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ATP

392: Corporate Relationship Counselor

 

00:00:00   I've made a couple of just absolutely terrible errors. I've asked Marco Arment for advice on things to buy. Related to absolutely nothing at all. You know, ATP membership is a thing. If you wanted to go to ATP.fm/join, you could join and be a member of this very program.

00:00:17   He's recommending relatively inexpensive things now, though, right?

00:00:20   In my defense, the most expensive pair of headphones I've recommended was only $700.

00:00:25   Oh, the head--I thought you were talking about the flashlights. Who was asking about the flashlights?

00:00:28   No, no, no. Well, there's both. Yeah, Casey was asking about the flashlights, too.

00:00:32   Yeah, no, I've brought this on myself. I have made this bed. This is not really Marco's fault.

00:00:36   Just ignore his headphone advice when he tries to get you to buy a thousand-dollar pair of headphones. You can just ignore that. Go to the next one.

00:00:41   None of them were a thousand dollars, and I recommended one that was like $180 and one that was like $300.

00:00:46   One was $899 or something.

00:00:48   No, I said that's what I use, but I wasn't saying he should buy it. It's a different kind than what he wants.

00:00:54   It's just I've known Marco for 20, 25 years, something like that at this point, maybe even more than that.

00:00:59   Yeah, maybe.

00:01:01   But anyways, you would think--well, I guess the first 15 of those years didn't count because neither of us had money.

00:01:05   Yeah, exactly.

00:01:07   You would think in the last 10 years I would know better than to ask Marco for advice.

00:01:12   And in Marco's defense, both of these times, I specifically solicited the advice.

00:01:17   I have not pulled any--well, I shouldn't use that phrase, turn of phrase.

00:01:21   I have not made any moves on either of these items, but I did put a $70 flashlight, which if I recall, I'll put in the show notes.

00:01:28   I put a $70 flashlight quietly into the Amazon shopping cart, and within a day, Aaron said to me, "What is this $70 flashlight?

00:01:39   Why do you think you need it?"

00:01:41   I hope none of the product photos have a person's hand for scale because that's not going to help your case.

00:01:45   No, it's really not.

00:01:47   It's like next to a quarter. It's like, "Wait, what? Is this a doll's flashlight?"

00:01:50   Is this a flashlight made for ants?

00:01:52   They're not big. They're way smaller than you think they are.

00:01:55   Oh, my word. But anyway, you would think after all this time I would know better than to ask Marco for help

00:02:01   because the problem with asking Marco for help when it comes to purchases is that you will be spending considerably more money than you would like to spend.

00:02:08   Well, do you want something good?

00:02:10   It's like people come to me and they're like, "What should I buy that's good?"

00:02:14   And then I tell them, and they're like, "That's a lot of money."

00:02:16   "Yeah, 'cause it's good."

00:02:18   Well, there's a discontinuity or at least an area of that graph where the two lines diverge and do not ascend at the same rate.

00:02:26   And very often your recommendations are past that point.

00:02:29   I wouldn't say very often.

00:02:31   The problem, though, is that it is often, if not nearly always, that the thing that Marco suggests is very, very good.

00:02:38   It's better, but it was like quality and price were tracking pretty nicely with each other with a similar slope.

00:02:44   And then at a certain point, price starts going up a little bit steeper, and then you just follow that graph out to the right for a while, and all of a sudden you're like, "Well, it is better."

00:02:52   Like my Mac Pro, basically. That's where my Mac Pro is.

00:02:55   Yeah, right. Like you can talk.

00:02:57   Well, once every ten years I buy something like Marco.

00:03:01   How often do you buy a flashlight or a pair of headphones? Not that often.

00:03:04   Fair enough. Yeah, I solicited this advice because it's a long and involved story that I will cut down as much as possible.

00:03:10   Basically there's an old train tunnel that is being turned into a rail trail park thing.

00:03:17   And by donating a very small amount of money, I have gotten the perk of being allowed to tour it before it opens, presumably this fall.

00:03:27   And this train tunnel, I mean, it's something like a mile long, and it's pitch black in there.

00:03:31   And I have flashlights, but I have crappy, like, ten or twenty dollar flashlights.

00:03:36   I don't have something that would illuminate a mile long train tunnel.

00:03:40   And this flashlight will not, well, might, but probably won't illuminate a mile long train tunnel.

00:03:45   No, it's not made for long throw, it's made for wide illumination of where you are.

00:03:48   Which actually is probably better.

00:03:50   You can get some that are made for like super long throw, but then they have like a narrower beam.

00:03:54   Sure. And so I asked Marco, "Hey, you know, I need something that will last me something like, you know, an hour and a half, and that'll be pretty damn bright. What do you got?"

00:04:00   And so he recommended, and I will put in the show notes, the Olight SR2, 1150 lumens USB magnetic rechargeable variable output slides.

00:04:08   Olight S2R Baton 2.

00:04:10   Isn't that what I said?

00:04:11   You said SR2. It sounds like a car.

00:04:14   SR71, right?

00:04:16   That's not a car. Or a flashlight.

00:04:18   He was thinking MR2.

00:04:19   And so, but the funny thing is, I wanted to see an example of it in use.

00:04:25   And Marco very graciously said he would record a video, and did end up recording a video of it at nighttime.

00:04:31   And it was very impressive, that will not be in the show notes.

00:04:33   But I, you know, did a YouTube search to see like an example of this in action.

00:04:38   And of course, do you remember the name? I'll have to dig it up. The name of the channel I ended up on, it was like Sensible Prepper or something like that?

00:04:45   Is it like Doomsday Prepper?

00:04:47   And I realized, oh, this is not good. This is not good for me at all.

00:04:51   No.

00:04:52   Well, the problem with researching any kind of like, you know, let me get a nice flashlight.

00:04:57   Flashlights are part of the "everyday carry" community.

00:05:01   And that very quickly leads you to guns and gun people.

00:05:04   And I just have, I want nothing to do with that side of it.

00:05:07   And so, like, it's really hard to get good opinions and reviews of anything that even goes near the "everyday carry" type category of like useful little gear things to have that maybe fit in a bag.

00:05:19   And it's like you so quickly fall into like a crazy rabbit hole of communities and priorities that you don't have and don't want to be in.

00:05:28   That's so true. But I mean, but he's a sensible prepper, so it's okay.

00:05:32   Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. That's like a compassionate conservative, right?

00:05:36   I have a big apology to make.

00:05:43   We have gotten so much feedback, way more than I expected.

00:05:48   On an audio problem in last week's show.

00:05:52   Indeed.

00:05:53   Last week, there were some, I believe, cicadas. Is that right, John?

00:05:57   Never found them, but yeah, some kind of critter.

00:05:59   Yeah, some kind of, you know, August bugs. It sounded like, you know, cicada bug noise on parts of John's track.

00:06:05   And I noticed this during the edit. And normally I'd be able to remove such noise during the edit and nobody would ever know.

00:06:12   This time I tried a couple of ways to remove it, my usual techniques to do it, and I just couldn't get it out without like totally crushing the rest of his high-frequency audio and making him sound very weird.

00:06:24   And so I thought, you know what, it won't be that big of a deal. Let me just leave it in. Maybe nobody will notice.

00:06:30   Everybody noticed. We're still getting messages on Twitter, via email, saying like, "Hey, there's some kind of noise. Something wrong with the recording on John's track."

00:06:39   People saying it was really hard to listen to, that they thought something was wrong with their car.

00:06:44   And so I am so sorry. I later edited, I later re-edited the file.

00:06:51   And so if you re-downloaded it after a certain point, you would have gotten the edited version that didn't have the cicada noise.

00:06:58   Basically after the first few hours of it being out, some people recommended some different techniques.

00:07:03   What I ended up doing was basically a bandpass, but notching out like only like the 7 to 8,000-ish frequency range that these bugs were in, with a method that was working better than what I was doing before.

00:07:18   So anyway, so the fixed version is out, and I greatly apologize.

00:07:21   The funny thing is, I was actually really nervous that people would notice an audio problem last week, because I was using a new microphone for the first time in probably four years.

00:07:30   Oh, I didn't notice. No one noticed. Thank God. I was kind of hoping nobody would have a problem with it, or it wouldn't be a big shift for anybody.

00:07:38   But it mattered a lot to me to get this right, and we got zero people noticing that, because everybody was noticing these very loud bug noises on John's track.

00:07:47   And to answer some questions from the chat room and elsewhere, yes, I mean literal insects.

00:07:51   They're literal living insect creatures outside my house somewhere, making noise.

00:07:56   And yes, I have all my windows closed, and no, this is not normal.

00:08:00   The reason I suspect cicadas is because I think in my area it's a cicada season.

00:08:04   Like, I pretty much never see cicadas around here. We found a couple of dead ones on the sidewalk in our travels over the past couple of weeks.

00:08:11   So I think this is anomalous. It's unexpected for us to have any bugs that make this level of noise, and further unexpected for them to be so loud that, you know,

00:08:20   despite being closed into my little podcasting sarcophagus here with all the windows closed and no air conditioning on and everything all sealed up,

00:08:28   still they were so loud they were just coming through the windows and walls of this building into my microphone that should only be picking up my voice from six inches away.

00:08:38   Oh yeah, right. You have the world's most sensitive microphone. You have a large diaphragm condenser.

00:08:44   Like, that should pick up everything in the universe, and for some reason, every other week it doesn't.

00:08:50   Every other week your audio is perfect, and I have no idea how, because that kind of microphone, I can't get to work right in my rooms ever.

00:08:57   Because I'm in a room with, like, carpeting and a bookshelf and weird shaped walls, and there's lots of stuff to absorb the sound.

00:09:03   But, you know, I mean, yes, it does pick up a lot, but when I get far away from the mic it gets quieter, right?

00:09:07   So this bug, like, it was loud for a bug, but still, it's outside and all the windows are closed, and so it's not that loud. I'm kind of amazed that it showed up on the track at all, but obviously it did.

00:09:18   Yeah, so anyway, my apologies to everybody. I will be a little more aggressive in the future about trying to remove things like that that I think nobody will notice.

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00:10:58   Thank you so much to Hay for being a pretty cool email service and for sponsoring our show.

00:11:03   MacRumors, not the website, just the rumors about Macintoshes. Apparently today is the day, and as we record this at 9 o'clock in the evening on August 19th, I guess West Coast is always a little behind.

00:11:20   And so maybe something will happen, but we were told at some point recently that we would get a new iMac, new AirPod Studio, new HomePod 2, new HomePod Mini. Have any of those things happened, gentlemen?

00:11:30   We got a new iMac, but not on August 19th. I just wanted to swap this down. I don't want to attribute to any source, like whatever.

00:11:38   We talked about it on whatever that show was a couple of episodes ago just because it was such a huge dump of rumor info. It's like, wow, someone's really laying it on the line with all these announcements and dates.

00:11:51   And now I think we can just ignore it forever because August 19th has come and gone and these things didn't happen, and even though the iMac did happen, it didn't happen on August 19th. So much for the Nostradamus-like prediction filled with dates.

00:12:03   And then would you like to add a clarification about the thing you were trying to quote last week?

00:12:09   This is the reason I think people should listen to our podcast because we're the only podcast in which one of the hosts will try to cite a half-remembered saying from a shareware website that really comes from something in ancient history that I couldn't even remember.

00:12:23   And then a listener will write in to tell us, I know which saying you were talking about. And also, turns out, as they say, the popular notion of the saying is a mistranslation. So here we go.

00:12:36   Nate Mavis says, "The quote you were reaching for is from Socrates, not Aristotle, and it's from Apology 30b." I have no idea about how classics work. Apology 30b? Do they like number and letter? Anyway, that's a thing.

00:12:48   "You have construed it as some ancient scholars have. Being virtuous will lead to wealth and other good things." This was me talking about Apple should concentrate on just trying to make good stuff and then they'll be successful because of that instead of the other way around.

00:13:00   He says, "But that's an incorrect translation. Socrates says, rather, that virtue makes wealth good. Not virtue will make wealth and other good things for you. Think of what you tell a kid playing against cheaters. If you cheat to win, winning isn't good. Playing by the rules virtuously is what makes winning good."

00:13:17   So M.F. Bernie proposes his interpretation in a paper from 2012, which we will link in the show notes, and no other tech podcast will. And Nate says, "I spent the chunk of my dissertation defending it in detail and now I'm in software. I leave it up to you which interpretation is more relevant to Apple's situation today."

00:13:34   So there you go. I meant the first sense that being virtuous will lead to wealth and other good things. But the other, perhaps more correct interpretation is also applicable, I think.

00:13:45   That is actually very interesting and I agree. You will not hear anyone else talk about that. Oh my goodness. So there was some hubbub in the last day or two and I saw that this video existed but I didn't get a chance to watch.

00:13:58   Apparently somebody has dropped a Big Sur beta onto a Lenovo touchscreen enabled, I presume ThinkPad, but a Lenovo laptop. And the touchscreen worked? Question mark? What's going on here?

00:14:11   So first of all, let me start by saying I have no idea if this video is real. But if it is real, the pitch of the video is, of course, if a touchscreen laptop works and you touch it, maybe it would just interpret that as mouse movement or mouse clicking and then why wouldn't it work?

00:14:24   But if you watch the video, the whole point is that the person in the video performs gestures, like pinch to zoom, in the Maps application in Mac OS, and the gestures work in the Big Sur beta on this laptop.

00:14:36   Again, I have no idea if it's real or not. The reason I included it here, and I'll put a link to the video, is just so you can see what it might look like. In what context might touch be useful on a Mac with a touchscreen?

00:14:50   Because whether it's real or not, you can see someone using a laptop with Mac OS on it with real Mac OS apps and occasionally pawing at the screen.

00:14:57   Now, the performance and responsiveness seems atrocious. It's almost like, is it working? Is it not working? And you see it's kind of working. So it looks really terrible. But A, it's on a Lenovo. Who knows what kind of support this is?

00:15:08   B, it might not even be real. And C, it's a beta. So I thought it was mostly a curiosity, but it's interesting to see, like, one of the first videos in the wild showing real hardware, presumably real hardware and real software showing someone touching a Mac in the screen.

00:15:23   Additionally, there's some changes with regard to the menu bar icon spacing. I can never remember what these things in the upper right are called. Is there a new--

00:15:32   Menu extras, menu bar icons. I think menu extras is what Apple calls them or what they used to be called under the covers. Anyway, we talked about this when we talked about Big Sur, that yes, there are all the different things being spaced out for touch, right? And we mentioned the menu. This is not a new feature. The very first Big Sur bit had this in it. But here is Ricardo Mori on Twitter complaining about the new spacing.

00:15:52   Not because, you know, necessarily he minds that it's like spread out so it's easy for your fingers to touch, but now they take up more room. And so here's a little screenshot. You can see in his tweet where he says, my icons used to take up about this amount of room.

00:16:04   But now that they all have a huge amount of white space between them, on a 13-inch laptop, like, the icons take up like more than half of the menu bar. And so if you have an app with a lot of menus, they're going to clash in the middle and your icons are going to get hidden.

00:16:17   And it's inconvenient. So this is the downside to sort of spreading Mac OS out for finger spacing or whatever it is they're doing. Whether they're doing it for finger spacing or not, bottom line is they're spreading stuff out.

00:16:27   There's all the new large controls. The menu bar can be enlarged. The menu icons are spread out from each other. And if you have a laptop with a small screen, suddenly it feels even smaller because there's all this extra white space between things.

00:16:39   So it would be kind of neat to have an option to sort of collapse that spacing if you don't have a touch screen Mac or if you just don't plan on touching your menu bar icons. But somehow I don't see that option forthcoming.

00:16:52   Yeah, it's so hard not to conclude that touch is coming to Mac OS because it seems like so many of these changes are curious, if not dumb, if that wasn't the end goal. And typically Apple does quietly orchestrate their future plans.

00:17:12   You know, things like auto layout is a great example. You know, it used to be that Apple didn't care if you laid everything out by the pixel or point. And then they started saying before we got bigger phones, you know, you might want to just think about like a relative layout where you're anchoring things to other things.

00:17:30   And that might be a good call. And then fast forward a few months and suddenly we had bigger iPhones. And so it certainly seems that we're getting touch screen Macs or some sort of alternate input mechanism if not touch. But I don't know, if not, this seems like such a weird choice to just add all this white space everywhere.

00:17:52   Finally, Jon, you're having a problem with your rubbers.

00:17:56   Yikes. Yeah, this is I spent all that time and we talked about on the show, I don't know, six months ago or something, picking out a mouse, trying a bunch of mice, seeing which I felt comfortable because I wanted a new one with my fancy new computer.

00:18:08   When I got my Mac Pro, I was using an ancient mouse and it was just not great. And I eventually settled on the Microsoft Precision mouse, which, you know, had some trade offs out of all the ones I tried. It was the one I liked the best.

00:18:19   I even after that, I'd used it for a month or so. I even considered doing the cheese grater thing, the actual physical thing that grates cheese from a cow and buying multiples.

00:18:29   Right. Because I'm like, well, I like this mouse. I found a mouse that I liked. It took a lot of, you know, buying multiple mice to see if I could find it. But I found what I like. So why don't I, you know, maybe they'll stop making this one or maybe they'll change it in a way I don't like. Maybe I should buy multiples. But I didn't because I figured, well, I don't know, I used the last mouse for like 15 years or something.

00:18:48   I don't, you know, I'm not going to wear. I don't need to buy a new one. Like if 15 years go by and I need to get another mouse, I'll do the research again. But now for a little while, I felt like there was like some kind of schmutz or something on the side of my mouse. And occasionally I would like scrape it with my fingernail, just like schmutz off of there and it would like go away.

00:19:05   And eventually I felt some of this thing under my thumb, under my left thumb gripping the mouse, and I tried smoothing it away and it didn't really go away. So then I said, let me look at it. I looked at the mouse and it wasn't schmutz. The side of this Microsoft mouse, the entire left side, and the right side for that matter, is like rubber coated.

00:19:23   The whole mouse is plastic, but it's like rubber coated plastic on the sides for grip, which I like. It's very comfortable and it's a very smooth rubber. But it is apparently so soft and smooth and velvety that the act of me just using my mouse and having my left thumb in like that same position on the side of the mouse, you know, is just how I use it.

