going

00:07:58   to care much about it because it's another thing to feed, another mechanism to deal with,

00:08:02   and the people are kind of in the, with Dave Siffre, way back in Tectorati, he described

00:08:06   it, the magic middle is people who have a reasonable audience, he was talking about

00:08:10   blogs, but reasonable audience, but they're not huge, but they have, you know, sizable

00:08:15   and they can do something supportive, and my Wi-Fi blog was in that area.

00:08:18   You know, I've had podcasts, like New Disruptors for a while, it was like that, where it wasn't,

00:08:22   I didn't have a hundred thousands of downloads, but I had tens of thousands and that was enough

00:08:27   to bring in enough revenue to let me focus enough time and pay for editing and all the

00:08:31   rest of it.

00:08:32   So I don't know exactly who this first pass of podcast subscriptions serves, but I don't

00:08:38   think it's really you.

00:08:39   Maybe it is for your paid podcast, but I don't know.

00:08:43   I mean, you already have a thing in place and you don't give anybody any money and you

00:08:45   already reach an audience that knows you, so maybe not.

00:08:48   Pete: It took me a while to really firm up my opinion about this podcast initiative,

00:08:54   Subscriptions from Apple, and I would say first, it's very, it's not surprising to

00:09:01   me, but it is a relief that none of it seems the least bit destructive to Apple podcasts

00:09:10   as we know it, which in addition to being an app that you can use to listen to podcasts

00:09:16   is also this stewardship of the iTunes directory and allowing it to be an open API.

00:09:22   I mean, anybody who listens to ATP knows from Marco Arment, who makes a third-party podcast

00:09:28   player that uses the iTunes API, that it's the backbone of the whole podcasting industry.

00:09:33   Android podcast apps are allowed to and do use the iTunes directory.

00:09:40   I mean, Google for their own app, there's a certain point where it's, I think, distasteful.

00:09:45   Google is big enough to build their own podcast directory, but an indie app can do that, and

00:09:51   they haven't done anything that's the least bit destructive to that in terms of, oh, now all of

00:09:58   a sudden free podcasts don't show up because we really want to steer as many people as possible

00:10:05   podcast makers to use this proprietary subscription thing. So, I'm glad they didn't do that. So,

00:10:10   I feel like the worst-case scenario is if the subscription thing is sort of a bust. No harm done

00:10:16   to us as podcast listeners. No harm done to me as a podcast professional. It sounds weird,

00:10:24   but I guess true. So, there's that. And I think that's good, and I don't think that being

00:10:32   heavy-handed would do them any favors. But the weird thing about it is I'm not quite sure who

00:10:37   it is for, right? You kind of got at this. If you're more in that Kevin Kelly, thousand true

00:10:43   fans area where you're looking, and Craig Maud and I talked about this sort of demographic of

00:10:49   creators extensively on the last episode of my show. That was great. I wanted Craig to do the

00:10:56   Craig Maud cast a number of years ago, and he finally launched a podcast. He didn't call it

00:11:00   that, and I'm devastated. But you know what? That's sort of what put me in mind to talk to you

00:11:04   about being on Next because I can't talk to Craig. I don't think we talk much typography on the show,

00:11:09   but we've been talking. I talked to Azirov about the typography of his books, and then that got me

00:11:15   thinking about you anyway. But that thousand true fan idea, it works. And the internet makes it

00:11:22   possible in a way that it was possible on the local scale in the old pre-internet days where

00:11:29   you could have a band who was big in Philadelphia, and every weekend they were playing somewhere,

00:11:37   and they could make a living as musicians locally without having any national stature.

00:11:44   There are examples of that, but for the most part, I couldn't do what I do without the internet.

00:11:52   There's just no way. I could have my own printing press and print up Daring Fireball as a weekly

00:11:59   zine, and I would not have enough customers who I could distribute it to. I really couldn't.

00:12:05   Maybe it'd be more of a possibility if I'd moved to the Silicon Valley, but it's really hard.

00:12:13   There was that guy who lived—what was his name? Mark Anderson? I think he still does live on

00:12:17   Bainbridge Island here in the Seattle area. Or not Bain, I'm sorry, Whidbey, which Lilmore wrote,

00:12:21   you have to get there by ferry or drive them from the north. And he ran—was it like technology

00:12:25   news service? And it was a mailed newsletter, and he charged a fortune for it, and everybody

00:12:29   in the world seemed to subscribe to it. But it was one guy. It was one guy who could do that.

00:12:33   There definitely were expensive print newsletters before the internet.

00:12:39   I'll tell you, here's something funny though, the paid podcast thing. So,

00:12:44   I did New Disruptors for a couple years back, several years ago, and did like 100 episodes.

00:12:50   It was great. And people asked me if I'd reboot it, and I did a Kickstarter and raised enough

00:12:54   money, again, to cover sort of editing costs and time and whatever, and do some live events and so

00:12:59   forth. And did a year's run of it, and I found the weirdest problem wasn't my interest, because I

00:13:05   love talking to people about how they find their own way to do their own thing. Like, you know,

00:13:08   you were on the original run of it, and there's just so many interesting people out there.

00:13:11   Here's the reason I didn't keep doing it in the second boot a couple years ago. Could not get

00:13:16   enough guests because nearly—I wouldn't say all creators, but Kickstarter, Indiegogo to a

00:13:22   lower extent, things like Substack, Memberful, and Patreon, and a few other things. They basically

00:13:30   have filled the zone for independent creators trying to figure out how to fund themselves.

00:13:34   And if you can achieve a sufficient ignition for either part or all of your living,

00:13:39   you have all these platforms to use, many of which take very little of your money.

00:13:43   And if those don't work for you, there's almost no other way to do it. So, it's not that independent

00:13:49   creators have been locked out, whether they're cartoonists or podcasters or writers or whatever.

00:13:54   It's more like the zone is full. So, I would try to find somebody who was doing

00:13:58   anything unique that hadn't been done and charted their own course. It was like,

00:14:02   "Well, I just use Patreon." And then I do this thing. It's like, "Oh, well, that's not as

00:14:05   interesting to say, like, 10 people on in a row who say, 'Yeah, I use Patreon.' That kind of solves

00:14:09   everything for me." So, that's where I think Apple's walking into that void where—not void,

00:14:14   but that filled space where they're saying, "What are you doing different for people, Apple?"

00:14:17   And again, it may be useful for people who haven't done anything yet, and maybe there'll be some stars

00:14:22   or some new things that come out of there, or maybe it produces enough revenue for smaller

00:14:26   podcasters to produce a more vibrant and broader, less, you know, more niche podcasting market that

00:14:34   doesn't have to achieve a level where people can put more of their time and effort in. So,

00:14:37   I don't know. I don't know.

00:14:38   Jared: Well, and so, I just see that in that market, it's just a non-starter to me that

00:14:44   you don't get a relationship with the people who are paying for it, right? And I'm not faulting

00:14:49   Apple for setting it up this way. But it's a long-standing complaint that independent developers

00:14:55   who are used to the Mac world, where you buy the software from the software maker and they get your

00:15:01   email, and then when you lose your serial number, you have tech support, they could see that you're

00:15:06   a customer and they can offer you upgrade pricing and blah, blah, blah. I get the privacy angle that,

00:15:11   nope, you subscribe, you subscribe with Apple, and all I find out as a podcaster with a paid

00:15:18   podcast and Apple Podcast is now I have another $5 a month coming from somebody, and I don't know

00:15:24   who. But it doesn't work with that whole like, hey, what if you do want to have live shows for

00:15:29   your followers? What if you want to offer them, you know, if you're doing like a book, a physical

00:15:34   book, right, which you've done, which Craig Mott has done, or a print, you know, like you're an

00:15:39   artist and you're doing prints to put on the wall, but you want to offer them to your members first,

00:15:46   which is a super common frequent thing to do that is like win, win, win, right? Because it makes the

00:15:51   people feel it's another source of income for the creator, but it makes the members feel good

00:15:57   because they enjoy getting your work because they like your work, which is why they became a member,

00:16:02   you know, you don't get that with this, whereas you do with all of these other systems. And then

00:16:07   at the other end of the scale with like the super big Joe Rogan's and Dave Chappelle's and,

00:16:14   you know, just whoever the biggest name podcasts that you can think of,

00:16:18   I seriously wonder if I look at it and I just think I thought the same thing with Joe Rogan,

00:16:26   frankly, but I just look at it and think there, it's great that no one company totally dominates

00:16:32   podcasts, but because they don't know one podcast, even Spotify, even iTunes is a big enough platform,

00:16:41   right? Like if you're that big, like for me, my audience, can I say, can I produce something for

00:16:49   pay that would only work on Apple platforms? Yeah, definitely. In fact, it might be a waste of time,

00:16:54   honestly, if I were to do something to do Android. But on the other hand, why, if I could do it on

00:17:02   the web, why not just do it on the web, right? Which is how dithering works. But for the truly

00:17:07   mega celebrities, can like a Dave Chappelle do a paid show that doesn't show up for Android users?

00:17:12   Pete: Here's what I dig, though, when you're describing that, I realize, oh yeah, this is

00:17:16   the missing piece is Apple just needs to integrate, and I say just, but the next, like Apple Podcast

00:17:22   Subscriptions 2.0, what it offers is, in show notes, it offers Apple Pay to buy stuff, right?

00:17:29   And if you're a subscriber, you can give them a discount on that. And then, so the Apple Pay

00:17:34   thing is like, hey, I'm Craig Maude and this is my podcast, and if you're a member, you know,

00:17:38   if you're a subscriber, you get X dollars off my next book, just open up your podcast app right now,

00:17:43   go to iTunes, and you'll see a thing right there right now, and you can double tap and you'll get

00:17:47   the discount because you're a subscriber. If you're not a subscriber, subscribe right away,

00:17:50   then you can still get the discount. I mean, that is a powerful pull, and I don't mind,

00:17:55   you know, and again, Apple is good about like that digital versus physical thing,

00:17:59   so you'd probably have to pay them 30% as usual for a digital good, but if it's a physical good,

00:18:02   maybe they'd let you put a different method of payment or let you use Apple Pay, and it doesn't,

00:18:06   you know, whatever. But like that kind of power of buy a thing in the podcast app that I'm talking

00:18:11   about right now or later, go back to the podcast app because I'm driving or whatever, that'd be

00:18:16   a huge integration, even if I don't know that person before they buy, when they buy, they have

00:18:21   to, you know, I have to get their address or some limited piece of information they've allowed

00:18:26   me to obtain in order to fulfill a thing. - Yeah, but I don't understand how would it get to them,

00:18:30   'cause you don't know their address, right? - Well, no, they'd have to, I mean, you know,

00:18:33   and when you do an Apple Pay transaction, you have to get people-- - Oh, I see Apple Pay,

00:18:36   not in app, that was where I was misusing it. - Well, I'm sorry, yeah, but it would be exactly

00:18:41   that is that it's in, you know, you build it into the podcast app, and then it's an integrated thing

00:18:46   where Apple still controls the privacy aspects and you're disclosed what you're providing

00:18:50   as a buyer to the podcaster. So it doesn't build a relationship like you're building a mailing list,

00:18:55   but it builds a relationship like you can actually sell somebody something or get them to participate

00:19:00   in something. So that might be a 2.0 thing, but maybe not. Maybe this is just Apple, you know,

00:19:06   messing around because they wanna test the waters, and then they go and they buy Patreon, or they

00:19:10   buy the last independent podcasting company that's not available, I don't know, something like that.

00:19:15   - I don't know, I just don't know that it's a good fit. And then the other thing, Ben Thompson and I

00:19:20   touched on this, but we kinda, I kinda came to this conclusion at the end of today's episode

00:19:24   of Dithering, which is, wait, wouldn't the solution to this be an Android version of Apple Podcasts,

00:19:31   you know, which they do for Apple Music? And it caused us to both double-take while we were

00:19:37   recording and double-check and make sure that that wasn't a thing, you know, because there is,

00:19:41   I know there's Apple Music. And would that be popular? I don't know. I mean, Apple's forays off

00:19:50   their own platforms have been relatively not very popular. I mean, you know, Safari for Windows

00:19:59   did not take off. And it's one of those things, like, I don't know how many people even remember

00:20:04   that there was Safari for Windows. But it's fascinating to think, like, and see what Chrome

00:20:10   did to the browser industry and think about the potential that was there. And it just did not

00:20:15   click with Windows users. You know, I'm not a Windows user. I don't know. I remember, like,

00:20:22   kicking the tires somewhere where I saw Safari running on a Windows machine. But, you know,

00:20:27   that wasn't popular. iTunes was kind of popular. But was it really popular because it was a good

00:20:34   music-playing app for Windows? Or was it because everybody wanted an iPod, and if you had a Windows

00:20:39   PC, you therefore used iTunes? It seemed, and it also seems like the complaints from Windows users

00:20:46   were just a magnified version of the complaints from Mac users, where it started as, you know,

00:20:50   like a liked, if not beloved, app. And then as it grew in scope over the years, it became less and

00:20:57   less popular. Yeah, it's still like that, right? Because iTunes is now just this giant mess on

00:21:02   Windows because it's been broken up into its constituent parts and rethought for macOS.

00:21:08   Right. So now it doesn't even have the focus of Mac designers trying to at least, you know,

00:21:13   want to work with your photos on Windows, just open up iTunes. Like, why would I do that? No.

00:21:18   So I don't even know if an Android version of Apple Podcasts would help, because if it doesn't

00:21:23   actually get, you know, the fact that it could exist doesn't mean, I don't know.

00:21:29   The only thing that would pull it would be something like, you know, to subscribe to this

00:21:33   podcast, you need Apple Podcasts for Android. And then so how does, who is promoting that where

00:21:39   millions of Android users suddenly download the app? Or does Apple do Android specific? I mean,

00:21:45   I don't know. You can't figure out how people would get it. So an Apple Podcast would have to be

00:21:51   huge. Like, Apple TV+ is a great example, though, Jon, because I was researching, you know,

00:21:56   I've written a million books now. So I've always got like, whenever Apple breathes, I have to like,

00:21:59   go back and update four different books. And so I was looking at Take Control of Apple ID. This is

00:22:03   one of my favorite books because I wrote it because Joe Kissel and I were kicking around,

00:22:07   like, what's the next book idea? It's like, what's the pain points like Apple ID? So I wrote a book

00:22:12   about, you know, here's how to solve half the book is solving problems. But so I was digging into

00:22:17   Apple TV+ for an update. And I was like, okay, what platforms can you use it on? And the answer

00:22:21   is like, goddamn everything. It is the most ridiculously well supported thing Apple has

00:22:28   ever made. I think arguably, you could probably play it on a Android watch with a browser in it.

00:22:33   Like, you know, it's, it's any, it's practically any browser, any platform, any smart TV with the

00:22:40   right support, like Apple TV+ works everywhere because they've got the content poll, I want to

00:22:45   watch Ted Lasso, I need Apple TV+, let me watch another thing I want to and Apple says yes, where

00:22:50   most of the time, Apple says no. So that's what they'd have to do with podcasts have compelling

00:22:55   original content, or exclusive content that was so compelling that people sought it out and they

00:23:00   downloaded in the millions onto their Android or phones or Windows devices. I mean, Ted Lasso,

00:23:07   I don't know, I suspect Ted Lasso resulted in, you know, I want to say like a million Apple TV+

00:23:12   subscriptions or installations or whatever of things. I wonder I wonder I mean, and that was

00:23:17   one of the early announcements too, right? That was was that one of the maybe there's more

00:23:21   announcements in those first five minutes that I'm giving them credit for they pre announced that the

00:23:25   next season will start in July. There was my family's day holy cow, we were just like, the

00:23:31   produce, you know, one of the producers is on Twitter. And of course, as you can on Twitter,

00:23:35   you're like, hey, what's the next season coming? He's like, oh, it'll be this fall. Don't worry.

00:23:38   Like he said this week ago, like it's coming. We've done it like Jesus. And then when it was July,

00:23:42   like, oh, yeah, don't wait till September for it. It is funny. I wish I could give credit. It's sort

00:23:48   of an obvious observation. But somebody, somebody put it so well, which was that, hey, remember when

00:23:54   before Apple TV plus came out, and there were a handful of stories, and like the only example of

00:24:00   original content we had was the carpool karaoke. And, and the weird no offense to it. And the weird

00:24:06   show about it was like, app, I forget what it's called Planet of the Apps. Remember this? Oh,

00:24:12   yeah. Gwyneth Paltrow and some other people. Yeah, what's gonna be the show that's on network TV

00:24:17   that's like this? We're like inventors come in with their crazy ideas. Shark Tank. Yeah,

00:24:22   Shark Tank. So it was like Shark Tank for apps, but like with Gary Vaynerchuk, who I love, but

00:24:27   oh, yeah, yeah. But it was not it was not people who took and I didn't take it. I didn't think

00:24:34   like, well, I think these two shows are probably emblematic of everything Apple will come up with.

00:24:39   I thought they I just thought they can't be. But it's not an unreasonable. It wasn't unreasonable

00:24:47   for people to jump to the conclusion that maybe they were emblematic of what Apple was coming up

00:24:51   with. And while before any of these shows came out, there were a couple of stories. I think

00:24:56   the Wall Street Journal, I think Trip Mickel had the one that was the most widely reported

00:25:01   that Apple was, Eddy Cue and Tim Cook were being too hands on. And we're giving these notes. Tim

00:25:07   Cook in particular was giving notes that they should, can't you make this nicer? And, and

00:25:12   that's right. Then there was the rumors be no new nudity, but no, no adult themes or something

00:25:17   where it was all going to be nicey nicey stuff that kind of came out. Yeah, something like that.

00:25:22   And it's like, and in hindsight, that's really has not played out at all. Yet, nobody's attracted it.

00:25:27   I was watching an episode of Dickinson and the other people in the room and I was like,

00:25:30   Holy, okay, I need to turn this off. I haven't seen that yet. But it's, it's really good. And

00:25:36   it's, it's a me, it's actually totally amazing. It's an HBO. It's the kind of thing you'd be

00:25:40   like, Oh, you can only see that on something like HBO before, which is a lot of what you say about

00:25:44   Apple TV. Yeah. Servant is the one I think of. I haven't seen that. It's well, we're addicted to it.

00:25:50   I think it's pretty good. It's interesting because it's a horror drama. But the episodes are only a

00:25:57   half an hour. And I find that format to be fascinating. And yes, like all streaming things.

00:26:04   And again, what a boon to the creative arts. Sometimes they're 33 minutes, sometimes they're

00:26:08   27 minutes. You don't have to make it exactly 27 colon 00 every single episode. Oh, it's been so

00:26:16   great. I have so many series on different streaming services. That's I think it's excellent point.

00:26:19   Right. But there are some really, really sick, twisted, gory, perverted stuff in servant. And

00:26:26   it's like, I think, I think people say like, Apple had never made any kind of content of its own,

00:26:32   like the closest thing was stuff they did during the Apple keynote. And it's like, and now we're a

00:26:36   studio. It's like, well, what's that going to be like? It's going to be like car park. It's going

00:26:39   to be these very limited things. And then they've, they've totally proven us wrong. Those who thought

00:26:44   it was going to be somewhat boring or anodyne. Yeah, totally. I, you know, I think they hired

00:26:49   good people and let them do their work, you know, which is sort of what Eddie Q said in response to

00:26:54   those accusations. He's like, I'm not giving people notes. I don't, what do I know about

00:26:57   his, his response paraphrasing, but he was like, I don't know anything about making TV shows. So I

00:27:02   found good people who know how to make, who know how to make good TV shows. And they're opposite

00:27:07   of Quibi, right? Is that they, it's totally the opposite of Quibi. But anyway, I, how funny though,

00:27:14   is it that even though there are several counter examples of shows with, you know, truly adult

00:27:19   content and themes, that, that the breakthrough hit of Apple TV plus is this show that is truly about

00:27:27   the nicest guy and feeling good about yourself in a way that is not corny and it, it, it, it is kind

00:27:37   of exactly what, you know, yeah. There's a lot of F word in it, but you know, that's okay. They didn't

00:27:43   sign that, but no, yeah, it's like, it's a, it's like deconstructing toxic masculinity. Like it's

00:27:48   a show that's both incredibly enjoyable and also shows, it's like a blueprint of being a good man

00:27:54   and becoming a better man. And we just watch it and we're just, we've watched it twice as a family

00:27:59   here and we're just in awe of it. And you know, everyone is ultimately redeemable and I have

00:28:04   feelings about season two, like, like redemptions that are yet to come. Maybe with the exception of

00:28:09   the guy, the old guy who used to own the team. Rupert played by the wonderful, with his Anthony

00:28:14   head. No, yeah, Tony. It's the guy from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and the, the Folgers instant

00:28:20   coffee commercial. But it wouldn't surprise, wouldn't surprise me if he sees, if we, if we

00:28:25   see another side of him in season two, right? Right. Because they're sending us, right. It's

00:28:28   going to be, it's, it's one of the best TV. I mean, I put it up there with Good Place. It's

00:28:32   one of the best pieces of TV made the last few years. It's, it's really unbelievable. And you

00:28:37   can just see, I, and I, it's, I'm not going to pretend like I know Tim Cook well, but it's like,

00:28:42   he wears part of his, he's very private, but you can just tell that he loves Ted Lasso, right? You

00:28:48   can just tell he just loves it. It's kind of a show written for him, isn't it? I didn't think

00:28:53   about that. It's about football and football and fish out of water and being good to other people

00:29:00   and, and being creative. And it's like, he must've got like three episodes of watching it and just

00:29:04   been like this, this, this is what I was talking about. Oh man. That's great. Yeah. It's a,

00:29:11   what a delight during pandemic year to have that. All right. Speaking of a delight, let me take a

00:29:14   break and thank our first sponsor. Oh, I don't want to put down any of the other sponsors on

00:29:19   this episode. And I don't want to put on, put down any previous sponsors. I love all of the sponsors

00:29:25   of the talk show, but Yes, Please might be at the top of the list. If you make your own coffee at

00:29:34   home. And at this point, honestly, it's the whole saga, who doesn't? You've got to try fresh roasted

00:29:40   beans from the crew at Yes, Please. They spell it. It's pronounced Yes, Please, but it's spelled

00:29:44   Y E S P L Z. They are long time coffee nerds. They're founders, Tony Knesne. You might know

00:29:55   Knesne. I've got a note. I've got a note. Knesne. You wouldn't believe it. He's, he's a friend of

00:30:02   mine. I'm sorry to interrupt. Well, maybe it is. I don't know. I don't know. I could be wrong. I'm

00:30:06   sorry. I'm totally wrong. He's better known as Tonks. And you might remember the old Tonks coffee

00:30:10   company. Also his partner, Sumi Ali. They are veterans of coffee's quote, third wave scene. I

00:30:18   don't even know what that means, but they are fanatical about roasting great coffee. Tonks coffee

00:30:22   was great back in the day. Yes, Please coffee today is even better. I honest to God do not know

00:30:28   how I would have gotten through the last year without Yes, Please getting delivered to the

00:30:32   house, especially about a year ago when it was really sort of like, Hey, you don't even know if

00:30:37   it's safe to go outside, blah, blah, blah. Ah, what a relief. It is fantastic coffee. I am

00:30:42   drinking some right now. I actually brewed this. I, to keep up with Glenn's energy, I had to brew

00:30:46   a second pot of coffee. But I am literally drinking some right now. And they believe,

00:30:51   here's the thing about this. They're total, total coffee nerds, but that part of their nerdiness is

00:30:56   they honestly believe that brewing a perfect cup of coffee should be easier than making like a box

00:31:02   of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Just hot, really hot water, fresh ground coffee. There's a couple

00:31:08   simple, simple ways to make it. It is so easy. They're not trying to tell you to buy some kind

00:31:13   of $500 gadget and spend half an hour just to get like a tiny little espresso thing of coffee. No,

00:31:20   I brew a whole pot of coffee. It takes me like four minutes and like 30 seconds of that is paying

00:31:25   attention. But man, their coffee is great. What you do, you sign up, go over to yesplease.coffee.

00:31:31   What a domain name. Y-E-S-P-L-Z.coffee. And just use the promo code fireball. And you can take

00:31:39   five bucks off your first shipment. Banish bad coffee from your kitchen. Give yesplease.coffee

00:31:44   a try today. It's a subscription service. You could just buy some if you want to try it. But

00:31:48   the subscription service, that's where the money's at. That's the thing. Because then it just shows

00:31:53   up. You figure out your schedule. And if you guess wrong, if you're like, ah, two, like one 12 ounce

00:31:59   bag every two weeks and like you're running low, switch to like the bigger bag. Maybe try 16.

00:32:05   Or maybe if it's too much coffee for you, you can switch to like every three weeks or something like

00:32:09   that. It's easy to adjust on the fly. You don't have to like cancel and then resubscribe. You just

00:32:14   log in and you adjust the frequency. And if you're going away or something like that because you've

00:32:19   got your vaccination and you're ready to actually leave the house, you can just put it on pause.

00:32:23   It is so easy to manage. You get great coffee just sent to your house on a schedule that is right for

00:32:30   you. Again, I'm drinking it right now. Go to yesplease.coffee and remember that promo code

00:32:37   FIREBALL. Can I just say, I met Tonks in Seattle over 11 years ago, I think now. I wrote the very

00:32:44   first coffee shop turning Wi-Fi off to promote people talking and free up table story. I wrote

00:32:50   the first. I'm going to stake that. I wrote the first and Tony was the brewer there, the roaster

00:32:55   there. And I met, that's when I met him. And anyway, but it was only 11 years ago. Maybe it

00:33:00   was a little longer. It was for the New York Times and a local reporter, the guy who worked for the,

00:33:06   this guy Brian worked for the Seattle Post Intelligencer said, "This might be a pure

00:33:10   alley. You should look into it." And I wrote something on a blog and my editor at the New

00:33:14   York Times, where I was writing at the time said, "Hey, you should write that for us," which is the

00:33:17   weird, it never happened before or since. And I wrote it for them and it went viral and the story

00:33:21   got ripped off and translated into Bulgarian and like running a Bulgarian newspaper and everyone

00:33:26   just kept calling this poor cafe and, you know, "What are you doing?" And then anyway, and then

00:33:30   like for the next 10 years, it seemed like every week there was a "cafe turns off internet" story.

00:33:36   And then, you know, then everyone had self-access and hot spots. But anyway, that's Tonks origin

00:33:41   story. It was it. Yeah. We had a coffee shop like that here and right next to, you know,

00:33:45   really high traffic spot next to a park. And they, the first one I remember in Philadelphia

00:33:50   that had it. And I know that it sounds like, "Oh, roll your eyes. It's a bunch of hipsters who don't

00:33:54   want," but it really was appropriate because they were busy without people working there.

00:33:59   Oh, yeah. And it's not to say that there's anything wrong with working in coffee shops.

00:34:04   I've worked in coffee shops who hasn't, you know, it's great. But it's, it wasn't what they were

00:34:08   going for, right? Like they're, they wanted a culture. And it was just, you know, relatively,

00:34:14   it's still there, relatively small coffee shop. And if they could fill it up with people who are

00:34:18   there to socialize and talk to people they know, you know. Yeah. It's just funny, funny trends.

00:34:23   But anyway, remember coffee, remember going into coffee shops? Well, I'm back now. I'm,

00:34:29   I'm going into coffee shops. Oh, man. I'm getting close. Oh, we're back. Oh, that's great. I love

00:34:35   that. What else was in the news? Let me see here. There's the apple card family thing.

00:34:39   Yeah, I was intrigued by that. It's just a weird, it's like, Apple's so weird. It's like,

00:34:46   "Hey, now you can share your card with other members of the family." It's like,

00:34:49   you mean like we've been able to do for 30 or 50 years?

00:34:52   I was, I was really hoping that by posting, "Hey, I'm not even sure what this means,"

00:34:57   that I would get the, because usually when I do that, my readers are so helpful and it's just my

00:35:02   lazy way of doing research, but cricket's chirping on this. Like, how, it sounds like what they're

00:35:08   doing is something new, but is that Apple hyperbole or no? Like, is this different than like my wife's

00:35:14   and my joint Amex account? And if so, how? I think it's, I think it is, I think what they're

00:35:20   emphasizing is that, like normally with a credit card, I mean, you know this, right? So normally

00:35:25   the credit card, you open an account, you typically don't open it jointly. I mean, sometimes you have

00:35:29   to put down both parties' income in a married couple or whatever, and you can get extra cards

00:35:35   and for family members and whatever, but somebody's usually like the person who,

00:35:39   the card is in their, like the main account holder.

00:35:42   Primary card holder, right.

00:35:44   Yeah, and I think this is more, like they really are trying to make this like a family card. So,

00:35:49   they're providing online ways to control limits for kids, they're providing

00:35:53   like charts and graphs and data, and it's, they keep talking about co-owners instead of like a

00:35:58   primary owner and sharing. So I think it is a little, I think in effect it will seem the same.

00:36:04   I think in nature it's actually a bit different and probably affects even like your credit rating,

00:36:09   a little different report and so forth. But I do love the idea that they're making it,

00:36:15   I mean, it really, you know, if you've got a family like you and I do, I think that's the

00:36:18   issue. It's like if you have kids, this transforms how you manage like the budgets and controls and

00:36:26   what they can do with a credit card. So it's much more of a training credit card than most credit

00:36:31   card companies offer for any card. So that's kind of, I think that's my take, but I don't think we've

00:36:37   seen the impact of it yet because Apple has let you, you know, they've added those a ways to

00:36:42   set up purchase amounts and so forth for people already in your family. And so as a result,

00:36:48   this is like an extension of that. I don't think it seems as different. It's just all managed on

00:36:52   one card and you get the higher percentage cash rebate.

00:36:55   Yeah. And you know, I mean, I don't know, I gave him a hard time and it was like, what's next,

00:37:01   you know, when they announced that they're getting into credit card business, payday loans at the

00:37:05   Apple store, I, you know, and I still am ambivalent about it. And I still feel like if there's an area

00:37:13   where they should really be able to brag and lead the way it should be on the APRs that they offer.

00:37:18   Oh God. Yeah. It's absurd.

00:37:20   Like, I think that, you know, that the, the, uh, what does APR stand for even annual?

00:37:28   Annual percentage rate, annualized percentage rate.

00:37:30   Yeah. Annualized percentage rate.

00:37:31   And then 10.99 to 21.99 as of April 1st, 2020, their footnotes says.

00:37:37   Right. That's 21.99 is, it is, it is, it really, I think it was, I think like,

00:37:44   you could go back to like when they made up the word usury, you know, that yeah, 22% yeah,

00:37:49   that's usury. That's, that, that's not right. I don't get it.

00:37:52   I don't get it. You know, they've got, so the credit card companies and Apple specifically

00:37:56   in its financial analysis of our transactions has more information and can do more data

00:38:01   transformation than whatever. And they cannot manage risk enough to say, here's a 3.99%

00:38:06   credit card because we trust you or 6% or whatever. They cannot manage risk well enough

00:38:10   to issue that to people. That seems bizarre. Something that would be a reasonable amount

00:38:16   of interest to carry. I mean, it's, and again, when I was younger, I had a ridiculous amount

00:38:22   of credit card debt at one point. I mean, never enough to like, actually like get into bankruptcy,

00:38:27   but enough where it was like, Oh, what, you know, it's a huge nut to pay every month.

00:38:32   And paying that off, getting out of it was like, Oh, never again. So I get it. Like,

00:38:39   I'm not, it's not like a holier than now. Don't ever carry a balance on a credit card.

00:38:42   I definitely did it. But it's like, if you can choose not to, you'd be insane. Even at the best

00:38:48   interest rates they offer, like 11 or 12%, that's really high. It's not a good deal.

00:38:53   Pete: PayPal does better. I know you get these unprovoked things from PayPal. I have a business

00:38:58   account there and they're like, Hey, do you want a credit line of, you know, I don't know, it's like

00:39:02   $2,500 and we'll give you, you know, a hundred dollars if you use it. And the interest rate is

00:39:08   like 7%. And I was, I always pay off balances on the business side, particularly. And I was like,

00:39:14   yeah, I'm about to, you know, for my tiny type museum project, I was like, Oh, I need to send

00:39:18   somebody here a buck. So I'm like, yes, I'll take a hundred dollars free. And you know,

00:39:21   it impacts your credit limit or rating a little bit or whatever. So I took it, they gave me a

00:39:25   hundred bucks. I was like, I think it was a hundred dollars. And I paid it off within the

00:39:28   period of time that it was 0%. So I didn't pay anything for it. They just gave me money. And I

00:39:32   was like, well, you trusted me. You gave me a low interest rate and you gave me money to do this.

00:39:36   And you're PayPal, right? You're not even Apple. And you did that. So why, you know?

00:39:40   Uh, well, it's funny. I don't want to turn this into an episode about credit building up your

00:39:44   credit, uh, because I don't really know, but, but we bought a house like five years ago, four or

00:39:49   five years ago, and we were going through the mortgage process. We only had my wife and I only

00:39:55   had one credit card and we'd only had that one credit card and American express card for like,

00:40:00   uh, I don't know, eight, nine years. And they were like, well, you should have more credit cards. And

00:40:06   I, I grew up thinking that that was, that was the, you know, that having lots of credit cards was bad

00:40:11   credit. Like, Ooh, red flag. This guy's got six, six lines of credit from six different banks.

00:40:15   No, no, they want you to, you show your credit worthy by having credit that you're not using.

00:40:20   So you want to have, probably want you to have like $60,000 worth of credit limits across your

00:40:25   cards. And you're using like 10 or 20 of it at any given time or none, but you have to have them

00:40:31   open. It's just, it's the weirdest thing. You're more credit worthy when you have too much debt

00:40:37   than you are when you don't. I remember my wife was talking to this woman from the mortgage

00:40:40   company. She's like, well, don't you, what about like a target card or something? And my wife is

00:40:43   like, are you out of your mind? We're buying a house. What, why would it matter if I have a

00:40:48   target card? You know, it was crazy. And we're like, well, wait, what should we do? Should I

00:40:54   mean like, do, should we get another credit card? And they're like, Oh no, not now. Not when we're

00:40:59   actually looking at you for a mortgage. And it all worked out, you know, and, and, you know, it, it,

00:41:04   it worked out in the end, but afterwards, once we had the mortgage, we were like, Oh, all right,

00:41:09   I guess we get to get more credit cards. And, you know, now we've got like an American Airlines one

00:41:13   that we only use when we're buying airfare, you know, and it's like, it's so it's all worse. And

00:41:20   of course I bought, I got the Apple card cause I figured I should write about it. Now I've got that.

00:41:25   It was so much easier when I had one credit card. Cause then I never had, I never had to think. I

00:41:29   never, never ever had to think just here. We were earning miles for a while. We had a United card

00:41:33   and we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of United miles, which we, some may will use to go

00:41:37   back to Europe, I hope. But I've now have cards where I get the Apple card, another one where I

00:41:41   get 2% for transactions and the Apple one, I'll do it whenever I can use Apple pay. And the other one

00:41:46   is when I have to do like an in-store and I I've got face ID on my phone. And like, so I'll put in

00:41:51   or tap the other card, city card and just get 2%. I'm like, I want 2% back on everything I do.

00:41:56   Cause I don't need miles right now. And so I'm, you know, I'm getting 2% cash back. So I'll take

00:42:00   that. Yeah. I was doing the thing where I was using my Apple card for all the Apple pay payments.

00:42:05   Cause you get 3% or whatever, or I don't know what, or you get it, you get 3% from Apple,

00:42:11   for Apple pay, but 3% from Apple and selected partners. So I switched to T-Mobile and I changed

00:42:17   it. So now I only use that card to pay my Apple bills. So like my iTunes monthly, anything I buy

00:42:22   from Apple, I put on that card and anything else I just don't. Cause the extra 1% just wasn't worth

00:42:27   it. It's like, I just, just, just let me use my one credit card anyway. Now Apple's in the credit

00:42:32   card business and they've improved it. What else is, what is next on the list? Air tags. Oh man.

00:42:40   Yeah. I'm, I'm really into this because yeah. So I I've written, you know, I've written about like,

00:42:46   find my Mac for years and years. And so I was totally prime when the COVID-19 exposure

00:42:52   notification thing came out. I don't get briefings from Apple that much anymore. And, and one of the

00:42:57   folks over there was like, Hey, you need to be heads up about this thing. Cause we know you do

00:43:01   this. And it's like, Oh, okay. What is it? And you know, and it's the COVID tracking business was

00:43:05   basically find my COVID exposure. It was the same thing. I mean, much more sophisticated and security

00:43:13   leaning like privacy preserving. But AirTags is basically, you know, it just realized that same

00:43:18   thing they built a couple of years ago, which is a distributed crowd-sourced, anonymous Bluetooth

00:43:24   beacon based system. But adding in ultra wide band and NFC to it and, you know, tagging it to

00:43:34   devices you carry with you. So it's pretty slick. I mean, it's what, I mean, I realized tiles came

00:43:41   up with this before, like they were the original developer of it, but there's a critical mass thing.

00:43:46   And it's like suddenly, you know, as Apple rolls us out, you've got, I don't know, a hundred million,

00:43:51   well, probably hundreds of millions of devices worldwide that will send back information about

00:43:57   it is things. It is in fact a billion devices that, that billion that can be qualified. Yeah.

00:44:02   Which is crazy. Like somebody that's wild. Yeah. Talking to Apple last week, they're like,

00:44:06   I know it sounds crazy, but it's actually up to a billion devices that are participating.

00:44:12   It is. That's amazing. It is truly a fascinating system. And it's not unlike a lot of crypto type

00:44:19   stuff. It's not even that hard to sort of see as a lay person, you know, get up in front of a

00:44:25   whiteboard and start talking, all right, these identifiers rotate the identifiers. There's no

00:44:30   backwards table mapping the identifier to use. So even if you know the identifier of an AirTag,

00:44:38   it's just a unique thing. And then it calls home and home just says, okay, AirTag 1-1-1-2-3-4

00:44:47   is here. Nobody knows whose it is. And you know, it's, it's somebody walks by with an iPhone and

00:44:55   the iPhone picks up the beacon. It's like, oh yeah, there it is. It's right there. Yeah. You know,

00:44:58   it's literally like if you'd written a tag number on a piece of equipment, you own your little pink

00:45:02   tag, you stuck on it and said 1-7-5-3-9-2 whatever. Right. And someone, if they found it,

00:45:07   they picked it up and they go like, oh, and they just like mail it into some central address,

00:45:11   postage paid. And that central address is like, oh, that belongs to it's even more secure or

00:45:15   private than that. That belongs to Glenn. And they call me up and say, Hey, we found it. Or more

00:45:19   likely I would call up and say, Hey, do you have an item? And it's got this number on it. They say,

00:45:22   yeah. Would you send that to me? Sure. I mean, it's, it's practically that simple with more

00:45:26   cryptography and anonymity, but it's kind of like a, you know, a global lost and found system where

00:45:34   the person finding it has no idea what they've found. They don't touch it. You know, it's just,

00:45:38   they don't even know their device is transmitting these anonymous tags back to Apple. And the person

00:45:43   who lost it doesn't have to disclose anything about themselves in order to claim it. Just the

00:45:47   proof that they, you know, essentially they tell your machine tells Apple when you're using the

00:45:51   FindMy system on your end, it tells Apple like, hey, cryptographically, you should release any

00:45:56   information that matches this pattern. And Apple says, that's great. We don't know what's in it,

00:45:59   but here you go. We know there's a match. And that's the only thing they know about you,

00:46:03   but they don't know the coordinates or any other data inside.

00:46:05   Uh, I know that Apple has to keep rotating some of their big messaging things because you can't

00:46:12   just keep repeating yourself time after time. But you know, for a while they had the 1000 no's for

00:46:17   every yes that they emphasize once or twice. And then for a while, I'm not sure which came first,

00:46:22   but there was, that's great. There was a couple of things that was only Apple, right? Only Apple

00:46:26   could do blank. But this, this FindMy network, I really do want to say is sort of an only Apple

00:46:33   thing. Like who else could do this? I mean, Google has the technical chops for sure. But I don't know

00:46:44   if it's feasible for them to work that into Android without designing the actual Android

00:46:52   handsets for everybody around the world. That's my thinking. It's also, I think the ultra wideband

00:46:56   aspect of it is, you know, is a huge deal, even though, excuse me, even though it's only part of

00:47:03   the product. I mean, I guess, you know, this is like, this is a multi-purpose or multi-part

00:47:08   device. It's, you know, here's how you find something that's nearby to you because of ultra

00:47:12   wide, ultra wide band. And then there's the Bluetooth LE part, which people could replicate,

00:47:17   but right. I mean, so tiles, and again, no offense to the company, they came up with a very clever

00:47:21   idea. They implemented it and they just, you know, do they, I don't know what critical mass they

00:47:26   have. Like they have a lot of people using tiles, but they don't have a billion people

00:47:29   running tiles app and that's what they needed to make this work. And so I know why they're

00:47:36   peeved about it. And I think with this in place and Apple opening it up to third parties, we're

00:47:40   going to see, you know, does Apple cut them some deal? Do they settle and just say, look, we're

00:47:45   going to make you a feature, put them in the app store or Apple store and whatever. But this is,

00:47:50   it doesn't diminish the utility of a third party product that Apple's selling this because Apple

00:47:54   is selling their own very specific thing. There's not even a key ring holder on the device, you know,

00:48:01   so it's very idiosyncratic version of it. Kyle's complaint is, you know, and they're, they're

00:48:08   in cahoots with Epic, you know, with the app, what's it, app Alliance, whatever it's called.

00:48:14   I forget the name of it. The Alliance of Soar Losers, Sour Grapes Commission.

00:48:20   App Fairness Alliance? Is that, is that right? It's yeah, it's something generic, but right,

00:48:27   but you know, their contention right is that Apple is denying them. Oh, Coalition for App Fairness.

00:48:33   Okay. Yeah, there we go. So it's people's Judean history front. Epic, Spotify, Spotify,

00:48:38   and Tile are at the forefront of it. But Tiles complaint about this on sort of

00:48:44   antitrust arguments or abuse of their position as the platform vendor. Like it sucks to be Tile,

00:48:53   but that doesn't mean like, there's only two other ways to take Tile at their word. One would be to

00:49:00   allow Tile to write and install system level software for the iPhone. But even if, you know,

00:49:10   like in Mac parlance, like system extensions, right? So that they could run in the background

00:49:16   and do things that, that only Apple can do because they, they can, you know, like when you bring your

00:49:22   AirTag next to your phone and you get the little pop-up from the bottom that's nicely animated,

00:49:29   a third party can't do that. You third party can't install something that is just always listening

00:49:34   so that if, if your product is brought within an inch or two of it, no matter which app you're in,

00:49:40   it brings it up. That's just not how iOS software works. And even if Apple were to loosen rules for

00:49:48   iOS and allow system level extensions like that, which they're not going to do, or if they granted

00:49:54   a one-time exception to Tile so that Tile could do it, which again is even less likely, it still

00:50:01   doesn't give Tile the billion device network because what is Apple going to actually bake

00:50:07   Tile's code into the version of iOS that's pushed out to all billion users? No, of course not. It

00:50:14   doesn't make any sense. So there's no way, like it sucks if you're Tile, but this is the sort of

00:50:19   feature that is so much better if it's built into the system. And there's nothing, if you don't, if

00:50:23   you don't own the system, there's nothing you can do about it. Yeah, and Apple allowing third-party

00:50:29   access to the Find My system is the right solution. And I think you could argue, you being Tiles or

00:50:35   you being a reasonable person, maybe Apple should have done this, you know, maybe this should have

00:50:39   been considered at the launch when they started the crowd-sourced thing that seemed very Tiles-like

00:50:44   without their own tracker, they should have said at that point, our goal ultimately is to allow

00:50:48   third-party access that doesn't violate the privacy of users and yet provide, or drain batteries,

00:50:53   and yet provides the same experience that we have in our MFI program and our blah, blah, blah.