00:19:42   I'm a side mouse gripper kind of person, has worn, doesn't warn it away, but has worn a little, like first it's like a little bit of a slightly shinier smooth spot and then there's like this little lip that I'm, it's not a lip, it's not the edges, it's the center of the rubber.

00:19:57   And I have just made like a little rough patch with my thumb and I'm like, oh no, I haven't even had this mouse that long. This is not going to last 15 years. So I don't know what I'm going to do about this.

00:20:06   I mean, the mouse is fine. And if now that I just know that's what it is, I don't pick at it. Right. It's not like I've worn through it in a hole and it's not like it's peeling off. It's just a little bit worn in that area.

00:20:16   If it would wear evenly, you know, like a baseball glove or something, just kind of wear down and get a patina, that would be fine. But when it wears so that it has like a little, a little flaky kind of rough bit, I don't really like that.

00:20:29   So I don't know what I'm going to do about this, but I just wanted to update everybody on my mouse woes that apparently buying five different mice and trying them each for weeks was insufficient.

00:20:37   And this is the thing with, I think about this with product reviews all the time. If you're doing a product review for a product review website or even just for yourself and your life, it's very difficult to know conclusively what is a good product from just using it for like a couple of weeks, especially if it's something that you intend to keep for a long time. Right.

00:20:55   Like say a cheese grater for your kitchen, that kind.

00:20:59   I love that you have to say that every time.

00:21:01   I mean, I can't because I don't want you to, you know, anyway.

00:21:04   You buy it, you grade a bunch of cheese, you do timing tests, you do like this was the easiest, we got the least tired doing it. It made the evenness, you know, gratings, whatever.

00:21:13   It was machine washable and it was like all, all this, you know, dishwasher safe rather. You say all these things about it.

00:21:19   Like this is the one. And then you publish that article and then, you know, you go off and forget about it. And one of your employees takes home the cheese grater and then six months later it breaks.

00:21:29   I feel like you have to go back to the article and say, don't buy this cheese grater. It breaks in six months. Right. It's not the best one. Yes, it had the best performance when it was working.

00:21:36   Like, you know, like in case it's BMW. Yeah, it's good when it's working. If it dies all the time, it's not actually the best choice.

00:21:43   So I'm disappointed in my Microsoft mouse. I did some Googling and I found someone with the exact complaint for a Microsoft mouse saying I used it for a little while and it wore in the exact same spot, but it's not actually my mouse.

00:21:57   It's an earlier Microsoft mouse with rubber stuff on the side. I think they just use very soft touch rubber for it to be like expensive feeling and nice.

00:22:04   And it is expensive feeling and nice, but I think that soft touch rubber is not particularly durable. So, and it's not like you can replace the rubber on the side or anything.

00:22:13   So I don't know what I'm going to do. I like this mouse enough that I would probably just like buy a new one every couple of years if after a couple of years it becomes dire.

00:22:21   But, you know, it's so hard to find good mice these days.

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00:23:45   The drama continues. Actually if you'll give me about 90 seconds I need to go pop some more popcorn. Epic and Apple still killing each other.

00:23:55   Where did we leave off? Where were our intrepid heroes the last we spoke? I don't even remember. It's been such a blur of anger.

00:24:02   It was basically the very first night that this had come out and they had sued Apple and Google.

00:24:08   Right.

00:24:09   But nothing else had really happened yet.

00:24:12   Fortnite had been taken down from the store but if you still had it installed it was fine and that's all that had happened.

00:24:18   There had been the lawsuits, there had been the video release, Fortnite was off the store but if you still had it you could still play it.

00:24:23   Right.

00:24:24   And there was a bunch of context that we didn't actually have time to get to and we'll probably go into it shortly here.

00:24:31   But yeah, so Casey, sorry, what's new this week?

00:24:34   So I may leave something out but as best I understand what's new this week is that, you know, like we said Fortnite is removed from the App Store and Apple has told Epic that they have until a week from Friday, so the 28th, to basically cut the shit out and start acting nice again.

00:24:52   And if they don't apparently their entire development account, their developer account will be taken away, which means they won't be able to use Xcode, well, they won't be able to do anything really with Xcode, they won't be able to do anything with any Apple platforms.

00:25:07   And that would be a pretty serious bummer and I'm still not clear whether or not there would be a trickle effect on the Unreal Engine, which we can talk about a little bit more what that is in a moment.

00:25:18   But this is the, as I think Gruber has described it, or maybe it was Jason Snell, the nuclear option that, you know, this is the Apple saying you can go outside and play hide and go screw yourself option.

00:25:31   And so that's what Apple has done.

00:25:34   And there's been, you know, there's been a lot of all of the talking heads like us going around and around and around about what makes sense, what's fair, what's not fair.

00:25:44   And I think there's a lot more to talk about it about this case specifically, but God help me for the first time, I think in my entire life, I actually sat down earlier tonight and tried to do like a poor man's mind map to try to figure out what is really going on here.

00:25:58   Because I feel like there are maybe five different arguments that are all happening at the same time and are all interrelated about, you know, whether or not 30% is fair, whether or not app review is fair, whether or not Apple is being retaliatory baby and so on.

00:26:14   And I was going to try to force us to pick these apart one by one, and I just don't think we'll be able to do it because they are so intertwined.

00:26:22   But something I think that's been very difficult for me is picking apart and separating these different concerns.

00:26:30   And maybe we'll try to do that, just try to keep an eye on that as we discuss further.

00:26:37   I don't know, that's kind of the executive summary. Where would you gentlemen like to go from here? John, do you have immediate thoughts?

00:26:43   Yeah, like I think before we start talking about the other stuff, we'll just talk about the threatened punishment, right? So Apple said, what was it, were they going to terminate their developer account?

00:26:52   And so, I mean, the first question may be, is that a thing that Apple can do? And the answer, of course, before you even look it up, you know, is yes, because all those terms and conditions that everybody just clicks through and every service that you ever click through terms and conditions on, I guarantee you, they all say, we can do whatever we want and you have no recourse.

00:27:06   Like that's what they all say. And you agree to that because what are you going to do, not agree? I mean, you could not agree and not be a developer, right? But like most companies are able to put language in all of their agreements for all of their sort of third party, you're going to do stuff on our platform that basically says, if we don't like what you do, or even if we do, like for any reason, we could just wake up in the morning, decide, you know what, we don't like you today, we can take away all your things.

00:27:29   Because that's just the nature of the agreement. Apple's got the things you want access to those things. This is the agreement, right? So yes, the agreement says they can do this. And then any agreement says this is what it means if we do this, if we terminate your account, it says you will lose access to the following programs, technologies and capabilities.

00:27:44   Obviously, in these legal agreements, very often terms are defined elsewhere. So you have to kind of look up what they mean. So this first thing that I'm going to read is going to sound bad. But I'm sure it's defined elsewhere to be not as broad as you think. So you will lose access to the following.

00:27:58   All Apple software, comma. Now obviously, losing access to all Apple software, because that would mean like you'd go into the Apple Store to try to buy an iPhone, they'd be like, are you Tim Sweeney? Get out of here.

00:28:09   They'd give you an iPhone with no software on it. Like you can have this iPhone, but no software for you. Right. Anyway, all the sentence reads differently. All Apple software, comma, SDKs, comma, API's, comma, and developer tools. Now, I think that's maybe just poorly written or Apple software is a term defined elsewhere, though the S is not capital.

00:28:27   So anyway, you don't get to use the developer tools and stuff. I'm skipping over a bunch of stuff just to get to the meaty stuff. One of the things you lose access to is the notarization service for Mac OS apps. Now remember, it's not like you have an iOS developer account and a Mac OS developer account and tv OS developer account.

00:28:43   Although at various times there have been distinctions related to platforms, you essentially have a developer account. A developer account is a thing that puts apps on the stores. Now companies can have multiple developer accounts, I imagine, depending on how many legal entities they have, and we'll get into that in a second. But anyway, they have a developer account, right?

00:29:01   So this agreement is not specific to saying, you know, if you get a developer account, you can make any of those kind of apps. You know, Marco can make a Mac app, I can make an iOS app, like from our own single developer account if we want it. It's not limited by platform.

00:29:14   So when they terminate the agreement, of course it's going to say, we terminate your access to the notarization service. You can't make notarized apps because you don't have a developer account. Right?

00:29:22   And it seems weird because we're talking about an iOS app, you know, Fortnite on iOS and iPad OS, right? But now you're losing access to Mac OS things? Like you can't notarize a Mac OS app? It's like you weren't even mad at us about a Mac app, right? We're talking about, it doesn't matter. This is the developer agreement.

00:29:38   You lose access to developer ID signing certificates. So not only can you not notarize an app, which is like sort of giving it the Apple stamp of approval by sending it out to Apple and then they sign it and send it back. You can't even sign it yourself with your own developer ID certificate.

00:29:54   So developer ID is where the developer can just sign an application and give it to somebody and it'll run even though Apple hasn't signed off on it. Right? You lose access to the universal app quick start program, which is the thing that gives you the DTK. So if you've got a DTK, you have to send it back to us. You can't have that anymore.

00:30:11   And then finally, this is a little extra FU for Epic. You lose access to engineering efforts to improve hardware and software performance of Unreal Engine on Mac and iOS hardware. So what Apple is saying is up until now, we here at Apple have worked on our stuff on like our OSs and our 3D engines and our drivers and all that stuff, you know, our 3D, you know, driver software and everything.

00:30:36   So that it performs well with Unreal Engine because Unreal Engine, which we'll talk about in a little bit, is a very popular engine for 3D applications on many platforms. And it has been important for Apple for Unreal Engine based software to run well on Mac and iOS hardware.

00:30:51   So what Apple is saying is not only are we going to terminate all this stuff and not give you access to any of our dev tools or anything. Also, we're going to stop making sure that Unreal Engine runs really well on our products.

00:31:04   Which, I mean, on the one hand, it's like, well, most people don't get that kind of service from Apple where you make some kind of third party library and then Apple spends its own resources making sure that your library runs really fast on their hardware.

00:31:16   But that just goes to show the nature of Unreal Engine. And what Casey was getting at before is like, okay, given all this, this is the agreement, they take away all this stuff. What does that actually mean aside from like Fortnite's not on the App Store anymore?

00:31:29   Does it mean, for example, that other applications that use Unreal Engine are going to have problems? And briefly, Unreal Engine is a 3D engine that you can license from Unreal, from Epic, and use it to build the game on it.

00:31:42   Because 3D engines are really hard to make and Epic's Unreal Engine has been really good for many, many years. It comes with all sorts of stuff. It comes with an entire development environment for you to make your game.

00:31:51   It's how a single person developer shop can make a good looking 3D game. That single person is not writing the 3D engine from scratch. They're licensing an engine and then building a game on top of it.

00:32:01   And it gives you much more than just the 3D engine. It gives you physics and scripting and, like I said, an entire IDE. It's a very complicated, big thing.

00:32:07   And the Unreal Engine actually has really nice licensing terms where I think it's like free to use until your game makes over a million in revenue.

00:32:14   And then after that, Epic gets like 3% of your revenue or something. But it's used all over the place. It's used on consoles, it's used on PC games, and it's used on iOS games and Mac games, you know, the whole nine yards, right?

00:32:25   So, on the App Store now are many, many games that are built on Unreal Engine. Does this happening to Epic, like their developer account being terminated, does that mean that anything bad happens to applications not made by Epic but that happen to use Unreal Engine?

00:32:42   The short answer is like immediately no. Like, so they terminated Epic's account, do those games all break? No, they're all fine.

00:32:50   But the medium to long term answer is that if you would imagine that this developer account is the only way that Epic has to continue development of Unreal Engine on Apple's platforms,

00:33:03   eventually Apple would release an OS where the Unreal Engine and/or the tools stop working or have show-stopping bugs in them. And the game developers would be like, "Oh, I need to update my game for the new whatever OS.

00:33:16   I'll need the new version of Unreal that works with the new whatever OS." And Epic would say, "Sorry, we can't actually make a new version of the Unreal Engine for whatever OS because whatever OS is an Apple OS and we literally can't build anything for Apple OS because we don't have access to the dev tools."

00:33:31   If you take a very narrow reading, yeah, that's a thing that could happen. But in reality, all right, so you terminated, Apple terminated this developer account.

00:33:41   It's kind of a game of whack-a-mole to say, "Okay, well, what if Epic just makes another developer account?" "Uh, we noticed it uses the same legal entity."

00:33:47   "Okay, well, what if Epic's parent company, was it Tencent or whatever, makes, has another shell company and they get a developer account and they become the Unreal development company that is separate from Epic and Apple's not mad at them?"

00:33:59   Like, this could go around forever and ever. Like, bottom line is there's no practical way for Apple to stop continued development of Unreal Engine and Apple's platforms.

00:34:09   Right? Legally speaking, technologically speaking, they could chase each other forever. There's no way to actually stop it, assuming both parties are invested in making this happen.

00:34:21   So, the punishment, given everything that I said, the punishment is actually kind of bad, but it's not the end of the world and it probably won't affect everybody who built on Unreal Engine, but it probably is where the damage is done.

00:34:36   Say it never does affect any other person who builds on Unreal Engine. If they think it might affect them, they might be like, "Eh, do I want to use Unreal Engine? Because they're fighting with Apple and I'm not quite sure how that's going to turn out."

00:34:48   It seems like it'll probably be fine, but now I have doubts and maybe I'll use Unity instead, which is a competing 3D engine that works on Apple's platforms and other PC and game consoles and stuff, right?

00:34:58   So, this is actually a fairly strong move from Apple. What they're doing, even if it never actually "does" anything,

00:35:08   A) of course, the damage is epic because Fortnite gets off the App Store and they can't make the money from people using Fortnite on iOS devices, and people who use iOS devices spend a lot of money, so that's bad for them.

00:35:20   And B) it makes people, in epic's words in all their lawsuits, "damages their reputation." It makes people more wary about building games on top of Unreal Engine, because Unreal Engine is made by the company that's fighting with Apple, and maybe something could happen could affect my game.

00:35:36   And so I think this is the nuclear option, maybe, but it's a strong move. It's something that has to, you know, Epic has to take this seriously.

00:35:47   And again, Epic could have anticipated they'd do this move because of course, what does Epic have that Apple can take away from them?

00:35:54   Their apps in the store and then eventually their developer account, right? So I'm sure they planned for this, but I think a lot of people watching this are thinking this is where Epic is going to blink.

00:36:04   Because Apple, in their benevolence, you know, put a press release that says, "Asterisk." The App Store is designed to be safe, blah blah blah, there's a bunch of stuff about how great the App Store is, and Apple goes on to say, this is quoting from their little thing they sent to the press,

00:36:18   "We very much want to keep the company, meaning Epic, as part of the Apple developer program and their apps on the store. The problem Epic has created for itself is one that can easily be remedied if they submit an update to their app that reverts it to comply with the guidelines."

00:36:33   It actually says, "Revert it to comply with the guidelines they agreed to, which apply to all developers." I love that every time Apple references the guidelines after the congressional hearing, they always say, "The guidelines, which by the way are totally the same for everybody. The guidelines which apply to everyone equally. The guidelines, which as we know, are the same for every single person. The guidelines which have no exceptions."

00:36:54   Like they always had a modifier. You can say it all you want, Apple. Every time you say guidelines, you can say, "Which apply to everyone equally." It doesn't make it true. You can't just keep it. Anyway, that's setting that aside.

00:37:07   So Apple's giving them an out. First of all, they gave them this deadline, whatever it was, the 28th, and then they're saying, "Just fix your game. Just take out the little thing that lets you pay with a credit card and change it back to the way it was, and all will be forgiven."

00:37:18   So a lot of people are thinking, "Well, maybe Epic has made its point, and maybe Epic will continue to pursue the lawsuits, but maybe just to come back to a safe position while the lawsuits grind on through the courts."

00:37:29   Maybe they just released a version of Fortnite that removes the—or they didn't even have to release it. They can just turn off the server-side thing that enables that feature. No more paying with a credit card and getting 20% off. It's back to normal.

00:37:41   Or they could just stick it out and say, "We're willing to take the potential reputational damage. We're willing to have Tencent open a shell company to take on Unreal Engine development." Whatever. We're in it for the long haul.

00:37:51   So I don't expect this is the end of the story, but it's a bold counter move by Apple. More next week, I assume.

00:38:02   I think bold is being generous here. This should erase any doubt in anybody's mind whether Apple is the IBM in 1984. Yes, clearly they are. Oh my god, they are really not doing well in the court of public opinion right now.

00:38:24   They couldn't possibly have made a worse counter move if they're trying to at all seem like the good guys.

00:38:33   And by the way, the reason I think people are saying they look like a bully, just to make this very clear, is that the fight, such as it stands, you could just say, "Okay, well, you submitted an app that violated the rules and we're angry at you and we pulled the app, right?"

00:38:46   And that could be like, "That's it. Well, you did a bad thing with the app and we rejected your app, right?"

00:38:52   That's all they had to do.

00:38:53   Right. Well, all I'm saying is that that would seem proportional. It's like you submitted a bad app or you rejected your bad app and you broke our agreement. You did a sneaky thing. You broke the agreement.

00:39:02   And technically, yes, we have, according to our agreement, we can do all sorts of stuff because, of course, our agreement tells us we can do whatever the hell we want.

00:39:08   In fact, like I said, Apple can terminate your agreement for any reason if they just feel like it, right? There doesn't even have to be a reason.

00:39:14   But as Marco was saying, it seems mean to say, "Well, we're just fighting over this one app. You really got to terminate my whole developer account? We don't just develop Fortnite. There are other games by us on the store. We do other things."

00:39:27   That's why it seems like bullying because it's like, "Okay, well, this happens all the time."

00:39:31   And the only time we've seen entire developer account termination is if you're putting up malicious software, which I think would be a proportional response.

00:39:39   You have shown you are not responsible enough to have a developer account. You are putting out software that spies on people, tries to steal information.

00:39:45   Yeah, but talk about treating all developers equally. Facebook's account should have been terminated many times. Ubers, too.

00:39:52   Lots of big companies do all that. Their accounts are fine.

00:39:55   Yeah, so that's the thing. It's a measure of how big is Epic? Is Epic as big as Facebook? No.

00:40:02   Are they as important to Apple's platform as Facebook? No. Is they important to Netflix? Probably not, right?