00:50:58   They could have said that, and then they still could have taken, you know, eight to 15 months

00:51:02   to build it out. And I think it took a bit longer than that. I think they announced it last

00:51:05   summer, right? That they were going to allow access. And then the recent announcement was,

00:51:11   "Hey, we have partners now, but they're still not available, but they will be soon. And then,

00:51:14   you know, we'll approve other folks after that." So, I mean, this is at some level,

00:51:20   and may be provoked by Tiles' actions, this is probably the ideal outcome, except that it's

00:51:25   a year later than Tiles or somebody else might have liked, right?

00:51:29   Pete: I mean, it's a never, it's an evergreen topic in tech. And I think it seems like it's

00:51:36   different now because we're talking about these big tech companies like Google and Amazon and Apple

00:51:43   as being more influential than at any point in the past, certainly more than, you know, 15,

00:51:48   20 years ago, right? Now, you know, ExxonMobil isn't the biggest company in the world. They're

00:51:53   not even on the list. It's all of these companies that own these platforms. Their influence is

00:51:57   greater. But the issue is still kind of the same. I mean, we in the Apple community still call it

00:52:02   "Sherlock-ing," where, you know, there was a, Apple came out with a product called "Sherlock,"

00:52:10   and it was sort of like desktop search. And then there was a third-party app called Watson

00:52:15   that did it a lot better. And then like a year or nine months later, the next version of "Sherlock"

00:52:21   was a lot more like Watson and just, you know, copiously borrowed good ideas. And because it

00:52:28   was built in, kind of put an end to Watson as a feasible product. It happens over and over again.

00:52:35   I've written about, I remember the, remember the confabulator thing. They called them gadgets.

00:52:40   You'd use HTML and JavaScript. Or no, theirs wasn't HTML. It was like an XML format,

00:52:46   but sort of like HTML. And you'd use Java. Easy to make little gadgets that you could put all

00:52:52   over your desktop. And then Apple came out with dashboard, with widgets for your Mac.

00:52:59   And you've argued about, I think you've written this exact thing. So tell me if I'm quoting you

00:53:03   back to you, which is, there are some features that are obvious that Apple will eventually

00:53:08   implement and may choose not to. But if you build a feature like that into a piece of hardware

00:53:13   software, you're going to get Sherlock, probably, because it's a matter of time. But there's other

00:53:17   stuff that's non-obvious. And when Apple does those, then it's like, "Oh, did they really

00:53:22   have to kill that company?" Because it's not a core thing, and it's not obvious that it makes

00:53:26   sense for Apple. And I think we have a lot more Sherlocking of obvious features. And Sherlock

00:53:32   wasn't one of those. Like Apple, the things that Sherlock did, Apple didn't offer most of that

00:53:36   stuff, and then they suddenly did. They like put out a portmanteau of things that were very Sherlock.

00:53:41   Like, but like his tiles—

00:53:42   Or Watson, Watson being the third-party one.

00:53:44   Oh, sorry, Watson. Yeah, yeah. I mean, right. And so, that's what I wonder about

00:53:48   with something like this. Like, is AirTag trying to Sherlock tiles? And that would be true if Apple

00:53:57   wasn't also opening up its ecosystem. Like, did Apple wait to release AirTag until the point at

00:54:03   which it could legitimately say, "We have a licensing program into play place, and we have

00:54:07   people in the pipeline who will be able to also release stuff that is an equal player in our

00:54:12   ecosystem?" And again, that could have been provoked by the threats and the congressional

00:54:17   hearings and whatever, but that gives them some kind of deniability because they're not killing

00:54:21   tile. Tile could easily compete with its feature set and form factor and other things with AirTag.

00:54:27   It seems like, to me, right, you know—

00:54:29   Well, I don't know, though. It seems like they're, you know, they could. I do think that that's why

00:54:34   AirTags took so long to come out. I mean, I know that it's been rumored for like two years,

00:54:38   and there were signs of it in the OS from like two years ago. It really—and reports from six,

00:54:44   seven, eight months ago from rumor sites that, "Hey, the AirTags seem ready to go," you know,

00:54:50   and there were pictures of them. And the ones that came out last week look exactly like the ones that

00:54:55   were supposedly ready to come out. So it honestly passes the Occam's razor sniff test that they were

00:55:02   waiting for the made-for-iPhone third-party thing to be ready, which doesn't seem like it was ready

00:55:09   until earlier this month.

00:55:11   No, it's true. In Apple, I should say, this is the, I think, the key factor, though, and this

00:55:15   is where I think you'd have to say, you know, what's fair here is Apple did remove tile from

00:55:19   the retail stores. So that was like a year and a half ago. So I think was that an issue, you know,

00:55:27   was that retaliation against tile being involved and trying to get the U.S. government involved?

00:55:33   And so there is something there. Like if tile became—so let's say, so here's the scenario,

00:55:37   is if tile became part of this, you know, licensing program and could use the Find My Network,

00:55:43   would Apple, you know, A, would Apple undo it? And B, if so, would Apple stock them in the

00:55:48   Apple stores again, just as even a nice thing? Like, here's another product that does this.

00:55:52   Like, here's our Find My selection of things from seven different companies, including tile.

00:55:56   Tom Bilyeu: Right. I don't know. I mean, are they going to put these

00:55:59   $4,000 VanMoof bikes in the store? I don't know. But they did promote, I mean, they promoted the

00:56:08   three products that came out was the VanMoof bikes, which apparently are very nice bikes.

00:56:12   I don't want to make fun of them. A couple of people wrote to me, they say they have them,

00:56:15   and they're apparently very nice e-bikes. Belkin has Soundform Freedom True wireless earbuds,

00:56:22   clearly AirPod competitors. They're AirPods from Belkin. But they have Find My support.

00:56:30   And the Chipolo One Spot item finder, which is, that's the thing that's like a tile tracker. So

00:56:37   I don't know if they're going to put them in the stores, but, you know, it's just the thing.

00:56:42   Like Benedict Evans has written about this, and he's dug up a long time, I don't even know if it

00:56:49   was about this one in particular, but this issue of when the platform maker builds a feature in.

00:56:55   I mean, my rule of thumb is if it makes sense, if it would be better built into the system,

00:57:00   and it's worth building into the system, it will be built into the system. And the

00:57:06   worth part is how many people are actually going to use it. I mean, if it's something

00:57:12   truly obscure, even if it would be built into the system, why would they, you know, they can't build

00:57:17   every idea in there. But, you know, for something like this, like the AirPod support, or these

00:57:24   AirTags now, it is worth building into the system, and it makes it better. And it's, you know,

00:57:29   it stinks if you're the one who had the idea. But if you've got an idea, even if it's just software,

00:57:34   and it's a utility, and it's like, oh, man, I mean, like, look at like the Launch Bar type

00:57:38   apps, right? Like there's Launch Bar and Alfred and a whole bunch more.

00:57:43   - And those still, right, those still exist.

00:57:45   - Even though Spotlight is now works like that. You hit Command + Space, you type something,

00:57:51   you hit Return, and boom, you get what you're looking for. And the trick is, why are Launch

00:57:57   Bar and Alfred still successful? Because they do so much more. They do so much more that it

00:58:02   wouldn't make sense for Apple to build into the system version. Whereas the concept of a tile

00:58:08   tracker is so simple. Here's a little square, you put a battery in it, you match it up with the app

00:58:14   on your phone, and then you can put this tile on a backpack or in a suitcase or wherever you want,

00:58:18   and it'll tell you where it is. That's it. There is, you know, it's wonderfully simple,

00:58:23   but there is no level to go Launch Bar style. Oh, and you can write your own custom extensions

00:58:29   and scripts and extensions, you know, there's not a lot of room there.

00:58:34   - Yeah, you don't need much more except if you could do, you know, something that requires a

00:58:38   lot more battery and whatever, it's GPS and cellular. And there are devices like that.

00:58:43   My wife and brother-in-law from my late mother-in-law got a tracker like that,

00:58:49   they slipped in her purse because she started to wander. It was surprisingly compact, it charged

00:58:54   fast, and it did GPS and cellular and gave you location information, but that's not what

00:59:00   everybody needs. That's a specialized product for help. - I do not mean to laugh, but isn't it,

00:59:08   'cause I've had relatives, you know, who've gone through similar type things. My mom's aunt used to,

00:59:16   I mean, she must've been 80. She kept thinking she was late for school and her husband would,

00:59:21   and 'cause she stayed in the same town, so it was, the elementary school was the one she had gone to

00:59:27   70 years ago, but she'd be there like on a Saturday morning in the rain in her nightgown there.

00:59:33   But isn't it funny though that they knew she would still take her purse?

00:59:37   - Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. It's amazing what parts of you you keep with you

00:59:42   when the rest is gone. - Right, and like,

00:59:43   she's probably a woman who, you know, when she was younger, she'd never, she'd no more likely

00:59:48   leave without her purse than leave, you know, without shoes on. - That's right, yeah, so yeah,

00:59:55   so this is not a solution for that. But I think, you know, I think that's the point is I think the

01:00:00   tile and these little devices are useful with a very specific limited function. And, you know,

01:00:09   and also kudos finally for Apple releasing something that you can just replace with a

01:00:13   standard battery. That's kind of nice for once, right? I'm not giving points for that.

01:00:18   - All right, all right, let me play devil's advocate though. What product they make should

01:00:22   have a replaceable battery but doesn't? This one has to, right? 'Cause what else are they gonna do,

01:00:27   put a lightning charger on it? That doesn't make any sense. - Yeah, yeah, it'd be a lightning

01:00:30   charger and what you'd do is you'd have to plug it into your AirPod to charge it. There'd be a

01:00:34   stick out of like, no, I'm sorry, just saw another picture of the original, the Apple mouse thing.

01:00:40   Apple mouse being charged by an Apple pencil. Yeah, no, I think you're right. They have to,

01:00:46   they have to, but I mean, the AirPods, it's the, I just always am slightly aggrieved by the AirPods

01:00:51   because I've had this discussion with other people and I know you've written about it a lot.

01:00:54   It's could you make AirPods without, with batteries that were not even user serviceable

01:01:00   but serviceable in some fashion? And the answer is maybe, so maybe you couldn't make AirPods to Apple

01:01:07   specifications without making them essentially an environmental problem. But anyway, so that's the

01:01:13   big one. The rest of, you know, I actually have come to the point where Apple's batteries have

01:01:17   so much in like laptops and devices, like mobile devices are so good and have so much, they over

01:01:24   promise so much that I'm like, and they also, their battery replacement charges for your,

01:01:29   you know, the things that you can't do, aren't user serviceable are so reasonable now. And they

01:01:35   included them, you know, you've got AppleCare Plus, it includes battery, even your battery

01:01:39   drops below whatever, they replace it for free as part of that, all those things together. I'm like,

01:01:43   well, that kind of took care of the battery issue and then Apple does have to recycle and deal with

01:01:49   the batteries they pull out. So for all of those devices now, I'm like, it's a pain that you can't

01:01:53   replace it yourself anymore. The advantages probably outweigh that and it's not a ridiculous

01:01:58   price to get Apple to service it if it happens. So. Right. I don't know what the path out of this

01:02:02   is. And I do know though, that like, under the umbrella term, right to repair that legislation is

01:02:10   going from the grassroots to like the attention of legislatures around the world.

01:02:18   But it is, and I think it's unclear to me, I stake out a middle ground here where I'm not in complete

01:02:27   defense of Apple's mostly no user serviceable batteries. But I also don't think it's a very

01:02:34   cynical play either. I really do think that when you compare, it's just impossible to look at a

01:02:40   modern iPhone and think of it as a device where you could somehow crack the back off. They're

01:02:46   just so dense, they really are. And it really does take an enormous amount of three-dimensional space

01:02:54   to design a battery that can be taken in and out safely, right? Which is a big part of it as

01:03:01   opposed to just sealing it up. Oh yeah. Once they got to those multiple polymer lithium ion

01:03:07   batteries and the sort of like terraced batteries in the 2015 MacBook, when you get to that point,

01:03:14   you're actually putting people maybe in danger if they start taking it apart. Maybe danger is an

01:03:19   exaggeration, but the laptops particularly, it becomes more complicated. Yeah, I would have to

01:03:24   say there was a period of time when it felt like Apple was thumbing its nose at people a bit,

01:03:28   because they did the pentalobe screws and they did stuff where they could have used a solder or

01:03:32   a screw and they used some kind of impenetrable glue that had melted off. And you're like,

01:03:37   that was a choice during manufacture and maybe it had a manufacturing purpose that shaved 1/13th of

01:03:45   a cent off every device, but maybe not. But then you transition into the modern era where you're

01:03:51   like, could you make, you know, I've got a 2017 iMac and I could put more memory in it myself.

01:03:56   Could I take out the drive? I mean, that's a huge, weird engineering task. So they put a slot in the

01:04:02   back for that? Like, I don't know. And now, you know, the M1 just breaks that. Then you're like,

01:04:07   well, what are, you know, I mean, yes, it could do something with an SSD potentially.

01:04:11   Everything is just on a postage side stamp. That's right. I mean, you know, in the future,

01:04:15   the funny part is the new, well, I know we're gonna talk about the new iMacs, or the new iMacs,

01:04:18   like they could just have a slot, you just pull it out and stick a new computer in.

01:04:21   I know. You really could. It really is almost like it really, I thought about that. It's like,

01:04:27   why get a new display when the M3 comes out in two years? Why not just have like a cartridge that

01:04:33   just has the, you know, the computer on it?

01:04:35   Swappable chin like a plastic surgery.

01:04:37   But I do get it. And I do, you know, having gone through, I've had AirPods for so long,

01:04:43   and it was funny, I had to look it up recently. I think they came out in like 2015.

01:04:48   It's surprisingly long to me for a thing that still seems new.

01:04:51   One thing I'd looked, I was just upgrading my Apple Watch to the new OS. No, I forget what I

01:04:59   was checking to see if it if it wanted to because I've been using I was using the beta versions of

01:05:04   14.5 for a long time so I could get the unlock with the watch while you're wearing a face mask.

01:05:10   Which I'm glad I did because it was a long beta cycle. I got like two months out of that.

01:05:14   But I wound up poking around and looking at the battery. So I have a series five Apple Watch.

01:05:21   So I, you know, it'll be two years old in September. Or maybe October was the time I

01:05:28   bought it. And according to the OS, it is not it's the battery capacity is at 91%.

01:05:34   Oh, wow.

01:05:35   Which, you know, isn't great, isn't bad. I mean, I wear it more more days often than not.

01:05:42   You know, you know, I'm an idiot and I bought the titanium version. So I don't know what is that,

01:05:47   like six or 700 bucks? I mean, you know, I mean, like you get a $600 watch, you don't expect the

01:05:51   battery to, you know, and I know I can just take it to Apple and I can throw it away if the battery

01:05:58   gets unacceptable. Very sensitive with the watch compared to like a laptop. But like, you know,

01:06:04   by the time it gets down to like 80%, maybe in another year, it's like, wouldn't I rather just

01:06:10   buy a series eight Apple Watch two years from now? You know, there's it, it's not planned,

01:06:18   planned obsolescence is the wrong term, like, because it planned obsolescence really sounds

01:06:23   like you truly went to your engineers and said, I want you to design a toaster that after 600

01:06:30   times, 600 slices of toast, the spring will break. And then they have to buy a new toaster.

01:06:35   Like that's it. It's largely about the fact that by the, you know, Apple stuff lasts long enough

01:06:40   that by the time it really does wear out or is unusable. The new stuff is so compelling that

01:06:48   it really does make more sense to just get a new phone. Yeah. And this is, I think the big

01:06:52   difference though, with Apple gear than with the things made by most other companies, like who

01:06:57   wants an Android three phone or an Android six phone or something, right? Those do not have a

01:07:03   lot. I mean, they do. I mean, they're used in the developing world or some aftermarket. But I think

01:07:07   those are more disposable and I know people are walking around with like iPhone fours and fives,

01:07:11   right? Those are still functional. And you know, whenever I've sold, I don't think I've so rarely

01:07:17   had a computer die. I actually, when I got a MacBook Air last spring thinking foolishly,

01:07:23   well, Apple won't release two MacBook Air models in one year, especially during a pandemic. So I

01:07:27   bought a new Intel one, right? When they came up with the better keyboard version and my 2015

01:07:32   MacBook, which I'd had, you know, five years under AppleCare Plus, how to get the keyboard,

01:07:36   the bottom case, the battery replaced, I think at one point, but totally, you know,

01:07:41   cover. So it was worth having bought the AppleCare Plus. That one was dying in such a weird way that

01:07:46   I took the buyout and I got 300 bucks for it from Apple as a trade in and let them disassemble it

01:07:52   and do whatever. Right. But that's one of the few times, like normally my battery is like, as like

01:07:56   one of my kids both got 2018 MacBook Airs. And so they're getting towards the end of their three

01:08:01   years of AppleCare Plus and they're in good condition. And we're probably gonna, you know,

01:08:05   I think at least for one of them, they might get a M1 or whatever the subsequent model is.

01:08:09   So I'm like, hey, what's your battery capacity? So install the battery monitor app that I really

01:08:14   like, third-party tool. And it's like, oh, it's at like 79, 80%. Like as soon as it's consistently

01:08:20   under 80%, we are getting this battery replaced because when we sell it, I mean, it's a benefit

01:08:25   for somebody who buys it. We can say, you know, A, we'll get a little better price for it. And B,

01:08:29   can say this was just repaired under warranty and has 100% new refurbished battery. And there you

01:08:34   go. So you're not getting it. What's the name of the app? Because people are gonna ask.

01:08:38   It is, I think it's literally called Battery Monitor to accept no substitutes. It's buy,

01:08:44   but let me tell you the maker, cause I think if you go, you know, the usual app store problem,

01:08:48   if you actually go into Battery Monitor and the app store, you will get, you know, too many

01:08:53   different apps. It is by the fine people at, oh, they're telling me I can't run it on my computer

01:08:58   because it's I'm on an iMac. So anyway, it's the best battery monitor. I will put an, I promise

01:09:07   I've already made a note. I will put it in the show notes. It's great. It's what I was using.

01:09:10   I was testing a lot of USB battery packs and draining batteries and doing stuff. And I am just

01:09:15   a big, I know it's so funny. It's a big fan of this simple app because it just pulls out all

01:09:21   the stuff. You can get some of it from system information, but not all of it. Some of it,

01:09:24   you have to actually use this app in order to see, like you can get cycles, but you can't get

01:09:30   percentage of capacity from, oh, Marcel Bracink software. Well, anyway, I feel like we will look

01:09:39   back long, you know, hopefully sooner rather than later. I mean, 10 years, you know, 10 years feels

01:09:46   like a decent goal that we'll look back on this era of glued in batteries and the lifespan,

01:09:55   the usable lifespan they had and think of it as incredibly crude. Oh, that's a great way to think

01:10:00   about it. Yeah. But it's, you know, there's a lot of this stuff though that people think, you know,

01:10:04   like, I don't know, the individual AirPods themselves, I don't know. I've seen what they

01:10:08   look like when they're taken apart and it's really hard to, to argue against the design. I don't know.

01:10:15   I wish that they were more repairable. It seems incredibly wasteful that the best thing to do with

01:10:20   a $160 pair of wireless headphones that just doesn't hold a charge anymore is get new ones.

01:10:26   Well, you know, there's those women who started the company that does AirPod battery replacement,

01:10:32   right? They have some kind of secret thing they do. Jeff Carlson wrote about this for tidbits.

01:10:38   Oh, I'm blanking out of the product name. It's a, they have some kind of clearly robotic

01:10:45   system for replacing the batteries. So they take the glue out and whatever, and they don't charge

01:10:50   that much for it relative to the cost of the AirPod. PodSwap is the name of these folks. PodSwap,

01:10:56   you send them and they're what they're clever at 60 bucks for a swap of the first generation ones

01:11:01   currently sold out in the second, you send them yours in and they send you a refurbished pair,

01:11:06   basically. They swap them out and then they deal with the, with the issue of, you know,

01:11:13   cleaning and doing it, but they have some secret sauce they've invented. It doesn't sound like it

01:11:18   cannot be manual because it's too, you know, no one's been able to forget a manual process. And

01:11:23   anyway, it's a, it's a clever idea. They can do it. Apple could do it.

01:11:27   I will. All right. I agree with that. And I will put this in the show notes,

01:11:31   but just looking at the math, right? $160 pair of headphones and 60 bucks to swap the battery.

01:11:39   Again, that is a better deal than buying a new pair of $160 headphones, right? No doubt about it,

01:11:44   but it's still, that's like a third of the price. Like back when we were kids, if you had bought

01:11:49   a $40 calculator, if you had found out it costs $15 to replace the battery, you'd, you would

01:11:54   thought it was crazy. Right? I mean, that doesn't, it. Oh yeah. It's a great, I mean, that's the thing

01:12:00   is our problem is we're comparing. Yeah. It's I mean, remember when we used max and they would

01:12:05   essentially like, or any computer and they like burn out within two or three years, like they just

01:12:09   die. Something would go wrong with them. And sometimes you'd replace a component,

01:12:14   but often they were too slow at that point or whatever. And you just have this, you know,

01:12:17   off with the towers you'd wind up with, if you didn't take, there's no computer recycling. So

01:12:20   you didn't figure out where to get rid of them. You could have like 10, you remember this, right?