00:40:06   You can kind of go by the market cap of the company. You can size it up. Epic is a big, important company, and their parent company is even bigger and even more important.

00:40:15   But they're not Facebook, right?

00:40:17   So, anyway, that's why we're all saying this seems like bullying because they had a response that would seem more proportional that would fix the problem, which is like, "Hey, someone's app is on our store violating the rules."

00:40:30   Which, this is another thing, not to go off on a tangent here, but I'm slightly confused about this. All right, so the app's not on the store, but if you still have it, you can play it?

00:40:37   That's the kind of compromise we would expect because Apple doesn't want all of these kids to get mad because they can't play Fortnite, right?

00:40:42   But on the other hand, we can't have Epic breaking the rules, right? But those kids who are still playing Fortnite, they can still use their credit card, whatever, to get 20% off, right?

00:40:52   Yeah.

00:40:53   And that's the thing about the app enabling new features after it goes out, which is the thing that all apps do but is technically against the guidelines if you read them, right?

00:41:01   That Apple actually doesn't have a good way to stop those transactions other than pulling the app entirely and breaking it for everybody, which they don't want to do because then people would really be angry, like, "Hey, my kid can't play Fortnite, right? Now I'm super angry."

00:41:14   And I don't want to say kid. Adults play Fortnite too, whatever. The user should be very upset if you broke a thing.

00:41:19   So Apple has to just kind of grin and bear it and while this grinds on, yes, new people can't get Fortnite, but honestly, a lot of people already have Fortnite on iOS devices. It is a very popular game.

00:41:30   And in the meantime, they can all be buying V-Bucks for 20% off and that's got to burn Apple, right?

00:41:36   So I feel like maybe this bullying response is in response to sort of Epic having one over on them because they can't, it would hurt Apple more to literally stop Fortnite from working for everybody, which, that's one more question.

00:41:51   When they terminate the developer account, will Fortnite stop working for everybody?

00:41:54   That's a good question. So as far as I know, so like there's multiple ways of, you know, Apple developer account expiration/termination. So if your account just expires, like if you don't renew your developer account, your account expires, you can't submit new builds to your app and your app disappeared from the store.

00:42:15   But anybody who has it, it can still run and you can still redown it from the purchases tab.

00:42:19   Same thing, if your developer certificate just expires and you still have your account, but like your distribution certificate that you built the last copy of the app with, if that expires, nothing bad happens.

00:42:29   You just have to make a new one before your next app update. But otherwise, like it still stays in the store, people can still download it and use it, et cetera. That's all fine.

00:42:36   If Apple revokes your certificate from, like in like a malware kind of way, where they actually like revoke the thing that says it's okay to run this, then you have a Charlie Monroe situation, which we, I still want to talk about.

00:42:51   Then you have a situation where the app on iOS, I think, just crashes on launch and just refuses to run without any explanation. On the Mac, that's when you get the dialogue that says, this app will damage your computer and you should move it to the trash.

00:43:05   Oh, I have so much to say about that. But anyway, that's like revocation at Apple's level. Not just like, you know, this is no longer valid, but like all previous signed things are now invalid from this app.

00:43:17   So I don't know what happens if Apple terminates your developer account, but not for like a malware kind of reason.

00:43:26   I think if you have the app, it continues to run. I think we've seen this like with various times, whenever people have tried to like put emulators in the iOS app store and they're up for like a day and Apple figures it out and takes them down, I think they still run after that for people who already had downloaded them.

00:43:44   So if that's the case, I don't think all copies of Fortnite out there would be remote killed if their developer account got terminated.

00:43:53   Yeah, I mean, so what you described are the various options. What we don't know is inside Apple, when you hit the big terminate account button, like, does that make any of which of those things does that make happen, if any?

00:44:04   Obviously, Apple can do whatever they want, regardless of what that button normally does. They can decide a la carte, we're going to terminate the developer account and we either are or aren't going to revoke your certificate.

00:44:13   But it's on the table as one of their options. And it's not clear from their threat, what they'll choose to do when they do this termination. To give an example of emulators, like I downloaded NES emulator, like on day two of the iPhone or something, somebody put up an NES emulator, and that worked for years.

00:44:28   Now, when somebody put up the NES, this is early days, but when whoever put up the NES emulator, that's a violation of the rules. But it's also not malware. But it's also kind of a blatant violation of the rules. And there's also intellectual property things.

00:44:41   It's kind of a judgment call whether Apple, to think, would Apple have terminated that developer's account? Again, it's not a clear cut case of like you're trying to do something like really terrible, you know, like steal people's personal photos or something like that.

00:44:55   But you were breaking the rules. So I would imagine that they didn't terminate that developer's account, they just rejected that application. But who knows? But either way, it seems clear that they can choose to let the app live on. But the caveat in the case of Fortnite, if you let the app live on, literally millions of people will continue to be able to bypass an app purchase and get V bucks for 20% off, giving epic money.

00:45:20   Obviously, it's not sustainable long term because, you know, you want new customers and stuff like that. But boy, it really makes me think that I can't imagine Apple tolerating three more years of 100 million people bypassing their purchase just because they refuse to reject the certificate for the game.

00:45:37   But on the other hand, does Apple want to break Fortnite for every single one of its customers? So they're starting to get between a rock and a hard place here.

00:45:46   That's the least of the problems. I mean, my big problem with this, so lots of people have pointed out what Epic's real motives here might be. Yeah, they want to make, they want to bring their app store to iOS and take 12% of everybody's, you know, cut instead of having to pay Apple 30%, whatever.

00:46:01   That to me is separate. That's like, what Epic wants to do with their money and everyone else's money is not really material to this conversation. What's material to this issue is like, first of all, whether Apple's rules are anti-competitive and whether they've overreached or whether it's too big now and has to change or whatever else.

00:46:23   And then secondly from that, their treatment of Epic in this, whether that's kind of, you know, quote, "fair" or not whatever people think.

00:46:32   And I think no matter what you think of Epic, because I don't know anything about Epic, I don't care, but when I see what Apple's doing here, if you look at it kind of a big picture scenario here, Apple's in a really questionable place with antitrust and control and monopoly and anti-competitive behavior.

00:46:54   I think it's well supported by lots of evidence around the world, the EU, the US congressional committee, their position is worthy of arguing, is worthy of consideration whether regulation needs to be applied.

00:47:08   It is not a given that they are 100% in the right with the status quo. So Epic has filed a lawsuit to challenge this.

00:47:18   Whatever you think of Epic and how they're doing this, the idea of filing a lawsuit to challenge Apple's policies and control in this area, I think is a valid argument to have.

00:47:30   I think that deserves to be heard and to be argued.

00:47:34   What Apple is doing in response to this is such a bullying move that what they're effectively doing is shutting down the potential to have this be argued in court.

00:47:47   They are throwing such a bullying move here that what they're basically saying is we're not even going to allow this to get anywhere near arguing in a court or in front of a judge or anybody.

00:48:00   We're going to destroy your entire business first so that nobody can challenge us.

00:48:05   Well, they're not destroying their business, but they are doing the strongest move they have available in the attempt to scare them into presumably not pursuing a lawsuit.

00:48:12   There's nothing Apple can actually do to stop them from filing. You can sue anybody for anything.

00:48:17   But this is an intimidation tactic. Here's our threat. Here's our big hammer. We are going to do this thing. Here are the consequences of this thing.

00:48:24   And the consequences are far reaching and damaging to your business.

00:48:27   Again, it's not going to destroy Epic. Epic has, you know, this is not the...

00:48:31   I don't think Apple's platforms are their primary source of money, although it might be almost 50% of their money getting close to it.

00:48:37   Anyway, but Epic, if they're stubborn, can plow ahead with their lawsuit.

00:48:43   And by the way, I listed Tencent as their parent company. They're just an investor. They don't have a majority share.

00:48:48   But Tencent is very big is what I was getting at.

00:48:50   So this is... it's an intimidation move. It's a bullying move. It's a counter move in the current thing just to see if they blink.

00:48:56   And Apple is trying, as we said before, is trying to give them an out.

00:49:01   It was also at the end of that other little thing. It says, "We hope you're able to cure your breaches of the Apple program license agreement and continue to participate in the program."

00:49:09   What Apple wants is for them to get back in line. And it's saying, "Here's the carrot. You get back in line, you can continue having Fortnite.

00:49:16   We'll go back to making sure Unreal Engine works real well. You keep your developer account and we just go back to the way things are."

00:49:22   Right? And, you know, so yeah, I think it's not going to immediately destroy Epic's business.

00:49:27   It's not that big of a hammer, but it's trying to scare them off.

00:49:32   Now, let's say they do this. They say, "Okay, okay, Apple, fine. Here you go. We changed Fortnite back. We didn't even have to release a new version because it's all done server side.

00:49:39   We changed it back to the way it was and now it's just backed in that purchase and you get your 30 percent."

00:49:44   The lawsuit still exists. The letters that Apple has sent, as far as I'm aware, do not say, "Hey, Epic," and also, by the way, you have to drop your lawsuits. Right?

00:49:53   So, I don't know if you want to put that into Apple's credit column or whatever, and I don't know if there's been a back channel, but Apple is not making dropping the lawsuits an explicit condition of this.

00:50:04   It's clear that they want them to go away and it's clear they're trying to intimidate Epic as much as they possibly can, but it doesn't, like, Epic could release the new version and say, "Okay, we're in compliance now. See you in court."

00:50:18   Well, but, you know, Epic, I think the reason why they didn't just file a lawsuit, you know, without changing their app, they didn't just file a lawsuit saying, "You should change your policies and then keep their app compliant."

00:50:32   Instead, they intentionally provoked the rule so that their app would be kicked out of the store, so that they could be damaged, so they could have standing to sue.

00:50:42   I'm not a lawyer, so forgive, you know, I'm going to try to not get too far into the legal side of this because I don't know it, but I think their case is probably easier to make if they are more damaged.

00:50:54   Like, if they can show that Apple had so much power that they got, you know, that they lost X millions of dollars a day or, you know, whatever with this one thing, that actually might help their case or it might help illustrate that Apple has too much power.

00:51:09   Now, when I look at this move by Apple, this developer account threat, my first thought was, "Oh no, Apple lost their cool."

00:51:17   If you're fighting with somebody and they lose their cool, usually it's good for you because if they lose their cool, they will start making moves that are maybe hastily thought out, that are maybe, you know, going to hurt them or can be used against them later.

00:51:38   And so in this case, it looks like Apple lost their cool with this and made a threat that was really big and really over the top, I think.

00:51:49   And I don't think it was a good idea for Apple to have made this threat because not only does it make them look even more like jerks, and honestly, I think it kind of makes them look desperate,

00:52:00   but it also shows to the world, to all the world's governments, to all the world's consumer protection agencies, to all the world's congresses and legislators and to the courts, quite how much power Apple has.

00:52:16   And it's too much. And that's the whole thing right now with the legislation possibly or regulation around them.

00:52:23   They do have too much power. They should be regulated. They should have an injunction granted against this action while this lawsuit's pending.

00:52:31   They have too much power and they are abusing it for anti-competitive purposes.

00:52:38   And so for them to have made this extra move, you know, taking it off the App Store, as you said earlier, that's all they had to do.

00:52:45   And then, you know, let the lawsuit proceed and let that work out over time.

00:52:49   To also then threaten this, I think makes the case better for everyone who's fighting against them to say, "No, look, they need to be regulated. They are acting as an abusive monopoly now.

00:53:02   They are trying to actively shut down not only competition but legal challenges against them in ways that they probably shouldn't be able to."

00:53:10   So I think this actually hurts Apple's case and makes it even more likely that they will be more heavily regulated down the road.

00:53:19   That's why I think this is a bad move and I think they will come to regret this.

00:53:24   Yeah, it was clear from day one that Epic doing this stuff like, you know, they knew they were going to get kicked out.

00:53:29   They weren't surprised about what happened. And getting kicked out was part of their plan because, like you said, it's not like, legally speaking, you need to do that because you can say,

00:53:37   "Here's how we would experience harm," but you have a stronger case, you can say, "Here's how we did experience harm."

00:53:42   It's not a hypothetical anymore. It's a literal thing because if you argue in court, if we did this, then Apple would do that and Apple could say, "How do you know we would do that?

00:53:48   We do weird things all the time. You have no idea what we would do." It's like, well, here's what you actually did.

00:53:52   The downside for Epic, especially with what I, you know, if we're right about this thing still being in the store where the 20% option is, is now Apple can show damages too.

00:54:00   Because they can say, "For the last year that this has been, you know, in court, Epic has been on the store not paying us our 30%, which they should be as part of the agreement.

00:54:10   So we've continued to allow users to download their app, and here's how much money we lost in V-Bucks."

00:54:15   So Apple can cite damages as well. Again, not just a hypothetical where Apple could say, "Well, if we let people do that, they wouldn't give us our 30%."

00:54:22   And they could say, "Actually, they didn't let us give our 30%, and we were nice and didn't kick it off the store because we didn't want to anger our users, but here's how many millions of dollars we lost."

00:54:29   So it's a double-edged sword there. But for sure, having all of these bad things happen in all cases, like they did with Google too.

00:54:37   They went on Google, they got kicked out of the store, they sued Google, they're going to cite the fact they were kicked out of the store.

00:54:41   Like, it's a clear strategy, it's just a little bit tricky. Something people have discussed on and off about this.

00:54:49   Epic is complaining about all the stuff with the App Store, they take too big a cut, they have too much control, yada yada.

00:54:55   Lots of people say, "Well, Epic and Unreal and all that stuff, they participate in the game console world as well."

00:55:00   And the game console world is essentially exactly like the App Store. You can't release something for the Xbox or the PlayStation without going through Sony.

00:55:08   Sony decides what goes into the platform, Sony's rules about qualifying your game for the PlayStation are way more draconian than Apple's.

00:55:15   There's a reason the App Store has hundreds of thousands or millions of apps and the PlayStation does not have millions of games.

00:55:25   Sony tightly controls their store. Back in the day it wasn't an App Store, it was literal plastic discs.

00:55:32   But these days, there's a digital version of all these games and you can also buy plastic discs and that's a whole other discussion for another time.

00:55:38   Game consoles are very much like this and the game console vendors, the platforms take a big cut.

00:55:45   According to Apple's research and that paper they put out, the cut is actually similar to the App Store, 30% ish depending on all sorts of deals or whatever.

00:55:52   So why isn't Epic suing Microsoft? Why aren't they suing Sony? Why aren't you suing them?

00:55:59   They're doing exactly the same thing to you. They take the same big chunk out of your thing.

00:56:03   They don't let you do all the stuff you want to do. They don't let Epic have its own game store inside PlayStation.

00:56:08   Every single thing they're saying about Apple is the same situation. Why aren't you suing them?

00:56:13   And I think before we get to antitrust, which Marco has already weighed in on and I've mostly not been weighing in on yet because I think there's so much talk about before even considering antitrust.

00:56:24   Getting back to my argument from last week, the reason that Epic is not suing Sony and Microsoft, it's the same root problem that Apple has.

00:56:36   The platform owners, Apple, Sony, Microsoft, their job is to try to create that win-win-win situation where developers, users, and the platform owner all succeed together.

00:56:49   And you may look at it and say, "Well, why is Epic mad at Apple and not mad at Sony?"

00:56:55   That's the job of the platform owner, to make sure that people aren't so mad that they sue them.

00:57:02   And so the simple explanation is that despite Epic having butted heads with console makers at various times, in fact having very similar sort of head-butting arguments about internal purchases and selling inside and outside the store.

00:57:16   These things have played out in the console world, in fact, sometimes specifically with Epic many times.

00:57:22   The game console platforms have better managed their relationship, this little triangle relationship between users, developers, and the platform.

00:57:29   They've managed it better enough, better enough, not like their developers aren't mad at them sometimes, not like users aren't mad at them sometimes, but they've managed it better enough that they're not in the situation.

00:57:39   It's not that the rules are different, it's that the platform owners have, better than Apple, been able to say, "It's our job to make sure that people don't get so pissed that they sue us."

00:57:51   And that sort of relationship, if you wanted to pin it down to what have they done that's better.

00:57:56   Game console makers understand gaming and the gaming market better than Apple does in many ways.

00:58:02   One of those ways is that they understand it's an entertainment industry, and it works more like making movies and TV shows, where those platforms actively cultivate talent and participate in this win-win scenario where they will help pay for the development of a flagship game for a timed exclusivity.

00:58:22   They will recruit talent, they will invest in studios that make games, they will help you market your game, they will sell branded versions of your console that are Gears of War branded.

00:58:33   All this relationship between Sony and developers is why developers hate Sony less than Apple, or why Epic does anyway.

00:58:39   Because Sony is there saying, "Here's a bucket of cash we're going to dump over your head."

00:58:44   Or Microsoft says, "Develop Gears of War. Here's millions of dollars to develop it. Keep it on our platform only. We'll make a special Xbox that's Gears of War branded, and we'll sell it in the store with Gears of War."

00:58:56   And Epic is like, "Yes! We like you! This is good!" And Apple's like, "Put your app on a store that gives 30% and $99 a year."

00:59:04   It's not that type of relationship. Consoles have first-party games, consoles have timed platform exclusives mostly. I'm not saying that Apple has to do that. I'm not saying just about games or whatever.

00:59:17   All I'm saying is that the game console makers have better managed their relationships, and that's what Apple is doing wrong. They're not making sure everybody is happy.

00:59:27   Many things spin out of that. Once the war starts, once the shooting starts, it just gets worse and worse. Like Marco said, losing your cool is not good. I wish I could remember this specific example.

00:59:36   There's actually a specific example of Epic intentionally going against the rules and butting heads with one of these console makers, and they settled it more quietly and more amicably than Apple has done so far.

00:59:49   This isn't over yet, but you're always going to have flare-ups, and the big players like Epic who are cranky are always going to butt heads with you. You've got to manage that at the end of my "Art of the Possible" thing.

01:00:01   Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy? Do you want to just be like, "We're just sticking to our principles," and then get sued and have this giant disaster?

01:00:09   Are you going to say, "Even though I think I'm right, let's get back to the part where we all win. Let's get back to the part where we at least find an acceptable compromise, because we get an advantage from you being on our platform, and you get an advantage from being on our platform, and our customers want your game, so let's facilitate. You've got to get back to that win."