01:12:24   You'd like 10 towers in the corner for your last 10 years. So now like my expectation is when I

01:12:29   buy a Mac, it's going to last me five to seven years, unless I have a specific reason to update,

01:12:34   like I need to write about new technology. So my five-year-old Mac book, which I liked,

01:12:39   was dying. It was doing weird stuff and I needed to write about, you know, I need a new machine

01:12:43   that I need to write about the M1. But many of the machines that I've then sold because they

01:12:48   weren't dying, people have gone on, they've told me, oh, I'm still using that thing from three

01:12:51   years ago. So they get eight or 10 years out of a Mac with the nominal repair in the meantime,

01:12:57   either the battery swapped or some component. So that is fantastic by the standards of our youth.

01:13:02   Absolutely. But the thing is we hold everybody to higher standards now. And so we hold Apple

01:13:06   to the standard of like, well, couldn't it be even longer? We just need some kind of next generation

01:13:12   push on batteries, something that's as revolutionary as lithium ion was to everything

01:13:18   that came before it. It's all coming. I hadn't thought about that. Like the 10-year timeframe

01:13:22   on batteries is not going to be, well, we have 20% more efficiency out of lithium ion. That is not

01:13:27   going to be what it is. But like, for example, just to name one, you know, and we'll get into

01:13:31   the Apple remote in a bit, but I'm much happier with the Apple remote having a little lightning

01:13:35   port in the back than if I had to find a CR2032 battery every single time it ran out.

01:13:40   No, it's true. I have to charge my Apple remote like every...

01:13:43   It really is the most delightful thing. It's like your TV tells you, hey, the battery's getting low,

01:13:48   but it's like, you know, like 10%. So you could easily, if you just don't want to deal with it

01:13:52   right now, you could just keep watching the movie. But if you do want to charge it up, you just need

01:13:55   like 10 minutes on like a charger you have laying around. Anyway, let me take a break here and thank

01:14:00   our next sponsor. Oh, you know what? I take it back about yes, please. This is a nearer and dearer

01:14:05   sponsor to my heart. It's the only sponsor in talk show history who has ever written the theme song

01:14:13   for this podcast that doesn't actually have a theme song. Alex Weinstein. Look, we're all

01:14:19   storytellers. The game you're developing, is it a peaceful meditation or an exhilarating rush?

01:14:25   The commercial you're directing, is it an inspiring and heroic type thing or is it

01:14:29   strange and curious? The podcast you're editing, is it banter between friends or is it serious,

01:14:35   in-depth reporting on like a real life mystery? In every project, it's music that tells the story.

01:14:41   It's music that creates emotion. Where do you go for music? Well, I'm sure you have some sort

01:14:49   of go-to stock music site, but stock sites think more is better. They tout how many hundreds of

01:14:57   thousands of songs they have in their catalogs. It's like listening for a needle in a haystack

01:15:01   and it's a very boring haystack. Why don't you try something new? I want to tell you about Alex

01:15:08   Weinstein music. This is a direct line to a composer whose music has been licensed by Google,

01:15:15   Amazon, Intel, Slack, Panic and more. And he did the pick and boogers with John theme song for this

01:15:23   show. You are listening to his music right now while I do this read. Alex's style is different

01:15:35   than most. He takes a human approach to music production. Sounds can be imperfect. Rhythms

01:15:41   can live off the grid. It's handmade and organic music with exciting rhythms and texture and genuine

01:15:50   real personality style. The result is a unique sound that helps your story stand out and connect

01:15:56   with your audience. Do you want to tell a better story? Start with better music. Visit

01:16:01   alexweinstein.com. Tell him John the booger picker sent you alexweinstein.com/thetalkshow.

01:16:17   [Music]

01:16:18   What a fun ad, but you didn't get to really experience it. You just got to listen to me talk.

01:16:28   Now you're gonna have to listen to it to see what the music actually sounded like.

01:16:33   I'm imagining it in my head right now, but I'm gonna go find it. I'm gonna go listen to the show.

01:16:37   Listen to myself. Where's that music?

01:16:40   All right. Speaking of Apple TV remotes, there's a new Apple TV remote.

01:16:46   You know my friend Joe Rosenstiel, right? Joe is written the most eloquent. I'm not sure anyone has

01:16:53   written as beautifully and as at length about the hatred for the old Siri remote as he has,

01:17:01   and I recommend searching for Joe Rosenstiel and Siri remote if you understand everything that

01:17:06   there is. And I saw this as like, thank God. I just bought the Function 101 remote last year,

01:17:12   which is very much like the new—it's got a lot of things in common, but not entirely—to

01:17:18   this new Siri remote. But it was kind of like, oh, thank God. All right. But why, you know,

01:17:22   when you hit yourself in the head for long enough, it starts to feel good, John.

01:17:25   Talk about—and that's another one. I think that the black Siri remote came out in 2015

01:17:32   with what they call the Apple TV HD. Six years with that.

01:17:38   Oh my God.

01:17:40   I can't tell you. To me, still, the biggest head scratcher in my entire career writing about Apple.

01:17:47   It's not the most important thing by far. It's not my biggest complaint, not my most serious

01:17:51   complaint, because it's relatively low stakes. What are we complaining about? The trackpad,

01:17:57   diving board end of it? You touch it wrong, and all of a sudden you pause the movie,

01:18:01   and all you wanted to do was pick up the damn remote to adjust the volume, and you've paused.

01:18:06   Maybe you clicked or something and it went back. But, you know, worst case scenario,

01:18:11   I don't know, your family members are mad at you for doing it or, you know, but you're 10 seconds

01:18:15   away from getting back to where you were. It's not destructive. But it's just so baffling.

01:18:20   It's awkward. When did Apple make anything awkward? When did Apple make anything awkward?

01:18:24   Besides the pencil and the aforementioned mouse charging, right? Those are the two most awkward

01:18:31   things that Apple ever did, and they're just when you're charging, right?

01:18:34   I don't know. It's not a bad idea. I could certainly see how it was like,

01:18:39   "Let's make it. Let's prototype it and see how it is," you know? But if you actually prototype it in

01:18:45   a real-world living room where the lights are down, it is a disaster, you know?

01:18:50   And years and years and years, they just kept shipping this thing. They're making the best

01:18:55   Macs they've ever made in history. They're making the best iPhones they've ever made in history.

01:18:58   They're like, "Let's just keep shipping this pizza."

01:19:01   The funniest—one of the funniest parts of the whole saga of that remote is that when they came

01:19:06   out with the Apple TV 4K in 2018, they did tweak it. They put a white ring around the menu button,

01:19:14   which in addition to being white, if the lights are on, was actually raised so you could tell the

01:19:22   menu button apart by touch. And I remember talking to somebody at Apple about—it was like, "That's

01:19:28   it?" And it was like, "Well, I guess some people don't like the old remote, but now we have a ring

01:19:34   around the menu button." And it's—

01:19:35   It's part of Ives' severance. You can never change this

01:19:38   until after—ex-years after I've left.

01:19:41   Do we blame this on Johnny Ive? Did Johnny Ive—

01:19:44   No, no. The Siri remote had naked pictures of him. It was holding him hostage.

01:19:49   I mean, is that whose fault it is? And now that—

01:19:53   Somebody liked it.

01:19:54   You know, and Apple's always changing, right? And maybe some designs, like the aluminum

01:20:02   unanodized MacBook Air, stayed the same for kind of an extraordinary long period of time.

01:20:10   But for the most part, every couple years, everything gets a new look.

01:20:12   I don't want to attribute everything, you know, "Oh, a brightly colored iMacs." Well, thank God

01:20:19   Johnny Ive is gone. They fixed the remote. Thank God Johnny Ive is gone.

01:20:22   No, no, no. It's just—

01:20:24   But some of these things, it might be—

01:20:28   I think it's they didn't care—nobody there cared as much as the people using it cared

01:20:33   that they hated it. Is my suspicion?

01:20:35   I don't know. There must be some—

01:20:36   But they all used it. Don't you think all the Apple people?

01:20:39   I know they do.

01:20:39   Or are they always using their phone?

01:20:40   Nope, I know that they do. I know that like, Eddy Cue is a big time Apple TV user. I know

01:20:47   Phil Hill uses it.

01:20:47   No, no, I mean, the Siri remote, though, like, if you're using your phone, if your phone is your

01:20:51   remote, you don't have this experience. And so my question is, is everybody or all those people

01:20:57   phone in the hand people so they're watching TV and they don't even care, they don't use it

01:21:00   because it's not as, you know, it's not as sophisticated as the phone remote. And when I

01:21:04   use the phone remote, I have my anger level at Apple TV goes down like, you know, 97%. So,

01:21:10   maybe that's it?

01:21:11   See, you know what, I don't like using the phone remote, not because I think there's something

01:21:16   wrong with it, but because when I'm watching TV, I want to get away from, you know, it's the end of

01:21:20   my day. And I want to be off the phone. It's like, it'd be better if I just left my phone in the

01:21:26   kitchen and didn't even have it in the living room with me because I don't want to find out somebody

01:21:31   posted to Slack or, you know, breaking news from New York Times. No, I'm watching something with

01:21:36   my family, you know, so I don't. But maybe, maybe that's the explanation. I don't know. But we have

01:21:41   a new remote that looks like it's looks nice. Looks nice.

01:21:44   Pete: Goes on sale at 5am? So, if you want one, I think you can get up at 5am.

01:21:50   Ted, it is funny. It is funny, maybe. I don't know. I mean,

01:21:55   Pete. 5am Pacific.

01:21:57   Ted. So, they fixed the remote. It looks like they fixed the remote. And one of the problems

01:22:02   with the Siri remote, the black one, the one that we hate, is, in my opinion, people could just look

01:22:07   at it and think, "Well, isn't that weird that it's symmetric? Aren't you going to be, you know,

01:22:11   not know which end you've picked up?" And it's like, "Yeah, yeah, the things that you thought

01:22:14   just by glancing at it." So, yeah, I'm not, I can't review the new Apple remote yet. I don't have it.

01:22:19   But my review of the photograph of it is that it certainly looks like it's going to make me

01:22:25   very happy. Pete: Yeah. This, the thing I'd love to talk about, though, if I can dig into something,

01:22:30   is this color balance thing. So, John, I know you worked, I know you worked in desktop publishing.

01:22:35   Did you ever have to do color correction?

01:22:38   John: Yes. But I typically never had to do it. There was somebody else, when I was at the

01:22:44   Philadelphia Inquirer's Promotions Department, we had, the work I did was never so sensitive

01:22:49   color-wise that I had to worry about it, so we did. But I also remember reading, like,

01:22:54   Macworld coverage of, you know, this is the CRT era.

01:22:57   Pete; Yeah, and the late, great Bruce Fraser's incredible book on, was it Color Correction? It

01:23:02   was about color, it was a real world color, I don't know, it was a great book. I remember,

01:23:08   it was so great. Graham Nash loved that book, apparently. Graham Nash was a huge nerd. He

01:23:12   became very good friends with Bruce Fraser before his death. Anyway, but no, so I was doing color

01:23:18   correction back in the day. I did it under, like, one of those color-balanced hoods.

01:23:22   Pete; Yep.

01:23:23   John; And this was for a shop that was doing, it was like a typesetting and output shop imaging

01:23:28   center place connected with the Kodak Center for Creative Imaging where I used to work.

01:23:31   And, or sort of connected with them. Anyway, so we had one of these hoods that you would go under

01:23:36   and the lights were perfect and whatever, and I was like, one day I'm like, oh, this is funny,

01:23:40   and I realized I had like a five-degree color red difference between my two eyes. Like, that's how

01:23:46   much correction I was doing and how calibrated the environment was. Like, well, my eyes perceive red.

01:23:51   So, anyway, you know, so I've been working, you know, color correction is this magical art,

01:23:56   it's not calibration, I realize those are two different things, but you're always trying to

01:23:59   figure out like, how do you get the thing that's the original thing? And this is one of those

01:24:03   aspects of like, when you produce television, there's a broadcast quality thing, you know,

01:24:08   there's all these parameters around the kind of video and one of the remarkable things about

01:24:13   HD video and sort of modern production is that you can have a handheld device like a phone

01:24:17   that can actually produce something that meets broadcast qualities with, you know,

01:24:20   a post-production part. So, this is all really cool. But you're like, all right, how do I get,

01:24:27   how do I not have to sit there and tweak the million things, right? I just got a new TV,

01:24:31   we went from a, you know, 32-inch to a 40-inch or whatever we have now, we got the biggest thing

01:24:34   that fits. We decided to go from 1080p to 4K because we're watching more TV. And I'm like,

01:24:40   doing the calibration stuff and the controls are really poor. It's a Vizio, it's okay,

01:24:45   and I think I've got it okay, but I'm not delighted. And then this comes out, I'm like,

01:24:48   oh, can I have to buy an Apple, new Apple TV? I don't have a 4K, I have the HD one.

01:24:53   Am I going to have to buy a 4K? Because this is incredible. It's like one of the greatest uses

01:24:58   of technology is a thing that makes your life easier in a noticeable way that makes you happier,

01:25:05   right? It makes you feel better. It's not life-saving, but it's just a brilliant idea.

01:25:11   Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm going on and on about it.

01:25:13   - Have you tried it? You know, you don't have to get a new Apple TV for it. You know,

01:25:16   it's just built into tvOS. - No, I did not. Oh, I'm an idiot. John,

01:25:21   excuse me, I gotta go calibrate my TV. I didn't know that, I didn't know that. All right, I gotta,

01:25:25   - But yet I, - Oh, I just got 14, I got 14.5 yesterday,

01:25:30   so I didn't have the, I wasn't ready for it yet. - Yeah, same here. I manually forced it to update

01:25:35   yesterday and I haven't used it since, so I have not done my homework. I feel like it,

01:25:41   color correction, whatever you want to call the whole scheme, getting your display to show color

01:25:47   well is one of those little things that has gotten so much better over like, you're in my lifetime.

01:25:54   Number one, CRTs were terrible. I mean, they were what we had, but in hindsight, it's like,

01:25:59   oh my God, no wonder my eyes are so bad. But they were also terribly inconsistent. They were easily,

01:26:06   they had like dials, they had actual physical dials under the screen that somebody could

01:26:11   screw with, you know? And then you'd be like, ah, why did you do that? Where were these before?

01:26:18   - Yeah, there were no presets, right? - Do you remember, how about the whole thing

01:26:22   with Mac versus Windows standard gamma? - Oh, Jesus Christ.

01:26:26   - Right, how, and then, - Forgot about that.

01:26:30   - Remember that, and then you'd have like a monitor that was going on the Fritz and you could like

01:26:33   recalibrate it in the control, the monitor's control panel and you'd get like another custom

01:26:40   thing and it was so, it was a disaster. And that's not even going to professional standards. That was

01:26:47   just trying to get it so it looked right to your eyes as somebody who cared about color. And now

01:26:52   they just work, but not your TV, right? And so, you know, right? So like your iPhone,

01:26:58   you never have to worry about like what gamma your iPhone is generating or whatever. You just

01:27:03   do brightness, right? All you have to worry about is brightness. Do you want to turn true tone on?

01:27:08   These things that you can easily understand and they're not really about calibration,

01:27:11   but are about personal taste. - Oh, and the P3 color space. I mean,

01:27:15   when Apple started talking about that and I was like, well, well, most people notice, I don't know,

01:27:19   it'll have some more vivid colors in a few areas. And it's, you know, if you use a RGB or was it

01:27:24   SRGB versus P3 phone, you look at them side by side and the SRGB thing looks like washed out crap

01:27:30   sometimes for the same photo. You're like, this is noticeable improvement that people, if you put

01:27:35   them side by side, a normal person would say that one's better with the P3. - But anyway, this new

01:27:40   calibration thing is supposed to work. You know, we'll have to try it afterwards. - Why can't I do

01:27:45   this on my Mac? John, why can't I do this on my Mac? - You're not supposed to need to. - I got an

01:27:49   iMac, so it's calibrating already. - Right, see, that's just it. You're not supposed to need to.

01:27:52   You're supposed to plug it into an Apple display or a built-in display. But,

01:27:56   and otherwise the other big thing with Apple TV is sort of, as I wrote about it, it's like a lot

01:28:04   of speculation that Apple was like getting out of the market because that's why they're pushing

01:28:09   the TV+ app onto all these other platforms and they're just gonna, you know, be more like Netflix

01:28:14   instead of worrying about selling Apple TV boxes. They just want to put Apple TV on everybody else's

01:28:18   boxes. Other people who thought, well, no, they should sell their own box, but they've got to

01:28:23   compete on price. These Roku things are only 40 bucks and Amazon is only 40 bucks. They need

01:28:29   something for under $100. And Apple was like, nope, we're good. We'll just keep selling these

01:28:34   for $180. - Because we can't. - A 32 gigabyte upgrade for 32 gigabytes you probably don't need

01:28:43   and that they didn't even bother telling you what you could use it for. The only thing I can

01:28:49   imagine would be if you really do use your Apple TV as a gaming console, they're having the games

01:28:55   installed could take up multiple gigabytes. But like for streaming video, you certainly don't need

01:29:00   extra 32 gigabytes. But on the other hand, it's only 20 bucks. So it's like if you're already in

01:29:06   for 179, why not? I don't know. - You know, the secret too is I don't know if anybody but me

01:29:12   enables this. Content caching on your Mac. If you got a desktop Mac and you got a bunch of

01:29:16   extra storage, like I've got an eight terabyte external hard drive that I use for like offloading

01:29:22   stuff and backups and whatever. Mac OS, you go to sharing preference pane, you check the content

01:29:30   caching box and then you can set a limit and point it to a drive. And any Apple content,

01:29:36   like it's synced appointments, stuff protected with fair play, whatever, is just cached there

01:29:41   for the network. System updates, iOS updates, whatever. And so you don't know what's in there.

01:29:46   Apple does all this disguising and encryption, but it's basically I've got like an Apple

01:29:50   content distribution network node on my drive. I can't even tell if it works. Like it's constantly

01:29:58   downloading stuff and it's full of, it's got like 20 gigabytes of stuff on it or whatever.

01:30:04   I can't remember what I devoted to it. But it's like if you've watched a movie from a streaming

01:30:10   device, it doesn't necessarily download it to the device. It'll download it to the caching server.

01:30:14   So when you stream, it doesn't come off the network, off the internet. We have gigabit

01:30:18   internet, so that's fine, but it comes from your local network. Anyway, so that's a trick you can

01:30:23   do if you have a lower speed network. And that's in settings sharing. It's in a

01:30:28   system preferences sharing. It's just one of these options. And if you look up details about it,

01:30:34   Apple has some stuff online, but it's kind of like, turn this on and we'll cache some stuff

01:30:38   on your machine, like all kinds of things. And so if you've got a lower speed connection,

01:30:43   you've got like a 10 or 20 megabit per second connection. Back when Apple was making Wi-Fi

01:30:48   routers, the time capsule had a feature like that, where the, you know, your, your, your, if you're,

01:30:54   if I forget if it was just the time capsule, because that time capsule, probably, because

01:30:59   it's, because it's the only one with storage, right? Like a regular, oh, we can't. Yeah.

01:31:03   Because I mean, I've always thought, I think that Apple, I wish for $179, I wish the new Apple TV

01:31:09   was also a Wi-Fi hub. I mean, it's already a home kit hub and it could be a content caching hub.

01:31:14   It could be so much more. And instead it is to me, a little bit surprising that they did the

01:31:22   very least surprising thing possible and just sort of upgrade the A series chip to the A12,

01:31:27   kept the prices the same and said, no, no, we're good. And, and, you know, it seems like their

01:31:33   attitude is yes, we want TV app everywhere. And so we're doing that. And anybody who's,

01:31:41   who thinks that's fine and at a $40 Roku box or the built-in smart TV stuff on your TV, if that's

01:31:49   good for you, then Apple TV will be there for you. And if you want a premium experience and,

01:31:55   you know, color corrected output and the Dolby Atmos sound to their home pods and the Dolby,

01:32:04   whatever they call it for the HDR content, you, you know, if you're willing to pay 180 bucks,

01:32:09   you can, you can have a premium experience with the Apple TV box. It is sort of a very old school

01:32:15   Apple idea. You know, it's sort of like where the Mac was 20 years ago, you know, where, yeah,

01:32:20   it is a serious premium over a PC crap box, but some people are willing to pay for it. And, you

01:32:25   know, five, five, 6% of the market is fine for them for this product. You know, this isn't supposed

01:32:32   to set the world on fire. Have you used a smart TV with the Apple TV app on it? Because I had not

01:32:38   until recently. I did when we got a new TV a year ago. And how long did you use it? Like 30 seconds.

01:32:47   We got our new Vizio and it's a relatively modern, you know, 4k. It's not super high end one. It's

01:32:53   like very affordable model. And I was like, well, this is great. It's got all the apps and I've got

01:32:56   an HD Apple TV, so we can watch 4k Apple TV programming through the app, the Apple TV app

01:33:02   on the Vizio. And I don't know, I lasted, I don't know, maybe a couple of days messing with it. And

01:33:06   it's so slow and the interface is terrible and everything lags. And to go back and forth between

01:33:12   Apple TV app on the Vizio and Apple TV on its own hardware, you know, the last, like a fourth

01:33:18   generation one, not a fifth or later, it was the most painful thing in the world. I'm like, all

01:33:22   right, this is why they can charge. This is why I haven't used a Roku. And so I realized Roku is a

01:33:27   totally different experience and they're very affordable and so forth. So that's not a fair

01:33:32   comparison, but it was embarrassing. Yeah, I bought, I didn't, I wound up not really writing

01:33:36   about it at length, but I bought a Roku and an Amazon box like two years ago, just, you know,

01:33:43   and each one was like 80 bucks. And I thought, well, I can justify it cause I'll write about it,

01:33:47   but I didn't write about it, but I tried them both and they're fine. They're better in my

01:33:53   appearance, in my opinion, than it, to me, it's like three tiers. There's the built into the TV

01:33:59   tier, which is not good. We have an LG and it's, people often say, if you read the reviews, people

01:34:04   who actually bother to try Samsung and Sony and LG and Vizio and whoever else, then LG does have

01:34:10   the best reputation for the built-in software. And it's actually, it's like the remnants of the old

01:34:17   Palm OS, right? It's, or WebOS from Palm. Like LG was the company that wound up buying the rights to

01:34:26   the Palm WebOS and they either never used it for phones or quickly aborted it for phones, but,

01:34:33   but that's what they've gotten their TVs. And it is better than, than most of the other ones

01:34:38   I've seen, like at family members' houses and stuff like that. That's not good. The Roku and the

01:34:43   Fire box or Fire TV box, whatever Amazon calls it, are better. Roku's, in my opinion, better

01:34:49   than Amazon. Amazon is just so clumsy software-wise, everything, even their store. To me, it's their

01:34:55   Achilles heel is that their design is so bad. Like we were just, I forget what we were watching,

01:35:01   our family, we just watched something on Amazon Prime, but it's like, even my son who doesn't

01:35:06   typically nerd out on stuff like this, he was like, this app is so janky. It looks like,

01:35:13   the Amazon Prime app looks like a prototype, you know, like a couple of engineers who weren't even

01:35:20   working with the designer put this together. 'Cause everything is just like a rectangle and a box and

01:35:26   all right, we can just put an image here and put some text here. And it's like, you know,

01:35:30   then you go show your boss, like, look, we could make this app that shows all this video. And it's

01:35:34   like, yeah, let's green light, let's bring a designer on board, get an interaction team.

01:35:40   You know, like nothing is animated. It's so weird. It's very crude. The Roku's much better

01:35:47   in that regard, but it's also clearly like a step behind the Apple TV, like just a night and day

01:35:53   to me. So it's worth it to me. 180 bucks. I don't know. I don't need to buy a new Apple TV 4K.

01:35:59   So I've had mine since the 4K one came out in 2018. So I've still got years ahead of it. So

01:36:06   for the 180 bucks I spent on it, it's not bad, but it is interesting to me that it's contrary

01:36:11   to everybody's advice. I don't remember anybody's advice to Apple being, what they should do with

01:36:17   the Apple TV is change nothing. Just keep selling these boxes for $180.

01:36:24   They are so funny because they don't have to. Apple, as I think you've pointed out,

01:36:31   many people pointed out, they figure out a price point and then that's the price point for that

01:36:35   product, not forever, but often it doesn't move very much. And they don't need to. And then

01:36:41   occasionally, we've seen them do it with like the HomePod and some other products where they're like,

01:36:45   maybe this is a little much. And they tweak it or they produce a new thing and then they have a

01:36:49   justification to make it lower. They try to keep the lowest price of the lowest end Mac

01:36:53   at under $1,000, those kinds of things. But I think they like their prices more than they like

01:36:59   adjusting prices. They don't want to—I mean, they're never racing to the bottom,

01:37:03   but I think, you know, how do you have a company that's worth trillions of dollars and delivers

01:37:08   30% plus margins consistently? That's how. You don't change the price.

01:37:12   Pete: I would say the product where that was the most conspicuous for the most people was

01:37:18   the MacBook Air and that era when it was not still $999, did not have a retina screen,

01:37:26   and was just looking slower and slower and slower. And they just were waiting until they could make

01:37:33   the retina MacBook Air that they wanted to make. And in the meantime, what every other PC maker

01:37:39   would have done is, well, we'll at least lower the prices, you know. But they, you know, I think,

01:37:46   I mean, again, they'll never explain themselves, but basically they didn't want to,

01:37:50   "Okay, we're not ready with the next generation MacBook Air yet, but we'll lower the price to $799.

01:37:56   Okay, you know, there you go." Or $699, you know.

01:37:59   Pete: That was super cheap, wasn't it?

01:38:00   Pete; They never did. They never lowered the price. It was always $999. They had like—

01:38:04   Pete; Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:38:04   Pete; No, they had like $899 for education, but they never lowered the price because they didn't

01:38:08   want to come out with the one they always wanted to come out with and say, "Okay, now here it is,

01:38:12   and it's $1,199." You know, and in fact, when they came out with the retina MacBook Air at like $1,199,

01:38:19   they still kept the old crummy one around at $999 just to hold that price point until like a year

01:38:26   later when, "Okay, now we can sell last year's retina MacBook Air for $999, and here's a speed

01:38:32   bump version for $1,199," etc. And then the other one that really stands out, of course, is the

01:38:37   Trashcan Mac Pro where it never even got an update, but yet they kept these incredibly professional

01:38:43   prices, you know, $4,000 for this computer with a seven-year-old chip. I mean, it was crazy,

01:38:52   but it was such a niche product, you know, it didn't have the mass market. But it's all about

01:38:57   holding those price points.

01:38:58   Pete; Yep. And again, I mean, their spreadsheets make it work. I mean, it just cracks me up that

01:39:02   I bought a 4K TV for just a few dollars more than the new Apple TV 4K, right? It's like,

01:39:10   that's what they can do, and they own that. And you know what? I will probably eventually get

01:39:15   one because I got a 4K TV now and an HD Apple TV. So, I probably will eventually go, "Oh,

01:39:19   yeah," you know, wait for sale or some, you know, whatever, and then I'll do it.

01:39:23   Chris; My advice to anybody buying a TV is research the hell out of it. The nice thing is there's only

01:39:29   a few brands. It's not as complicated as you would think.

01:39:32   Pete; There's what, Sony, Visio is not a Sony brand, right? It's Visio, Samsung, and Sony,

01:39:38   and maybe LG still makes TVs.

01:39:40   Chris; And LG, right. And, you know, did you get OLED or no?

01:39:43   Pete; I did not. No, we got a cheap thing. And actually, it's really, I was shocked by the

01:39:48   reviews, we were really positive, and I swear to God, we didn't pay more than $250 for it.

01:39:53   Chris; So, I-

01:39:53   Pete; It's really good.

01:39:55   Chris; I went, right, I skipped the whole LED. I've never owned an LED TV.

01:39:59   Pete; Yeah, yeah.

01:40:00   Chris; So, I went right from plasma to OLED. But by going, waiting, holding out for OLED,

01:40:06   there were only four brands. There's only four brands that make OLED. I chose LG because it just

01:40:10   seemed, it was a good combination, and I liked the idea that the software was at least, if I ever had

01:40:15   to use it, it was better. And then immediately, stop looking at TV prices because…

01:40:20   Pete; Oh, yeah, that's great.

01:40:21   Chris; Because TV prices, like, if you wait three months, you'll save all this money,

01:40:27   or for the same amount of money, get a way bigger TV or way brighter TV. Like,

01:40:31   the TV market continues. It's amazing. It's really, you know, but it's not something…

01:40:38   Pete; There's something about…

01:40:38   Chris; It's not something you want to keep your eye on the prices after you've made the decision.

01:40:42   Pete; It's just, very by the way, is I think TV makers barely make any money.

01:40:47   Chris; No.

01:40:48   Pete; Like, companies, you know, used to be more, and the race to the bottom was so quick,

01:40:52   and there's so few companies that can make, like, manufacture the glass and the LED components. So,

01:40:57   you know, Samsung famously provides chunks of that to Apple, right? And then Apple's building

01:41:01   its own factories too, or buying or supporting ones, to avoid having to use Samsung as much of

01:41:07   a source and blah, blah, blah. But the thing is, it's really, the TV business is so terrible

01:41:12   that, or the HGTV business that, I don't know if, I remember a few years ago, practically no one

01:41:18   except Samsung was making money because everyone else had to buy source materials from elsewhere,

01:41:24   and I don't know what it is today. But anyway, so they charge these ridiculously low prices

01:41:28   that are sometimes below their, you know, their profit. You're like, how do you,

01:41:32   I don't understand a market like that. It's like the negative Apple model. It's like,

01:41:36   let's have a negative 5% margin on all our products.

01:41:38   Adam Boffa - All right, let me take a break here. Thank our next sponsor. All right,

01:41:42   I keep talking up each sponsor as being better than theirs. But if you have this sponsor and

01:41:48   you need them, they will become your favorite company ever. And I'm talking about Backblaze,

01:41:54   longtime sponsor. They're back sponsoring the show again. Online backup for your Mac or PC,

01:42:01   six bucks a month, no gimmicks, no add-ons, no gotchas, no paying for the gigabyte or something

01:42:07   like that. You pay by the device. You have two Macs, you pay twice. You have one, you just pay

01:42:14   for the one. It backs up everything you've got connected to the Mac. It's all in the cloud.

01:42:19   They have over an exabyte. I don't even know how much that is of customer data backed up and

01:42:23   counting. Oh, they're telling me how much it is. That's 1 billion gigabytes. 50 billion, over 50

01:42:31   billion files have been restored for Backblaze customers. What do you do if you need to get stuff

01:42:37   back? Well, number one, how do you get set up? You just install their software on your Mac,

01:42:41   sign in, you get a 30-day free trial. It just starts backing stuff up in the background.

01:42:46   You don't even notice. It doesn't slow down your computer. It doesn't slow down your memory.

01:42:51   Let it go. You might need to give it a couple of days because you might have a lot of stuff.

01:42:54   Then after that, everything just backs up incrementally. You don't even know it's there.

01:42:59   There's nothing to do. You don't have to remember to go in every day and hit a button or something

01:43:03   like that. No, it just backs up incrementally as you go to the cloud. They've got an iPhone app,

01:43:09   Android app too, where you can go and access your files. If you just want to access a file from your

01:43:14   Mac while you're on your phone, just go to their app. There it is. You could just get it there and

01:43:19   view it or email it to somebody or something like that. But when you want to restore, they have

01:43:23   options. You can restore by mail. You can get a flash key or a hard drive restore shipped right

01:43:30   to your door. If it's like an emergency, like, "Oh my God, this is an emergency. It's a disaster.

01:43:34   I need this tomorrow." Get a FedEx delivery. They'll send it on a hard drive. You can send

01:43:39   the hard drive back to them after you've restored it to your computer and get the money back for

01:43:43   that. You can restore online, over the web, anywhere from the world from anybody else's

01:43:50   computer if you need to access some of your files. Really, really convenient. Very reliable.

01:43:56   For an extra two bucks a month, they can increase your retention history to one year.

01:44:01   So for two bucks a month, you can have a year of retention history in case you're worried about

01:44:06   accidentally deleting a file or something like that and not noticing until it's too late.

01:44:10   15-day free trial is the correct length of time of the free trial. Backblaze.com/daringfireball.

01:44:19   So go to backblaze.com/daringfireball. Seriously, back your stuff up. Even if you don't use Backblaze,

01:44:26   use something. But Backblaze, I use it. I have it installed. I love it. My thanks to Backblaze

01:44:30   for sponsoring the show. My wife's 2014 Max SSD just entirely died. And we were able to retrieve

01:44:40   all our files, 300 gigabytes, off Backblaze. Thank you. I'm not sponsored by Backblaze.

01:44:45   I didn't know that story, but I've heard similar stories over the years. I honestly hope, and

01:44:51   Backblaze will not even discourage me from saying it, I hope none of you ever need it. I really do.

01:44:56   I hope every single one of you never needs to use it. But if you do, that's when I get email

01:45:01   from people and they're like, "You know, I signed up for this a couple of years ago on your podcast,

01:45:05   and you'll never guess what happened to me last week." One million chance, doc. One million chance.

01:45:10   What else we got? Are we moving on to IMAX? IMAX. What do you think? I love the colors.

01:45:17   I love the design. I guess the biggest complaint is why make it so absurdly thin?

01:45:25   Because they can. I mean, this is kind of the Apple thing, right? They're obsessed by it.

01:45:32   Because there's no—you know, I've got, like I say, I've got the 2017 one, and it's

01:45:36   curved. It's a little heavy still, so making it lighter would be good. But there's something

01:45:42   about, I don't know, like they want—you remember when the iPad came out and it was like,

01:45:48   it was a sheet of glass and they'd removed the computer and you were completely interacting with

01:45:51   the thing almost as if it didn't exist. You were directly sticking your hands into the computing

01:45:56   experience of the device. So, I feel like there's a little bit of the, we're going to erase the

01:46:01   computer until it no longer exists practically to produce an experience that you are not separate

01:46:07   from the computer. And maybe that's the guiding philosophy. I don't know. I like the colors,

01:46:12   though. I do like the colors. If they didn't have an institutional compulsion to keep making things

01:46:17   ever smaller and make the computer disappear, if they didn't have it, I mean, yes, can it lead them

01:46:22   to go too far? Sure. I would say, you know, I would say the one-port 12-inch MacBook is the best

01:46:30   example. The one-port, one USB port that also doubled as the power connector is not enough.

01:46:36   It just isn't for anybody.

01:46:37   Pete: Yeah, I had that machine. I own the 2015 MacBook and it was incredibly irritating. Two

01:46:42   ports is fine, but one was ridiculous. Jon, let me ask you a contrasting question. Maybe this is

01:46:48   the way Apple thinks about it and maybe I'm wrong is, does it need to be any thicker?

01:46:51   Jon: Maybe, you know.

01:46:53   Pete; Like, this is the both incredibly thin, but I wonder, did they actually strive for it?

01:47:02   They're like, well, we got a monitor, like, well, where do we stick the computer? In the past,

01:47:05   we stuck the computer sort of behind the monitor, you know, if you take apart your old,

01:47:09   and they had the bulge, right? You kind of bulged out like a CRT and there was an LCD.

01:47:13   And now they're like, we got the chin, are we going to get rid of the chin? It's like, nah,

01:47:16   we sort of need the chin. People put their hands on it. The height of the thing, we didn't give

01:47:20   you an adjustable height, so unless you use a VESA mount version, you know, you kind of need

01:47:24   that extra, like the screen shouldn't be that low. So, let's just stick the whole computer in the

01:47:28   chin, you know, and eventually I'm like, you know, and they put, this is the fun part where they put

01:47:33   the Ethernet port on the models that have gigabit Ethernet is in the power adapter, right? Which is

01:47:37   neat and weird. Eventually I'm going to be like, oh, they're just going to put the entire computer

01:47:41   in the power adapter. Like that's the next evolution of the iMac is going to be a little

01:47:45   Mac mini-sized lump on the floor. - Or a little Apple TV-sized thing, right? It's almost like,

01:47:50   it's almost like, is the Apple TV too big? You know, like, why does it need all those ports?

01:47:56   Why can't it be more like Apple TV? No, I'm with you, you know, and it is interesting because

01:48:02   part of making it so small is it does have an external power adapter now, which I believe

01:48:07   is the first desktop Mac ever with a power, external power connector. I mean like, ever, ever.

01:48:14   - I'm trying to think if, yeah, and I would say people were, had different opinions about it.

01:48:19   I will tell you this, I'm confident with my extensive but limited knowledge of computer

01:48:26   circuitry that I believe is probably, you may exceed me on this, but it's certainly,

01:48:30   I'm comparable to you because I'm not an electronics person, but I have read and

01:48:34   talked to and dug into it. I am absolutely confident the failure rate of the main device

01:48:40   will be substantially lower by removing the power circuitry from it and sticking it into

01:48:45   a power brick. Because then you're like, my machine died. They're like, great, we will send

01:48:49   you a new $50 item instead of having to repair a $1,400 item. - I wonder, I wonder how often that's

01:48:56   what something in that fails. - What fails, SSDs don't fail more, I mean, over a period of time.

01:49:02   The main circuitry don't fail. The heat dissipation is an issue from the power supply more than the

01:49:08   low power circuitry. This is an M1 based device, so the power dissipation is like, you know,

01:49:13   like nothing compared to the Intel chips. You've got M1s, you touch the computer and it's not hot.

01:49:20   And if you're using, my kids have these 2018 MacBook Airs and one of my kids will be doing

01:49:25   this game called GeoGaster that's super fun. They plop you down in a Google map and you have to find

01:49:30   where you are on the planet, it's really neat. And he's just using Google Street Map and his machine

01:49:34   is so hot you can't touch it, right? - Yeah, yeah. - So, these Macs are gonna be absolutely cool to

01:49:40   the touch in every circumstance and just won't overheat. And overheating and other related issues,

01:49:47   I'm sure, are a huge part of the failure of devices for repair. - I love that it's too thin

01:49:53   for an ethernet jack. I mean, 'cause-- (laughing) - Oh, I didn't even think about that. - Right?

01:49:59   So, the headphone jack is on the side because the headphone jack is too deep to go in the back with

01:50:06   the USB ports. But an ethernet port wouldn't fit either in the back 'cause it's not deep enough

01:50:12   and it wouldn't fit on the side 'cause it's not thick enough. And it is pretty funny thinking

01:50:18   about back in the day when ethernet was the shiznet, part of what made it so cool was that

01:50:25   it was so much smaller of a port than everything else compared to display adapters and SCSI,

01:50:32   for example. I mean, SCSI was the size of a book. - Oh my God, I love that. That's so great. And so

01:50:38   that's actually, I had not thought about that as a USB-C thing, is that it's actually shallow,

01:50:43   so it's not just small. I didn't think about that. So, the circuitry on the back end goes out

01:50:48   on either side. - Yeah, it's really pretty interesting. I mean, but that's the company.

01:50:52   So, the people who are complaining about the chin, that they wish that they'd gotten rid of the chin,

01:50:57   why not just make it, the whole thing, a little bit thicker than you could have put the computer

01:51:02   behind the display and nobody sees how thick it is? I get it. I mean, that's certainly,

01:51:08   but maybe you should start a computer company. I don't know. I think Apple's, like I said,

01:51:13   compulsion to keep making things thinner and create the illusion that the computer itself is

01:51:18   disappearing is driving them towards that goal much faster than if institutionally Apple was

01:51:26   more willing to say, "Ah, we'll just put it in the back. Who cares? Nobody looks at the back."

01:51:30   - That's right. They could have a big ugly bulge. Imagine if there was like a

01:51:33   square bulge in the back, so it was super thin, no chin, and the bulge had the computer in it.

01:51:40   So, here's where it makes me wonder. Here we are at the end of April, WWDC is in like five weeks.

01:51:48   Where do we see the rest of the Apple lineup going? So, with these iMacs, they've completed

01:51:56   the consumer end of the game, unless they have new products, like if they were going to bring back

01:52:02   a just plain MacBook that's even smaller than the MacBook Air, which I expect them,

01:52:08   I don't know if they'll call it the Air. I expect though that they will have a future,

01:52:12   they're going to bring back laptops that are smaller than what we now call the MacBook Air.

01:52:16   But right now, there are consumer Macs across the board. All the consumer Intel Macs have either

01:52:22   been replaced by M1s or are available as an alternative. You can still buy the Intel 21-inch

01:52:30   iMac if you want. I have no idea why anyone would buy that, but it's there if you want it. It's the

01:52:35   Pro Macs that are left. And I'm just looking at the calendar. With the iMac, what I think they're

01:52:43   going to do is, so for example, if you want a 16-inch MacBook, your only option is the MacBook Pro.

01:52:49   That's it. And the 16-inch MacBook Pro starts at like 2,800? 2,400, I think. But it's a serious

01:52:59   amount of money. It's more than most people spend on a laptop. And that's a base configuration.

01:53:04   Most people are probably going to, you know, you're looking at probably most people who buy a 16-inch

01:53:08   MacBook Pro probably spend $3,000 easy. I think, but that's it. That's your only option for a 16-inch

01:53:17   MacBook. There is no, there's never been a 16 or 15-inch, you know, $1,200 MacBook. I think that's

01:53:24   where they're going with the iMac is that, okay, so they've got this 24-inch display. It's much

01:53:30   bigger, noticeably bigger than the old 21-inch. But what about the people used to the 5K 27-inch?

01:53:35   My guess is that they'll be, the new iMac Pro will just be like the 16-inch MacBook Pro where

01:53:43   it's just, that's the big iMac. It's 27 inches. Maybe it'll go up to 30 inches. I don't know.

01:53:48   I speculated maybe they'd go to 30. A couple of people are like, I don't know about that because

01:53:53   27 is exactly 5K. They're not going to make the pixels bigger. Who knows? Whatever. 2730, a bigger

01:54:00   display. All of them are iMac Pros. They all have, you know, the ability to have more than 16

01:54:06   gigabytes of RAM, more than two terabytes of storage. But what chip is it? Is it the M1X?

01:54:13   Is it, is it dude, but, and when, you know, like when is it coming out? If they announce him at

01:54:20   June but they don't ship till later in the summer or the fall, then does an M1X even make sense?

01:54:26   Why come out with an M1X when the M2s are probably coming out later in the fall, right? Like,

01:54:32   Yeah, I don't buy the, well, I'll tell you, I'll tip my hand, which is, you know, among the

01:54:36   many thousands of books I feel like I've written. Take Control of Your M Series Mac is my book about

01:54:41   M Series Macs because Jokicsel and I are like, we're not going to name this M1 Mac because we

01:54:46   don't know what Apple's going to do. And we figure I'm on the favor of the M2. M1X sounds like the

01:54:53   thing they do for incremental change. I think for a Pro machine, it's going to be called an M2

01:54:57   because it's going to be a fundamentally different thing. So there might be an M1X that allows,

01:55:02   oh, I don't know, like maybe it'll allow 32 gigs of internal memory or something. But there's been

01:55:06   some good discussion about, you know, when you start to get above a certain size with a system

01:55:10   on a chip, like you cannot just, you can't throw like a terabyte of RAM into a system on a chip.