01:00:26   It's not as if what Apple is doing is a separate argument. Is it more important or worse for Apple to be doing it versus game consoles or whatever? And again, I'll say that for later, but just bottom line, the game console makers have historically done a better job of managing their relationships, and I feel like Apple needs to go to a corporate relationship counselor.

01:00:49   Epic is on the couch. How do you feel when Apple tells you they're going to terminate your house? Epic's like, "I feel bad. I feel like Apple doesn't appreciate me." Apple, tell Epic how you appreciate it. I don't know. This could be a whole skit. I can't do it on the fly.

01:01:05   Yeah, and this is the kind of thing that Apple is historically not good at. Apple dealing with other companies in general, it's not very good at, especially when the negotiations are actually negotiations and compromises on both sides, as opposed to Apple just being able to dictate things.

01:01:24   Exactly. That's the way Apple likes it. They're real happy with those relationships.

01:01:36   And by the way, that scenario happens all the time in the App Store. When it's Apple versus an individual developer, Apple tends to find a way to definitely handle those conflicts because they have all the power, and so they're not usually super jerky about it, at least not intentionally. Sometimes, again, Charlie Monroe, accidentally jerky, but in general, in these scenarios where it's single, lone developer versus giant Apple, Apple finds a way to get past them.

01:02:00   We've talked about a million of those App Store things over the years, like, "Oh, some developer had a thing with Apple," but because Apple has literally 100% of the power in every possible way, they get resolved and we move on because Apple essentially just runs you over.

01:02:14   You comply or you go away, but either way, it's solved. But when it's not one dinky little developer and instead another billion-dollar corporation, Apple doesn't know how to use its words and talk about its feelings and we head up here.

01:02:28   Oh, my word. I don't know. It's tough because on the surface, I can see why Apple is acting the way it is. I completely disagree with their course of action, but I can understand it at a surface level.

01:02:44   So Epic did something that is expressly forbidden. Not only did they do this runaround where they downloaded this update directly into the app, which I know for games that's sort of kind of allowed, but it seems like the way they did it probably wasn't allowed.

01:03:00   But beyond that, they had this third-party payment system that is expressly not allowed, and it seems like there should be a consequence for that. I mean, that seems pretty straightforward. And then they escalated by suing Apple.

01:03:14   Well, you know what? F*ck you right back. Now you're not allowed in the store anymore. Again, on the surface, I can understand how this seems like a reasonable series of actions.

01:03:26   And I just feel like nobody at Apple has taken a step back and said, you know, as we said last time, "Are we the baddies?" Nobody has said, "Is this really appropriate?" Because we are not the scrappy upstarts anymore.

01:03:42   And I'm not the first person to say that in the last couple of weeks, and I won't be the last. But so much of Apple appears from the outside to be thinking of themselves as the beleaguered upstart, and they're not. They are IBM now.

01:03:55   And if you want to enjoy the spoils of being IBM, then you need to act like a grown-up. And Apple is not acting like a grown-up right now. And it's just crummy.

01:04:06   And the other thing about it is, and this is what I was alluding to earlier, like so much of this is intertwined with so many ongoing kerfuffles that Apple is involved with, if not directly started.

01:04:19   And why did Epic decide to do this end-around and try to take money directly? Did they do that because they want a direct relationship with the customer? Well, maybe. But I don't think that's it.

01:04:32   Did they do that because they wanted to make it easier on the customer? Well, certainly not, because in-app purchase is unequivocally easier on the consumer. It may not be easier on the developer, but it's easier on the consumer.

01:04:44   It's not easy on the consumer's pocketbook. Well, fair, fair. That's a good point. But it's easier. Epic was saying that more than half of the customers picked the cheaper option. And I'm like, really? It was only slightly more than half? I thought 100% of the customers.

01:04:56   Maybe they were suspicious because they're like, wait a second, this must be some kind of scam. But yeah, customers want it to be cheaper.

01:05:03   Yeah, absolutely. And so why did Epic do it? Well, I mean, obviously they wanted money. They wanted more money. But I think that in a large to a large degree, Epic, as many other people have said, this 30% is just too darn much. The rent is too dang high.

01:05:20   And I don't think that's an unreasonable perspective. And then like the App Store, like this is another different topic. Like is the App Store and App Review reasonable today?

01:05:35   Well, actually, before you get to that, the 30%, 30% being too darn high. Again, consoles also charge 30%. You have to add a slightly qualifier. It's too high for what Epic feels like it's getting for its money.

01:05:47   That's, you know, that's the difference. Why aren't they mad at Microsoft? They're paying Microsoft 30%. Why? How are they happy with that? Because I guess they feel like they're getting value for their money.

01:05:58   Again, maybe they're going to do a branded console. Maybe they're going to help them with marketing. Maybe they're going to advertise their game in their marketing materials. Maybe they have a close relationship about exclusive future games. Like that's corporate relationship management.

01:06:09   Right? That's what the console makers are doing better than Apple. So when we say 30% is too high and someone says, "Uh-uh, Microsoft charges 30% how is that different?" Microsoft is managing the relationship better.

01:06:18   It's more than just that 30% number. Clearly, Epic thinks for this 30%, A, we're not getting enough value and B, there's extra pains in our ass.

01:06:27   Dealing with Apple is worse than dealing with Microsoft. Even though it is harder to get something onto the consoles than it is into the App Store, as far as Epic's concerned, at the level that it plays, it has less of a problem.

01:06:42   Not no problem, because again, I think that Epic is super mad at the console makers too. But so far, not as mad as they are at Apple.

01:06:48   And so, yeah, if you are a platform and you're dealing with an Epic and Epic is important to you and Fortnite is a popular game, manage that relationship better.

01:06:57   So 30% is too high for the value that you think you're getting. That's the qualifier on everything in any sort of relationship. Are we all okay enough with the terms not to literally go to war?

01:07:09   And so far the answer with Apple is, "No, we're not okay." And the other console makers are like, "For now, we're okay enough."

01:07:16   Yeah. And the other thing that got me thinking as I was talking to a friend of mine, and mostly about the idea of like side loading.

01:07:26   So, you know, should it be possible for an iPhone to install an app that somebody downloads over the internet?

01:07:34   So yes, you can side load now with like a developer certificate. And if you sort of kind of know what you're doing, you can even side load using, what is it, Alt Store or something like that.

01:07:43   That again is fiddly and complicated, but you can do it. But should side loading be allowed?

01:07:50   And at first my initial reaction was, "Hell yeah!" Because this is no longer just a phone. This is your primary computing device.

01:08:00   Even for some people like myself, like I spend more time in front of a computer than most people, like a traditional computer.

01:08:08   But nevertheless, in so many ways, I would say my iPhone is my primary computer. And this is getting into the whole like, is the iPhone a console?

01:08:18   Which has floated around many of our friends' podcasts, but particularly on dithering recently.

01:08:23   And whether or not you consider the iPhone a console, I do think that the iPhone is for many people their primary computing device.

01:08:31   And if it's their primary computing device, shouldn't they be able to put whatever software they want on it?

01:08:36   And that's a very slippery slope. And at first I would say yes, and then I thought about it and I was like, "Well, I don't think so actually."

01:08:45   So then that brings up this topic of curation, which is what my friend brought up. Like the App Store is curated.

01:08:51   Now you can take "curated" to mean only the best. You can take "curated" to mean not actively hostile.

01:08:57   You can take "curated" to mean, well, it may be garbage, but at least it doesn't steal your data and crash.

01:09:03   Maybe it's not actively hostile and that it doesn't steal your data, but it also doesn't crash.

01:09:07   There's so many ways to take "curated." And I think that that's okay.

01:09:13   And I think that most Apple customers want a more curated experience, however you define curated.

01:09:19   But we are how many years into the iPhone? 13 or something like that? It was 2007, wasn't it?

01:09:24   Yep.

01:09:25   Okay, so we're 13 years into the iPhone. At this juncture, I feel like it is reasonable to let consumers make more choices for themselves.

01:09:38   I don't know that we really need Big Brother Apple to be running interference for us quite as much as they have been.

01:09:46   Now I wouldn't necessarily take that all the way to allowing sideloading, but for example, the, what was it?

01:09:53   The Xbox thing from last week? I already forgot the name of it. Xbox Live or something like that.

01:09:57   Xcloud.

01:09:58   Thank you, Xcloud. Yep, yep, yep. Xcloud and Stadia.

01:10:01   That's not the actual name, that was the code name. I still don't know the real name.

01:10:03   Fair enough. Well, whatever. You know, these streaming gaming services, or even like an emulator.

01:10:08   Like take a Nintendo emulator. One of the things that Apple said is, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on.

01:10:13   We can't verify that all these games are not trash. So no, you can't have that in the App Store. Uh-uh."

01:10:19   Why? Like, let the consumer decide. Well, because they couldn't verify that all these games are going to use an app purchase.

01:10:26   That's the real answer. Well, that's, yeah, you're right. You're probably right.

01:10:29   We can't review all these games to comply with this extremely anti-competitive problematic rule that we have.

01:10:33   Right, no, you're right. And so at this point, 13 years on, I mean, the iPhone is almost old enough to get a learner's permit in most American states.

01:10:42   Thirteen years on, I think that customers understand what the iPhone is about, and the iPad too. I'm picking on the iPhone.

01:10:50   But, you know, what iOS is about. And I feel like we should be allowed a little more choice.

01:10:55   And I don't think that we're the scared little children in the corner wondering how to use this new computing platform.

01:11:03   Again, I don't think sideloading is the answer, but I feel like there should be a relaxation of what is allowed on the App Store.

01:11:10   And that doesn't necessarily explicitly relate to Epic, but I think that that's one of these boiling points that I'm seeing lately,

01:11:17   is that people are saying, "We want more choice," and Apple's saying, "Mm, no." And that's crummy, and I don't like it.

01:11:25   Yeah, because I think the role of keeping users safe.

01:11:31   Which is very important.

01:11:32   Yes, I like that a lot. And I actually don't want sideloading or alternative App Stores.

01:11:42   That's not what I would hope for as an outcome here. I'm totally fine having the App Store continue to be the only way to get apps.

01:11:51   And as a slightly further step from that, I would be okay with sideloading long before I'd be okay with alternative App Stores.

01:12:00   Because the OS has technical limitations. I took this on Under the Radar this week.

01:12:05   The OS has technical limitations where an app currently cannot install another app.

01:12:11   And if that were still allowed, if apps could be installed through enterprise distribution, basically, through that kind of managed sideloading procedure,

01:12:23   but they couldn't themselves then install other apps, so you could have apps that were distributed on websites,

01:12:30   but you couldn't have good alternative App Stores unless they would just be giant web views or something.

01:12:34   But I'd be fine with that too. But ultimately, I actually don't really think either sideloading or alternative App Stores are incredibly necessary or compelling on iOS.

01:12:46   However, the App Store, I think, overstates its value. Apple overstates the App Store's value in terms of curation and user safety.

01:12:59   There's lots of apps in the App Store, I would say the majority of apps in the App Store, that are total garbage.

01:13:06   There's lots of apps in the App Store that steal your personal information in ways that you don't necessarily think or expect or are fully disclosed on.

01:13:13   Many of them by Facebook. There's lots of apps in the App Store that do crash or that don't work as expected or that don't work as advertised

01:13:22   or that don't provide all the functionality because App Review is neither perfect nor thorough nor consistent.

01:13:29   The App Store is not actually providing a huge degree of safety, consumer protection, stuff like that.

01:13:37   Most of the safety and consumer protection come from the operating system. They come from the technological limitations that it isn't that apps aren't reading each other's files and installing persistent demons behind the scenes that you can't uninstall.

01:13:54   They aren't avoiding that because App Store policy wouldn't let them. They don't do that because they can't on iOS.

01:14:01   The OS blocks that kind of behavior. It is literally impossible to do those kind of things on iOS unless you've found some kind of security exploit.

01:14:09   I know the point you're getting at. It's mostly true, but the thing is, practically speaking, if you were able to very easily get people to download applications that Apple never looked at,

01:14:19   the way it would be damaging is because those are the applications that would use private APIs to find the exploit to do the thing.

01:14:28   It's not to say that you can't get something with an exploit through the App Store because if you find a really good exploit, you might not have to use private APIs or do anything that they can detect.

01:14:37   But once you have that side channel, it's way easier once you find an exploit to say, "Now we're home free."

01:14:44   The OS is supposed to stop all of those things, but if you find an exploit and I feel like unfettered access to private APIs and to be able to poke around like that,

01:14:52   that's how you find a hole in the sandbox more easily. In fact, many of the jailbreaks require some kind of in like that where you can get arbitrary code execution so you can get to a private API.

01:15:01   So all I'm saying is it makes it more challenging for the technical limitations you just described to hold.

01:15:07   Because obviously they're not foolproof. And App Review is, even App Review is not foolproof, but App Review is one more stage where Apple can say,

01:15:14   "Okay, are they trying to bypass our technical limitations? Let's use our tools to detect it." Without that extra step, you're just relying on technical barriers and they're never perfect.

01:15:23   Exploits are found all the time. So it is not a completely black and white situation, but certainly most of the benefit that we enjoy is from the technical barriers, not from the "curation."

01:15:39   Sure, but many of those same tools are running through the notarization service. So when you submit your binary for notarization, it's scanning it for a lot of those same kinds of things.

01:15:49   But if you had a side channel, you wouldn't have to notarize it either. The whole point of a side channel is I can somehow distribute this app to users and Apple never sees any part of it.

01:15:58   I won't notarize it. Maybe I'll use developer ID.

01:16:01   No, I don't think that's necessarily a given. They could have it work the same way that enterprise distribution works. Well, I don't know, enterprise distribution, I guess, are those binaries ever going through Apple servers?

01:16:11   Well, anyway, it could be like on the Mac, where on the Mac, now with modern OSes, you really have to jump through hoops to run something that's not developer ID signed and I think soon or already notarized.

01:16:23   So they could do the same thing on iOS where they would have to be notarized binaries and everything. So some of that attack area could be reduced. There are ways to get around that.

01:16:31   You can construct the selector from strings. There's all sorts of ways that you could get around their static analysis tools.

01:16:37   And the thing is, companies like Epic, I think the reason Epic wants to relax the rules is if you would just relax the rules a little bit, Epic would find a way to essentially bootstrap their entire store. All they need is a tiny little corner. It's like, "Hey, go to our website and click this link," and it will use some weird exploit to get their foot in the door to bootstrap the process, which will pull down.

01:16:57   It doesn't take much. This is the thing with security flaws. Once you can get that little thin end of the wedge in, and you see it from the easy jailbreak stores and the ways they try to make enterprise certs less annoying, if you can get that in there.

01:17:11   It's worthwhile for a company the size of Epic to play that whack-a-mole game with Apple. We'll use this weird exploit to get the thin edge of the wedge in to be able to bootstrap our store install process, and then once we get that, we're off to the races.

01:17:27   It's worthwhile to them, monetarily speaking, to go through heroic measures to make it as less annoying as they possibly can than all the things that Apple throws up.

01:17:43   I don't think Apple wants to engage in that war. It's more cut and dry when it's like, "There's the App Store and nothing." That's why every time we talk about sideloading, it becomes like, "Eh, eh."

01:17:57   From both perspectives, it seems like it can't be as good from a user's perspective, and then from Apple's perspective, if they open that door even a little bit, it's a new war you're waging on a new front.

01:18:11   Now all of a sudden, we allowed this, but now we have to find everybody who can find the little path that we've allowed and use that to bootstrap their entire universe that is filled with Bitcoin mining or God knows what.

01:18:24   This is why I'm not pushing for sideloading or alternative app stores. I don't think the world would end if we had that, but that's not my ideal outcome. My ideal outcome is the App Store policies get slightly relaxed in the most problematic areas.

01:18:40   I really would not want Apple to totally lose control of distribution and software quality on iOS. They've already lost a lot of it just by size. The value of the App Store from any kind of store perspective, like you were mentioning earlier about game consoles and you have things like cooperative marketing efforts between the platform vendor and the apps and the games and everything.

01:19:03   And here, the App Store does not do much for any apps marketing anymore. There are way too many apps. Not a lot of people are just casually browsing the App Store as a thing that you do every day.

01:19:15   Like when the phone was new, you would just kind of casually browse the App Store because you had no apps. It was like a fun thing to just browse around. "Hey, let's install whatever's here. This looks nice. I'm going on a plane. Let me go to the games page and see what games are new and install some games."

01:19:29   These days, it's a much more mature system with a billion apps in the store. The marketing value is nearly nothing. Even the apps that get featured, they have less traffic going to them than they used to because people aren't doing that in the same way that they used to anymore.

01:19:47   And the App Store design doesn't help either. It's very low information density. You have very few apps per page, etc. So all these things combine to be like this is providing very little marketing benefit.

01:19:57   The hosting benefit is something that exists, but it's something that you could host yourself for pennies or dollars per month. It's not significant that they're offering that.

01:20:09   What the App Store mainly is offering here is that app review process and the payment integration for the upfront purchasing and everything and the ease of the payment integration. That's what they're offering.

01:20:21   So anybody who says 30% is not worth it for that, I agree with. It's not worth it. For Apple to be in a position where they can dictate, "We are going to take 30% of all your money that goes through this platform," was a totally reasonable-ish--

01:20:46   I mean, it was never incredibly great--but a reasonable-ish position to take when they were small. And the argument I made last week is, like what Keesh was saying earlier, this is now a major computing platform.

01:20:57   This is a huge part of lots of people's lives in really critical ways. Imagine a couple of scenarios here to help make this point a little bit better.

01:21:09   A. Imagine if Windows PCs and Macs were this way from the start. Imagine if all PC and Mac software for the entire history of those platforms, Microsoft and Apple respectively, were controlling everything that could possibly ever get written on them and forcing everyone to put 30% of all commerce through them.

01:21:32   Imagine if Google Chrome and Apple Safari and every browser--imagine if web browsers required that all web commerce had to pay them that happened through their browser or they would make their sites un-browsable in their browser.

01:21:50   Imagine, now you might say, "Oh, well, you know, Apple built this whole system on mobile." Okay, that's interesting. Apple's not the only company that has contributed massive critical infrastructure on mobile.

01:22:04   I would argue that if Apple deserves 30% of all transactions that happen on phones, so does your carrier. What if AT&T all of a sudden decided, "You know what? We're going to demand 30% of all transactions that happen through our network." Or you have to remove your phone from our network.