01:55:16   So an M2 that allows, so I mean, we can back this out, right? A Pro system has to be able to have

01:55:22   enormous amounts of RAM and should be able to have like four terabytes or eight terabytes of

01:55:28   storage because that's a reasonable thing from an SSD. So if you do that, you have to re-engineer

01:55:33   the chip, which means it's a next generation thing. And the M2, almost certainly, I doubt

01:55:38   they'll put it in two configurations. I mean, I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem to be

01:55:42   their approach. So the M2 will support some kind of external memory configuration. So you can use

01:55:48   DRAM and maybe it'll be user expandable because of the sheer difference of size people want.

01:55:55   But that logic to me makes a lot of sense. And an M1X, maybe in the fall, there'll be an M1X

01:56:01   that drives the next generation of chip for specific machines, you know, maybe there'll be

01:56:06   MacBook Air, you know, version two of it. But an M2, I think, has to be the Pro chip.

01:56:11   And I mean, my logic could be totally wrong, but that does seem the way Apple likes to do its

01:56:14   labeling.

01:56:15   But then what would be the next chip for next year's MacBook Air? If the M2 is for Pros,

01:56:22   see, that doesn't add up to me.

01:56:23   Well, I mean, but it could be, I mean, that's, it could be the M1X. I mean,

01:56:26   it could be an M1X like they did before. But then you just, I mean, do you up cores in it?

01:56:30   Like, I have a feeling there's a core, and I mean, sort of, it's the issue of like cores,

01:56:34   there's so much in the M1, and I realize it's not that different in some ways from what was in the

01:56:40   A series. But it's, I mean, do you, you know, how many cores do you need? And a Pro needs more cores.

01:56:46   So we know that's going to be a new architecture.

01:56:48   And what do they do to the, you know, they're already using the five nanometer process.

01:56:53   They've already got, you know, the neural, like all the things that are already in there.

01:56:57   What is the next generation for a MacBook Air? It's going to be tweaks. And I don't know what

01:57:02   those are going to be. If they're not, you know, maybe they'll be higher performance,

01:57:06   or maybe they'll be 16 and 32 gigabyte options on chip instead of eight and 16.

01:57:10   Yeah, it's, so the other way to look at Apple's in-house chips, Apple Silicon,

01:57:16   iOS and Mac, is to go by the actual cores. And they come out with new names for these cores

01:57:23   every year. So back in a couple years ago, when they had the A12, they called the high

01:57:29   performance cores Vortex, and the high efficiency cores Tempest. Then the A13 year, it was Lightning

01:57:36   and Thunder for high performance, high efficiency. And then last year, with the A14, which is in the

01:57:43   iPhones 12, and the iPad, the new iPad Air from last fall, Firestorm and Icestorm. Firestorm is

01:57:51   high performance. And so that the A14, two high perform, two of the Firestorm, four of the high

01:57:57   efficiency Icestorm. The M1 goes four of each, but they're still, it is the same cores, right?

01:58:05   Like the, it's like the 2020 cores. So that's the thing. It's like, if they came out with like

01:58:12   pro Apple Silicon Macs, and they called it the M1X, M1 to me would mean the Firestorm,

01:58:19   Icestorm cores. Oh, interesting. From last year. And maybe they add more of them, right? So maybe

01:58:25   it's 16 cores instead of eight cores. And it's eight of each, eight high performance, eight high

01:58:31   efficiency. I don't know how they want to mix and match them. But it would be weird if they came out

01:58:36   with these products that are completely under their control with their chips. To me, it would

01:58:41   be weird if they came out with pro MacBook, 16 inch MacBook Pro, and maybe the iMac Pro,

01:58:48   with the M1X. And it's got more cores. And so if you're doing Xcode, Xcode doubles in speed

01:58:56   because you've got double the cores. But single core performance would be worse than the new iPhone

01:59:02   that's coming out in September? Yeah, yeah. So that's right. So I hadn't thought about it that

01:59:06   way, but you're totally it is that an M2 has got to increase core performance. And so an M1X is,

01:59:13   I think you're exactly right, is quantity as opposed to the literal core. And also GPU too,

01:59:21   right? I mean, eight core GPU is great, but they could be putting a 12 or 16 core one into a

01:59:28   professional, into a pro model. Right. It does not seem that the GPU in these, as sufficient as it is

01:59:36   for typical users' needs, it's not a pro GPU. And leaving aside the whole issue of PC gaming and

01:59:44   stuff, there's all sorts of professional reasons to want a better GPU. And it's also very, very,

01:59:51   as much as Apple is milking, not milking, that sounds too negative, but it's extraordinary that

02:00:00   this M1 chip is both for $700 Mac minis and for $1,700 iMacs and also for portables. And it's

02:00:10   great. It's not just like, oh yeah, it's a great desktop chip and you can use it in a portable.

02:00:16   And it's like, oh, well, what's it do to battery life? Oh, it doubles your battery life.

02:00:20   Pete: I've told people this a bunch, I've had the M1 MacBook Air for five months almost, and

02:00:26   I still am in disbelief when I do a lot of things on it that it works as well as it does. Like,

02:00:31   it's almost like an ongoing marketing machine because like you, I've used Macs for decades,

02:00:38   and I've enjoyed some significant improvements in performance over the years, but this one is

02:00:42   ridiculous. So, every time I touch it, I'm like, that can't just have happened that fast.

02:00:46   And you know…

02:00:47   Jim: The battery life thing amazes me. I typically keep my Mac in my office,

02:00:55   and it's downstairs in the kitchen, it's on the second floor. But I forget what I was doing,

02:00:59   but I wanted to be with the family, so I took my M1 MacBook up there and I didn't plug it in. I

02:01:06   have USB-C up there, but I didn't realize I didn't plug it in. I'd been up there like all weekend,

02:01:11   and I was like, huh, this isn't plugged in. I look at the battery and it said like 61%

02:01:15   is still remaining. And I'm like, what? That doesn't make any sense!

02:01:18   Pete; Get this, though, you know what was added, and you're going to love this, in Big Sur 11.3

02:01:22   that just came out, you know what they added that wasn't there before was hibernation for M1s. So,

02:01:29   it was getting that battery life with, unless you were, well, I don't know if you're wearing the

02:01:32   beta back that far, but so it didn't have hibernation mode, so it got that battery life

02:01:37   with just normal sleep mode. Chris; That's crazy. It's really insane.

02:01:40   Pete; So, with hibernation mode, I figured you could probably, you know, go around the world and

02:01:45   you know, do like, I don't know, like 18 hours of use on the thing over 30 days and it would still

02:01:50   have a charge at the end. Chris; It's, the whole Apple Silicon story for Mac, and one of the things

02:01:55   that to me is so exciting about it is that they've so successfully kept their cards close to their

02:02:00   vest, right? Nobody knew what these, we were kind of hoping for iMacs last week, but nobody knew

02:02:06   what they looked like. And never, somebody, you know, somebody said, ah, they're going to be in

02:02:09   colors again. We didn't know what colors, you know, we didn't know how thin, nobody was like,

02:02:13   this thing looks like a giant iPad from the side. I mean, it literally is the thickness of the

02:02:20   original iPhone. The whole thing is as thick as the original iPhone. It's crazy. Nobody knew what

02:02:26   the initial lineup of M1 Macs was going to be last November. No, it's all terribly exciting. And

02:02:32   nobody knows what their story is with Pro iMacs, which is super. Pete; I told my wife this, I said,

02:02:38   we don't know what's coming. And this is what, and no one knew that the M1, when the M1 shipped,

02:02:42   it was a shock to everybody. What exactly? And she's like, that's not usual, is it? I'm like,

02:02:46   no, somehow Apple's kept tighter lips on this than any product they've released in, I don't know how

02:02:52   many years or decades, maybe because it's so different. But, um, so here's, here's my best

02:02:58   guess. And I have no inside information about this at all. I don't even know where I would go. I mean,

02:03:02   you know, John Turnus is not entering his phone when I call him to ask for tips,

02:03:07   but here's what I think. And, and I'm just mainly looking at the calendar and just thinking about

02:03:14   the fact that the room for a Pro tier of M1 is sort of running out because the A15, which will

02:03:23   have the same cores as the next generation M2 is absolutely, we all know is slated for September.

02:03:30   Now, whether it'll be late, probably not this year, if it wasn't late last year with COVID, but

02:03:35   we know iPads or iPhones come out in September or at least get announced then. And it'll be the new

02:03:41   two cores that's, so I think they're running out of time. And I kind of think back to last year when

02:03:46   they first announced this transition and they did say it would be over the next two years.

02:03:49   And I kind of chalk that up to a sort of institutional under promise over deliver,

02:03:55   right? Let's say two years, but like when they did the Intel transition, they got the whole thing

02:04:00   done in a year. They had the whole Mac lineup done in a year with going from PowerPC to Intel.

02:04:07   What if it really is two years? And in that two year thing is that the M1, the first year

02:04:14   of Apple Silicon for Macs is entirely consumer based. And it's with the year two,

02:04:22   where there'll be an M2 for consumer Macs. And then that's when we see the M2X and that's the

02:04:28   Pro story. So you're thinking consumer that there's possibility April 2022 before there's a consumer

02:04:34   M2 and then fall for a Pro M2. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if they can do the M2X later this year,

02:04:40   but I'm thinking that maybe like, and it seems like from the rumors and from what people are most,

02:04:47   what I know is popular and what people are waiting for, it's the 16 inch MacBook Pro that people

02:04:52   really, really want. Yeah. I mean, I could see that, right. I could see them holding off on

02:04:55   other designs, but then if they can do that, they could do anything, right? I mean, it's not a...

02:04:58   Right. And then it, but then it gives them another six months to figure out what the,

02:05:03   because the, and then the other end, the far end of the spectrum is how do they replace the Mac Pro

02:05:09   where you're, that a fully spec'd Intel Mac Pro right now is insane. It's, I don't know, it's like

02:05:17   5,000 cores. It's, but it, and you gave, I mean, you put terabytes of RAM into it. It's nutty.

02:05:25   Yeah. So it's a hot, you got it. That's what I'm thinking, but it has to be a different,

02:05:28   there's a different way of thinking about it then. I mean, for years it's been like the iPad,

02:05:34   an iPhone and lower end, the consumer Macs were all kind of the same thing. And then the phones

02:05:40   and iPads were outperforming. And now you have an iPad Pro that's using the same chip as,

02:05:45   you know, the consumer Mac. So it's all in alignment now. But the Mac Pro is, you know,

02:05:51   just something beyond that. So it's gotta be something. I mean, so that's the thing is,

02:05:55   what if it's two years for the Mac Pro? Right. But it's not two years for, you know, a, an iMac Pro

02:06:02   and a 16-inch MacBook Pro and a refreshed 13-inch MacBook Pro. Right. Exactly. Or at least a second

02:06:08   tier, right? Like I, what I could see them doing with the third, and you know, there's rumors that

02:06:13   they're going to 14 inches from 13 inches where maybe it'll go. And so maybe, maybe they keep the

02:06:18   13-inch one around at a 1400-ish price point, but they come out with a Pro Pro 14-inch smaller MacBook

02:06:26   Pro with the M2, maybe the M2X, whatever. Maybe it has to be the M2X because it goes to 32 or 64

02:06:34   gigs of RAM. And it starts at $2,000, you know, but the, if you, oh, wow, I don't want to spend

02:06:40   $2,000. Well, don't just, you know, we got the, you know, there's all the holes in the product. I

02:06:44   mean, the product matrix has the holes in it. And I think it's, I mean, you know, as you, as you've

02:06:48   written about, I think quite eloquently, eloquently when reporters are like, well, they haven't made

02:06:52   the decision about X yet. You're like, it's two months. They made the decision like a year ago,

02:06:56   guys, you know, come on. So they've either made M2 chips already or they're, you know, in mass

02:07:01   production in the, whatever example stage. - Well, that's the thing, there are, there are tons of

02:07:04   people at Apple who know everything we're speculating about here, and they're all keeping

02:07:08   their mouth shut. And I love it. - It's amazing. It's amazing. No, I love, I love that. No, I, I

02:07:13   want to hit one of the consumer points, too, though. It's just in passing is it's weird to me,

02:07:17   it's just reminds me of, you know, it's not the Schneider cut level, Schneider cut level of

02:07:21   things, but it's like people are like, how, it's kind of a little bit of a, oh, Apple's playing to

02:07:25   the, or how dare they make Colorful Max. I'm like, you don't have to buy one. They have a,

02:07:28   as Jason Stell is calling it, the no color, right? There's seven, it's six colors plus a non-color,

02:07:35   isn't it? And you can buy the non-color one. So I don't know. But I think it's, I think it's

02:07:40   wonderful to see them trying something different after a lot of uniformity for a lot of years.

02:07:45   And this is like the purple phone and whatever. People want to do things a little different.

02:07:49   Apple's got its fingers on what people want. They, you know, they don't, we know they famously don't

02:07:53   do focus groups the way a lot of the industry does, but they listen to people. They listen to

02:07:57   what, CUST, SAT, what is it? The, yeah, customer SAT. Yeah. So they, they know that. And so this

02:08:02   is clearly something they think they want it, they can do. They can do interestingly, the whole like

02:08:08   accessorized thing, all being the same color is pretty neat. I am a Johnny Ive fan boy. I love

02:08:14   the guy's work. I've talked to him a few times and he's always been charming and delightful

02:08:20   and truly interesting. And I think he's done wonderful work for Apple, did wonderful work

02:08:24   for decades, but it's impossible not to see the post Steve Jobs era of Johnny Ive as chief design

02:08:33   officer as it clearly, I mean, there's stuff we can speculate on thinness and other design

02:08:39   decisions, but the move towards monochromatic hardware is undeniable. I mean, there's absolutely

02:08:46   no denying that an awful lot of the product lineup went towards very true, at Johnny's terms, honest,

02:08:55   you know, that this is honest to the materials it's made of and aluminum looks like aluminum,

02:09:00   you know, and, and, and trends and things go in waves and who knows, maybe if Johnny Ive were still

02:09:07   there, it would be just as colorful, you know, and maybe these are just colors of IMAX that he signed

02:09:13   off on before he left. I don't know. But it is very welcome to me. And again, if whether it's

02:09:19   completely serendipitous with the timing of the disaster and melancholy of 2020, it really feels

02:09:26   incredibly well timed in a way that it almost might've felt inappropriate a year ago, right?

02:10:00   [Laughter]

02:10:24   That to me would have been like, you know, that's that would have been like,

02:10:27   "Hey, look at these cheerful, bright, colorful IMAX last year." It's like, yeah, I don't know.

02:10:32   I think we needed everything to be sort of dark gray last year. I don't know. It feels very well

02:10:37   timed and serendipitous or not. Can I call out, there's something that I am in love with,

02:10:42   with these that's not related to the Mac. It's the touch ID on a keyboard, on an external keyboard.

02:10:47   I should not have forgotten to mention that. I just, because I mean, years ago when they first

02:10:51   released a secure enclave in an iMac, I was like, "Well, how are they going to touch ID? They can't

02:10:57   do it. You know, they can't do an external keyboard." I thought, "Oh, well, Apple's clever.

02:11:00   They'll have some kind of USB-based thing because they wouldn't trust it to blue." I don't know. And

02:11:06   then it never appeared. And I thought, "All right, maybe this is just a thing they can't do. You know,

02:11:09   they don't want to have an ugly, they're not going to stick a touch ID sensor on the front of your

02:11:13   iMac you have to touch. That would be weird. And you're not going to do with a Mac Mini and

02:11:17   whatever." So I was like, "Okay, it's just never going to happen." And then this happened. And I

02:11:20   was like, "Oh, they needed to redesign Secure Enclave so that it could accept like wireless,

02:11:25   direct wireless connections, doing some kind of proprietary thing over the, not the W, whatever

02:11:31   their wireless chip is." Yeah, the U1 maybe? I don't know. Who knows? Yeah, so there's something

02:11:37   going on where they control the protocol, they control the wireless thing, and Secure Enclave

02:11:41   can securely do wireless communication because it's only for M1 devices. And I thought that's

02:11:47   kind of cool actually. Yeah, I would anticipate that, I don't know when it would come out,

02:11:52   maybe you have to wait a year, but you know how Apple always issues their security,

02:11:55   state of Apple security white paper? Oh yeah. I feel like learning how the, if they can explain

02:12:00   even in basic layman's terms, how the touch ID security works with the air gap, it sounds fast,

02:12:08   should be fascinating. I think you've talked about it on the podcast, the Apple Platform Security

02:12:13   Guide that came out in February. That was, I mean, I recommend listeners, if you have any interest

02:12:21   in how Apple does anything, that is one of the greatest documents Apple's ever produced. I could

02:12:26   not have written my M series book without it because it digs into like boot modes and,

02:12:33   this is just by the way also, but did you know, you probably know this, you know that you can't,

02:12:40   if your Macs, there are special hidden partitions you can't and should not erase on an M1 Mac. Yeah,

02:12:46   yeah. So if your M1 SSD dies, you cannot boot it up externally because the policy information

02:12:52   for external boot is stored in hidden partitions on the internal SSD. And that's one of these super

02:12:58   weird things and you can sort of extract it from the Platform Security Guide, but there's also like,

02:13:02   there's a thousand other little interesting details in there that has helped me as a writer,

02:13:08   but also as an M1 owner, just understanding how they pulled all this stuff off. Anyway,

02:13:14   it's a fascinating read and eventually I hope they'll update it sooner than another year or two

02:13:18   with this. Yeah, that's why I was thinking we may have to wait for it because I know it just came

02:13:23   out a few, just a few weeks ago. Yeah. But it's, you know, so I guess the other thing I would be

02:13:30   doing, our mutual friend John Siracusa disfavored by not mentioning the fact that these iMacs do not

02:13:36   have face ID. They've owned, you know, their only biometric is the touch ID, which is optional. You

02:13:41   have to pay a little bit extra for the keyboard. I forget. I think it's like 40 bucks. Yeah. If

02:13:46   you don't buy, if you, or do you, it's if you buy the low end model, it's not included, but if you

02:13:51   buy it, so they have like three tiers standard models. Yeah. And it's unclear because they don't

02:13:57   have the build to, cause you can't actually order them yet. They don't have the build to order

02:14:01   things. So you don't know, can I just get the lowest end new iMac and just upgrade the keyboard

02:14:08   to touch ID? I don't know. Probably, but, um, but they, you know, that's the thing about going

02:14:14   touch ID on the keyboard is it's apparently in lieu of face ID, uh, which I think would be

02:14:21   slicker. Um, but I don't know, I'm not sure if I'm overlooking something. Siracusa seems to think

02:14:27   that they should just have face ID, you know, you're right in front of it. There's always a

02:14:31   camera. I think there's a, if, I mean, I remember reading about the technology they're using. I

02:14:36   think they'd have to develop different technology, although because they're not tapping, um, battery

02:14:42   power to do it, they could probably do it. But I mean, it's, I think you have to be relatively

02:14:46   close. So do you want to have to like lean, like get closer to the camera, move your head? No,

02:14:52   closer, closer. Yeah. I don't know. But if you're close enough to touch the button on the keyboard,

02:14:57   aren't you inherently close enough? I don't know. Well, you could have the keyboard far away. I

02:15:00   think the distance, like I think I'm two feet. I have a tape measure. I'm currently, look, I could

02:15:05   live measurement. I am currently, uh, yeah, about 24 inches eyeball from, um, from my IMAX screen

02:15:12   as we talk. And I think a lot of people are like 18 to 24 inches away typically. So, um, that I

02:15:19   think may be the problem. Well, I've got the 20. I wonder, I wonder if it's not just that face ID is

02:15:24   by Apple's, you know, Tim Cook's spreadsheet numbers just too expensive because the, to me,

02:15:31   and to me, the tell on that is that that new iPad Air that was actually the first thing to have the

02:15:37   A14 in it last September has touch ID on a button instead of face ID, you know? I figured that was,

02:15:44   didn't you think that was pandemic Air though? That was a choice that was made for the pandemic,

02:15:47   that they didn't want to add to the, you know, I don't see, I think that was too late. I think that,

02:15:52   I don't think that, you know, for a device that debuted, I'm sorry. No, you're right. No,

02:15:56   that would have been too. I was thinking the iPad pro. Yeah. Uh, I, I mean, we know that Apple can

02:16:01   do seemingly anything. So my suspicion is they would need, um, have to have a separate hole cut

02:16:06   for an infrared camera in the, um, in the top where they already have that kind of built in

02:16:12   the glass on an iPhone or iPad. So, uh, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I, I like face ID at first. I

02:16:18   thought it was, I just did not get into it. And I was like, this is great. I said to myself just

02:16:22   before we all had to put on masks for a year. Um, I just think, I just think it might be that face

02:16:28   ID is, you know, and when this, my, my hypothetical iMac pro comes out sometime later this year,

02:16:35   I would think whether it's June or September or November, like one year after the first

02:16:42   batch of Apple silica, I wouldn't be surprised if the iMac pro iMac pro has face ID.

02:16:48   Oh yeah. Cause then they can put in the extra buck 50 and cost of goods for, for putting it. Yeah.

02:16:53   And you know, and as we've said already, they, we know in the lab somewhere, there is an iMac,

02:16:58   uh, behind, you know, steel doors that does face ID. Cause of course they're testing it

02:17:02   and they either it's the cost or maybe they decided the experience was too awkward

02:17:06   in their scenarios or they wanted to, I don't know, maybe they're in cause you don't need,

02:17:12   it's weird because I think the, it's just easier to hide into the experience and move your phone

02:17:18   closer or farther away as necessary. Um, but it's also touch ID is a generally good experience.