01:22:21   ISPs, broadband, cellular, component makers, network providers. Like, what if Cisco decides, "You know what? All this traffic that's routing through our switches, we built this infrastructure, we deserve 30% of all money that goes through it."

01:22:35   It's a ludicrous argument, and you can start to see how if any company really did this for a large portion of the economy, it would crush that economy and it would severely restrict it. It would cause lots of problems, and everybody would probably be better off.

01:22:53   The entire economy would probably be better off if those gatekeepers did not do that after things get to a certain scale. And you look at game consoles, and game consoles are fundamentally different. They just are.

01:23:08   They're not general purpose computers. They serve a significant part of an economy, but not like a broad part. They serve a narrow part in certain specialized ways, and that's it. General purpose computers, PCs, Macs, and yes, mobile phones, are a much more broad tool.

01:23:27   Much more essential to everyday life. In the same way that certain services like your water and electric supply are regulated as essential services. That's how these computing devices are. They are essential.

01:23:40   And it makes no more sense that Apple deserves 30% of everything that goes through their platform and can dictate everybody that goes on and off of it, than if AT&T, or Comcast, or Cisco, or so many of those other things, if they would do the same thing.

01:23:56   No one here deserves to lock up an entire market in a way that has this much impact on the economy, and has massive anti-competitive forces at play as well. We're beyond that level of companies can do whatever they want because it's their company.

01:24:11   Again, once things get to a certain size, they go beyond that. It is the monopolists' style, and role, and duty to always say, "We built this. We put all this money into it. We deserve to retain our control."

01:24:24   They always say that. Standard Oil, I'm sure, said that. The railroads back in the day, I'm sure they said that too. That is their job to play that card, and to try to drum up public opinion, and the court's opinion to say, "We built this, and we deserve to run it however we want."

01:24:41   But that's not how society works. Capitalism, in its purest sense, doesn't work. You need exceptions and regulations that are part of the system to keep it healthy, and to keep the economy from being locked up, and having these giant monopolies form and crush everything under them.

01:24:57   And this is that size now. This is that kind of thing. And in the same way that AT&T shouldn't be able to say, "We are now going to just take 30% of all your money that goes through our network," Apple is now too big for that.

01:25:12   And their platform needs to be regulated to preserve this entire section of our economy, of our society, of everyday consumer and business usage of their platforms. They need regulation. They are too big to have the control that they have, and the way they exercise their power.

01:25:33   They are just too big and too important for that now, and the needs of society are now above that.

01:25:39   I've still been studiously avoiding the antitrust stuff, and I don't want to delve into it at this late stage in this episode, but I will leave it in the topic list because I'll give my take on antitrust stuff maybe next episode.

01:25:49   But I do want to save myself from another flurry of emails, assuming there's no bugs outside my window. First, the name of the XCloud thing, Project XCloud was their streaming gaming thing.

01:25:59   It's just going to be part of Xbox Game Pass, which is their subscription gaming service. It'll be part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

01:26:06   Second item, I mentioned Microsoft and Gears of War branded Xbox and all that other stuff.

01:26:13   Microsoft actually bought Gears of War a couple years back, bought the entire franchise. That, I imagine, is another example of corporate relationship management.

01:26:24   It's not like Microsoft stole it from Epic. They bought it with lots and lots of money. We'll make a game that'll be exclusive for your platform, and then, "Oh, well, actually, we'd like to make a new franchise," and Microsoft's like, "Well, we kind of like Unreal. Let's come to agreement. Here's a giant bucket of money. Can we have Gears of War? Here you go. Here's Gears of War."

01:26:45   That's better corporate relationship management and talent retention than Apple is doing. Somebody in the chat room earlier said that, "I can't believe he's listening to Apple fans arguing against the walled garden. Why don't you just use Android if that's your argument?"

01:27:00   I don't think any of us are arguing against the walled garden. We're just saying we'd like the garden to be better tended, right? Or we'd like the rules of the garden to be different. In fact, we just got done talking about sideloading.

01:27:11   We're not arguing against the walled garden. It's not a walled garden anymore. It's more of a walled prison. It's not fun to be in here. We're not frolicking through the flowers and sitting on a bench and appreciating nature. Some people are angry.

01:27:23   It doesn't mean the concept of a walled garden or a curated space is bad. Again, game consoles. Game consoles are the most walled garden. They have extremely closed walls, very tight control. I like game consoles for those reasons because the platform owners who succeed learn how to cultivate with both money and encouragement and marketing and every tool they can possibly imagine talent that makes creative things.

01:27:49   We talked about this with Apple Arcade. Apple kind of got a tiny bit of a clue of like, "Hmm, maybe we should give people money to make good games for our platform." But the scale they're doing with Apple Arcade is nothing compared to the scale the console makers do it.

01:28:05   Console makers, how much money does Sony pay to Naughty Dog to put The Last of Us exclusively on that platform? That bucket of money could pay for all of Apple Arcade 75 times over. Now, Apple might say they're being savvy in saying, "We're not putting all our money into these big buckets."

01:28:19   But there's a reason when everyone says AAA games, most people don't think of phones or iPads. Even though there are some really great games for phones and iPads, I still think Apple doesn't quite understand.

01:28:30   But anyway, getting back to walled gardens, I personally love walled gardens that are beautiful gardens. They have walls, but the beauty of the garden is worth it enough for me to pay the admission, to get the console, to sit down and play the set of games that Sony has decided are allowed to be on their platform.

01:28:46   And given the amount of time I have, I appreciate the fact that of all the games on the platform, I could actually scroll through the list of all of them, and there's a small enough number, and the best ones are really, really good. That's why I keep buying Sony consoles.

01:29:00   So, like I said, I don't want to get into my personal take on the antitrust stuff now, because we have so much Ask ATP that I think I want to get to, but I wanted to address those small items just so we get slightly less feedback.

01:29:10   And by the way, if you already tweeted at me before you got to this point in the show, that happens. What can you do?

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01:31:13   [Music]

01:31:29   I'm going to put this together. This is a search engine for Ask ATP questions and answers. This was born from me saying, "Why is it that we're asked how to move things between computers 85 times a year?"

01:31:43   And so Brendan took it upon himself to put this together and it is stupendous. So thank you Brendan for doing that. That is extremely cool and I'm sure took forever.

01:31:52   Moving on. Nathaniel Cohen writes, "I have a three external monitor and laptop screen setup. Two of those monitors are identical with the same make and model. The OS therefore seems unable to reliably identify them.

01:32:06   Their identities frequently become swapped and I usually have a once per day fun time with the Mac OS monitor arrangement/resolution configurator.

01:32:15   This functionality for configuring monitors as exposed by the OS is horrendous. The arrangement tab does not identify any of the monitors even when you click and drag to adjust their position. You have no idea which monitor you are affecting.

01:32:25   Similarly, the UI for display configuration is needlessly spread out across N windows if you have N monitors and it's impossible to tell if two monitors have the same make and model, which window corresponds to which monitor."

01:32:37   I guess there was a question here.

01:32:39   My question is more of a comment.

01:32:43   I put this in there. The question is probably like, "Don't you think this is bad?"

01:32:47   Thoughts?

01:32:49   First of all, it's been so long since I used multiple monitors that I actually had to connect to my external monitor, my external monitor, the surrogate, which is my sidecar iPad to confirm this.

01:33:04   I don't mind too old to remember how it used to be, but I double checked and of course now I forgot again. Anyway, Mac OS has pretty much always had a way to do exactly one of the things he's asking for, which is, "What monitor is this?"

01:33:15   In the arrange panel where it shows you little squares or rectangles, each one represents your monitor.

01:33:20   If you have one big monitor and one small monitor, it's easy to tell which is which. The big one is the big monitor and the small one is the small monitor.

01:33:26   But what if you have monitors that are exactly the same size? How do you tell which is which?

01:33:31   If you just click and hold on the little rectangle, it will put a red border around the monitor that you are clicking and holding on.

01:33:37   You'll click and hold in the little preference pane on a little tiny representation of your monitor, but then that actual monitor will get a giant red outline around it in real life if you look at it.

01:33:46   Anyway, that feature does exist. It's not obvious that it's there, but you can identify the monitors in that way.

01:33:53   So then you can tell which one you're rearranging.

01:33:55   The other part of this, though, has a tie-in to one of my Switch Glass War stories, which I'm not going to have time to go into entirely here, but I will give the short version of it, which is when you have monitors connected to your computer...

01:34:08   Actually, before I get to that, the thing about the windows being spread out, this is the thing that Mac OS does and has always done, I think, for adjusting monitors.

01:34:16   If you try to adjust the settings on the monitor, you have system preferences open and you've got the monitor preference pane.

01:34:21   And when you pull up the monitor's preference pane, whatever your main window is that has system preferences on it will show the monitor's thing.

01:34:29   But then on every other monitor, you'll also see a little miniature monitor's preference pane that has the settings that apply to that monitor.

01:34:38   So if you want to change the resolution of a particular monitor, you bring your mouse cursor to that monitor where there is a window sitting there that says pick one of these resolutions, pick this color depth, whatever, pick this rotation thing.

01:34:49   And the window in that monitor applies to that monitor. That's a system that they use for a long time. It's a little bit easier than having to do like, okay, well, first I click the little representation of my monitor and then now I know my future changes apply to that monitor.

01:35:02   Like, it's better when they, I think, it's better when every single monitor has dead center on it, a window, and that window controls the monitor that it's on.

01:35:11   In fact, I like that feature so much that when I made Switch Glass, one of the features I wanted to have is that the little switchy palette thingy, you get one of those on each monitor.

01:35:20   And if you want to adjust the settings, I made one preference window, or I tried to do this, I muddled it a little bit. Anyway, I made a preference window.

01:35:27   And when you open preferences, you get one preference window on every single monitor.

01:35:31   And if you want to adjust the settings of the little palette on that monitor, you use the preference window that's on that monitor.

01:35:36   So I used the same approach, which most people maybe aren't familiar with or that seems weird, but to me it seems a fairly clean way to do it.

01:35:43   I muddled it because I put global settings at the bottom, but then I labeled them global settings. Anyway, it's whatever.

01:35:48   Anyway, this problem of like, okay, that's the app that I wanted to make in Switch Glass. Seems easy.

01:35:55   I'll walk through the list of monitors and I'll put a little, on first launch, I'll put a little palette on every single monitor.

01:36:02   And then when people make, you know, preferences, they'll change the settings. And then when they change the settings, I'll save them.

01:36:10   But I have to save the settings for each monitor. Like, all right, I made this palette like really big in the upper right.

01:36:16   So I got to say, okay, really big in the upper right applies to this monitor. Well, what is this monitor?

01:36:21   I need some way to identify monitors, just like Mac OS, you know, and poor Nathaniel.

01:36:28   I need some way to identify monitors. So I'm going to save, I'm going to save this state. I'm going to save somehow this monitor.

01:36:34   And I thought foolishly this would be an easy thing to do. There's probably some API you call that just gives you some kind of identifier for the monitor that's unique to that monitor and you just save it.

01:36:42   But, you know, nothing, nothing in software development is ever that easy, especially in this weird edge case areas that I'm wondering in Mac OS, right?

01:36:51   Turns out there is no really good way to do that. There's a bunch of ways to look super tempting. One of them is like a monitor ID or display ID that you get.

01:36:59   And the very first thing I did is that display ID. There you go. That's easy. And it's like some big number.

01:37:04   And if you save that number when you launch it again and you set and you look up the just go through all the displays, you'll find the same ID and it matches up like this is great.

01:37:14   I'm like, oh, but what if this number changes every time you reboot? So I rebooted my computer. Number stayed the same.

01:37:19   I'm like, well, problem solved. This is like day one. What a great developer I am. I've just solved this problem. No, that's a trap.

01:37:27   So I forget what it is. Like Apple doesn't promise that this thing does what it does, but it's called like ID or something. And practically speaking, it works.

01:37:35   So like I figured I was done. And then I started getting weird bug reports from people. And it turns out if you have a Mac laptop with a discrete and an integrated GPU, when it switches from the discrete to the integrated GPU, that number changes.

01:37:48   And the bug reports I was getting for this were mind bending because I was like, A, this never happens for me. And B, what in the world are you talking about?

01:37:58   Like, what do you mean? Like when I do it? Because again, they would do something unknowingly that triggered the use of the discrete GPU.

01:38:05   And if they did that and then they launched the app, like it would pull the settings from the discrete GPU number because the numbers were stable, but they were different numbers for discrete and integrated.

01:38:14   It took me so long to figure that out. Anyway, that doesn't work. So I need some other way to identify it.

01:38:21   There's a bunch of info you can get using weird-ass C APIs that tell you the vendor, the make, the model number, and the serial number.

01:38:29   Like, I'm home free because even if you have the exact same monitor, they're not going to have the same serial number, right?

01:38:34   All right, crack developers, what was the problem with this API?

01:38:37   Private?

01:38:38   No, I mean, this is Mac. I can do whatever the hell I want. No, not private.

01:38:41   I don't know.

01:38:44   Maybe you need -- in case you should know, this is your computer engineer. Hardware sucks.

01:38:49   You buy some random-ass monitor and you call these APIs, oh, this one doesn't return anything for serial number.

01:38:56   This one doesn't return anything for model number. This one doesn't return anything for vendor.

01:39:01   And the API is to say you can call this API and it will return a number representing the vendor or it will return FFFFFFF.

01:39:11   And monitors in the real world -- and I need all three. I can't just do make and model because, again, if you have two identical monitors, which a lot of people have, I still can't tell what monitor is.

01:39:22   They're both the same make and model. But they return nothing for anything.

01:39:26   And then the internal display sometimes returns weird stuff because the internal display is made by weird different manufacturers, right?

01:39:33   So that little API is out the window. Can't use that because hardware is like, gosh, I don't have a serial number. I don't know what you're talking about.

01:39:39   Finally, what I settled on was there's a color -- what is it? Color sync? Some color space -- there's some API that does some crap that I don't understand out of the covers that gives me a number that is my best effort.

01:39:52   It is like -- it's stable across GPU switches. Even on monitors that don't return a serial number, it returns a stable identifier.

01:40:00   I honestly have no idea where it's coming from and I think it's related to color sync thing, but the OS does have some way to identify the monitor.

01:40:07   I don't think that is even 100% reliable, but it's reliable enough that I no longer get these bug reports.

01:40:12   All this long story has to say that the act of identifying a monitor so that you know the next time the computer breaks up -- that's the same monitor I saw before -- is actually extremely difficult.

01:40:23   And it would not surprise me if the Herculean efforts that I went through to make sure this works in all weird scenarios is not what the monitor arrangement handling of Mac OS proper goes through.

01:40:38   Because I can imagine Mac OS proper might use, for example, the make, model, and serial number and just say, "Well, of course everything always returns a serial number," and then just not care about some cheap knockoff monitor that doesn't do that.

01:40:50   Or maybe the color sync thing or whatever it is that I'm using -- one of the failure modes is in Nathaniel's specific case with his specific monitors.

01:41:00   So I don't have a good answer for you, but I can tell you that this problem is not well solved in Mac OS, and it doesn't surprise me that you're having these problems.

01:41:10   And I would love -- I mean, I'll just file this on a radar at some point or a feedback or whatever -- I would love for Apple to provide APIs that perform this function because I think being able to identify the same monitor across boots is important.

01:41:24   I kind of feel frappled, though, because if you literally have an identical monitor and that monitor just lies or just doesn't tell you anything about itself, and there's another one right next to it that does the exact same thing, how do you tell which monitor?

01:41:37   Maybe someone under the covers -- again, the GPU identifier -- but on boot up when it senses these two monitors, maybe you could tell what port they're connected to? I don't even know.

01:41:47   Anyway, this is a hard problem. I'm sorry, Nathaniel, and it's one of my many miniature war stories about dealing with switch glass, and I feel for all of us.

01:41:57   Just have a single monitor. That's the solution. Get a really, really big $5,000 monitor. That's my advice.

01:42:02   Oh, excellent.

01:42:03   Six if you want the stand.

01:42:05   You know what? I had actually forgotten about the stand until Marco said that, so thank you.

01:42:08   You're welcome. But I recommend expensive products.

01:42:12   Let's not forget. Mike Milonazzo, or perhaps Casey List, writes, "As a part-time developer with no design skills, I struggle with finding ways to improve the look and overall design of my apps.

01:42:23   I can't afford to pay anyone to help at this point, so I'm looking for resources that I can learn from.

01:42:27   I often look at popular apps as well as other apps in the same space as my apps, but I feel like it's one of those 'you don't know what you don't know' situations where I might not recognize small details -- buttons with a slight shadow, spacing on different elements, etc.

01:42:40   Do you know of any websites or YouTube channels that do app teardowns that could be a good way for me to hear experts give constructive feedback?

01:42:46   Any other resources you can recommend a part-time developer with little artistic sensibilities?

01:42:50   Well, I'm all ears, gentlemen. What do you got?"

01:42:52   I should have an answer to this, but the simple answer is no, I don't.

01:43:01   I have gone into this process myself for the same reason.

01:43:05   I, too, have been a developer with no design skills that couldn't afford to pay someone else for help.

01:43:12   I have now moved into being a developer with some design skills who doesn't feel like paying people for help because I like doing everything myself if I can, and it has all sorts of benefits for things like speed and workflow and everything doing it that way.

01:43:26   First of all, there's no shame in this. My apps are kind of ugly and I don't know how to help and I can't afford a designer.

01:43:35   That's a very common place to be for developers.

01:43:39   So there's no shame in this. Own it, as Mike is, so that's fine.

01:43:45   And don't be afraid to actually address this and call it out in public and be vulnerable in this way and solicit feedback from people who will give it.

01:43:55   Also, there are certain general principles that you can start with.

01:44:01   One of the best is, you could actually read the HIG. I haven't, but you could.

01:44:08   Because when it comes to things like sizing of controls, spacing, a lot of design comes down to just following the platform standard.

01:44:19   And many of iOS's tools and things like auto layout, things like even...

01:44:25   What the hell was that?

01:44:29   Sorry, that's from a kid outside who just threw a rock at my window.

01:44:31   What? Seriously?

01:44:33   Terminate his developer again.

01:44:35   Yeah, it should be alright. They ran away.

01:44:37   I was going to say, are they looking to flirt with you or something? Is this like a late 90s, early 2000s date movie?

01:44:43   Seems unlikely.

01:44:45   Go to the window, maybe get some romance.

01:44:47   Maybe holding up a boombox, perhaps.

01:44:49   Marco hasn't seen it.

01:44:51   Neither have I. I just know the reference.

01:44:53   I think I've seen bits and pieces on TNT or something.

01:44:55   Auto layout, Swift UI, you get a lot of this stuff for free.

01:44:59   Following the standard spacing, following standard sizing, etc.

01:45:03   So a lot of it is, if you don't actively mess with it, it will be right.

01:45:09   So that's one way to ensure that you have a reasonable design.

01:45:17   Follow things that are as standard as possible, if you can.

01:45:21   One of the other major areas of design becomes typography.

01:45:25   And this goes to not only how you lay out your text, but where you lay it out in the UI,

01:45:33   what style of text you use for different elements, what sizing, what spacing, how you word things,

01:45:41   how you capitalize and punctuate things.

01:45:45   And all of the, the style of how to do that is all spelled out in various style guides all over the place.

01:45:51   Apple has style guides here and there.

01:45:53   You can also just kind of look at what other apps do.

01:45:55   When you're writing your settings screen text or whatever, you can go look and see,

01:45:59   what do most other apps do for capitalization of this setting?

01:46:04   Do they capitalize every word? Do they capitalize only the first word?

01:46:07   Stuff like that. You can kind of look at other apps.

01:46:10   This is how I've learned most of my app design skill, if you can call it that.

01:46:15   Taking cues from what do Apple's built-in apps do in this way.

01:46:20   And look at the really boring ones like mail.

01:46:23   How do Apple's built-in apps, or the settings app,

01:46:27   how do they design this thing?

01:46:30   What size icon do they use in this context?

01:46:33   What style of text and capitalization do they use in this context, etc.

01:46:37   That's a lot of design right there.

01:46:39   And then as you get more comfortable with this,

01:46:42   as you start to make things fancier, just kind of be careful.

01:46:48   Dip your toe in things slowly.

01:46:50   So for instance, if you want to do something like add a custom font, that's a risky move.

01:46:55   You can do it well, you can do it poorly.

01:46:58   Be careful. Go into it slowly.

01:47:00   Add one font, not seven.

01:47:03   That's step one.

01:47:05   Use it gently. Dip your toe in slowly.

01:47:09   Don't pick a super extreme font with tons of overt personality

01:47:14   that might be off-putting to people and stuff like that.

01:47:17   As you're sizing your text, or picking colors,

01:47:20   or at least shades of grey for your text,

01:47:23   don't use a bunch of different shades or a bunch of different colors.

01:47:27   Pick a small number of colors, and a small number of sizes,

01:47:31   and a small number of styles.

01:47:33   Stuff like that.

01:47:34   So you end up dipping your toe slowly into custom design,

01:47:39   rather than looking like a ransom note from made-of-torn-up magazines.

01:47:43   [laughter]

01:47:45   But other than that, unfortunately, I can't actually recommend

01:47:49   specific YouTube channels or books or websites to do this,

01:47:53   because not only do I not know of any off the top of my head,

01:47:56   and I didn't really read or watch any,

01:47:58   but also if you start asking designers,

01:48:01   you can go to various designer websites or forums,

01:48:05   or have designers yell at you on Twitter,

01:48:07   if you ask them, "What is the right way to do this?"

01:48:10   or "What's the best way to do this?" or "How do I make this better?"

01:48:13   they're all going to give you different answers.

01:48:15   They're going to disagree with each other, they're going to be contradictory.

01:48:18   Many of them are going to be wrong, many of them are going to be bad,

01:48:21   or many of them are going to actually work worse in the context of an app,

01:48:24   because designers aren't all perfect.

01:48:27   I mean, how many developers do you know who are perfect?

01:48:30   I think I know zero.

01:48:32   [laughter]

01:48:34   If you think about development as a practice,

01:48:37   it's pretty much impossible to do it perfectly,

01:48:39   and you can ask four developers in a room how to do something,

01:48:41   and you're going to get four very different answers.

01:48:43   And design is the same way.

01:48:45   Designers don't all agree on everything.

01:48:47   It's the same monolithic block that they can give you,

01:48:49   the one true answer.

01:48:51   They're going to have recommendations that are all over the map.

01:48:53   And some of them are going to be bad designers,

01:48:55   some of them are going to be great designers,

01:48:57   and it's kind of hard to tell if you don't know what you're getting ahead of time.

01:49:00   So it's actually really hard to involve other people in a great way here.

01:49:06   No one person is going to tell you everything correctly

01:49:10   and everything you need to know.

01:49:12   So it is worth developing this skill on your own.

01:49:14   It's like developing a sensibility of at least general guidelines of,

01:49:19   "I can make a pretty good version one,

01:49:22   and then if I get a lot of feedback to a certain point,

01:49:25   then maybe I can adjust this screen or adjust this font

01:49:29   or move this controller, or if my users are not finding something

01:49:32   or if they're complaining about how something looks,

01:49:34   maybe then adjust it."

01:49:36   But, yeah.

01:49:38   Overall, this is a worthwhile skill to develop,

01:49:40   but I don't unfortunately know of any good shortcuts to do it,

01:49:45   except try to mimic what the system apps do as much as possible

01:49:50   if you have any doubt on a design choice.

01:49:52   I'll just make one modification to what Marco said in one edition.

01:49:55   The modification is I think you should read the HIG,

01:49:57   the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

01:50:00   It's not going to be super helpful.

01:50:02   It's not going to tell you exactly what to do,

01:50:04   but there's tons of text there, and even if you disagree with it,

01:50:07   it has a rationale, and you will find things in the HIG,

01:50:12   especially if you're not an experienced designer,

01:50:14   that you hadn't even thought about,

01:50:15   that you hadn't even thought this was a thing to make a decision about at all.

01:50:18   Even if you disagree with the decision that the HIG says

01:50:20   or it seems weird or whatever, you don't agree with the rationale,

01:50:23   just knowing that this is a thing that you should think about

01:50:25   and make a decision about is valuable.

01:50:27   So I would absolutely read the HIG, not read it as the Bible,

01:50:31   but read it just to sort of get the lay of the land,

01:50:35   start learning what it is that you don't know.

01:50:37   And the addition I would say is find other developers to bounce things off of.

01:50:45   Ideally, they'd be more experienced developers,

01:50:47   but even if it's just a bunch of people who are at the same level of experience,

01:50:51   having other people put their eyes on what you're working on really helps.

01:50:57   So I've been a Mac user since 1984.

01:50:59   I know what Mac UIs should look like.

01:51:02   When I was making my first Mac app, I could tell it was wrong.

01:51:06   If you have experience with the platform, you're like,

01:51:10   "Well, I'm not a designer, but I've been using a Mac for a few years,

01:51:13   and this looks messed up."

01:51:15   I was very able to tell that I got a bunch of controls,

01:51:19   I'm laying out in a dialogue, and it doesn't look right to me, like it's off.

01:51:22   And I could even tell you what specifically was wrong with it.

01:51:24   It feels heavy on this side, and this spacing feels too tight.

01:51:28   It's like, "Okay, well then what if you just make the spacing bigger?"

01:51:30   It's like, "No, it's still wrong."

01:51:32   I have a finely tuned sense of what is right and wrong

01:51:35   from vast experience with the platform,

01:51:37   but what I didn't have vast experience with is,

01:51:39   say you've got this bucket full of controls,

01:51:41   how do you lay them out in a way that doesn't feel wrong?

01:51:43   It's real easy to do it when you just have a simple problem

01:51:46   or one of the examples from The Hig,

01:51:48   but what about when you've got your app with your stuff in it

01:51:51   and experienced Mac developers say,

01:51:53   "Oh, I've been faced with that same bucket of controls,

01:51:55   and here's how I dealt with it.

01:51:57   I did it like this, I did it like that."

01:51:58   And again, they're not going to agree,

01:52:00   but the way I essentially workshopped

01:52:02   in my very first dinky little Mac app,

01:52:04   the one tiny little preference window,

01:52:06   I bounced it off a bunch of vastly more experienced Mac developers,

01:52:09   and they also didn't agree, right?

01:52:12   But we could all agree it was wrong,

01:52:14   and they had some good ideas about how to make it better,

01:52:17   and then I essentially took the idea that I like the best

01:52:20   and modified it with my own taste,

01:52:22   and then would bring it back again and say,

01:52:24   "I think Marco was in the channel,

01:52:25   in case you were both in the channel when I was doing this."

01:52:27   I would relay out the dialogue and say,

01:52:29   "What do you think of this?"

01:52:30   And then five more opinions would chime in,

01:52:32   and then I would do the same thing.

01:52:34   Find the opinion that I agreed the most with,

01:52:36   give it a try, and try it again,

01:52:37   and iterate, and so on and so forth.

01:52:39   That's a great way to learn,

01:52:41   and obviously maybe you're not going to have access

01:52:42   to a Slack channel with people with decades

01:52:45   of development experience,

01:52:46   but surely you have access to some other developers,

01:52:49   and the law of averages mean that some of them

01:52:50   will be more experienced or better designers than you.

01:52:53   That combined with what Marco was saying,

01:52:56   you just got to put in the time and do all those things,

01:52:59   and I think you'll be fine.

01:53:00   There's no become a great designer in 21 weeks course

01:53:03   that you're going to find on YouTube

01:53:04   that's going to do what just putting in the time

01:53:07   and giving it a try and doing some basic background reading

01:53:10   and bouncing ideas off your friends.

01:53:11   That's all there is to it.

01:53:13   - A. Krishna Rao writes,

01:53:14   "I'm a long-time Windows user since the early '90s,

01:53:16   "but I love my iPhone and iPad.

01:53:18   "The new move to Big Sur and Apple Silicon

01:53:20   "that can run apps across Apple platforms

01:53:23   "has me finally contemplating the big switch.

01:53:25   "I'm a power user and want more than the basics."

01:53:28   That's such an open-ended question.

01:53:30   I don't even know where to start with the answer,

01:53:32   to be honest with you.

01:53:34   If you want to laugh,

01:53:35   you can look through the exchange that Marco and I had 15,

01:53:39   no, 12 years ago now.

01:53:40   - Before the iPhone or iPad existed.

01:53:43   - Was it?

01:53:44   I thought it was after the iPhone,

01:53:45   but maybe you're probably right.

01:53:46   Maybe it was 2006.

01:53:47   I thought it was 2008, but anyways.

01:53:49   We a long time ago had this conversation publicly via Tumblr,

01:53:54   and so you can go get a good laugh about that.

01:53:57   I don't know.

01:53:58   Where do you start with this?

01:54:00   - This question doesn't make it clear

01:54:01   whether this is about hardware or software.

01:54:04   Is it like what hardware should I buy

01:54:07   or where should I get started learning about things?

01:54:09   On the software/knowledge side,

01:54:12   listening to weird, nerdy podcasts like ATP

01:54:15   is a great start because even though,

01:54:18   especially if you're new to the platform,

01:54:20   a lot of the stuff we talk about

01:54:21   is gonna go over your head.

01:54:22   Just through osmosis and exposure,

01:54:23   you will start to learn things about the platform.

01:54:26   Again, kind of like reading The Hig.

01:54:28   You'll learn what the issues are and the lay of the land.

01:54:32   Maybe you won't understand the details,

01:54:33   but you're like, oh, this is a thing, and that's a thing,

01:54:35   and maybe you'll hear us talk about something

01:54:37   like clipboard managers or something,

01:54:39   which you probably know from Windows already anyway,

01:54:41   but just as an example,

01:54:42   a category of app that we talk about

01:54:44   is if it's just a thing that everybody knows about,

01:54:46   but maybe you're not familiar with.

01:54:47   Like quick launchers, like Launch Bar or whatever,

01:54:49   and that will send you down a rabbit hole.

01:54:50   And then outside the podcast world,

01:54:53   finding websites or people to follow on Twitter

01:54:56   that are themselves Mac power users

01:54:59   and just absorbing the firehose of those websites,

01:55:03   those blogs, those Twitter streams,

01:55:06   you will pick up everything you need to know

01:55:08   about being a more advanced user on the platform.

01:55:11   Like I know people always want sort of the,

01:55:14   like I said, the 21-day course or whatever,

01:55:16   just like, here you go.

01:55:17   Here's everything you need to know,

01:55:18   and people always want someone to create those,

01:55:21   and they hope they exist,

01:55:22   but the thing is stuff like that dates very quickly

01:55:25   and has a huge amount of opinion inserted into it

01:55:28   and generally isn't financially very advantageous,

01:55:32   so they tend not to exist,

01:55:34   or if they exist, they either were never valuable

01:55:37   or they're no longer valuable

01:55:38   because they're too far out of date, right?

01:55:40   So people who learn that way, people are like,

01:55:42   "Look, just tell me everything I need to know.

01:55:43   "Like, I learn well from videos.

01:55:45   "I learn well from reading.

01:55:46   "Tell me that about this new thing."

01:55:48   In most new things, that doesn't exist.

01:55:50   The example I always go back to,

01:55:52   I think I wrote about once, is like remote control cars.

01:55:54   Like, tell me everything I need to know

01:55:55   about remote control cars.

01:55:56   Like, no, that's not the way it works.

01:55:57   What happens is you get a car, and you build it,

01:55:59   and you break it, and you buy a bunch of magazines

01:56:01   filled with stuff that you don't understand,

01:56:03   and you read them for a year, and at the end of the year,

01:56:05   you know more than you did at the beginning.

01:56:06   That's it.

01:56:07   Like, there's no course.

01:56:09   There's no instruction.

01:56:10   There's no smooth path to learning.

01:56:12   It's just dive in there,

01:56:15   and expose yourself to the things that you want, you know,

01:56:20   the things that you want to achieve.

01:56:21   Find people who are already there,

01:56:23   and then just absorb their output.

01:56:25   Even if in the beginning it doesn't make any sense to you,

01:56:27   it will eventually, and that's the way

01:56:29   we all got to where we are.

01:56:30   We didn't know anything about computers,

01:56:32   and we just went to, you know,

01:56:34   we just sat in front of it and plugged away

01:56:35   or went to the computer class or the computer club.

01:56:38   I took typing courses, they called them,

01:56:41   but we were typing on computers,

01:56:42   which meant that I could figure out

01:56:43   how to put my name on the screen in between the typing.

01:56:46   You know, like, there's no shortcut.

01:56:49   Just like the designer questions, there's no shortcut,

01:56:51   but the good news is there's tons of resources,

01:56:54   no matter how you want to consume it.

01:56:55   If you like YouTube, there's plenty of YouTubers

01:56:57   where you can just watch them start talking about tech stuff.

01:56:59   If you like podcasts, hey, here you are, right?

01:57:01   If you like blogs or websites,

01:57:02   there's tons of those out there.

01:57:04   Just find the ones that appeal to you,

01:57:06   and just start absorbing.

01:57:09   You will learn.

01:57:11   And if this is a question about what computer to buy,

01:57:12   I'm sorry, we failed you,

01:57:14   but you have to be more specific next time.

01:57:16   Well, yeah, where do I start?

01:57:17   Buy a Mac.

01:57:19   Which one?

01:57:20   Yeah, I know, well, some.

01:57:22   Buy a laptop.

01:57:23   No, don't do that, it's terrible.

01:57:25   I can't even agree on that.

01:57:26   You're not buying anything until the ARM Macs come out,

01:57:28   so, you know, hold that thought.

01:57:31   Well, but, like, I mean, would you tell somebody,

01:57:33   like, don't switch to our platform right now?

01:57:35   Like, I don't think I would tell them that.

01:57:36   I think I would, you know,

01:57:37   it's not the best time in the world to buy a Mac hardware.

01:57:39   Our platform?

01:57:40   I didn't get my check.

01:57:41   Do you get a check?

01:57:42   It's not my platform.

01:57:43   You don't get your 30%?

01:57:44   Yeah, where's my 30%?

01:57:46   I built this platform.

01:57:48   Yeah, no, I would say, I would say,

01:57:50   especially if you're a long-time Windows user

01:57:52   thinking of switching, 'cause this person says,

01:57:54   because of the ARM transition

01:57:57   and the ability to run iPad apps, right,

01:57:59   you know, that has me finally contemplating the big switch.

01:58:01   Yeah, wait for ARM.

01:58:03   If you can, wait for ARM, for sure.

01:58:05   If you're switching platforms,

01:58:07   like, that means you're already on a platform

01:58:08   and you're fine.

01:58:09   Stay there.

01:58:10   It'll, you know, wait until ARM Macs are available.

01:58:13   They will hopefully be compelling,

01:58:15   and that's the thing that is specifically attracting this person.

01:58:18   Yeah, and you probably won't have a long wait.

01:58:20   I mean, maybe, like, another month

01:58:21   before the first one is available,

01:58:22   and it's probably gonna be a laptop, so, yeah.

01:58:24   And only two years until, in theory,

01:58:26   they're all available,

01:58:27   'cause it's a two-year transition if all goes to plan.

01:58:29   Yeah, exactly.

01:58:30   All right, well, thank you very much

01:58:31   to our sponsors this week,

01:58:32   hay.com, Squarespace, and Raycon.

01:58:35   And thank you to our members who support us directly.

01:58:38   You can learn more about that at ATP.fm/join.

01:58:41   And we will talk to you next week.

01:58:44   [music]

01:58:47   Now the show is over

01:58:49   They didn't even mean to begin

01:58:51   'Cause it was accidental

01:58:54   Oh, it was accidental

01:58:57   John didn't do any research

01:58:59   Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:59:02   'Cause it was accidental

01:59:05   Oh, it was accidental

01:59:08   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:59:13   And if you're into Twitter

01:59:16   You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:59:22   So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:59:26   Aunty Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C

01:59:31   U-S-A, Syracuse

01:59:34   It's accidental

01:59:37   They didn't mean to accidental

01:59:42   Tech podcast so long

01:59:46   So Alex Keeling wrote in

01:59:50   And I think this was supposed to be an Ask ATP question

01:59:53   But we wanted to move it to a Ask Neutral question

01:59:57   Are we doing that, Alex?

01:59:58   Yeah, that's a thing now.

02:00:00   Alex asked, she was asking about

02:00:03   general stick shift driving techniques and advice

02:00:06   And I don't have the actual letter written to us

02:00:09   But basically, how do you drive a stick?