02:17:23   You know, originally it was a little weird now. It's so, uh, incredibly reliable. I mean,

02:17:28   I didn't own, I had the 2015 MacBook, so I didn't get touch ID in a laptop until last spring. And,

02:17:35   um, I didn't really know I was missing it as much. And now I'm like, Oh my God, what was it like to

02:17:39   have to enter my password? I'm like, well, I have an iMac that I use as my office machine. So I'm,

02:17:44   I'm constantly looking at like, my finger is moving to my keyboard that doesn't have touch ID

02:17:49   as my iMac is prompting me for a password. I'm like, Oh God, I gotta take my password in again.

02:17:53   So it seems barbaric unless you just restarted. But you know, it does raise the question then

02:17:59   of the one thing Apple has never done yet is ship any device that supports two methods of biometric

02:18:06   authentication. They have touch ID devices and they have face ID devices. And so far

02:18:12   near the twain shall meet if they were to make an M class iMac with face ID or a Mac book pro with

02:18:21   face ID, any Mac with face ID, what would happen if you paired a touch ID keyboard with it, which,

02:18:28   you know, it it's, and it's sort of a tricky question on the whole in the long run. I think

02:18:34   it's very obvious that our computers will be using more and more senses for lack of a better word

02:18:40   to do all sorts of things. I mean, they use cameras for all sorts of things now. Now they're using the

02:18:46   ambient light sensor on the phone to help you calibrate your TV, as we just mentioned.

02:18:50   Our devices are gaining senses and the ways that a human recognizes another person, like if you and I

02:18:59   you know, ran into each other on the street, I would probably see you first. But if I heard your

02:19:04   voice, I would know, hey, that sounds like Glenn, right? Multiple senses are good. So it, you know,

02:19:10   face ID plus touch ID is in some sense better because it's certainly more secure if you were

02:19:16   doing, you know, like something so secure, you know, updating the operating system and it wants

02:19:22   to check both face ID and touch ID. I don't know. But what happens if it's like, ah, in the middle?

02:19:28   Do you get to choose, you know, if it's just like a typical, oh, you want to delete this one file

02:19:33   and the finder wants you to authenticate before you move it to the trash? Do you get to do either?

02:19:38   Pete: It's tricky too, because of like the negative matches too. Like I'm constantly

02:19:44   surprised because of mask wearing how often my phone's like, oh, you got to enter your password.

02:19:48   I'm like, I didn't, but I didn't look at you for a while. Why? So it's very sensitive.

02:19:52   Pete; And the other thing about face ID is, hmm, wait, nothing that happens with face ID other than

02:20:00   unlocking the device, which is where you just want to get in. But when it's confirmation, oh, you

02:20:05   want to confirm a purchase or you want to confirm the destruction, you always have to, well, no,

02:20:11   you always have to double click a button to make sure it doesn't happen by accident, right? The

02:20:16   worst thing you'd ever want is you go to trash this important sensitive file and the computer's

02:20:22   like, well, let me double check with face ID. Oh, he's right in front of the computer. There it goes.

02:20:27   Deleted, right? And so if you have to confirm face ID with some kind of button push anyway,

02:20:36   well, why not just have touch ID on the button in the first place? Because then it's just the

02:20:40   button. So there's a part of me that says maybe face ID is never coming to the Mac.

02:20:44   Pete; Right. Because what's the, I mean, the ease of face ID is to not have to interact with,

02:20:50   I mean, even with the buttons, but like to unlock or something. It's a reduction in like

02:20:54   inefficient interaction that could cause rejection. So like getting your finger, touch ID works great,

02:21:00   but you still have to, it's often a two-hand operation or you got your thumbs in the right

02:21:04   spot so it can be awkward in a mobile device and face ID is very efficient. You know, you hold it

02:21:10   up, even if you have to double click, you do it one-handed and you just look at it, you do the

02:21:14   thing, ducked up, it's done. When you're on a keyboard, you're always, you just rest your finger

02:21:18   on touch ID. Oh, you want to confirm it. You hold your finger down. It says great, done. And that

02:21:22   it's a, I think it's a simpler interaction for that modality because it's right, the intentionality

02:21:28   behind it, but also just like where your hands and grip is related to what you're doing.

02:21:34   Pete; So anyway, we'll see, you know, but it's unanswered question. Anyway, I would love,

02:21:40   I know, and I know it would have been the answer to our face masking year is it would have been

02:21:45   great to have iPhones that did both face ID and touch ID on the power button, right? It's, you

02:21:52   know, and maybe they'll come out with it. It'll just be too, hopefully, hopefully too late for

02:21:57   face masks. I was just hoping they'd figure out a way, I think, I mean, I've read a lot about

02:22:01   secure enclave and I'm not a cryptographer, but I'd hoped that they would figure out a method of doing

02:22:06   no, I think, I mean, I think they've, they built it into such a hard coded mode to avoid,

02:22:13   you know, government and criminal and whatever interception that they can't just say, oh,

02:22:19   here's an update that lets you unlock your phone without face ID or with a poor face ID mask,

02:22:27   like an eyeball face ID mask for 15 minutes after the last time you updated it. Like they just

02:22:31   won't, I don't think they can do it. I'm not sure if they would have done it if they could,

02:22:36   but it may simply be a limit in how secure the system's designed.

02:22:40   Pete; Yeah, it is. I know one thing I've heard from ever since face ID came out and I heard from

02:22:44   during Fireball readers who are medical professionals and they wear face masks, you know,

02:22:49   in normal times and they say what a pain in the ass this whole thing has been. And I know that

02:22:56   culturally, it, you know, it's, everybody knows now, but like in most of Asia in flu season,

02:23:01   it's very common to see just, you know, normal years without a coronavirus pandemic. You just

02:23:06   see lots of people wearing face masks. And again, the face ID was met with objections there that in

02:23:13   pre-COVID US didn't exist. So, it's interesting that it's on Apple's radar now as a, oh yeah,

02:23:18   this hits home to us. You know, it's just like anything weather related where it's like, oh,

02:23:22   sometimes the weather isn't like Cupertino 72 degrees and sunny. Huh.

02:23:26   Pete; Yeah, I mean, this is, and also like, you know, what my future is,

02:23:29   I mean, I was, I was delighted, as I know you were, that the CDC bowed to scientific wisdom and is

02:23:36   relaxing the outdoor masking recommendations by using science and clinical research. That's great.

02:23:42   But for me, I'm like, well, I'm going to wear a mask like 10 months of the year, either outdoors

02:23:46   or in congregate settings from now on, because I have seasonal allergies. This last two years,

02:23:51   I mean, look, I'm looking for bright linings, right? Any silver lining? My allergies have

02:23:55   been fantastic. And I saw my allergist a few months ago and he said, you know, you should

02:24:00   just wear a cloth mask from, you know, February to June any year now. I was like, oh, really?

02:24:05   He's like, yeah, it'll totally help you. I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ,

02:24:07   who just wasn't socialized before.

02:24:09   Pete: Have you seen the numbers on influenza in the U.S.?

02:24:12   Pete; Yeah, was it like 18 deaths in the entire season?

02:24:15   Pete; Yeah, and it's something, it's just unbelievable.

02:24:17   Pete; And the number, yeah, and that's the other thing is I've had the flu twice in the last,

02:24:21   you know, two and three years ago or three or four years ago, and once I got the kind that

02:24:25   not only did I get it and then recover, I got, I had side effects that lasted for four months.

02:24:29   I got this terrible heart inflammation thing.

02:24:31   Pete; Oh my god.

02:24:32   Pete; Oh, it's this time, you've talked to people, I recovered fully from it,

02:24:35   but it's just, it takes months to recover to get back to normal. And I was like,

02:24:40   god damn it. So, I'm like, all right, so from February to June, I'm going to wear a mask

02:24:44   for allergies, and then from, I guess, September to May, I'm going to wear a mask for flu. So,

02:24:50   I guess you'll see me in June and July, July and August without a mask in the future because it'll

02:24:55   be acceptable.

02:24:56   Pete; The thing that's so startling about the influenza numbers, and they were so worried

02:25:00   about it, they were like, oh my god, it could be a double whammy. But it's like, the precautions

02:25:04   we collectively took, even with all of the controversy over large swaths of America who

02:25:09   didn't want to wear masks and businesses who wanted to reopen as early as they could, and

02:25:15   as soon as the numbers came down a little bit, it's like, well, let's reopen everything, and then

02:25:18   the numbers spike back. On all of that nonsense all year long, what we were doing was enough to

02:25:24   completely, all effectively, I know, not 0.0 all the way, but 0.00 something, get rid of influenza.

02:25:33   That shows you how crazy contagious COVID-19 is, right?

02:25:37   Pete; Yeah, yeah. It's both horribly contagious and then, like, you know, it's like very contagious

02:25:43   and not contagious. Like, no fomite spread, basically, no outdoor, real outdoor transmission.

02:25:49   So, coronavirus only spreads into COVID-19, right? Limited cases, but apparently the flu,

02:25:55   if we all just took a little bit more care, we could have gotten rid of it years ago.

02:25:58   Pete; It really is amazing that in the midst of a pandemic, it's the first time I can remember

02:26:02   where I've gone, like, I don't know, 14, 15 months now. I mean, because I say 14, 15 because I don't

02:26:07   think I was sick early last year either just by luck, but it's like, I haven't been sick in a

02:26:11   year. It's crazy. I mean… Pete; I know. There are, there's silver linings in the middle of

02:26:16   all the horror. It's like, there are some things. There's also, I mean, you know, again, sidebar,

02:26:20   but it's the, all these things were like, well, there might be an effective HIV vaccine. There

02:26:24   might be a vaccine against malaria. There might be, you're like, oh my god, you know, hundreds

02:26:28   of thousands of people died here and millions worldwide, but perhaps hundreds of millions of

02:26:33   people will live in the next 20 to 50 years because of improvements that were discovered

02:26:38   in the last two years. So, there is something to look forward to in terms of global health. I mean,

02:26:44   that's, that's a good, if that outcome turns out to be true and then hooray.

02:26:47   Pete; All right, let me take one last break here, thank our fourth and final bonus sponsor of the

02:26:52   episode. Oh, and I do, I have a soft spot for these guys too, because they are the most regular

02:26:57   sponsor of this show. It's my good friends at Squarespace. Squarespace is all in one service

02:27:04   where you go to host, build, design, tweak, update a website. If you need a website or you know

02:27:12   somebody else who's come to you for help because they need a website, I implore you

02:27:16   to check out Squarespace. Spend just a couple hours seeing what you can do and how far you can

02:27:21   go. Free trial, you don't have to pay anything, no credit card up front. You can totally get started

02:27:25   to see what it's like. Do it. Templates to choose from, components to just drag and drop out into

02:27:33   your website to build the site that you want. A design that can be customized completely to your

02:27:38   own brand. You don't have to stick with the pre-built templates. Anything you would want,

02:27:43   really, really great analytics. And by great, I mean like just a nice dashboard that makes total

02:27:49   sense at a glance and not something that looks like an airplane cockpit. Like, I don't know what any

02:27:55   of this is. Now, who's coming to your website from where, how often, boom, they've got it. Really one

02:28:01   of the best analytic dashboards I've ever seen. Great technical support, great prices. I can't

02:28:08   recommend them strongly enough. Keep them in the back of your mind for the next time you or somebody

02:28:11   you need, you know needs a website. And you can go to squarespace.com to get started and just

02:28:17   remember this offer code, talk show. No the, just talk show. But when you check out after your 30

02:28:23   day free trial is over, you get 10% off. You could prepay for a year, save 10%. That's like getting a

02:28:30   couple months, getting a month for free. Unbelievable deal. My thanks to Squarespace.

02:28:34   Go to squarespace.com/talkshow and remember that code talk show for more information.

02:28:39   All right. We're running long shocker for me.

02:28:42   What? Unbelievable. iPad Pro. That's what, last but not least,

02:28:48   that was Apple's last announcement. I sort of have the least to say about it because it's like,

02:28:55   I expected them to say it has the A14X. In my mind, what an A14X is, isn't really different

02:29:02   from the M1. So now that I think, I'm like, why did I even think that? Because like I told you,

02:29:07   I knew it was going to have A14 caliber cores, the Firestorm and Ice Storm. Because it's the iPad Pro,

02:29:13   of course it would be for high performance instead of just too high performance. And it would have an

02:29:18   eight core GPU instead of four core GPU. That's the M1. And what else is there? I mean,

02:29:25   Thunderbolt, right? Well, the iPad Pro can use Thunderbolt. So it's Thunderbolt/USB4 ports. So

02:29:33   for the high performance, I know. For all everybody, it was like the Mac is going to

02:29:37   become an iPad. It turned out the iPad became a Mac. Here's my question. Let me ask you a

02:29:43   provocative question. So why not, I mean, it's not that provocative. Why not have a Mac OS

02:29:47   compatibility layer on an iPad? That's what everybody's talking about, right?

02:29:51   I mean, maybe they would do it. I don't know. Maybe not.

02:29:54   I don't know. I mean, so many people- It'd be really weird.

02:29:57   There, it's like this, there's this whole, I haven't linked to them yet, but there's like,

02:30:02   I have a whole built up stash of links to what I'm calling the iPad malcontents. And it's not

02:30:09   people who are outside the iPad ecosystem complaining about this thing they don't use.

02:30:17   Like if I were to complain too much about Windows or PC users complaining about the Mac,

02:30:23   and you're like, "You don't even know what it is." No, I'm talking about people like Jason Snell

02:30:28   and people who use the iPad full-time for work are the ones who have the most astute criticism of it

02:30:37   in this spectrum of, "This is the best hardware I own. I love it. I love so much about this device

02:30:45   as it is, but yet there's software on the Mac that is so much more powerful. Why can't I use that

02:30:53   on the iPad?" And is the answer a Mac compatibility layer? I mean, I know that the one Verge,

02:30:59   I forget who wrote it, but the Verge story was like, "Just put Mac OS on iPad," or something

02:31:04   like that. Well, right. And that's, I mean, right, that would be them. I mean, Apple will never

02:31:08   capitulate, I don't think ever. I say never, and then it's like, "We'll never put TV on an iPad."

02:31:16   I don't know that Apple wants to release a touch screen Mac, even though the iPad Pro

02:31:24   with a keyboard is so very close to a touch screen Mac. So, what is the difference? But I think

02:31:30   just the way they said we're going to have an iOS and iPad OS, I think Mac OS will remain

02:31:35   disparate or different. The thing is, it comes down to the Mac App Store, right,

02:31:39   and locking down the app. So, if Apple makes it possible to run Mac OS apps on an iPad Pro,

02:31:46   I cannot believe they will let you run arbitrary side-loaded apps. It will all

02:31:49   only be Mac App Store apps that you can run. Right, and then that immediately rules out a

02:31:54   bunch of the professional apps people are talking about. And I know there's a bunch of professional

02:31:58   apps that are in the Mac App Store, but there are some prominent ones that are not.

02:32:01   Right. Does that make it worth them doing it now, to do that? Probably, I don't know. I don't think

02:32:08   it's suddenly opening up an iPad audience doesn't make it worthwhile for them to become part of the

02:32:13   App Store environment. iPad, as exemplified by the iPad Pro in particular, because it's truly

02:32:21   puts, it's not just Pro meaning more expensive or nicer, it's Pro meaning has truly professional

02:32:27   specs, right? These iPads go up to 16 gigabytes of RAM now. They're actually—

02:32:32   They're two terabytes of storage. The previous limit was 512 gig or something?

02:32:38   Glenn, they're so Pro that they're telling us how much RAM is in them.

02:32:41   [Laughter]

02:32:44   Right?

02:32:44   Okay, that's hilarious. That's it.

02:32:49   But they are in a weird space that no Apple computer has ever been in before. I mean,

02:32:55   here's this thing that is 11 years old platform, and you still can't write iPad software on an

02:33:02   iPad. Not even close. There's nothing—I mean, who knows? Maybe this is the year where they

02:33:07   announce Xcode for iPad, and this is a lament that only has five weeks of life. I don't know.

02:33:14   But it is—that's weird, right? I mean—

02:33:18   No, it's totally weird, but that's when you need the M2—I mean, you need a Pro

02:33:21   M series chip to do Xcode. I mean, not really, but maybe.

02:33:27   I don't—well, no, because we know that the M1, it's a great developer machine on—

02:33:31   No, you're right. You're right.

02:33:32   Everybody who has one on a Mac already loves it, and most Xcode projects are way faster.

02:33:38   I know I have a friend who has an app that actually compiles slower, and he's like,

02:33:43   "I must be the weird exception." But for the most part, it's faster.

02:33:46   This is the thing that drove me crazy about—I had my iMac—I actually just switched to an external

02:33:50   SSD finally, a Thunderbolt-based one, for my iMac at a Fusion drive, and it took me forever,

02:33:55   and whatever. So I was—Fusion was generally fine except for certain apps. So I got the M1,

02:34:01   and running Creative Cloud, launching Photoshop and using it on my M1 with 16 gigs was orders

02:34:09   of magnitude faster than running Photoshop on a quad-core 2017 iMac. I'm like, "Oh, for great—you

02:34:15   know, what are they in emulation?" And I'm like, "Oh, come on." So yeah, I can imagine how the

02:34:20   developers feel with Xcode, because it's such a hog.

02:34:22   I've seen—and Photoshop comes up a lot, because there is Photoshop for iPad. Apple even showed it

02:34:29   off in the iPad Pro thing, and I hear—I bring this up, or I didn't even have to bring it up,

02:34:34   and people who read my site watch the show, and they're like, "That's not real Photoshop.

02:34:38   I need real Photoshop. Why can't I have real Photoshop?" And it's like—

02:34:43   Pete: They have Photoshop for M1 now. It doesn't have all the features yet, but they have a,

02:34:46   you know, so that's essentially Photoshop for iPad that's not on an iPad yet. Like,

02:34:52   how hard is it to recompile—

02:34:53   Jay: I just can't help but feel that it is sort of—we just have to accept the

02:35:01   incompleteness of the story, you know?

02:35:06   Pete; Yeah, you're right.

02:35:08   Jay; It doesn't all add up, but it's sort of—to me, it's sort of like the thing with the Apple TV

02:35:14   hardware, where people are like, "Well, 200 bucks is way too expensive compared to Roku's,

02:35:19   and Apple's pushing the TV app all over the place, so they should lower the price that

02:35:23   they can't just make another Apple TV that costs $180." And it's like, "No, yeah, they can,

02:35:28   and that's fine." And it's like, they can't just keep shipping these incredible iPad pros and not

02:35:35   have software like the Mac, Mac-caliber software. Like, where's Final Cut Pro, right? What's the

02:35:41   point of putting the Pro Display XDR-caliber micro-LED thing in the 12.9-inch iPad? Well,

02:35:48   if it's such a great thing, like, for color correction, why is there no Final Cut for iPad?

02:35:53   Pete; Right, right. But here's the thing, is once, I mean, maybe this is, there's always like the

02:35:58   reverse Trojan horse or something, I don't know what you want to call it, where with every

02:36:02   developer working to create ARM-compatible M1-targeted versions of their Mac apps, then

02:36:09   suddenly they have software that works on the iPad, more or less. Right?

02:36:12   Jay; Ah, I just don't see it, though. I don't see it. I just don't see them adding AppKit

02:36:17   to iOS. I mean, they're…

02:36:19   Pete; But they could just, they could have a way to make it easy. You've written your,

02:36:22   you've written, you don't have to run, you don't necessarily have to run Mac OS apps in iPadOS,

02:36:29   but you can have M1-targeted apps that are designed for Mac OS that are easy to then make iPadOS

02:36:36   versions of, but only through the App Store, right? I mean, it sort of happens today a bit,

02:36:40   but I mean, that seemed like some of the issues going on with Catalyst and I know all these

02:36:44   various efforts to provide some kind of platform synthesis, but it's weird that the iPad winds up

02:36:51   being the loser in that scenario and not the Mac. Jay; I don't know. You know, and is it the loser?

02:37:00   It's certainly, the iPad overall sells in much higher quantities than the Mac overall.

02:37:05   Pete; No, no, no, you're right. I just mean in terms of software experience, right?

02:37:07   Jay; Yeah, right.

02:37:07   Pete; All these things, the professional, I think you're right. I mean, when I look at this now,

02:37:11   it's like, what is an iPad Pro that is not a Mac? It's like it has cellular connectivity built in,

02:37:16   which Apple has never put into its Macs for whatever reason, and it's got better,

02:37:22   you know, it's got camera stuff. It's got better cameras front and back and whatever, and a lot of

02:37:27   the rest of it is like, it's not really, you know, there's nothing else that's that different. We get

02:37:32   more ports than a Mac, typically. So yeah, it's like, what is an iPad for when it's so close to a

02:37:40   Mac now? It is a different animal, but what is it for?

02:37:44   Jay; I don't know. It's, you know, and again,

02:37:46   I just kind of feel like the way that it is, maybe this is it. There is no other shoe to drop,

02:37:52   and this is just, at this many years in, maybe just accept that, yeah, it's, you know, there's

02:37:57   a lot of stuff, you know, Safari and Notes and Apple Mail, you know, it all sort of works, but

02:38:04   I mean, even, you know, Apple Mail, maybe that's a bad example. Like, why in the world with Apple

02:38:09   Mail on iPad can you not set up smart mailboxes? I love smart mailboxes.

02:38:13   Pete: Yeah, yeah. Can you not still not caption photos in photos for iPadOS?

02:38:18   Jay; I think it's possibly true that you can't.

02:38:20   Pete; Now you can, right? But it took until recently, I want to say,

02:38:24   Latin America means iPadOS 14, iOS 14. But yeah, there's weird absences, weird gaps, and…

02:38:32   Jay; The smart mailbox thing kills me. I live by a smart inbox that I just set up with all of my

02:38:39   inbox mail from seven days, and that's the one I try to zero out, and then, you know, because I've

02:38:44   got tens of thousands of other unread emails from 10, 15 years. But for the most part, you know,

02:38:50   I consider my inbox empty if my seven days of email, smart mailbox is empty. Well, you can't

02:38:56   do it on an iPad. Pete; Smart albums in photos also, you can't use those. They have the powers

02:39:02   there, the processing's there, why can't we do it? Jay; And it doesn't, yeah, I don't know.

02:39:06   Pete; I don't know, I mean, I think that is, I mean, I will say that again, though, is like,

02:39:09   what is an iPad Pro for when it's so close to a Mac with similar specs? And it's a different

02:39:16   experience still because of the, I mean, the touch element, the pencil capability, the portability,

02:39:22   the built-in cellular aspect, the fact that you can detach a keyboard at will or not use one at

02:39:28   all. I mean, all of these things are differentiations, but iPadOS doesn't live up to macOS,

02:39:34   is what I mean. I'm not a full-time iPad user, partly because I found, I'd rather be on a Mac,

02:39:39   and I've got two different sizes of Macs, basically, an iMac with an external, a 5K

02:39:45   iMac with an external 4K monitor and a laptop, and I switched between those because I did not find my

02:39:53   iPad experience worthwhile enough to not have basically a laptop, a Mac laptop.

02:40:27   I found that I would lose hours a day working on my iPad in the kitchen because it was so much better

02:40:34   and so much more useful for a lot of the stuff I wanted to do because I had this trackpad and

02:40:38   a Magic Keyboard. And then I would think about it and think, you know what, though? I just keep,

02:40:42   a lot of my work when I'm working on my iPad is sending things into a to-do list to do when I get

02:40:47   to my Mac. And if I had just spent the last 90 minutes on my Mac, I would have just done that.

02:40:54   You know what I mean? It's like that trap that any to-do system can fall into where you feel like

02:41:00   I'm totally organized. I've got my whole life in this list, but it's like you're not actually doing

02:41:04   it. You've just put everything into a list. And it's like, that's how I often feel when I spend

02:41:08   too much time doing anything other than just reading on my iPad, which I do love for comfort

02:41:14   and for just shifting my posture and going to a different room. But if I really try to do anything

02:41:19   else, I find myself far more hamstrung. But I know other people feel otherwise, and they feel

02:41:25   like their mind has been freed when they're on the iPad. But yet, there's just so little headroom for

02:41:34   power using on iPad. I mean, smart mailboxes are a perfect example. I'm sure whatever the percentage

02:41:40   of all Apple customers who've ever created a smart mailbox on their Mac is very low.

02:41:45   But it's a great feature. It's, you know, that helps. They've got the code. I mean,

02:41:50   the code works on both platforms. They could just put the code there. Right. And now,

02:41:54   part of the frustration, I think, that it's coming out by calling it the M1 and not calling it the

02:42:02   A14X. It's just rubbing it in your face that you know the device is capable of doing it very

02:42:08   quickly, right? You can see how fast. Anyway, I don't know. I was going to talk to you about

02:42:15   NFTs, but I'm out of energy. No way. Forget it. I don't care.

02:42:18   So here's what my kids do before they go to bed. You know, my kids go to bed relatively early.

02:42:24   We've somehow managed to make that happen. And their trick is if they want to stay up later,

02:42:28   they're like, "Dad, explain blockchain to us." You know what?

02:42:32   They're like, "All right, let's start with the—" No. Here, wait. I'll give you my one sentence.

02:42:37   All right. "A non-fungible token is like a Post-it note that says, 'I owe you one art.'"

02:42:41   [Laughter]

02:42:45   And it's a signed Post-it note?

02:42:47   Yeah, sure. As long as you keep that—as long as the Post-it note doesn't fall off the refrigerator,

02:42:53   you own that art. There you go.

02:42:57   All right. All right. We squeezed it in. Glenn, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show.

02:43:02   Oh, it's so fun.

02:43:02   Where do we want to send people to read more of your fine work?

02:43:06   Oh, gosh. Let's see. Well, I've been finding stuff over at Macworld.com, as usual. Remember

02:43:11   when people used to get excited about CMSs, John? We talked about content management systems.

02:43:15   Oh, yeah. Oh.

02:43:16   That was the thing. They switched over to WordPress over there. Actually,

02:43:19   it's delightful because WordPress is now not bad. So, easier to post articles there.

02:43:25   So, Macworld.com, I've still got some Tiny Type Museums. Most of them are sold, but

02:43:30   there's a handful of them left available.

02:43:32   And where can people find the Tiny Type Museum?

02:43:35   I have one.

02:43:37   Tinytypemuseum.com.

02:43:38   I have one. I was just looking at it.

02:43:40   You technically got number one, you know.

02:43:44   Really?

02:43:45   Yeah. You got the one. I mean, so they're not numbers. It's one of a hundred-ish. Like,

02:43:51   there's a shipping issue, right? So, I figured we had to make—my collaborator who made the

02:43:58   wooden cases, which are amazing—we had to make a little more than a hundred in case something went

02:44:02   wrong, right? And she was going to get one. I have a couple, and so there's a few above a hundred.

02:44:07   But we were like, "What if something goes wrong in shipping?" It seems like it's really likely.

02:44:11   So, if someone's museum was destroyed, they were insured. But I'm like, "I'm not going to

02:44:15   just say, 'Sorry, I'm giving you your money back.' That seems horrible." So, we made some extras.

02:44:20   So, we have—it's technically an edition of a hundred, and then we have just a handful more,

02:44:25   and I've shipped ninety—well, ninety-five of them so far sold, and a couple people for reasons that

02:44:32   are unknown to me. It gave me money and have not given me their address after two years. That's

02:44:37   their prerogative. Anyway, so there's a handful. Like, once I've shipped a hundred or sold a hundred,

02:44:42   then I've got a handful more. But anyway, there's only like, I don't know, there's like a handful

02:44:46   left in the world, like nine probably the most that I could ever sell at this point.

02:44:51   Pete: I got, for the first time in my life, I have an office, home office with nice built-in shelves

02:44:56   and the Tiny Tight Museum has a prominent space of honor.

02:45:00   Pete: Oh, that's nice. I'll give you a G, right? Or a J.

02:45:04   Pete and Pete – I forget.

02:45:05   Pete; There's a big letter. This is one of the bonuses is if you tell me your initials,

02:45:09   which people have done, I've tried to find some nice wooden type. I got a piece, you know,

02:45:14   people, wood type, it's like, I'm sorry?

02:45:16   Pete; I think I got a G.

02:45:17   Pete; A G. Wood type is, I think I have some nice G's, as you can imagine with my name.

02:45:22   Wood type is this amazing thing because it was really made mostly from the mid-1800s to like

02:45:27   1980s but mostly in kind of this one century period and it's just all kind of jumbled up.

02:45:31   Some people have preserved collections and some stuff was just thrown away or used for firewood.

02:45:35   And so, you go on eBay and you can buy mixed lots of it and so I bought tons of it in order to have

02:45:40   good sets to send people and examples and whatever and I'm digging through one piece and some wood

02:45:45   type is stamped with a metal stamp on the side with the foundry and I get this one piece, it's

02:45:50   a lowercase umlauted U and I look up the code, the name, because there's people who do this thing and

02:45:56   they research, you can find all the stamps of every wooden type company including the different

02:46:00   periods and I'm like, oh, this piece of type was made in 1869 in Geneva and there's something,

02:46:07   I don't know, so weird and it looks just like a piece of type I have here that was made probably

02:46:10   in like 1950 in, you know, Wisconsin. And anyway, there's just something so wonderful about that

02:46:16   where it's just like this ordinary object, like this is 150 years old. That's really cool,

02:46:21   it looks great, it's held up, it didn't get outdated, don't install any new firmware,

02:46:25   it's just a U. All right, well, anybody who wants one, I can vouch for it. It's also a sort of

02:46:30   thing, it's not for everybody, but if you think it's for you, it is for you because it is exactly

02:46:35   what you think it is and it's just a delightful little package of this little hero set of—

02:46:41   It was given as a gift to more people than I would have expected and a few people donated it to their

02:46:46   universities or bottom for university teaching collections. The other thing I always appreciate

02:46:51   is Take Control Books publishes all my technical books and so we did this M-series book because I

02:46:58   was writing a book about securing your Mac, we updated a book that was a few years old,

02:47:02   and dug into all the new security stuff and kind of the new sort of Apple— Apple is doing so much

02:47:06   physical security of devices now, they have to kind of rethink their whole orientation towards

02:47:12   security. The M-series book is, I would really, really recommend it. I love it, it's very kind of

02:47:19   the Take Control people. I think I've somehow been lifetime'd into a—

02:47:22   Oh yeah.

02:47:23   Like new books come out and I just get them, but I read that one and it's so interesting because

02:47:28   as a long time— and I'm sure this applies to so many people who listen to my show— as a long-time

02:47:33   Mac user, everything I know about how to troubleshoot a Mac is out the door. It is all

02:47:39   new key combinations, it is— it's all been rethought and all for the better, but it—

02:47:45   Yeah, but—

02:47:46   There's an awful— you should read the book because there's an awful lot of— because

02:47:50   it's the sort of stuff you want to know before you need to know it.

02:47:53   Yeah, and I wrote this because I was doing the Securing book in like January, or December,

02:47:57   January, and I kept coming up with stuff that was like, "Oh, but not in the M1. Oh, but not in the

02:48:01   M1." I'm like, "Oh, there's a book worth of M1 stuff." Tell me if you come across this because

02:48:06   the weirdest one is I'm digging around— and you know Howard Oakley who writes Eclectic Light is

02:48:10   his website? Howard is the nicest person, it turns out. Had a lot of incredibly pleasant interactions

02:48:15   with him lately, and he's such a knowledgeable person, generous with his information, and I'm not

02:48:20   sure anybody else in the world outside of Apple seems to know or document as much about APFS

02:48:25   and the M1 and boot modes than he does. So, he's the place I go to. Anyway, I'm digging around,

02:48:33   I think in the Apple Platform Security Guide, and I'm reading Howard's site, and I'm like,

02:48:38   "Wait, what's Fallback Recovery OS?" So, you know, Apple's now sort of calling Mac OS

02:48:42   recovery is now Recovery OS. That's sort of the term only used in the Platform Security Guide.

02:48:47   So, in your M1, there's not just a recovery mode, recovery partition. If that fails, there's a

02:48:53   backup one that you can trigger, but it's kind of like the AB things on a spaceship, you know,

02:48:57   they send probes off and there's two, you know, just in case one of the computers fails. So,

02:49:00   we actually have two recovery partitions in case one gets corrupted. You've got a backup one that

02:49:06   has to—has slightly different features, but it'll work seamlessly, and if it boots, it'll actually

02:49:11   restore the other one and then switch and become the main one. You're like, "What the—?" You know,

02:49:16   this is just hidden in the M1s, and there's very few circumstances, hopefully, under which you'd

02:49:22   have to deal with it. And then Apple did a whole thing about reviving or restoring firmware,

02:49:27   which is available on Intel's, I had no idea about it. Intel Macs, it's just as weird on M1s.

02:49:33   But anyway, it's a great journey, but even things like, you were talking about

02:49:39   keyboard shortcuts for starting up, the boot modes on a M1, there's like five boot modes,

02:49:44   and there's like 14 on Intel machines. That's insane.

02:49:48   But it's great, because it's less that you have to deal with.

02:49:50   Yeah, but that's what you need to do. And I love the take control books, which is great.

02:49:54   But much like my comment about modern streaming television show needing to have episodes of not

02:49:59   of a set length, the one thing I love about take control books is that they're always

02:50:04   of the length they need to be and no more. Whereas, and I know you know this as a long-time

02:50:08   book author, it used to be that, oh, you know how people buy a book when they need a computer book?

02:50:14   They go into bookstore and they look for the thickest book with the subject that they're

02:50:19   looking for on the spine and figure that's the best book and buy it.

02:50:23   That's what the Mac Bible sold.

02:50:25   There was this race to have the most pages. And that's why, you know, your tiny type museum is on

02:50:32   one side of my shelves, on the other side are all of my old computer books, most of which look like

02:50:36   phone books.

02:50:37   Oh, it's sweet.

02:50:38   Yeah, and just by the way, I am working on take control of cryptocurrency.

02:50:43   Oh!

02:50:44   So, you will get an NFT explanation eventually. This is Joe and I, we realized, and I think the

02:50:50   book, you know, I had a friend who was a colleague, worked across the hall of place I was at, who

02:50:55   she was a home birth midwife. And she eventually left midwifing because she realized she got so

02:51:02   many people coming in who she felt were not qualified from a safety and health perspective.

02:51:08   To give birth at home, most of what she did was tell people,

02:51:10   like, don't give birth at home. And she found that too depressing. So, she went to a different

02:51:14   field. And I'm like, this cryptocurrency book may actually wind up being a lot of reasons why you

02:51:19   should never invest in cryptocurrency, but I'm going to be honest about it. And if you want to

02:51:23   understand how it works, it's going to say it. And then it's like, okay, with all of this in mind,

02:51:28   here's how you can do it safely and intelligently and whatever. But as I go through it, I'm like,

02:51:32   man, am I just going to write a book that's like, hey, just don't do this. I don't think it'll do

02:51:36   that.

02:51:36   You see the story, a couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post had a story about some poor guy

02:51:39   who had a bunch of Bitcoin and put it on a USB device that's meant like a Bitcoin currency holder.

02:51:48   And Bitcoin went up in value to like $600,000. And then he went to the app store. And the context

02:51:57   of the story is, hey, you think you can trust the app store? Well, this guy went, the company who

02:52:00   made this device that it's like for your self storage of your Bitcoin.

02:52:05   Yeah, they don't need care.

02:52:06   They don't even have an app. But some scammers made an app with their company name, I don't know

02:52:10   what it is, Trexor or something like this. So he thought it was legit. He put into it his backup

02:52:17   key to his Bitcoin, which is like only supposed to be used in recovery if you lose the device.

02:52:22   And they stole all of his Bitcoin.

02:52:24   Pete: I felt bad for the guy, but Josh centers told me this, Josh centers of tidbits,

02:52:29   he's looked into this and those devices. He said, that's the key that they tell you to never enter

02:52:34   anywhere for any reason. And he entered it into an app. So he was ripped off. He is the victim,

02:52:39   and I'm not blaming him. But he did use the key that they said never do this with the key.

02:52:43   And so he still is a crime victim, but he did do the thing you're not supposed to do.

02:52:49   Joe: You're never ever, ever supposed to do it. But he plugged it right in. But it's also the case

02:52:55   that you're not, it's too complicated. This is why I don't, like when you, we don't keep our

02:53:01   checking accounts on USB devices in our home. We go to a real bank. You know what I mean?

02:53:07   Well, if you had cash, if you had $600,000 in $100 bills, you would do a much better job protecting

02:53:17   it than this guy did with, you'd never act the way as loosey goosey with the Bitcoin. It'd be

02:53:22   like, it's like if he kept $600,000 in cash in a mailbox in front of his house and then just had

02:53:30   like a padlock and then somebody was like, well, I need to do service on this. Can I have the key

02:53:33   to the padlock? He's like, here you go. You know, here's one of the things about Bitcoin is there

02:53:37   are billions, maybe tens of billions of dollars at the current exchange rate that are lost forever

02:53:42   because they're locked up. I met this guy years ago and I was writing a Bitcoin story for The

02:53:46   Economist. I'm sure we talked about it in my Bitcoin episode with you a few years ago.

02:53:50   And it turned out he was generating in his little apartment because of a fluke in timing about

02:53:55   equipment availability, like some significant single digit percentage of all Bitcoin mined in

02:53:59   the country, or in the world, sorry, was being generated in that guy's apartment for just a brief

02:54:03   period of time. And he said, oh yeah, I've got these hard drives, this is my cold storage,

02:54:07   and they've died and I can't recover the data off them. And they had like, I don't remember how many

02:54:12   Bitcoins it was, but by today's dollars, it might've been hundreds of millions of dollars today.

02:54:17   And I'm just thinking about, it's such a weird thing. It's like, well, I put my money in a

02:54:21   flammable bag and if I don't enter the key right, then the bag catches on fire and all the money's

02:54:26   burned up forever. I don't think that's a good way to keep money. It's like the Bruce Schneier

02:54:31   remark that, you know, that so many people think like the worst thing you could possibly do with an

02:54:36   important password is write it down on a piece of paper because piece of paper, that seems

02:54:40   terribly insecure. And Bruce Schneier's argument is no, we're actually very, very good at keeping,

02:54:46   if you know you have important information on an important piece of paper, we're naturally evolved

02:54:51   to know how to protect it and keep track of it and put it in, oh, this is where I put important

02:54:55   pieces of paper and that's where it is and keep it safe. And it's almost certainly more secure

02:55:00   than anything a lay person could ever do digitally, right? I remember there was a story a couple of

02:55:08   months ago or maybe a year ago about people who've lost access to their Bitcoins. And there was one

02:55:13   guy who had tens of millions, maybe more, maybe hundreds of millions and whatever contraption

02:55:19   he had used to store them, limited the number, limits the number of guesses.

02:55:24   Oh, I read that. Yes.

02:55:26   And he's like near, he's got like 10 guesses and he's used eight. And honest to God, I mean,

02:55:31   it would drive anybody insane. I mean, I think I'm relatively very well balanced emotionally and

02:55:40   mental health wise. If that were me, I would, I think they'd have to lock me up. I mean,

02:55:44   that would be, I would—

02:55:46   Yeah, if they said, "You're going to lose $20 million if you enter this code wrong." I mean,

02:55:50   it's life changing.

02:55:51   And he sort of has some guesses, you know what I mean? Like he kind of thinks, you know what I

02:55:56   mean? Like the way that a lot of us have certain combinations and ways that we make when you get

02:56:01   to make your own password, which you really probably shouldn't do anymore. But you know,

02:56:05   you have some ideas about old passwords, you know? And it's like, I don't know, did I use a zero

02:56:11   instead of an O? Or did I use the three instead of the E?

02:56:15   It's a terrifying thing. And we're reading these stories all the time. I mean, you know, this is

02:56:20   one of the—and we won't get into this right now—but it's one of the things that's weird about

02:56:24   cryptocurrency is I think the total value of all that outstanding is valued at like almost $2

02:56:28   trillion now, I think. But it's a weird thing because it's not really. I mean, that's the

02:56:33   exchange rate. So at some level, it's worth nothing, unlike fiat currency, which is backed by

02:56:38   the full faith and credit of a government, where, you know, the government's going to demand your

02:56:42   taxes in that money, and they're going to pay you in that money, and they're going to pay all their

02:56:45   debts in that money, and so forth. So there is some basis, whatever it is, of fiat currency. But it is

02:56:50   that thing. It's like, you could have a run in the bank. It's like if everybody tried to cash out

02:56:53   their Bitcoin at once, it's worth practically nothing. So it's this weird, like, quantum

02:56:58   superposition of like, you know, your money's worth a huge amount of money, and your Bitcoin's

02:57:02   worth a huge amount of value if you can access it, and then if you can get it through an exchange

02:57:06   system and retrieve it in a fungible form. But yeah, I feel like we're going to have a story

02:57:13   every day about somebody who had, you know, one Bitcoin or 50 or whatever.

02:57:17   Pete: Do you have any Bitcoin?

02:57:18   Pete: Do you have any Bitcoin?

02:57:19   Chris (

02:57:27   over and over again): I remember reading a story about somebody who, like, as a gimmick

02:57:31   for the press, bought pizza with Bitcoin, and like, in hindsight, it's now, it's like,

02:57:36   I don't know, like five-

02:57:37   Chris (over and over again): Oh yeah, like $60,000 or 50-

02:57:39   Pete (over and over again): Yeah, $60,000 in today's money.

02:57:42   Chris (over and over again): I had like, $40 in Bitcoin, I bought like $40 in Bitcoin several

02:57:47   years ago and totally forgot about it and it's gone and I don't know if it was stolen or I

02:57:51   donated, I probably donated it to somebody back then or whatever, but I'm like, well,

02:57:56   that would have been like $8,000 now or whatever it was. I did the math when I bought it because

02:58:00   I found the receipt and I was like, well, you know, that's not life changing. I'm still like, I had,

02:58:04   this is, John, you know, I missed the domain name rush. I kind of missed that. Like,

02:58:10   I was registering domain names in 1994, I think it was, and some of the domains I registered

02:58:16   were later sold for vast amounts of money. I did not receive the vast amounts, I received some

02:58:20   commissions. I got a little money out of the domain thing, but I'm like, Bitcoin,

02:58:24   that's the one I missed, Bitcoin. I should have bought like 10 Bitcoin for $10 and never sold

02:58:29   them, right?

02:58:29   Pete: Yeah, I kind of regret that I didn't either. Just a little, you know, just, I don't know,

02:58:33   put a couple hundred bucks in.

02:58:34   Chris (over and over again): We'll get the next one for sure.

02:58:36   Pete: All right, Glenn, it's good talking to you. Really, really, really did enjoy it.

02:58:41   Chris (over and over again): It's great.

02:58:41   Pete (over and over again): Anyway, oh, I would be remiss if I didn't tell people about your

02:58:46   Twitter and also warn them about your…

02:58:48   Chris (over and over again): Double-edged sword.

02:58:50   Pete (over and over again): Glenn F. G with two Ns. Glenn F on Twitter,

02:58:55   but be ready. It's a lot. Anyway…

02:58:57   Chris (over and over again): I backed off.