02:00:12   I could answer this question

02:00:14   And then Jon will explain that everything I've said is wrong

02:00:18   Even though it wouldn't be

02:00:19   So let me just cut to the chase and ask Jon

02:00:22   How do you drive a stick?

02:00:23   You can chime in on these bullet points

02:00:25   I feel like we can all chime in on them

02:00:27   We've all driven stick

02:00:28   I mean, this wasn't directly from her thing

02:00:30   I just listed a bunch of

02:00:32   'Cause she was just asking in general

02:00:34   But this is my list of things that people talk about

02:00:37   about driving stick and maybe I left stuff off

02:00:39   But just chime in, go ahead

02:00:41   Tell us what you think about all the bullet points

02:00:42   Alright, so to start, how do you learn?

02:00:45   There are very, very different ideas about how to do it

02:00:49   And I've only taught a couple of people, to be honest with you

02:00:52   But what I like is

02:00:54   Starting out without using the gas at all

02:00:56   So you're stop dead

02:00:58   You, using your left foot of course

02:01:01   You slowly come off the clutch until you see

02:01:04   And or feel and or hear the engine start to bog a little bit

02:01:07   Because the clutch is starting to pick up

02:01:09   And then you push the pedal all the way back down

02:01:12   Do that again

02:01:13   To feel where it is the clutch is starting to grab

02:01:16   And you do that a whole bunch of times

02:01:17   Just not even intending to move

02:01:19   Hopefully you're on a flat surface

02:01:21   And you're just kind of staying still

02:01:22   And you're getting a feel for where the clutch is really grabbing

02:01:25   Then you do the same thing extremely slowly

02:01:28   But eventually let yourself get to a roll

02:01:31   So you're eventually all the way off the clutch

02:01:33   And then you stop

02:01:34   And you do that again

02:01:35   And you do it super slowly

02:01:36   A whole crap load of times

02:01:38   And then once you get a feel for how that works

02:01:40   Just make it faster

02:01:41   Simple right?

02:01:42   That's all you gotta do

02:01:43   And that's how I like

02:01:46   Just learning how to get going

02:01:49   The other, well it used to be pro tip

02:01:52   But not as much anymore

02:01:54   Because of electronic parking brakes

02:01:56   But the other thing you can do is

02:01:57   If you're ever on a hill and need to take off

02:01:59   Particularly if you're in a front wheel drive car

02:02:01   Which most are

02:02:03   Then you can use your handbrake

02:02:05   To hold you where you are

02:02:07   While you're doing the whole dance with your feet

02:02:09   And then release the handbrake with your hand

02:02:11   Once you start to creep forward

02:02:13   That is a very neat trick that I didn't know for a long time

02:02:17   And I wish I had known when I was first learning

02:02:19   But in terms of technique and advice

02:02:22   I am a big believer in John's first bullet here

02:02:26   Which is downshifting and engine braking

02:02:28   So what that means is

02:02:30   As you're approaching say a stop light

02:02:32   You would, and let's say you're in

02:02:34   I don't know, 4th gear because you're just around town

02:02:36   As you're approaching the stop light

02:02:38   And you see it's red

02:02:39   Downshift into 3rd and then come completely off the gas

02:02:42   And what is it, the compression of the engine

02:02:45   Will force the engine to try to slow down

02:02:47   And when you're off the clutch

02:02:49   That means if the engine's slowing down

02:02:50   Your wheels are slowing down

02:02:52   And so I'll downshift once or twice or maybe even three times

02:02:54   Coming up to a stop sign or stop light

02:02:57   And that's again downshifting and engine braking

02:02:59   And I am in favor of this

02:03:01   Some people would argue that that's a poor choice

02:03:03   Because you'd rather wear your brakes than wear your engine

02:03:06   And I understand that but I don't know, I've always done it

02:03:09   John, before I move on to the next bullet, thoughts about that?

02:03:11   You should do all the bullets

02:03:13   Because you've already gone through learning and downshifting

02:03:15   So I'm gonna go ahead

02:03:17   Alright, I'll carry on then

02:03:19   Common guidance, which I am terrible at

02:03:22   Do as I say, not as I do

02:03:23   Keep your hand off the shifter

02:03:24   It's bad for the lift linkage

02:03:26   It's bad for the transmission potentially

02:03:28   Just don't touch the shifter if you're not actively shifting

02:03:30   I often rest my hand on the shifter

02:03:33   Which is not at all what you're supposed to do

02:03:35   But you should keep your hand off of it

02:03:37   If you want to make things smoother

02:03:39   And this is kind of like moving from novice to amateur level

02:03:44   If you want to make things smoother on a downshift

02:03:47   Then you can do what's called rev matching

02:03:49   So let's say you're cruising at

02:03:50   And I'm making this up

02:03:52   But let's say you're cruising at 40 miles an hour in 4th gear

02:03:54   And you're at 2,000 RPM

02:03:56   Well you know, or you will learn over time

02:03:58   That if you were to downshift at 40 miles an hour from 4th to 3rd

02:04:02   Then that will bring you to about 3,000 RPM from 2,000 RPM

02:04:07   Well what you can do in order to make things a little smoother

02:04:10   Is you would press the clutch

02:04:12   You would blip the throttle

02:04:14   Do a little "vroom" with your right foot

02:04:16   To get the RPMs of the engine up to about 3,000 RPM

02:04:20   Or wherever you think it'll land

02:04:21   And then you come off the clutch

02:04:23   And the reason you do that is because

02:04:25   Then the engine and the transmission are all in their appropriate relative speeds

02:04:31   Such that there's no like, jerking backward and forward

02:04:35   The opposite of this is just popping the clutch

02:04:38   Which means you are, you know, you're doing

02:04:40   What I say, 30, 40 miles an hour in 4th gear

02:04:42   You press in the clutch

02:04:44   You downshift to 3rd

02:04:46   And you just come right off the clutch real fast

02:04:48   And then you'll feel that like "gaggg"

02:04:50   Of your whole body shifting

02:04:52   As the engine and the transmission are coming back into an even relative speed

02:04:58   So I, again, strongly encourage rev matching

02:05:02   It will make your downshifts particularly, considerably smoother

02:05:08   Then if you want to go from novice

02:05:10   Or, well you've gone from amateur to novice

02:05:12   Now if you want to go from novice to expert level

02:05:15   You can do what's called "heel towing"

02:05:17   Which is something I also do

02:05:19   Which is kind of difficult, although I do it in the wrong way

02:05:22   So the way you're supposed to heel toe

02:05:24   Is you're supposed to put the toes of your right foot on the brake

02:05:28   Which is the middle pedal

02:05:29   And you're supposed to twist your foot

02:05:32   Such that the right heel can press the gas pedal

02:05:35   So the idea is

02:05:37   What makes you think that's the way you're supposed to do it?

02:05:39   Because it's called "heel toe"

02:05:41   I think you, I mean, I understand that it can be done both ways

02:05:46   I think the way you describe, I would say the way you described it is the wrong way

02:05:49   Well, and the way I describe it is not the way I do it

02:05:51   And I'll describe how I do it in just a moment

02:05:53   But if you ever see racing drivers doing what I would call a heel toe downshift

02:05:59   I almost always see them done with a twist of the foot

02:06:03   Such that instead of your toes being at midnight and your heel being at 6

02:06:08   Your toes are at like 10 and your heel is at like 4

02:06:12   And again, that's not the way I do it, but that's the "standard" way of doing it

02:06:16   I think that's the opposite of the way you just described it

02:06:18   Basically I'm saying heel on the brake, toe on the gas

02:06:20   But you were saying toe on the gas, heel on the brake, heel on the gas?

02:06:24   Correct

02:06:25   Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the way I always thought I saw it

02:06:27   Was that you're twisting your foot counterclockwise

02:06:29   Whenever I see videos of people's feet, I always see heel on the brake, toe on the gas

02:06:34   And that's the way I think of it

02:06:35   Obviously both of them will work

02:06:37   But just, you know, anyway, continue to do the description

02:06:39   Like why are we touching the gas and the brake at the same time?

02:06:41   Right, so the theory is, especially if you're driving with the quickness

02:06:46   Not always, it doesn't have to be that way, but often if you're driving with the quickness

02:06:50   You're coming up into a turn very quickly

02:06:52   You're going to brake as you're entering the turn

02:06:56   And then on the way out of the turn, you're going to want to stand on that gas as much as you can

02:07:01   But because you've lost all that speed in the turn, you're now in the wrong gear

02:07:05   So the idea is, you will start your braking and then press your foot on the clutch to come down a gear

02:07:12   And then as you're braking and your foot is on the clutch, you're already on top of two pedals

02:07:18   You would like to do that blip of the throttle to do the rev matching that we were just talking about

02:07:22   At the same time

02:07:23   So you now have three pedals you need to interact with and only two feet to do it

02:07:26   Unless you're extremely gifted

02:07:28   And so what you would do is, you would blip the throttle with potentially your heel, potentially your toe

02:07:35   Or what I actually do, and I've done in every car I've ever owned

02:07:38   Is I keep my foot vertically oriented

02:07:41   My toes are at midnight, my heel is at 6pm or whatever

02:07:46   But I will roll my foot

02:07:49   So I'm rolling as though

02:07:53   I don't know how to, it's so hard to paint a word picture here

02:07:56   But I'm rolling the right edge of my foot such that it's hitting the gas

02:08:00   This is terrible podcasting

02:08:02   It is terrible podcasting

02:08:03   I'm so happy this is the after show

02:08:05   So you roll your foot such that you can press the gas with the right side of your foot

02:08:12   And the brake with the left side of your foot

02:08:15   Now someone in the chat is saying, "Oh this is racing technique and not safe driving"

02:08:18   I disagree actually

02:08:19   I think it is safer to not disrupt the balance of the car

02:08:23   So this is more necessary in racing

02:08:26   But I still think if you're coming through a turn and you need to downshift

02:08:30   The last thing you want to do is disrupt the balance of the car

02:08:34   And if you're popping the clutch or doing a whole bunch of things in serial rather than parallel

02:08:41   That can disrupt the balance of the car

02:08:44   So that's what I would call heel-toe shift

02:08:47   And Jon I'm genuinely curious to hear how you perform such a maneuver

02:08:51   Because again for me it's a roll with the left side of the foot on the brake, right side of the foot on the gas

02:08:56   Oh my god

02:08:57   I drove manual for probably 10 years

02:09:02   I never did any of this stuff

02:09:04   Except downshifting sometimes

02:09:06   This doesn't surprise me

02:09:07   And it was fine

02:09:08   I never lost a clutch

02:09:10   I never blew out an engine

02:09:12   It's fine

02:09:13   You don't need to do almost any of this

02:09:15   The electric car owner speaks

02:09:17   Yeah exactly, thank you Jon

02:09:19   But hey Alex asked what do we recommend

02:09:22   Well this is what we recommend

02:09:23   This is the crash course

02:09:25   This is what Casey recommends so far

02:09:26   Alex asked about "general stick shift driving techniques and advice"

02:09:31   This is none of that

02:09:33   Casey added his own bullet point for learning

02:09:35   But everything else I think is in the category

02:09:37   There's one more bullet point Casey, the last one

02:09:39   I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying

02:09:41   And then finally double clutching

02:09:43   So I'm a little weaker on this

02:09:45   This is not something I ever do

02:09:47   But the idea is typically with a car with synchros

02:09:51   Which is basically every modern car

02:09:53   You would just, let's say you're going from second to third

02:09:56   You press on the clutch

02:09:58   You move the shifter

02:10:00   You come off the clutch

02:10:02   Well it used to be, and it still is in certain circumstances

02:10:05   Like 18 wheelers for example

02:10:07   That in order to get the transmission in the engine spinning at reasonable rates

02:10:11   You would need to kind of modulate that yourself

02:10:14   So instead what you would do is you would push the clutch in

02:10:16   Get the gear shift in neutral

02:10:19   Come off the clutch

02:10:20   Push the clutch in again

02:10:22   Then put the gear shift in third

02:10:25   And then come off the clutch

02:10:26   And that's double clutching

02:10:28   And maybe Jon has a legitimate reason why you would do this in a modern car

02:10:31   I never ever ever do this

02:10:34   And that is all the bullets that Jon put in

02:10:36   And off the top of my head that's actually all the things that I

02:10:39   Oh, actually one other thing

02:10:41   If you live in a snowy climate

02:10:43   Or if you're in a situation where you, maybe you're on a slick road or something like that

02:10:49   It is possible to start from a dead stop in gears other than first gear

02:10:55   Spoken as someone who didn't learn stick on a car with 75 horsepower

02:10:58   Well there is that

02:11:01   I assure you my Volvo wagon could not come start in any conditions in second gear

02:11:07   Oh come on

02:11:08   It had four gears plus an overdrive button and second gear was not going to send you anywhere

02:11:13   One of my happiest moments with my Maxima was when I was starting from a stop

02:11:18   Going uphill

02:11:20   A pretty steep stop

02:11:21   And the Maxima did not have hill hold

02:11:24   It was too old for that

02:11:25   This was a 1996 Maxima so long before that was a common thing

02:11:28   And so I got it from first

02:11:33   I got it from a stop

02:11:34   I thought I was in first

02:11:36   And I was uphill and I just slowly crept up the hill

02:11:39   And man that was harder than I thought

02:11:41   And then I realized I was in third

02:11:43   And I just started in third uphill

02:11:47   And it didn't stall

02:11:48   It made it like it didn't have a lot of extra power

02:11:51   But it did make it

02:11:53   It had more than a giant Volvo wagon that probably weighed a million tons with a 75 horsepower engine

02:11:58   Yeah

02:11:59   All I'm saying is if you're in a modern car and you're in like snow or something like that

02:12:03   It is potentially advantageous to start in second or potentially even third

02:12:08   Because you're putting less torque against the wheels that are driving the car

02:12:12   And that would make it less likely to do like a burnout or whatever the case may be

02:12:16   Oh burnout

02:12:17   If you're in a front or rear wheel drive car and not an all wheel drive car

02:12:20   Give the car way too many revs

02:12:23   You know, 3, 4, 5 thousand RPM as you're sitting still and then just pop the clutch

02:12:26   And that's basically all you need to do

02:12:28   Although in a modern car you're probably going to need to turn off traction control and all that jazz

02:12:31   But you can do it

02:12:33   That is the list I think

02:12:35   Let me try to add as you're talking John the things I just came up with

02:12:38   But where did I go wrong? What did I forget?

02:12:41   I'm going to go into learning because we have a separate thing for that

02:12:44   Maybe I'll talk about that

02:12:45   I'm of this podcast the only person who has successfully taught another human how to drive stick as far as I know

02:12:50   That's not true

02:12:51   I taught David Karp how to drive stick

02:12:53   A child's human

02:12:55   My own child

02:12:56   Okay fair enough

02:12:57   He was only 19 at the time, does that count?

02:12:59   Anyway I'll talk about that some other time, it's a whole different thing

02:13:03   Downshifting vs engine braking

02:13:05   The trade off, Casey mostly got it at all the points I wanted to make

02:13:08   But the trade off is

02:13:10   I would say it's not between wearing your brakes vs wearing the engine

02:13:14   It's wearing your brakes vs wearing your clutch

02:13:17   So when you engine brake, you're not letting the clutch shift

02:13:21   But it is more stress on the clutch in a situation when you wouldn't be doing it at all

02:13:25   You're downshifting, engaging a lower gear and if you're not doing rev matching

02:13:29   All of a sudden the transmission is going faster than the engine

02:13:34   Then the transmission is connected to the engine and all of a sudden it speeds the engine up

02:13:37   And yes that is where on the engine but it's also where on the clutch

02:13:39   Because you've just touched a clutch to the transmission

02:13:41   You've made it those surfaces and they were turning at different speeds

02:13:45   Again if you didn't do rev matching

02:13:47   If you don't engine brake at all, you will wear your brakes down way faster

02:13:53   Brakes are more expensive than a clutch

02:13:56   If you look at how much it costs to replace 4 brake pads

02:13:59   That's more expensive than one clutch

02:14:01   If you look at the parts cost

02:14:03   Unfortunately the clutch is inside your car in a place that is hard to get to

02:14:06   So changing your clutch tends to be way more expensive than changing your pads

02:14:11   All that said, I feel like that's the trade off you're doing

02:14:15   I think it is essentially unsafe not to do any engine braking in a stick shift car

02:14:20   Maybe it's because I'm using cheap cars

02:14:23   But the brakes alone without using any form of engine braking

02:14:27   Will make you feel like your car is worse braking because it does

02:14:30   Any car with a non manual transmission

02:14:33   Uses some form of engine braking to help slow the car down

02:14:36   An automatic transmission does not shift into neutral

02:14:39   As soon as you try to come to a stop from 60 miles an hour

02:14:41   Try that in a stick shift car in a safe way

02:14:43   Go 60, hold down the clutch and try to brake

02:14:46   And then do the same thing with down shifting

02:14:48   It's night and day

02:14:49   So you have to down shift and use engine braking

02:14:51   That has to be part of your driving

02:14:53   You don't have to do it horrendously

02:14:55   You can do some braking with less engine braking

02:14:57   You can down shift less aggressively

02:14:59   But I feel like you have to know how to down shift an engine brake

02:15:04   Even if you just do it as a matter of

02:15:06   I find myself doing it as a routine

02:15:08   Like stopping from 30

02:15:09   I will go through all the gears back down to 1

02:15:11   Sometimes while I'm doing that

02:15:14   I'm barely engaging the gears in between

02:15:16   Just because it's a casual stop

02:15:18   Is just a good habit to get into

02:15:20   And my history has shown

02:15:21   I sold my 1992 Accord

02:15:23   Just as the clutch was going

02:15:25   And that was over a 10 year old car

02:15:27   Eventually all clutches will wear out

02:15:29   Whether you do engine braking or not

02:15:31   But it's not like you're going to wear through your clutch in the first year

02:15:33   It'll be fine

02:15:34   Please learn how to down shift and do engine braking

02:15:36   Keeping your hand in the shifter?

02:15:38   No, don't do that

02:15:39   I think most of the stories about how bad it is

02:15:43   Are sort of like

02:15:44   Tales that we tell each other

02:15:47   Legends, urban legends about

02:15:48   Oh it's going to mess up your linkage

02:15:49   And you're putting stress on the

02:15:50   I'm not even sure if that's true

02:15:52   But there's a more important reason

02:15:53   If your hand is on the shifter and you sneeze

02:15:55   And you knock it out of gear

02:15:56   Or do something like

02:15:57   Just don't have your hand on a control surface

02:15:59   That you're not planning to control

02:16:01   You're just asking for you to screw something up

02:16:03   So don't rest your hand on the shifter

02:16:05   Isn't the steering wheel a control surface?

02:16:07   Right, but you have to constantly steer

02:16:09   But you don't have to be constantly shifting

02:16:11   How much control of your hands are you losing

02:16:14   When you sneeze?

02:16:16   You could get startled or whatever

02:16:18   Obviously you have to be steering

02:16:20   If you could avoid holding the steering wheel

02:16:22   And you didn't have to steer

02:16:23   Then yeah, you shouldn't be on that either

02:16:24   But you have to steer

02:16:25   But you don't have to constantly be shifting

02:16:27   So why touch your hand to a thing

02:16:29   That you could potentially screw up

02:16:31   When there's no reason you need to be touching it

02:16:33   Also, again, in my probably decade of driving stick

02:16:37   I don't think I ever accidentally knocked the car out of gear

02:16:40   That's kind of hard to do

02:16:41   But do you rest your hand on the shifter

02:16:43   The entire time you're driving?

02:16:44   Of course, it looks cool

02:16:45   That's terrible, don't do that

02:16:47   Don't be one of those people

02:16:49   I was totally one of those people and it was fine

02:16:51   I am one of those people, but I know I shouldn't

02:16:53   Yeah, no, I mean, yeah

02:16:56   Maybe in some kinds of cars

02:16:58   Or some older cars or some newer cars

02:17:00   It actually is bad to rest on the linkage

02:17:02   I just don't know if that's specifically true

02:17:04   I feel like the safety thing is more compelling

02:17:05   But in general, it's not, I'm not going to say sanitary

02:17:08   It's not like proper technique

02:17:11   It's like piloting a plane

02:17:12   And leaving your hand resting on a landing gear switch

02:17:14   It's like, oh, I've never accidentally turned it on

02:17:16   Just get your hand off of it

02:17:17   Do you need to use landing gear now?

02:17:18   Then just don't have your hand on the switch

02:17:20   Oh, I've never accidentally turned it on

02:17:21   Just don't do it

02:17:23   Rev matching

02:17:25   If I had fancier cars

02:17:27   I would probably be more into it

02:17:29   But my cars tend to be, have so little power

02:17:32   That this is not that big of an issue

02:17:35   That said, it's kind of hard not to rev match

02:17:38   Once you get the hang of stick

02:17:40   Because you know, again, that you're about to

02:17:43   To shift, and you know the engine is not going fast enough

02:17:47   For the gear you're about to engage

02:17:49   You're about to pass, right?

02:17:50   You downshift, at least I do in my wimpy cars

02:17:52   I have to downshift to pass anybody

02:17:54   That's always going to happen, right?

02:17:55   And when I downshift

02:17:56   I know that the engine needs to be going way faster

02:17:59   In this gear than it's currently going

02:18:00   You're going to get a head start on that

02:18:02   You're going to say, well, engine, get ready

02:18:04   Because if you don't do it

02:18:06   And you just downshift

02:18:07   You have to, especially in my wimpy cars

02:18:09   You have to baby the clutch engagement

02:18:11   So you don't suddenly lurch

02:18:12   Because the delta is big

02:18:17   And there's not enough torque and power

02:18:20   To just sort of overcome that easily

02:18:21   So you have to baby the engagement

02:18:23   And if you don't baby the engagement

02:18:24   Then it's lurchy

02:18:25   And it's like, why don't I just cut to the chase

02:18:27   And get the engine up to the speed that I know

02:18:28   Round about the speed

02:18:29   And the question is, how do I know what speed needs to be?

02:18:31   You just know it needs to be faster than it is, right?

02:18:34   The bad part about this is

02:18:35   Depending on the size and weight of the flywheel in your car

02:18:40   Blipping the throttle

02:18:42   Like this is something when I was looking at that cool

02:18:44   What is it? The T50?

02:18:46   What the hell is the name of that car from the guy who made the McLaren?

02:18:49   Oh, yeah, I know what you're thinking about

02:18:51   It either has no flywheel or such a lightweight flywheel

02:18:54   That it would literally be impossible for a human to blip the throttle

02:18:57   Because you'd blip it and then it would go up briefly

02:18:59   And then go right back down before you could even engage the gear, right?

02:19:03   So it all depends on you having a flywheel in your car

02:19:05   That says, okay, when I blip the throttle

02:19:07   I can then go back to changing the gear

02:19:09   And get it into gear before the engine reverts to its previous speed

02:19:13   And in this super fancy $2 million supercar with no flywheel

02:19:17   You can't do that

02:19:18   And in modern cars, they do the rev matching for you a lot of times

02:19:21   I have never actually driven a car with its own rev matching

02:19:24   But certainly the engine computer can do it better than you ever will

02:19:28   Because A, it knows the actual speed it needs to be

02:19:30   And B, it can do that while your feet are doing other things

02:19:32   Yeah, I've driven one

02:19:34   My dad's Corvette has optional automatic rev matching

02:19:37   I think it's on by default, but it's fairly easy to turn off

02:19:40   In fact, yeah, his car, which is a 7-speed stick

02:19:43   Has paddles behind the wheel as though it's

02:19:46   Yeah, I was just gonna say, you know why they do that?

02:19:49   You know why it has paddles there?

02:19:50   Yeah, it's for the rev matching

02:19:52   No, no, no, no

02:19:53   Those paddles are the paddles that you use to shift the car

02:19:56   If you don't get it with the stick

02:19:57   Sure

02:19:58   And GM being the cheap car company

02:20:00   They didn't want to make a separate steering wheel without the paddles

02:20:02   So they just want to have the same steering

02:20:04   So they just take the paddles and they put them there

02:20:05   They just write "rev match" on them and they connect the wires to a different function

02:20:08   You literally have two gigantic pedals

02:20:10   The same exact pedals that you would get for shifting that Corvette if you didn't have a stick

02:20:14   And they just put a white rev match at the top of each one

02:20:16   I don't think it said rev match at the top, but otherwise I think we're saying the same thing

02:20:20   The ZR1 did, because that video I had about the ZR1

02:20:23   I was laughing at that part, like, "Why the hell does this car have these giant paddles?"

02:20:26   Like, "Oh, so it can be the same steering wheel, so they don't have to have a second part"

02:20:30   Yeah, they turned this bug into a feature

02:20:32   Anyway, but his car does do it, and it was more accurate than when I did it

02:20:37   But I think that's, for me, that's part of the fun

02:20:39   Is trying to get a good rev match downshift

02:20:42   And so I quickly disabled it

02:20:44   Although if I was, like, taking it to the track or something like that

02:20:47   I would probably leave it enabled

02:20:49   Yeah, heel-toe I am terrible at

02:20:52   I don't know if it's because I have big, goofy feet

02:20:54   I don't know if it's because my little Hondas don't have pedal spacing or positioning that is amenable to it

02:20:58   But I am so bad at it that I've never been successful enough at it to find it to be enjoyable or useful

02:21:07   With the things I already described, just like human rev matching and careful clutch engagement

02:21:13   And the fact that I'm not really going that fast in an Accord

02:21:16   Like, I'm not unsettling the chassis through corners

02:21:18   I kind of relate to the people who are saying this is kind of more of a racing thing

02:21:23   Like, if you're worried about the chassis becoming unsettled in corners, slow down

02:21:26   It's a cool thing to play with or whatever

02:21:30   And maybe if I had a sports car again, if I had a car with more power

02:21:33   Or a car that even had the notion that you might attempt this

02:21:36   I assure you that none of the Hondas that I've ever owned had a notion that people are going to try to heel-toe

02:21:39   I don't know

02:21:40   I find it very difficult to do

02:21:42   And I'm not good enough at it to ever do it

02:21:44   So I would set that aside

02:21:45   Double clutching, I only put it on here because

02:21:47   I used to know a lot of people back when I was a teen

02:21:49   Who would swear by driving their car with synchros

02:21:52   And double clutching, they said, "Yeah, you don't need to do it because of the synchros"

02:21:55   And by the way, the synchros are the thing that make sure that when you engage the gear

02:21:58   That the actual gears that are going to engage with each other are turning at the correct speed

02:22:02   So you don't take a tooth gear turning faster than another tooth gear and try to mesh them

02:22:06   Double clutching on the big trucks, I don't actually know how they work on behind the scenes

02:22:10   But it's basically like Casey said

02:22:12   You take it out of the gear and put it into neutral

02:22:14   And then you have to bring the engine up to speed so that when you engage the gear

02:22:17   The two gears that you're going to engage are moving at the right speed

02:22:20   And I think you're actually also responsible for modulating the throttle to get the engine up to speed

02:22:25   And then you engage, and if you don't match the speeds and you try to engage them

02:22:28   You're essentially taking two big metal gears moving at different speeds and trying to mesh them

02:22:32   And you get terrible noises and you destroy stuff, right?

02:22:35   But for cars with synchros, I don't know if I just, there's this crop of weirdos that I went to high school with

02:22:40   They're like, "Oh, you should totally double clutch your car with synchros"

02:22:43   So I learned how to do it when I was learning stick

02:22:46   And I did it for a little bit

02:22:47   And as far as I can tell, it's absolutely 100% pointless

02:22:50   Like, it's worse, it's slower, it's not fun to do, and there's no reason to do it

02:22:54   So my advice is, unless you're driving a semi

02:22:58   Which by the way, they probably only have automated transmissions now anyway

02:23:01   But unless you're driving a semi that requires it, double clutching is not a thing you need to know exists or learn how to do

02:23:06   Starting in second, third, yeah

02:23:09   This is where you have to know your car's power

02:23:11   Me always having weak cars

02:23:13   Starting in second for sure in the snow is a thing you should do

02:23:16   Although I would still say that I had to start in hill in second

02:23:19   Many of my cars didn't really have enough power to do that snow or no snow

02:23:23   And burnouts, you'll just wear it through your tires, don't do that

02:23:26   It's all about getting the power to the road

02:23:28   But it's fun, burnouts are fun

02:23:30   Margo, do you have anything to add?

02:23:32   Trying to tell us if we should all drive electric cars?

02:23:34   I mean, yeah, I mean, A, electric cars do neatly solve many of these problems

02:23:38   But anyway, if you're going to drive stick, like, don't let this conversation turn you off of it

02:23:43   This may sound like it's a crazy thing to do that's really hard

02:23:46   And you have to do all these things to do it right

02:23:47   And the fact is, none of this is necessary

02:23:49   You don't have to do any of this and you'll be fine

02:23:51   So it's like, I drove stick for all that time and, yeah, never had to do almost any of this stuff

02:23:58   That's the thing I think about stick shift driving, Margo

02:24:01   You're saying you didn't know or care about this and you were fine?

02:24:03   In my experience, when someone says I know how to drive a stick

02:24:09   There is a wide range of experiences you would get by driving in the car with them

02:24:14   Lots of people, like, wider than you would expect

02:24:18   Everyone like, oh, well, you know, everyone knows how to drive and people are good drivers and bad drivers

02:24:22   But the range of, like, the things I've seen people do in a car where they're ostensibly driving stick sometimes boggle my mind

02:24:31   I don't know if it's because of the gap in learning or no particular standards

02:24:35   Or just people have bad habits, but boy, like, I don't know

02:24:41   I'm not just saying like valets who just have to know enough stick to park a car

02:24:44   Like people who own stick shift cars and you get in the car with them and you're just, like, biting your tongue

02:24:49   And saying, what are you doing? And you're jostling around and they don't know how to engage the clutch and everything

02:24:54   I don't know why that is

02:24:56   Obviously it's much less of an issue now because nobody has stick shift cars

02:24:58   And I feel like the longer this goes on and the rarer sticks become

02:25:02   The more this problem will solve itself because the only people who have them are hopefully people who know how to do it

02:25:06   But I don't even know

02:25:08   But anyway, sorry to interrupt, continue

02:25:10   I agree with you, you don't need to know all this weird stuff

02:25:12   You can be happy and just drive a stick and you'll be fine

02:25:14   Yeah, and like Marco said, this is expert level and extraordinarily fast data dump as to what Jon and I think about driving a stick

02:25:23   But really and truly you don't need 80% of this

02:25:26   And you probably won't hear 80% of this because Marco doesn't care about it and he'll cut it before it gets released

02:25:31   No, I'm just keeping this in

02:25:33   You will hear it from other people who drive stick though

02:25:35   That's why I think it's important to cover all these points

02:25:37   You'll find somebody who will look like a wise expert and will tell you that you should double clutch your car with synchros

02:25:41   And just don't listen to that person

02:25:42   That's why I think it's worth knowing all this stuff

02:25:44   Mostly just so you know to dismiss it

02:25:46   But I do think the engine breaking one is the thing you have to know how to do

02:25:49   If you don't I feel like your car is less safe because you have way worse braking power

02:25:53   Way longer braking distances

02:25:55   And it's just not a good habit

02:25:57   Do not stop your car from 80 on the highway down to zero with the clutch depressed the whole time

02:26:02   That's bad for your brakes, that's bad for your life

02:26:04   Learn how to engine break

02:26:07   Yeah, that's actually the one thing that like when I was a newbie stick driver

02:26:11   Like for my first few years driving stick I didn't do that

02:26:14   And then I eventually developed that skill and that was like a significant betterment of my stick driving abilities

02:26:20   I actually don't think it makes any difference in terms of the ability for the brakes to stop the car

02:26:26   Like I don't think the brake boost is in most cars anyway driven by like engine RPM

02:26:31   Or if it is it's a very small difference

02:26:33   No, it's not the brake boost it's just that the engine like

02:26:36   It's not the, so when you connect a fast moving transmission to a slow moving engine

02:26:41   Some energy has to be spent to speed that engine up

02:26:45   That's energy coming out of your speed of the vehicle

02:26:48   Like the kinetic energy is being used

02:26:50   You know the kinetic energy as translated through the wheels through the axle into the transmission

02:26:55   Is being expended spinning the engine up from 1000 RPM or whatever it dropped to

02:27:01   Up to like 2000 right and then you do it over again

02:27:04   Because you shift to a lower gear the engine goes down to 1000

02:27:07   Well not only that but the engine vacuum is doing way more than just like spinning up the engine every time you shift

02:27:12   Yeah, I mean I'm saying like spinning the engine because it's moving slowly

02:27:15   There's lots of things that make it hard to spin the engine up

02:27:18   Like you know you're not giving it gas to spin the engine up

02:27:21   The entire amount of energy is coming from the speed of the car

02:27:23   So you are bleeding off speed by using it to constantly spin the engine up from a lower RPM

02:27:30   Right to a higher one and then repeating that process right

02:27:33   And then the second thing is even if the brakes have the ability to stop in the same distance

02:27:37   There you know you're going to produce more heat in those brakes

02:27:40   If you have wimpy brakes lots of small cars have very very wimpy brakes

02:27:43   And if you're stopping from a high speed they're not good at you know

02:27:46   They get hot they get worse there's brake fade right

02:27:49   Especially if you're not in a sports car that's used to that type of thing

02:27:51   If you ask the brakes to do the whole job themselves you're asking a lot of your brakes

02:27:57   Again especially if you drive a dinky economy car that has tiny tiny brakes

02:28:01   Maybe drum brakes in the back and tiny little you know discs with you know wimpy calipers in the front

02:28:08   Yeah, it also becomes more reasonable or more extreme if you think about like

02:28:12   Suppose you're driving down a mountain and so you're going downhill for like 15 minutes straight

02:28:18   Like if you're riding only the brakes that whole time

02:28:21   They're going to overheat

02:28:22   Yeah you're going to have overheating problems and that's no good

02:28:25   They catch fire just like in Ford versus Ferrari right

02:28:27   Yeah there you go

02:28:28   And finally with regard to engine braking like what if you're slowing down

02:28:33   But then suddenly there's some sort of hazard that you need to speed around

02:28:37   So you want to be in the most appropriate gear for the current speed in the car

02:28:42   Because if you're caught unawares and you're in like neutral or something

02:28:47   And then you suddenly need to use the accelerator to swerve around a child or a dog or something

02:28:52   That's not a good place to be

02:28:54   You want to be in gear already so all you have to do is slide your foot off the brake and onto the gas to get power

02:28:59   As opposed to being in neutral or way too high a gear

02:29:02   Such that you're either going to bog when you try to go or you're just not going to have any forward motion at all

02:29:07   Yeah and if you're in gear if you're in the correct gear for the whatever speed you're decelerating in

02:29:12   You will have shockingly instant torque response when you hit that accelerator

02:29:17   I'm not sure about the accelerating around a child scenario

02:29:20   But that's what I was getting at before about the sort of habit of downshifting

02:29:23   Just constantly being in the appropriate gear for your speed is just a good habit

02:29:26   Like I said even if you're just downshifting through the gears even if you don't even engage the clutch between some of them

02:29:31   Just constantly being in the right gear is getting you so that if you did need to use the gas for whatever reason

02:29:38   It's ready to go and you don't have this process

02:29:41   Because the process is not just getting into gear the process is decide what gear is appropriate for the current speed

02:29:46   Put the car into that gear and then you can go

02:29:48   Whereas if you just routinely go up and down the gears in order based on your speed

02:29:53   As just sort of like a habit that you just do without thinking about

02:29:56   You will always be in the appropriate gear for the speed and ready to go again

02:30:00   And that's you know again that's what an automatic transmission or an automated manual

02:30:03   That's what they're doing for you right there

02:30:05   And of course they can shift way faster than you can and all those other things

02:30:08   But like that's your hint on engine braking

02:30:10   Automatic transmissions do not put your car in neutral right

02:30:14   They use the engine to help brake the car

02:30:16   As you slow down automatic transmissions will downshift to be ready to be in the appropriate gear and to do you know so

02:30:23   So will DCTs

02:30:24   Yeah

02:30:25   Like you can't just put the DCT in neutral very easily and coast to a stop like it really fights you on that

02:30:30   It really wants you to go down through the gears as you slow down

02:30:34   [door closes]